I want to be left alone. I’m not interested in a plan to get me sober. I’m ashamed, and frustrated by my inability to get my act together. The only thing I seem able to do is cause a commotion. All of which just makes me want to stay far away from the people who bring up those feelings. I go to see Dad anyway.
When I get there, he’s with Amanda and a woman I’ve never met. This can’t be good. Dad speaks first.
“This is Candy Finnigan, she works with drug addicts.”
“Okay.”
“Amanda said you told her you have AIDS. Do you?”
“What? No! I never said that.”
I turn on Amanda. “I never said that. You’re making that up. You’re so full of shit.”
Dad seems to be wavering, unsure whether to believe me. Candy looks unmoved. She has the no-bullshit, been-there-done-that attitude of a recovering alcoholic with her own reality show on A&E, Intervention, and a forty-year marriage to the keyboardist from Big Brother and the Holding Company. She gives Amanda a reassuring look.
“Why would I say that? Where did I say that?”
“Where?” Amanda says. “Cameron, you said that at Pia’s house, right before shooting yourself up in front of me. I believed you. Either you were telling the truth, and you need help, or you weren’t, which is really fucked up, and you need help.”
Candy talks about Suboxone, a methadone-like opiate that is increasingly being used to wean addicts off of heroin. Dad speaks from the heart. He knows my flight to Germany has a stopover in Amsterdam, and he knows I’m not going to use it to tour windmills. He implores me not to go. “Please, Cam, have Thanksgiving with us. Please.”
* * *
—
I call Curtis to come and pick me up. When he arrives, he can tell that I’m utterly defeated. “What’s wrong?”
I say, “Well, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be going to Germany.”
The DJ gig wouldn’t be a huge payday—plane tickets, a few nights at a good hotel, maybe a couple thousand dollars—but Sebbo’s my friend, and I’d been looking forward to going. I tell Curtis what happened and that I’m going to stick around.
“Right on,” Curtis says. “That’s a good choice. It’s the holidays, it’s Thanksgiving, your family wants you around. You’re making a good decision.”
When I arrive for Thanksgiving, though, I find Dad in the living room with Mom sitting next to him. This is definitely not good. The last time the two of them were in a room together was more than ten years ago. Mom looks like she’s been crying. Dad says, “Have a seat, Cam.” They’ve arranged for a private rehab in Santa Monica, Dad explains, and he is going to drive me straight there after dinner.
I could just not go, but I’m an ambivalent addict, so I take the passive route. I’m not happy with my life, and I want to make Dad happy, and things have gotten so bad that I feel like I owe it to my parents to give rehab a shot. I’d love to wake up and be rid of my addiction, which is another way of saying that I don’t actually want to quit coke, not really, or else I’d be willing to do whatever it takes to get clean. I’m stubborn, and I don’t believe rehab will work or that I even want it to work.
I walk out the back door and call Curtis, who’s at the apartment. “Hey,” I say. “I’m not going to be coming home.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“I’m going to detox. I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to do me a favor. I need you to pack me a bag of clothes. Get my duffel bag from my bedroom and throw in some C1RCA T-shirts, shorts, and some shoes, and bring it to my dad’s house. They don’t want me to leave.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you to do me a bigger favor. When you pull up, I want you to have some fat lines already racked up on a CD. I’m going to walk out into the driveway and grab my shit.”
“Okay. All right.”
When Curtis arrives at the gate and calls me, I tell Dad, “Curtis has my clothes, I’m just going to grab them real quick.”
Before he can react, I go outside to Curtis’s car and get in. He hands me a rolled-up bill, and I snort half a gram of coke in ten seconds.
“Holy shit,” Curtis says. “This is really happening.”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “it’s going down. But don’t worry, I’ll see you in a week.”
I have no memory of going back inside the house. Apparently I tell Dad that Curtis forgot some of my clothes and we need to stop by my apartment on the way to Santa Monica. Apparently, when we do, Erin says, “Are you okay, baby? You look really fucked up.”
