In the 10th grade I couldn’t tell whether I wanted to be good and feel bad about it or to be bad and feel good about it. Delivered from the womb of summer’s safety, soon this new burning passion for exploration willed my legs to find new ground. To find the things in life that scared me. To work towards finding the patches of light and darkness in the world. To feel alive.
I had fallen comatose towards late autumn. Accustomed to being alone in the comfort of my air-conditioned home, I existed in the simplest form possible. Stimulus followed by action, a single cell organism. Sense food, eat. Sense heat, move. I lived like this for weeks and everything I did in those static air-conditioned hours felt empty. Sensing heat, move. Sensing entertainment, watch. Sensing exhaustion, sleep.
Until one morning, I remember waking up, throwing off my sheets, walking over to the mirror in my room and staring back at my naked body and calmly thinking, “What does death feel like?”
I have never been diagnosed with depression; neither have I ever had the serious urge to kill myself, but I knew that if this continued, I would surely have to. It’s strange to reflect back on that feeling now, but it made complete sense to me then. At that point, life was nothing more than reactionary impulses. The lethargy had created a creature of habit, content with my formulaic lifestyle.
This overwhelming sense of stagnation had grown to the point where I felt as if I were not living for anything. That death was closer to what I was experiencing than life. And for the next two years I found myself chasing people who had found what made them feel alive so that I could maybe learn from them.
The first people I found were the returned, the lost, and wandering. The boys that love forgot. They mold together, these boys. They’re hard to tell apart sometimes. These tragically hurt figures in my life. So broken by unfortunate circumstance that they are convinced they know exactly what they live for. I was attracted to this tragedy, as I had never experienced it before. It felt like these losses had made their lives meaningful, and they deserved to feel these complex emotions that I felt inside the stagnant temperature-controlled confines of my bedroom. I would watch these boys that love forgot, and I wondered how I would validate the pains of my existence.
❖
Cameron Caprari didn't know that I was Jewish. And if he had, we probably wouldn't have become friends. I had met him through a friend who was part of the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian auxiliary of the Air Force. And it was almost as if, in the middle of lighting a tiki torch, he had been airlifted out of the backwoods of West Virginia and dropped into the suburbs of Westchester County.
Cameron wasn’t traditionally handsome; neither was he very handsome in any nontraditional way. His hair was tightly shaven, his eyes were stormy and close together, and he had acne scars all across his chin.
The first time I met him he was just coming back from a search and rescue exercise. The room smelled like death as I stood uncomfortably in the herd of twenty other adolescent boys in a stark gray changing room. While changing out of his CAP uniform he took off his steel toe boot and showed it to me, saying, “They don't call these Jew stompers for nothing!”
I froze, horrified. I had never heard anyone actually say anything derogatory about Judaism. Of course, I knew that there were people in faraway lands who hated the Jews, but not here amongst the neatly trimmed hedges of Westchester. The room got smaller, and the walls got grayer, and soon everything faded save the black Jew-stompers being laced and filled by what I assumed to be the Jew Stomper himself. And as he got up, he turned around and said, “We’re going to Wendy’s, I’m buying—wanna come?”
And I burst out laughing. Here was the danger I’d been looking for, the disaster project, the purpose I had sought out amidst the boring unfulling hours of my domestic life. I had never seen anything like him; he simultaneously scared me and was somehow intriguing. Cameron was a car fire I wanted to put out and watch burn at the same time. Being friends with him I hoped would fulfill the urge for badness I wanted to explore and the building of goodness I needed to accomplish to feel whole. “Of course,” I said, and we stomped our way out of the changing room.
Cameron lived with his grandmother, alone, because I guess that’s what you do when no one else loves you. He never talked about his mom. I remember him once admitting that in a tragic turn of events, his mother married the divorce lawyer employed in his parents’ case. I never knew why he didn’t live with her though. I knew he didn’t really know his father—he had always been distant—but when Cameron talked about him he (at least) never let on if it hurt or not. A frequent topic of conversation we’d have was about how much better a dad he’d be when it was his turn. “I’m gonna be a great father,” he’d say two or three times. He’d say it and I’d laugh a bit on account of how mental he was. “I’m gonna be a great dad, I am man, I’m gonna be a fucking great dad you’ll see.”
