To Be Honest Page 8

  † I was oblivious to the fact that we were only a foot away from Maya and these two nerds, who could definitely hear everything I was saying.

  * Yes, that was what I was supposed to do.

  Chapter 4

  Family Camp

  In 1997, when I was sixteen, my parents sat me down at the dining room table and asked if I wanted to go to family camp.

  The rest of my family had gone to this camp without me for the last few years while I was at nerd camp. Mom explained that it was an experimental community created by a famous family therapist. The founder had died ten years before, but it was now run by her protégés. Mom had been studying to become a therapist for the last few years under the mentorship of one of these protégés; that’s how she’d originally been invited. Mom said the camp’s culture and activities had been designed to exemplify how, in practice, this famous dead therapist’s methods could make a better society.

  I asked, “Are the therapists there good?”*

  “I like the therapists,” Mom said. “A few of them at least.”

  “It’s not all about the therapists,” Dad said. “Family camp has a whole different culture.” Dad paused and got teary. “It’s hard to describe,” he said in a voice muddled by crying. “It’s the only place I know where you won’t be punished for being honest.”

  That was it. I was sold.

  So, all the Levitons got into Mom’s minivan and drove together the six hours up to the Bay Area. I was seventeen, Josh was fourteen, and Miriam was ten.

  I hadn’t spent much time with Miriam. By the age she could speak articulately, I was eleven or twelve, already Dad’s little disciple. Miriam was only around when Mom or Dad were in the room and they tended to be the focus of my attention. At family dinners, Dad and I would talk about whatever was on our minds, usually leaving out Miriam and Josh, sometimes even leaving out Mom.* Miriam had big curly hair, big cheeks, and a performing streak; she liked to sing and dance and improvise one-girl shows, playing all the characters. While I’d only had to deal with Dad, Miriam received criticism from both Dad and me, like we were Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets, high up in the theater box, joking together obnoxiously. Though Josh and Miriam could have resented being so often ignored, I got the sense they were relieved to avoid Dad’s scrutiny. Still, Miriam had endured a trying childhood and, by ten, was already embittered and uninterested in hiding it.

  The one-and-a-half-lane road to family camp runs along the top of a series of cliffs, twisting like crazy, treacherously steep at all times whether going uphill or downhill. It felt metaphorical, like we were supposed to vomit physically to prepare for vomiting emotionally.

  From the road approaching camp, one could see a creek with a cute little bridge and children frolicking among the rocks, hunting crawdads with whittled spears, catching newts in jars and, beyond that, the thick woods. Our van pulled into the camp “parking lot,” a big grassy clearing in the forest. Most of the cars there had bumper stickers: “I am the proud parent of my inner child”; “All who wander are not lost”; “Stop child abuse. It shouldn’t hurt to be a child.” Countless “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty” stickers. One license plate frame read “I’d Rather Be Surfing,” and another read “I’d Rather Be Myself.”

  The bathroom building resembled a cement block dropped haphazardly in the forest. The outside walls of the kitchen building were plastered with posters, each one featuring a quote from the camp’s founder over a background of clouds, rainbows, or flowers. I moved poster to poster, rubbing my chin like a snob in a gallery.

  “Normal is dysfunctional.”

  “Ask for what you want, even if you are certain the answer will be ‘no.’”

  “Criticize without blaming.”

  “The failures of a family can be measured by the number and severity of its secrets.”

  We had dinner at our own picnic table in the dining area, and a fidgety man in wire-rimmed glasses with a smattering of unruly gray hair joined us uninvited. I assumed he was friends with Mom or Dad or both, but my parents’ awkward greeting suggested otherwise. He introduced himself to me and immediately said that I didn’t have to remember his name. “You don’t have to remember names here,” he said. “We don’t care about politeness.” I didn’t believe him; a week without politeness sounded too good to be true. As if to illustrate, Dad told this man that we’d rather not have him at our table. The old man showed no sign of offense, said okay, and sat somewhere else. This exchange between adults saying explicitly what they wanted and accepting each other’s boundaries was my vision of utopia. I’d never realized how much all the indirectness and hostility I usually encountered weighed on me, how freeing it felt to know I wouldn’t be scowled at over every insignificant interaction.

