Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Every weekend, I’d Amtrak to New York City, my new playing field, to skate and drink 40s and smoke blunts and do mushrooms with a graffiti crew I was getting to know called BHC. Its members tagged, or signed their work, as Tone and Kaz and Chast and Deter; a couple of them later became skater extras in the movie Kids. My tag was SAKE, as in for God’s sake; I liked how the letters mashed together.

  Drugs went hand-in-hand with the culture of skateboarding and “writing,” which was the umbrella term for all the varieties of painting graffiti. We’d go to bodegas above 100th Street to buy weed, or to dealers hanging out in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, or to an old lady who ran a comic book store near Columbus Circle and sold us mushrooms.

  I liked doing mushrooms and acid. I enjoyed the way they changed how things looked, with colors becoming brighter and patterns coming to life. Tripping, I could sit and stare at a wall for what seemed like hours. Every experience felt like a vision quest, where I’d make new mental connections and have psychological epiphanies. The revelations would stay with me for days, I remember, though I can’t recall any specifics now.

  As I got more interested in drugs, I became less interested in seeing friends from childhood. I still considered them friends, but we were into different things. They were squares, and I wasn’t. My new friends and I would gather in Hell’s Kitchen, where several of them lived, or skate around the Cube sculpture on Astor Place, in the East Village. I began to learn little lessons of the street. Once, I was with Tony, aka Tone, when a kid came up to us and said, “You guys write?” I assumed Tony would say yes and talk about where and what we tagged. When he didn’t, I was about to start talking myself, but Tony cut me off and said: “Nah, we don’t write.” He knew that the kid was fishing to find out whether we’d written over something he’d written. That was how beefs started, and Tony had the survival instincts to head off that possibility.

  * * *

  —

  Eaglebrook went through ninth grade, but when I returned for my third and final year there, I only lasted a month. I had a little stash spot in my letterman’s jacket, an inside pocket torn at the bottom so I could reach through and move contraband around the lining. I kept a small bag of weed there, along with a couple of starter-kit pipes, bulky and ridiculous-looking contraptions pieced together from PVC tubing that gave off toxic fumes when heated. Someone must have told someone else about it, because when I was in class one day, Mr. Kilroy, my adviser and the husband of Mrs. Kilroy, our sexy medieval history teacher, searched my room and found it. I was called to the headmaster’s office. Mr. Chase had the evidence sitting on his desk. The school had a zero-tolerance drug policy, and he said he was expelling me.

  7

  2005: Spin Out

  I used to go up to Mom’s house in Santa Barbara fairly regularly. I love it there. It’s beautiful and peaceful and home to me. It’s where I finished high school and began to find myself, and some of my oldest friends are there. It’s also where I really started heading down the path to losing myself. Sometimes Mom is around, but often she isn’t.

  Now, with my ex Amanda living there, I no longer feel welcome, but one weekend when Erin is back east seeing family, Curtis and I drive to Santa Barbara for a visit. On Sunday, Curtis returns to L.A., and I stay. I’ve agreed to drive Mom’s dogs to the vet’s office with Amanda the next morning. That night, I stop by the house of Doyanne, one of three beautiful sisters I’m friends with, to say hello. She has sugar cubes of acid she’s been saving to do with her boyfriend, but she asks if I want to do them with her.

  By the time I get back to Mom’s house, it’s the next morning. The LSD has pretty much worn off, and the last thing I want to do is take Mom’s dogs to the vet, but I said I’d go. Amanda is furious, screaming at me for being late. “What are you on, Ecstasy?” I’m not late. Really, she’s just angry that I spent the whole night out. She’s been calling me for hours.

  It’s raining. I’ve been up for three days straight, and Amanda’s dead sober. When I go to get in Mom’s Escalade, Amanda says: “Motherfucker, I’m driving, you’re too fucked up to drive.” Before we get onto the highway, she pulls into a Chevron on Coast Village Road to gas up.

  “It’s my car,” I say. “You’re not driving. I’m driving.”

  “You’re too fucked up.”

  “I’m not fucked up. I’m driving.”

