Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Maria mentioned that motels are good targets, because they have cash, and I decide I’ll hit a seedy place on the eastern edge of Hollywood. My friend Coco drives me. I met her in New York and have always been impressed by her. She hustled her way through Columbia University, and we’ve had an off-and-on romance.

  I’m using an air gun, which looks like a regular handgun but is powered by a small CO2 cartridge and shoots tiny pellets. It’s only slightly more powerful than a BB gun, so I comfort myself that what I’m doing isn’t so bad. Coco waits in the car in the alley behind the motel. I go in wearing a ski mask and holding my gun and come away with a couple hundred dollars. Risk and reward are clearly out of whack: this is not going to be a sustainable way to pay my bills, and I know I’m inviting disaster. But I’m doing it less for the money than for the adrenaline, the knowledge that I’m able to do it, and the bragging rights. I like confusing people, making them puzzle over how someone who came from so much privilege can do such crazy shit. I don’t tell Coco, or anyone else, that I’m using a pellet gun.

  I do a third stickup, this time entirely on my own. I tell Erin I’ll be right back. I put a bandanna on my face, get on my motorcycle, and gun down the hill. I am scared and excited. I pull up at a nondescript motel and go into the front office. An older white woman is at the desk. I pull out my gun. She stays quiet and backs away as I reach around and open the cash drawer. She’s not in mortal danger, but she doesn’t know that. There’s only some change and one $20 bill, which I grab. I race home, crazy with the energy rush, proud of my balls, flushed with embarrassment at my paltry haul, and ashamed at having done something so outside of my character. Doing stickups at tiny hole-in-the-wall places, not even expecting to get much money—I never pictured myself in situations like these. But things are so bad and empty for me, my life is such a mess, and the stickups at least provide crumbs for my ego, scraps of self-worth, giving me a feeling of power: At least I have the balls to think about this and follow through on it. Or so I console my lost self.

  * * *

  —

  One of my biggest regrets, later, will be how little time I spend with my grandparents during these years, especially Granny. I’ve always had such a strong relationship with her, and I’d like to think that we touch base occasionally, but it’s possible that as much as a year goes by when I have no contact with her at all.

  At the moment, there’s even more distance between me and Mom than usual. She has a lot going on. She’s entangled in her custody battle with her ex-fiancé, Zack Bacon, and is trying to keep me away from him, knowing he might use my behavior to gain leverage. We rarely speak, and Amanda has recently told me—actually said the words out loud—that I’m not welcome at my own house.

  Mom is now dating Michael Klein, a rich entrepreneur who’s into yoga and the Grateful Dead and lives in a 13,000-square-foot guitar-shaped house north of San Francisco. He’s a nice guy, but he wears a fanny pack and Birkenstocks and has little in common with Mom. He eats only raw food. Mom’s raw tastes don’t go much beyond sushi and caviar.

  I’m skeptical of this new relationship, but when Mom and Michael decide to get married, in Santa Barbara in December 2005, I reluctantly agree to walk her down the aisle. I’m thinking: I’m not welcome at your house, but you want me at your wedding, because it will look better to have your son there? Mom says she’ll make it easy for me, renting a tuxedo and arranging for a car to pick me up at home in L.A.

  On the day of the ceremony, Amanda keeps calling—“Jesus, Cameron, roll out of bed, get in the car!” I keep saying, “Yeah, I just need another half hour.” Amanda starts calling Erin: “Put him in the fucking car!” But I don’t like this guy. I don’t like the idea of Mom marrying him, and I don’t want to be part of their wedding. I know my skipping it will really hurt Mom’s feelings, but I’m angry at her. I’m angry about her relationship with Amanda, among other things. I’ve told her: “If you want to know something, why not come to me and ask me? Why do you have this woman snooping around my life, giving you half-truths?” And then I have my longer-standing resentment toward Mom, warranted or not, dating back to childhood. I probably want to hurt her feelings.

  I never get in the car. Mom is devastated, and embarrassed in front of all her friends. I’m her only family in the world, and I blew off her wedding. The marriage lasts less than a year.

