Our rations were insufficient, forcing us to eat ants, crickets, roots—anything we could get our hands on. We learned how to make traps to catch desert mice. You’d put two pieces of wood together to make a T, top it with a heavy rock, brace it with a thin tiny stick, and put a raisin on that. When a mouse went for the raisin, the stick would move or break, and the rock would slam down on dinner. Then we’d skin it, gut it, roast it, and get a couple of nibbles of meat. We were so hungry that if we caught one, we were eating it. One evening two weeks in, when we reached that day’s destination, a bag of apples was waiting for us. We each got one. I ate the core and the seeds, too. Everyone did. That’s how hungry we were. It’s amazing how much you can enjoy an apple.
Then we did solos. Everyone was assigned his own isolated plot, far enough apart that none of us could see each other. Each plot was marked by a circle of stones with a ten-foot radius, and we had to stay in the circle for three days. The guides gave us each a pencil and notebook. I journaled. I did my mundane daily chores. I made my fires and tended them. I managed my sparse rations. I could eat as much as I wanted or as little as I wanted in a sitting, but those rations had to last the whole three days. The solo was profound, and it was trying. I’d never been alone like that, and it was hard to be with myself for so many hours, but I found to my surprise that I enjoyed the solitude. The silence was spiritual. I took pride in how well I was adapting to the challenge.
The third and final week, it was our turn to track the next group of first-weekers, spying on them through a telescope. By then, we were thin as twigs and caked with desert dirt, but there was a shared sense that in a short time we’d all matured and grown in surprisingly meaningful ways. Even the kids who’d really struggled and you didn’t think were going to make it were coming along. We’d formed a fairly capable and cohesive unit. It was a real confidence builder, for all of us.
One morning, we woke up and set out hiking for the last time. We walked for hours, singing in the predawn darkness. Eventually, as we approached what the guides called “trail’s end,” we could see our families walking to meet us. Mom and Dad were there, and we hugged. Then, each kid demonstrated a skill learned over the past few weeks.
Some kids demonstrated how to make a mousetrap, others how to make the nest used to turn an ember into a fire. I’d decided to show how I could make a fire with my wooden bow. It was a windy morning. I worked on it, and I couldn’t get it. I could tell that the guides were on the verge of saying, “It’s okay, let’s move on.” But I wouldn’t stop. I kept working on the flame, working on it, working on it, refusing to give up. Finally, it caught. I warmed the embers, built the fire. Mom and Dad were so proud. They had a look on their faces that I hadn’t seen in a while: hopeful.
We went to the hotel where the families were staying, and where there was going to be a brunch buffet for all the kids and their parents. Before I jumped into the shower in my room, I paused to look in a full-length mirror in the bathroom. It was the first time I’d seen myself in three weeks. I saw a different person, lean and mean and dirty, a young warrior. I liked this version of me. It made sense. I felt like I’d gone through some real changes. I’d tested myself and come out stronger. I was fourteen.
* * *
—
Dad was between Falling Down and Disclosure, and Mom was gearing up for the release of a documentary about Dada artist Beatrice Wood that she had helped produce. While they tried to figure out where to send me next, they parked me in New York City at a place called Beekman, which was basically The Breakfast Club: The School. Beekman had a smoking garden, I got to make my own schedule, and kids sat on their desks in class or openly carried on side conversations. My friends and I arranged our classes so that we had a two-hour lunch block, when we’d go to the park, skate, and smoke weed. Afterward, I’d sit through math stoned, while Charlie, our teacher, gamely tried to impart knowledge to our classroom of ne’er-do-wells.
Beekman was on East Fiftieth Street, near to where many of my BHC tagger friends lived, and right in prime skating territory. The skyscrapers in midtown had staircases and fountains and rails and ramps; we were in a constant war with the security guards as we went for kick flips, really high ollies, trashcan ollies, 180 ollies, nollies (off the nose), tail slides, nose slides, board slides, and grinding (sliding on the trucks). My graffiti improved. I got the lettering down pretty well, and basics like throw-ups and big outlines and bubble letters, though I never mastered the more intricate, artistic piecing.
Post-Idaho, I had more confidence, and a newfound desire to test myself and see what else I was capable of. Skating, I’d grab onto moving buses and trucks and taxis, letting them pull me down the avenues. The taxi drivers were the craziest; when they’d see me in their rearview mirrors, they wouldn’t stop or yell, they’d punch the gas. A few times, they accelerated so quickly that, if I’d fallen off, I could easily have died.