  The next day, I attended the morning ceremony called “temperature reading.” I followed everybody to the amphitheater where most of camp’s 150-person population sat freezing on the old wooden bleachers bundled up with mugs of coffee. The attendees generally wore camping clothes or sweatpants, a lot of green family camp hoodies and T-shirts.

  Temperature reading began with “warm fuzzies,” a time dedicated to campers taking the stage and giving appreciations about anything that had happened the previous day. Lots of campers stepped down from the bleachers to give little speeches, and I was impressed at how much everyone seemed to love camp and one another. I’d never witnessed communal positivity that didn’t read to me as empty etiquette. Warm fuzzies was followed by “bugs.” Frowning campers now got in line, three times as many as had come to the stage for warm fuzzies. Someone complained that the teens made too much noise at the campfire. Someone else was mad that his favorite jobs had been signed up for before he’d arrived. A little girl of about five protested camp’s chopping down trees for firewood. Someone brought up an imposition on the part of another camper and we had to listen to an indignant rebuttal. Others leapt up taking sides. Campers started crying, upset by all the fighting. Then other campers expressed resentment of the ones who didn’t like the fighting, refusing to be shamed for being brave enough to work through conflict. After a while, most had lost track of which original bug had started it.

  I theorized that this was what happened when those who had been censored their whole lives were suddenly invited to speak: they weren’t used to making decisions about what they wanted to say or why.

  The “session area” sat at camp’s edge, a clearing with a floor of orange and yellow leaves, and a ceiling of trees with little gaps of visible sky. Camp rolled a chalkboard into the clearing to serve as backdrop for the work and added a rug to represent a stage. The audience sat in folding chairs with scattered boxes of tissues. I loved the surreal beauty of the chalkboard in the woods.

  The therapists at camp were referred to as “facilitators” and the therapy was called “work.” I loved that camp had made up its own unique jargon. Inventing names and phrases felt personalized and expressive; thoughtless inheriting of language was square.*

  One of the facilitators, Max, with a beak nose, a bushy beard, and knowing eyes, got up front. He wore a fleece vest and beanie hat and seemed to be perpetually shrugging. He sprayed himself with mosquito repellent and announced that we’d start with a full-group “check-in.”

  “This is a chance to share with the group what’s bubbling for you right now or to catch us up on your life since last camp.”

  One by one, campers gave soliloquies summarizing their recent pasts, mostly telling devastating stories. Everyone was crying, including me. It was heartbreaking to have real people standing right in front of me with the saddest faces in the world, telling the most important stories of their lives. I loved the flawed beauty of their improvised speech.

  One woman started her check-in with a grimace. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe some of us don’t enjoy standing here to hold up our year for judgment?”

  Max the facilitator rose. “We all hear your feelings about how check-in doesn’t
fit for you. How many others here feel uncomfortable at check-in?”

  Dozens of hands flew up. I couldn’t imagine what there was to feel uncomfortable about. Now, campers took turns sharing feelings about check-in itself, describing their self-inflicted guilt and shame, their “inner critics,” their experiences not worth listening to, their lives never good enough. Some spoke about fear of judgment and mockery, even at camp. I knew in theory that these feelings were common, but I’d never heard it confirmed, confessed explicitly before me.

  The next afternoon, we congregated before the blackboard in the woods again for work. Max the facilitator asked the audience of about forty in lawn chairs if anyone wanted to volunteer, and a broad-shouldered giant who towered over all of us raised his hand and lumbered to the leaf-strewn rug. Max asked him what was “percolating,” and he told the story of his wife getting pregnant. Only a few sentences in, he broke into a sobbing so intense that it was more like screaming. Through that unbridled crying, he told us that his wife had miscarried and it was unclear now if she could have children and that he blamed himself.

