The Deadhead

I’d gotten good at feeling my way to The Deadhead in the dark.

The first time I made the trek was my third night as the least enthusiastic counselor at Camp Marigold, northeastern Ohio’s premier Christian summer camp.

I was about to shed my shower shoes and climb into scratchy flannel sheets when my roommate Naomi called to me from across the cabin.

“I told you about Tommy’s mission trip in Nepal, right?”

She hadn’t, and didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Well with the time difference and all, this is really, like, our only time to connect. So, like...he’s going to call any minute, you know?”

I said a soft “cool”, debated whether or not “time to connect” was a euphemism for phone sex, and gave a congratulatory salute as I crept out the cabin, shower shoes and all.

As I trekked through the campgrounds, I stayed off the beaten path. Not for any obviously poetic reason, but because if I saw anyone, I’d have to explain why I wasn’t in my cabin. And unless “thou shalt not eavesdrop while thine bunkmate talks dirty to her long distance boyfriend” suddenly became the 11th commandment, my excuse wouldn’t save me.

I reached the fence that divided Camp Marigold from the rural roads that boxed it in. True to name, planted marigolds dotted the fenceline.

Without thought, I hopped the fence and made my way into the diner across the street, passing a fading neon sign that read “The Deadhead”.

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Camp Marigold had been Paul’s idea, years ago. I wasn’t psyched about going, but I didn’t have anything better to do. Plus I figured a little religious propaganda and fresh air would be better than being home, so I didn’t put up a fight. I never did.

I remember my mother showing me the brochure, at Paul’s urging. The cover had a decades-old photo of Eli and Fran–the married couple who ran it–with their daughter Marigold donning a camp tee, a crucifix, and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.

The summers there were unexceptional, but this was my first as a counselor. I thought it’d be different.

I blame Dirty Dancing.

If there’s one thing the movie taught me, it was that there’d be a seedy underbelly at Camp Marigold—a counselor counter-culture that came to life after dark. We’d smoke Marlboro Reds and play poker with vending machine change and swap issues of contraband Cosmo.

To my dismay, it didn’t exist. The counselors were all former campers who actually wanted to be here. And the campers who didn’t want to be here—the rebellious types I felt both loyal to and less than—found cooler jobs.

They worked at movie theaters and community pools and theme parks. They were eating their weight in free popcorn and making out with ripped life guards while I was teaching repressed pre-teens how to make boondoggle crosses.

Some girls have all the luck.

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“You a Marigolder?”

The man behind the diner counter broke my daze as I zoned out to the drip of a coffee pot. He was forty-something, heavily-tattooed, and either confused or irked by my presence. Time would tell.

“No, just passing through,” I said in my most performatively lackluster tone.

Passing through? What kind of drifter facade was I putting on here?

“You’re lying.”

“I mean...technically aren’t we all passing through? Like, metaphorically speaking?”

His face didn’t budge. Time froze, painfully. Then he spoke.

“It’s okay. I don’t care. Just like to know who’s at my counter.”

I nodded as if I could relate. He looked at me quizzically.

“I’m G. You are…”

“Samantha.” I doubled back. “Sam.”

“Sam. Well, welcome to The Deadhead. WhatcanIgetya?” he said in one word.

“Coffee, please.”

G poured my coffee, handed it over with no promise of cream or sugar, and returned to the kitchen. A while later, he appeared with pancakes.

I knew they were pity pancakes. I was fine with that.

I savored them slowly. One, I was trying to filibuster this late night breakfast and stay as long as possible. Two, they were delicious and I figured this would be my first and only visit to The Deadhead.

The pancakes became a nightly ritual.

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I had a bad habit of fixating on people’s faces when I talked to them. I’d find a straying trail of eyebrow hairs, an eyelash that turned down instead of up, a zit that desperately wanted to be popped —and my gaze would lock onto it. Not subtly, either.

It wasn’t like I was judging anyone for their flaws. God knows I wasn’t one to talk. I just needed something to latch on to.

But I could never do that with G, because he was always moving. It was ideal.

I came to The Deadhead nightly, since Naomi’s calls were, well, also nightly. I couldn’t get a guy to look at me and she had this boy combatting spotty Himalayan cell reception on a daily basis.

Anyway, G was as conversationally starved as I was. The late night crowd was either nearly catatonic or in a hurry to get back on the road. So we swapped softball questions in between his runs back and forth from the kitchen.

Soon I knew his favorite color and fruit (orange) and favorite animal (slow loris, because of the eyes and the name). He knew my lucky number (21) and favorite food (I lied and said chocolate chip pancakes so he’d start adding chocolate to my nightly short stack).

As a thank-you, and to not feel so useless, I helped with the little chores. That’s how I started working at The Deadhead. Unofficially.

The deal was simple, as most unspoken ones are. I had somewhere to go and all the pancakes and coffee I wanted. G had restocked napkins and refilled salt shakers. And none of us had to answer any hard questions.

