Remembering Cam Fajer
Remembering Cam: Time, Regret and Suicide
*This narrative essay represents my vivid, extremely personal memories of childhood and my teen years, along with incidents that occurred into my twenties, thirties and forties. My recollections are supported by diary and journal entries which began when I was 18, in 1984, along with archived Facebook text messages from 2011, only some of which have been used in this essay. They have been recorded and used to demonstrate accuracy within the body of the essay. Those individuals who knew Cameron best will understand exactly what the importance of that accuracy means when they recognize the details that only they will comprehend as pertaining to Cam and the circumstances of his life. In this way, the truth is upheld by me, and I apologize to no one.*
Published online April 16, 2018.
As much as we may want it to be otherwise, we do not choose love; love chooses us.
Like many kids in high school, I wanted to be attractive, accepted and appreciated by my peers, the teachers and the school administrators. But when I was in my sophomore year at Lincoln High school, during what we now call The Greed Decade, I was going through my own special brand of high school turmoil, high school drama, and high school grief.
I had recently become pregnant by an athlete, but I miscarried at a little over six weeks with what would have been this young man’s blond, blue-eyed baby. Recovering from a natural miscarriage, weak, depressed and probably anemic, I survived a terrible secret I could share with virtually no one. It was a traumatic and terrifying ordeal I kept from both my parents and nearly all my eight siblings.
With the sole exception of my oldest sister Margaret, I told no one. The prospect of disappointing my parents, particularly my mother, represented my most colossal fear. I had tried to tell my younger sister after school let out one day as we walked down the narrow winding asphalt path in front of the school. She was a freshman and we sometimes spent time together on the school grounds. The winding path led to SW Salmon Street toward a huge and ancient walnut tree near the freeway overpass. We stopped in the middle of the path and I tried to formulate the words, but couldn’t. I ended up bursting into silent tears on the walkway. “What’s wrong?” my sister asked me as I looked at the ground and let my hair fall over my face.
I made an excuse about being depressed and how hard it was for me to see Cam constantly walking through the halls at Lincoln. Cameron was the boy I’d met in grade school after he moved from Illinois to Portland with his large family. Cam was tall, blond, with a moon face, deep set, jewel-like blue green eyes and full ruddy cheeks. He played on the basketball team, the football team, wrestled and was also a promising and competitive baseball player, having played since he was a child.
Despite his funny looking moon face, there was something about Cam that was magnetic, playful and seductive. My younger sister had heard a few of my recollections about Cam beginning when I was in middle school. She knew the stories, but could never understand what the big deal was. “I don’t know WHAT you see in him. He looks like Lurch from the Adam’s Family! That face!” She was trying to cheer me up. “I know he’s not that good looking; there’s just something about Cam,” I responded.
As my sister looked around that day, the smile left her face. I stood with my head bowed, standing on the pathway next to the lawn wiping away tears, and I could tell she was embarrassed by my sudden display of emotion. It was so totally unlike me to lose my composure. She told me we should continue walking. I could sense her impatience, after all what would happen if someone saw us? The other kids might talk and gossip. I never brought it up again after that, knowing if I told her, everyone else in our family would know, too.
I told no one, except my oldest sister, who was the single person I could completely trust with a deadly secret. After calling Margaret one evening on the house phone and begging to see her, I bused over to her home in NE Portland the following day. When I got to her place, I told her I’d missed my period a few weeks after spending the afternoon with a boy I’d known since Id’ been in sixth grade and he in seventh grade. She listened patiently and we made plans. The following Monday, she took me to the Planned Parenthood office and pretended to be my Aunt. We showed them our ID’s and they never said anything about parental consent being required.
She asked them to perform a free pregnancy test, telling them I’d be thrown out of the house if my parents learned I was pregnant. It worked. As I could prove I was older than 16, a resident of Oregon and Multnomah county, and a high school student, with a female adult relative present with me, who had the same last name, they agreed to do the test without requiring any form of written parental consent. When the test came back positive a few days later, my sister called me to tell me to come to her apartment. It was a Saturday and once again, I bused over.
We walked to a nearby park as she told me the news. I stumbled alongside weeping quietly, literally wringing my hands. While we sat on a bench, watching her young son and my precious nephew, Rudy, play and run, I felt weak-kneed with fear and anxiety. My stomach felt like it had dropped to my pelvis and it cramped constantly from nerves. I felt so afraid. Margaret understood what I was going through. She told me she could help but I could tell “no one” she had “helped” me, least of all our parents. I nodded brokenly, trying not to dissolve again into tears and said nothing.
Who had done this to me she wanted to know? I told her his name was Cameron or “Cam” for short. Was he a “good person” she wanted to know? I hesitated, unsure how to answer. Finally, I lied, and told her yes, he was a very fine boy. She promised me she could help me get an abortion and that we had “more than enough time” to arrange it. She promised she would tell no one. She promised this would always be something she “kept to herself” and I must, too.
My sister’s detached and stoic pity and understanding was something precious. Her matter-of-fact way of dealing with the situation and how she never once judged me was also something I valued beyond measure. I was frantic with worry; frantic I would be exposed and so grateful for her advice and counsel. She had been “in the same boat,” she told me and had been able to “take care of it.” I would survive this she promised. But she looked at me sternly, as she drove home the point that I could never tell anyone, most importantly I could never tell our parents she had helped me. I nodded my head, swearing I would say nothing to anyone.
But the need for an abortion never came.
Less than a month after that meeting with Margaret, as she was planning to arrange the abortion, late at night on a weekend, I miscarried. Since finding out I was pregnant, I cried every night for days. Silently, I wept into my pillow, until with exhaustion I finally fell into a tense sleep. I prayed that God would help me. I prayed to God that something would happen to take me out of this situation. The cramping in my lower pelvis, panic and fear must have worked some sort of stress induced miracle. The fact that I was starving myself and not eating must have also helped. It simply wasn’t meant to be. Lying in bed all weekend, a bloody towel between my legs, confirmed to me that no baby would be the result of my ill-chosen tryst with Cam the year I was 17. I had been delivered. I was free.
*One online website I looked at, while doing general research for this essay, details the dynamic of what is called “spontaneous miscarriage.” The article states that “90% of women, ranging in age from 18–34, with elevated levels of the stress-induced hormones Cortisol and noradrenaline, during the first weeks of pregnancy will experience “spontaneous miscarriage.” Researchers claim the body may recognize the elevated levels of cortisol and noradrenaline as an “alarm” that conditions are “unfavorable for pregnancy.” Though, at the time the miscarriage happened, to me it seemed like an act of God. Words cannot express how grateful I was to be out of hot water and to be done with it. I could walk away and pursue my own future. I had been given a second chance at my own life. Link on Miscarriage.
THE THRILL OF FIRST LOVE
Cam transferred to Chapman Elementary when I was in sixth and he in seventh grade. The year was 1979 and he was a recent transplant from Illinois. I was almost fourteen, Cam was almost fifteen.
As I’d been at Chapman Elementary since Kindergarten and would indeed graduate from the school in eighth grade, I was a long-time student and I knew everyone. This included the social pecking order and where I stood in that time honored dynamic; somewhere near the middle, depending upon whom you might ask.
Cam was lumbering, with a feline walk that could only be described as seductive. He was blond, green-eyed, and golden skinned. He was a man-child who captivated me from that first day of shop class when we met. On that first day of school in early September, 1979, he was the typical “new kid.” What differentiated Cam from the rest of the boys at Chapman was that he had the body of a man. I found him intriguing and confusing as a result.
I knew he was a boy of only fourteen but he had that body — the body of a man and the confidence of a man. When we naturally clashed, due to our physical attraction to each other, I found myself not only thrilled by his presence but intimidated, also.
Cam could be inscrutable and secretive. Ultimately, it was his bizarre secrecy which confused and confounded me. He gazed out of eyes that revealed little or nothing and consequently he was very difficult to read.
Our first literal contact came when we were waiting in line to leave class on that first day of school, which was the day Cam and I first met, September 4th 1979.
As I stood in line, I felt the slightest tickle on the left side of my hip, like a warm flickering just over the thin denim of my Chic jeans. I turned and looked behind me and there was Cam, towering over me. He looked down at me and was utterly inscrutable as he looked right at me, boldly giving me direct eye contact. The confidence and masculinity radiating from his eyes was almost threatening.
The class was crowded and we were all waiting in line to leave once the bell rang. To the left was the wall, so if Cam imperceptibly touched me with his left hand, no one would be much inclined to notice. I turned back toward the door of the classroom, waiting, but once again I felt a flickering sensation. Something was touching the top of my left buttock.
I swung around and looked up at Cam, glaring. His hands were in front of him and he was casually grasping his left wrist with his right hand. But I knew he had touched me. “What are you doing?” I whispered tersely. Cam smiled the faintest smile, looked down at me but said nothing, no apology, no excuse, nothing. That was the first day of our class together and would represent the way Cam often dealt with people. He did what he wanted, and he didn’t apologize.
Cam was drawn to my playful exuberance and witty sarcasm as I often sassed the shop teacher, Mr. Potts, and others in class, laughing and running around happy to be having fun and making things with my hands. Even then, shop class was regarded as the class only slackers took, or meatheads. The kind of lazy students who didn’t want much of a challenge. But lots of students took it anyway. They wanted a break and so they took shop. I took it because I wanted to have fun and not so much written homework. Cam took it for much the same reason.
I found Cam’s quiet mystery compelling. He displayed a charisma that was attractive and masculine. There were depths to Cam I couldn’t penetrate and he seemed to possess a confidence in himself that drew people to him. At fourteen, he stood almost six-feet tall and weighed 160 pounds. Compared to my short five-foot three inch frame and 110 pound body, Cam was unlike any other “boy” I’d ever known.
Cam made more of an impression on me during the second day of class by taking a rubber band and using it as a slingshot. He sat in the very back of the class next to the barred basement windows, and I sat at one of the work tables near the middle of the classroom, a good thirty feet away. With his rubber band, he shot a metal paper clip at my backside which made me nearly jump out of my skin. When I swung around, he was stone faced and as I held my butt, rubbing the painful spot just below my waist, I couldn’t know for sure if Cam had done it or if it had been someone else.
“Who just did that?!” I demanded angrily. The other boys sitting at Cam’s table laughed and Cam remained calm like a Buddha, revealing nothing, looking away and smirking. One of the other boys discreetly pointed over at Cam when Cam’s back was turned, and gave me a wide eyed expression that said: “Can you believe this guy?”
That was how it all started. So, that first week, I did my best to ignore Cam, until he began pestering me every chance he could by shooting paper clips and rubber bands at me regularly, and then pretending he hadn’t. Or tossing small paper airplanes at me and then mimicking me as I tried to catch them or throw them back at him, making fun of my “girlie” delivery. Glaring at Cam and flipping him off when the Mr. Potts back was turned became the norm for me during those first couple of weeks.
Another ironic occurrence happened when I was at home and talking with my mother, talking her ear off about this guy in my shop class who was the new kid in school and how I kind of didn’t like him but he was kind of cute, too. My older brother Brendan, who was 21 was also in the kitchen listening and he asked about Cam.
“What did you say his name was?”
“His name is Cameron Fajer, but everyone calls him Cam for short.” I told my brother Cam was tall and muscular and blonde, but looked a lot older than he really was.
“Yeah, I think I met that kid.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, he had a really weird name. I remember he said his name was “Cam” which I thought was kind of a strange name.”
“Where did you see him?”
“He was up at Wallace park last weekend riding around on his bike and I was there on my bike, too. He rode over and asked me about my bike and how long I’d had it, and then asked if I wanted to “go on a cruise with him.” He seemed kinda lonely, so I said, yeah, sure.”
“What did you do, like, where did you go?”
“Oh, we just rode our bikes around NW for about a half hour. He was a big kid, blond as I recall and said he was new at Chapman and had come from Illinois, and yeah I remember when he told me he was only 14, I was like, wow! He looked 18 at least. Anyway, that’s what happened. So, that’s the guy in your shop class, Theresa?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Well, you should be careful. He’s a big kid. He could be trouble.”
I’ll never forget how funny it felt that right after I’d met Cam, by only a few days he had met my older brother Brendan and they were riding their bikes around NW Portland, which really was a small town, back then.
When Cam and I were in shop class, we generally spent the whole class time watching each other, poking fun, insulting each other and generally giving the other a hard time, but in time it became clear that our rapport was couched within the knowledge that it was because we liked each other and were attracted to each other.
Except that in time, Cam became even bolder. He was able, due to his larger size, to do other things that frankly frustrated and upset me. He would stroll by me in shop class, reach in and pinch my butt, hard. He continued to flick paper clips and rubber bands at my back-side so hard, I’d jump. He seemed to enjoy pestering me at every turn. There were other girls in the class who were pretty, too. Girls I presumed he might find more interesting, but he left them alone. It was me Cam wanted.
Cam would walk by me as I sanded a chunk of wood or plastic, and rap his large bony knuckles on my butt and thighs so hard he would leave bruises, all while remaining perfectly inscrutable.
“Would you STOP, Cam?” I’d demand.
If Mr. Potts ever noticed, he’d laugh and smile. “Okay, you two, stop flirting!” He’d scold. Often, Cam would claim it was not he who had flicked my butt with paper clips but someone else, even when I’d seen him do it. Cam always made sure the shop teacher Mr. Potts was never around when he decided to single me out for his special brand of attention. The things Cam did to me are today grounds for suspension or even expulsion but back in 1979, it all seemed relegated under the banner of the old adage that, “Boys will be boys.” It was definitely a different time, then.
Sometimes I became incensed. I would march up to him, wide-eyed with fury. “I SAW you do it Cam! Don’t deny it, I SAW you!” Cam would calmly stand there and deny it, smiling down at me, as if he were indulging a spoiled child, would shrug and say: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Theresa.”
After about two weeks of his constant harassment, I went to Mr. Potts in his back office to complain. Mr. Potts just laughed. He told me it was “nothing” and to go back to my table and focus on whatever project we were working on. He told me I should be glad that “a boy like Cam” thought I was “cute enough to bother with.” That was how it was in 1979. Boys could get away with a lot. But the truth was I was intrigued by Cam’s attention. He was the new boy in school, and I felt flattered he found me a girl attractive enough to harass and torment in the flirtatious way that he did.
Cam captured the interest of the other students at the school, as well. Some liked him, others hated him. Generally it was the other boys who disliked him, as they were jealous of his superior size and development. Later that year one of those boys would challenge Cam to a fistfight under the “shelter” at Wallace Park. The “shelter” was a small building for picnics on rainy days, and I along with dozens of other kids would rush over to watch Cam scramble with the other boy, rolling around on the ground, fighting, punching and grappling for control. It was a horrible scene that I will never forget.
The kids made fun of Cam’s lumbering walk which I thought of more as feline in its grace, than lumbering. More than one person compared him to “Lurch” from the Adams Family TV show, but never to his face of course. They would have been too scared. Kids even made fun of his plain “Sears” style beige corduroy pants, and generic Tee shirts that he always wore. There were no brand names for Cam. One girl I was friends with referred to him as, “that Hayseed from Illinois.” I laughed at their comments, never confiding to anyone that I secretly crushed on him, or that whenever I was around him, I got butterflies in my stomach, when he towered over me and smirked at me, undressing me with his eyes.
In time Cam asked for my telephone number, but I refused to give it to him. This made Cam angry. He couldn’t understand why I just didn’t give it to him. I told him I didn’t know him “well enough” and that he’d only just transferred to Chapman. He told me I was “stupid” for not giving him my number. But in the end he got it from a fellow classmate, a 7th grade boy who volunteered in the office and knew where the student files were. They were paper at the time, and easily accessed, unlike today.
I had refused to give Cam my phone number out of fear he’d think I was easy. Being considered “easy” was something all the girls worried about. There was nothing more important than our reputation. No girl wanted to become known as a “slut” or “easy” and I had felt I simply could not take the risk. I refused to give Cam my telephone number, but he ended up getting it anyway.
Cam called one afternoon on a weekend, and we talked for almost an hour, and he called again after that. We talked about everything. Our families, what we wanted to be when we grew up and Cam even mentioned that he slept with his bedroom window open at night, although he was not completely honest about the details, I would come to find out later.
“You could come over and toss a rock at my bedroom window. I always leave the window open.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m just kidding, but I do leave my bedroom window open almost all the time.”
“Really? Why do you leave your bedroom window open? Sometimes it gets cold, you know?”
“I know, I just love fresh air. I always have.”
“Oh, okay.”
After spending several hours talking on the phone for more than a week, Cam asked in a cajoling way if I would come and visit him. I was instantly suspicious of his motives but he joked and promised he would never “take advantage” of me. He promised me he was a gentleman. I told him I couldn’t go to his house, but we could meet on the school grounds to talk.
We agreed to meet behind the school, on the west side, and that’s where I met him the following night, just as the sun went down and the street lamps were beginning to light. I stood by the SE side entrance of Chapman but couldn’t see him. I stood there confused, looking around and becoming frightened. Then I heard the faint whisper of someone calling my name, a faint whisper.
“Theresa? Theresa?” I turned around and there he was standing in the shadows. He walked up to me, smiling, and so happy to see me. He seemed like a different person once he was away from the context of Shop Class and school. He seemed sincere and happy, and nice.
“I’m glad you came,” he said quietly. He slowly bent down, put both his hands on my shoulders, pulled me in and delicately kissed me. I didn’t resist and returned his kiss. Then he brushed a strand of hair out of my face, smiling at me in a way he never had before. He seemed so happy to see me, so different from how he could be in shop class.
“So, I’m here. You said you wanted to talk?”
“Let’s just go over here, behind the fifth grade classrooms. Over there behind those trees.”
Cam took my hand in his, which was dry, warm and large, the size of a mans hand. I looked down at our hands as they were clasped together, and saw that his hand was a dark honey color and my hand was white like milk. My hand was tiny compared to his and again I felt I was standing next to a man with the face of a boy.
Cam led me behind the fifth grade classrooms. They were small square buildings that had been added only a couple of years before. He led me to a patch of green grass that was below a canopy of tall Douglas Fir trees, and gently pushed me to the ground. He reassured me that it was okay when I started to get back up and he laid over me, pinning me to the ground, gently.
“Cam, what are you doing?” I started to resist… but not really.
“Let’s just kiss for awhile,” he suggested.
“Okay, I guess, but that’s all!”
We lay like that, kissing and holding each other for about ten minutes until I felt a heavy thumping. I wondered what it was and pulled away, looking around.
“Cam, what is that?”
“What’s what?”
“Someone’s going to see us!” I was starting to get scared.
“What’s wrong? I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“What’s that thumping?” I asked. Cam looked at me and smiled.
“That’s just my heart, Theresa. That’s my heart beating.”
Cam seemed proud of himself, as he took my hand, opened the palm and placed it over his heart. I felt his heart under his sternum, pounding. I couldn’t believe how hard it was beating and I became alarmed.
“Are you okay, Cam?” I whispered, afraid.
“Sure, I’m fine. This is what happens sometimes when you make out with a girl,” he explained patiently.
“Wow!” I whispered.
“Yeah, I know,” he murmured quietly.
Cam pushed me back down on the soft grass and we continued kissing deeply. Then I felt his hand go up and under my shirt and into my double AA bra. I didn’t object. He cupped my left breast in his right hand, and squeezed it while kissing me. My hands continued to grip his hard shoulders and upper arms. I couldn’t believe how hard his shoulders were. Again, I felt I was with a man and not a boy.
