The mess hall was a large, rustic, E-shaped building which served marginally edible meals to four hundred kids, plus counselors and assorted staff. Wobbly wooden chairs surrounded long tables, scarred from decades of carelessness and vandalism. In the center was a large stone fireplace that, due to safety concerns, had not felt the lick of a flame in decades. 

A rectangular passthrough gave us a glimpse into the kitchen where the camp's only African-Americans moved through billows of steam in chef's whites and black mesh hairnets, sweating over stainless steel vats and straining under the weight of industrial-sized bowls. Supervising all of this was Sparky, the head cook at Big Hills from time immemorial, who would occasionally be lured into the dining room by thunderous applause and the appreciative stamping of feet when he had served a particularly popular meal, usually Pop Tarts, and take bow after bow.

On the dining room walls were dozens of large colorful hand-painted banners commemorating Color Wars past, dating all the way back to the 1950's.

At summer camp, there are a lot of special events to break up the daily routine. Backwards Day, International Day, Rock and Roll Day. A trip to an alpine slide, a baseball game, an amusement park, rafting down the Delaware river.

But that was all just foreplay. The climax was Color War, when the entire camp was divided into two teams — a blue team and a white team — for a five-day competition. Everything took on a martial air. From among the oldest campers were selected the team's generals, colonels and lieutenants, who would scream at their troops until they lost their voices. 

Each morning, the teams would line up and march in formation, complete with cadence calls. Everything we did, from sporting events to cleaning our cabins, was judged and points were awarded or subtracted. It was exhilarating. Everything we did could make the difference between triumph or defeat. For those five days, everything we did mattered.

Color War happened near the end of the summer, but the exact date was always shrouded in secrecy. The anticipation would climb to a fever pitch and when Color War finally broke, usually through some elaborate piece of stagecraft — one year involving an elephant, another involving two knights in Medieval armor suddenly dueling in the middle of the camp production of Bye Bye Birdie — everybody went out of their minds with excitement.

But that was six weeks away, give or take.

Right now, we were assembled in the mess hall to meet the head of the dining room, the effeminate and amorphous Ed Drezner, who was ostensibly our boss.

He took an immediate dislike to us.

He knew that we were the children of doctors, lawyers and businessmen, on our way to becoming doctors, lawyers and businessmen ourselves. So he could be forgiven for thinking that we didn't care very much about what he had to say about mops and squeegees. Especially since we didn't.

What my fellow waiters and I really did care about was the waitresses, who were sitting across from us, looking every bit as disinterested as we were.

They had been a tight clique since grade school. At the beginning of every summer, they would converge on Big Hills, squealing and hugging excitedly. Eight weeks later, they would disperse, weeping and hugging sadly. They almost never talked to each other the rest of the year. Such was the nature of camp friendships in the Time Before Facebook.

In the summer of 1984, they were sexy as hell. There were eleven of them and for years to come they would fuel my erotic fantasies — individually or sometimes in accommodating pairs — but there were three of them who really stood out.

Lynn Abrams was known as The Abrams Tank, which had the same salacious connotation to us as "brick house" had to the Commodores. She was an athlete, a tennis player, who moved with a dancer's fluidity. Long graceful lines and slender muscles gliding across the court. A gold chai dangling above her cleavage, below the pert new nose her parents had bought her for her sixteenth birthday.

Aimee Feinberg was a frosty, fussy Jewish-American Princess. We called her Iceberg. Her Long Island accent rankled, but physically she was the picture of refined elegance, wearing soft, tactile clothing. Muted pinks and powder blues that practically begged to be stroked.

But to my mind, the hottest was Nancy Wasserman. With center-parted brown cinnamon hair, she was short, with large breasts and sharp, agonizing curves accentuated by tight T-shirts tucked into short-shorts. And her thighs. Oh, Lord, her thighs. Even today, I could probably pick them out of a line-up.

Her nickname unfortunately was Booger, which her bunkmates branded her with when she was ten, due to her proclivity for picking her nose. That her mucousy moniker did nothing to dampen the longing in my loins should tell you just how unbelievably hot I thought she was.