  * * *

  —

  I have my third seizure in a room at the Beverly Laurel, an out-of-the-way motel where I sometimes crash. I come to on the floor next to the mini-fridge, with Erin giving me CPR. I’ve pissed myself, and my teeth hurt from clenching, and our friend Jill is crying hysterically, but I’m pleased that Erin has followed my edict and not called an ambulance.

  My reaction, as with my earlier seizures, is to worry that everyone around me is going to be scared and nervous and come between me and my drugs. I want to be getting high again. My insane behavior is scary to others but not to me, not until years later, when I won’t be able to understand how I could ever have thought this way.

  * * *

  —

  Just when it seems like my death is preordained, and that I’ll be found impaled on a steering column or slumped over with a needle in my leg or sprawled on a bodega floor with a cop’s bullet in my head, something unexpected happens that causes my life to swerve in a more hopeful direction.

  Amanda, still thinking I’m addicted to heroin, reads an article online about ibogaine, a supposed miracle cure made from the bark of a tree that grows in Central Africa. It’s a hallucinogen long used by tribes there as part of a rite of passage from boy to man, and is gnarly enough that it’s an alternative to another rite, in which a boy kills a male lion and returns home with its testicles dangling from his spear point.

  Ibogaine isn’t officially recognized as a therapy in the U.S., so I agree to go down to Tijuana for it. It will get Amanda and Mom and Dad off my back. My family, still thinking I’m addicted to heroin, will pay for whatever they believe could be a cure. At a club in Hollywood, I run into my DJ friend Magnum, a musical hero of mine since I was young. He’s in bad shape, addicted to I’m-not-sure-what and looking to get clean, and I convince him to go down to the ibogaine clinic with me.

  Ibogaine has been called a miracle cure for drug addiction, which does sound appealing, but since I know that my addiction is to cocaine, I have more modest ambitions for the experiment: I’m mainly just curious about what could be a powerful hallucinogenic trip, an interesting and possibly enlightening vision quest.

  The process is supposed to take seven days, and Amanda drives me down to a café in San Diego, where I meet a guy named Nathen, who shuttles me over the border to an unassuming four-bedroom house in a leafy neighborhood. Inside is the clinic called the Ibogaine Association.

  I tell a guy in a white lab jacket who seems to be in charge that I have a strong tolerance, and he’d better give me a higher dose than most. I swallow three capsules, put on a pair of blackout goggles, and lie down on a bed on my back, as instructed.

  I quickly become nauseous. I stumble with what feel like sea legs to the bathroom, where I vomit and pee at the same time, a strange sensation. I return to the bed until the nausea returns. I try walking to the bathroom again, but this time my legs buckle, and I crawl the rest of the way.

  When I’m lying on the bed, goggled, there’s no external sensory stimulation. For forty-eight hours, I go on a sort of instrumental tour of my brain. It is as if I can feel each localized chemical reaction taking place in my mind. I am also aware of the systematic loss of my vocabulary: I watch the words drain away into some dark recess of my brain. The visuals and thoughts continue, but now I have no words to attach to them. It’s a confusing, helpless, desperate feeling.

  At some point, I become aware of someone screaming pitifully, as if they’ve lost a child. I try getting out of the bed but can’t summon the coordination to do it. I pull the goggles off. Colors are blazingly intense. Bright tracers rip across my
field of vision. I feel awkward, like a newborn animal. The screaming hasn’t stopped, and I become aware of a terrible stench. I want to get out of here immediately.

  I sit up, swing my legs over the side of the bed, find my cigarettes, and stumble out to my room’s balcony. It’s late afternoon. The sun is grazing the rooftops of Tijuana. The respite from the stench, and some stilted small talk with another patient who’s shown up while I’ve been on another planet, begins to sharpen my senses.

  A nurse tells me that Magnum has been wailing for the better part of two days. That’s my first indication of how long I’ve been lying down. That alone takes some minutes to digest. My ride isn’t due for another four days—the ibogaine trip was the treatment, and the remaining days are just for recovery—but I don’t think I can stand to be here another four hours.

