Camp Granada
Camp Granada
By Carlonie Hunt
“Mudda Fadda kindly disregard this letter”
This place is dreadful. I don’t want to be here. It’s dull, there’s nothing cultural going on, the
movies are all out of date by the time they get out here (they probably get stuck in the traffic
on the 495) and what about all those venal women, the man-manipulators with
their white talons and dried up bleached hair? Well apart from the rich ones of course, they
have well tended highlights. But I bet both species always make their husbands take the trash
out.
A long, thin, eroding and vulnerable sandbar that is nothing but expressways and motorways,
home to that curious genetic mutation – ‘Greater Spotted Long Island Man’; weaving in
and out of traffic, eating, drinking, on the phone making futile journey’s in their big, fat
SUV’s, clogging up the roads, complaining about the price of gas and giving us all respiratory
disease. Perhaps if they drive about long enough, they’ll be removed from the gene pool one
way or another.
So I keep myself to myself and I don’t talk to anyone, other than out of absolute necessity.
There’s no friend material here. They’re all back in the city. In fact, you can almost see the
curtains twitching in our plastic coated condo complex, busy body neighbors waiting to tell
tales for any minor misdemeanor, or ‘infractions’ as they like to call them. Management boards
giddy with the petty power of their self created fiefdom. No this! No that! No the other! No!
No! No! They couldn’t wait to rip out the mellow cedar shingle sidings and replace them with
plastic ones, committing mass genocide by destroying the homes of millions of insects. No
wonder half the birds have vanished around here. Well, that’s if all that pesticide they put
down every spring hasn’t killed them off first. Creatures take potluck round here, starve to
Death, or Death by slow poisoning. Oh – the choices of modern wildlife today. Talking of which,
what about rest of the great unwashed yelling coarsely at each other in bars – the beer making
them talk more rubbish than usual and then jumping red lights – morons.
You get it already, clever old you. I didn’t want to come here. Unfortunately, it was just about
the last option in the world left to me. I suffered misfortune on a monumental scale. A not-
so-young woman, not-so-special woman, who’d never much stuck her head above the
Parapet of Life. I worked out that the odds of what happened to me were 1 in 8 million. Maybe
more. But who cared? I can tell you that no-one did. I could only deduce that I must be a very
special person on the karmic level. The day mySoHoapartment building collapsed, just 3
weeks after I bought it, spending every penny I ever earned on it; just as the workmen were
finishing the rewiring, the new kitchen, the smart new slate tiled bathrooms, well, that was the
end of my Life. I Died that day. But as if to stick the boot in one more time, just to make sure,
Life made sure that a few months later I got fired from my job running a prestigious events
company in the city. I was Stone Cold Dead, like a pheasant taking a bullet to the head.
I was really good at that job too, but I was no longer the person they hired. I was a glorious
success one day, a failure in an unfathomable situation the next. I’d been pivotal in saving the
some 40 jobs from certain death after the uncertainties of 9/11. And this was my
karmic ROI. Thank you very much Universe. Now there was really nothing left. I had come
fromLondontoNew Yorka successful, affluent woman and within a few months, I’d lost the
bloody lot.
Well, except for a fairly new relationship. He’d just left his wife. It was too soon to live
together, but he suggested it anyway. If only to allow me to re-group he said. As cheaply as
possible. The legal fees following my catastrophe were gargantuan as you can probably