  I get in the driver’s seat. On the 101 freeway, we’re still arguing about who should drive. Amanda starts slapping me, and I lose control of the steering wheel. We spin out, do a full 360, skid onto the median, and hit a tree. Only Amanda’s airbag deploys. She is shaken but unharmed. I’m not wearing a seatbelt, and my head bounces off the steering wheel.

  “You can’t be driving,” Amanda says. “You’re going to get arrested if you were driving. Switch places with me.”

  I remember the bags of coke and weed in my quarter pocket and begin picturing the imminent arrival of the California Highway Patrol. I jump out of the car, hop a fence, hide behind some bushes, dump the coke onto the back of my hand, and snort it all up. When I return to the car, a guy who saw the accident has pulled over and gotten out of his car, and he asks, “Are you all right?”

  “Do you smoke weed?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hand him the bag of it. He says, “You’d better sit down.”

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “Your head is wide open.”

  Blood is gushing from my forehead and dripping onto my white shirt and khakis. I sit down on the car’s bumper and wait for an ambulance.

  As soon as the CHiPs arrive, they separate me and Amanda. The officer questioning me says: “Who was driving?”

  I say, “She was.”

  He is convinced I am lying—maybe the giveaway is the bleeding, steering wheel–shaped wound on my head—and keeps asking me the same question, despite my unchanging answer. Amanda tells the same story to the cop who’s questioning her and threatening, “You’re going to jail, sweetheart, I know you’re lying.”

  The ambulance comes, and at the hospital I get a dozen stitches in my head. Then Mom shows up to get the dogs. In front of her, one of the cops tells me, “We’re going to give you one last opportunity to tell the truth. If you don’t, you’re going to prison. Who was driving?”

  I nod at Amanda again and say, “She was.”

  One of the CHiPs starts yelling at Mom: “Do you know your son’s going to prison? We know he was driving. He’s going down.”

  But Amanda and I tell the same story, and since she’s driven the car before, the cops find one of her hairs on the driver’s seat visor. Eventually, they have to let us go.

  * * *

  —

  My world has shrunk to only a few equally drug-addicted friends. My other friends keep their distance, and my phone, which has always rung constantly, is mostly silent. Curtis is still paying rent, but my life has gotten too dark even for him, and he no longer sleeps at the apartment.

  When Dad presses me to go to another rehab, this one in Arizona, I reluctantly agree, and Amanda says she’ll take me there. She’s a compulsive nurturer. She takes care of her father, who has had legal problems. She’s been a mother to her younger sister. It’s a seven-hour drive. Around the midway point, I make Amanda stop the car, and I get out, thinking I’ll hitchhike back to L.A. But Amanda coaxes me back into the car and finally gets me to the clinic in Sedona.

  The rehab does no good, because I’m not done with drugs yet, maybe because I feel there’s nothing for me to go home to. I’m just returning to the same bullshit, with nothing really going on in my life, and no money in my pocket, where I’m a burden to anyone who has to look out for me. I don’t believe in myself. I have no discipline. I just want to do what I know I’m best at, which is drugs.

  When I return from Arizona, Mom and Dad’s attitude is understandably to stand back and see what happens. And what happens is I slip right back into my habits. My relapse starts with self-pity: No one cares about me
. No one loves me. I start getting worked up. Then it’s a short step to what makes me comfortable. Even though I’ve started to loathe the cocaine—what it does to me, how I act on it—it has a gravitational pull I can’t resist. I must have some kind of demented death wish. Every shot, I want to take myself right to the brink of overdose. If that doesn’t happen, I immediately reload and do another one.

  * * *

  —

  While I was in Arizona, Amanda found me an L.A. apartment on Craigslist. It’s on Orange Grove Avenue, off of Sunset, conveniently around the corner from Amanda’s place on Hayworth Avenue. Erin is visiting friends in Chicago, and when she comes back to L.A. I spend weeks hiding her from Amanda. Amanda hates Erin, who has replaced her in my life, and whom she unfairly faults for my worsening drug problem.

