Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  Cameron wrote a song on the guitar I lent him, the beat-up tomato-red Fender Duo-Sonic I bought off the dentist’s son for $25. You can hear that model of guitar a lot nowadays, a toy-sized treble-rich guitar with no sustain. I let that guitar of mine go for almost nothing; starved for cash and desperate to get out of my hometown I, against my better judgment, hauled the Duo-Sonic into the music store, where they pointed at this and that defect and—positive that I was fencing stolen goods—said they could only offer me $60 for it. I took their money, then later heard that the Duo-Sonic was in their window—“a classic antique”—wearing a $490 price tag.

  I attempted to teach Cameron to play that guitar in my parent’s garage after school, weekdays, tried to turn him into a band member, but frankly he wasn’t very adept. His interest in guitar technique was quashed after meeting Greg of the Circle Jerks. Greg told him about the “Magic Chord,” told him that you need just two fingers, that you finger the roots of the bar chord, pluck those strings together very fast, turn the amplifier to full distortion, and everyone will feel you’re plenty talented. Greg had Cameron convinced that the rest of the guitar—the other four strings, the pick-up switches and bass/treble knobs—were made for wussy jazz and that no one who played rock and roll should touch them.

  So Cameron wrote a song, sorta like you’d imagine, a fast distorted 4/4 hard-core basher which was played on only two strings, with Cameron just shifting the Magic Chord up and down the frets every half-measure. The song had no melody, no words, no title; we covered it, my band, long after Cameron stopped showing up for our garage rehearsals, and we dubbed it “Cameron’s Song” in his honor but I doubt he ever came and saw us and I’m not certain, even if he had, whether he would have recognized the piece.

  The thing I remember about giving him guitar lessons is Cameron smiling at me the whole time, nodding enthusiastically with a short “Okay, okay” each time I’d show him something.

  “You want to hold your pick—”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Like this.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  We’d take our fake identification cards and together go to shows at the Starwood or the Whisky or the Cuckoo’s Nest where the headliners dressed as we dressed, plain jeans, normal tee shirts, short hair, where the singers couldn’t be heard above the instruments though they screamed themselves hoarse trying, their bent-up mouths appearing like dark wounds gashed into their pallid faces, features in terrific pain, the musicians brazenly using made-up names like “Jello” and “Smear,” “Zoom” and “Crash.” Our favorite singer was named Dinah Cancer, our favorite bassist Derf Scratch, our favorite drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Occasionally, Cameron and I would come out having favored different folks on the bill—he’d generally enjoy no-nonsense barrage, I’d prefer stronger melodies, better words. But still, we went to the gigs together, endured them all the way through, and to my mind that was the important part, the part that truly made us friends.

  My mother calls and I’m immediately suspicious. I haven’t been home in some time, and I know she’s anxious to see me, to draw me back any way she can, to position me there, a permanent cushion between her and my little sister. But this time she doesn’t sound that way at all; she just isn’t sure I’ve seen the news. It has been drizzling in my hometown for weeks and now the storms are intensifying. Flash flood warnings have closed down most of the local campgrounds, including one located just a quarter-mile from my parent’s house, the house I grew up in. In recent years, maybe due to the campground’s proximity to freight tracks and the main highway, this particular site has housed a steady flow of unpaying inhabitants—drifters and runaways, migrant workers and homeless, their belongings in milk-crates, their tents improvised out of painter’s tarps, their laundry draped like Christmas ornaments over the oleander. This campground straddles a dry creekbed, a broad sand ditch lined with pepper trees where my friends and I would hunt for fossils on summer afternoons.

  A few weeks each winter the creekbed fills to capacity with roiling waters, the overflow from mountain dams located high over us in the Condor Sanctuary, rushing thousands of feet down, racing and scurrying and taking along gnarled husks of fallen oak and trunks of pine, turning the logs over and over in haste, momentum growing, a crashing river hiding within its foam so many half-visible scraps of weighty things that standing on the bank you might glimpse the top of a stove or a closet full of clothes or a sheared-off car door drifting by, strewn with uprooted tumbleweeds and greasewood.

