Camp Lore - 36. Chapter 36

Having failed to prank Steve, the guys turned on Nate.

“Are you in this or not?” they asked Steve.

“You plan. Let me see where it’s going. Then I’ll decide.”

But almost immediately, he started helping out.

“No, that’s not gonna work,” he advised. “You can be smarter than that.”

“Maybe you can.”

“None of you are stupid.”

“Then you’re the least stupid of all.”

“I’ll take that.”

“Now, what could we do better?”

“Well, for one thing, your choice of questions. You’re asking impossible things that no one’ll know. So you’ll lose your audience immediately.”

“Like Jeopardy.”

“Some people like Jeopardy, Dan.”

“Like you?”

“No, I’ve always found the information useless. So I walk out of the room if someone’s watching.”

“Well, it’s better than WHEEL! – OF! – FORTUNE!”

“Anything’s better than that – except maybe Price is Right.”

“How do you know so much about game shows? Especially if you hate ‘em?”

“I visit my grandparents a lot.”

“Could we go back to pranking Nate?” Paul rightly asked. “If you want to write a term paper on game shows...”

“He’s right,” Steve pointed out. “We’re way off.”

“So what’re we doing wrong?”

“I told you – the questions. You’ve got to ask things that people know but they can’t remember – not immediately. It’s one of those Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me things.”

“How do you know the names of all these shows?”

“How do you know that’s a show?”

“Is it?” Jim asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s ‘cause it’s on the radio.”

“Radio? Who listens to that?”

“OK, it’s on podcasts from the radio.”

“I like podcasts.”

“Are there game show podcasts?”

“Yeah – Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”

“Oh... right.”

“And that’s what you want your questions to be – so everyone in the audience knows the answer – or at least some of them can get to it. But Nate can’t... So he looks dumb.”

“And so he’ll embarrass himself.”

“Which is all we really want.”

“There’s got to be an easier way.”

“Nah – he’s almost embarrass proof. Anything you do to him, he just smiles, and shrugs it off.”

“But if you hit him on his brain...”

“Because he thinks he’s so smart...”

“And you get him in front of the whole camp...”

“That might actually stick.”

“At least, it’s worth a try.”

Actually, Nate wasn’t a show-off kind of smart. He wasn’t constantly pushing everything he knew at you then saying, “The rest of us learned that in pre-school.” He just knew a lot of stuff.

“It’s not that I read any more than you,” he told me one night when he was searching out something on the web. “It’s just that I stupidly remember. And I depend on that so don’t waste a lot of time memorizing things. I just know they’ll be there.”

“Must be nice,” I admitted.

“It’s a trick, and I keep expecting it to fail. And one of these days, it probably will.”

The guys were hoping it would be on stage, in the Rec Hall, that week. In fact, they were relying on it.

“Now don’t get too carried away,” Steve reminded them. “Remember what happened with me.”

“If you were a nice guy, you wouldn’t remind us.”

“And we at least embarrassed you into singing all the time.”

“Nah, I can simply say ‘I need to save my voice.’”

And the guys laughed.

The set up for the game show Nate was going to be volunteered for was simple. There were two teams that answered questions alternately. Again, Greg was the host, and that’s why the guys could control the questions. Each team had two players, drawn from across the camp, so they could help each other. The real purpose of the game was to have fun, not to embarrass your friends. And there were the usual small prizes – privileges and candy – suited to the age groups.

Normally, the teams were matched to make it fair. Ten year olds competed against ten year olds. Counselors against counselors. So presumably, it would be waiters against waiters – or against counselors or the oldest boys. But the guys wanted nothing to do with competing against Nate. They all wanted to be safely at the back of the Rec Hall, happily laughing when Nate melted down. And to make sure of that, they picked the brightest fifteen-year-old and the smartest counselor for the team opposite Nate, and they paired him with a cute but not especially intelligent seven-year-old.

“Isn’t there a rule against that?” Dan asked.

“Nothing I’ve been able to find,” Greg admitted. “Actually, there aren’t a lot of rules for this game. We make them up as we go along. It’s just for fun.”

So when Nate found himself on stage again – as a camp favorite – and found himself paired with one of the youngest campers, he just grinned and waved. After all, it was only a game show. Nothing bad could happen.

Until the questions began, and the team opposite him got really competitive. It’s what Jim and the guys had hoped for. Then Nate’s natural competition streak kicked in.

Except it took a half-dozen questions for him to realize he had to play seriously. At first, he let the kid hold the buzzer and press or fumble it. Then Nate would smile at the audience and get them to laugh when he got the answer right. Still, by the time he realized this was cutthroat, he was a thousand points behind.

So Nate gently took the buzzer away from the kid and whispered something to him. The boy smiled and nodded, and you could tell he was happy. And Nate made another intelligent choice – he let the kid announce the answers.

Since it took Nate a moment to whisper the answers to the boy and for him to memorize them – and since, sometimes, the kid got halfway through them and turned to Nate, needing a refresher – Nate had to lean back over and again whisper till the kid got them right. That gave Nate just the extra time he needed.

And the audience was eating it up. They loved when the kid recited a complicated trig formula he clearly didn’t understand. Or came up with the name of a minor Soviet cosmonaut from the beginning of the age of space travel. And the audience just assumed Nate would know the answers, so they never questioned who would win. And even when Nate caught and simply let the other team answer first and get it wrong, so he and the kid would pick up the bonus points, they easily stayed ahead.

“Another bust,” Dan predicted, well ahead of time.

“Who’s idea was this, anyway?” Jim , sighed.

“Is that the name of a game show?” Paul wondered.

“No,” Steve said, laughing. “But it ought to be – Or Fifty Ways To Embarrass Jim, Paul, and Danny.”

Nate was laughing, too, when he and the kid came off stage. The kid had gotten enormous applause, and without even knowing what he was doing, he milked it for several minutes. Nate, Greg, the counselor, and his fifteen-year-old teammate just stood there, smiling and clapping.

“That was fun,” Nate said. “Now let’s dance.” And he headed to the Canteen.

“Don’t tell him that was a set-up,” Jim begged the rest of us – just a little desperately.

“It’ll cost you,” Steve warned.

“Name it.”

“Next round of beer’s on you.”

Jim turned to Brian.

“Can we get the car?”

And when we all got back to the bunk afterwards, there was a case of good imported beer in the fridge.