Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Before Amanda left New York, she had basically become a spy for Mom and Dad, and she’d sometimes show up at the apartment where I live with Erin and a few friends and cause a scene. It’s a fifth-floor two-bedroom in Greenwich Village that I’m paying for, and which is dominated by a Balinese opium bed in the living room. We’re a makeshift little family of addicts.

  At the Thompson, Amanda’s eyes flick to the sweatband covering my elbow.

  “You have track marks.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Amanda?”

  “Don’t gaslight me. I can see the track marks on your elbow.”

  “You’re a fucking lying psycho bitch. I’m not doing anything. Stop telling my parents I’m doing this stuff. ’Cause I’m not.”

  I’m not trying to scare her—she’s tough, and not really scareable—but I’m tired of her meddling and need to make her understand that she needs to stop talking about me. This is wishful thinking, but it feels good to vent. I know she’s going to call Dad, so I beat her to it. He seems to believe my story that I’m being harassed by my crazy ex-girlfriend. I have become a fluent liar.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Amanda storms into the apartment and finds me in the closet off my bedroom. I spend most of my time there now—shooting coke, wearing outlandish clothes, and imagining imminent police raids. When Amanda shows up, I have a needle in my arm. She berates me, slaps me, grabs my box of hypodermics, and leaves in a huff as I shout after her. Then I find Erin, who’s on the couch in the living room grinding her jaw, and yell at her for leaving the door to the apartment open.

  I’m sure Amanda has already called Mom to say I’m out of control. I know Amanda’s staying with her friend Jackie on the Upper East Side, and I cab up there to tell her to leave me the fuck alone. Amanda refuses to buzz me in, and Erin and I get into a fight on the corner of Seventy-Fifth and Madison, while a large man nearby watches a little too intently.

  I know I’m out of control: I’m an addict; I’m not crazy.

  * * *

  —

  Dad calls. I haven’t seen him since Eric’s funeral. Our lives couldn’t be more different. He lives on an estate overlooking Hamilton Harbour in Bermuda, where Granny grew up. He’s now married to Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the two of them, paparazzi magnets with two young children to raise, moved there for privacy a couple of years ago.

  I know he’s been in New York for the past two weeks, staying at his apartment on the Upper West Side, but I wasn’t expecting to hear from him after our short conversation yesterday. “Hey, Cam,” he says, “I’m going out of town tomorrow, but I’d really like to spend some time with you before I go, just to talk and see where everything’s at.”

  This makes me feel great, and I say, “Absolutely, I’d love that.” For the man I respect most in my life to call me in this precarious moment feels something like divine intervention. I’m excited that I’m going to see Dad, and optimistic about mending our relationship.

  The next day, he comes to the Village, and I go downstairs to meet him in front of the building. I bring Junior, my chocolate Lab, along, so he can get a walk in. Friends often tell me that Junior is me in dog form, which makes me so proud, because Junior is an exceptional animal: loyal, smart, and sweet, with an adorable habit of licking Erin’s hamster. Dad and I stroll down University Place to Washington Square Park and find a bench.

  With Dad at a Red Cross benefit.

  As we sit there, he talks about what happened to Eric, the pain his addictions caused for him and his family, and Dad’s fear of something similar happening to me.

  “Cameron, you’re fucked up.”

  Being compared to Eric again is hard to hear, but I can’t argue. What I say next is actually the truth.

  “You’re right, Dad, I am fucked up. I do want to make some changes. I really appreciate you coming down to talk to me like this.” For a long time, my relationships with him and Mom have been shadowed by my drug use and their frustrated responses to it. There’s not a lot of trust on either side.