Then as I opened my eyes for a moment, out of my peripheral vision, I saw an older hippie couple walk by. They looked over, saw us and though they were fifty feet from us, I could tell that they smiled. They stopped and the woman pointed, quickly dropping her hand to her side. They were just standing there and kind of laughing quietly. I became alarmed, and instantly self-conscious.
“Cam! There’s someone there. We really should go, now.”
“Okay. But I wanna see you again, Theresa.”
“Okay, but just not here. Not out in public like this.”
“Why are you afraid? You don’t think I’d take advantage of you, do you?”
“Take advantage? What do you mean?”
“You know, like force you?”
“Oh. I’ve never heard anyone put it like that before.”
“It means I’d never press my advantage.”
“Press your advantage? What’s that?”
“You know, since I’m a boy and you’re a girl, and I’m a lot bigger?”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Well, I just want you to know I’d never do that.”
“Okay, I believe you.”
Cam and I started to get up, and as he got to his feet first, he leaned over and helped me up, pulling me up as if I was a rag-doll. We walked down to the sidewalk and began walking east, and as we passed the fifth grade classrooms our fingers interlaced. I felt his thumb stroking the skin of my hand and the innocent intimacy of the gesture became incredibly exiting. No boy had ever done that before. He kept looking down at me and smiling. Again, he seemed so completely different when we were alone.
We continued walking through Wallace Park and then said goodbye outside his house on NW Raleigh Street. As I prepared to walk the four blocks to my house, which was farther northeast, I saw a familiar car drive by. The car stopped in the street, right in front of Cam’s house, idling next to a car parked at the curb. It was my oldest brother Dennis. He was ten years older than me, and at 23 he was out with his friends, driving around in his restored bone white 1967 Fastback Mustang.
“Hey there little girl? What are you doing out this late?”
“Oh, hi Dennis! I was just… uh, with my friend?”
“Is that your boyfriend Theresa?” Dennis was teasing me.
“He’s only a friend!” I stammered.
“Only a friend, huh? You better get home now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Right now, Theresa. It’s after dark.”
“Okay.”
I was worried I’d get in trouble with my mother if Dennis called her from a payphone and told her the truth. I had told her I needed to meet a girlfriend of mine on the school grounds to help her look for her lost coat, and didn’t want to get caught in the fib.
My brother Dennis watched, making sure I left. As I started off down the street, I looked to my left and saw Cam watching from the shadows of the driveway. He said nothing as I passed and then he disappeared into the darkness. He called later, and we talked on the phone for an hour. He told me he wanted to see me again and this time I should come to his house. I found myself feeling like I could trust him when he continued to joke, saying: “I’m not gonna do anything to ya. Not anything I haven’t done before. It will be fun, come on! I have a private bedroom, and I know we can’t go to your house, cuz your mom and your family will be there.”
So I agreed to meet Cam three days later at his parent’s tiny tan colored house on NW Raleigh Street, catty corner to Wallace Park. He told me on the telephone to go around to the back door when I came over. That Saturday morning, after I walked the short distance to his house, I walked around to the back, passing through the driveway and feeling obvious, like a lurking criminal in a spotlight. When I got to the backyard area, I quietly rapped on the back door window. I felt nervous because it was broad daylight and I felt particularly exposed in the light. I heard Cam almost immediately climb the stairs. He was almost silent as he discreetly let me in. I found this rather insulting, as if he were letting in the help but said nothing in protest. He was dressed in his socks and his usual beige corduroy pants and a light blue tee-shirt.
As we walked down to the dusty basement, he shushed me, telling me: “Be quiet, my family’s upstairs!” Cam looked at me sternly, his eyes wide with warning and I nodded my head, again feeling like a criminal. I tiptoed down silently in my new Nike sneakers with the red swoosh. After realizing his family was indeed upstairs, I also realized they could not have known about my presence and that us being together was basically forbidden.
We were finally in the basement common area, and standing on a cold cement floor. I looked around in dismay, wondering why we were in a dark, dusty basement. It was then I realized that Cam slept in a dim corner of that dark basement. I saw four old bedspreads nailed to the exposed wood rafters near the ceiling. The bedspreads purpose was to simulate walls and create some semblance of privacy of some kind. There in the corner, adjacent to a small basement window, (which let in some ambient light) sat a double bed hidden partially behind the bed spreads. There was no headboard or footboard and the bedding though clean, looked old, brittle, pale and worn.
“Is this where you sleep?” I asked, stunned.
“Yeah, this cracker box house is too small for me to have my own room.”
“Wow. I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not a big deal; it’s just how it is. Our family is big.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Instantly, I felt sorry for Cam when I saw where he slept. Even I had my own bedroom. I slept on an antique, cast-iron bed adorned with four genuine glossy brass knobs. It was a valuable bed that had belonged to my father, and had been made in the 1920s. My bedroom had pretty wallpaper on the walls, with pink and peach colored Peony flowers. The two windows facing north, overlooking NW Thurman Street were covered in brand new white muslin curtains my older sister Maggie had made. The bed was covered with a beautiful bedspread, adorned with tiny white and blue flowers.
Every morning, before school, I happily made my bed, pleased as I was with the new bed spread. It moved easily under my fingers and made the bed look like something out of a home decorating magazine, replete with lacy crinkled dust ruffle below the mattress. My mother had proudly given the bed spread to me, “just because” she had said. She purchased it with her store discount, from Frederick & Nelson where she worked in the Book Department as the manager. It was stylish and quality bedding, so it seemed odd and a sad contrast that Cam had his “room” in that dim, dusty basement, instead of a regular bedroom like every other kid I knew at Chapman.
But I didn’t dwell on his lack of a proper bedroom long. After we walked to his bed, I stood there and smiled. I realized we would have lots of private time together. We wouldn’t be bothered by passersby as had happened the previous week when we’d kissed for the first time on the walkway outside the school, when we had laid down on the grass to make out beneath the old Doug Fir trees. I put my hands on my hips and tilted my head, flirting, with a Mona Lisa smile on my face. I made Cam wait for just a moment before I spoke.
“So, Cam, what are we gonna do, now?”
“You KNOW what!” Cam said as he approached me.
I smiled up at Cam as he gripped his hands under my armpits and began to lie back on the bed on his back, pulling me up and over him with the ease of lifting up a rag-doll. Once we were both on the bed, he maneuvered me around and lay on top of me, leaning down to kiss me deeply as he laid his heavy leg across me, pinning me under him.
Though I was almost fourteen, and Cam almost fifteen, we met many times during those months to “make out” lying across his bed, sometimes for hours at a time until we both became drunk and vague with euphoria. Cam turned out to be an incredible kisser, and an affectionate and tender lover, though we never actually had sex. Cam had always promised me he would never hurt me, or pressure me in any way and he kept his word.
In that dim basement Cam and I discovered the thrill of our physical bodies and the erotic power of deep mutual attraction. We kissed deeply, frantically holding each other, completely lost to the outside world and only aware of each other. After each make out session, though, the message Cam communicated to me was clear: I was not someone he wanted to advertise he was spending time with. He liked me. Obviously, he liked me a lot and he thought I was attractive, he wouldn’t have called me if he hadn’t, but he didn’t want anyone to know what we were doing together.
Being that we were both so young and I wouldn’t have known how to formulate the words, I never confronted Cam about his attitude. I allowed his treatment of me, not knowing how to articulate that it was wrong. Cam was certainly not any better off than I was, either socially or economically. We lived in the same general area, the lower income NW area, commonly referred to as “the NW Flats.”
So, when Cam quietly sneered at me one afternoon, after making-out with me for over an hour, “You don’t need to go blabbing all over the school about what we do together, either!” I had just nodded in silence and tried to quell his fears that I’d blow the whistle on him. “I won’t say anything” I promised quietly. “You’re still my girlfriend, though,” Cam told me firmly, with a churlish expression on his face. “I just don’t want anyone to know what we do, or they’ll tease, ya know?”
It seemed reasonable to me. It made sense, so I kept my mouth shut. All that mattered was that Cam continued to kiss me, continued to hold me with his big, long gorilla arms in his little basement corner, and continued to give me that thrilling feeling. The wonderful thrill of being young and alive and experiencing erotic pleasure for the first time — of having a small attractive body and knowing I was pretty, and of being with him.
There was nothing like it in the world, feeling that feeling.
During our time together in his basement, the yellowing bed spreads hung around the bed and drifted imperceptibly. In the dim light we moved slowly while the smell of clean laundry lingered fragrantly in the air. Cam’s sweet, clean mouth and perfectly formed body was something I was becoming addicted to. I felt powerless against the dizzying feeling of delirious intoxication. I felt I would do anything to get more of the feeling that only he could give me.
We were both so young and it was all so fresh and new, this thing we were doing; holding each other, kissing each other, squeezing, pulling, tasting each other, our legs intertwined warmly, the fabric of our jeans rustling against each other. We were encased in a dim, smoky and halting sensuality. And because Cam was so much bigger than I was, so much taller, with the body of a man, the feeling of his heavy weight as he lay across me left me feeling pinned and dominated and the sensation was intensely erotic and powerful for a girl like me.
There was something about Cam that was alluring, darkly seductive and even melancholy. His hands, compared to mine were enormous and strong, his biceps and thighs rounded, hard and developed. He outweighed me by more than fifty pounds and when he pulled me to him, gripping me under my armpits, I just slid right up and into his embrace with ease.
Cam was an alluring man-child, and I believe also a natural romantic. When he wasn’t being sarcastic in shop class, poking fun at me, trying to look up my skirt, or rapping my butt with his bony knuckles, he could be a most attentive, tender and affectionate lover; a lover who would never “press” his “advantage” or make me feel unsafe.
Cam would kiss the tip of my nose, smile down at me and make me feel loved, wanted and appreciated. To this day Cam is the only person who has ever done that. Kissing the tip of my nose became his little idiosyncratic habit when we made out and I never forgot how special that simple gesture made me feel. Being with Cam felt spiritual and complete, and was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. But the larger truth was that Cam loved girls and not just me, and I learned to accept that early on. Cam loved girls and he had a wandering eye.
As I looked over at his dressing table one afternoon, which was the only other furniture in his small area, I saw several pink envelopes with pink stickers on the outside, and the rounded cursive writing of a girl.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Just love letters from other girls,” Cam casually responded with a smirk, looking over at me to gauge my reaction.
“You have love letters from other girls — from Portland?”
“No, those are from a couple girls in Illinois. Most of them are from my old girlfriend. She still writes. She misses me a lot.”
Cam was trying to make me jealous and it worked. I was mad. I sat up on the bed, stone faced and glared over at him. He laughed. “Come on, that’s all over and done with. She lives in Illinois. How’s she gonna get to me here in Portland? Did you ever think of that, Theresa?”
“Whatever Cam!” I said sullenly.
“Besides, she’s a nut. She doesn’t mean anything to me, anymore. And I only knew her for a little while. I heard you’ve had boyfriends. I heard Jimmy Dunkin was your boyfriend and Rowdy Mechals, too. Is that true?”
“What if it is? I’ve known them both for years, so what! I’m almost 14, and that’s how things are in public school, in case YOU didn’t know!”
I was starting to get upset and Cam could intuit he had hurt me. He walked over and pushed me back on the bed, crawling over me and pinning me under him with a smile. Instantly, I forgave him and opened my arms. My eyes were troubled and sad but without another word, we resumed making out. It was just another example of the pattern we had developed. I discovered I had little pride when it came to Cam. He was too adept at emotional manipulation and I was too young, inexperienced and weak to fight back in the same way.
After countless make-out sessions and the end of that first term of school, shop class was over and strangely Cam just stopped calling me. Just like that. Instantly, I felt bereft, confused, sad. I had been indoctrinated by my parents, particularly my father, to believe that a “lady” never drank beer, smoked and never pursued a boy. I couldn’t call Cam. That would have been “aggressive and unladylike,” according to my father. But I did call, and twice I asked to speak with him. His father Vincent, and an older brother Anthony told me they would convey the message. Still, Cam never called back.
I often wondered why Cam had so suddenly stopped calling and I think I can narrow it down to one single incident that happened during a short school break during that time in 1979. There was a short break, a four day weekend for some reason I now cannot recall, (probably a teachers training session) and an older brother, older sister and my younger brother and I decided we wanted to go to the Esquire Theater, formerly located at 2300 NW Kearney Street, to see a movie. The tickets were half the normal theater prices and at only one dollar and 50 cents, the Esquire Theater was a huge draw for Chapman Elementary, and Lincoln High School kids living in the area.
On that chilly Fall evening, we paid for our tickets and walked down to the front left hand row, the fourth row in the theater. We sat down and waited for the movie to start. We talked, laughing and happy to be out to see a movie without our parents. After a few minutes, I felt the strange feeling that someone was watching me. I tried to ignore it but it wouldn’t go away, the strong feeling that I was being watched.
Then suddenly I knew Cam was in the theater.
Cam and I had developed a strange kind of telepathy at that point during our many make-out sessions, and I could feel his presence in the room. His name just popped up in my head, CAM! And I knew he was nearby.
I turned around and scanned the half full theater and after only perhaps three short seconds, I saw Cam and our eyes locked. He was looking right at me, his eyes smoldering and burning a hole right through me. I smirked, smiled flirtatiously and flipped my shoulder length dark hair behind me, and turned my back on him. Cam was alone and I knew he’d want to see me, but what did he expect I’d do, just get up and walk to him? I knew that’s what he would want and that I would not be able to do it.
I looked back at him a couple minutes later and he quickly motioned me over with his hand, in an impatient come over here gesture. I ignored him. Then about five minutes later my older brother asked me to get a large popcorn and large soda that we all could share. He gave me a ten-dollar-bill and I stood and began to walk up the aisle so I could go to the concessions stand in the next room. I was wearing some shiny Clinique burgundy lip gloss, a little bit of Coty face powder, and pretty pearl drop earrings. I was dressed in form fitting Chic jeans, a tight long-sleeved lavender cotton shirt and a tiny jean jacket that fit me perfectly. I knew I looked cute and put together. Cam watched me the whole way, scanning my body from the top of my head to my legs, down to my feet, his eyes dark, glaring and jealous.
Cam was angry I hadn’t come to him. I smiled, enjoying his attention, knowing that we had been together only a couple of days before, in his dim basement making out and loving every minute of it. As I passed Cam, and he sat directly to my left, I flipped my hair again and smiled at him. I was teasing him and he must have known it, but that was part of our rapport and part of what made our secret connection so fun.
We were constantly jockeying for control and in this case, I had the upper hand. When we were alone Cam always had the upper hand, and I could never compete, so being able to flirt and tease him was rare and fun for me. I thought he would understand and never thought he’d take my refusal personally.
After getting the soda and popcorn, I came back with my hands full, pushing the door open with my elbow, to get back to my siblings. It was then I saw that Cam had gotten up out of his seat and was waiting directly next to the back row door. As I walked in, almost passing him, he grabbed my left wrist, his hand was warm and huge as he held my thin wrist tightly. He gently but firmly pulled me to him and I almost stumbled. It was hard not to panic for a moment, wondering if I would drop the soda I held in my right hand and the tub of buttered popcorn in my left hand, which Cam seemed unconcerned with. He leaned into me and I could feel his warm breath against my neck. We whispered to each other for a short minute or so.
“Theresa, why didn’t you come back here and sit with me?”
“I’m with my family, Cam. What do you want me to do, Jeez!”
“Oh come on, that’s only your older brother, it’s not like he’s your Dad!”
“I’ve got my hands full! Cam?!”
“Sit in the second row! WILL you please?!”
“Cam?!”
“SIT in the second row. I’ll be waiting.”
“Cam? Jeez, I can’t. I can’t always do what you want me to.”
By then, my older brother had turned around and was looking at me suspiciously and motioning for me to come over, and bring the soda and popcorn. I gently pulled away from Cam and that was the last time Cam would ever touch me during that school year. I looked back at him, still feeling frightened and unsteady, trying to carry the soda and popcorn. Cam gazed at me coldly as I walked away. But I could not have known that by not doing what he wanted, Cam would punish me by banishing me from his presence. But that is of course what he did. He punished me by not calling me anymore and offering me no explanation.
I spent the rest of the school year thinking about Cam, missing him and wondering why he’d stopped calling me so suddenly, unable to make the theater connection as one of the probable reasons why. It couldn’t have been because I was unkempt or unattractive, as I was always fresh and sparkling clean. I was independent, playful, outgoing and generally well-liked.
And though I was quite young, I had access to all kinds of the simple things, like quality lip gloss and perfume, (thanks to my mother working in a fine department store) that make a girl memorable and attractive. I wore my straight brunette hair in a shoulder length bob; I wore Clinique transparent cherry lip gloss I’d gotten from the Frederick & Nelson department store, and even perfume, White Shoulders, also purchased from Frederick & Nelson. My clothes were okay, and I was always clean. It couldn’t be because I had a bad reputation either as I didn’t just casually make out with other boys. In time, I began to think back to that night at the Esquire Theater and it was the only thing that made any sense to me.
I had always known Cam was afraid the other kids might find out about us, but I honestly couldn’t understand his anxiety about wanting to keep that part of our connection secret. It became apparent from his own words that he didn’t want anyone to know because he was afraid they would judge, or tease him. We were still at the age where it didn’t matter who you were with, anyone was a potential source of ridicule if they found out you were “boyfriend and girlfriend.”
I never understood why Cam was so worried about what the other kids might think, but in time, I found out there might be another reason that Cam had stopped calling me, other than me rejecting Cam in the Esquire Theater. Cam had discovered I’d had a regular “boyfriend” the previous summer. A boy named Rowdy.
Rowdy was tall, with feathered canary blond hair, and large golden brown eyes. He was also far more traditionally handsome than Cam would ever be, and Rowdy was the opposite of Cam in nearly every way in terms of persona. Rowdy was dreamy, sweet, sensual and he was kind to everyone. Furthermore, Rowdy didn’t care what other people thought of him because of the kids he hung out with. Rowdy was loyal to his friends and had a laid back confidence in himself that Cam completely lacked.
Cam found out about Rowdy from another student and I think knowing about Rowdy made him feel inadequate. Several weeks after Cam stopped calling, he was walking to school one morning and he saw me talking to Rowdy on the school grounds as we stood next to a large Douglas fir tree directly in front of the main walkway leading to the front door of Chapman Elementary some 150 feet away.
Rowdy was flirting with me, and as Cam walked by us, he glared at me, and that’s when it clicked. He was jealous of the bond Rowdy and I had, having known each other for years. Cam was jealous and insecure. Now, I had the second reason why Cam had stopped calling me. It all made sense. What happened at the Esquire Theater several weeks before, and knowing that Rowdy was an old boyfriend were the reasons Cam had stopped calling me. But it still didn’t change anything. I simply could not summon the courage to call Cam again, or try to reconnect no matter how much I wanted to. It seemed he had made up his mind and that was that.
One afternoon, in one of the girls bathrooms, the one at the west end of the building, toward the end of the school year, I saw a girl had written in pencil on the wall near the front southern facing door: “Cam Fajer is cute!” I was incensed that another girl would write something about Cam and felt weak with swirling jealousy. I stood there, alone in the large restroom, wide-eyed and in a furious silent rage, glowering at the words, determined to know who had written them.
I casually asked around and eventually was told it was a new girl who didn’t even last the school year. She was a “scummy girl” with bleach blond hair who had recently transferred to the school from Medford and she didn’t stay long before being expelled for marijuana possession. She was a seventh grade girl who wore too much make-up and had a bad reputation as a “loose slut” according to some other girls I talked to.