* * *
—
It’s unusually cold for L.A. this year, and I am checked into a bungalow at the Fairmont under an alias. I have a bedroom, and there is a decent-sized living room. For the next week, I’ll be under twenty-four-hour supervision by two caretakers who alternate shifts, while nurses and doctors periodically check in on me. I can walk around, but I can’t go outside without an escort. I’m bored out of my skull.
I text Curtis and ask him to bring me the remote for my Sony PlayStation.
“Okay.”
And some coke.
“Absolutely not.”
Like me, Curtis is good at making fine, questionably existent distinctions. Bringing me coke before was a last hurrah. Bringing it to me now would be nuts.
When Curtis arrives, the caretaker searches him, patting his pockets and riffling through the bag he’s brought with him. Curtis pulls some Gatorade and snacks out of it. Then we go into the bedroom, where he reaches into his tighty-whities and fishes out a mini-bottle of vodka. I should probably feel guilty, but the only thing I feel is an addict’s edict to get high. My blinkered pursuit of that goal blots out any possibility of reflection upon what I’m doing.
The real problem is that the detox team thinks—because Dad thinks, because I use needles—that I am addicted to heroin. And I let them keep thinking it, even though I really do want to be free of the coke (or wish to, at least, since I’ve made no effort to make it happen). I feel there’s a dark glamour to heroin, and that a heroin habit somehow puts me in a more sympathetic light—that its fabled addictiveness makes me seem less responsible for failing to wean myself off it. And so the treatment, which is for an opiate dependency I don’t have, does nothing to cure me of my very real and destructive coke problem. On the upside, the narcotic they give me is strong stuff, and I get extremely high off it.
I feel endless turmoil. How did I let things get to this point? I don’t like what my life has become, and at the same time I alone am responsible for it. I feel powerless to do anything, but only I can change it. But I don’t, so I just hate myself and keep doing the thing that I hate, and keep spiraling perversely, desperately, into more extreme behaviors.
5
1983: What About This Guy?
Some of my fondest memories from when I was a young kid are of Christmas. It would be just the three of us—me, Mom, and Dad—at the house in Montecito. I’d come downstairs in the morning, and Dad had made a fire, and Mom had made everything beautiful, down to the last detail, with bulging stockings hanging from the mantel. Or else we’d go to Snowmass, near Aspen, where we rented a condo until Dad bought Wildcat Ranch, and he’d set up a tree, and it would be just our little family, cozy and warm and surrounded by snow.
I think Mom and Dad tried hard not to fight in front of me, and to the extent that I was aware of the tension between them, I didn’t connect it to any likely long-term consequences. Instead, I remember happy times snowmobiling with Dad, or dirt biking together. Anything with an engine that went fast, we both loved. There was no inkling yet of the troubles that lay ahead, for Dad and for Mom and for me.
* * *
—
With Dad working so much of the time, and Mom often preoccupied, a village of other people helped raise me. Once a week, when we were in California, I’d go over to Pappy and Oma’s in Beverly Hills, and they’d feed me spaghetti with butt
er and Parmesan for dinner. I felt loved by them. Pappy was big and good-looking and had real presence. He was a tough, virile guy, but he was always sweet and loving to me, and I never felt intimidated by him. Every time I’d see him, he’d stoop as if to retrieve something from the ground and say, “What’s this?” Then he’d stand up holding a $50 bill, which he’d hand to me. In California and New York, Pappy would take me on great little outings to shows like Cirque du Soleil and the Big Apple Circus, which featured grizzly bears in diapers. “I don’t think those bears like that very much,” I said. “Nah, I don’t think so either,” Pappy said.