  The nurse asks, “How was it?” I just look at her, then begin to make my way to Magnum’s room. He’s surrounded by three housekeepers, one rubbing his back softly, one tending to the mess he’s made, one standing there looking exhausted. They are tender and understanding.

  I don’t need to spend four days here recovering. I visualize my couch at home. I picture Junior curled up next to me, him sensing that I am healing and need love. I see myself reunited with Erin. They represent safety. I call Erin and somehow manage to communicate that I need her to pick me up, and I’ll meet her at a McDonald’s just across the border.

  I go downstairs, where two of the housekeepers are watching a telenovela. They ask if I want something to eat. In my pidgin Spanish, and over their objections, I insist that they call a taxi, or I’ll walk to the border.

  When the cab drops me off, I tell immigration officials something close to the truth: I am a drug addict who came to Mexico for a cure not offered in the U.S. It’s a hallucinogen, and I am still tripping, and it has taken a lot just to get here, and I’m just trying to get home to my family. Though I meet all the criteria for the world’s worst drug mule, I must look so pitiful that they don’t even go through my backpack.

  I walk through the tunnel to the U.S. side, where I find Erin, my salvation, waiting for me in the parking lot beneath the golden arches. I drown her in affection the whole ride back to L.A. For another week I see tracers and sparklers, the aftereffects of the ibogaine. Amazingly, my craving for cocaine has evaporated. I just have no interest in it anymore.

  8

  1993: Gooned

  Mom and Dad were understandably upset about my expulsion from Eaglebrook. I pointed out that Dad smoked pot, but he said that he’d waited until he was nineteen before he tried it for the first time. He told me my brain wasn’t fully formed yet, and that drugs would screw up my endorphins, which were responsible for my sense of well-being.

  He and Mom announced that they were sending me on a three-week wilderness program in Idaho. I put up no resistance. I knew I’d fucked up, and anyway, it sounded like Outward Bound; I thought it might be fun.

  When I got off the plane in Boise, I saw a man with a sign that said SUWS, which stood for School of Urban and Wilderness Survival. Beside him were two miserable-looking boys with carry-on bags, like me. We waited silently until a fourth boy arrived, wearing handcuffs and flanked by two big dudes. He’d been abducted—or “gooned” in SUWS lingo—while sleeping at his parents’ house, and brought here against his will. Wow, at least my parents didn’t do that. I got a momentary peek into the spectrum of parenting styles and felt a new appreciation for my own mother and father.

  We rode in a van for two hours, then left the highway and turned onto a dirt road, eventually stopping at a rickety barbed-wire cattle fence with a gate. The rest of the group was already gathered there, in a clearing. There were a dozen of us, boys and girls, and two adult male field instructors—lean, taciturn guys who looked like they’d spent a lot of time outside.

  An early role, in Oliver, with my friend J.D. at Eaglebrook.

  It was October, in the Owyhee Desert in southern Idaho. We were each handed a set of clothes: green army fatigues, hiking boots, a T-shirt, a red hooded sweatshirt, and socks. Stacks of material were scattered on the grass. I was given a bundle of tarp, string, tape, four ounces of powdered milk, rice, lentils, flour to make dumplings, raisins for a treat, and a can of peaches in syrup. We had no packs, and I asked how we were supposed to carry our gear. “I’m glad you asked,” a bald guide who seemed more senior said in a quiet monotone. “Watch closely, and I’ll show you.” He proceeded to patch together a makeshift pack out of the string, tape, and tarp.

  That night, we hiked a few miles. Then the other guide, who had scraggly facial hair, announced that we were going to make camp. He said, “Tonight, I want you to take out your can of peaches. Enjoy them, because you’re not going to have anything tasty like this for some time.” When we’d finished, he told us that the can was going to be our cooking pot going forward. He gave us buck knives, and we each punched a couple of holes near the rim of our can, threading a wire between them to make a handle. A second, larger can would serve as our drinking cup and be filled with water each morning, which we’d have to boil the night before to make it drinkable.

