Camp Suck Jailbreak Camp Suck Jailbreak I knew food ...

I knew food so good they called me Chef Boyar-Z. At 18, I'd sliced pizza, boxed donuts, steamed hot dogs, squirted special sauce, wrapped fish and scooped ice cream. I liked making food because you could eat it, and I liked serving food because you could ask girls for their numbers.

I don't know what I was thinking when I applied for a factory job in the summer of 1993. I guess it was the $8.50 plus overtime.

On the asphalt archipelago of Jamaica Plain, Boston, my factory recycled car parts. On day one, I learned that brake pads aren't soft, paddy things at all; they're heavy, cruller-sized chunks of steel shaped like second-trimester fetuses. From bell to bell, I iron-brushed, boxed and inventoried the things. By day two, I found myself grimy and sinking into fantasies about previous summers of making strawberry frappes for girls on rollerblades. I soon had to round up and murder every one of those soft-focus memories. They were too painful. When I found one of the little bastards hiding from my superego's death squads, it was time for a trip to the torture museum. Mass graves were the only way. The summer of anti-love grinded on like a tractor in first gear. There were no girls at the factory. And since I came home every day too tired for anything but a frozen burrito and Gumby videos, there were no girls anywhere else in my life, either. But there were lots of jacked-up, scar-heavy ex-cons who smoked Kools for breakfast and had scorpion tattoos on their necks. My factory had one of the largest prison-release programs in the state, so most of my peers were fresh out of jail and on parole or working high-wire probation acts. When the factory manager hired me, he squeezed my shoulder, pointed a finger and said: "Watch your back in there. And no unions."

Since I was barred from organizing the workers, I kept to myself, humming Joe Hill songs and dreaming of autumn, winter, dentistry.

After two weeks in brake pads, I was moved to building B, where scrap metal was collected into rusted disposal containers and wheeled across the factory floor to other, larger, rusted disposal containers.

I put in for a transfer and got moved upstairs, where a relative idyll awaited me: shrink-wrapping newly refurbished hubcaps. My partner in this activity was Louis, a 23-year-old former Latin King from the Bronx. Louis had been in and out of institutions his whole life and was now living in Boston with his girlfriend and baby daughter. He hated the factory as much as I did, but he loved being free. He went back to New York often for funerals, and said every time he did, all the girls in the neighborhood would ask him to give them babies. I'd hold the hubcap down onto a cardboard backing while Louis worked the plastic wrap, telling me all about the fine woman, the cold forty and the precision blunt that awaited him after work. I'd nod and say, "Shit, esse, I hear that," even though we both knew I was going to go home, eat a Pop-Tart, jerk off and fall asleep in front of a Monkees rerun.

Our friendship was cut short when, after a month at the factory, I quit. A school friend had told me about a counselor position that needed mid-session filling at his brother's sleepaway camp. I jumped at the job, pinned it to the floor and gave eight hours' notice at the factory. I spent the rest of July in a breezy arts and crafts house in the New Hampshire woods. I cleaned soft brushes for 10-year-olds named Todd and Rebecca. I wore shorts and sandals and went swimming every day.

But the place was creepy. The enforced ideology of group fun turned out to be worse than the social isolation at the factory, and the job required being with the brats 24/7, keeping them busy and convincing them that their parents really loved them. Soon a chip was growing on my shoulder, tumor-like, and within a few weeks it was inoperable. I hated everyone. The other counselors had been going to the camp their entire lives and acted just like the 10-year-olds. The camp directors were suburban high school gym teachers with clipboards and whistles. The only girl my age that I could stand was a daffy ex-cheerleader acid casualty who had turned her back on conventional beauty. At night, I listened to the faint sound of cars on the highway and dreamed of freedom. I had escaped Birkenau only to land at Camp Suck.

Freedom came when the directors decided to make me the first counselor in living memory to be fired from the camp. None of the campers had ever seen this before. As I packed my things and explained what had happened, they just stood around me, speechless, as if I were waving an actual functioning light saber.

Angels, it turns out, are just stoners with cars. After a two-minute phone call to my buddy Jon, he hired me as a roadie for his band, the Unknown. After a day by the side of the interstate, he picked me up in his Pontiac Fiero and we headed south. Rolling down the highway with the windows down, he passed me a pipe and told me to pick a tape out of the mess on the car floor. I found an old Helmet album and we blasted it through his battered Alpine speakers. I looked out at the pink dusk and shut my eyes. Finally, I thought. Summer.