* * *
—
Other times, I’d be left at Granny’s house in Sherman Oaks. I didn’t realize then that these extended visits often coincided with periods when Mom and Dad were separated or going through a particularly rough patch in their marriage. Granny was an actress who often performed on the stage. From growing up in Bermuda, where her father was attorney general, she had a slight British accent. I loved spending time with Granny and felt a deep connection to her. She taught me to play chess, and since she was a big golfer I’d tag along with her to the driving range. Then we’d go to Hamburger Hamlet for a bite. Years later, when I was DJing and taking a stab at acting, she’d be my champion, always believing in me and my abilities. I loved her so much.
Me, Pappy, and Dad.
I also loved Uncle Billy, her second husband, who’d raised Dad and Jojo. He was what I imagined Ernest Hemingway to have been like. He was a man’s man, always smoking his pipe, a very sharp guy with zero tolerance for bullshit, and a gentleman who carried himself with grace.
* * *
—
When I was five, and we made the move to New York—driven east by Mom’s unhappiness with California and show business—we lived on the Upper West Side, surrounded by friends. We spent a lot of time with the Wenners, who had a town house on Seventieth Street, a few blocks away. We’d sometimes spend the weekend at their place in Southampton. They had an amazing collection of movies, and I saw The Breakfast Club there for the first time. Sometimes if Dad wasn’t around, Jann, being my godfather, stepped in. I remember him grounding me once; for exactly what, I don’t recall. The Ronsons lived next door to us in the San Remo. I had a crush on Charlotte, was pals with Samantha, and looked up to Mark, who was a few years older than me and already playing around with turntables.
Sometimes Mom and Dad would drop me off to play with Sean Lennon, who was three years older than me, at the Dakota on Seventy-Second Street. I don’t know if I already knew the details of his father’s death, but I always had the distinct feeling that the building was haunted. Sean was quiet. Sometimes Yoko was there, but we mostly hung out in Sean’s room, which had an egg chair hanging from the ceiling, listening to music or playing board games. One Sunday, Mom and Dad and I went over to Strawberry Fields with Sean and Yoko and linked hands for Hands Across America, the follow-up event to USA for Africa’s “We Are the World.” The idea was to forge a continuous human chain across the country to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness. I was vaguely aware that it was for a higher cause, but I was in my gym sweats from school and just felt like a little kid doing a sing-along with his parents.
* * *
—
Occasionally Mom would have her driver, Lawrence, a tall, distinguished gentleman, drop me off in Montclair, New Jersey, at the home of Patsy and Jimmy Webb and their six kids, for what seemed like weeks at a time.
Jimmy was a successful songwriter. He’d written “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which was a Glen Campbell hit, and “The Highwayman,” a number one country hit for the Highwaymen, a supergroup that included Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Patsy was the daughter of the actor Barry Sullivan, who’d starred opposite Pappy in The Bad and the Beautiful, and had met Jimmy when she was twelve. Dad met her around the same time, when he starred opposite her father in a CBS Playhouse episode called “The Experiment.” When I stayed with the Webbs, Jimmy never left his den except to go into a side room where he built model battleships. He’d call me in, and he’d sit there in his bathrobe drinking whiskey while we watched movies, such as Innerspace.
I was closest to their son James, who was my age. We’d go up to his brother’s room in the attic and play The King of Chicago, a 1930s mobster game, on his brother’s Amiga computer, or we’d get Patsy to take us to an arcade at the Willowbrook Mall. She was a terrible driver, and I always felt that my life hung in the balance when I got in a car with her. James’s older brothers had a pretty good band, and we’d hang around when they threw house parties and performed. We’d play ninjas with James’s friend Ian and also take part in Mini V—Vietnam War reenactment for kids—which was basically an excuse to wear bandanna headbands and act like Rambo.
When I turned eight and we were living in New York, Mom and Dad threw my birthday party in the evening, at the Manhattan nightclub Regine’s.