  Mom explains that the sheriff scoured the campground after the flash flood warning and removed all the transients, hauling them to higher ground, to safety. But the sheriff had inadvertently missed an occupant, some deranged man, a homeless guy, who drowned soon after in the middle of the night when the river burst its banks, water inundating the site with such force that trash cans and picnic tables were picked up and carried nearly ten miles downstream, washed almost to the beach.

  In the obituary my mother was surprised to read that the dead man had actually been quite young, was a recent graduate from our local high school. She thought I might have known him because we were the same age, graduated the same year. His name sounds familiar to her. Didn’t you know some boy, she asks, named Cam-something, whose last name was Joyce?

  Cameron was the kind of kid who reassured parents, easygoing, amiable, even ingenuous, and mean to no one but himself. It used to offend me when I read of people being warned against punk’s amorality and anti-ethics because though I often considered myself passionately bankrupt of values, devoutly bored with manners, wonderfully unimpressed with most any grown-up, still this did not seem true of Cameron, who was another kind of punk altogether, irregular, inconsistent, unreliable, yes, but shy too, always kind, civilized.

  I would laugh at those anguished predictions about kids my age when I thought of Cameron, riding his quietly pleasant Vespa scooter around the sun-drenched valley, overdressed in his fishtail Union Jack parka with the fur-lined hood.

  Tell Cameron not to do something and he wouldn’t, whereas most of the rest of us would out of spite. They’d tell us not to skateboard over the pads in front of the automatic doors at the grocery store, they’d tell us time and again, not realizing the more they told us the more fun it was; but Cameron wouldn’t do it, they asked him not to and he abruptly lost interest in it.

  And yet Cameron was more complicated than that too, for he came along with us when we sourly stalked the school halls, my few friends and me, and any people we passed whom we didn’t like we would nod at, declare “After the revolution . . .”, and then draw a finger across our throat. And we liked almost none of them, not teachers, not students, and gradually we amassed detailed plans to kill most every one of them.

  Leaning on our favorite wall of combination lockers, close to the edge of campus, some of us crouched, positioned so that the wall supported only our heads, others standing, one knee bent, we would proudly pass around well-worn copies of berserk books whose scenarios fit us more comfortably than high school, although I must point out that in this Cameron was not one of us, he never ascribed to these bibles of ours. Cameron’s rebel status—the reason he sought the company of petty thieves, liars, and braggarts like us—was more intuitive, less thought-out; he did not internalize, the way some of us did, the distant romance of anomie-struck youth in holy literature; Cameron in a sense wrote his own story, which he kept to himself and told none of us, and he shrugged away the books and essays we’d offer while smiling patiently, tall and lean, seldom speaking, eventually pushing off from our favorite wall, waving a small ‘so long’ at us without pulling his hands from the deep pockets of his parka, and then putt-putt-putting away on his polite white Vespa.

  We would drive long distances together, all of us, in order to see any showings of A Clockwork Orange or Quadrophenia, films we knew every line of dialogue from. One of us would usually have stolen a half-gallon of alcohol from the back of some parent’s liquor cabinet, that untouched
chardonnay from Christmas long ago, that cognac which a grown-up was reserving for a special occasion, that fancy malt-something which adults keep for later, and we’d pass it back and forth during the film, sloppy and more alive there than anywhere, each of us Alex and each of us Jimmy, cocky, defiant, sexy, intoxicated, dismissive of authority. It seemed to us these films alone appreciated us. Never Grow Old, they insisted, for once mature you would be Jimmy, heartbroken over his return to Brighton, or Alex, helpless in the hands of well-meaning, bungling adults.

  Stretched out in the theater darkness, warm in the bath of flickering light, I grew bold enough to reflect on how we boys turned out this way, our hearts like onions, like stones, and why so lost, why so lonely, got far enough in contemplating these concerns to recognize that such musings should proceed no further if I wanted us still to retain our camaraderie. So I would simply stop, suddenly and completely, and seek to forget that I had ever raised such imponderables, and maybe ask for the bottle to be passed down my way once more, and work to be drawn back again into the movie.

