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    Camp Don Bosco was my first male peer group, and it was a shock to learn that boys were, in fact, dipshits. The mystery I’d always thought surrounded tough guys just disappeared. Here’s an actual conversation I heard on the picnic tables outside the canteen that summer:
             
    CRANDALL:
So, how many times have you done it with her?
    COLANTINO:
None. She’s a virgin bitch.
    CRANDALL:
Virgins are the worst kind! It takes so long to get it!
    COLANTINO:
But virgins are the best kind when you do get it.
    CRANDALL:
But it takes so long!
             
    Crandall was a fourteen-year-old dork, and sounded like a real idiot bragging about sex, but he was in with the tough guys because his best friend was ringleader Steve Doherty, a sociopathic Scott Baio look-alike. The only kid allowed to give Crandall shit was Doherty’s little brother, who was in St. Pat’s. Spaz was a tiny kid from Dorchester who lost more fights than he won, but he was crazy and would fight
anybody
, so he got the respect normally reserved for the tough guys who spent their leisure time kicking the shit out of Spaz. Spaz wore a scapular around his neck, a string of holy medallions that consecrated him to Mary. Supposedly, if you die wearing one, you go straight to heaven. But one night, Brother Al told us all a cautionary tale about a man who thought he could get away with his sinful ways because he wore the scapular. “He led a very immoral life,” Brother Al told us, pacing the floor after lights-out. “He did everything.” After he died in a car crash, the police found his scapular . . . dangling from a nearby tree!
    Mike McGrath was the only tough guy who took a liking to me, and without him, I wouldn’t have lasted a week at Camp Bosco. Mike was from my parish, St. Mary’s, and we’d been confirmed together. His big brother, called “Urko” after some evil gorilla on the
Planet of the Apes
TV series, was one of Milton’s scariest delinquents. Mike was just a joke back home, but at camp he told everybody he was “Big Mac,” and I didn’t blow his cover, so he looked out for me. (“Ape shall never kill ape.”)
    Everybody complained that Camp Don Bosco was too far from Boston to pick up our beloved WCOZ. The only radio we got was a local country station, which only Brother Al could stomach. We all missed WCOZ on Sunday nights, which was when the Dr. Demento show aired. But instead of radio, we had Bubba Colantino’s “master blaster” boombox and five tapes in heavy cranktation. Our two biggest albums were “2” and “Zeppelin,” normally listed in reference works as
Led Zeppelin II
and
Led Zeppelin IV
. Some people call the latter “Zoso,” but I never heard it called that at Camp Don Bosco. Damone in
Fast Times
calls it
Led Zeppelin Four
. The Columbia House Record and Tape Club ads listed it as
Runes
. But the guys at camp just said, “Put the Zeppelin on.” (A “Zeppelin” was also a kind of bong that looked like a thermos and held two roaches and filled up with enough smoke to choke an elephant.) When Steve Doherty said, “Put on two,” he meant the album with “Whole Lotta Love.” The three other albums we blasted all summer were
Hi Infidelity
,
Crimes of Passion
, and
Back in Black
—Brother Larry approved of the theology of “Hells Bells.”
    The guy with the most Zeppelin tapes was Mullen, the junior counselor in charge of St. Pat’s. I knew him from my grandparents’ parish, St. Andrew’s in Forest Hills. Mullen shaved his head and never said a word. There was a story going around that some lady had offered him a hundred bucks to beat up her son all summer, to toughen the boy up, but that Mullen had turned her down. Nonetheless, all the Magone guys were too scared to touch any St. Pat’s kids because that was Mullen’s cabin. I didn’t understand the tough guys—I thought the whole point was to be tough so you wouldn’t have to be afraid, but it seemed to me that the