Tagging, I’d join the crew in seeking out the most hard-to-reach spots. We climbed scaffolding, so that when it was removed, people would wonder: How the fuck did you get up there? We wrote on the sides of interborough bridges, wrapping one end of an extra long belt around a railing and the other end around ourselves, and dangling off the side of the bridge to paint. I was fixated on pushing myself to see what I would do and what I could do. I wanted to go further than any of the kids I was hanging out with. I got off on the exhilaration and adrenaline and on the respect I earned through my antics. In my teenage mind, they made up for the baggage of my last name.
Meanwhile I was trying new drugs, expanding into ecstasy and cocaine, which I bought from delivery services in the city. My behavior, as far as I was concerned, was consistent with the warrior version of myself I’d glimpsed in Idaho. To me, SUWS had been about having a positive experience, not about turning myself around, so now I didn’t feel like I was regressing. My life felt fun and relatively innocent. I was enjoying the freedom that I had.
It was also around this time that I started to get into DJing and electronic music, through Deter. His real name was Beau, and he was resident DJ for two Drum & Bass parties in the city: Camouflage and Koncrete Jungle. I’d carry his records to the parties, dance at them, and then go back to the tiny apartment he shared with his mom on St. Mark’s Place, where he’d let me mess around on his turntables. Drum & Bass was good training. It had the fastest tempo of all the EDM genres—160 to 180 beats per minute—so once I mastered beat-matching in D&B, everything else came easily.
I liked Beekman, but I wasn’t in a position to press the issue of where my parents sent me next, and when I was allowed to return to Eaglebrook for the second semester of ninth grade, I went, and I managed to stay out of trouble.
* * *
—
That summer, in Mallorca, I experienced my first love. I finally worked up the courage to declare my feelings for Galen, my longtime crush. It turned out she felt the same way, and we’d sit up in the pool pavilion at S’Estaca and just stare at each other, for hours. We began a relationship that would last for several years.
I found that I was getting less sensitive to Dad’s anger. One night, Jay and I went barhopping in Deià and then dirt biking in the hills. We got back to the house around five in the morning, much later than I’d said we would, and we were loud coming in, waking Dad up. He called me to his room. He was naked—I guess he slept that way—and started yelling at me and getting right up in my face. Maybe he poked me in the chest to drive home a point. Soon, we were manhandling each other. Then I threw him against the wall.
I think we were both startled that it had happened. Neither of us said anything, and I walked out, but it was a turning point. Something fundamental and unspoken had shifted in the way we saw each other.
* * *
—
For tenth grade, Mom and Dad, whose marriage was still limping along, found a Quaker boarding school in Yardley, Pennsylvania, called the George School, an hour and a half from New York City. It wasn’t as lax as
Beekman, but it was more laid-back and progressive than Eaglebrook.
At George, I channeled my aggression into sports. On the lacrosse field I adapted my Youth Football technique. I wasn’t the biggest guy on the team, but I had good stick skills, and I was decisively the hardest hitter. I played right midfield, which put me about twenty-five yards away from the center spot. Usually, the players facing off would be in there for a while as each tried to get the ball. I found that if I took off at a sprint, I could usually get there before one of them controlled the ball. Keeping my hands together, which made my checks legal, I’d run at top speed, sending my target and his pads exploding in all directions. Though the hits were legal, they were so savage that referees started calling penalties, citing me for unsportsmanlike conduct or unnecessary roughness. But I became known for delivering crushing blows, and it was an effective strategy. Once hit by me, a player who found himself in a face-off again would be anxious to get out of there as quickly as possible, which led to unforced errors. Pummeling people—leveling them—was what I was best at, and what I liked to do. Dad got a kick out of my ferocity on the field, and the coaches loved it. At the varsity banquet at George, the head coach, who liked to give nicknames, singled a few of us out, calling me Cam “I’ll Slam You” Douglas.
I thrived at George, playing varsity football too, enjoying the company of girls, and making a couple of good friends. I also hung out with two janitors at the school who lived in Trenton and who I’d leave campus with to smoke blunts. On weekends, me and a couple of like-minded friends would take the train to New York, where I continued skating and tagging and increasingly DJing with Beau.