  I tell my Mom that it’s too bad about Cameron but that I’m doing fine and no, I won’t be coming back for the memorial service. After that, weeks follow when I cannot quell my thoughts of Cameron. I am summoned home every few minutes by one memory or another. Every time I step into a hot bath I anticipate drowning. I begin to recognize Cameron’s mannerisms in most everyone around me, every coat I see is a parka, every motorcycle a Vespa. At the video store, I linger over A Clockwork Orange, finally decide to rent it, find I can’t watch it anymore. The front window of my neighborhood record store advertises expensive digital remasterings from many of the bands we used to see, reissues of Twisted Roots and the B-People and Middle Class. And one night, digging through my drawers looking for a set of thumbtacks, I uncover instead the receipt for the Duo-Sonic, the guitar I sold after Cameron gave up on it, and the receipt is just a piece of paper with a date and “$60.00” written on it but it holds my attention for an hour until I sigh, pack my bags. Finally, I drive home.

  I remember being with Cameron the first time he did black beauties. He swallowed three, then insisted I haul him over to the Arastradero, this all-ages disco at a nearby strip mall. There was no liquor allowed inside so Cameron and I first sat out on the concrete block at the head of our parking space, me drinking a shoplifted forty-ounce bumper of beer, Cameron jiggling a foot, sharing very little of what he was experiencing. We were sixteen. Once inside, I danced with this college student to one lame new wave hit after another—“One Step Beyond” then “Planet Claire” then “Pump it Up.” I felt like a goddamn martyr, faking my pleasure at these songs solely to have this girl come out to the car with me. I looked across at Cameron, who sat beside the dance floor, nervously tapping on a tabletop, utterly enraptured by the sight of the Arastradero’s rotating mirrored ball. “I got a bottle in the car,” I told the girl, and impulsively I grabbed her hand. “Let’s go outside!”

  Just then the start of “Heart of Glass” blasted onto the sound system.

  “No way!” she shook me off. “And miss this song?”

  She started her wiggling again so I just walked off, dragged Cameron out with me. He revealed that he was seeing spiderweb bridges and stalactites, asked me whether he was hallucinating, softly requested that we listen to some soothing Muzak on the car radio. We drove to get chili at Bob’s Big Boy. Cameron had his teeth gritted, no appetite. He set about methodically crunching the crackers with the tips of his thumbs. He did this for some time, silent, suddenly stopped, looked up, squinted, tried to focus on me.

  “I got our band name,” he whispered. He couldn’t stop blinking. “It’s real good.”

  We were forever working to name our band, spent more time on that than rehearsing. I wasn’t even sure that there was any band to name, but still I was interested.

  He had this clammy look about him, very pale, sort of stuck. “Memorial Garage,” he spoke thickly, wiped his nose, gazed off.

  “You alright?”

  He shuddered, didn’t respond.

  “You gonna be sick?”

  He shook his head, leaned two slender fingers into his pale neck to check his own pulse.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Memorial Garage. Do you think maybe you can explain it?”

  He clamped shut his eyes, opened them, once more shook his head. “Just Memorial Garage. That’s all.” I saw that he had started to cry. “Really you fucking gotta trust me on this, man.”

  My sister wears a Walkman to the dinner table, my dad asks for the pepper to please be passed, my mom says she fluffed my pillows and my old room is ready. My dad tells me my sister quit eighth grade flag football, my mom says my sister should be able to do whatever she wants, the Walkman plays Alice in Chains. I can make out the high-end rattle of the percussion leaking out the headphones across the table, can’t distinguish the band’s voices from its instruments. My dad says of course of course and that’s not what he meant, my mom asks who wants another helping of squash, my sister loudly announces she has to go use the phone right now. My dad frowns at my mom, my mom shrugs, they look at me. Alice in Chains ends, Primus starts. I ask if there’s some reason they’re both looking at me, and they go back to their plates.

