Missing

God, he was a moody fucker, a human mood swing. Will posed something yesterday which reminded me that Cam killed himself this time last year.

I'm not angry with him now. He was the son of an escape artist, a man who abandoned his family, who Cam almost met, who left a space that could not be filled, and of an undetermined shape.

Cam found a scene from the Steve McQueen movie Bullitt in which Steve and an actress talk in a smoky jazz bar. The man playing the guitar, Cam tells me, is his father. Apparently the director liked the music well enough that what you hear in the movie is actually Cam's Dad playing.

In the scene, we can make out the man's silhouette, but not his face. He sings some scat over the guitar and it's very beatnik and 1960s. A man in those days would perhaps run from Clear Lake, Iowa, from a wife and two kids, heading off to California. . . .

You can hang around this one pump station
I'm going to take myself a lifetime vacation
Next time you see me take a long last look
There'll be one less name in the telephone book

Cam wrote beautifully about images that possessed him. I think his most evocative lyrics are the ballads. Songs about lonely highways, big moons, about being somehow outside things, driving by, hoping someone will burn a candle for him. The boy knew how to write a hook, and in his humorous songs, could certainly twist it. He wrote a song about my first marriage, Bessie's Gone, that still cracks me up. And he took the time to write a song about me. Who does that? Wrote a hell of a good one about our friend Al, too.

Cam's passing taught us another important lesson: Facebook is immortal. Cam's site is still up and people are still posting, although Cam, of course is not. For a while, Cam's site was a pretty strange place. His wife was posting and in a lot of pain, people were reacting to the news, it was raw, even a little creepy. I went there this morning just before I started writing this. It's quieter now. People are still posting, but we've all had some time to get used to this.

Steve Earle wrote "I Ain't Ever Satisfied." The song was about Cam. It was about that part in all of us that whispers to us that our successes aren't real, our better qualities are evanescent, that we are frauds about to be found out. There was no pleasing him sometimes. There was no pleasing himself. I'm not sure if this made it fair. One could safely say that Cam suffered from his moods more than anyone else. That didn't make him any easier to live with. At one point in my life, I backed away from Cam, determining that I could not ride with him, could only step back and watch him go. He was tough on wives, because of the darkness in him at times, but also because he was a very sweet, generous, expansive guy a good deal of the time, and that was real, too.

When Cam died, I wasn't that far from cheating clumsy middle aged death myself. I was watching my mother fight death brain cell by brain cell. The idea that Cam would just step off, take a lot of pills and die, left me grasping. . . .

Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to take a crack at a really good, difficult book. I'm going to work up a few songs to the point they're worth doing. I'm going to work on laughing and encouraging and being generous of spirit. I can do that.

My Dad was a different sort of cat, too, Cam, but mine stuck around. I knew that whatever I did, he was proud of me and loved me. Because of him, there are times, just some times, but times nonetheless, when I feel full, happy, thankful and at peace. I mutter to my father that I'm sorry and he sighs and says he guesses it will be okay.

I wish he'd called me, called somebody, old Camster. He was, I guess, too much apart from us, from all of us, that night. There was about Cam often a sense that he was present but also was thinking of something else, some next thing. It meant we connected but did not stay connected.

I look out the window, and see you standing in the road.