Bad Icons

Chapter one: "He smokes heroin"

He was barely lucid when I tried to wake him up. He was laying on the bare carpet of the living room, his skin almost as sickly beige as the hideous flooring. He looked two steps off of deaths door. But that might be an understatement. We'd gotten used to him looking like that. I didn't know if that was concerning or not.

He was frail...and in an almost vegetized state, his deep brown eyes lacking all luster and glazed over. He was veritably comatosed. I tried shaking him gently, but his limp body just flopped around like a dead fish. He wasn't deceased but he was as damn close to death as any human could be. His eyes cracked open a little further the harder I shook him, and he managed to force a chagrined smile that strained his face, and made the corners of his eyelids crease.

A wave of relief washed over me as I realized that he wasnt so far gone that I couldnt get through to him. I touched his arm gently, just signaling that I was there. The key was to approach him as gently as I could. I looked at him in the dim city light emitting from our downtown apartment window. The rosy glow of those hundreds of small homes and windows cast a slightly sunset tinted veil of light over his face and added some life back into his gaunt, hollow visage. He was every parent and teachers nightmare. A pale, skinny wreck with little life left in his body, covered in tacky, trendy tattoos. A teenage, white trash, blackbear lookalike.

I nudged him trying to make him come around but it was useless. I had eyed the glass, poorly built, IKEA coffee table laden with drug related paraphernalia. He never tried to hide it.  The tinfoil stolen from the kitchen drawer, the spoon...I didnt think any less of him because of it...but I had started to accept the worst. He smoked heroin.

I was sick of people romanticizing it at that point. All of those 'The 1975' songs about how it was just great to get in the backseat of some beat up, aesthetic car and get fucked up all night to 80s music. That wasnt how it was. Instead I drove him to rehab every week and every week he made me the same promises. He would tell me all the bullshit lies in the world, with a smile on his face like he genuinley wanted to change. He would smile at me with his bright, bleached white teeth and say, "I think this is it...I'm gonna beat it this time".

And I would simply smile back like a fool and leave him home...only to come back with the others to a silent house, and Cam, laying in drug induced, euphoric bliss. The anger that I had at the beginning soon washed away and was replaced by pity for him. I wanted nothing more than to just get him to bed and try again the next week. I had to try. For him. For all of us. I made him promise that he wouldnt steal our money for drugs. That was the one thing that I made him swear on.

I took his tattooed hand in mine and sat cross legged on the floor next to him in the dim light. I could hear the other two kids that lived alongside us in the other room snoring softly. It felt like the whole city was asleep except him and I. I let my eyes trace his silhouette in the dark for hours, watching him to make sure he didnt choke in his sleep and as he was coming around and able to force some slurred words out, I propped him up against our olive green chaise longue sofa, and then declared in a firm whisper that I was going to bed, and he should too.

Walking off down the dark hallway didnt make me scared. I was scared that in the morning I would wake up and Cam would be lying stone dead in the middle of our living space, wearing those same pair of beat up Van's and his zumiez camos that smelled of weed and months of depression. I could imagine the look on the coroner's face as they saw him. The look of distain...the disgust at his tattoos and his "trashy" aesthetic. The cut of his hair and the scruff on his chin. The idea of that sent me into uncontrollable anger and I verged on tears.

I barely slept at night because of him. But I never told him that. I just stuffed handfuls of melatonin down my throat and then passed out without dreaming or thinking. I just hoped every night that if there was a god out there he would stop Cam from getting loaded up on dope again before any of us woke up the next morning.

I didnt want him to think he was a burden to any of us. Because he was my best friend after all. He was the one who took us all in. After his Mom died he inherited her insanely valuable apartment in the downtown of San Francisco, and when I ran away to go my own way in life, and became an almost homeless art student, he was the one that offered a place to go. A warm place to sleep. The least I could do was be respectful of his life and his privacy...but it chilled me to the bone that any second he could just take a little too much of something to quench his cravings.

Cam was a great guy by all means...but I always hoped he would get better...but to no avail. I just wanted him to feel like we had his back. And we did. For the most part. The meetings I took him to didnt help...but I took him anyway because I hoped that one afternoon I would come home and he would be back to doing what he loves most, instead of essentially slowly killing himself.

I had watched him go down that path and he was almost unrecognizable from the person he was. His hair...his beard...the way he spoke and presented himself was all wrong. I knew there was still some Cam in there...behind the awkwardness and the tear stains and the lonely, constantly paranoid and panicking look in his eyes...but his usage worried me during the best of days.

The last time we saw him somewhat near normal was when his sister came to visit us. He had been clean for a couple of days then, and had gone thru boxes of alka seltzer and ibuprofen to calm his killer headaches and intense stomach problems from withdrawl, and he had tried to make himself look somewhat presentable so when she came, she wouldn't know. I thought about bringing it up to her...but I knew it was really none of my buisness and at the end of the day it wasnt my problem.

There were a couple of times where Cam did admit to needing help. I fell asleep beside him once in the living room, and when I woke up, he was coming down from his high and was in tears of embarassment and disappointment. And I just remember that haunting look in his eyes that were welling with childish tears and fear...when he said the words, "I really needa get my shit together..."

Heroin is a word that scares a lot of people off. It makes people cold sweat when they hear it. I lost that feeling. I just associated the word heroin with one of Cam's less positive or good days. It was something that became almost normalized to me because it was a frequent visitor in our home. And the more my college bills and my work dragged on the more I wished I had the old Cameron back. And I'm sure everyone else did too.