♪ (LOW RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
When we were seven and eight years old,
my parents sent me and my brother, Evan,
off to summer camp.
And I was looking forward to this.
I was really looking forward to it.
Play baseball, and basketball,
and all kinds of sports all day long.
I was really looking forward to this.
Except it wasn't that.
They would wake us up at five o'clock in the morning
and we'd have breakfast in this big, big room.
And after breakfast, we were ushered off
to arts and crafts.
And arts and crafts were run by this guy, Al.
When you're eight years old, it's hard to tell
how old an older person is, but he seemed really kinda old,
like 60 or so.
And he had this enormous head.
And he wore a white sleeveless t-shirt,
and he had these long, long hairs
that grew out of his shoulders.
And he had big, fat, meaty hands,
and he would have us make these...
what were supposed to be tornado lanyards
made out of gimp.
I don't know if they still make gimp.
It's like this plastic string.
And he would come around and sing these camp songs.
And we were supposed to sing along with him.
Clapping his meaty hands and his bad breath
permeating the room, and I just thought,
"This is no good. I want to go play basketball."
Then after arts and crafts, we were supposed to go swimming.
I thought, "Good, I like swimming.
This is gonna be fun."
Except the lake that we swam in was fed by a mountain stream
and the water was freezing cold.
It was unbearable.
And they let you out of the water if you turned blue.
And a couple of kids were lucky enough to turn blue.
But I never turned blue.
Then we would go and have lunch, then we would have naptime.
One hour naptime.
And after naptime, they sent us back to arts and crafts.
And this is when I planned my escape.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
JOHN LURIE: Other kids heard about my escape
and they wanted to join me.
So I said, "Okay, bring your duffel bag,
bring your sandwich, and any camping gear
that you brought here, bring it with you.
What we're going to do is,
at the beginning of naptime, we're going to sneak out.
Then we'll have an hour head start."
Thirteen of us left the camp.
Wally, Billy, Tommy.
There were two Ralphs, so we called one Small Ralph,
and the other one, we just called him Ralph.
So it was Wally, Billy, Tommy, Ralph, Small Ralph,
Chester, Gerald, Carl, Wilbur, Freddy, Joey, Dennis,
and Smeltzer.
Smeltzer never talked,
but we thought his name was Smeltzer.
We thought we heard a counsellor call him Smeltzer.
Smeltzer, Smeltzer.
We got about five miles away.
Then somebody said, "They're coming!"
So we all ducked down in a ditch,
and they drove by, and they didn't see us.
♪ (QUIRKY MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
I promise you, the stories I tell on here
and in my book, The History of Bones,
they're all true.
I mean, they're as true as I can make them.
Except for the stories, of course,
that are obviously not true,
like I never had quarters coming out of my nose.
But other than that, I tried to be really honest.
So the first part of this is absolutely what happened.
But it was 60 years ago.
And I more remember telling the story
than the thing actually happening,
if you know what I mean.
So some of this may have drifted.
So I'm not sure, but this is how I remember it.
So from that point on, we decided to stay off the road.
We moved further into the woods.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Wally had a compass, a toy compass,
and I don't think it was really working,
but we were supposed to be going east.
We had started out in Massachusetts.
But clearly, now, we were going south.
There was moss in the trees, and there were more mosquitoes,
and there were these flowers, these beautiful flowers.
Flowers I had never seen before. They were incredibly beautiful.
And they were everywhere. Flowers.
And there were fields of beautiful, lush, green grass.
And it felt good to be walking out here like this.
We felt free. We felt important.
Of course, almost immediately,
everybody had eaten their sandwiches.
And by the end of the day, they all started to get hungry.
But around, just as the sun was going down,
we came to this place.
A place that I'd only read about in books,
where it was like a village with huts,
and they had these totem poles with these tiger heads
painted on the top of them.
I'll try and paint them for you.
It was so beautiful there, but there was nobody.
There obviously had been people, but there was nobody there then.
So we kept going.
Now, we're really hungry. And we saw these mushrooms,
I said, "You can eat mushrooms.
I know you can eat mushrooms."
So we started picking all the mushrooms.
But Billy came by and said,
"No, those are poisonous mushrooms."
But near where the mushrooms were,
there was a farm,
and we could see these sprigs coming up,
and Billy said, "Those are potatoes underneath there,
and if we dig, there will be potatoes."
♪ Potato ♪
We had a little, little pot, like a little dented pot.
So we boiled the potatoes and that's what we ate.
♪ Potato, potato ♪
And we moved on.
We came into this really beautiful area.
It was fields, with these trees.
And Wally said, "I think that tree is talking.
Is that tree talking?"
So we went up close to the tree to see if it was talking.
And there was words coming out of the tree.
So we thought, maybe the tree could guide us on our journey.
So I got close to the tree. And I said, "Can you help us?"
And he was going through stock prices on the NASDAQ.
He was just reciting stock prices.
