Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  One of the girls giggled.

  “Should we be worried?” they asked.

  “Nope,” I said, untangling Cameron’s spindly arms and legs, smoothing him out so that he looked a bit more presentable laying there passed out cold on the condo’s floor. “He’s like this all the time.”

  “We should maybe call an ambulance though?”

  “Amphetamines,” I explained. “He’ll wake up, he’ll be fine.” I made sure his breath was visible in a compact mirror and then I shed my own clothes.

  The ice cream parlor closes at eight-thirty so we have to hurry. The dishwasher is quickly filled, my sister is dragged from the telephone, my dad from the computer. My mom, dad sit in the front of the car like always, my sister, me in back. The town goes by the window and nothing appears any different. My sister and I ignore each other. It’s been four hours since I got home. We have yet to speak. Her Walkman and headphones rest in her lap, a threat.

  At the ice cream counter my parents pretend to be newlyweds. My dad croons along with the music on the loudspeaker, my mom giggles, takes his hand, rests a cheek on his shoulder. My sister and I take our cones, move outside. She leans on the car, notices me watching a homeless guy approach. He is having a tough time of it, stumbling, dropping things.

  Fuck, she laughs, indicating the homeless guy. It’s the first word she’s directed towards me. Who’s this loser? I laugh with her, nod. Her eyes connect with mine, share something. Too weird, wheezes an unfamiliar voice. It’s you, hey man. The homeless guy is speaking. He croaks my name a few times. My sister rolls her eyes, stamps her feet, recrosses her arms, licks her cone. Figures, she snorts.

  The homeless guy wants me to shake his hand. How have you been, he asks, you heard what happened to our friend? Yeah, I reply. I can’t recall this guy’s name, but I briefly give him my hand. He looks like someone I might have hated in high school, probably someone we’d planned on killing after the revolution. Yeah, I say again, too bad. Could be it’s better off, the guy shrugs, he wasn’t well, you knew that. Yeah, I say, guess I did.

  I think of the party I heard about where, after a few drinks, Cameron made everyone whisper because he insisted the government was listening. Everyone assumed he was joking but they indulged him anyway. A few days later, he attacked a group of Asians on the street, claiming that they had placed electrodes in his brain, that they were monitoring his thoughts for the CIA. No one told me what happened to him subsequently; I caught rumors he’d disappeared somewhere across the country, in Boston or New York, I heard that he was calling himself “Camden Joy,” writing on some city’s walls or some crazy thing, and I kept setting his smile against East Coast backdrops, I’d imagine him smiling as the New Yorkers spoke, smiling like he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help but trust them, leaning back, just watching, hands deep in his parka, smiling. I always figured I’d find him eventually, I’d imagine these elaborate schemes in which I’d smoke him out, make him reveal himself, like maybe I’d write under that name “Camden Joy” and he’d track me down as a result, schemes like that, which were far-fetched and spooky in a way I knew he’d like, and then after finding me we’d shake our heads over our impossible past, disputing it like an amnesiac might if awakening to a hoax, we’d mock memories of “the good old days,” and he’d smile and smile.

  Hey man, you really gotta come out and see us, the homeless guy is saying to me. I would, I say, but I’m just visiting, I’m leaving soon. Come out to the campground first, the guy encourages me, it’s where him and me are staying. You and who, I ask. Him and me, the guy says. I got Camden out there. What, I ask. I got Camden with me out there, he says, man, they cremated his ass, don’t you know. I got what’s left of him out there with me. You should really see him before you go. I’ll try, I say. I’m pressed for time, you understand. The guy fidgets for a long time, studying me. You haven’t changed, man, he informs me at last, not at all, and he staggers off.

  Cameron and my other friends and I remained close for a long while, for no other reason than that we simply dreaded explaining ourselves to anyone who didn’t already get us, who didn’t admire the complex hail of references which comprised our daily chit-chat.

  Inevitably, Sex and Drugs got in the way of this friendship, for the intensity and immediacy of their sensate gratification so dwarfed the ordinary pleasure of our camaraderie as to make us entirely question the depth and commitment of our feelings towards one another, made us ask whether we truly knew each other, if we were ever even friends at all or just neighbor boys who had a few tastes in common, similar jokes and mannerisms, liked a couple of the same LPS and movies, nothing more.

