Camping on the Tramp

One August day in the mid 2000s, I popped ’round to Twist’s parents’ place, where Twist told me the trampoline was broken and her parents were ready to finally toss it out. In an effort to avert or even just delay this travesty, I immediately set to writing her parents a note on Fabreeze-scented “stationary” (i.e. a piece of computer paper). This document served as our “desperate plea” not to throw away the trampoline just yet. I expressed that there were too many good memories had upon it to just toss it—including Twist wishing she could be abducted by aliens like our high school art teacher—and that a proper goodbye to the symbol of “carefree summers” must be had first. Twist said that her dad would probably find the note funny enough to keep the trampoline around for at least one more month. Thus, she and I could have one last “camp on the tramp.”

I never had much experience with trampolines growing up. (Aside from splashing around in the pool, pretending to be a mermaid, I was an indoor kid.) Maybe this explains why I’m such a wiener when I’m on one. While others strive to launch themselves as high as they can in the sky and do mid-air acrobatics, I await the inevitability of someone jumping on my head. Or maybe I’ll be propelled off the trampoline by someone else’s landing and right into an fully operational trash compacter. (Hey, we saw what almost happened to Kim Cattrall at the end of Mannequin.)

(Future blog post reminder to self: An in-depth analysis of Mannequin and its zanier sequel, Mannequin 2: On the Move.)

But I loved Twist’s trampoline for all sorts of non-jumping reasons. For starters, it was a good place to kick back and miss spotting the shooting stars and satellites that everyone else around me saw. On another occasion, Twist had a yard sale (that had started at three-thirty in the afternoon), and while waiting for her to make more than fifty cents, we decided to wear every single piece of clothing item for sale on the front lawn. We came damn close to achieving this: I had nineteen layers on, but Twist won with twenty-eight. I wore a snowsuit. Twist wore a bathing suit over a pair of flannel pajama pants. Skeleton wore a pink dress with a frilly neckline that Twist last wore probably in fourth grade. Despite that it was a warm July day, we did not die of heat exhaustion, but we were so layered up we could barely move. Somehow we mustered up enough energy to run around back and jump on the trampoline. We probably looked like sumo wrestlers bopping around in a popcorn maker. Then, layer by layer, we performed for each other laborious, exhausting stripteases.

But the best thing to do on the trampoline was to camp on it. From 2002 to 2005, camping on the tramp was the thing to do in the summer.

One July evening in 2003, I headed over to Twist’s for some tramp camping. It was preceded by tooling around on a My Little Pony name generator (favorites: Baby Blue Drop, Cloud Puff, Queen Lighter, Coconut Jubilee, and Baby Egyptian Skylark) and milled around in the kitchen, watching the E! channel’s list of most shocking moments in entertainment. Some inclusions and the way they were ordered we found questionable (“Wait, Elvis dying is less shocking than Michael Jackson supposedly molesting children?”). We agreed that River Phoenix had been too hot to die. OJ was number 1, by the way.

When we at last retired to the tramp, Twist was incredibly hyper and wouldn’t stop talking. Even though I was exhausted, I felt it my duty to respond, and then soon I couldn’t stop talking, and we were both cracking up about stuff that wasn’t even funny. We saw a leafy T-Rex shape in the trees and named it “Snacky,” and Twist longed to be abducted by aliens like our former art teacher. (I never understood why Mrs. C had felt it necessary to share this information with class after class for years and years.)

We discussed our superpowers: Mine would be telepathy and super-strength, and hers would be X-ray vision, flying, and “luck.” (She also talked about how she wanted lots of money, but I told her wealth wasn’t a superpower. How wrong I was!) We decided to combine our powers for selfish reasons, like I would have the strength to pick up a bus and drop it on someone, and with her luck, she would have the bus fall on people she didn’t like (with a ploop! sound). It was about four in the morning before we finally drifted off, and we woke up at 5:45 because it was raining, so we migrated inside and slept again.

Another memorable camp-the-tramp evening took place two years later. Beforehand, we went to Denny’s for coffee in our pajamas with me wearing her brother’s bright red skating helmet. I also wrapped an ace bandage around my arm and thus looked like something was definitively wrong with me. We sat in the back of the restaurant and she eavesdropped on the guys sitting behind her, who were saying stuff to each other like, “No porn star hamburger for you!” I drew pictures on the empty sugar packets of her riding on a brontosaurus and she played her kazoo.

We also did her MASH. Instead of the age-old “number of kids” and “location of honeymoon,” we like to invent our own categories, like “autobiography title” and “reason for death.” One of the most fun categories is “favorite sexual position,” and we realized that including an option that begins with “hanging upside down from a lamppost” was always necessary (e.g., “hanging upside down from a lamppost with an atomic bomb up your butt”). Apparently that’s our missionary position.

Then we went back to her house, where her mom was hanging out around the kitchen table. Twist regaled us both with the story of how one time she was drunk and skinny dipping with a bunch of her friends (plus one complete stranger) when our friend Ink Canyon somehow found them despite that they were in the middle of the woods at 1 AM. He alerted them to his presence by jumping over them, naked, into the water, screaming, “RUN AWAY!” all the way down. (Twist doesn’t know why these kinds of stories irk her mom so much, considering how apparently in her youth, her mom made out with a complete stranger in the bathroom of an airplane before doing a bag of coke with him.)

Twist and I hung out in the kitchen with her mom for nearly an hour, talking about birth control, making necklaces, and listening to her mom adamantly declare that Twist had to be some mentally ill person’s baby. Her mom gave me one of the bracelets she made, which is adorable because I’d said I liked it, even though it was too large for my wrist, and she just handed it to me. We also discussed Twist’s cat Tablescraps, who Twist thinks sucks now because her parents have trained him to be well-behaved. Loud noises frighten him: Twist goes “wwwwwwwwaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH” at the top of her lungs and he flees the room in terror. Tablescraps is also afraid of her kazoo.

Finally we headed out to the tramp, with Twist’s mom reminding us to put on bug spray so we wouldn’t get West Nile virus, but Twist said she’d rather die than smell like bug spray. It was a perfect night. We lay on our backs, staring up at the sky while wrapped up in blankets like human burritos. She and I split a USA Gold and tried to spot shooting stars. She saw four but I only saw one; I didn’t have my glasses on.

Snacky the Tree-Rex loomed overhead, and fireflies (or “flyer flies,” as I called them as a kid) flickered hello as Twist once again professed her need for wanting to be abducted by aliens. I reminded her that she always says that when we camp on the tramp. This naturally led to a discussion about Mrs. C, whom we were sure hated us and found us bizarre, yet she nominated us both for the art award at school.

Too lazy to make the odyssey inside to use the loo, I navigated to the edge of the pitch-black yard about ten feet away and peed near a tree, using a piece of my Wonder Woman stationary as toilet paper. When I returned, we talked for a long time about boys and all their complications. Despite such the aggravating topic, I laughed into my pillow for hours.

Twist eventually asked for the time. Five AM. She groaned: She had work at DialAmerica at nine. The garbage trucks clanked and rumbled by, and Snacky slowly turned back into a tree.

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