  Once I’m gone I can speak up, I can notice how everything they say misfires, bounces off, I can pinpoint unhealthy patterns, sour dynamics, but when I’m in it, when I’m at their dinner table, everything is a haze, familiar, aching, confused, I can be no one but their disappointing son, I can do nothing else but choke out the few lines I have recited my entire life and shake my head at how little I feel, how little I comprehend this act called dinner with my family.

  I wonder what the hell they are doing wrong because I personally can’t think of a thing and yet the fact is that Cameron went mad for drugs the same way I went mad for girls, the fact is that whether or not it was his and my parents—he and I both went mad. I have to question what else they could have done, what could have been lacking, for when we were small boys our folks were the sort who always endeavored to comfort us, to encourage us, they raised us to appreciate sunsets and exercise, they gave us a chance at churchliness, moved us to suburbs close to the beach (they proudly told us this was once an “alluvial flood plain”), they made us camp out in the backyard to show us meteor showers and point out the North Star, bought us paint sets and bicycles and magazine subscriptions, they taught us to recognize good kite-flying weather and to say thanks and stop at stop signs and read newspapers and enjoy public television, and they worked hard at their jobs—perhaps a little too absent, a little too preoccupied, this is true, but still they worked hard nonetheless.

  But maybe there was something murderous about this work ethic of theirs, maybe that was the source of the problem, for I think of how they would read our adolescent Christmas lists like aggrieved parents reading a ransom note, too proud to admit that they could not afford our teenage demands, confident that they could completely buy us back if they only drove themselves harder, removed themselves a little more, stayed late at work for enough nights. And then something happened where they began to work so hard at times we hardly saw them, and it felt as if we were being purposely kept out of their sight, as if we had already in fact been kidnapped, and our parents confirmed this for they began to behave as if they, in turn, were already set on being blackmailed. All I know is, despite the attention lavished on our early upbringings, by the time we were as old as my little sister we wanted none of it, all any of us hoped for was an early death, a violent early death. Out of all of us happily only one got what he’d hoped for; sadly, that was Cameron.

  Cameron barely graduated, he was forever skipping school to cruise around on his Vespa or hitch-hike down to L.A. I think it can be accurately claimed that as his friends we had more to do with his graduating than he ever did, for I believe that he got out of high school mainly due to the gullibility of teachers who believed the stories we fed them, the endless excuses we gave as to why Cam
eron didn’t show up today or yesterday or the day before or last week either for this or that class. The example I remember is Mrs. Constantine, our literature teacher.

  Ever the punk rebel, Cameron had taken to wearing exceedingly normal polo shirts and cardigan sweaters to high school and so we, in turn, took to telling Mrs. Constantine that Cameron’s frequent absences were the fault of the school golf team.

  “I had never before heard that Cameron golfed with our golf team,” she informed us skeptically.

  “Of course. Why do you think he wears those dorky polo shirts and stupid cardigans all the time?”

  Mrs. Constantine considered this. “I suppose,” she said. “I might have heard of it if he were the type of boy who talks. Still, I should have seen his name on these lists that are circulated around, that have the names of all the golfers on them.”

  “Well naturally. But remember it’s Cameron, after all. He doesn’t want anyone to find out. You know how he is. He does everything he can to keep it a secret. ‘L’Angelo Mysterioso,’ all that.”

  Mrs. Constantine nodded, made a gesture to indicate the secret was safe with her because her lips were locked and she had tossed away the key, and then excused many of Cameron Joyce’s absences in her ledger as “Necessary for School Business.”

  Cameron often took far too many uppers and then requested a lift to the disco. One time he was near to overdosing at the Arastradero on a handful of cross-tops. Two beautiful college girls kept checking us out. Eventually they came over and, with no other prelude, just liking the looks of us I guess, asked for Cameron and I to take them home. We drove them to their condo, followed them inside, watched the girls unceremoniously shrug out of their clothes.

  “Oh,” said Cameron. “Christ.” He was suddenly moving away. He had that clammy look and he was staggering back and back, one hand darting behind him, unsuccessfully groping about for a chair, and then he quietly sank to the carpet, a pile of slouched limbs.