A couple of days later, I went back to the same girls’ restroom. I scribbled over the girls words, with a black pen making the letters indecipherable. Then below the scrawl, I wrote in an angry hand: “Cam is ugly!” I felt vindicated when I saw my big capital letters in black ink above the other girls small pencil script, which I’d destroyed. I walked out the door feeling smug, angry and sad.
When Cam graduated to eighth grade, and I to seventh grade, I spent the entire year trying to avoid him in the halls. It made me heartsick to see him lumbering through the halls like a cougar, with his tall man-size body, walking with that strange feline grace, or to catch his odd, simmering gaze. Cam’s gaze seemed to mock me. His eyes mocked my presence and communicated fully some kind of deep seated resentment and continued attraction for me. His eyes were jealous but were also still filled with desire. I saw it in the way he looked at me. In the way his angry gaze told me he enjoyed, in a cruel way, the silent way we were still communicating with each other. I saw it in what he was telling me with his eyes and with his entire face.
That year went by agonizingly slow and I saw him everywhere, as we walked to our respective classes, every single day, all through the school. As Cam lived only a few blocks from my house, which was located on 24th and Thurman Street, a house at least twice as large as the tiny home he lived in, I couldn’t help but see him in the neighborhood on a regular basis.
Once, during that time, as I spoke to a girlfriend in a glass payphone on 25th and Thurman Street, arranging a movie date, but after only a couple of minutes, I had a strong eerie feeling that someone was watching me. I turned directly around as I stood in the phone booth, and looked one block south, behind me.
Standing on the sidewalk, directly across from the Post Office stood Cam, watching me silently like a spider, his hands in his pockets, his legs spread like the athlete he was, and completely motionless. I looked at him, bewildered, and uncertain what he was doing and why he was just standing there. Cam had that same expressionless look on his face and I felt the strange and familiar heart-skipping magnetism that only he could make me feel.
I said goodbye to my friend, and gently put down the telephone receiver. I looked back at Cam and still he refused to move, he just stood there silently, gazing down the street, his hands in his pockets. I didn’t know what he wanted, and felt frustrated. Why did he always do things like that? I finally walked off in a huff, swinging my arms. As his image disappeared from my peripheral vision and I walked east, toward home, I tried not to cry. What had he been doing? What did he want? Why didn’t he just yell hello, or motion me over, or at least wave?
The truest reality is that Cam was my first love.
Cam was the first boy I’d fallen hopelessly and crazily in love with. He made my heart pound and my knees weak. He made me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt before or since. And even after all this time, (more than thirty five years) I’ve never been able to recapture that intense feeling of dizzy, wild attraction that I felt when I was with him.
I know now it was simply part of being so young. It was the thrill of youthful discovery — that feeling of newness and emotional intensity that comes when you find your physical ideal, coupled with some inexplicable spiritual component that simply cannot be explained. It was a connection I’ve never felt again with quite that level of sublime euphoric perfection.
After Cam graduated from Chapman, and left for high school, I pined for him secretly all during eighth grade within the hidden confines of my mind and heart. Nothing could console me during that last year at Chapman and I told no one, other than my younger sister, who was distracted with her own life and never understood what the big deal was. Though I didn’t want to admit it, I was looking forward to the time when I would be at Lincoln high school as a freshman, just so I could see Cam walking through the halls, again, moving with that sinister languid confidence he had.
Months would pass and I wouldn’t see Cam in the neighborhood and the truth is, I missed those unexpected run-in’s. I thought of Cam endlessly during my final year at Chapman and I hated myself and Cam for that reality. What was it about him, I wondered? What was it about him that I couldn’t seem to forget?
THE STANCE OF YOUTH
Shortly before I started my freshman year at Lincoln, during the hot summer break, I boarded a Trimet bus heading south on NW 23rd Avenue. I was meeting a friend at the Nordstrom Department Store for lunch. I wore bright red Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a pink pullover V-neck shirt.
There, standing by the Fryer’s Quality Pie Shop, below the last window at the north end of the building, stood Cam. He was in his ever-present beige corduroy pants and white Converse sneakers, a white Tee shirt gripped loosely in his right hand. I sat on the right side of the bus as it slowly ambled past, watching him as he stood casually outside the restaurant. He was unaware of my presence and never saw me. I ached at the sight of him. He looked perfect. His smooth hairless chest and flat belly shone a dusty gold and his perfectly formed body looked exactly like the statue of David at the Galleria Dell’ Academia, in Florence, Italy.
In a word, Cam was beautiful.
As I sat on the bus, watching him, fingering my silver clutch purse resting in my lap, I pulled at my fingernails, which were freshly painted peach frost. The longing I felt for Cam was visceral, deep and melancholy. He stood, as if waiting for a ride, bored, leaning against the building, with his thick shock of honey blond hair lifting in the summer wind.
The image of Cam standing there burnt itself in my memory and I will never forget how lovely and natural he looked, every gold cell springing, put on display; a haunting image of health, youth and masculine beauty that has lingered in my consciousness for years.
HIGH SCHOOL AND A WHOLE NEW SET OF RULES
Eventually, the time came and I was enrolled at Lincoln High School. Going nine years in a grammar school, from Kindergarten to 8th grade at Chapman School was for the most part a wonderful experience. It took a while to get used to how big Lincoln was, to find my classrooms and make a small number of conservative friends. The change was sobering and incredibly lonely, but I understood it was like that for almost every other kid, too.
And then there was Cam, lumbering through the halls again. I was still angry at how he had treated me in grade school, so when I saw him, I generally flipped my now long brunette hair at him and never took the risk of speaking with him. Though I missed him during my 7th and 8th grade years at Chapman, I certainly didn’t feel I could ever trust him again.
Cam was the kind of person who betrayed people, consistently and with regularity. On some level I knew that was a part of who he was, and that aspect to his character would never change. I knew whoever he married or became involved with when he was older would also learn that truth.
I knew in my gut that Cam would never be faithful to a single lover.
I spent my entire first year at Lincoln avoiding him, (yet secretly hoping to see him) and most of my sophomore year avoiding him as well, until the last part of the year, when he seemed to look at me with more interest. During that year, I took more time with my appearance and made even more of an effort with my make-up. I dyed my long brown hair black; I wore cherry-red lipstick, dark brown mascara and peach blush. I painted my nails with apricot or pink frost nail polish and bought a few attractive outfits, some with designer labels.
Cam seemed to notice. He glanced at me longer and more often, and toward the end of the year he approached me in the main hall and spoke to me briefly. I could tell he was nervous, afraid I wouldn’t respond, and as a result I found it hard to be rude and so I spoke to him. He asked me how I was and I told him I was doing well. I was naturally suspicious and didn’t respond as readily as I had before.
Eventually after a few weeks, his seeming sweetness and sincerity broke down any defenses I’d created and in time, I felt I should let by-gones be by-gones. Maybe I could trust him, I wondered. Maybe he would be different, now. Maybe I could forgive him. That was what I’d been taught as a Catholic; to forgive and forget, to let people back into your life even after they had hurt you.
One afternoon, I was practicing for a choir recital in the auditorium and Cam walked by the open front door. He walked inside, looking over and I felt him watching me as we sang. He came by two more times to watch as we sang and once again, I felt that strange excitement that I knew Cam was watching me, and wondering what it might mean for the future.
Soon, the simple talking and saying hello to each other turned to our previous playful banter and flirtation of grade school and after once again getting our new house phone number from a mutual friend; he called me one night out of the blue. We talked on the phone several times and though I was apprehensive, I was also anxious to resume our past intimacy. I continued to flirt and encourage him, giggling into the phone.
The flirting became more blatant. We asked each other pointedly direct questions. I asked him if he was still a virgin. He told me “Nope! Not anymore.” Cam claimed he was “experienced” explaining that “sometimes sex is good; sometimes it’s not.” I was convinced. His lie seemed reasonable. And a lie it was. During one conversation, he asked if I remembered grade school: “Do you remember what we used to do together… at Chapman?”
“I remember,” I said simply. “Of course, I remember, Cam.”
“Yeah,” he remarked quietly, “We were just kids then.”
“Do you miss those times?” I asked.
“You bet, I do! You were cute. We had fun.”
“We did, huh?”
“Damn, right love!”
Cam and I talked about all kinds of things during that time, including talking about some of the kids we had gone to grade school with. Kids from Chapman Elementary were discussed at length, their various personal lives. At one point, during one particular discussion we had, Cam wanted to confess an experience he had with a girl who was in his grade, back in 1979. A large girl with short warm brown feathered hair, and brown eyes, a white girl who kind of resembled a boy, a big boned, broad in the shoulders and wide in the hips kind of girl. We both knew the girl, because her younger sister was cute, attractive and popular with curly hair and blue eyes. The sisters didn’t even look like sisters. When Cam told me he had “made out” with this girl a couple of months after he stopped calling me, I was amused and surprised.
“You made out with… Ginn? Why? She’s really not very …”
“Not, what?” Cam asked, chuckling.
“Well, she’s not really very …cute. Why would you do that? Did you lead her on?”
“I don’t think so? I mean we just made out that one time…”
“But why… why her?”
“I dunno, I just wanted to see what it was like.”
“You made out with her because you wanted to ‘see what it was like’? Wow. Would you make out with anyone? Like a woman in her 40’s?”
“No, obviously, I wouldn’t but I dunno, I just wanted to see what it was like.”
“Okay. Well, it’s your business, Cam.”
“That’s right, it was my business,” Cam said, as we both laughed. What troubled me was that it felt like he was laughing at her.
After Cam confessed he’d made out with a girl who was not considered attractive, because he’d wanted to “see what it was like” and he told me all the details, down to how this girl French kissed, I began to laugh and asked him to spare me the details. We both laughed like old friends admitting our failings to each other like a couple of buddies. It created a false sense of security and represented a rare moment of honesty from Cam, so I found his admission oddly intriguing.
After a few more days of flirting on the phone, Cam asked if I’d like to “spend some time” with him at his house. And of course, I did. Of course I wanted to be with him again. It felt like we were two opposites careening towards each other, two forces of nature, that we were compelled and destined to be together. I pretended I didn’t want to, but Cam saw through that. He always knew I was putty in his hands, that I was weak and foolish and would believe his lies. I could see the smile on his face, I could hear the smile in his voice when we spoke on the phone.
And despite all that, despite my intense desire to be with Cam again, somehow I knew it would be ill-fated. Somehow I knew he would screw me over again, but there was something about Cam that seemed so familiar. It felt almost like something that was destined to happen, like I couldn’t say no to him.
Even as I knew it was in his nature to betray, to hurt, and to wound, I knew it was in my nature to pity him, to love him and to let it happen again.
And so I let it happen. Again.
Cam was the scorpion who stings the frog in the back after begging for a ride over the raging icy river. After promising the frog he will not harm him, the scorpion destroys them both. I knew on some deep level that it was as much in Cam’s nature to sting those people he cared about as it was in my nature to be loyal and accommodating beyond the point of all reason.
Cam was the Scorpion, and I was the frog.
During one of our many conversations in grade school Cam had told me he was a “Scorpio” born November 21, 1965. I told him my birthday was in early January, 1966. As I was interested in astrology at the time, I got an Ephemeris at a local astrology shop and did his chart. I learned he had both Sun and Moon in Scorpio. He was what they called a “double Scorpio” hence the magnetic and secretive personality, the selfishness and the propensity to hurt and sting those closest to him.
And as I would come to find out many years later, Cam would also demonstrate the scorpions’ habit of stinging itself if it feels trapped, is in danger, or in Cam’s case is unhappy with nothing to look forward to, or struggling with too much adversity.
Yet, despite the inner dialogue of warning that I heard in my head that day, I heard my voice whisper “yes” into the telephone receiver. I felt a tickle of fear and apprehension flash through my middle as I put the phone down. The thrill that only Cam could give me was still there.
I wanted it again. I wanted Cam.
The day came and I spent an entire afternoon making myself beautiful. I showered, shaved my legs, and smoothed lightly scented mandarin-orange body lotion all over my body. I did a nice subtle makeup, with frosted peach, instead of cherry-red lipstick, black mascara and a light sparkly peach blush. I put on my new turquoise flared mini-skirt, new pink lace panties, a sleeveless white top, and new braided Bass brown leather sandals I’d just bought from Frederick & Nelson. A touch of White Shoulders perfume sealed the deal as I walked to his tan colored house and knocked lightly on the front door.
I felt confident and knew I looked great.
At the time, I didn’t understand that me coming to his parents house was clearly the wrong thing to do. Even then, in the early 1980s, years after the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, wherein women were “liberated” sexually, it was still the wrong thing do. But at the time, I thought I was a modern girl.
Looking back now, I see what a fool I was. I was so naive and idealistic.
I thought could handle his invitation. Cam would “respect me in the morning,” I told myself. I was soon to learn that “the rules” never change and Cam with his provincial attitudes about women and sex would prove that to me in the final outcome.
Cam had been waiting for me. He answered the door right away, greeted me politely and invited me in with a welcoming, proprietary wave of his left hand. He gave what seemed to be a formal tour of the downstairs, as if he felt he was obligated to do so, as a proper host might. He showed me the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, all nicely decorated in shades of tan and beige and I secretly marveled at how extremely tiny the Fajer house really was. Once again Cam joked about the house being a “cracker box.” He asked if I’d like something to drink. I politely declined. Then, getting right to the point, he asked if we should go upstairs.
“Would you like to go upstairs?”
The question was posed to me with a provocative smile. I smiled up at him, saying nothing, giving him my answer only with my eyes, and followed him up the cramped, narrow stairwell. On the second floor, he showed me his new room. I thought he still slept in the basement, but apparently he’d gotten his own room after an older sibling moved out. It was too small though, and messy, so he suggested we would be more comfortable in his parent’s room. He steered me out of the doorway and into his parents much larger bedroom with his hand on my back. The bed was unmade and there were frumpy looking adult clothes scattered here and there but everything was clean, with white, beige and tan bedding. As I looked around, I knew what was coming.
Cam walked over to the side of the bed and sat on the edge, patting the rumpled sheet next to him. He wanted me to sit near him. I stood defiantly, not moving for a short moment and then fell laughing onto the bed and into his arms as he dove toward me at that exact moment. It seemed that no time had elapsed since the last time we’d held each other, four years before. We kissed and eventually after making out for over an hour, Cam told me he wanted sex.
“Do you wanna make love?” he asked shyly, as he lay over me.
“I thought you’d get to that,” I said, giggling. Then Cam seemed hesitant. He faltered. He rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed, thinking.
“Are you sure? I don’t know. I’m just kinda ashamed at how this relationship is getting started. Are you sure you wanna go… all the way?”
“Are you serious? Well, we don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to?”
“I want to… it’s just…”
“It’s just what, Cam? Why would you be ashamed? Jeez, Cam it’s the 1980s! What’s the problem? I thought you said you weren’t a virgin? What are you, a kid?” I asked playfully.
Cam didn’t need much more convincing as he moved toward me again, crawling over me with a determined look on his face. We slowly helped each over strip out of our clothes and I remember we felt completely comfortable being naked together. His body was perfect and my body was as perfect as it would ever be. Our clean fragrant bodies radiated health and youth and we felt utterly at ease with each other.
Though some might say, I moved too quickly, I was desperate to reconnect with Cam. I was desperate to feel the thrill of being in his arms again, to feel his heart pound against my chest, to feel that sensation of life within me, in relation to the life in him. And so Cam and I made love on his parent’s bed, in the warm afternoon, with the bright sunlight spilling over us, and nothing else seemed to exist in the world, except the two of us.
I had presumed Cam was not a virgin because he had told me he was not a virgin. I had already had my first consensual sexual experience with a boy about three months before, so I knew what to expect. What I did not expect is that Cam would lie about being a virgin. While I lay under him, I was able to determine that this experience probably was indeed Cam’s first time. He seemed hesitant about any thrusting as if he was afraid he might hurt me. I had to keep helping him, which I did silently and without comment, encouraging him, gripping his shoulders firmly. Finally, after getting the hang of it, several minutes later Cam’s body shuddered in orgasm.
It was wonderful, while we made love, to caress his hard, broad shoulders, and muscular arms. “God, you’re so big,” I whispered, looking up at him. I knew intuitively Cam loved hearing such a flattering comment. He smiled deliriously, closing his eyes, lost in the sensuality and the pleasure of being with me.
Cam was young and gorgeous. His dusty gold color was intoxicating, his jewel-like green eyes multi-faceted and beautiful and I felt delirious knowing we were finally going all the way. I felt if he’d asked me, I would have done anything for him and maybe, just maybe, we actually might have a future together. Maybe I could be his girlfriend, even if it meant being his secret girlfriend again, which I would have accepted, swallowing my pride yet again simply in order to be with Cam.
Only time would demonstrate to me the complete naivety of that simple and impossible hope. Because deep down I knew my desire for Cam was ill-fated. A part of me knew it would never happen the way I wanted, or hoped it would.
I knew intuitively that deception and his mercurial mood swings were as much a part of Cam’s unstable character as his conflicted indifference, his hot and cold responses, along with the strong sexual desires that were also a big part of who he was and would always be.
We lay on the bed, recovering, breathless and smiling, and held each other. He stroked my arms and then reached in and kissed the tip of my nose. “Do you wanna take a shower together?” he asked. “I’ve already had one today, but another one won’t hurt” I said, giggling. I hopped up and we walked into the bathroom. Cam stepped in first and then helped me in, extending his hand, so I could step into the bathtub safely. We stood under the warm water, and I giggled, telling Cam I’d never taken a shower with a boy before. He admitted that he’d never taken a shower with a girl either, and that it was a first for him, too. He smiled down at me, so much taller than I was, so much bigger as we soaped ourselves, rinsed off and washed our hair. Our bodies were both so young and perfect; there was no self consciousness or awkwardness. At least it seemed that way to me.
Cam had asked me before we made love, if I was “ashamed” of my body, “like so many other girls are,” he added contemptuously. “I’m not ashamed of my body at all,” I said bluntly, “I just wish it was more perfect than it is.” I explained matter-of-factly.
“More perfect, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m kinda small breasted as you know.”
“They’re perfect Theresa, they’re just the right size.”
“Oh really?” I said with a giggle.
“Yeah — I don’t like girls with big sloppy boobs.”
“I’m not ashamed of my body, though. I’m not ashamed of being naked for example, here with you,” I murmured, with a small smile. Cam’s awareness of things like body-image and personal shame made me think he was enlightened about such things, but I could not have been more wrong.
THE MADONNA WHORE SYNDROME
The reality was that Cam wasn’t enlightened at all. He was your typical Catholic boy, who equates a good-girl with hating sex and a bad-girl with liking sex. The Madonna/Whore Syndrome plain and simple.
In Cam’s simple mind, I had liked it and liking it for a girl was a sin. When he was on top of me, I’d wiggled and squirmed, spread my legs, gasped, whimpered and made lots of noise. I had liked it. And he had liked it. I could tell Cam was thrilled being with me. I could tell he was thrilled by my touch, at the way I clung to him, especially when he shuddered in orgasm. But later he would feel that “shame” he’d asked me about earlier. Cam would reveal his own preoccupation with sexual shame simply by virtue of him asking me about it.
After we had dressed and showered and I put on a fresh layer of peach frost lipstick, we sat on the edge of his parents bed talking. He told me he would call me again. He said he’d had a great time and he was glad we would be seeing each other, again. He asked about my ballet lessons and how they were going? He wanted to know if I planned on “going professional” as he stroked my knee and held my hand.
When he was close to me, he was often affectionate and sweet, like that. It was only when we were six feet apart or so that his mood could change and a distance would be created.
