Fifty Little Men in Training
All fifty
of the trainees arrived in a converted limited utility bus (the short bus, you
might have called it in school).
Stepping out on the gravel-strewn dirt lot, their first impressions of
Camp Social Realism were not ones to engender expectancy. Likewise, those who watched them disembark
could conjure little hope that they would fulfill even the baseline requirements
of the camp’s program.
“They’re little,”
explained Obed to a waitress in one of the diners in the neighboring town.
Laura
wrinkled her nose as she poured the coffee.
“How
little?” she wondered.
Echoing
sounds of Swedish, normally humorous on some puppet show or documentary about
the clown settlers of the Great Lakes region,
were now perceived as threatening and psychedelically ominous, perhaps because
of the fact that they did echo, and also perhaps because of the insistent,
clashing beat that accompanied their sinuous movement through the town’s empty
streets. The old McRose’s discount store
building, abandoned for years, had been informally taken over and converted
(bekehren) into a strange nightclub of sorts.
Two of the little men, on an off night, ventured out of camp and out to
the dark parking lot surrounding the building.
Only a couple of vans of distinctly stoner and/or hippie appearance
stood among the burgeoning maze of weeds.
“You think
they’ll card us?” Cliff asked his companion with a chuckle.
.
