1974, Catskill Mountains, New York

By Jay D. Homnick

We were fearless, the two of us big guys. Or so we thought. Until we ended up holding hands in the dark country night.

It started, as so many adventures seem to, in summer camp. Camp Morris, a laissez-faire camp in the Catskills for Jewish teenagers. The premise was that you would spend most of your day studying Bible and Talmud in a refreshing, outdoorsy environment, then grab a few hours of personal recreation in there somewhere. The lifeguard was only at the pool for the afternoon hours, but the handball and basketball courts had overhead lights, staying open until 11. There was an indoor rec room with ping pong tables, and impromptu hockey games with tennis balls for pucks were common. For your studious types, this was heaven on earth.

It was for my buddy and me, too, but not in quite the same way. We were both 16 and footloose. I did a little bit of studying myself, maybe two, three hours a day, enough to salve my conscience. He worked in the kitchen as assistant to the cook, which kept him busy in the daylight hours. When night kicked in, he and I were off to a schedule of nonstop fun that left lesser men gasping for breath. The camp is on a hill, two miles outside of Woodridge, New York – a one-horse town provided the horse doesn’t stretch his neck. Our evenings began by hitching a ride into town.

There we would shoot pool for hours in a bar where we were the only white people. It was the 1970s, with a lot of Black Power hostility in the air, so the way to defuse racial tension was to grin agreeably when you were called “honky.” Each about 6′ 2″, 200 pounds, we could stand our ground. We got along well with everyone and at closing time, usually 11 or so, Floyd the owner and bartender would drive us back to camp. Then we would catch a ride the other direction, to Woodbourne. The Lucky Dip was the Jewish hangout, where you could get an ice cream cone, socialize, play air hockey and shoot some more pool. It closed at about 1 a.m., and that owner also provided our ride home.

In a camp silent with sleepers, we would make our way to the pool. We were masters at climbing the fence; we had the place to ourselves. No need for bathing suits in that darkness, and that hour of skinny-dipping was a rare treat denied to most civilized types. Towel off, get dressed again, then off to his room for Scrabble. As a camper, I had to bunk with roommates I could not disturb. He was an employee and had a small room of his own. At daybreak we said our morning prayers, then I went to bed for a few hours while he went to work. It was the first time in six years he and I could spend time together, and we made the most of it.

Yes, we had a history. At age 10, we began our year as classmates and made fast friends; our fathers shared an alma mater, too. We attended a Hebrew school in its first year of existence, and some of the Catholic school kids living nearby were none too thrilled by the new neighbors. They often approached us belligerently, shouting things, throwing socks filled with chalk, threatening worse. We would jaw back at them, and the battle never escalated into fisticuffs.

One day they approached as usual, haunting us with their taunting, but they were only at about half strength. They always came the same way, with a hulking sort of swagger, from their base on the north side of the block. This time, as every time, we formed a battle line facing northward and hollered the appropriate backchat. Suddenly – zap! – eggs were splattering on our clothes.

There was a comical double-take moment like an old slapstick comedy, where we could not comprehend how we were facing empty-handed bullies and still being pelted by eggs. Then we turned and understood. The other half of their gang had walked around the entire city block to flank us from the south.

We were on the receiving end of a classic military pincer attack.

My buddy came up behind me and said: “Stand still, I need your shoulder.” He propped his small bottle of pepper spray on my shoulder to keep it steady and he squirted. He shot at one, then another, of our assailants. “Aargh! I’m blind, I can’t see,” two different guys were shouting at once. They were staggering and stumbling and groping at their eyes. The steam had gone out of the other side. Their concern now was to tend to their wounded.

The police were called, so we thought we were finished. What if the pepper spray did not clear up eventually, as advertised? If one or both of those boys had their eyesight permanently damaged? We would spend our teenage years in a reform school. Our families would be humiliated. At 18, we would reemerge to face people who would shun us with every glance. We hid upstairs in a small room off the administrative offices, where the secretarial staff kept a refrigerator with cold drinks. Eventually, someone discovered us up there and brought us down to be chastised by a stern officer.

His father decided he would get into too much trouble in that school. He was sent elsewhere and, when he was old enough, shipped to dormitory schools in Memphis and St. Louis. That summer was our reunion.

We only broke our gallivanting routine when they came to pick us up for basketball games. Although my outside shot tended to fail me in up-tempo games, we were both strong inside players. Being sort of rootless, we ended up barnstorming as mercenaries – paid in fun, not cash – for any Jewish camp that needed two big guys and was willing to provide transportation. I remember one night where I got 19 rebounds and he collected 16; we were dominant at the big-man game.

Then Camp Morris scheduled a game against the Jewish Federation camp, Magen Abraham, up in Livingston Manor, near the highest altitudes in the Catskills. It was a hard-fought game and we were thrilled to be playing for our home camp – host camp, more like. We ended up losing by a narrow margin and we piled back into the team van to wend our way down the mountainside. The engine, it turned out, was as down on its luck as we were. Five or so miles away it sputtered to a stop.

Forced out of our van, we saw just how dark a rural road is without headlights. Shimmers of starlight and glimmers from the occasional farmhouse struggle to lift a heavy opaque blanket of gloom. The group muddled around, with no clear strategy. A bus came by with Our Lady of the Assumption painted on its side, but the driver ignored our wildly flailing hands. In later years, when various ladies in my life made unwarranted assumptions, that scene often flashed back into my mind.

It was up to the two big guys to make a move to effect a rescue. We decided to walk down the road ourselves to find some kind of assistance. Off we strutted into the night of grim silences and startling noises, scanning the bleak horizon for a ray of hope. We had gone a mile perhaps, feeling the first twinges of weariness, when we passed a farm with about a dozen dogs clustered near a barbed-wire fence. They were barking ferociously, but we did not feel threatened by confined animals.

Suddenly, as we pulled up alongside, they began jumping the fence one by one. They ran full force in our direction, then pulled up just short. Taking up positions in a circle all around us, they kept up a relentless cacophony of barking. At this point we assumed they were attack dogs softening us up for the kill with their intimidating frenzy. I was literally gripped by fear, my muscles locked paralytically. Then my friend reached out his hand and took mine.

I don’t know how long we stood there; it seemed much longer than forever. Eventually the dogs backed off and drifted back to their base, loping into the farm as effortlessly as they had left. We met someone further down the road who helped us restart our vehicle. Life returned to its normal rhythms, if our teenaged excess could be considered normal. But we were never quite so cocky again, having a better sense of our limitations.

We did know one thing; our friendship would last forever, our hands locked against all of life’s vicissitudes.

Jay D. Homnick is a well-known commentator and humorist. He writes weekly columns on politics and culture in The American Spectator and Human Events.