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My mom won’t tell me much more than this: my father was a musician. She’d been following his band on tour. She was in love with the drummer, but settled for my bass-playing dad after a few unsuccessful weeks Penny Lane-ing. She got pregnant, he got terrified, and she stayed behind in a small town on the tour route while he followed his dream.

So she found someone else to follow. Well, many someone elses.

It started with a commune a few miles from the spot my mom stepped off the tour bus. That’s where I was born. I don’t remember much of it. Probably for the best.

When things got expectedly culty, my mom fled, but not far. She ended up with Ezra, an Orthodox Jewish farmer a few acres over, who had disgraced his family with a divorce and was living in isolation. I think he loved taking something from the hippies next door more than he loved my mother.

Then Kyle, who my mom met while working the stand at the farmer’s market. They wed a few months later. Kyle was the face of a burgeoning fitness empire, and as his new family, we became the faces (and bodies) of that empire, too. I can still feel the sandpaper grit of the scale under my bare feet and hear the plop of my kale smoothie hitting the bottom of the cafeteria trash can.

And then a tattooed Buddhist named Xan who my mother met at a yoga retreat where Kyle wanted her to “center herself”, which ironically uncentered him. Xan was my mother’s second husband, the nicest of the bunch, and the reason my half-sister gets a name as cool as Siddhartha while I’m just Sam.

Then after Xan, a few months of nothing.

It was wonderful.

I never had the heart to tell my mom that my happiest times were her falls from grace. When the savior-of-the-week was gone, our little world would drift into hedonism. That meant eating whatever I wanted without concerns of being kosher or vegetarian or staying in a caloric deficit. And sleeping in. And watching TV til my eyes teared up. And walking around in my underwear without feeling that familiar ick.

But it was a long stretch of lonely nights for my mom, which turned into drinking alone, and drinking alone turned into drinking too much, and drinking too much turned into AA meetings in a church basement. And as my mother walked out of that church basement one night, she ran into a pious man named Paul.

She says it was divine intervention. I say old habits die hard.

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“I have to ask…”

This was unusual of G. We never prefaced our questions.

He continued.

“You’re at Marigold. You’re way too old to be a camper and way too…” G waived his wrist around the room. “Well, you’re here, so you’re not old enough to be anywhere actually fun. So you’re a counselor.”

“Astute observation.”

A rare wry smile from G.

“So how are you here all night and then up at the crack of dawn doing wholesome camp crap?”

“I’ve never been a big sleeper. And the free coffee helps,” I said half-truthfully.

Satisfied, G nodded and started towards the kitchen.

I thought of something and hummed inadvertently. G turned around, curious.

“What?”

“I figured you’d ask why I’m here. Not how I’m here,” I replied.

“Oh, I know why you’re here. You don’t belong there. Same reason I left, too.”

“But...Camp Marigold’s for girls?” I said, my inflection rising as if even I was unsure.

“Sure is. I would know. They named it after me.”

I felt a little foolish for not realizing it sooner. G did have the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.

Once it sunk in, I tried to muster an out-of-body experience so I could gauge my own facial expression. I didn’t want to look surprised at this and somehow insult G. Or was it a compliment that this tattooed, buzzcut-donning man who stood before me was nothing like the girl in the photo from so long ago?

I decided it wasn’t up to me to decide. So I offered my most nonchalant “huh”. That seemed to suffice.

I had a thousand questions. But G and I usually went tit-for-tat. One piece of truth handed over at a time.

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The next night, back at my same spot at the counter, I figured it was my turn to ask something.

“Why did you name this place The Deadhead?”

“Ah,” G said with a half-smirk. “You garden?”

“No deflecting, man. But also, no.”

“Well, my grandmother did. She left me this land, and the rest to my parents.”

He paused. For emphasis or to gather his thoughts, I’ll never know.

“So she could tell you that when a marigold isn’t thriving, you decapitate it. You cut off its head in hopes that the plant will grow a new flower. The flower you wanted. It’s called deadheading.”

“Deadheading. I like it.”

I was out of questions. So was G. We spent the next few minutes contentedly listening to the coffee drip.

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I awoke staring at The Deadhead in the distance from between two pine posts, my head planted solidly in soil.

It seemed I’d fallen asleep beside the fence I’d been hopping for weeks. Collapsed, more likely.

Some might say it was divine intervention. I say it was probably gallons of diner coffee and sleepless nights catching up to me.

I felt the sun on the back of my neck. I knew there’d be a burn. And later, leering eyes. Whispers. Rumors. Intercom calls. Heavy footsteps. Packed bags. I felt the corners of my mouth turn up.

As I rose, I looked back at the marigolds that stood like chess pawns before the fence. My eye flew to the smallest of the bunch, its sun blocked by a fallen fencepost. I found the flower with the saddest leaves, twisted its head clean off, and carried it with me as I walked on.