And I would ask him a question,
he would just say more stock prices.
Fucking tree. Why?
And we moved on.
And we came to this very jungle-like area.
And we could see up ahead of us, there were alligators.
A lot of alligators. And I didn't know what to do.
And they were all saying, "John, what should we do?"
And I thought about it,
and I remembered something Gurdjieff had told me.
And I said, "Okay, let's back up.
And we'll cut down little trees and then take the branches
and tie them with our shoelaces."
And we made stilts.
And then we walked through the alligators.
We were like three feet,
the alligators would look up and go... (GROWLS)
But they didn't bite anybody. They didn't attack the pole.
And so we walked through the alligators.
And now we were tired.
And once we saw that we were safe,
we decided to make camp. And we cooked...
♪ Potato, potato ♪
And as I was sleeping on the ground,
-I heard this gigantic clomp. -(LOUD STOMP)
JOHN: And I looked up and I saw that Tommy was missing.
And that there was a gigantic alligator
at the edge of our camp.
And I realized what had happened.
I said, "Everybody get up, everybody get up,
everybody get up now!
Get up now!
Turn the alligator over, turn it on its back,
and rub its stomach.
Turn it on its back and rub its stomach."
Which we did,
and then the alligator fell off to sleep.
When we were sure he was asleep,
we pried his jaws open
and Wally climbed inside and pulled Tommy out.
Tommy was covered in alligator gunk,
but he was okay.
He was okay. He was really okay.
So we cleaned him off and we moved on.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
JOHN: Then we got to this area with giant frogs.
There were giant frogs. There were giant, giant frogs.
Ooh, somebody said, "We can eat the legs.
In France, they eat the legs."
And Billy said,
"No, not on those frogs. They're poisonous."
So for lunch we had...
♪ Potato! Potato! Potato! ♪
So we continued on.
That night we came to a small town
where everybody was asleep.
And there was a hardware store.
And in the hardware store, in the window,
there was a TV playing.
And we saw that we were on the news.
We were on the news. And...
So we were listening very closely.
And we found out everybody was angry at us.
They said, "How selfish and irresponsible
of these children to run away like this
and make their parents and the camp counsellors worry,
unnecessarily."
"Unnecessarily."
So now with this, now we go, "Oh, we can't get caught.
Now, we can't get caught. Everybody's mad at us.
We have to hide, we have to keep hiding."
And we continued on.
So now, we sort of started
to fight amongst ourselves a little bit.
They were questioning my leadership
and there was like, "Well, where do we go?
We can't go home.
And we can't let anybody find us.
Are we gonna live like this for the rest of our lives?"
And I said, "No." But I didn't know,
I didn't know, I didn't know what to do.
I did not know what to do.
And then we found another field that had...
Potato!
JOHN: I never realized how delicious potatoes were.
But they are, they're delicious.
So Wally said, "We can't just eat potatoes,
we need vitamin C, we need all the vitamins,
not just potato vitamins."
So we broke into a supermarket.
And we collected lemons.
Because I think we were all starting to get scurvy
'cause we were all walking
like we've been on a horse all day long.
So now, we were getting good at this.
We eat potatoes and break into supermarkets.
And we would stay away from people,
and we would just march on.
We'll walk till we hit the ocean or something.
We came into another town,
and it seemed like everybody was asleep.
And now we were worried we're gonna get caught
'cause, like, there was a string of grocery stores
that have been robbed and they would mark our path
on the map, so they would know which way we were going.
So we were worried, we were very, very worried
we were gonna get caught.
We came into this town. And again,
there was a TV playing in a store window.
This was a store that sold TVs and there was a bunch of TVs,
and there was pictures of all of us.
So we listened very carefully. And what we learned was,
when they were interviewing Al,
you could see Al for what he was.
You could see the hairs coming out of his shoulders,
the long hairs coming out of his shoulders
and his big, big, and massive head.
Ew, Al.
But more than anything, what helped us...
was that, when the reporter came back...
talking to the anchorwoman, she said...
"That man looks like he smells bad."
And he said, "Yes.
He smells really bad. And his breath. Ugh.
If I was eight years old, I would have run away too.
If I was eight years old, I would've run away too,
if I was brave enough.
Those kids were brave. Those kids were amazing."
And then people became on our side,
and we became national heroes.
It was a fucking beautiful thing.
It was a really beautiful thing. It was wonderful.
It was absolutely fucking-- Oh, it was good.
So we decided to celebrate.
-ALL: ♪ Potato ♪ -♪ Potato ♪
-♪ Potato ♪
♪ Potato ♪
ALL: ♪ Potato, potato ♪
♪ Potato ♪
♪ Potato, potato ♪
♪ Potato ♪
♪ Potato, potato, potato ♪
♪ Potato, potato ♪
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
♪ ("THE FIRST AND ROYAL QUEEN" BY THE LOUNGE LIZARDS PLAYS) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
Potato!