  What were such similarities in the face of Girls, who quickly meant everything to me, or Speed, which began to mean everything to Cameron? It grew crucial that we dismiss the friendship to pursue these bigger joys, and Cameron accepted—just as I was made to grasp and grudgingly admit—that he would have to make himself better understood in order to obtain access to these higher pleasures, and he began to hang out with agitated speed-freaks who endlessly described things they witnessed which were utterly invisible to the rest of us, and I began devoting myself to girls whom I respected solely for the tautness of their trim calves and the willingness in their open smiles. These were, in some ways, our uneasy attempts to apply for membership to new circles, signaling our willingness to be cheaply belittled and lamely categorized by these new so-called pals so that we might be allowed to drop a hungry hand into their grab-bag and come away having scored some of their goodies.

  I stride down our block of tract homes and across the kiddie park, skirting the shopping center the whole while, then continue over the highway, down and up a tall cement embankment, wading through a field of knee-high green brush, across the railroad tracks, down a row of ditches which irrigate a field of baby’s breath. Wild anise sprouts everywhere underfoot like weeds, encouraged by the winter’s rains, the gentle morning breezes rippling its feathery leaves, the reek of licorice pouring from its sticky, cane-like stalk.

  So you came, the homeless guy calls out, I knew you would. Well hey there, I say, I was just taking a walk. This is incredibly close to where my parents live, actually. The guy ignores me. I knew you would come, he repeats. We always figured if anyone got to be a household word, it’d be you. But then, you’re not a household word, he mumbles dismally, not even you.

  Not even me, I agree.

  What’s the point anyways, he says. Right? You heard Susan Lucci on the radio the other night. No, I reply. Well, he discloses, I got a radio, I got me Camden’s radio set-up . . . Wanna see Camden? Not really, I tell him. You came all this way, he mutters. Wanna see where he lived?

  Yeah, I concede, okay.

  The guy motions for me to follow, starts across the campsite. Watch the poison oak, he declares. Leaves don’t turn red till summer. The guy leads me around barbecue pits, sacks of trash. So, he says, Susan Lucci has had no easy time of it. And you think, if not Susan Lucci, you know, then who. Because what she deserves . . . that’s some incredible talent. And that Emmys thing is so screwed. Too weird. Breaks your heart. Oh, I drily put in, absolutely. You don’t care for Susan Lucci, he notices. Okay well, you will. I didn’t once upon a time either.

  He points to the top of a eucalyptus tree. That’s it, he says simply. About nine feet up, three branches diverge off the frame of the main trunk. A piece of plywood rests between the limbs.

  Cameron lived there, I ask.

  Camden, he corrects me, yeah. He hasn’t been Cameron since high school. But you know, the guy goes on, Camden always kept talking about you. What did he say, I ask, do you remember? No, he says, you couldn’t always hear him real good. What’s funny, I say, is I can’t even remember anything we talked about, just him smiling all the time, you know? Right, the guy says, I know. I hadn’t seen him, I say, in a long time. You kinda—the guy gesticulates frustratedly—we couldn’t find you, right after Camden got picked up for going off on those Jap dudes.
/>   I got real busy, I acknowledge. My career just . . . It took off.

  Fine, he says.

  I always heard Cameron went to New York City, I say. Sometimes I’d go there, I’d look all over for handwriting on the walls. The guy shakes his head, points up again at the plywood. He came home, he says. He was at the emergency room, they were calling him psychotic and all this, got him down on this cot, KO’d him with Thorazine. I met him up there at the crisis center, they were doing him up with four and a half milligrams of Haldol three times a day. We just took off together, man, it was getting wicked.

  The crisis center was in town here?

  Near here, he nods, yeah. So we’ve been here now, this is our third springtime. The state pays us general relief. Were you here that night, I ask, the night the cops came to get everyone out of the way of the water. Sure, he says. Well, I ask, where was . . . why didn’t you take Cameron with you?

  Well, he says, the difference there was, Camden didn’t like the cops and so he went and hid in the river bottom, soon as they showed up. And the stupid fucks, they never even saw him down there.

