So while working as a residential counselor at a camp for gifted youth in central Kentucky many moons ago, I had this friend/coworker, we’ll call him Andrew. Since that’s his name.
Anyway, en route to camp that year, Andrew–a very tall, gangly, pale ginger with enormous coke bottle glasses, a twisted-up sort of face that always managed to look either incredulous or like he’d just smelled stinky feet, and a rasp-whine of a voice you could hear from a mile off–had decided to stop at the military surplus store in town, buying a ton of old fatigues, knapsacks, etc., on the cheap.
He took to wearing this stuff all the time, at first as a gag, but as camp dragged on and madness brought on my sleep deprivation, copious drinking, and the constant chattering presence of 200 precocious-but-often-obnoxious children began to set in for poor Andrew, it became deadly serious. He clung to his tatty old military gear like a safety blanket, wearing it everywhere and often refusing to shave or change for days on end, eventually adopting the persona of a gaunt, haunted homeless military veteran and only answering to the name printed on the pocket of his worn green shirt.
Between camps (the program ran two, back to back, with naught but a weekend’s break to separate them), he took the homeless bit to a whole new level, fashioning himself a bindle out of some cloth and a stick he’d found. He carried it around everywhere during our adventures that weekend, much to our mixed amusement and horror.
The last night before the kids arrived, we made a drunken sojourn to Taco Bell and purchased what might have been dozens of soft tacos for our frantic consumption. We all wound up passed out in various rooms, reeking of booze and dogfood-grade beef.
Come the next day, as we all raced to repair the damage we’d done to the dorms in our stupor and get our new batch of campers checked in, no one saw much of Andrew, so it wasn’t till that night that he lumbered down to the common room, bindle in tow.
As we sat around getting ready to watch Teeth, he untied his sack to rummage through its contents and there, at the very bottom, he found three fully wrapped, entirely unconsumed tacos.
Andrew, of course, ate his bindle tacos with the appropriate amount of shame.
The level to which this story is appropriate for this thread is actually kinda surprising me!