I told him I wanted to go professional, but who could tell? Ballet was expensive and complex. Creating a career out of it was filled with hardship and incredible sacrifice, even if you had the money and the connections. He asked me how flexible I was and I told him I was practically as flexible as a contortionist. He laughed and said he could tell, that when he’d been pushing my legs down, while we made love, he was surprised at how supple I was. I laughed and said I’d show him.
“Here, grab my leg and just push it up, while I’m standing here!”
“What do you mean?”
“Just take my leg and push it up, my supporting leg won’t bend. I’m super flexible.”
I realized then that Cam was closing off, again. His mood was shifting as I’d seen happen before when he appeared to be tired, hungry, or moody at school. He stood there and refused to take my leg and do as I’d playfully suggested. Cam had to be the one in control. It had to be Cam’s idea, Cam’s decision. He was so desperate to control all situations that he couldn’t even engage in some playful fun, without balking at being told what to do. It felt strange and confusing for me. What was his problem, I wondered?
“Okay, then don’t do it,” I said bending to pick up my purse and slip on my sandals. We walked downstairs and into the kitchen, I followed behind him. Cam explained he had to make himself a quick peanut butter sandwich, as he was hungry and had football practice at Lincoln soon. I nodded, standing against the kitchen counter while he quickly threw together a sandwich made from cheap white Wonder Bread and Jiffy Peanut Butter with no jam.
Cam was the center of everything in that moment and he knew it. As he moved about the kitchen, I watched him, fascinated with his feline grace, his quiet confidence and in awe of the power and authority his body seemed to emanate. He enjoyed being watched. He was smiling. Once again, Cam was in control. Then his mood shifted and as he was spreading the peanut butter, he looked over and asked:
“Did you see the latest Saturday Night Live episode?”
“No,” I responded, “Was it good?”
“Yeah, it was really funny. It was the one with Dan Aykroyd.”
“I think I heard about that one.”
“You know the one right?”
“I didn’t see it, I just heard about it. What was it about?” I asked him. At that point, Cam looked right at me and smiled before saying: “You know the episode? The one where he was fuckin’ that whore?”
I stood silently for a moment while contemplating what he’d just said. I looked up at him with wide eyes. The words hung in the air, accusatory and obscene. I continued to watch him, surprised, and feeling instant disappointment. His words were like a punch in the gut, and at the same time, I felt sorry for him. Cam was so utterly trapped in his own ignorance and neuroticism, that he didn’t even see it. He didn’t even see how Catholicism and the sexual repression of his family and American culture had harmed him.
Fuckin’ that whore.
What had we been doing only minutes before? Was I equal to the “whore” on the episode of Saturday Night Live? He looked right at me then, and laughed, gently, mocking. “Well, I gotta get going,” he said. I looked at the floor as I followed him into the living room, still erect and standing as tall as I could, but my eyes were on the floor. He opened the front door, holding it open for me as I walked out, like any gentleman would. We walked over and stood on the sidewalk in front of his house facing each other as he continued to eat the sandwich nonchalantly, like he had won a prize or had a big secret he wasn’t going to share with me.
“Should I… call you sometime?” I began hesitantly. “Yeah, sure, if you want to?” Cam said, smiling. Then he was gone, jogging off in the other direction, heading west toward Wallace Park. I turned around, and walked the four blocks home, feeling numb, and stupid for ever trusting someone as damaged and emotionally stunted as Cam clearly was.
Even at only seventeen, I knew how damaged Cam was and that he would probably always remain that way, lost in confusion, and lost within his own troubled psyche, forever blind to the darkness within himself.
Part of Cam’s shame at his burgeoning sexuality, and even the self-loathing that would finally end up consuming him was directly tied I believe to our Catholic heritage and roots.
Cam’s family ancestry is Polish; my family is Scots/Irish. Both families were raised Catholic. Learning about the “sins of the flesh,” were common elements to both our upbringings. Sexual shame and repression were part and parcel to being raised well in the eyes of the Catholic Church. And of course sex was still something people didn’t talk about. Even then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sex was still a taboo subject in what many considered to be enlightened America.
After Cam enrolled at Chapman in 1979, he and his family attended the same Churches my family attended: St. Mary’s Cathedral and St. Patrick’s Cathedral both located in NW Portland. The difference was that the Griffin family had been parishioners for a lifetime, starting when I was an infant, and Cam and his family were new to town.
In a territorial sense, I felt like my space was being violated. He was always everywhere it seemed, even in Church on Sunday, while we went to Chapman together and then later, at Lincoln. If I didn’t see Cam at St. Mary’s Cathedral, then I saw him at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, instead, or at school, or in the neighborhood.
An odd coincidence was that my mother knew Cam’s grandmother and that she had lived in a house about a block away from our old family home. One afternoon, while I was still in high school, I confided in my mother about Cam and what he had meant to me.
Then my mother told me about the fact that when I was a baby she had known Cam’s grandmother. She had called her “Mrs. Fajer” and explained that she knew the family and that they were Polish. She further told me that the reason Cam and his family had moved to Portland after growing up in Illinois is that they had family here, already. I remember how stunned I was when my mother told me about how she had known his grandmother, “Mrs. Fajer.” The connection was odd and seemed bizarre and predestined, somehow, like all my experiences with Cam seemed, predestined.
After our little make out sessions in grade school, it became very hard to see Cam sitting with his father Vincent Fajer, near the altar of St. Mary’s Cathedral, always on the left-hand side of the church near the west side door. My mother and younger brother and I would sit in the fourth or fifth center aisle row, to the left of the Nave, and I would often catch Cam looking over at me and sometimes he’d catch me looking over at him.
Seeing Cam in Church was confusing and upsetting. After a while I begged my mother to let me stay at home, never telling her the real reason I didn’t want to attend. She refused of course, because as good Catholics, we were expected to attend mass each Sunday and never complain about having to go.
Like all proverbial “sinners” Cam and his father always left Mass directly following communion, a big No-No in the Catholic Church. My mother would shake her head disapprovingly when she saw Cam and his father Vincent, trying to sneak out through the west side entrance/exit unnoticed, which of course they never succeeded in doing.
“Isn’t that the boy you go to school with?!” my mother asked me more than once.
“Yeah, it’s him,” I would whisper sullenly.
“Well, they have no business leaving like that. It’s so rude!” my mother announced once in a harsh whisper.
After that eventful day, near the end of my sophomore year at Lincoln, the day in which Cam and I got to know each other in the biblical sense, he simply never called again. Again Cam abandoned me. Cam would pretend, apparently, that the day never happened and would eventually spread a cruel rumor all through Lincoln High School about me, saying that I was “easy.” And that false, untrue rumor would become the reason I’d transfer to Grant High school across town, where no one would know me. Where I could disappear into the swarming sea of laughing, frantic, pimple studded faces and try to forget Cam and what he had ever meant to me. But before that would happen, there was a new student at Lincoln, and she wasn’t very nice.
THE GERMAN EXCHANGE STUDENT
The most painful part of my on and off again relationship with Cam came when a new exchange student became part of the student body at Lincoln. Ines was a new German Exchange student. She had a long mane of wild, wavy blond hair. She would be seen with Cam, walking next to him in the halls, laughing and smiling up at him. The rumor circulated like wildfire that they were “going out” and that she was Cam’s new girlfriend.
I felt stupid for trusting a liar like Cam. What was wrong with me that I would do that? I had trusted him, when I knew deep down that he was fickle and essentially a shallow person who was incapable of being honest. And then it became obvious he was a social climber as well. This overweight, big boned German girl, with the beautiful blond hair was someone Cam could be seen with. Apparently, he was not afraid if anyone knew if they were an item.
I also knew Ines. We had first period Choir class together. She was a quiet, arrogant German exchange student. She had a thick German torso, thunder thighs and a huge bubble butt. She had a pretty face but her one beauty was her hair. It hung to her waist in long unwieldy tendrils and was the color of spun gold. Ines thought she was far prettier and more desirable than she actually was though, and most of the girls in Choir class tolerated her tiresome attitude of pissy superiority. We knew she was a foreign exchange student, far from her homeland of Germany and probably homesick as a result, so we tolerated her attitude of quiet contempt and tedious bitchiness.
The rumor was that when Ines told the school administrators her name was “Ines” and pronounced Eeenis (which is similar to penis) she had been encouraged by a teacher to tell people to call her Inez instead. Inez, with the stress on the letter Z, was also a common German name, but it was not her real name. In this way the teachers reasoned Ines wouldn’t be teased. Most of the students knew the story and most of the students laughed about it secretly. “Do you know the story about her NAME?” I was asked by more than one girl in choir class who didn’t like her. We all knew the story and more than a few of us laughed about her behind her back. It wasn’t hard, considering what a pissy bitch she always was.
During this time, several weeks after I’d been used by Cam to lose his virginity, and he and Ines were now “going out” the choir class prepared to do a recital performance at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Portland. I would be among six girls to sing a solo, which would not include Ines, as she was not good enough to sing a solo and didn’t want to because she was too scared.
About two days before the recital, Ines turned around and looked over at me as I sat in the tier above her. She looked up at me and asked quietly in a bitchy voice: “You’re not go-ink to vear dose shoes are you?” The shoes I was wearing were high heeled, tan lace ups, and called Famolares. They were not ugly shoes, they were not even worn. I had gotten nothing but compliments from several other girls about the shoes, which were called “vintage” so her comment didn’t make any sense. But then of course upon later reflection, it did make sense.
Ines was jealous of me.
The other kids got quiet for a minute and watched me. Her words were fighting words. I smiled venomously at Ines and didn’t answer, instead deflecting her comment by laughing and then turning to my left, flipping my long, dark hair at her, and cheerfully talking to the girl sitting beside me. I blew her off. Ines turned back around, flipping her mane of blond hair over her right shoulder. The other kids and I snickered at her as she sat with her huge butt bulging out the back of the metal chair. She tried to cross her bulky thick thunder thighs but was unable to cross them. Finally, she crossed her ankles instead, pretending to read the sheet of music she held in her lap.
One of the girls I was friends with, a girl named Katie, who sat to my left, laughed and said loud enough for Ines to hear: “She needs to worry about her own dumb look. Jeans and Tee shirts every day gets old fast! And have you seen HER shoes?!” Ines wore worn out hiking boots nearly every day and weird, beat-up, European looking shoes most of us girls would never be caught dead in. I leaned into Katie and we both laughed and laughed.
Later, after class let out, I walked beside Katie and asked what the problem with Ines was. She sighed and took me aside, near the Auditorium and the old President Lincoln Bust that stood there. “Well… it’s gotten around that you and Cam were like, you know, like, boyfriend and girlfriend when you guys went to Chapman. I heard he told some guys about you and that you were really cute, then. It’s also gotten around that you were like, close here at Lincoln? Like recently. So, Inez, she’s kind of jealous of that. That you knew Cam for longer or something.”
Katie waited for my reply, hoping for something juicy. But I said nothing. I just smiled good naturedly and laughed, saying: “She doesn’t have anything to worry about. I’m not interested in that Neanderthal. He’s a moron, just ask around.”
“Well, I heard he’s like a straight A student and gets really good grades?” Katie said.
“That could be true,” I agreed, “but he’s still not very bright and he’s not very nice either.”
“Really?”
“I could tell you stories. I know Cam…” my voice trailed off.
No one could tell how hard it was to pretend to be cool, to pretend that the situation with Cam and Ines didn’t bother me. I was that skilled at maintaining the mask. No one could see how painful it was to deny the reality of my sadness, when only a few weeks before, Cam and I had been tangled up in bed together, lost in the wonderland of our young and perfect physical bodies, and he had told me he would call me again. No one could see how much I hated myself for becoming one of “those” girls. The kind of girl who lets a boy manipulate, humiliate and then abandon her.
The kind of girl who gets “used” by a jock football player and then dumped.
I wondered if Cam had told Ines anything unflattering about me or admitted to her that we’d had sex, the way he had poked fun at his old girlfriend from Illinois, saying she was a “nut” just so I wouldn’t feel jealous. I could only wonder, never knowing for sure, but I knew because Cam was so innately dishonest, that he more than likely did not tell Ines the truth about our history together, in grade school or high school.
Lying for Cam was easy. I’d seen him do it so many times, in school and even on the phone with me. It would have been easy for Cam to deceive Ines. She would have wanted to believe whatever he said about me that was negative, or dismissive, to steer her off the path of the truth. Ines would have wanted to believe Cam’s words if he’d told her he didn’t even know me, and that we never had a history together. I could see him saying that, too. Ines would have wanted to believe him, just like I had wanted to believe him when he mocked his old girlfriend from Illinois, calling her a nut.
THE RECITAL AT THE HILTON HOTEL
The Night of the recital loomed and I wondered if Cam would be there, since it was common knowledge that he and Ines were now “going out.” I had practiced the short solo several times after class with the Choir teacher. She encouraged me and told me how sweet my soprano sounded; encouraging me to get private opera lessons, and telling me I had “rare potential” as a singer. I loved her praise and tried even harder to do well, if only to please her.
The night of the recital, I walked to the front of the group. I stood before the audience and began singing my solo. No one from my family was there. I had told no one, but even if I had, I knew my mother or father would not have attended, saying they probably would not have had the time.
Then, less than a minute into my solo, I noticed Cam. He was standing in the back of the room, to the far right, behind the sixty or so people who had gathered to hear us sing. As he now stood six feet two inches, he towered over the rest of the people. Strangely, I felt too scared to falter, and soon my solo was over. I sang,” As-Jesus-Goes-A-Walking,” a short classical spiritual, and I did well. The people clapped their appreciation.
But why did Cam have to be there? Couldn’t he have spared me that? Why did he have to ruin this happy accomplishment for me? It was then I realized Cam had come to see Ines sing, though she hadn’t even been given a solo like me, as she wasn’t as good a singer. Though during my solo Cam’s eyes had been on me and no one else, it was still confusing and perplexing as I sang the solo that again our eyes had locked.
It was also cruel. It was so cruel of Cam to do what he did.
After singing several songs as a group, the entire choir retired to a nearby room for juice and cookies to celebrate the end of the recital. I tried to avoid Ines and Cam. But he seemed to want to get close to me, so he could show off. Wherever I was, he seemed to be close by. At one point, he sidled up towards me, with Ines on his arm. He turned around, asking her brightly, as he leaned into her, giving me an unencumbered view of his happy face: “Would you like me to get you something to drink?” Cam was the perfect gentleman. His phoniness was comical, though, and the way he played it up worthy of an Oscar winning performance. I despised him in that moment, because I knew he was doing it for my benefit.
It was so intentionally cruel.
Ines then looked over at me and her eyes gloated with cold satisfaction. I looked away, smiling placidly and tried to ignore her pointed stare. The truth was I felt sick. When Ines finally turned her back to me, I looked for Katie, who was watching me from across the room. Katie walked toward me and put her arm around my shoulder, a concerned look on her face, steering me away from them. She could tell how hard the struggle was. She could tell I hadn’t told her everything.
“It’s okay, Theresa,” she whispered sympathetically. “Just sit over here with me.” I sat with Katie drinking apple juice from a paper cup and waited for the rest of the students to leave. She wanted to know more, but I’d never felt comfortable enough to really confide in any of the girls I knew. If I’d told Katie or any other girl about my recent history with Cam, it would have spread around the school like wildfire.
Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me. When Katie pressed me for more details, I told her it was nothing important, and I just couldn’t talk about it. She smiled as if she understood and said: “I just know there’s more to this, Theresa. You know you can tell me one day, if you want to.” I smiled and nodded my head, thanking her.
Avoiding Cam was becoming impossible. I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to maintain the needed façade of indifference. Going to school and seeing Cam walk through the halls was becoming too difficult. Knowing Ines was jealous of me and looked daggers at me every chance she got was also too hurtful. It was an emotional roller-coaster ride and assuming a blank, placid appearance of tranquil contentment was becoming impossible.
That veil of deception I was so used to wearing was beginning to break away. It was a heavy mask that I could no longer maintain. It was beginning to crack and disintegrate. The fissures weakening the integrity of a hidden structure I was forced to maintain, but couldn’t.
The weight of the sadness was making me sick. The hurt I felt, the disillusionment, the dismay, it was slowly eating away my resolve to persevere at Lincoln. I knew eventually I would be forced to leave. My fear that Cam would spread a rumor, my fear of the future and what it might bring were beginning to weigh on me like a ton. Something would reach a tipping point. I knew it.
It came sooner than I thought it would.
Avoiding Cam and Ines became my daily challenge. I stopped using halls I normally used. I started using back stairwells and taking the long way to my classes. And I skipped school. A lot. When I was in school, I started spending my entire lunch break in the library in the hopes that I wouldn’t see them.
And that worked, for the most part. Until one day, when I had safely ensconced myself in the very back of the Lincoln Library on the south side of the room. I was sitting in the back, reading a book on Ballet, trying to think of something else when I heard a familiar low voice. It was Cam, talking quietly. I looked up and he and Ines walked within feet of me. I sat at the bottom of one of the stacks, with my legs crossed Indian style, a pile of books in my lap. My makeup was perfect, my lipstick cherry red and my eyelashes long and black. I knew the blue of my eyes would stand out against the black mascara as they always did.
Cam looked to his left and he saw me. He froze and his face looked stricken, wide-eyed and for the life of him, very guilty looking; a kind of “deer in the highlights” look. Ines did not turn around, so I don’t think she saw me. My eyes locked with Cam’s for a long silent moment. I looked up at him blankly, but with no judgment, and no emotion. But before he could turn away, I looked back down at my book, dismissing him.
Our secret history would be safe as it shuttled between us. I would never rat him out. Not to Ines, and not to anyone else.
When I could sense them moving away, I looked back up, to see Cam steering her away. Upon reflection, I realized his stricken look was probably just fear that Ines would see me, and might become angry. It was clear she felt threatened by me and had been jealous of our previous history for quite a long time. He had been able to steer her away in the nick of time. Cam and the foreign exchange student, with the mop of beautiful hair, the thunder thighs and the bubble butt. Cam certainly had done well. He’d landed the snooty German girl, who thought she was better than all the other Lincoln girls’ but clearly was not.
I looked down at my book again and felt a familiar feeling return. That bereft feeling of complete emptiness. The painful ache you get in the center of your chest when you feel all alone and you know people just don’t care. It was a feeling I was becoming very familiar with. The feeling of a bottomless sadness that just wouldn’t go away.
If there was ever a doubt in my mind about Cam and Ines, it was shattered a few days later as I passed the auditorium. I saw them together, surrounded by a group of other kids, mostly freshmen who seemed to be gawking. Cam was leaning against the wall, acting cool, and Ines was leaning against him, with the old battered bust of President Lincoln on its old stand, as a mute witness in front of them.
Cam had placed his left hand on the left side of her pelvis, dangerously low, pressed over her jeans. He was gently squeezing and stroking her pelvis with his big hand, massaging that area. It was blatant and inappropriate. I would never have allowed him to do that to me in public, or anyone else, but then Ines was the German exchange student, so maybe she just didn’t’ know any better.
Ines did seem slightly embarrassed though, but still she did nothing to stop him. Once again she was wearing a ratty tee shirt, worn out jeans and her huge ugly hiking boots. As I passed, Cam looked over and I smirked, and flipped my hair at him in a clear Fuck You gesture. He smiled brazenly, appraising my body appreciatively as I passed, again undressing me with his eyes with Ines completely clueless that he was doing so.