  Dad talks about Erin, saying she’s an enabler. He talks about my roommate Jay, my closest friend since childhood. When we were growing up, Jay was easygoing, everyone liked him, and he was a good sidekick, always down for whatever. We were both distant from our families. His father lived somewhere else, his mother was religious to the point of not acknowledging Jay’s issues, and his stepfather was an asshole. We found love and support in each other and said we were brothers. We each have a tattoo of the other’s initials on the back of our left arm. People always ask, “Where’s Cameron and Jay?” Dad thinks Jay is the worst thing that ever happened to me. Jay doesn’t have a job, or any of the other traits a parent looks for in a friend of their child’s. He’s a freeloader. He got me into shooting coke. Normally I’m defensive about my friends. This time I say, “I hear you.”

  For the next half hour, I open up to Dad. I agree that it’s time for me to straighten up and get my life figured out. I’ve been making good money touring as a DJ in Europe, but it doesn’t cover the cost of supporting myself and my friends and our drug habits. The bookings are dwindling, and I’m embarrassed that I still have to ask Dad for help. He listens. He doesn’t judge me. He says to quit DJing. Relocate to California. “Get away from your drug family, Cam.” I’m moved and happy. We’ve had a meaningful, productive conversation.

  He’s flying to Scotland tonight, on a golf vacation, and says he’d better get going. As we head back toward my building, Dad pans his head, like he’s searching for something. Then he says, “Junior’s a really great dog, he’s so obedient; do you mind if I walk him?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, handing over the leash.

  As we reach my block, Dad’s looking around again. This time I follow his gaze, and notice a big guy stealthily walking behind us. Dad starts to speed-walk away from me, pulling Junior with him. Now I see that, in addition to the guy behind us, who is quickening his pace, there are two more hulking dudes barreling out of a van parked by the curb and coming swiftly toward me. One of them is the guy who I saw on the Upper East Side a few days ago, watching me and Erin fight. Dad is now on the far side of the sidewalk, and as the three guys surround me, I go into fight-or-flight mode.

  “Fuck you, Dad!”

  “You need help, Cameron.”

  The goons start trying to reason with me. I say, “I don’t know what the fuck you think is going to happen right now, but I can promise you it’s not going to turn out well.” I’m a cornered animal, and they can see that.

  They look at Dad and shake their heads, like: We’re calling it off.

  I grab Junior’s leash from Dad.

  “You’re a fucking pussy,” I say. “All you had to do was ask me to get in that car, and I’d have gone.”

  I am furious and really hurt. The fact that Dad is motivated by concern doesn’t matter to me. I feel crushed and betrayed. I know that Dad, with some justification, firmly believes that I’m full of shit when I say I would have gotten into that car if only he’d asked me to. But after our talk, I felt a connection with him that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Doesn’t he know how much I love him and look up to him and want to do right by him? Can’t he have some faith in me?

  I stop answering his calls. For a few more months, I continue traveling for gigs. But things feel like they’ve gotten as bad as they can get. The coke has chewed my life to pieces, and I want so badly to be off it. I have nothing going for me. I have no money of my own. I really do want to get away from the club scene. I decide to focus on acting. It’s something I know, it’s in my blood, and in October I move to L.A., hoping to reset my life.

  2

  Mom

  Mom was nineteen when she married Dad in 1977, and twenty when she had me. Later, she’d say we grew up together.

  At first we lived on Tower Grove Drive, in Beverly Hills. Then Dad bought a place in Santa Barbara, and we started spending more time there.

  In m
y earliest memories, Mom is young and beautiful and full of music. She was finishing college at UCLA and would do her homework while I played on the floor. Together we’d drive around Los Angeles in her silver Ferrari, Mom belting out Hall & Oates and other ’80s hits, fully committing to each song, as if she were auditioning for something. At home, we’d dance to my favorite record by the Talking Heads—who I called the Talking Potatoes—boinging around the living room, which looked out onto a lawn and pool and the city below. At night, when Mom put me to bed, we’d pretend we were radio DJs and do a little jazz routine, taking turns on the different instruments. “Okay, Cameron, take it away.” I’d do a high-hat hiss. Mom would play sax. I’d switch to trumpet. She’d go to drums. As I fell asleep, she’d give me “softies,” gently stroking my back.