  When Amanda finds out that Erin is living with me, she starts showing up all the time. I’ll have people over, and Amanda will suddenly arrive and bang on the door and kick it until I let her in. Then she gets up in Erin’s face and screams at her, saying the meanest things she can think of: “Loser! White trash! Trailer trash! Get the fuck out of here! Nobody likes you!” Erin sits there and takes it.

  One day, Erin and I are in my bedroom, three days into a bender and double-fisting two large vodka cranberries each, when I hear Amanda yelling out front. The door is locked, and she goes around the house and starts banging on the kitchen door. It’s locked too, and on a chain, but Amanda takes a rock, breaks the window, and lets herself in. I hear her throwing things in the kitchen. I quickly lock the bedroom door but Amanda breaks it down. When she comes in, I am sitting on the bed, and Erin is on the other side of me. Amanda smacks the drink out of my hand, dousing me.

  “Fucking relax, Amanda!” I say.

  She leaps at Erin. I jump up and get between them. Amanda is brandishing a keychain with a solid metal ball on it, a miniature morning star, and she swings it, hitting the left side of my head, just below the temple. I come to lying on the floor. I’ve only been down for a second or two, but Amanda, scared, has fled. I feel a throbbing ache on the side of my head, and Erin drives me to an urgent-care place on Sunset. The specialist says my jaw is broken, and I need to get to an emergency room immediately. But my jaw doesn’t really hurt anymore, and I go home and shoot up instead. Later, when I run my finger along my jaw, I’ll feel a noticeable space where it’s supposed to connect to the cheekbone, and sometimes it will lock up on me.

  Finally I say, “Erin, Amanda is a bully. You’re an athlete, and you’re twice her size. She’s never played a sport. You could kick her ass. The next time she comes over, say, ‘You know what? Let’s fight.’ ”

  That sinks in. The next time Amanda comes over, kicking the door and screaming and trying to get at Erin, I say, “Hold on, Amanda, Erin’s coming out, she wants to fight you.” I open the door to the bedroom, where Erin is tying up her hair. And vroom: Amanda takes off.

  * * *

  —

  Really, it’s just me and Erin now. I almost never talk to Mom or Dad. They still think I’m addicted to heroin. If they only knew how much worse liquid cocaine is. Dad has me on a tough-love allowance, and what money I get I immediately spend on drugs. There’s nothing left for me to buy a new pair of shoes or go out to dinner. In a city that runs on cars, I’m carless. I walk to the few auditions I still book, sometimes traveling miles on foot, and show up to them sweating. The only offers I’m getting are for B and C movies and reality shows. I’m sitting around feeling like a schmuck, which exacerbates my cocaine use, which just makes me more disgusted with it. I am optimistic to a fault, perhaps, but sometimes I think: Maybe this is my lot. Maybe I should just accept that shit’s not going to work out for me.

  I’m brimming with resentment: toward myself, mostly. In Dad’s defense, what is he supposed to do? Am I owed something? Mom and Dad have sent me to a lot of rehabs. They’ve helped me with money. But it’s always from a distance. I’m sure from Mom’s point of view, she’s done her best to stand by me all these years, feeling she’s received little gratitude for her efforts. I do know that when Dad came to see me in New York, for what felt like our heart-to-heart, that conversation seemed to have had a greater effect than any 30-day program they ever sent me to. It’s unfortunate it ended the way it did.

  But Erin is still here. She’s the one person who has stood by me through everything, and my feelings for her have begun to deepen. Erin knows I can’t handle being alone. If we’re lying in bed together, watching a movie, and she falls asleep before I do, I wake her up so I won’t feel like I’m by myself. She says I have a fear of abandonment, and she’s right. As far back as I can remember, I’ve needed someone there with me, always, someone I really care about and who I think cares about me. Her steadfastness means a lot to me. I feel a love for her that wasn’t there before. For the first time in our three years together, I think of her as my girlfriend, as family.

  * * *

  —

  It’s only when I’m three or four days into a bender that I’m able to start enjoying it. The edginess and paranoia of the first few days are behind me. I’m out of my mind because I’ve been awake for days, and there are moments when I think I’m having a good time. To anyone else, I must look like a space alien. I see the wreckage of my behavior. I know I want the coke to stop.

