Best Baddie

The drive that followed the de-struction was always one of self-examination. I’d found myself on many of these drives, usually occurring before dawn made its presence known. Turning the car radio to a station that played familiar songs was comforting, but most of the time, that frigid feeling of guilt strove to overpower the lost man grasping, in futile attempt, for the morals he’d flushed down the toilet with several gobs of phlegm and a deluge of puke.

Yet I can’t blame him for any of it — the friend I shall moniker Camus for the sake of his identity’s preservation. You probably had, have, or will have a friend like him — or a bevy of them — in your lifetime. They usually emerge at the crossroads of youth, popping in during that first glimpse of pornographic flesh or handing you your first cigarette; pushing you across the border between social normalcy and immoderation with a multitude of tequila shots or parallel white lines of fine chemical powder; leading you onto that road of delinquency and danger that adolescent curiosity extends even further.

In that generation-defining novel On the Road, he is Dean Moriarty, painted vividly by author Jack Kerouac as a delusional dreamer adept at mapping out both spontaneous itineraries across mid-20th century America and self-destructive paths to beatific chaos. Moriarty’s character is patterned after the real-life Neal Cassady, an engrossing guide to Kerouac himself, yet though the author and his fictional equivalent Sal Paradise are fully aware of the kind of toxic character Moriarty/Cassady is, tagging along and leaving all cares upon departure was the only imperative. Stand by Me, a must-watch d*ck flick and cinematic basis for a thing called “bromance,” had River Phoenix’s character Chris Chambers, a budding bad boy at 12 years old, taking protagonist Gordie Lachance and their band of buddies to search for a dead body in the woods. And like the journey across America in On the Road, the boys’ journey towards the carcass was one of purgation — Lachance dealing with his own turmoil by becoming a spectator to his best bud’s personal drama and a veritable sidekick to his mischief.

‘Bromance’ & Cigarettes

I’d met Camus in the seventh grade after transferring from an all-boys private school to a co-ed international school known for its female students’ preference for hiked-up skirts and providing the proper American education to aimless kids bred from affluence. He was a year older, an inch or two taller, and, from then on, an instigator that thwarted my timidity with his transgression. You might assume that this guy was a lost cause with no grip or control on his life, yet he was a calculating deviant who respected his folks and turned in his schoolwork; intelligent in most respects, even when rendering poetry out of nonsense and whipping up the most insane plans which he’d share with a rapt gaze and a waft of cigarette smoke. My dad had always warned me about friends like him with that old adage, “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are,” but Camus was consumed by a sense of reckless adventure and I couldn’t help but become his accomplice. 

“We could have died so many times,” he’d joke each time we’d survive one “near-death” counter-cultural milestone after the other. But thrill always overrode fear and I’d invested myself in the nut despite my lack of knowledge of what exactly I was getting out of such a relationship. Excess was always a manifest element in our quest for that higher plane, whether it was that incident during eighth grade when we had drunkenly ridden a jet-ski into a raging sea and, thrown off by a couple of huge waves that killed the watercraft’s engine, were almost left stranded amid the havoc of a typhoon; or when we’d dumped an obscene amount of bud (neither of us knew how much to put in, we promise) into the microwaveable brownie mix and found ourselves wildly hallucinating meteors in the thick of rush-hour traffic. They were escapes as literal as any escape should be — concocted by two alienated madmen with every reason to rebel (dissolved relationships, parental misunderstanding, the usual angst-infested litter that festers in the souls of strapping young rascals) by feeding the agony and the ecstasy that permeated our friendship. After whatever it was we’d gotten away with, I’d end up on a couch in his room delirious and writhing from whatever we’d gotten away with. Of course, I’d always leave that couch before morning — stomach ridden with remorse and throat sore from too many cigarettes, yet sure that there would be more of these nights of debauchery to look forward to.   

A few days before Camus left for college in the United States, he told me that what bound us together was hatred — for society’s statutes, for the world, for people who weren’t us. These reflected in the things he introduced me to: films like Donnie Darko and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; songs like Go with the Flow by Queens of the Stone Age; a book like The Stranger by Albert Camus (the French existentialist I’ve derived his moniker from) — all elements that ended up defining my life at the time and tying together this heedlessness for a world that couldn’t gain our respect. But more than anything, Camus introduced me to the self that I was afraid of — the animal who would be unleashed when he taunted me with bare-knuckled fistfights and when we’d discuss our revulsion towards certain people, causing our imaginations to dive into a swamp of conversational filth. With Camus, every act of deviancy committed — or even relayed through the stories he told of his seedy life in LA and the demented friends he’d made — I lived vicariously through him and looked on in both awe and amusement.

Burning Men

It was always easy to slip into my role as Kerouac and watch this Cassady “burn, burn, burn,” but over the years, that flame grew smaller. When he went away for college, I learned about the world by my own means, maybe even becoming a Camus in the eyes of some people and earning advocates to the devil-may-care scoundrel in me. I never thought of Camus as a bad influence. Rather, the guy was an influence — a catalyst to certain experiences that taught me a lot about who I was and who I wasn’t. There were millions of times I could have declined his offers to go Clockwork Orange on the world and deny myself a life-jolting experience, but then there was also a sort of release that accompanied our savage high-jinks. But what’s clear is that every guy, whether lost or unbeknown to himself, needs a guide (even of the worst kind) to steer him onto that winding road of self-discovery.

A few weeks ago, after a night dusted with hedonism, the early-morning drive from Camus’s house felt different. Things had changed — the couch that I’d crashed on innumerable times was gone and replaced with a foldable mattress — and this time, he didn’t feel like he needed to see me out with the clever parting words and knowing smirk he usually had. Maybe he was changing. Hell, maybe I was changing; my need to be as bad as he wanted me to be somehow diluted in the time we’d set out on our own separate journeys.

As I drove home, there was no Camus in the passenger seat building anticipation to our next wild exploit as he usually did. This time, all I had was myself and for once, I felt like I was finally behind the wheel.