  * * *

  —

  With Dad away working eight, ten months of the year, and Mom left to raise me on her own, when I was five Dad agreed to move us all to New York. Mom had friends there, and she seemed to find her footing as a model, working for Eileen Ford and appearing on the cover of the first issue of Mirabella. She raised money for the Red Cross and became a producer of documentaries for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s film and television division. Some nights, after the museum closed for the day, Mom and I would wander through the Temple of Dendur and the galleries of medieval knights’ armor.

  * * *

  —

  Mom had an affinity for unusual pets. When I was a toddler in California, I had a large, floppy-eared rabbit who would sit on my high chair nibbling carrots while I stuffed SpaghettiOs in my mouth. In New York, I got a ferret named Tiki. He liked to nip hands, so I’d go into Mom’s closet and take her long, leather evening gloves, which protected my hands but were destroyed in the process.

  Mom’s own animals were another level of exotic. In Manhattan, she got a serval—a small, leopard-like wildcat native to the sub-Saharan savanna and illegal to own in about half of the fifty states. Ours, which Mom named Sangral, was a baby when we got him but quickly showed his hunting instincts. I’d walk into the kitchen in the morning, and Sangral would assume a defensive crouch and hiss at me. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d wake up with him on my chest, licking his chops. On other occasions, he climbed out the window onto a narrow ledge that ringed the Kenilworth, our building on Central Park West. I’m sure people on the street were wondering what a zoo animal was doing there. I had the feeling that Dad secretly hoped Sangral would fall off. We’d lure him back inside with dog food, his favorite—but he would eat anything. We were always rushing him to the veterinarian, who’d pull oddities out of his stomach: a glove, a piece of rubber, kitchen refuse.

  One of Sangral’s favorite stalking games was sneaking up on you and pouncing. Once, Dad was in the sitting room at the apartment, having tea with Janie Wenner, Jann’s wife, when Sangral leaped, landing on Dad’s head. Dad wrestled with him as I giggled and Janie sat there in shock.

  “Michael, what’s going on?”

  Dad finally threw the cat off and said, “Don’t worry, that’s Diandra’s pet.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Dad had a gash on his eyebrow.

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right, Michael, it’s pretty crazy.”

  We took Sangral with us when we moved back to Santa Barbara, where Mom had a zoo-like enclosure built for him, but eventually she realized he should be in something closer to his natural habitat and gave him away.

  * * *

  —

  With Dad still traveling for months at a time, Mom young and unhappy and isolated, and me her only child, I became her confidant—her receiver of rants and soother of bruised feelings. I learned that Dad’s prolonged absences weren’t the only marital hardship Mom had to endure. When I was seven and we were in Aspen, she held up a little plastic bag with what looked like the dried flowers she used to make the bathroom smell nice. But these plants were the color of moss and a lot smellier.

  “Do you know what this is, Cameron? This is a drug. Your father is using drugs.”

  Because of this and other evidence she presented to me, I said, “We’ve got to pack our stuff and get out of here before he comes home and finds out.”

  I proudly saw myself as her rescuing knight.

  * * *

  —

  Mom began looking elsewhere for her fulfillment, and she took to going away on her own adventures, sometimes for weeks at a time. I’d ask her, when she put me to bed, “Are you going out tonight?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So you aren’t?”

  “No.”

  I’d wake up in the middle of the night, go to my door, look down the hall, and see her door open, with the light on. I’d run down there and find her bed empty and undisturbed.

  * * *

  —

  Some people are born with a sense of rhythm. Mom was born with innate style. Dad was practical and unconcerned with how he looked; he got away with a lot, fashionwise, because he was a movie star. Mom had a huge closet filled with priceless dresses and jewelry, and she had a visionary gift for design. Under her exacting direction, our homes were impeccably rehabbed, decorated, and made over.