  When the man made a particular noise, like mooing, Max said, “Follow that sound!” The man mooed louder and his huge body curled into itself with the release. Max asked him, “If your pain had a voice, what would it say?”

  The giant answered, “You hurt everyone who loves you!”

  Max asked the giant to call up someone from the audience to play the role of his pain and recite this line over and over. Hearing this voice externalized destroyed him; his legs buckled. Audience members leapt from their seats to buttress his cumbersome frame.

  I knew nothing of self-loathing or loss or grief. I imagined that even the teenagers already acquainted with hospitals, prisons, courtrooms, and funerals hadn’t seen a grieving man cry this wildly.

  Max called up more volunteers to restrain the giant so he could rage. Almost everyone present got up to hold onto him, including Dad and me. I clutched the giant’s shoulder as he flailed under our group grip, bucking and twisting. Dad and I made eye contact; he raised his eyebrows and smiled at this bizarre moment of father/son bonding.

  After that, I went to every session I could. I saw work about a doctor bullied by his boss, childhood sexual abuse, a woman who wanted her husband to be more open to rough sex, the toll of years of unemployment, and the troubles with dating over the age of eighty. I felt I was getting views of so many different lives, so much perspective that I’d never find anywhere else. Knowing a person’s past helped so much to understand his present. Outside camp, histories were invisible; most people stubbornly refused to discuss why they’d ended up the way they were, leaving me forever in the dark.

  Aside from the proper sessions, Dad and I went to “men’s group.” The “specialty groups”—men’s, women’s, young adult, teen, elder, children’s—acted as confidential sessions where campers could discuss their partners or families privately. Someone could confess an affair in women’s group without her family knowing. A grandfather could talk about his dead wife’s secret addiction without tarnishing her memory for his kids or grandkids. I didn’t like confidentiality; I considered privacy dishonest.

  In men’s group that first year, I watched Dad do work about his anger at his father. Once Dad had chosen someone from group to play Zayde, Max asked Dad how he should be posed. Dad said, “He’s always asleep.” So the camper cast as Zayde feigned sleep on a folding chair. Dad kept describing him as “weak” and “cowardly,” so Max asked him to call someone up to play Zayde’s weakness. Dad picked a young, muscular guy and everyone laughed. Dad was surprised by the laughter. “The irony didn’t occur to me,” he said. “I thought of my father’s weakness as carrying him through life. Like he’d droop on the floor without it. So, to play weakness, you’d have to be strong.”

  Dad didn’t go as wild as others I’d seen, but he did cry a lot and talk about not wanting to be like his father. Once he’d calmed, the facilitator asked me to tell him whether I thought he was like his father.

  I said, “Are you kidding? You’re the least asleep person I know.” The group was moved. I shrugged and added, “For better or for worse. Pros and cons.” That got a laugh out of the men’s group.

  In less than a week, I’d already watched a few dozen people do therapy in front of me. Beyond that, camp had a magical power to transform every conversation into therapy. At camp, somehow we only told personal stories or discussed types of interaction or communication and how we felt about them; so many talks ended up commenting on the very conversation we were in the middle of. But this all felt right to me. And when I didn’t like a discussion, I could walk off without anyone being offended.

  My only objection was that in about a third of the sessions, either the person doing work or an audience volunteer would play someone’s infant self, curling up on the rug in the fetal position. The person doing work would apologize to his infant self or make promises. Someone might play their own infant self with other campers in roles as family around the “cradle.” I didn’t know how anyone else felt about having an adult onstage pretending to be a baby, but I found it unpleasantly distracting.

  Going to family therapy camp as a teenager had many unexpected side effects. Afterward, I couldn’t help viewing all strangers as vessels of hidden pain and fear. I imagined what the world would look like if pain glowed, if we could know on sight how much someone was suffering. Some would be candle flames and others would look like furnaces. Some would be blinding to behold.

  I came home from camp with whole new lists of manipulations, defense mechanisms, and coping styles, new categories of distorted thinking and delusion. Camp’s endless stories of abusers, narcissists, and gaslighters contributed to my brain’s compendium of lies. It was getting harder and harder for me to fall for anything.