  It’s during this period that I reacquaint myself with heroin, which I haven’t tried since I was sixteen. I’m supposed to go to Morocco for a DJ gig. Erin has just gotten a puppy, a hot dog named Oscar, and she brings it on the flight from LAX. We’re changing planes in New York, and her sister, Paige, meets us at Kennedy Airport to get Oscar, who’ll stay with her while we’re out of the country. But as we’re checking in for the next leg of our flight, Erin realizes that she left our passports in the dog carrier. Paige’s phone is dead, and we can’t reach her. We drive into Manhattan for the night and crash with Blake, a coke dealer I know, figuring we’ll catch a flight out the next day.

  Instead, we end up holing up at Blake’s apartment for a month. Besides missing the Morocco gig, I flake on some bookings in L.A., and my manager leaves a series of increasingly exasperated voicemails for me. Blake is a dope fiend, and stingy with her heroin, but she gives me a little bump. It’s so small I don’t think it will have any effect, but ten minutes later I feel comfortable and slowed down and leveled out. This is what I need in my life. Maybe heroin can be my savior.

  * * *

  —

  For now, though, I’m not done with cocaine hell, and back in L.A. I embrace my dangerous lifestyle, going to a tattoo parlor on Sunset called Shamrock Social Club and getting a 13—which has replaced 7 as my lucky number—inked behind my left ear.

  One day, my friend Maria says, “You need money? I know how to get some.” Okay. “We should stick up a liquor store in West Hollywood.” She says she’s done it before. We’re both high. We both need money. But I don’t believe that she’s going to go through with it, and I roll with her bluff.

  In the car outside the store, she pulls on a ski mask and gives me one to put on. I always try to act like I know what I’m doing, that I’ve got this and I’m not freaked out. But I’m high, and I’m shaken. She’s going through with it. I’m trembling with fear, afraid that a cop might walk in, or that the person we’re robbing could pull a shotgun out from under the counter. I have no idea what’s going to happen.

  Once inside, Maria flashes a handgun and tells the cashier to give her all the money in the register, which is only a few hundred dollars. I just stand there. Holy shit, holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening. Afterward, I feel exhilaration and an adrenaline rush, which I do like. Holy shit, that was unbelievable.

  * * *

  —

  In L.A., I often cop drugs on the street. I’ll go down to Skid Row, a place rife with drugs and addiction, find someone who looks like a drug addict, and say, “Take me to where the best shit is, and I’ll break you off a piece.” Around eleven one spring morning, I g
o to Skid Row and buy five balloons of heroin and four coke rocks. Minutes later, as I steer through the intersection of Fifth Street and Broadway, I hear a siren and see police lights in my rearview. I ignore this development and keep driving—“erratically” and “straddling two lanes,” the police will later claim. Eventually, I pull over near Third and Broadway. I fail a field sobriety test, and the cops arrest me. They find a bag in the car’s center console, containing 1.8 grams of heroin. They also find a folded receipt containing the crack, weighing .61 grams, and a four-inch glass pipe with burnt crack residue.

  “This isn’t right,” I say. “Why do you arrest drug addicts?”

  Erin flew to Philly this morning, so I call Amanda to bail me out. She picks me up. I’m grateful, but then she starts in with her scolding, and at the first light I jump out of the car. She starts screaming and threatening to pull my bail, but I know she won’t, and I keep walking until I get back to Skid Row. I just want to get high again.

  When I go to court, I’m put on probation, lose my driver’s license, and am ordered to attend substance-abuse classes once a week. I go to one, give the instructor a Sony PlayStation to sign me in for the rest, and never go back.

  * * *

  —

  How far can I push myself? I want to do a stickup without Maria. I’ve always had a fascination with guns. I had a BB gun, growing up in Montecito, and one time when I was ten, after seeing my neighbor beating her dog, my friend and I sat in my tree house and shot out her windows, which earned me a stern talking-to from Dad. I also went hunting a couple of times, once while visiting Dad on set in South Africa, and later when we visited producer Joel Silver at his house in Yemassee, South Carolina, and shot quail and pheasants.