THE TRUTH COMES OUT
The following week, as I stood beside my locker at the end of the day, stuffing it with books and Pee-Chee folders, I saw a girl I’d noticed before. She was a freshman I’d seen in the halls. A poor girl who always wore dirty jeans and shirts with greasy food stains on them. Passing her in the halls, she had literally smelled, she was so unclean. She was not a pretty girl and in fact, quite ugly, with disjointed features, terrible pimply skin and greasy medium brown hair that she always wore in a tight, low, unattractive ponytail. Her dandruff was excessive, and the sneer on her face made her seem even uglier.
I was repulsed by the sight of her.
She was obviously a poor girl, a girl the popular girls at Chapman would have called “scummy” but she was determined. I heard through the grapevine that she came to every class, turned in all her assignments, was never absent and got really good grades. She was the kind of person with an ax to grind and she looked the part too. She would graduate and go onto college no doubt, through Hell or high water. But I often wondered how happy she would end up in the long run. She seemed so incredibly angry. As she was a freshman and I was a sophomore we did not associate but I had observed her from afar and felt she was a fascinating girl to watch, as she had that huge ax to grind — grinding it against a most deserving world.
I looked over at the girl blandly, my eyebrows rose in seeming boredom, my large blue eyes, hooded. She sneered at me, so I gave her the “once over” and flipped my hair at her. I returned to my task of stuffing my locker, and as I stood with my head bent, listening intently, I heard her whisper hoarsely to her overweight girlfriend: “That girl over there? She’s a slut. I heard SHE has sex.” She said it loud enough for me to hear. That was the point — loud enough for me to hear, right?
As she walked away, smug and pleased with herself, laughing a mean-spirited laugh, I tried to pretend it didn’t matter. My face was expressionless as if I hadn’t heard her comment while I continued to put things in my locker, but my heart was pounding and I was in a state of instant panic.
I knew the origins of the rumor. There was only one person who could have started it: Cam. Cam had told people he’d fucked me.
Decades later, I would learn from one of the boys he played football with, that the day he lost his virginity to me, he’d gone to football practice with his buddies and had bragged that afternoon about how we had had sex, and that he’d told them my name.
Then I understood the strange looks I’d been getting for the previous few days. Kids I had never had problems with before. Kids I didn’t even know had been pointing at me and whispering things to each other. It hadn’t been my imagination. I was too perceptive and alert to not notice the sudden change.
When I’d been a freshman, I’d seen the same thing happen. Groups of girls or even boys would be huddled together and then one of them would point and say, “That girl? She’s a slut. Me and my friends heard SHE has sex!” I remember this happening regularly during my freshman year.
Over 20 years after the “sexual revolution” girls were still “sluts” if they had sex, while boys were heroes. Nothing had changed. The “sexual revolution” had accomplished nothing!
I’d always been so glad that it wasn’t me they were pointing at and humiliating and I can remember feeling sad for the girl who was singled out. But now, I was that girl. Now, it was me. No one else had had the courage to actually say something to my face, but the poor ugly girl did. And I was grateful, because now at least I knew the truth.
I also knew there was no way I could stay at Lincoln. I would have to transfer out.
The realization hit me as coldly and as rationally as a rain storm hits a fisherman. It was just that simple. I had to leave. There was nothing I had to go back to. There was nothing left and I’d be damned if I was going to end up a chased reject, tormented and teased by miserable sadistic teenagers. Teenagers who were too stupid to go against the grain of sexual shame and repression taught and legislated by the American public school system and within their own pathetic, misogynistic homes. It was not something I wanted to be a part of. I was smart enough to accept defeat as I knew it. Cam had won. He’d run me out, whether he’d intentionally wanted to or not, that was what had happened and soon I would be gone.
TRANSFERRING OUT OF LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL
The next morning, I went to see my tired, burnt-out counselor. He’d always taken an interest in me and had begged me repeatedly to get to my classes and try harder. I would skip class about once every two weeks, and ride Trimet buses, numbly looking out the window, trying to find some semblance of peace. He had spent most of my sophomore year begging me to take my studies more seriously. “You’re so bright Theresa, if you only applied yourself, you could be a straight A student!” he would tell me over and over. “And if you just show up, you’ll get a passing grade, a C at least!”
I had tried to do better, if only to please him, as neither of my overworked parents seemed to have the energy or interest to care about my academic success, (troubled as they were with my eight other siblings. But I could never see the point of it. What did it matter? Who would I be doing it for? Was college really something I wanted? What I truly wanted seemed trivial and old-fashioned. What I wanted was to be married, with a husband.
So “provincial” people said then, when the topic of marriage came up. Women should “strive for more” we were constantly told. Forget about marriage, go to college and become a “career woman.” We were Northern women after all and we had better options. We could have more, we were told; by the television, the radio and every other news media outlet in the world. But what I wanted was traditional. It made me an oddball of sorts. While all the other girls talked about college, I dreamed about being a wife and maybe even a mother. Not with a bunch of kids but just one child, and a white picket fence, a clipped lawn, and an attractive and well decorated home. A nice, ordered and harmonious life, so unlike my childhood with me and my siblings all running around in happy and often disordered chaos.
The day I went to see my academic adviser I felt completely numb. What the ugly poor girl had said to her friend confirmed my ugliest fears about Cam. That he was cruel and shallow and he would throw me under the bus without a second thought. But why? How could I deny that he was not a calculating social climber who could only think of himself and no one else when he was the ONLY person who could have started that rumor?
I walked into the office and asked to see my counselor. The secretary told me he would be arriving shortly and asked me to sit down and wait. After a few moments, he invited me into his office and told me to sit in the brown leather chair opposite his desk and that he’d return in just a moment. As I sat waiting, I noticed a letter sitting on top of a pile of papers.
Something caught my eye and I leaned over to get a closer look. The signature on the bottom: Cameron Fajer. It was a letter to a college. Cam was only a junior but already he was getting help from his counselor, (also my counselor) to get him into a good college. Of course, I thought to myself. Of course.
I lifted up the paper and there was another letter under it, to a different school. There were a total of four letters to different institutions of higher learning. I gingerly set the letters back on the pile of papers, aware of their importance and what they signified for Cam’s bright future.
Even as I sat in my counselor’s office, to talk to him about transferring out, I could not escape Cam’s shadow-like influence. It crept over me like an insidious spider’s web. There he was in black and white on the stack of papers in front of me. The irony of it seemed macabre and bizarre.
I leaned back into my seat, looked up at the ceiling and bit my lower lip viciously. I felt angry and sad and yet, the comic irony of the situation made me want to giggle. How could things possibly get any crazier than this?
I focused on my lip. If I just bit my lower lip hard enough, I’d feel calm again and the risk of crying would go away. Just a little more, just a little harder. There. There now. I had to maintain the mask just a little longer. I had to survive this meeting with my counselor, without dissolving into tears.
When I quietly told my counselor I wanted to transfer to Grant, his demeanor changed. He sighed and seemed let down. He wanted to know why I wanted this transfer. I told him about a boy I’d gone “on a date with” and that the boy had spread a rumor about me. Some of the kids were now talking about me, saying I was a “slut” and “easy.” They were even saying I had a disease, I lied to him. His face fell as I stopped talking. He sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair.
“They’re saying I’m a slut!” I squeaked pathetically.
“Of course you aren’t, Theresa.”
“They’re even saying I have a disease!”
I could tell by his exhausted demeanor, he’d been down this familiar road before, who knows how many times? He looked up at the ceiling and then he slowly became incensed. He straightened up. He inhaled and exhaled deeply. He wanted to know who it was.
“Who is this boy Theresa? You tell me his name! I want to know! I’ll go and talk to him myself!” he threatened. I felt panic as I looked down at the ominous pile of letters to colleges Cam was applying at.
How could I tell him it was Cam?! The nice blond athlete whose letters of college introduction sat at the top of a pile of papers on his desk at that very moment? I knew I couldn’t. Wild horses wouldn’t have been able to get me to talk. Because part of me knew I could and would never cause trouble for Cam. It would be easier for me to leave Lincoln and start fresh somewhere else.
Cam was at heart, a poor kid like me. And I knew that deep down, after seeing his pathetic sleeping quarters in that dusty basement that he suffered, just as I did. I knew that he had hopes and dreams just as I did and that he was as controlled by his insecurities and circumstances as I was by mine. Cam might have had parents who were more interested in how he performed at school, he might have had a family more invested in him going to college, but he still lived in the Flats of NW Portland and like me, he wanted better things for himself.
Though it may sound bizarre and a form of misplaced loyalty, there was a part of me that steadfastly refused to cause trouble for Cam, because I understood him better than he knew. I understood the dynamics of lacking and how lacking and going without can affect all of us in different ways.
Cam wore the mask of deception just as I did. He lied, all in an effort to protect himself from the attacks of others. How well I understood that dynamic. So, as I sat in the leather chair, opposite my academic adviser at Lincoln high school, nothing could induce me to give a name to the boy who had so devastated my reputation with a series of cruel and untrue rumors. I refused to tell my counselor his name, shaking my head no, telling him simply: “It’s not important who it was.”
Finally after all the arrangements for my transfer were made, I stood up to leave. My counselor, bless his old heart seemed heartbroken. He stood looking at me as if I were going into a den of lions, as if all the heartache of the world stood right in front of him at that moment. He placed his hand on my left shoulder and tried to smile.
“You hang in there at Grant Theresa, you’ll do well I think.”
“Thank you,” I replied quietly, “for everything you’ve tried to do for me” I added as a bashful afterthought.
I thought he might cry at that point, his eyes looked so pained as I turned and left the room. It was over. Finally, I could leave all thought of Cam and Lincoln behind me. I still had classes to go to, but what was the point? I would be at Grant the next day. I walked down the empty main hall, heading for the front doors of the school. There was no one about and it was quiet, the calm before the storm. All the classroom doors were closed and I heard the faint murmur of teachers talking and students responding. I’d skip and ride Trimet buses for the rest of the day, I decided as I silently walked to the front door.
I turned around and looked down the hall knowing I’d never return, knowing that in only a matter of weeks, Cam would realize he hadn’t seen me for a while, knowing he might wonder what had happened to me. Then I let the metal door handle go and I turned and walked out the door.
I walked east, down Salmon street alone, tears made their way down my cheeks as pedestrians looked over at me curiously. I knew I would never go back. I knew I’d never see Cam again, at least while we were teenagers. I noticed people were looking at me. Who was the cute little brunette girl walking down the street and crying, they must have wondered to themselves. A young dark haired businessman asked me, in a concerned fashion: “Miss, are you okay?” I kept walking, staring straight ahead and didn’t answer. He called after me, “Miss? Miss?”
STARTING OVER AND GUARDING THE SECRET
I started full-time night classes at Grant High School and eventually earned my high school diploma. The students at Grant were lower income, more down to earth and sometimes just plain stupid. It was an adjustment, but at least I wasn’t at Lincoln, tormented by cruel miserable kids, most of whom were all generally struggling themselves. And at least I didn’t have to see Cam skulking through the Lincoln halls, looking for his next girlfriend/victim.
A few months into 1985, my younger sister ran into Ines in downtown Portland. My sister was with a large group of her girlfriends shopping at the nearby Nordstrom’s Department Store when she ran into Ines waiting for a bus near Fifth Avenue. She approached Ines and said hello. They had never been friends but Ines didn’t seem to hate her either, and she may not have even known she was my sister.
“So, are you still goin’ out with that guy, Cam?” my sister asked Ines pointedly. Ines laughed and curled her lip in disgust.
“Uh, I’m not goink out vit Cam. He vas navare my boyfrund, anyvay!” she said adamantly.
Later, on the phone, my sister imitated the way Ines had said the words. She imitated the way she’d scoffed at the notion, as if it was the most absurd suggestion she had ever heard. As if Cam was beneath her somehow.
As my younger sister told me the details, I had to smile. I would always remember that day when I saw Cam massaging Ines’s pelvis in the blatant way he did. I found it amusing that Ines seemed so acutely embarrassed at the thought that anyone would think she had ever been “going out” with Cam. It revealed a lot about her lack of character and her blatant superficiality, mental shallowness and overall stupidity.
Sometime later, maybe a year later, in 1986, long after my younger sister ran into Ines, I was downtown myself one balmy afternoon. As I walked to a bus stop adjacent to Pioneer Square, near the old Greyhound Bus Depot, there stood Ines waiting for a bus. I recognized her instantly, though I hadn’t seen her in a long while. Ines still had lovely golden hair. It hung in loose tendrils floating about her face but her thighs and middle were still very thick, like a typical German woman, just as they had been in high school.
I was wearing a new black swirl skirt and a cotton button down lavender cardigan sweater with short sleeves and dark “Jackie O” sunglasses. My make-up was expertly applied, subtle and perfect, black mascara, a thin layer of Cody face powder, and a nice peach frost lipstick, a color I favored at the time. I had never understood why Ines hated me so much until my friend Katie explained it to me that morning outside of choir class, by the President Lincoln bust.
I still found Ines’s anger toward me strange and odd. I had never mistreated her and had always been courteous and polite, until such time that she became rude to me before the recital, when she found out about my history with Cam, a history she could never compete with, as I had known him intimately years before she would even meet him.
On that afternoon, at the bus stop, as soon as I looked over at her, I saw the same cold expression on her face that she’d had the night of the choir recital at the Hilton Hotel. For some reason Ines still considered me a rival, and I realized she still carried that old grudge against me. I happened to look great that day though, and that pleased me, so I held my head high, as I’d been taught to do in all my years in ballet. I smiled demurely while looking over at her. My long brunette hair fell almost to my waist by then, in long loose waves, and as I gazed at Ines, I turned to the right, and flipped my hair over my left shoulder in an obvious “fuck you” gesture.
I relished having an audience and particularly that it was her. I shook out my hair, and smoothed down my skirt. Then I took out my lipstick from my purse along with a decorative mirror compact and ceremoniously applied a new layer of peach frost lipstick to my mouth, with my back to her. Ines continued to stand there silently, staring at me like a dumb lizard, watching and too stupid to look away. Soon the bus came, at which point I boarded with a spring in my step. I sat down near the driver and didn’t look behind me. I left Ines at the bus stop and fortunately, I never, ever saw her again.
The year I was 22 and newly married to my first husband, and Cam was 23, and still in college at Oregon State University, and playing baseball with the Beavers, one of my sisters called me. She was angry and upset.
My sister had called me to tell me that only the day before she had run into a good friend of mine on the bus, from years ago. Rowdy, of the golden brown eyes and Canary Yellow hair. He had some sad news to tell her. As they had sat on the bus that very day, Rowdy told her he had always loved me, saying: “I was so in-love with your sister, Theresa in high school.” He told her that he’d wished we’d gotten together after he left high school. Rowdy then told my sister that Cam had told him a couple of years before that he had lost his virginity to me during high school. Rowdy said that Cam had bragged about it, saying: “She was really loud in bed, a really great lay. I shoulda called her back.”
As Rowdy was a kind, gentle person who would never say something cruel about anyone, especially an old dear friend, Cam’s words had offended him and had seemed unnecessarily callous. “Rowdy seemed so sad when he talked to me. He said how pretty you were and that he always loved you,” my sister told me.
Poor Rowdy, I had never known he cared for me that much. We had made out a few times when I was 12 and 13, in the months before Cam came to Portland, but I had never known Rowdy cared for me that much. But hearing what Cam had said didn’t surprise me, either. Cam knew Rowdy cared about me and I believe Cam said what he did in an effort to hurt Rowdy, to put him in his place, to prove something to him, that he was more of a man than Rowdy, that he had gotten to me, first.
Typical Alpha Male score keeping.
Later that night, when my husband left to work the graveyard shift at Wacker Siltronic, and I was alone, I sat on the edge of the bed with my sister’s words echoing in my mind. My hands lay folded in my lap, and I tried to pretend it didn’t hurt. But it did hurt. I hung my head and wept. Endless tears fell onto the front of my white cotton nightgown. It still hurt. Even five years later, it still hurt so much to remember what had happened between Cam and me.
For many years during my early twenties and into my thirties I would dream of Cam constantly, at least once a month, sometimes more than that. We were always in a classroom setting, sometimes we looked the same as when we were teenagers, sometimes we were adults, but it was always the same. He was sitting across from me in a classroom somewhere and he was laughing at me, mocking me, then walking by and trying to kiss me. He would grab my wrist, trying to pull me into some darkness that was always just behind him, trying to pull me into that darkness, while he laughed. I would wake up in tears, consumed with that bottomless sadness that took hours to go away. The dreams continued for decades, with me always waking in tears.
What was it about Cam? Why was I still so haunted by his memory?
Years later, when I was 24, in 1990, and married to my first husband John Kenneth, one afternoon, I had a strange feeling that Cam was at his old house. Something told me to call him, some strange impulse, and so I impulsively walked to the house phone in the living room and called his childhood home and asked for him. His father Vincent answered the phone, and when I shyly asked if Cam was there, he brightened.
“Actually he is. He just came into town. It’s funny you’d call. Talk about luck, he was almost getting ready to leave. He’s here for a visit. Who should I say is calling?”
“We used to go to school together. My name is Theresa Griffin.”
“Oh yes, I remember you. He’s mentioned you. Hold on.”
When Cam came on the phone, he was pleased to hear from me. My heart jumped at the sound of his soft melancholy voice. I felt butterflies in my stomach as I listened to him talk. I asked how he was doing. He said he was working and doing well. He asked if I was married yet and I said that I was.
“Are you happy?” Cam asked quietly.
“Pretty much, my life is really peaceful. We live alone, anyway. I finally, got away from my huge, crazy Irish family.” We both laughed. He understood, coming from a big family himself what it could be like.
“Do you have kids?”
“No, not yet.
“Me neither.”
“Are you married, Cam?”
“No, but I’m engaged.”
“Really? What’s her name?”
“Her name is Leeza, I met her at school.”
“That’s nice. Well, congratulations.”
“Yeah, you bet. Thanks.”
Cam and I talked for another 35 minutes and then said goodbye. It was sad and awkward and touching in a way, too. Cam always knew that I had loved him and I could tell he was pleased to hear from me. Bottom line, I wanted him to be happy. I wanted to forgive and forget. To let the past go and come to a place of rest, where I could let the memory of Cam go. But ultimately, that didn’t seem to be in the stars.
In 1993, at the Stadium Fred Meyers when I was newly married to my second husband John, I ran into Cam as he was shopping. I was proudly pushing my new baby daughter in her new $400 stroller. Cam stood next to an aisle filled with shampoo and shower gel and soap. He had his back to me, but I recognized him instantly.
Cam had always been tall, but it seemed he was even taller somehow, and there was no mistaking that head of thick blond hair, his impossibly long legs or his broad shoulders. I pushed my daughter in her stroller up behind him, pushed the stroller to the left at an angle, and then gently tapped Cam on the back of his left shoulder. He turned around, and was momentarily stunned. His face brightened into a large smile. I could tell Cam was really happy to see me.
“Hey! Theresa! How are you?”
“I’m fine. I saw you and thought I should say hello.”
“Is this your baby, here?”
“Yes, she’s a bit over a year. Her name is Amelia April.”
“Wow. Congratulations. She’s really pretty.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Wow, you have a baby now!”
“Yeah.”
We talked about our families and what we were up to, and after a few minutes I ran out of things to say. It seemed as if Cam still wanted to talk, but I couldn’t think of much more to say. I asked again about his father Vincent and his mother, Claramae, and Cam said his parents were both doing well. He asked about my mother Doris, and I told him she was well, also.
Then I politely told him I needed to get back to my husband John who was waiting nearby, watching. I smiled and began to walk away. Cam smiled and nodded his head, saying: “Hey, it was really great to see you, Theresa. It was great to run into you and see your new baby!” I smiled, nodding my head and waved goodbye, swallowing the deep sadness I felt seeing him.