  Truth or Dare

  When I returned to high school for junior year, everyone read as even more shallow and fake than before. I remember standing outside the venue where my school’s teen bands played, accosting a smoking acquaintance with my gratuitous running commentary about what was really going on, gesturing at a cool, attractive boy near us and bloviating, “Look at that guy! Think of how much he’s hiding! What’s his family like? What does he really feel about his friends or the girls he goes out with? We’ll never know! No one knows! It’s crazy! He’ll never tell!”

  Though I was having trouble appreciating anyone in my high school, the teenagers in my drama class interested me most. They were charismatic and talented, hilarious improvisers, impressive dancers. I felt an affinity for artistic people because they tended to be more open to discussing feelings, as if being expressive in one way encouraged a person to be more open in others. Regardless, the fact that I admired the drama kids didn’t mean they wanted to be around me. In most social situations, I could find one or two friends who enjoyed my presence and couldn’t see what everyone else disliked so much. But even those who liked me would eventually remark on how angry others became when my name was mentioned and the general unease that descended wherever I went. One actor I admired would glower at me so brutally that I’d leave any room he occupied. A friend who brought me up to him reported his response: “One thing I’ve gotta give Michael Leviton. He knows I don’t like him and he never makes a big thing about it. I’ve never met anybody who was so cool with me not liking him.”

  “That’s so nice that he noticed!” I replied, flattered by what I considered a compliment.

  On the first night of the drama class camping trip, I ended up crowded in a flashlight-lit tent with all my favorites from class to play Truth or Dare. I’d never played before but I’d heard about this game that felt ideal for me, a situation when everyone told the truth and any question was permitted. Because the drama kids appreciated spectacle, the dares tended to be pretty humiliating, so most picked truth. This was convenient because I had no interest in the dares. In fact, I interrupted the game to suggest that we skip the dare half and play “truth.”


  “Maybe you’ll realize that telling the truth is fun and you’ll start answering questions truthfully all the time,” I said. The group was unresponsive to this suggestion.

  My turn came to pose a question for the biggest heartthrob in our drama class. I considered what I wanted to know most about him. I wondered a lot about the experience of being the boy all the girls liked. It occurred to me to ask whether he felt like he could be himself with the girls he dated, but I decided against that one because I already knew the answer was no. One thing I didn’t know was how much sex the most desired boy in school actually had. I didn’t want to ask for a number—I wanted to make it personal somehow, have him tell us something about his emotional life—so I asked how many girls he’d had sex with, who was his favorite, and why.

  The tent erupted with protests, claiming I couldn’t ask that question. I scoffed, “It’s Truth or Dare! The whole concept is about answering any question!” The group continued to demand that I ask something else. “What’s wrong with what I asked?” I said. “And since when does Truth or Dare have forbidden questions?”* The heartthrob waved down the objections, told them it was okay. He made a show of mentally counting the girls he’d slept with and said twenty. It was hard to say if he was telling the truth or exaggerating in either direction. He said his current girlfriend was his favorite, which I figured he felt he had to say. “Because,” he said, thinking. “She’s smart? And fun?” I cracked up, expecting everybody to laugh with me at this avoidant, pandering answer that expressed nothing. “Come on!” I said. “That’s not an answer! You really don’t have anything to say about why you like sex with your girlfriend? You’re hiding your feelings, even in Truth or Dare!”

  The group again yelled at me, arguing that he’d been charitable enough to answer a bad question, that it was time to move on. Even while others performed truths and dares, the tension in the tent remained, everyone aware that I could ask an inappropriate question or call out someone for lying at any time. At one point, someone asked me a truth question; I can’t remember the specific question but I remember it being boring. “You could ask me anything!” I said. “Is that really what you most want to know!?!” Eventually, it was my turn to pick another question for a random girl I’d just met on this trip and barely spoken to. Without any personal context, I asked her one I’d want to ask anybody: “What are your sexual fantasies about?”