  Our house in Montecito, on Hot Springs Road, had big wrought-iron gates, and a long driveway bisecting the property on its way to the house. Mom turned a huge untamed area of rough bushes at the bottom of the estate into a beautiful Japanese meditation garden with koi and a teahouse. She put in a tennis court, fountains, a den, and quarters for the help. She regraded the hill that sloped down to the pool, creating an enfilade effect. She trucked in palm trees. She called the property by its original name, La Quinta.

  * * *

  —

  Mom was born in Washington, D.C., where her naval officer father, Robert Luker, worked for the Defense Department, running a project exploring the use of nuclear explosions to propel spacecraft, but she grew up largely on Mallorca. Her mother, Pat, or Patricia, was supposedly from a shipping family; she had studied at the Sorbonne, where she met her future husband, then stationed in Paris.

  Mom’s parents split up when she was six, and she had a lonely childhood. Pat was a beautiful, fascinating woman—an adventuress, a pilot, an archaeologist, and a writer. She would bring her daughter, Dia, along on her digs, or with her to Venice, where Pat sometimes spent summers studying at a monastery library on one of the city’s islands. But Pat already had brain tumors that wouldn’t be diagnosed until years later, and she was hardly a roaring hearth of maternal warmth. She enjoyed her freedom and male company, and she rarely spoke about her own family history. She always said she was of mixed English and Spanish ancestry, that she was a cousin of the Spanish king, Juan Carlos de Borbón, and that her maiden name was de Morrell—the middle name she gave Mom—but Pat’s wedding announcement in a 1945 newspaper gave her name as Patricia Portland, and said she was from Australia.

  Mom knew even less about her father. He’d been injured at Pearl Harbor and become an alcoholic, and after Mom was sent off to Ecolint, a boarding school in Geneva, when she was seven, she stopped seeing him. A few years later, when she was walking with a friend in the town square, Mom saw her father walking toward her. As he approached, she was about to say hello, but he just kept walking. He hadn’t seen her in so long that he didn’t recognize her. He died from heart disease when she was fourteen.

  The house in Montecito.

  During summer breaks, Mom went back to Mallorca and stayed with Pat at Miramar, a house near Valldemossa, on the northwest coast, which had belonged to the Habsburg archduke Luis Salvador. It had no electricity. Tanks of compressed gas powered the refrigerator, a record player, and other appliances. Whatever her parents’ shortcomings, Mom grew up in a culturally and intellectually rich environment, surrounded by writers and artists like Joan Miró and Kenneth Noland. Robert Graves came over for tea every afternoon at four. Mom rode Andalusian horses and became skilled at dressage.

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sp; * * *

  —

  Starting when I was seven, we spent every summer in Mallorca. At first we stayed at a hotel in Deià, the beautiful little town populated by expatriate artists who’d visited and never left. When I was twelve, shortly after Dad won his Best Actor Oscar, he and Mom decided to buy their own place, and the three of us spent days hiking across beautiful fincas, looking for the perfect property. Once, we went for ice cream, and I can still picture Mom taking a bite from a cone and then Dad taking a bite from the ice cream in her mouth. It’s a moment that has stuck with me, a rare memory of when things were still good between them. Maybe because those were the years before their marriage curdled, and maybe because it was a time before I grew angry and detached and got into drugs, Mallorca holds wholesome, innocent associations for me.

  They ended up buying a piece of land next to Miramar. S’Estaca, the name given to the site centuries earlier by a Moorish conqueror, was magical. Two hundred and forty-seven cliffside acres of pine and olive and orange and almond trees plunged down to the ultramarine sea. The whitewashed stone house at the center of the property dated to the nineteenth century, when it had belonged to the Habsburg archduke. Mom was even more ambitious for S’Estaca than for the house in Montecito. She began a grand restoration, which was a precarious undertaking. The house was off the road to Puerto de Valldemossa, a long, steep, corkscrewing ribbon of asphalt wide enough for only one car, and with a sheer drop-off on one side. Visitors would be terrified by the time they got to our gate, and then would have to navigate the dirt driveway—which was equally thin and treacherous, and went on for three quarters of a mile before it reached the house.