You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (22 page)

Once she managed to reach the top of the steps, we went for a T. rex attack route and tried to hold as still as my drunk ass would allow. Which wasn’t even close to still. Ashleigh took charge.

ASHLEIGH

No, Caroline. This is all a dream. Mamrie and I have been in bed for hours. Now, go back to bed.

MAMRIE

Yeah, Mom. You’re dreaming.

And then I straight-up
Wayne’s World
ed her, jazz-handing up and down in front of her face, with the “doo doo da loo” dream sequence sound effect.

MOM

Oh, okay. Night-night, girls.

And without a moment of hesitation, she turned and carefully headed down the stairs.
Success!

What wasn’t so successful was my performance the next day at school. I was so hungover that I hit Snooze a million times, until Ashleigh physically forced me out of bed, with no time to shower. I sat there in class, answering a hundred questions about
Hamlet
,
all while wearing sunglasses with little rhinestones in the shape of a heart in the corner. I would like to say I was just rocking a vintage look, but the truth is they had just become popular again because of
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
. I was a mess.

Since my brain was on a slower speed, I was last to finish my test. Everyone had already left for afternoon break when I sauntered up to Mr. Parrish’s desk. Mr. Parrish was the toughest, greatest teacher at our school. People feared him but also respected him. Kind of like Mr. Feeny from
Boy Meets World
. Or Michelle Pfeiffer in
Dangerous Minds
but with fewer Coolio jams playing. I turned in the exam, and as I was walking out the door to go destroy some Baked Lay’s in the cafeteria, Mr. Parrish called out to me.

“Excited to see how you do, Miss Hart. I’ve never graded a test taken by someone reeking of vodka.”

With that I slowly pulled down my shades and said, “Mr. P., in the words of Shakespeare, ‘The teacher doth protest too much . . . methinks. And . . . me drinks,’” then walked out the door.
*

These days I still have a hard time falling asleep, and I’d still rather depend on my big cup of gas station coffee in the morning to keep me going than resort to choco taco–level drugs. The only difference with my insomnia now is that I don’t let it bother me. “Jesus, take the wheel,” as they say.
*

Instead of tossing and turning at three a.m., I crawl out of bed and snuggle into the couch just in time to hear the magical phrase “The following program is a paid advertisement” as I take a sip from a cold martini. With the mayhem of everyday life, sometimes it’s nice to be the only kid awake in the world.

1½ oz Campari

1½ oz mescal

Juice of ½ tangerine

1 oz orange liqueur

1 sprig rosemary

Some sort of fire-making device (matches, a lighter, a caveman)

*Bonus ingredient: a broom to sweep up all the panties that will be thrown at you

Combine first four ingredients in a shaker full of ice and pump those biceps. Strain into a highball glass with one of them fancy-ass mega ice cubes. Here’s the fun part.

Clean and dry your shaker. Take your sprig of rosemary and lay it down on a piece of foil or other surface that you don’t mind burning. Light the rosemary on fire. As it smokes, invert the shaker and hold it over the rosemary, catching the smoke in the process. Once you think it’s filled with smoke, quickly close it over the top of the highball glass. You can carry that thing around to the other side of the party, and when you take off the shaker like a cloche over room service food, the smoke will billow out. It also gives the drink a nice woodsy flavor.

W
hen my freshman year of college was winding down, there were a lot of unknowns. Like where was I going to live that summer? And just exactly how much weight had I gained that
year? But the thing that was weighing heaviest on my mind (and not my thighs) was the housing situation. I could’ve gone home to live with my mom in my hometown. I could’ve also lain down in the middle of traffic, but it isn’t the preferred thing to do.
*

I could’ve scrambled to stay in Chapel Hill for the summer, but there’s something creepy about being in a college town when school is out. The bars that normally have a line at the door are abandoned, tumbleweeds blowing past the foosball table. When you pop in for a quick one, the bartenders’ eyes light up as if they haven’t had a visitor in decades, like an old man at a nursing home or an employee at Hot Topic. It wasn’t ideal.

