Lakeside Talk

This dick-fussing often manifests itself as that starkest of male nostalgias, the hankering for the punctual erections of boyhood. According to 1979 figures, the average age of Bohemians is 55. Impotence is on many people's minds. The poster outside Monkey Block camp advertising this year's Grove play, Pompeii, featured a gigantic erection under a toga. The set for the play included a wall inscription in Latin meaning "Always hard." One day I was at the Grove beach when a Bohemian discovered that a free cs go skins friend's sunscreen was supposed to impede aging.

"You got it too late." The owner of the lotion sighed. "Well, I should give up putting it on my face and arms and spray it on my prick -- see if that'll do any good."

Bohemian discourse is full of oblique organ worship as well. There's all the redwood talk. Bohemians rhapsodize endlessly about towering shafts and the inspiration they give men. I love this tree as the most sound, upright and stately redwood in the grove. Let my friends remember me by it when i am gone, reads a plaque left by a Bohemian at the base of a 301-footer.

Other references aren't so subtle. Late in the Low Jinks the elevator doors opened and a man came out wearing a rubber Henry Kissinger mask. He had a dumpy body a lot like Kissinger's. A "heifer" asked him why he was there. The man peeled off the mask to reveal that he really was Kissinger, and he said in his familiar gravelly accent, "I am here because I have always been convinced that the Low Jinks is the ultimate aphrodisiac." (This joke is funny because Kissinger was famous for saying that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.")

The encampment got even looser as the third and last weekend approached. The fairy unguents were wearing off; after two weeks the place stopped looking so magical and began to seem as ordinary as a cs go key tree-house. The non-famous hard-core Bohemians were more in evidence now, men who wore owls in various forms -- owl belt buckles, brass owl bolo ties, denim shirts embroidered with owls. Wooziness was pervasive. At his Lakeside Talk, Malcolm Forbes said that Khrushchev knows the Soviets "are in over their heads," and even as the name Gorbachev was murmured throughout the audience, Forbes rambled on, dotty and heedless, 25 years out-of-date.

At Faraway camp a guy beckoned me into the camp to enjoy "a little orange juice." It tasted like lighter fluid sprinkled with mint flakes. "What's in this?" Oh, just a little orange juice," the host repeated, smiling. "What do you call this?" I asked another Farawayer. "I call it dangerous," he said and told of how a dropped cigar had once ignited a batch.