You'll be Okay Without Me

I’ve only ever had two real friends. They weren’t the very best of friends. In reality they weighed in at just under the good mark on the friendship scales, and quite a ways off great. But they were real friends, and that, as they say, made all the difference.
Apart from being my only friends, they were also friends with each other. Our relationship was held together by an attitude; one that consisted of equal parts pessimism and delusion (with a dash of hope thrown in for bad measure). Our bond, just like all other negativity rich connection between peoples, was a strong one. We had a wonderful appetite for cynicism, an astonishing proclivity for self-pity and an inexplicable need to know why fucking us? when the answer was always as clear as day: us because us are a bunch of pessimistic, delusory assholes with a taste for cynicism and self-pity and us should really wake the fuck up, snort some coffee grounds and get the day started, that’s why us . But we never saw that. We always assumed it was because shit happens, right.
In many ways I’m thankful that we never were a wildly hopeful bunch, or even mildly hopeful, or even slightly hopeful. We were a just-the-right-side-of-hopeless bunch, and that served our neurosis well. The thing about hope is that the longer you have to be hopeful, the sadder you truly are. And we were, all three us, fucking sad - sad individuals - as in doleful, melancholy; and sad people - as in pitiable- and we knew it. But we liked it that way, or rather, it was comfortable.
 
Cam and I sat in a doorway, in lower Salt River, adjacent to an establishment we often frequented (the type of place that sold what felt like everything except alcohol and drugs). The owners of the doorway we sat in didn’t like us sitting there and smoking our cigarettes. But they were a gym, so they could go fuck themselves (although, if it came to a confrontation I’m certain that we would have acquiesced rather timorously). Being of a nervous disposition I was constantly peering over my shoulder, on the lookout for a confrontational gym owner. Cam picked up on this and laughed at me. He didn’t laugh because he found my paranoia amusing, but rather because in that moment he caught a glimpse of how utterly ridiculous he must have looked when he was being paranoid. I joined in laughing.
“What is wrong with us?” I asked, as we approached a natural stopping point, “For fuck sakes man, surely we have some backbone between the two of us.”
“I missed that lesson at school;” he said “I was too busy running away from the bullies.”
Cam was a suburban boy, whose parents were too ambitious to get him, and who went to a well-to-do high school (the type of institution that produces the next generation of cocaine addicts). He didn’t like his bourgeois type background, he despised it in fact. He saw himself as more of a song and dance kind of a guy. That’s why we called him Cam (or Cammy if we really wanted to piss him off) it was the most soutie name we could think of, and we knew he’d hate it. His name was Jack, although he went with along with Cam because he knew us too well to think he could conceivably persuade us to stop calling him thus. Cam was an altogether likeable sort of a gents – a feat made remarkable by his savant-like talent for sarcasm, and, the fact that he was a redhead (which we never teased him about because we didn’t see colour).
The thing you must know about Cam is this: he was by far and away the darkest soul amongst us, and he knew it. As a result he worked hard to avoid getting to a place where he would just say fuck it, because when he got there it was well and truly fucked. He was vital in that way - and I envied that. I always felt, although I’m sure I was humouring myself here, that had I his fervour, I might have made something of myself. Perhaps I will have escaped the oily sump of self-mastication and risen to the heights of normality. Or perhaps, that was just another delusion.
“I have to go see my parents now” he said. His parents lived in Plattekloof, though he made his home in Observatory. For Cam, visiting his parents made him feel like a woman giving birth to a third child – while planning the event they forgot how terrifically painful the previous experiences were, and in that moment resolved to never put themselves through such unpleasantness again. But he always did, he had to – they were his parents.
Paul and I knew to avoid Cam whenever he came back from Plattekloof. We knew this was selfish of us, and that this was when we, his supposed friends, had to prove our worth. But being repressed souls, Paul and I, we just could not be around that much anger, it made us uncomfortable. What’s more, our avoiding of him was motivated in no small part by an uncharacteristic sense of self-preservation – Cam was the type to yell imprecations at God and then punch a hole in the door when things didn’t go his way.
“Are you staying the night?” I enquired of him, to which he responded in the affirmative. We had finished smoking our cigarettes but knowing that his blood-pressure would soon be pushing dangerously high levels, he took another entjie from the carton in his top pocket and lit it. I, who never needed a second invitation did the same.
“The thing is man,” he started up without any prompting, “what does it say of me that I don’t want go home and see my parents?”
“Well,” I replied, “be careful not to assume that this is a reflection on you. It might well be that your parents are the villains of the piece-”
“What a well of optimism you are!” He chipped in sarcastically, before I could finish
“Whoa – you didn’t let me finish: but I’ve never met them so I’m going to assume that it’s you” I retorted, and then continued, “I’m just saying man. If Woody Allen has taught us anything it’s that Freud was right – everybody’s got daddy issues. You don’t need to get all existential and suicidal whenever you have to go see your folks.” The moment that word left my mouth I knew it was a mistake to have uttered it. Cam had this thing about suicide you see: he didn’t like it.
“Don’t fucking compare me to a suicide man; I don’t like seeing my parents – that doesn’t make me a coward!”
“Well, I agree with your premise, but I’d still vehemently argue that you were a coward.”
“Fuck you!” he said with an honest to goodness attempt at meaning it, but alas, the comedic effect of my reply undercut his tone too severely for him to be taken seriously.
“What makes suicide so cowardly then? It seems a perfectly rational thing to do – you go to a party, you don’t like the party, you leave. What makes life any different? Why must we see this thing through to the small hours of the morning? Why can’t we just call it a fucking day?” I didn’t know how he was going to respond - so I braced myself
“Just because you don’t like this party doesn’t mean you have to stop partying altogether. There are other parties going on – there must be” His response was a lot more civil than I expected (which was strangely disappointing) but he wasn’t finished,” It is cowardly, Jonathan, because people who kill themselves don’t want to live”
“Yes,” I said blankly “That is what suicide means”
“No, you mistake my meaning,” at this point his voice acquired something of a strident quality, “I don’t mean that suicides don’t see any other options, or that their lives are too hard, it’s that they just don’t want life. It’s not about the circumstances – that, they can change – It’s that they want to die, and they use their use situations to lessen their guilt and to make that happen. Now, and this is the part that makes them cowards Jonathan – they never come out and just say it, do they? No, they hide behind their circumstances because they aren’t courageous enough to say what they really want.”
He paused… And then continued: “If they would just come out and say it, I’d have more truck with the whole thing. But even then man, don’t ask me to mourn for you – because you got what you wanted and why should that make me sad?”
Just at the moment that Cam finished off his sentiment, an angry gym owner emerged from the door behind, asking us ever so impolitely to move our party elsewhere. As predicted we folded rather spectacularly and were up and off his doorstep in what seemed to me a world record time. As we were up, we seized the opportunity to part each other’s company. He was on his way to Plattekloof. I was yet to plot my own course, but stopping over at Paul’s before making my way home seemed propitious enough to be going on with.
“Cheers man.” said Cam to me as he stuck out a fist that I was clearly meant to bump.
I bade him a foreshadowing farewell, spun on my heel and made my way to my car.