  We smile at each other, proud of our friend’s ability to confound the law.

  You know how he was, the guy murmurs, and we smile again.

  Yeah, I admit, I know how he was. I begin to climb the eucalyptus.

  Be careful, the guy warns me. Camden used to fall from there all the time. Yes, I think to myself, I can see why, because only two sides of the plywood have any sort of branch support, the other two open into thin air. None of his belongings are up here, just this bare plywood placed in the trees. Is this all there was, I ask. No, the guy replies, I took everything else, his books and shit I got down here with me. You wanna see them? You still gotta come down and see Camden, man. Can’t believe you haven’t even seen Camden.

  I’m not really interested, I say. I am laying flat, my belly against the plywood, gazing off through the acrid haze of fried burgers and fast-food neon, and suddenly I jerk at the sight of something. Did you know, I start to ask, then stop. It’s just a coincidence, it’s gotta be. What, the guy asks. Well you can see, from this perch here, you look right at my parent’s garage. Yeah, concurs the guy, where you guys used to rehearse. Exactly, I say. Yeah, he continues, I was aware of that, Camden did that on purpose. He did, I say. The guy shrugs. I couldn’t tell you why.

  I have my fingers interlaced, palms down, my head on my hands. So, I think to myself, Cameron was home all this time, delusional in the arms of his eucalyptus, conversing with his memories and watching that stupid garage. I shut my eyes against the sunshine and remember the winter weather, the way it hits here and holds on. I picture this board wobbling in a thundershower, Cameron unable to make out the sounds of the highway or the freight trains when above them both is the storm whistling through the treetops, breaking branches in the blackness, shaking loose water and leaves with a high, relentless whoosh. As a child, I remember falling asleep to the rain pelting our roof, and in my mind the source of the storm was a face as big as the sky, a face with its mouth stuck open, howling, and the face was gruesomely contorted, and it never ran out of breath.

  I feel those childhood storms howling in the pit of my stomach right now, week-long storms which seemed never to go away. And every fear ever imagined sings in my bones, there is the fear of being locked up in my room too long alone, the fear of being devoured by the storm, the dwarfed feeling of being left behind, insignificant, a trifling speck of humanity. I know that as a boy, laying in bed, eyes closed, I regularly fell asleep to this feeling, this absolute certainty that I had been forgotten.

  I feel the abrupt shudder of plywood beneath me. Hey, the homeless guy says, shaking the tree. Hey. You been up there long enough. Come down now and see him. You gotta see Camden, man. You haven’t seen him yet.

  In a minute, I say sleepily. Just give me half a minute. I’ll be down.

  THE ALMOST REVOLUTION

  BACK BEFORE LIFE WAS OKAY, imbeciles with feathered hair parted down the middle and no acne organized suburban dances, where everyone bumped and gloriously french-kissed while vomiting hard liquor down one another’s champion throats. Stuck-up morons mocked me openly, said things like, “Scram, Shrimp!” so they could practice their routines in the boy’s room. They told everyone I was cognoscenti (because I outpointed them in dodgeball), isolato (because I lacked adequate fashion accessories), and pozzolana (because of my big bones). They walked unscathed from totaled hot rods while I sat up late with Marie, my girlfriend, and together we cursed Jesus H. Christ for allowing them to live, with their muscle cars and glass packs, beauty rings, righteous Sat. Nite Fever bud, and primo levi weed, their blithe insistence that nothing mattered except the continued tingling of tanned flesh beneath their polyester wraps. We were two fifteen-year-olds. Long-faced, slack-jawed and, of course, down-hearted, unable to bear the lack of soixante-huitards and nouveaux philosophes in our resort-style neighborhood, Marie and I rode bikes down to the shopping center one balmy afternoon, hauling a boombox, angrily intent on accomplishing some protest. But our brains were very young, just fifteen years old, and putting the predicate to a subject like “transgression” incapacitated us. Soon we settled on candy. We would eat candy. More candy than had ever been eaten. The world would wonder where all its candy went and we alone would possess the answer, having eaten it all. That kind of thing. Ingesting the goods of our crass société de consommation to call Western culture on its fascination with simulacra and facsimile, blah de blah blah. Lemonheads, Mike and Ikes, Atomic Fireballs, Branch’s Peanut Butter Rickeys, Hot Tamales, Licorice Stumps, M&M’s, Mounds, Mars, Marathon Bars, &c. You sense the magnitude of what we were planning. We bought, as I recall, thirteen dollars worth of candy; candy was cheaper then, this was a whole lot. We also bought a $3.99 cassette of Donovan’s Greatest Hits which, displayed for sale near the cash register, seemed as indicative as anything else of what Johnny Baudrillard would’ve disdained about the dead-end way in which we were being raised.