As I walked away, pushing my baby in her stroller, and though I felt sad, and a deep sense of loss, there was also none of the chemistry we had had as kids at Chapman or Lincoln. It was gone and that realization hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. It had dissipated over time, and there was nothing left. In a very real sense, I think over the intervening days, I grieved that loss more than anything else.
My innocence was completely lost and I knew I would never be young again.
In 2003, as I was walking downtown, south on sixth Avenue, I saw a familiar face looking at me. I wasn’t sure it was him, but as I slowly walked forward I realized I was looking at Cam again. We both smiled, sadly it seemed as I slowly approached and I stopped in front of him, looking up at him. I was 37, and he was 38. It had been 25 years ago that we’d first met and there he was again.
“I thought I recognized that face,” I said quietly, looking up at him, a sad smile forming on my mouth.
“Theresa… how ARE you?” he asked me.
Once again Cam smiled broadly and seemed so happy to see me, but he seemed tired, tired and sad. I told him I was a college student, and he tilted his head to the left, an expression of earnest happiness spreading across his face like a flower. His eyes were bright as he stepped towards me to get closer to me, leaning down, like how he used to, and nodded his head, a big smile on his face. I could feel that Cam wanted to touch me, but he didn’t.
“That’s great! Good for you, Theresa! Good for you!” Cam said emphatically.
“Yeah, I figured it was about time.”
“What are you studying?”
“I’m studying criminal Justice. I’m getting ready to transfer from PCC to Portland State, where I’ll finish the degree.”
“Portland State’s a good school, and right in town. That’s great Theresa!”
Cam shared that he sometimes struggled to find employment or “the right kind of work” and had just recently gotten a part time job. When I asked where he was working, he motioned with his head to the office building to his right, which at the time was adjacent to the 400 Café, and located at 400 SW Sixth Avenue, and said: “I’m doin’ reception.” I was surprised and asked, “You mean like a receptionist?” Cam nodded his head philosophically and smiled, shrugging. “Yeah, I’m doin’ reception.” He laughed in a self-deprecating way and I said nothing further about it, realizing that it was clear Cam was embarrassed he was working as a receptionist, a job normally held by a woman.
Cam asked if I was “still married to the same guy I saw you with that time at the Stadium Fred Meyers.” I told him that my first husband and I had divorced but I was still married to the man he’d seen me with at the Stadium Fred Meyers in 1993, the man who was my second husband. He said: “Yeah, I remember that. When your daughter was a baby.”
We talked for another five minutes and then I told him I had to get to class. I could tell Cam was disappointed I had to say goodbye, once again saying: “Hey it was great to see you again!” I knew Cam wanted to talk longer but I also had to get to my class. I smiled, waved and began to walk south, towards Morrison Street, leaving him standing there on his break. His face slowly fell as I moved away, watching me I could tell, as I walked away from him, holding my black umbrella and looking steadfastly at the concrete beneath my feet.
I chose not to look back or wave, and I struggled to push down the instant sadness I felt as I walked away. Running into Cam always seemed tinged with such deep regret of what might have been, tinged with regret that we had lost our innocence and that we had lost love.
I felt clearly it wasn’t just me who felt that way. Cam’s eyes were melancholy and filled with longing as he looked down at me. As troubled as Cam had always been, since I’d first known him, I also knew he would never forget the times we had shared together. He was as sentimental as I was, and that was something I’d always known in some way, from the very beginning. The kind of boy who would keep a little girls pink love letters long past the time he should.
I will always regret that I didn’t spend more time talking with Cam that day. It was clear he wanted to talk more and we might have had coffee together. He seemed lonely and eager to have someone to talk to. I should have just scribbled my number or email on a scrap of paper, but I didn’t. I was married and it would not have been appropriate, so I walked away instead.
I regret that to this day.
As the years progressed, and I headed into my middle forties, time seemed to continue to soften my feelings toward Cam. I recalled the times we’d run into each other. I thought to the past and realized Cam and I had only been kids, just children really. I needed to forgive him for what happened in grade school, and in high school, because the reality was he didn’t even know half of the truth of what I’d gone through in high school, for he’d never been told.
FACEBOOK AND THE MODERN WORLD
2011, June 14th, I saw Cam’s name pop up on Facebook. I had been on Facebook since January of 2009 and was an old hand at traversing the social media site. I looked at his friends list and saw Cam had exactly 13 friends, so at exactly 5:54 p.m. on that date, I sent him a friend request and one single short private message. In the message I encouraged him to look at my friends list, which at the time had over 460 friends, to see whom he might remember from back in the day when we attended grade school and high school together. The next day, June 15th at 9:58 p.m. Cam responded by accepting my friend request and sending me a message.
“Hey You! I thought I lost you to NW Portland. You seem to have escaped and found a way. I too am finding my way. I am quite happy right now, my wife and I just bought the perfect home and are looking forward to moving in just after the 1st of August. It’s in the Glencoe district……quite good schools. I have twin girls 11 years old and a boy who is 7. They are all great kids. That’s all for now. Keep in touch. Cam.”
Later that night he texted again. “Hey you? Theresa?” I responded a few minutes later. I told him I was doing well and was busy with my writing, completing a master’s degree and raising my nineteen-year-old daughter, the little girl in the stroller he’d seen back in 1993, when he’d told me she was so “pretty.”
Cam wanted to know about my writing and asked, “Have you ever thought of writing a novel?” I told him I had thought of that but was too busy with other writing projects to seriously pursue novel writing, but that I would in the future. I encouraged him to make his Facebook profile secure as there were lots of strange people on Facebook and with children and so many photos of his three children on his profile he might want to be careful.
He responded: “I changed my profile. Thanks…..Good to hear that you are happy and content. Raising kid(s) to the age of 19 is quite a feat and you should be proud of yourself. It took me awhile to lock into a job course, but I have. The trick I have learned it to be nice to everyone, and then no one will bring you down. It is only when you’re down that people will gang-pile on top and try to kick you in the teeth. Cam.”
The next day June 16th Cam texted again, this time at 1:17 am.
Cam: “Hey Theresa, what are you up to?”
Theresa: “Hi Cam, I’m up late tonight. Writing a paper. I usually turn in around 2…not working but living on loans and looking for work turns me into a night owl. I’ve got a lot going on despite my no work status. Lol.”
Cam: “Yah, gotta be up at 4:30.”
Theresa: “Yikes, that’s early. FB can be kind of addictive, it’s how I keep in touch with all my family and friends and new friends… it’s been pretty fun the past two years since I joined. Have met many cool cops, here.”
Cam: “Cops? I started FB after a Germany trip a few weeks ago to keep in touch with my new friends there. It has turned out to be a High School reunion quest.”
Theresa: “Jesus, tell me about it. But be careful. Things can get VERY out of hand on here and you feel like you’re back in high school. Some of these people have the depth of a kitty pool.”
Cam: “I go for quality not quantity.”
Theresa: “I remember you saying that when we were kids. I’ve had some weird experiences here. This one jerk asked me out. It was not going to happen. He was really short. I’m not into short guys. No offence to anyone. Long to short, I said no. Then he started messaging me. I had to block him.”
Cam: “Yah, I like the “long to short” comment.”
Theresa: “I always tend to talk too much. Same old Theresa I guess.”
Cam: “Quality not quantity, see I told you!”
Theresa: “True. I am pretty selective though, about who I have on my friends list. Only friends, family and some local media and police types. I’ve had fun. Have met many neat people. This amazing artist is going to paint my portrait too and my daughter’s portrait. I’ve been invited to dinners and art events, showings.”
Cam: “Cool. I’m amazed about who you have on your friends list.”
Theresa: “Most of them I actually know.”
Cam: “You bet. Hey, where in the world are you?”
Theresa: “Living you mean”
Cam: “Yah. I know it was 99th in SE, is that right?”
Theresa: “How’d you know? Not anymore. I live off Canyon Road. I live in a house, a nice old house. I live in Portland, but it’s in Washington County. It’s called the Portland Annex. This weird part of Washington County.”
Cam: “Ok I know right where there is. Yah, buying a house means slavery.”
Theresa: “Gosh, I’m sorry. It’s a nice place where I live. I’ve been here 7 years. No bums, no beggars, hookers, dopers. Its quiet and decent people.”
Cam: “good 4 u Theresa.”
Theresa: “I slave now too. It’s like the work never ends. Its over 2,500 square feet. I’m constantly mopping, sweeping. It’s endless. I hate it.”
Cam: “I lived in N Portland and heard gunshoots, I moved right away. Spelling.”
Theresa: “Wow.”
Cam: “You look very fit in your picture, just like I remember. You were taking ballet at the time we met at Chapman.”
Theresa: “Oh well, that photo is a couple years old. You’re funny. I’m an old lady now. I have silver streaks on both sides of my temples now. I did take ballet for a long time. I might go back, but I’m 45 now. I have to take it slow. I’m an old woman. Lol.”
Cam: “My grey hair has gotten me out of 2 speeding tickets and countless other things.”
Theresa: “It sure helps doesn’t it? I don’t get hassled anymore, or hit on all the time. And the kind of men I like, like law enforcement types? They’re more relaxed, I think about a girls’ appearance.
Cam: “Yah quality. I’m taking five now.”
Theresa: “Turning in?”
Cam: “No, not yet. Chat later?”
Theresa: “Sure, Cam.”
Four days later, June 20th at 9:26, Cam contacted me again.
Cam: “Theresa?”
Theresa: “Hi Buddy, how’s it going tonight?”
Cam: “Great. Just finished tearing out carpet for install tomorrow. I’m having a couple of beers now.”
Theresa: “Beer? Yuk. I’ve never liked it. I’m a teetotaler, or whatever they’re called. Yeah, I just got back from Costco, steered clear of all the crazy women on the lookout for deals. Jeez, crazy people.”
Cam: “Costco? Which one do you go to? If I go to COSTCO I go first thing in the morn or the last thing at night b4 closing. I hate crowds.”
Theresa: “I think it was the monster one in Tigard. Yeah, it was crowded. I went with my aunt. She helps me shop sometimes. Don’t drive. Lol.”
Cam: “Maybe we could meet at Costco sometime.”
Theresa: “If I can arrange it.”
Cam: “It would be nice to see you and catch up in person.”
Theresa: “Okay. Oh! Then on the way home on Oleson road this little mama duck was trying to cross the road with her two ducklings. The first one hops up on the pavement but the second duckling can’t. He tries like four or five times but can’t do it. Finally, I jump out and run over. He skirts to the left and then the right, and then I got him and helped him up. I got to save a little duckling. He was cold and wet, poor thing.”
Cam: “There were four ducks trying to cross on Cornell Rd at 185th a few months ago. I stopped and waited for them. What was I supposed to do run over them? That was a Good Samaritan thing you did.”
Theresa: “Yeah, he was so darn cute. It had been a weird day. I was downtown earlier. Downtown… my least favorite hell hole to be in… Lol”
Cam: “Ya, gotta like all the panhandlers, drug addicts, etc.
Theresa: “Yeah so true.”
Cam: “Listen, I got to go now. Must get up early tomorrow. See ya.
Theresa: “Take care Cam.”
Then June 23 Cam looked me up again at 9:35 p.m.
Cam: “Hey Theresa?”
Theresa: “You have a problem Cam. I think it’s called FB addiction. See? I told you it would happen. ”
Cam: “I know. What are you some kind of Doctor? Eh?”
Theresa: “It’s fun though. Yeah, I just have you figured out. Lol.”
Cam: “I find it funny that you can view others who chat online but no one communicates via IM.”
Theresa: “IM?”
Cam: “Yah, instant messaging.”
Theresa: “Oh yeah, I get it.”
Cam: “It’s like voyeurism.”
Theresa: “Yeah, Lol.”
Cam: “It’s been fun. My own little reunion and I don’t even need to talk to them. Cool!”
Theresa: “I’ve been on FB a bit over 2 years. I’ve had some weird experiences. One guy wanted to sext with me. No thanks. I blocked him. Then I had a Satanist send me a friend request.
Cam: “I am a man so I don’t think I will be approached like that. Just one of the many benefits of being a man, one other is peeing at-will, outside.”
Theresa: “Yes, I imagine it’s better than having to pee in a cup.”
Cam: “Gotta go now. This has been fun.”
Theresa: “Okay, take care Cam.”
The next day, June 24, at 11:15 p.m. Cam texted again.
Cam: “You again?”
Theresa: “Yeah, up to no good.”
Cam: “I’m waiting for my wife’s sister to arrive at the house from Ireland.”
Theresa: “My younger sister Bronnie lived there for seven years, many weird stories.”
Cam: “Yes, good place good people.”
Theresa: “Depending on where you go. She lived in Belfast, Londonderry. Her husband’s cousin got his ear cut off for walking into a Protestant area after 8 pm. He was Catholic. They knew because when they asked his name, he told them Sean. A Catholic name.”
Cam: “I see, They are from Dublin. A bit different than the north.”
Theresa: “Yes, very different.”
Cam: “Must clean now b4 they arrive.”
Theresa: “Have fun.”
Cam: “Yes, I will.”
Cam and I spent the next several days talking about our past, until the end of June, even exchanging emails. Every night sometimes for several hours, no matter where he was, he wanted to chat. I welcomed the chats, and the emails. They were important to me and I like to think important to Cam as well.
Cam seemed lonely and reflective during this time. I noticed one evening he posted a Youtube link to his Facebook page, of a song he liked, saying, “I just can’t stop listening to this.” It was Linger by the Cranberries, a particularly sad song about failed love and the machinations of control. I clicked onto the link and listened. I felt sad that Cam was obviously going through such a melancholy time in his life and wondered what was at the core of his unhappiness.
Then very unexpectedly, Cam took me off his friends list. Cam had begun to suggest we meet for coffee. He had begun to press the issue and I was apprehensive and would not respond in the way he wanted, because of how he’d treated me in the past and because of how well I knew him to be a moody, mercurial and emotionally unstable person.
I was single at the time of our 2011 chats, and while many women would have jumped at the chance to reconnect with an old boyfriend, I would not. I might have been single but he was not. During several of our communications, I told Cam about a crush I had on a retired police officer I admired. I believe that made Cam jealous. It was obvious, really. I think a part of me mentioned the cop because in a very real way, I simply didn’t want Cam to think I was game or available. I didn’t want him to think I’d ever consider getting together with him again, even for coffee.
I wanted to make it clear that we were just old friends, merely buddies from the sparkling past of our childhood, and teen years, and nothing more. I think Cam presumed I’d drop everything to go and meet him again, as I’d done so many times in the past, and when I refused, he became resentful. I was a different person. I couldn’t do it. I was much older, 45, and highly cynical. I was not the naive little girl he had grown up with.
In my mind, Cam was a leopard who could not and would not change his colors. The fact that he was married played a huge part in my decision not to respond to his invitation for us to get together. I’d been married twice already and knew intimately what it feels like to be the discarded wife left at home while your husband is out cheating with another woman, and you’re home alone and taking care of a little child.
But I was angry. Truth be told, I was incensed when Cam took me off his friends list. Because I hadn’t done what he wanted, Cam had banished me. It was ancient history repeating itself. Because we had emailed, as well as chatted on Facebook, I sat down and began crafting an email. I wanted him to know once and for all the impact he’d had on my life. I wanted to be completely and totally truthful about what had happened between us.
When I had looked for his wife’s profile on his friends list, when we reconnected on Facebook, I realized she was not on his friends list, but Ines was. I knew the significance of that, who could miss it? When he mentioned he’d traveled to Germany, for some “high school reunion quest” I knew the significance of that, too. There was no doubt in my mind that Cam had gone to Germany for a possible fling with Ines, why else would he not have his wife on his friends list, but Ines would be?
Why else would he travel to Germany? Out of curiosity, I searched for his wife, and finally found her Facebook account. I was surprised to learn she was Irish like me, with pale skin, light blue eyes and dark brunette hair — just like me.
What was even more odd was discovering Cam did not have even one photograph of his wife on his Facebook profile. His profile photo he had on his Facebook page showed a seemingly healthy, balding older man in his forties with a round face. The photo, which seems staged shows Cam wearing dark sunglasses and casual attire. He is standing on a balcony overlooking a lush green landscape, striking a pose and again wearing the light neutral colors he always favored, like he always did in grade school and high school. There was never anything flashy about Cam. He liked to stay under the radar.
When we were communicating via Facebook and in some of the more more personal emails we sent each other, we discussed parenthood, our general memories of high school, struggling to pay the bills, the stressors and disappointments of life, the master’s degree I was working on at the time, my writing of course and my writing website, (which had been online for almost five years, since 2007) along with a plethora of other topics.
Then one night I was checking my Facebook status, I noticed his profile pop up on my wall and saw the words “Add friend” loom on the screen. Cam had “un-friended” me. It was something I had thought about the whole time we were communicating. I knew eventually he would do it, knowing how fickle, unstable and mercurial he could be.
But it was more than simple fickleness. I instinctively felt Cam had become jealous of me in another way. Certain comments he’d made, made me wonder if he felt inadequate in comparison, now that we were both adults in our middle forties. Since I’d had strange situations arise in the past, with odd, unbalanced people, who appeared mentally unstable, I was now very protective of whom I associated with. Cam had commented about “quality” over “quantity” with regard to friendships. This was something he’d mentioned to me several times before in the past, as if it was impossible to have a large number of people in one’s social circle, without dire consequences.
I had laughed at his comment when he messaged me with it, thinking back to the many times he’d said the very same thing in grade school and high school. “Its quality, not quantity!” he would say firmly as we talked on the telephone, talking about family and mutual friends back in 1979. It seemed like a cop-out. I told him there was nothing wrong with having lots of friends, but Cam didn’t agree. He told me the people he could “really trust” he could only count on one hand.
But I also suspect because I had finally gone to college and graduated with multiple undergraduate degrees, as a double major, double minor, Cam didn’t quite know how to relate to me anymore.
Learning I was a graduate student at PSU, completing a master’s degree and that I was a published writer as well, with a personal writing website must also have blown Cam’s proverbial mind. I was an entirely different person from the little girl he’d known in grade school and high school. I was educated, ambitious and becoming known for my writing of difficult, complex and perhaps even socially meaningful essays, including interviews with law enforcement and other writers, including journalists, authors and painters.
The truth was, there was a lot Cam didn’t know about me. There had always been a lot Cam had never known about me.
Cam didn’t know for example, that my father was educated at Seattle University on the WW2 GI Bill, and had been a WW2 war hero earning a Bronze Star for meritorious achievement while on duty as an Army Staff Sgt in the jungles of New Guinea.
Cam didn’t know that “Daddy” read the classics, like Greek mythology and poetry and that he made his nine children read poetry, too.
Cam didn’t know that my mother was college educated and a makeup artist in her spare time with the Portland Opera, an avid reader of literature and a fan of classical music.
Cam didn’t know she was the kind of mother who encouraged all of her children to listen to classical music, to read literature and to use proper grammar.
Both my parents were college educated and we were a religious family, too, a family who did the best we could. My family had just as many positives as negatives, like any family. Like his family, in fact.
The tables of personal achievement had turned and I suspect Cam couldn’t handle it. When Cam wrote, during our first chat together, that he was afraid he had “lost” me “to NW Portland” I was secretly offended. The comment seemed incredibly condescending. I felt I knew what he was alluding to with the remark.
Cam must have thought I might end up some drug addled loser or maybe even a prostitute somewhere turning tricks for cigarette money. Looking back, I think Cam may have meant it as a sincere expression of concern, perhaps even caring, but at the time it had seemed like a put-down.
Thinking back to it, I have often focused on the word “lost.”