Luckily for me, those weren’t my only two options. Missionary trip to Africa, here I come! Ha—could you imagine? That is
not
what this chapter is about. One day while I was heading to
Wendy’s
class someone stopped me with a flyer. Normally I avoid flyers at all costs, but this time, for whatever reason,
*
I took one. It was for a camp fair happening on campus, where summer camps would come and recruit new counselors for the summer.

I almost threw away the flyer. I didn’t want to be a camp counselor! I’d never even been a camper. The closest I got to singing around a campfire was in my backyard during my pyromaniac phase, if you count doing voodoo chants while holding a Jonathan Taylor Thomas poster as “singing.” (Warning: Pine needles ignite pretty fast.)

I had a half hour to waste before my next
Frosty
class, so I did what I do whenever I pass a boys’ locker room: I decided to take a peek, despite the ill-fitting khaki shorts the guy who gave me the flyer was wearing. I walked into that camp fair and was immediately overwhelmed. Table upon table of well-groomed, chipper folks in their respective camp colors and polo shirts lined the rec hall,
standing behind their small tables decorated to the max for their camp. I felt a little out of place in my Poison Flesh & Blood Tour halter top that I’d made myself, but I sucked up my pride. I did a lap, avoiding any real eye contact, before I talked to my first table.

“Hi! Thinking about being a counselor this summer?” I looked over and saw a smiling woman with a name tag that read
LAURIE
.

“Thinking about it . . .” I said apprehensively.

Then Laurie sold me. She told me all about this wonderful camp. It was founded in 1919! All the girls wore adorable old-school gray-and-green uniforms! It was tucked into the North Carolina mountains along a gorgeous blue lake and massive rock-faced mountain! But the thing that really got me was the large photo they had printed behind their table.

“That’s our Lady of the Lake tradition. It’s how we close out every summer.” The picture had the entire camp (decked out in all white) gathered on the docks at dusk. Candles floated among the lily pads, and one girl in a canoe in the middle of the lake held up a lit torch. It was a goddamn postcard.

“Where do I apply?” I was hooked.

Driving up to the camp that summer, I was nervous. What if I got camp-catfished? What if this gorgeous mountain camp in pictures was actually the geographic equivalent of a hillbilly meth head with two teeth? What if it was an awful dump and I was stuck there for two months without any friends? My fears were quickly squashed once I hit that camp road. It was pristine. This was no hillbilly. This was the Brad Pitt of summer camps. And not even
Legends of the Fall
Brad Pitt; I’m talking
Meet Joe Black
era.

I spent my summer teaching dance, performing silly shows every night, and basically acting like an idiot while campers laughed. I was good at this, dammit! I loved having a cabin full of girls just on the brink of high school and using those weeks to drill into their heads that boys are idiots and should be treated like white pants: avoid while on your period and after Labor Day.

I felt so at home at camp that I spent my next two summers
there, bursting at the seams every time I made that first drive down the camp road, making Ariana Grande high notes when I reunited with my counselor friends.

Especially Hayley. Hayley was my camp BFF. She is literally the funniest person I know. She says whatever she wants, which is usually hilarious, and has the presence of Chris Farley without being a three-hundred-pound man. Have you ever met someone and thought,
Gimme some of that
? No, not sexually, but just charisma-wise? When I met Hayley that summer, she made me want to be funnier. If we were riding in a van of campers and they wanted to hear whatever bullshit boy band was popular, Hayley would make them listen to Hall & Oates. If it was ’80s day at camp, you’d better believe she was the first person with a high side pony, painting flames down the side of a golf cart. We were attached at the hip.

Here’s Hayley and me dressed as a tropical storm, which made the entire summer rainy.