  The candy tasted good at first, especially since it was for a good cause. The first ten Hershey products went down fine. We consumed them while fidgeting around outside the store, heckling shoppers who rolled by with full carts, yelling (as kids will) about how we were going to teach you bastards a thing or two about fake serenity, about soft utopias, and so on.

  We had the Donovan tape going on our boombox. A perfect soundtrack! As the digesting got tough, as we gagged on root beer barrels and choked back the stomach acids which rose, bewildered, in our over-sugared throats, Donovan too began to sound sick—but truthfully, didn’t he always sound sick? The pain hardened in our guts, bellies pregnant with some devil offspring, civilization’s fin de siècle hyperrealism made (ouch—!) concrete, but steadfast we continued to dine on candy, on candy, on candy (revolutions require strong stomachs). In fact, when (soon after) we began to vomit, decorating the shopping center walkway with festive rivers of speckled post-structuralist barf, we didn’t even consider that the candy might’ve been responsible nor did we bother doubting our philosophical persuasions. We instinctively blamed Donovan. He sang in his fey queasy tone, he sang his inane ditties and we puked. Cause and effect. Perhaps our incipient revolution did founder on the shores of a sudden dextrose intolerance—but America, you can thank Donovan that you still have your candy, for without him I do believe our protest would’ve succeeded.

  THE GREATEST RECORD ALBUM EVER TOLD

  . . . Like the inflamed sea creature one suddenly discovers attached to one’s body when previously some quiet wound resided thereat—on that day some open sore awakens into its fullest agitated condition of garish redness—this was the day I glanced down to find my TEENAGER OF THE YEAR.

  I am not writing this for money’s sake. Please understand that if you understand nothing else. I am writing this because I have just this one free night to deposit noise in your general direction—tonight! (I am off work all night.) I am not due again at the liquor store until tomorro
w at 9 AM so now till then I plan to tell you this while I have time I have a strong pot of coffee and twelve sacks of M&M’s and an itchy red rash on my right calf and no blossom-faced missus Marie and will not sleep for I cannot knowing what I just read in People that those in charge of giving us music have given up on our Teenager Of The Year Frank Black, that he is adrift and label-free—whoa! like hearing your dearest buddy is side-down on the cold cement sleeping behind 4th City Savings and Loan off Cahuenga Blvd. in the smoked glass recessed doorway in back beside the grey alarm security box—actually I have slept there three times before in my life and never once slept poorly but this is not about me, but about—Frank Black—and I am writing this because Frank Black is great (I want to be as great as Frank Black is!)—I am writing this not for money I am writing this from love. Love—I have seen eventually—does however cost one quite a lot (—!) so I expect this ultimately will bankrupt me utterly for such is the depth of my love for our disowned pudgy genius, such could I not have gotten through what I got through without Teenager of the Year, all the associative slipperinesses of meaning he is comfortably employing, the deranged tirades, no prosaic summing up “here’s my point,” instead of embraceable anthems only syntactical errors with sweeping implications, a splayed-out array of obscure pop ephemera meeting one another for the first time, a description, an overwrought response, a confident feeling, then some people, some places, some things. “Some gibberish it is so serious,” says Black in advance of his theory during Track Ten, put plain his gibberish ends up as poetry, random thoughts meticulously arranged, not subject predicate but modifier modifier modifier noun. Many other “B” artists have guzzled this thirstily at the font of ill-lucidity and lyrical obscurity—Barrett, Beefheart, Bolan—but none go POP! as unabashedly as this enthusiastic Black man which is why I write this now to instruct you concerning the “Greatest Record Album Ever Told”—