  I realized the next day that it was a lot of water. The guides insisted each of us finish our allotment before we could set out on the day’s hike. Some kids struggled to finish it and vomited. Some kids threw fits, crying and screaming and cursing. But it was all the water we’d be drinking that day, and without it we’d risk dehydration or worse.

  One morning, a chubby girl who was constantly throwing tantrums refused to drink her water. Then she threw it on the ground. The rest of us had to wait while she made a fire, boiled a new can of water, let it cool, and drank it. Some of the other kids yelled at her. The guides were patient and never got emotional.

  The later we set out, the hotter it was and the later we’d reach that day’s destination. Sometimes we wouldn’t get going until two in the afternoon; then we’d stumble into our destination at ten that night, and finish our chores around three in the morning. We’d only get two and a half hours of sleep before we had to wake up at the crack of dawn and do it all over again. In case anyone got ideas about running, before we went to sleep the guides confiscated our boots.

  On the second day, after we reached our destination, we were each instructed to find a piece of wood to start fashioning our fire-making kit. One of the guides demonstrated. He took a bent, flexible stick and tied a string to each end, making a bow. He then took a straight stick that would serve as a drill; and a flat piece of wood, with a shallow socket cut out, for a fireboard. Finally, he took his buck knife, which had a divot in the handle, and rested it on top of the drill. “That’s how you get pressure when you’re trying to start a fire,” he said. As he sawed the bow back and forth, the drill spun rapidly in the socket, and smoke began to wisp upward. He took the drill out of the hole, revealing a tiny coal, which he tipped into a nest of fibers he’d made from dried grass and twigs. He blew on the nest, and as flames began to rise, he put it beneath a stack of kindling.

  Now it was our turn to make bow drills. As I was cutting out the notch in my fireboard, I slipped and cut my finger deeply. I was bleeding a lot and could see bone. I was secretly thrilled, confident that I’d found my ticket out of this hellscape. This was an expensive program. They’d have to evacuate me to a hospital, probably by helicopter. I went over to one of our guides to present my program-ending injury.

  “Go get me a twig this size,” he said, indicating a three-inch length.

  “What do you mean? Look at my finger. I need to go to a doctor.”

  “Yeah, no, it’s too far.”

  I brought him a twig, and he put it next to my finger, made a splint, taped it up, and turned his attention elsewhere.

  In that moment, I realized this wasn’t going to be like Outward Bound. It was going to be like one of those programs for troubled teens that 60 Minutes investigates after a mounting number of fatalities results in state licensing authorities revoking accreditation.


  For twenty-one days we hiked in the desert, walking from dawn until dusk. Every night, we broke down our packs and set up our tarps as shelter. Every morning, before sunrise, we reassembled the packs. The nights were freezing. The days were blazing hot. The desert was barren. We wiped our asses with leaves. We were all dead tired and hungry, struggling to adjust to the minuscule amount of food. Several kids had panic attacks.

  The days seemed to go on forever. Just when I wanted to do nothing more than lie down and go to sleep, we’d have to first do our chores, like going to the stream to get water and making a fire to boil it for the next morning.

  The guides would do things like “tie” you, behaviorally, to someone who was struggling. I was one of the younger kids, but I adapted pretty quickly and moved to the head of the class. I took great pride in my bow and excelled at starting fires. I got tied a couple of times to the chubby tantrum-thrower. I couldn’t go to sleep until she’d finished what she had to do. I could give her pointers and try to keep her motivated, but I couldn’t do the work for her.

  One night that first week, as we were setting up camp, another group of kids came out of the bushes without warning. They were in their third week. Every group spent its third week tracking the next group of first-weekers. A lot of first-week kids would run, a pointless exercise in a vast desert where there was nowhere to go. When they did run, third-weekers would have to go and rescue them. The third-weekers’ visit to our camp was intended as inspiration: our ragtag group could one day—in a couple weeks—have our shit together like they did.