Monday, 15 July 2002 | Hairnet days

I had my first job when I was fourteen. I think it was a friend's idea to get a job, rather than mine or my parents'. I think it had something to do with where I lived.

I moved there when I was twelve and have always considered it strange and small—nothing there but a university and a couple of churches, not even a grocery store. Houses, a small, flat brick school, an old junkyard, a golf course, a gas station, a post office, and two non-university-affiliated restaurants with grade C sanitation. Some people call it quaint and safe, and they probably use the word friendly. I spent my sentence there like a popcorn kernel on a hot pan, readying myself to jump out and evolve.

During the summer months, just as the town began to drift off into quiet boredom, 1,000 little boys came roaring in, shipped in from all over the east coast to attend the country's oldest basketball camp. Two weeks of basketball camp were followed by a blur of others—golf, girls' basketball, soccer, volleyball, cheerleading, tennis—each camp bringing with it different body types and personalities and equipment, along with social stimulation for me and my friends.

Since I lived practically on campus, friends would camp out at my place for the week, and we'd spend the warm evenings walking the brick paths that zig-zag throughout town, playing video games at the student center, and meeting kids our age. I almost never had crushes on any of them, but my friends would always find one to pine for the remainder of the summer. Stephanie's big love was Brian, a skater with a bowl cut and a Vision Street Wear wardrobe. Sally liked a basketball player named Corey and borrowed his last name for her notebooks the following school year.

So the idea was to work in the cafeteria during the camps, shoveling smelly overcooked vegetables into divided plastic trays, watching the campers go past as if on a conveyor belt. We worked three meals per day for minimum wage. Stephanie and I would zombie out of the house at 6 a.m. for the breakfast shift, return to my house to sleep until lunch, and spend our afternoons combing the campus until the dinner shift. The summer weeks passed by in awkward two-hour segments of freedom.

Neither of us actually liked working there. I had to wear my long hair in a ponytail and encase it in a hair net; the combined smells of the mop water, creamed spinach, and sausage made me queasy; and I regularly found myself scooping dead flies out of the scrambled eggs. But I guess it gave us a sort of affiliation with the camps, with the foreignness we found so attractive, and gave us some money to shove in the video game slots at the student center.

Apparently this is the week the teenage golfers swarm around my old town. It's strange, thinking that some of them weren't even alive during the time I was there, netted and aproned, dishing out servings of grease. I wonder which unfortunate local kids have taken my place behind the counter.