Cameron and I saw each other a lot at the beginning of sophomore year. He’d race his Charger, one of the only things in the world he truly loved, up my street when I would come home from school, and he’d drop me off late at the end of the day. Over the course of that year, I became obsessed with religion. I had stumbled upon a few videos by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I loved their brutal allegiance to the truth, that gritty heightened awareness to what was really going on. Looking back, I take this to be me trying to find the purpose that year. Like the people I surrounded myself with, these confident figureheads attracted me because they were completely sure of their identity. The idea of atheism was culturally acceptable at Masters but still controversial enough where I could feel marginal and rebellious. It was my duty, as a sentinel to the objective (and rational, mind you) truth, to educate the masses. It was up to me to speak the truth. I was going to say what everybody was too afraid to say. This “anti-messiahs messiah complex” I had developed bled into my relationship with Cameron, who was a steadfast Christian. We would have long fights in the Charger that he would race across I-87. It always felt like I was befriending a crocodile. He was high-strung and anti-semitic and every move I made felt both satisfyingly calculated and daring. I wanted him to see me as a person he could trust and that understood him before he knew that I was someone he was supposed to hate.
Cameron was a screamer, which I believe was a manifestation of his rigid faithfulness to what he believed in, to the point where it seemed like he was proving who he was not only to me, but to himself.
❖
It was the night before his geometry final and we were sitting in his room, which with a desk, a dresser and a bunk bed, was about the size of a large bathtub.
“Hey,” he said, “you can sit up there.” He pointed to the top bunk, which instead of holding a mattress, supported the largest pile of dirty laundry in the tri-state area.
“Sounds good,” I said as I climbed up the cold metal railing and sank deep into the clothing and watched as he rummaged around in his dresser drawers.
“Do you mind?” he asked, raising a half full Ziploc bag of what I found out was Valium.
“I, um, I guess not,” I replied.
Taking two out of the bag, he put one down on the table and crushed it with his phone. It broke into two uneven halves. What am I doing here? I asked myself as I sat and watched him grind up the jagged chalk pieces into fine, white powder. He bent over the desk, head down, and after downing the two strips, he got up, swayed around the room, grabbed his electric razor and shaved off half of his eyebrow.
I sat up there shocked. Most of what he did shocked me, but I had never seen such personal commitment to an identity. I had never been over the bridge before. Yes, I had been contributing to my roles in the past as an “atheist,” but I had never committed like that. So I sat outside, until 4 in the morning, writing. I tried to find myself in writing. Mapping out my life, mapping out my values. It was so artificial though. At a time when I saw the lost around me so desperate to find themselves, writing in my diary seemed pathetic. When I woke up the next morning, Cameron had already finished his exams and asked if I wanted to go to Wendy’s again.
We were waiting at Wendy's, watching an exhausted mother sit her kid down and plop an iPad down in front of him. She herself, hiding in her Netflix. And every so often the kid would scream and she would push something on his screen and he’d quiet down for five minutes until he was back. And I laughed because it was funny. And I as I turned to Cameron to tell him how funny that was, he started to cry.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah man,” he said. “It's just that kid,” he quietly sobbed, his tears falling into his chicken nuggets.
“What about him?”
He looked around to see if anybody could be listening in, leaned in close to me, and said, “Let's steal him” before crying and stuffing a wet nugget in his mouth.
“What!?” I tried not to laugh.
“I can’t stand it,” he said. “He’s… he’s not being raised right! ” He quietly moaned to me, his chicken getting soggier by the teardrop.
The Wendy’s that we used to eat at was not built well for the abduction of minors, seeing that there was only one exit and the tables were somewhat cramped together. The building turned out also not to be built well for daylight mental breakdowns as I noticed everyone suddenly becoming transfixed by anything other than the sobbing skinhead sitting next to them. I told him both of these things to which he punched me in the arm and told me that none of that was the point.
“Then what is the point?” I asked.
“It’s just, I feel like, I feel like that’s me. And I know what it’s like, to be that kid.”
❖
The last time I saw Cameron was a week before he left for basic training in West Virginia. He had always talked about the army abstractly, but he had recently broken up with his “fiancee” of two months and had decided that the army was the next most reliable thing.
“I thought it would be one and done, man, only needed one girl,” he told me as we raced down the Saw Mill.
It mostly hurt him because it disrupted who he thought he would be. After so much uncertainty, one of the few reliable things in his life had been stolen away from him. And I regretted that it had to happen again so soon.
“Cam, I’m sorry,” I stared at my feet as the night passed all around us. I just knew I’d never see him again, and even though it was bad timing there was no other time left.
“Oh no man, it’s—it’s not your fault man, it’s her problem don’t—”
I interrupted him, “No Cam it’s not that.”
He sat there confused. “Sorry about what?”
I took a long deep sigh, hoping that this disruption might eventually help him.
“I’m Jewish.”