Salvo Louis—how he got that name
I can’t recall—kept mostly to himself.
He stayed all summer with “Provisional,”
the weekly pick-up troop for boys who came
alone. He was obsessed with Steppenwolf.
He had a shoebox of cassettes, and all
he ever talked about, besides the group,
was how his fellow campers for the week
missed out on “primo shit” the week before.
He didn’t make a lot of friends. Our troop,
which always had a campsite by the lake
the second week of August, would ignore
the “bastards” from Provisional. “The hoods.”
But I knew who played Monster in the woods.