Maybe Cam really did believe he’d lost me. Looking back, I think when he wrote those words, that was in fact what he meant, and that it was an expression of love and concern.
Years before, Cam had been embarrassed, (during one of our make-out sessions in grade school) when I asked what his father did for a living. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you won’t laugh,” he told me. Once I solemnly agreed, Cam told me, his voice low and hushed that his father worked in a factory. Instantly, I was intrigued.
“A factory? What does he do there?” I asked.
“He puts the speaking mechanisms inside dolls bodies” Cam said quietly.
“That’s an okay job!” I said, in an attempt to make him feel better about it.
“Yeah, I guess. What does your Dad do?”
“Daddy’s an engineer. He works at Providence Hospital.”
“You call your Dad, Daddy?”
“Well, yeah, we all do.”
“Didn’t you say there were nine of you?”
“Yeah, I’m the seventh! Lucky number seven!”
“Yeah, me too. I’m the seventh in my family, too.”
“We’re both the seventh! That means only good things will happen to us.”
“Why is that?”
“Cause the seventh kids are supposed to bring good luck, right?”
“I guess.”
“Except you said your sister died, right? Julia?”
“Yes, but we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about… Julia.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“So, your Dad’s really an engineer?”
“Yeah, just like I said.”
“He is not! He’s not really an engineer, is he?”
“Yes he is Cam! He’s an engineer! At Providence Hospital.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Cam said, as he pressed his mouth on mine again.
While Cam and I communicated during 2011, Cam made up for what he didn’t know about my history by asking me countless questions about my family, my parents, my siblings and my previous two marriages.
Then later, when I would not respond to Cam in the way he wanted and agree to meet, he took me off his friends list. I was not surprised, but I was determined. I was determined to finally speak my peace once and for all. I would tell him the truth about what he’d done to me in grade school and high school, and throw all caution to the wind. Decades later, I would finally tell Cam the truth about the devastating impact he had had on my life.
A friend of mine, who was also a PSU therapist, Dr. Gene Hawkinson told me once that “the power of a letter,” can heal a wound and restore a broken heart like nothing else. Gene told me that the power of a letter can be one of the most empowering things a person can do when they have been egregiously damaged or harmed by someone else.
I made the decision then and there, that night, while looking at that computer screen with the words “Add Friend,” blinking over at me, that I was finally going to write Cam a letter and tell him exactly what he had done to me, and how it had impacted my life.
In the letter, there were things I told Cam and there were things I left out.
I worked on the letter nonstop until I had more than ten pages written, and with not one typo or misspelled word, I sent the letter to Cam. I sent it in an email, and I mailed a hard-copy to his home in a big manila envelope. It was simple finding his home address and as I had included my return mailing address and the envelope never came back to me, I know that Cam got the letter and that he more than likely read the hard copy letter, as well as the letter in the email attachment.
In the letter, I told Cam about how he’d made me feel in grade school, using me for make out-sessions, but not acknowledging we were close. I told him about how he’d lied to me in high school, tricked me into having sex with him, just so he could lose his virginity and how due to the horrible rumor he’d started I had been forced to transfer out of Lincoln and go to Grant.
I told Cam everything I’d ever wanted to say to him for over thirty years but had not.
I told him that this last fiasco on Facebook was the final straw for me. I wasn’t interested in any more of his endless, neurotic games. He had blown it. Writing the letter was incredibly freeing. It was uplifting. I had taken a secret and I had set it free, to float away from me. I had bravely approached the heavy burden of a shameful thing and I’d let it go. I had “offered it up” so to speak, turning my back on it and letting it run its course.
I felt wonderful. I felt relieved and wonderfully empowered as if a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I went back to my graduate program with renewed enthusiasm and optimism. I approached my role as a mother to my adult daughter with renewed happiness and appreciation and gratefully faced the rest of my life and my many goals, ambitions and hobbies with strengthened resolve and personal fulfillment. I felt I had done the right thing.
I often wonder about the dynamic of deception and why it persists in humanity. I wonder about both the positive and negative fruits of deception, for clearly there are both. I wonder how people reconcile the two forms and how they justify blatant deception when it becomes a part of their own lives, particularly when it does not succeed for them. I have illustrated that that kind of deception, to a certain degree, involves a particular level of malice and weakness of character to make manifest.
Clearly, the experience that most affected me while I was coming of age in the early 1980s was what I experienced because of Cam’s actions, and his repressed attitudes about women.
Cam’s proclivity to engage in deceit by spreading a cruel and factually incorrect rumor about me, not to mention the games he played with me over a period of years affected me in many powerful and destructive ways. It also created the passionate, curious and highly imperfect woman I am today. It was a prolonged and painful experience I would rather have avoided, for obvious reasons but It was also character forming.
It shaped who I would later become and how I would approach my life and my belief systems regarding honesty, writing, disclosure and personal courage.
A few months after I’d sent Cam the letter, explaining the impact he had had on my life, I did a Google search of his name. I wanted to see if he was still on Facebook, but instead I learned something else. Something terrible had occurred to drastically alter his family-life and his relationship with his wife. The veil of domestic tranquility had been lifted, to reveal something very different and very dark existing in its place.
Cam had been arrested — twice.
The first arrest had been for a charge of “domestic violence” presumably against his wife. The second charge was listed as “interfering with a peace officer” and “resisting arrest.” This probably meant he had violated an order of protection and had fought with the responding police officers who had been called in to resolve the conflict and make him leave. As I looked at the website I saw that it had been shared on Facebook a whopping 129 Times!
My heart sank to know that so many people knew of Cam’s misfortune and were willing to share it on Facebook.
In only a few short months Cam’s life fell apart and he ended up being arrested twice. I examined both online records in surprise, sadness and dismay. Cam had been arrested for domestic violence — for beating his wife. How clearly I could see Cam doing that. How he would consider his wife his property, and his children too, as if they were objects, belonging to him and him alone.
After speaking with some mutual school friends, I was told Cam and his wife had separated. Looking back on our many Facebook chats, I found this sudden change surprising. He’d told me how “happy” he was and how he and his wife were buying a much larger house, moving in, in early August, 2011.
Cam had seemed very intent on convincing me of his happiness. And yet, I was always dubious. I was never at any moment entirely convinced. For the simple reason that those people who are genuinely happy never announce it… Rather, they live it and rarely make written or verbal proclamations about it. More than anything, his protestations of happiness seemed typical of someone with something to prove.
I knew Cam. We grew up together.
And though I did not live intimately with him, experience his bed farts, irritability at home on a Saturday morning, his frequent drunkenness or casual lies, lies spoken through dim smiles and relaxed confidence in his own ability to deceive, I did get to know in a very intimate manner Cam’s basic character during a profoundly revealing time in his formative development.
That development would inform his personality thereafter in multiple ways I believe became permanent.
Even after all those years of having no contact with Cam, and then reconnecting with him in 2011, via social media, I could sense intuitively that Cam was still the same troubled person I had known before and that he had not evolved in any way. If anything Cam had only become more troubled and disturbed.
Social scientists who specialize in human behavior tell us that our basic character is formed by the age of six. I believe this to be true. We are as kind, as gentle, or as neurotic and/or cruel as our character allows us to be, for whatever formative reasons may shape or distort our truest potentials. I believe this was true of Cam as well.
Letting Go of the Past
When Cam and I resumed contact, during which we exchanged emails and chatted on Facebook (communications I am certain he willfully kept from his wife) he seemed little altered to me. It became painfully obvious Cam was the same neurotic, moody, unhappy and changeable person that he’d always been.
Despite all that, I also understood intuitively that his role as a husband and father must have exhausted him.
I looked at the photos on Facebook, at how his face had changed over time, becoming bloated, at the thinning hair, the balding head and paunchy belly and I felt sad for Cam. But I was certainly not much better. We had both declined; we were not the splendid looking kids we used to be when we had spent those wonderful times together, making out and the one occasion we made love together and he lost his virginity to me.
During our chats and emails, I once again began to see the insecure poor boy I had grown up with in the flats of NW Portland; the boy who had tried so desperately to fit in, to play it cool, to pretend nothing bothered him. The boy who because of his parents lack of a larger house, lived in a “cracker-box” home and slept in a dusty basement corner with bed spreads surrounding his bed. It was a makeshift room that must have been demeaning for him, cold, depressing and some kind of proof in his young simple mind, of some kind of perceived inferiority on his part.
But Cam was never inferior. I only wish he had known that.
Reflecting back on my reasons for not telling my academic adviser about the origins of the cruel rumor Cam started, I remembered it had come from a desire to protect him. Sure, he had devastated my young life, and even when I could have exacted a certain measure of justice, by telling my adviser the truth, I chose instead to leave Cam to his bright future, unencumbered by me or the potential for any kind of trouble.
That impulse came from a part of me that still cared for Cam, that still loved Cam. The sight of those important letters of introduction, stacked on my adviser’s desk, (who also acted as Cam’s academic adviser) those letters to the various colleges Cam wanted to be accepted at, never for a moment left my consciousness.
Despite it all, despite his continued need to play mind games after we reconnected on Facebook in 2011, I knew I would always still love Cam, or perhaps only the memory of Cam. It’s hard to say, difficult as it is to understand the true motivations of memory and what it means to each of us.
The last section of my letter to Cam included this final thought… “And now maybe you’ll think of your own two daughters. How would you like them to have to go through what I went through? Do me a favor okay, Cam? Make sure your daughters don’t ever have to go through what this daughter went through. Make sure you know what’s going on in their lives. Be present, talk to them. Be involved. Listen to them and look for signs. Because speaking for myself, I can tell you, it was a very sad, very lonely, very painful place to be.”
The truth is, I will always care for the memory of Cam; for the boy who seemed to genuinely like me as he smiled down at me between kisses, kissing the tip of my nose so affectionately and always so solicitous of my comfort, holding me so gently with his long gorilla arms.
I’ve often wondered what brought us together in the first place and what it was that contributed to the intense physical, emotional and spiritual attraction we felt for each other, for clearly it was there. Perhaps it was nothing more complex than we were both so young and so unmarred in our youth, our inexperience, and innocence and in our hunger for life, for the life we found in each other.
There will always be an unexplainable quality to our odd pairing, during such an important time in both our lives. Perhaps in some inexplicable way it had to do with the fact that both Cam and I were the seventh children in our families.
In the Bible, the number 7 signifies “Completeness and divine perfection.” The Divine Number. In numerology, the number 7 denotes “The seeker, the thinker, and the fearless searcher of truth.” Cam and I were both seekers in that way, both searching for some truth that may have existed between us and within us.
As we lay together, scrambling to consume the other in a delirious fever, we were searching for something.
The innocence of our past experiences together, making out in his dusty basement, those times are etched in my memory and sometimes recalled with a certain nostalgia for the past and the lost exhilaration of youth.
But because of the insidious and irrevocable passage of time and the manner that Cam’s malformed character persisted, I knew I would never be able to either trust him or engage in even the shallowest form of superficial friendship. Even “going to coffee” was never an option with Cam because I knew he would want more. He always did. He always wanted more.
Cam’s insecurities and fears, which informed his character, much like my insecurities and fears informed my character, also gave Cam his unique ways of knowing, and it was Cam’s special ways of knowing that created a certain ruthlessness, a ruthlessness that seemed to persist in his character.
Sleeping in a basement, his simple double bed surrounded by four tattered, yellowing bedspreads, contributed to an obvious sense of personal deprivation and no doubt resentment at not having enough. How easily and how well I could relate to that sense of lacking. I had experienced it myself in similar ways and in certain respects to a much harsher degree.
That’s why I never told my academic adviser the truth about what Cam did to me. I understood Cam far better than he could ever have realized or suspected.
And I gave him that thing that never dies: Pity.
Conclusion: A couple of years later, after Cam had erased his FB profile, I found another website with the following explanation: “On Jan. 4, Cameron Thomas Fajer, 50, was convicted of driving under the influence of intoxicants, a class A misdemeanor, committed on or about Sept. 15, 2015. Fajer was sentenced to jail for 48 hours and bench probation for 24 months, and ordered to pay assessed costs of $2,000. Fajer’s driver’s license was suspended for one year.”
Clearly, Cam was going through some real turmoil, but I would not learn of the severity of his unhappiness until much later.
In the early morning of February 18, 2018 I had a strange feeling. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cam. It was a feeling that had haunted me since the middle of 2015, but I had repeatedly brushed it off, consciously choosing to ignore it.
I was worried for some reason I cannot name and that worry had begun in 2015, corresponding also to a time when I began to feel intuitively that Cam was driving by my house at night, located less than ten minutes from his own home. Cam knew exactly where I lived. I had told him. He knew the exact house, the street it fronted, the size and even the color of my house.
But I’d had a nagging feeling that Cam was not well and that feeling persisted for several months up until January of 2016, when it suddenly dissipated and I stopped thinking about him. All during 2015, I had wondered if he was homeless, or drunk, or both. I knew he needed help.
I knew he was struggling. I could feel his unhappiness, but because Cam had always seemed so strong, I pushed the feeling aside.
But the morning of February 18, 2018, something would not let me alone about it. I had to see what I could find out. After the last contact I’d had with Cam in 2011, about twice a year I’d randomly do a Google search on his name and see what came up. On one search I found a tape he’d made on how to create some kind of craft for a craft website, a paper airplane if I recall correctly. His name was on the website and when I clicked on the link, I heard his voice. The cadence of Cam’s voice sounded so intimately familiar as he quietly and carefully spoke, giving the instructions on how to put together the project, enunciating his words perfectly, and speaking slowly as was generally his habit. I listened to the tape twice, listening to his voice and remembering its every nuance. It brought back so many memories.
On another search I saw he was applying for a job through Craigslist as a house sitter for someone living at the coast. I presumed then that he was at least separated from his wife and living alone. I saw his name and that he had listed his age as “about 50.”
So, on that night of February 18, as that feeling of unease would not leave me, I felt prompted to do a couple of simple searches. After I found the usual court records websites and White Pages listing former addresses, I put in slightly different search words. Something told me to, I don’t know what, but I put in his first and last name and then the word dead. On the first page, four clicks down, I found a modest website for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the old parish where Cam and I had gone to church as teenagers, sneaking peeks at each other, just as we would in St. Mary’s Cathedral parish as well.
On the website was a schedule and on the schedule was listed a ceremony that had been conducted in August of 2016 for “the repose of the soul of Cameron Fajer.” As I read those words, my heart sank.
For the repose of the soul of Cameron Fajer.
I knew what that meant. Cam was dead and he’d taken his own life.
In a flash I knew Cam had committed suicide. I didn’t need anyone to confirm it for me, because I knew. I just knew.
I contacted St. Patrick’s later that day, and learned the person who had requested the mass was an older sister, Jan. I had remembered her name when Cam had told me the names of all his siblings’ years before, in 1979. That made sense. Cam had always told me during our telephone conversations that he was close to his family, and that he and his parents and siblings were “a very close knit family” as he put it.
The next day I called the coroner’s office in both Multnomah and Washington counties, and they both confirmed Cam had died in 2016, in January, the month of my birth. I contacted a family member of Cam’s on Facebook. That person, an older brother, confirmed that it had been suicide and that Cam had hanged himself from the rafters of his garage, breaking his neck in the process and was dead, at the age of only fifty.
As I looked at my phone and read the words, I felt crushed.
Emotionally, I was devastated. I spent the rest of the day intermittently weeping and raging, pacing my living room floor, back and forth, back and forth. How could Cam have been so stupid? How could he have done this to his three young children? How could he have done this to himself, or any of the many people who had known him and loved him that we had both grown up with?
I wished fervently that I had been able to reach out to Cam before he chose to do such a terrible thing. I wished I had not written the angry letter that I sent to him in 2011. I wished I’d done what I’d always done before, which was to take “the high road” and “turn the other cheek.”
More than anything I wished Cam understood how much he had meant to me, how much I cherished his memory and the many wonderful times we shared going all the way back to 1979, and that as my first love, I would never forget him.
When I was told by his older brother that Cam had recently been diagnosed with “extreme bipolar disorder” and that he had had “problems with his wife” I felt heartbroken thinking that Cam had been suffering and had felt so alone. His brother was very kind when he wrote…
“Cam was diagnosed with bipolar disease and extreme manic/depressive disorder. He, like most Fajer’s, lived on the edge. Well, he fell off that edge and was compelled to take his own life. He had problems with his wife and with keeping a job. His three children are mostly grown. We all understood he was battling demons. Knowing Cam, he thought he was doing the proper thing. May he live with the Angels.”
For the rest of the next night I stared bug-eyed at the ceiling of my darkened bedroom. My heart was in my throat, my stomach a knot. I felt sick. Was I responsible? Had my hateful words to Cam in the 2011 letter I wrote him, telling him how much he’d devastated my young life contributed even more to an obvious self-loathing? I’m sure it didn’t help Cam’s self-image, but as several dear friends of mine have told me, I cannot take the blame for Cam’s suicide. Only Cam chose to do what he did, and no one else.
Cam had issues with self-esteem from the time he was a child for a variety of reasons. I know the death of his sister Julia in a car accident could not have helped, and must have been traumatic for both his parents, perhaps even leading to depression.
But it was more than that. Cam had always been so pushed so hard to excel, and I’d seen it constantly over the years. When he was in grade school and high school, he played basketball, baseball, football and he wrestled. He was constantly busy, constantly being tested, constantly having to prove himself, and in the long haul, I think Cam simply became exhausted by life, the constant demands of life, and the inevitable disappointments of life.
LOOKING BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL
I think back to Lincoln and a school assembly that most of the kids were forced to attend. It had something to do with sports and with some wrestling matches that were to happen later that night. Cam was one of those listed to compete. I spoke to my younger sister and said that after school let out, I might go back and watch Cam compete. She didn’t want to go with me, so I sat with some of my choir and drama friends hidden among the crowd, missing my evening ballet class to be there.
The experience has never left my mind, and if that’s just because I was a typical girl, and not an athlete, but rather a “girlie girl” who sang, did drama and took ballet, and consequently was frightened by violence, I don’t know. But what I saw became emblematic, I believe, for what would later happen to Cam, and for what Cam would later do to himself.
Cam had to compete and it would seem to the casual observer that he had a huge advantage, because he was so big, so perfectly built, and so tall. But as I watched him compete, it was his face I never forgot. Cam hated it. The look on his face was one of resignation and morbid stress. Cam and his opponent went down and several times he struggled to gain control. His face was purple and contorted, pressed against the blue mat as he struggled. I could tell Cam hated everything about it. It was so ugly, so violent.
I knew he would rather be playing baseball, which was his true gift.
The expression on Cam’s face was the same look as when he’d gotten into a long fistfight with a boy named Joey back at Chapman at the end of his seventh grade year.
Shortly after Cam had stopped calling me, a boy named Joey became angry at him. The rumor we all heard was that Cam had been trash talking to other students. Joey and Eddie were my friends, and also twin brothers. They had recently transferred from NY and were fun, likable and engaging young men who immediately became popular. Joey and Eddie liked me and we were loyal to each other. We might trash talk with each other, but no one else was allowed to do so unless they were our friend.
The afternoon of the fight, the news spread around the school like wildfire. After the bell rang at 3:00 pm, the kids ran to the Wallace Park shelter, next to the basketball court, and gathered to wait. Cam walked by and spoke briefly with Joey, telling him he had to go home and change clothes, but he’d be back he promised. Cam walked to his home one block east of the park and changed. Then we saw him walking back to meet Joey under the shelter. There were about 30–40 kids gathered around. Most of the students rooted for Joey, they didn’t like Cam.