When it came time to go back for the third summer, I decided to pass. I was going to miss camp, but I finally had a serious boyfriend, and we were going to road-trip around the southeast and bask in the splendor of our still-metabolized bodies. At least that’s what I thought. Two weeks before school ended, boyfriend decided he “wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship” and cheated on me. The fact that six months later he and this girl were engaged but it didn’t work out is totally irrelevant to this story, but
totally
relevant to my self-esteem.

I. Was. Pissed.
My whole summer had been planned around that road trip. I didn’t have a summer sublet. I didn’t know what to do, and then it hit me.
*

I would go back to camp! Obviously I would have free room and board, but more important, I would have a perfect environment to mend my shat-on heart. Trust me, there is no better place to get over a guy than going to an all-girls camp for the summer. Strong female friendships. Zero cell service, so you can’t drunk-text your ex. And best of all, a 20:1 female-to-male staff ratio. I immediately drunk-power-walked back to my apartment to e-mail the camp director.
*

If this story sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because I used it as inspiration for
Camp Takota
. Unlike in the movie, I wasn’t engaged and freshly fired from a job, but like the lead character, I did go back up to camp, and it was just what I needed. I quickly fell right into the daily routine of being a counselor, which also includes
living
for your days off.

If you want to know what a day off for a camp counselor is like, just watch
Wet Hot American Summer
. Their version of going into town ends with them mugging old ladies and Michael Showalter shooting heroin in a crack house, which may be a little extreme, but I can tell you firsthand that we camp counselors took our days
off seriously. We would go hard on those precious thirty hours a week away from camp.

Rather than throw out my campers’ candy that they snuck into camp, I decided to keep it in a large plastic container under my bed. Notice how I sit on it, holding all the power. Mind games are fun.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved camp—loved all of it! But there comes a breaking point, usually at day six in a row. You feel like if you have to sing one more song, eat one more smiley face–shaped tater tot, or have one more seven-year-old ask you what a “bagina” is, you’re gonna lose it. When the clock struck five p.m. on that day, all you’d see was a cloud of dust behind my Honda Accord (because that’s how dirt roads work).

Days off brought a few options. Since our camp was about an hour outside Asheville, most of our days off were spent going to bars in the city and crashing on our friends’ couches. Other nights were spent at my friend Chrissie’s lake house right outside camp.
*

Over the course of those three summers, we had some legendary nights off. But the most memorable I ever had was the last one of that breakup summer. Camp was ending Tuesday but I had that Saturday night off. It was perfect. Hayley and I decided to keep it local and spend the night in the small town of Sylva.

Sylva is about twenty minutes from camp. It’s the home of Western Carolina University and not much else. It’s the kind of town that has one bar and whenever a nonlocal walks in a record-scratch sound effect is cued. The kind of town that could realistically vote a cat in as mayor because “everybody gets along with him.”

The crew en route was the dream team. First, there was John from the kitchen staff. John was the best. He was always there when I needed him—to unlock the kitchen late at night so I could raid the cheese, or to drunkenly make out with me despite the fact that I just ate a
lot
of sharp cheddar. Of course, my home girl Hayley was in tow, but her crush, Brian, was joining us. Brian was and still is a Hagrid of a man, with a huge beard and giant body. He and Hayley were both on the mountaineering staff. This meant they were responsible for taking packs of girls on three- or five-day hikes. They could turn a scrunchie and a stick into a tourniquet or calmly scare off a mountain lion. Meanwhile, I taught dance in the
one
air-conditioned room at camp and was terrified of squirrels.

As soon as Hayley saw Brian on the first day that summer, she said, “Mamrie. That man is gonna be my husband.” And she had been laying the tracks all summer. The flirtation was
real
. But this was the first time they would be off camp property together since admitting they were into each other. It had to be special.

PRO TIP: Before you make a move on your camp crush, you
have
to see him off camp property to make sure your radar isn’t skewed. Sometimes when you are away from society, your standards can drop without you realizing it. He might look like Channing Tatum when he’s in a kayak but end up looking like Stockard
Channing when he’s in a Burger King. I knew if Hayley needed a special night, I was the person for the job.