* * *
—
That summer, Dad decided I needed a more constant male influence in my life, someone to stand in his place when he was away. One day, he and Mom were having lunch at the Ivy in Beverly Hills, talking about their need for a nanny and someone to manage the house in Montecito. Dad was taken with the Hispanic busboy, who had Indian features and a knowledgeable smile and was very attentive. Dad said, “What about this guy? He seems very capable. He could be a houseman or something like that.” Mom spoke to him in Spanish. His name was Joaquín, and he was from El Salvador. They got his number. Soon, Joaquín was living with us. He took care of me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep.
Joaquín came with us when we moved back to New York in the fall. He didn’t speak English, so he and I spoke Spanish. His three favorite things in the world were Three’s Company, the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona, and hunting for dinosaur bones, which he would take me to do in Central Park while dressed in one of his sizable collection of safari suits, all in different colors, which he had spent a lot of money on. I don’t think he actually thought we were going to find T. rex vertebrae in Sheep Meadow, but he was a dreamer. He was so passionate about dinosaur fossils, and Central Park was the closest thing to wilderness in New York City. Joaquín got especially serious about the bone-hunting when we went to Snowmass at Christmas; he’d grab perforated serving spoons from a kitchen drawer, and we’d head out to a hillside and start digging together.
In New York, Joaquín would pick me up at the elementary school I went to on the Upper East Side, Birch Wathen, where I had to wear a coat and tie, and we’d walk home across the park, turning our routine into a mission where we’d climb over walls and shimmy up trees. Along the way, I’d pocket rocks that glinted with mica, and I amassed a large pile of them under my bed. I liked to hold on to things I thought were special.
Joaquín showed his love by feeding me. He’d cook me huge breakfasts of rice and beans and steak and eggs and grilled onions on a massive plate. He’d say: “Eat, eat, eat!” Dad thought I seemed unhappy, and when I started getting chubby, he investigated and found out Joaquín had been taking me to White Castle for bags of twenty-seven-cent burgers.
Sometimes I’d get Joaquín to take me to Chinatown, where I had my earliest exposure to the underworld and its dealings. A street hawker would take us down into a basement and pull bags out of the ceiling, with illegal fireworks inside. I loved fat, red M-80s with green wicks, which were packed with explosive flash powder; pineapples, which were twice as big; and Roman candles. My friends from Birch Wathen and I would have Roman candle wars in Central Park; and upstate, at our weekend rental in Pound Ridge, I’d bury a pineapple in a hole and set it off, or else use it to blow up someone’s mailbox. Even then, I felt a thrill at my brush with the illicit.
This was during the time when Dad was becoming a huge movie star and traveling even more than usual, and Mom was bitter and not around much either, for all intents and purposes. Joaquín was the one who was always there for me. He woke me up, t
ook me to school, picked me up, played with me, bought me Nintendo games, made me dinner. I spent more time with Joaquín than with my parents, and I often told him that I loved him more than them. Everything seemed so cut and dried in my young mind.
I was always in capable hands, and loved and cared for, just not necessarily by my parents. By now, I was starting to build some resentment toward Mom. As I saw it then, Dad had a legitimate excuse for his absence, and I was used to his comings and goings. Mom was supposed to be taking care of me, and for a while had done so, but increasingly she wasn’t. She was still very young, and I think the issues between her and Dad were building, and she was in constant turmoil.
* * *
—
Right after we moved back to Santa Barbara, when I was ten, Joaquín, who’d brought his girlfriend and her daughter west to help around the house, came to me and told me he was leaving. He was crying. I was crying. His girlfriend and her daughter were crying. It was heartwrenching. He told me he was going back to his country to fight for his people’s freedom. I’d later learn that Mom had found vodka bottles under Joaquín’s bed and asked him to stop drinking. I’d seen the bottles there, and just thought of them as being like the pile of rocks I kept under my bed. We were so close, and I was devastated, and that moment is burned into my memory. I’ve always felt like we’re going to cross paths again. Sometimes, on the street, I think I see Joaquín, and try to make eye contact, but after so many years, I know it’s wishful thinking. Maybe he’s not even alive anymore.
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