But I was not naïve. I had long understood my place in the social order. Beautiful girls did not like me. Over the years this was demonstrated in numerous ways, but never more clearly or articulately than by Christine Romano back in seventh grade science class.

We had been divided into teams for a science competition, answering astronomy questions in a head-to-head game show format. The reward was Tootsie Pops, so we all took it very seriously.

With the exception of myself and my friend Rob Moroney, our team was largely useless. But together we dominated, crushing our opponents. I put us over the top by reciting from memory exactly how many miles there are in a light year. It was impressive at the time, but doubly so in hindsight, since these days I can't always recite from memory the names of my two children.

Anyway, it was a grand celebration. Our teacher held up a lollipop bouquet in her fist from which we selected our flavors. The crinkling of fifteen wrappers simultaneously unwrapping sounded to my ear like distant applause.

Christine Romano walked by and cast an envious look in our direction. Christine had developed early and was a full head taller than me. With a light dusting of freckles and auburn hair falling dramatically over one eye, I thought she was gorgeous. 

Rob, noticing Christine's jealousy, waved his Tootsie Pop at her teasingly, then popped it in his mouth. "Mmmmm!" he said, enjoying the natural and artificial flavors. She laughed good-naturedly, her teeth sparkling.

So I followed Rob's lead, doing the same thing he did, and expecting the same reaction. Instead, her face hardened and her uncovered eye narrowed angrily. Her freckles seemed angry, too. Darker somehow.

"Stop it!" she snapped.

I was startled by her ferocity, but I was also puzzled by her double standard. I decided to investigate. 

"Wait. Rob just did the exact same thing and you thought it was funny. Why would you get mad when I did it?"

To my credit that was, for a seventh grader, a very cogent question. And to Christine's credit she had an equally cogent answer.

"Because he's cool," she said contemptuously. "And you're a fag!" She hit the word "fag" with tremendous force, like she was driving a railroad spike with a sledgehammer.

There was no coming back from that.

All of which is to say that I knew perfectly well that I didn't have a chance with Booger. Hell, I didn't have a chance with any of them. 

Except Emily.

Emily was the lone newcomer, an intruder among this close-knit group of unforgiving adolescent girls. She was a delicate flower — tall, with pale blue eyes and fluffy, light brown curls down to her shoulders — and she positively wilted under the heat of their disdain. She sat there with her legs and arms crossed protectively, folding in on herself.

Emily liked me the moment she saw me. The shy ones always did. I don't know what it was that attracted them to me. I suppose they sensed my own shyness and imagined me a kindred spirit, mistaking my social awkwardness for sensitivity and depth.

Once Drezner finished teaching us the ins and outs of bussing tables and sweeping floors we all sat and talked. I have always been baffled by the effortlessness with which people manage to start conversations with people they don't really know. Given time, I could be clever and funny with the people I liked, sarcastic and combative with the people I didn't. But in a situation like this, where the guys and girls were feeling each other out to see who would be feeling each other up, I was particularly inept. Eventually I would lapse into bitter silence and find a reason to leave.

As I looked uncomfortably around the room, I caught Emily's eye and she gave me a timid smile. "So," I said. "Where are you from?"

I wish I could tell you that I was engaging her in order to ease her evident discomfort, but I was really easing my own. I also wish I could tell you where she was from, or anything else I learned about her that evening, but I remember very little about that conversation other than my relief that I had somebody to talk to.

In truth, I was far more aware of the conversations that I wasn't a part of. Booger throwing her head back and laughing at one of Cheese's off-color jokes. The Abrams Tank peppering Kareem with excited questions as he recounted the time he saw Springsteen at the Stone Pony. Yogi and Iceberg comparing PSAT scores. His were higher than hers — although not a perfect score, which surprised me — and hers were higher than mine, which also surprised me.

Emily, apparently, did not sense my distraction. And ironically, the only person I wasn't listening to was the only person who came to visit me while I lay in the infirmary with bloody cuts, double vision and a crashing headache.