Gary Maggio is an Albany-based poet, actor and visual artist. Born in Brooklyn, he’s the short, left-handed Piscean child of a nervous Ashkanazi Jewish mother and angry Sicilian-American father.
Gary is the author of an illustrated memoir, The Christmas Book. He’s working on a second, called Ocean. He works part time at Albany Medical College, teaching med students how to communicate.
He also runs a cottage industry executing commissions of pastel pet portraits. www.gmagikman.com.
Sprout Lake Camp
By Gary Maggio
My cousin Artie from Coney Island had rheumatic fever as a boy and was able to attend for free an upstate camp for city kids with heart disease, located in the Hudson Valley.
By the time he got me a job there as a waiter in the summer of ‘64, Artie had matured from camp kid to camp counselor. The camp was an easy drive from our house in Dutchess County but the waiters were required to stay overnight, like the camp children with weak hearts. I think my parents and my sister were pleased that I would be gone for two weeks.
The waiters were mostly teen delinquents from the Bronx who could not otherwise obtain summer work. My roommate was Joseph. We each had a cot in a converted chicken coop with a leaky straw-slanted roof. I felt quite alone and I found Joseph terrifying, a veteran of street wars who was sly and foul-mouthed. He claimed that he had a miraculous dream about Jesus when he was younger so he had been trained as an altar boy to be prepared for the priesthood. Which turned out to be against his nature and his own intentions, which leaned more toward thieving and brawling.
He kept a knife in bed with him with which he would carve various sharp weapons from tree bark. This he did in the middle of the night — he never seemed to sleep — and he kept me awake with street gang stories and the noise of his knife ripping into the wood, carving plans to stab the bespectacled tyrant camp director Cyrus while he slept beside his rotund wife Sybil in a fine house built for him on the campgrounds.
He had a tattoo of a cross on the back of his left palm. He also sculpted a wooden Jesus with a knife in his temple.
The morning of my first day I had a humiliating accident dropping a tray with metal bowls of steaming oatmeal. The wooden floor of the dining room was always damp and polished in the morning, and the oatmeal swirled in puddles.
The afternoon of my first day I was removed from serving lunch or dinner and I was sad and hid on my chicken-coop cot. When Joseph was finished serving lunch, he found me with my head down. He pretended not to see my tears. He gave me my first cigarette and showed me how to smoke it. He was no older than I, 15 at most, but his index and middle fingers were already nicotine-stained.
Joseph resented his job, which paid him poorly, but it kept him away from city-street trouble in a deal he had made with a Bronx probation officer. But he liked me, watched after me, and demanded that the other tough waiters respect me.
He was the rough-tough older brother I always yearned for. In addition to getting me sick from my first cigarette, he also snuck me off the campgrounds and bought some nasty-tasting red wine with my money with which he also got me sick. And I was grateful.
Sometimes through your long life someone you once knew for only two weeks when you’re young and you never forget them, and never lose your gratitude for his helping others understand who you really are. And only recently, seventy years later, have I realized how Joseph helped me understand who I really am.