To make matters worse, I learned I’d just spent my entire paycheck for the summer’s efforts on my dad’s long distance calling card. When the season ended, I was sad not only because Beth and I were on the outs, but I also knew I’d squandered so much time on that pay phone in the middle of the woods. I’m sure we talked about how much we cared for each other, but the calls became less frequent, and Beth ended it at some point in early August. Beth had her job, her friends and college to prepare for, and any experience I shared meant little to her. I don’t remember the substance of a single call but do recall things slipping away as the dog days of July arrived. Instead, I had a pay phone on the wall of the Counselor Shack, a tiny cabin in the woods where we’d listen to music, drink beer, play air guitar, drink more beer and sing along to every cut on Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp album I’d stand next to the weathered door, its hole-filled screen no match for New Hampshire’s mosquitoes, and talk to Beth whenever I could. This being 1984, the idea that I could text Beth before video-chatting her was like a scene from an absurd science fiction film.
We promised to write letters, and I dedicated myself to calling her as often as possible. I was sure our “love” would transcend time and space. It was a great summer, but I’d made one mistake: I left Long Island in late June, convinced my girlfriend Beth and I would stay together, the two of us apart for 10 weeks but connected by the good people at AT&T long distance. I coached tennis, hiked mountains, swam in the lake and managed a 10-year-old baseball team. I’d just finished my junior year in high school – confident, thin-ish, tan and oblivious to life’s complications waiting for me in the years to come.
I’d spent the summer at a boys camp, my first as a counselor after seven seasons as a camper, an enviable transition for any camp lifer – that first summer you get dibs on the better breakfast cereals, are asked to call balls and strikes, and earn money for something you’d do for free if anyone had suggested it. In the late summer of 1984, I was lovesick and broke.
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