Cam and Joey grappled and fought, they threw a few awkward punches and at one point, Cam picked up Joey and body slammed him, but Joey was fast and furious and an able opponent. It was at that point I felt sick. I knew someone was going to get hurt and the truth is I didn’t want either of them to get hurt. I turned to a girl next to me, she was in a lower grade. I told her she needed to run back to the school and get a teacher. Because I was older she did what I told her and took off running.
Within about four minutes a male teacher was jogging across the front lawn, with two female teacher’s aids behind him. The man rushed in and broke up the fight and I recall that Joey was blamed for it. Cam, being the new kid and a really good student and athlete was given the benefit of the doubt. The adults told Joey to go home and walked with Cam to the asphalt pathway. They consoled him and told him he would not be in any trouble.
I stood next to the edge of the shelter and watched as Cam walked by. My eyes were wide and incredibly pained as I watched him. He turned and saw me and our eyes locked. He had tears just forming in his eyes, and was trying not to cry. His face was flushed, his hands scratched and his shirt dirty and torn. Cam knew how badly I felt for him, though. He saw it in my eyes. We looked at each other for a long moment and then he turned, looked down and walked home, with the teacher next to him, and Cam’s shoulders hunched in anger and stress.
Later that night, in 1979, I prayed that the Angels and Saints would comfort Cam somehow. That was the first time I ever prayed for Cam, but it would not be the last. Cam had been an all around great athlete and he never seemed happier than when he was playing basketball, or especially baseball and even football, but I could tell at that moment, in high school, that he hated wrestling.
The look on his face, of being forced to do something that was repugnant, the look of resignation and morbid acceptance of what he had to do, of being forced into violence, that same look was on Cam’s face when I watched him fight Joey back in 1979. That expression will always linger in my memory as the price Cam paid for being so continually pressured to excel, to prove himself, to be so constantly tested all the time with sports.
But why did Cam have to kill himself?
Was it really because he had reached the end, because of being diagnosed bipolar? Or was it also in some way a Revenge Suicide because the world had disappointed him? Sometimes people get to a point where they are so disappointed by life, so exhausted that they feel bereft and hurt by past experiences and decide they’re going to make those left behind suffer.
I know that Cam and his wife broke up repeatedly, only to get back together and then break up again. Clearly, he was not happy with her. I think a part of Cam wanted to tell the world: “I’ll show you. I’ll kill myself. Then you’ll all be sorry.” Did Cam do that? Who knows? But I think there was probably an element of that in what he did. That he chose to take his life when he was once again living with his wife and three children, and to do it in the garage of the family home convinces me of that.
Cam was like that. He was capable of hurting people with a look, or by something he might say, quietly, even gently, with a caress and a smile. That was what made Cam so seductive. He represented the constant go-between of love and cruelty, and of affection and rejection.
That was Cam.
Two dear friends of mine lost their son when he died from suicide. The death of my friends son was heartbreaking for me. The boy was only nineteen and seemed to have everything to live for. His death threw me, so I did some research to try to understand why. What I learned is that men sometimes kill themselves because they feel they have failed in their lives and cannot come back from that failure. They engage in a pattern of “social perfectionism” and when they can’t perform for whatever reason, when they can’t achieve the perfection they are striving for, they take their own lives as a way out, as an escape, as relief from suffering. Link on Social Perfectionism.
But knowing what I know about those who have survived suicide, and been interviewed about it later, I know that their main recollection is one of intense regret that they chose to end their lives and almost did end their lives. The Regret of Suicide.
And those souls who have not survived suicide feel the most intense regret and remorse when they finally end their lives and realize what a mistake it was and why they should not have abandoned those loved ones they left behind. The Lost Souls.
As a result, I know that as soon as Cam kicked the chair or ladder out from under him, he regretted his action. That fast. As soon as he did it, I know Cam regretted it. Why? Because of his children. Cam loved his children. And I know if Cam could go back in time, he would want a do-over.
I know it.
As kids, we loved playing Dodgeball on the grounds of Chapman school at recess. If a play didn’t go as we wanted, we’d yell, “Do over! Do over!” I recall many times watching Cam play Dodgeball on the school grounds, as I stood with my girlfriends, chewing gum, watching and laughing. “Do-over! Do-over!” he would occasionally yell. The joke was that you couldn’t. But that you tried anyway. It was part of the “trash talking” that made Dodgeball so much fun.
I know if Cam could have a do-over, he’d give anything to be able to do just that. But he can’t, not now. That’s not how suicide works. There is no do-over. That is the tragedy, the pain, the absolute heartache of suicide.
There is no do-over.
I also know, as my faith in God or a higher power informs me, that Cam will NOT be punished for what he did. Cam will not be sent to some dark fiery place where the soul goes after suicide to be punished by a devil with a red pitchfork.
Cam has already been forgiven by God, and all the Angels and Saints, and in time Cam will be forgiven by everyone who carries the pain of his tragic life in the recesses of their heart and their memory. In just the way I do.
The reality is that Cam was not in his right mind when he chose to end his life. He was not sane, he was not rational. He was depressed and likely, drunk as well. I know that the spirit that remains, the soul of Cam that can remember and look back, that precious and caring part of Cam will always be connected to the people who loved him, and the people that he loved.
It is that part of Cam that regrets what he did, utterly and completely.
When I learned Cam ended his life, I contacted a family member and offered my condolences in what I hoped was a genuine and sincere tone. Then I posted on social media that Cam was gone. I felt heartbroken and wanted to share what I was going through. I got numerous private messages from people who like me had grown up with Cam and had known and loved him as far back as 1979, when he originally came to Portland to live. They were now grown “girls and boys” that we’d gone to Chapman and high school with, and even men who had once played football with Cam, and some mutual neighbors.
They hadn’t known until I posted about it that Cam was gone and they appreciated knowing. They appreciated that I had shared that information with them. Like me, they felt shocked and heartsick. We shared memories, regret and our profound dismay that such a sparkling, precious and talented person as Cam would take his own life.
Within only a few hours, Cam’s wife contacted me on Facebook. She wanted to make it clear that I didn’t “know” her husband and that I had had “no contact” with him “after high school” that she knew of and therefore I had no business writing anything about him, or expressing any kind of grief over his death.
She wanted to make it clear I was nobody important, and at no time was I ever important to Cam, because I didn’t “know” him well enough.
At one point, she called me a “nutjob” for posting about his death.
In her estimation and as Cam’s wife, she felt she was the only person qualified to speak for him, even if that meant commenting on a history she knew nothing about.
The dynamic is not difficult to understand. She was the wife, the mother of his children. I was just some girl he used to know from decades before she had ever met him, and therefore irrelevant.
She needed to convince me of my lack of importance, so she could feel better about her role. I get it; I understand.
And of course she was absolutely right. I will never know her husband, or the man he was to her. The person I knew was very different and as she stated, I will never know Cam in the way she did.
Nor would I have ever wanted to.
By contrast, it is equally true she will never know the teenage boy and young man I knew, the boy I grew up with, connecting with intimately over a period of many, many years.
OLD JEALOUSIES RESURFACE
Within five days of learning Cam had ended his life, I was contacted by an old friend. He told me Ines had recently Facebooked with a mutual friend of ours from Lincoln. Ines told the mutual friend, a woman, that I was a writer of “true stories” but that apparently I made them all up when she wrote…
“Theresa was determined to make something out of nothing. She has an idea in her head that is just not true.”
I’d been told in high school that Ines was jealous of my past history with Cam, which was confirmed when out of the blue, she began regularly glaring at me in choir class and in the halls, and behaving as if she was indeed jealous. Learning what she’d said to the mutual friend only confirmed that this dynamic had not changed for her.
Bemusedly, I learned Ines knows my current legal name, including my author name, and stalks my Facebook page and my writing website. Ines went on to write…
“She is an author who writes “true stories” that are fiction but she thinks that they actually happened, (only in her head though).”
Apparently, Ines believes that my entire body of written work represents this dynamic of creative malingering as opposed to writing truthful articles, essays and memoir culled from my own rich life experiences.
I suspect it is just insecurity and envy that promotes this wishful thinking on her part. There is of course no possible way Ines can make such an absurd assertion with any manner of authority. My body of work is too large, diverse and truth-based for it to be solely fiction, as she would like to believe.
Since Ines was not there during my interactions with Cam, (nor was she even in the United States during those times) she cannot possibly comment on my history with Cam, as it predates her own history with him by several years.
After the mutual friend asked Ines if she knew of Cam’s suicide Ines responded simply and stoically by writing: “Yes, I know. His wife told me.” After that short and hollow acknowledgment, Ines was more interested in ridiculing me and in casting aspersions on my character and abilities as a writer than in expressing any genuine manner of remorse for Cam and his life which was cut so tragically short by a preventable and tragic suicide.
That in itself reveals everything anyone might need to know about Ines and her shallow character and simple-minded, narcissistic mentality.
She never cared about Cam, never at any time.
I thoroughly understand there are people who will never acknowledge me as anything other than some kook author and writer who wrote a sentimental essay about first love and its inevitable consequence of predictable disappointment. And that’s okay, I can accept that.
This is just how some people are. I’ve learned to accept these things and not to take them personally. I have never been much concerned with what people think of me. I know the truth of my history and that is all that matters to me.
I’m also confident there are many other people — the people Cam and I knew and grew up with, who will recognize the various details in this essay, the details that resonate to the actual circumstances of Cam’s life and the experiences we shared, during grade school and high school and even after that.
The truest reality however is that I choose to honor my history and the impact that history has had on me.
I do not require the permission of others to do so. Whether that means when writing about a particular dynamic, a unique experience or writing about a specific individual, I do so without requiring the permission of others.
As a writer of “true stories” with over thirty years experience, and at least average expertise in the art form, the permission of others is something I will never require in this remembrance of Cam Fajer.
One thing I have also learned is that people cannot just turn off their emotions. I cannot change the fact that Cam and I had a long and varied past and that we had contact numerous times over more than thirty five years, including over social media. I cannot change the fact that I loved Cam, and that I know he cared for me, in some broken, sad and repressed way. I cannot change the fact that Cam expressed that concern and caring in 2011 in our numerous chats and emails. That’s not how things work in the real world.
When I remember Cam, I see in my mind’s eye, the young man who loved life, a young man who nearly every time I saw him was eating a Golden Delicious Apple, sometimes tossing them in the air before biting into them, but always eager, hopeful and looking forward to some new endeavor. Cam loved life, and he loved a challenge and he did the best he could.
Cam was an incredible athlete and probably could have gone professional with the right support and encouragement from his time as a varsity baseball player in college; he was that good at baseball, having played all his life.
Cam was also an incredible person in many other ways. He could be tender, sweet, gentle and loving. But for whatever reason, he came to a dark place in his life and he didn’t know how to proceed or go forward. At the age of only 50, he mistakenly presumed he didn’t have anything left to offer the world, or to live for, or to look forward to, and he made a mistake. He chose to end his life — the very worst thing he could ever possibly have done to his two young twin daughters and his young son.
When I remember Cam it will be that he loved life, and could be a most tender, affectionate and sincere person. He touched many lives, not only the lives of his family members, but many other lives as well, including my own.
But I will also remember the man who at the age of only 50 hanged himself. I will remember that that Cam felt so alone and so convinced of his unworthiness, with no hope and nothing to look forward to, that he felt no reason to continue living. I will remember that Cam was willing to abandon everyone he’d ever known in order to end the pain his life had become.
I won’t make flowery statements about how his memory will be an inspiration for me, or that I will only remember him in positive terms, because if I did that, I wouldn’t be honest about the reality of his death and what that reality means to me and how it will follow me forever.
The morning I learned of Cam’s death, I’d been listening to classical music on the radio in my writing office. They had a piece playing I’d heard over the years, but had never really noticed before, but on that day I was captivated by it. I bought it and continued listening to it on my IPhone as I wrote. Cam knew how much I loved classical music. He used to tease me about it, that I didn’t like any other music quite as much and that I should “broaden my mind” to other forms of music.
The piece was Gustav Mahler’s 5th. The fifth symphony. I found myself listening to it repeatedly while I wrote, hour after hour. It was later that night that I realized I will always associate the lachrymose and intensely romantic and melancholy sounds of Mahler’s 5th with Cam.
Every time I hear it now, I immediately think of Cam, as it seems such a perfect musical representation of his difficult and sad life, and the struggles he faced. Gustav Mahler’s 5th symphony is a small comfort, and it is a gift I will always cherish in my remembrances of Cam.
The fact is I will always grieve for Cam, and in a very real way that grief will never end.
I will hold onto the memories of the experiences Cam and I shared over so many years and I will remember Cam. I will try to search for some kind of meaning in his life, and in his death that I can hold close when my mind inevitably wanders to the grey, shadow laden past, where regret and the passage of time are as final and unforgiving as the last beat of our hearts.
There will not be a day that I don’t think of Cam, and wish fervently that things could have been different for him. There will not be a day that I don’t feel the fierce remorse of his suicide, wishing he was still alive somewhere in this world, happy and smiling his mysterious Cam smile, and tossing another viridescent green apple in the air.
More than anything, I know not a day will go by that I don’t pray for Cam — asking God and the warrior Angels and all the guiding Saints to look after him, to comfort him and to make certain his soul finds the rest he was never able to find in this life.
Rest in Peace Cam, we will see each other again.
Theresa Griffin-Kennedy
Works Cited
Barbey d’ Aurevilly, Jules. (1901) What Never Dies. Manche, France. Translated from the French by Oscar Wilde.
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CONFIRMATION: A couple of years after this essay was published, in late September of 2020, a former longtime girlfriend of Cam contacted me via email. She and Cam had gone to college together and she hadn’t known of his 2016 suicide until she searched his name and found my essay and read it several times. She felt troubled and wanted to reach out to me. We emailed for several weeks back and forth, back and forth, sharing our experiences with Cam and our perspectives on the tragic arc of his troubled life and heartbreaking suicide.
It was healing. Hopefully, for both of us.
All of my innate suspicions regarding Cam’s deceptiveness, going back to 1979, his inability to be truthful, his casual ease with lying, and his need to be unfaithful were confirmed by this woman. She told me she and Cam finally broke up because he could not tell the truth, or be faithful. When she found a “huge box of condoms” hidden in the back of his car as he prepared to leave for a trip to Mexico with some college buddies, she knew she had to save herself and break it off, which she did.
This enraged Cam of course, and he never forgave her. This would have been years, perhaps decades before he finally married a woman naive enough to believe his endless lies.
This former girlfriend told me of Cam’s mercurial mood swings, his violent outbursts, his unfounded jealousy, and hot and cold personality. It felt wonderful to have another woman, who like me had early experiences with Cam, and could provide confirmation for me, regarding what I already knew about him.
She admitted she didn’t know how to feel about his death. She admitted she wasn’t sure she was sad, because she had gotten to know him so intimately and was also quite glad she had been able to get away from him, having seem him at his worst, and feeling that she definitely deserved a better, more stable partner.
My perspective will always be different, though. Cam was my first love and I grew to love him. And sadly, I will always love him. I will always love the boy I grew up with, who held me so tenderly and kissed the tip of my nose, telling me he wanted to continue to see me and that I was his girlfriend. I will always love the man who told me in 2011 that he was afraid he’d lost me, the man who sought me out and wanted to be with me again, like all those times before.
Of course it makes no sense. Of course it is not logical. It never will be. The mysterious machinations of the heart and soul never are.
Because in the end, we do not choose who we fall in love with, love chooses us.
The Love behind the Death
Dedicated to Cameron Thomas Fajer, 1965–2016
Written and published via the internet 7–7–2018
What do you say of his shadow? Of his memory? Or the ashes that exist in his stead now that the flesh is gone? What of the smooth perfection of the golden sirenic skin I cannot forget? What of the beautifully formed hands, the perfect male body?
Or his viridescent bejeweled eyes that I still can see? When there is no chance of ever returning, when forgiveness and absolution are not possible, after the rope takes the life, what does he become other than mine?
I want to tell him, and I know he will understand: “You belong to me now. In death you are mine forever. I hold you now and I will never release you. I will hold you as you longed for me to hold you.”
In life we couldn’t be together, though we often were anyway. The passing rustle of our legs retained a heat we cannot forget, the fragrant apple scent of our mouths and drifting tongues contained a magick — a magick that remains within us. Those memories are ever-present, drifting among our secrets in the chilled ether and still shuttling between us.
Yet, for whatever necessary reason, we couldn’t be together on this avenue. Still you were on my mind and I was on your mind. I know because you told me. Now all that is left after the rope and the garage and your tender broken neck is this bitter recollection and my fierce and sweet remorse.
That’s all you’ve left any of us.
You got your revenge, Cam, but the tears I shed, remember you. My tears remember you with my grief and the love I can’t give, not in this world, anyhow. Not in this drifting universe, where the undulating cadence of your soft tenor touches me, reminding me of your words, all those words, all the words you spoke to me, spanning the fragmented and intermittent years, and decorating the dissolving decades, all those words you gave me.
All those many words.
The chill wind of your memory does not allow me to forget. But rather it keeps your pain alive and present. It is a wound that time will not heal. It continues to flower, to crescendo, to speak your name on repeat until I am dead. When once again we will face each other, walk to each other, in the direction of you and me.
In the direction of the love behind the death,
In the direction of our searching arms and our searching mouths,
In the direction of you and me.
You and me — you and me — you and me.
Theresa Griffin Kennedy
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PUBLIC COMMENTS:
Hard to know where to start. I read the entire piece and you took me through your journey with courage, honesty, love, growth and compassion. Quite a trip. I felt the era, the place, saw the kids, heard their voices. Nice. I met Cam. Traveled with you through physical yearnings, teenage angst, emotional turmoil, spiritual growth and the moving on. You brought your experiences and insights to life. Thanks for sharing these intimate moments honestly. It was not mushy, just real life. I love strong women writers!
Sincerely, Liz
Theresa’s story was compelling, and so poignant I simply could not stop reading it. Its about a young girl who at the tender age of thirteen meets a pretentious, secretive fourteen-year-old boy. She takes you on a journey of what it was like not to feel good enough, wanting affection and that even the need to feel validated can be commonplace for most teenagers.
The reality of Theresa’s story of what it was like to be emotionally moved by this young boy was so profoundly written, that I actually felt like I was there and even at times wept myself.
This story shows she had to take on the role of an adult making and facing decisions that most couldn’t even imagine. It takes you into the face of the many bittersweet emotional landscapes she endured well into her high school years and adulthood, and how she came to terms with her past by fighting for a future.
Her story depicts how she had to cope and experience not just what it was like being disadvantaged but also to seamlessly integrate a young girls’ love for a grade school boy up until the present day, showing a tale of a raw, imperfect and at times even a dysfunctional relationship that will certainly strike a chord with any reader.
I highly recommend Theresa’s story to anyone who would love to read an excellent, coming-of-age story that will leave you turning the pages and on the edge of your seat.
Best, Eddie
Theresa Griffin-Kennedy: I am a freelance writer of creative
nonfiction, a poet, fiction writer and contributing columnist for The online
Portland Alliance Newspaper and for the website GoLocalPDX.
I am a social activist fighting for social change through writing
as a social act. I paint abstract with mixed media and am a
writing instructor and writing coach and am the published
author of a crime history book and a book of poetry,
modern free verse. Learn more.
THIS INTIMATE PERSONAL ESSAY, COPYRIGHT APRIL, 16, 2018, MAY BE REPRODUCED OR DISSEMINATED ONLY WITH APPROPRIATE ATTRIBUTION GIVEN TO THE AUTHOR THERESA GRIFFIN KENNEDY.
Online since 2007
