In the vernal days of ringer t-shirts and that slightly inarticulatable fear we had of the swirling colors in Sid & Marty Croft-dom, many of us Jersey suburbaniters fell prey to a longing we could never quite name. We'd see scrawny kids our age swimming in olympic-sized pools that had nothing to do with competitive sports training. When dry, they'd be clad in uniforms of white shorts and bright yellow cotton tees, identifying them in their unity, their longish 70s-style hair mussed up from a day of communal fun in the sun. They went home each dusk, happily worn out from their sunshiny day's-worth of carousing (and that much more tan), on a bus--every one of them holding a bag of goodies, and that pinnacle of their belonging: yellow balloons on strings, floating above their heads... the child's equivalent of a royal crown. On the schoolbus, which was purged of anything school-related by now, surely they sang songs about bottles of beer falling off walls during the entire ride home... They were a mysterious privileged group, all lucky enough to be part of what the rest of us knew only from the blotted film clips we saw on commercials that extolled the joy of ...
How many times did I plague my mom with "Can I go, too?" each time that pang of longing hit when I watched tv? I could not tell you; neither could she, if you asked my mom. But it was often. And I never did get to go.
We in the Jersey burbs relied on NYC television stations for our life-sustaining cartoons, our syndicated reruns of What's Happenin (Hay,HAY!Hay?); we occassionaly submitted with grace and aplomb to WPIX's double-header Yankee games (WWOR in Seacaucus, NJ, had the Mets), which intereferred with our regularly scheduled programming. But no matter what the show was, we'd still see the Smiley Face from the Young People's Day Camp, telling us about what we were missing out on:
"...arts and crafts! Hiking! Day trips! Swimming!..."
In his smile, we were ... taunted. As we saw their large picnics in parks, we ourselves sat stuck to our couches and eating junk food. Our sweat went unrelieved, as we envied their splashing and marco/polo-ing in the swimming pools. We watched with a desire in our eyes that could still be considered innocent, coming from our ignorant and fresh faces. Weren't we deserving of going to day camp? Didn't we, too, deserve to have Smiley Face t-shirts to wear when we made popsicle-stick log cabins or clay ashtrays for our dads? Christ, wasn't it bad enough we couldn't all get to be Bad News Bears? AND NOW THIS INJUSTICE TOO???
To this day, I've not met anyone who ever went to the YPDC--but I've met a million people wanting to punch Smiley in the Face. The tempered, matured sourness we have makes us all want to strangle Smiley Face's non-existant neck. We remember our envy, our longing. We remember what it felt like to not belong--AND the exacerbated shame from having it showed to us by our very own tv sets, who we thought loved us.
Well, we're older, now. Disgruntled. We know that Smiley Face takes new forms, like shiny cars and palm pilots you can talk into; PlayStation 2; a faster computer. We acknowledge that we didn't have a seat at those picnic tables where so many nutritious snacks were served. And it's set the tone of our whole existance to this day.
One day, Smiley... one of these FUCKING DAYS...I promise you, I will get to you. I will BE in your pools, I will BE eating hamburgers and hotdogs with you, and I WON'T have the words "Camp Counselor" on my fucking nametag!!!!