I don’t remember the first time I did coke, but I really started ramping up my use that year at George. In New York, we’d buy coke in tinfoil bindles, and we’d bring a couple of them with us on the train back to George, finishing them by Sunday night. I had ADD, and the cocaine focused me. It was rocket fuel for the life I was living and liking. I was feeling myself. I was a decent athlete. I was popular. The coke allowed me to stay up for hours and made whatever I was doing more enjoyable. Coke also conferred social advantages. I was doing it with older kids, seniors, so it had an aura that I liked. And it provided one more avenue for my overall ambition, which was to bend rules, push boundaries, and be more extreme than other kids. That instinct was powerful in me.
Drugs and alcohol weren’t yet my highest priority. That winter, tired after three years of wrestling, which was stressful and demanding, I switched to swimming for the season, thinking it would be more fun. I was still focused on sports and girls and skateboarding. Drugs, though, were the cause of my next move.
Since my expulsion from Eaglebrook, Mom and Dad had required me to submit to random urine tests. I failed one of these, and then—I don’t remember this, but Dad insists it’s what happened—I was either expelled from George or asked not to return after my weed stash was found in the giant katsura tree on the school’s south lawn, which also serves as the school’s logo. At that point, I convinced Mom and Dad that the best place for me was back in California. They were more persuadable than usual, maybe because they had a lot on their minds. Their marriage, which had been circling the drain for a while now, was about to take the final plunge.
9
1977–1995: Mom and Dad
My parents’ marriage began, as it would end, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
When Mom met Dad in 1977, she was a sophomore at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She’d interned at the White House but had become disillusioned with her ambition to join the diplomatic corps. She was at home in rarefied circles, and was close to members of the Iranian royal Pahlavi family and U.S. congressman John Brademas. Her friend Stuart, a son of future Governor of Rhode Island Bruce Sundlun, was working for the Actors Studio’s James Lipton, who was producing a State Department reception for Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, and Mom went as Stuart’s plus-one to the event at the Kennedy Center. She was nineteen.
Dad was thirty-two, and on top of the world. The year before, as producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he’d won the Best Picture Oscar, then spent the next twelve months on a hedonistic round-the-world victory lap with Jack Nicholson, who’d won Best Actor as the film’s lead. The inauguration was one of the final stops. Dad arrived at the Kennedy Center gala with Jack and Warren Beatty, and all three of them were enthralled with the ethereal young beauty in a white dress named Diandra de Morrell Luker. Dad, in particular, was infatuated and spent much of the evening talking with her on the lip of a fountain in the upstairs atrium.
Mom, for her part, had no idea who the dashing man with a beard and shag of hair was, and at first she thought he might be a well-known painter or writer. As the reception wound down, Mom invited Dad to go with her and Stuart to Pisces, a club in Georgetown. Dad said he’d meet them there later, but Mom said the club was private and she wasn’t sure he’d be able to get in. Dad confidently assured her it wouldn’t be a problem. Then he got there, and it was a problem—until eventually he got word to her inside and she came out and fetched him. He invited her to the inauguration the following day.
The next morning it was freezing, and Dad said, “Not to be too forward, but let’s watch from my hotel room. We can open the window, look down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll have a good view.” They spent the rest of the weekend together, and as soon as Dad got back to L.A., he called to invite Mom for a visit. Four weeks later, they were engaged. Pappy asked Dad if he was sure he didn’t want to wait a bit. Dad said yes, he was sure about this.
They were married on March 20, 1977, eight weeks after they’d met, beside the pool in Pappy’s backyard in Beverly Hills, with a small group of guests who included Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, and Gregory Peck. The ceremony was followed by a big reception at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Afterward, Dad invited a few dozen people upstairs to a large Moroccan suite he’d reserved. There, Mom innocently asked a woman she was talking to why three people had just gone into the bathroom together.
* * *
—
Mom had an elegance that stood out in Los Angeles. She was long-waisted, with dark blond Botticelli curls, a patrician nose, and perfect posture. But Dad was chasing his dreams, Mom was a new transfer student at UCLA, and the culture of Hollywood, where she knew almost no one, was alien to her.
When she went to her first industry dinner party, she sat next to Walter Matthau’s wife, Carol, who was in her fifties, wore white Kabuki makeup, and turned to Mom and said, “I understand you just got married. Can I give you some advice? If you want to be a really great Hollywood wife, you’ll have all your teeth removed.” Mom was perplexed. Dad had to explain the crude joke to her later.
Mom and Dad’s wedding, at Pappy’s house.
On her twenty-first birthday, Dad threw a big party for Mom at the house they’d rented in Beverly Hills, and it was a disaster. Though Mom had tonsillitis, Dad didn’t cancel the party, and while she lay ill in bed upstairs, he partied downstairs with Foreigner and other guests, nearly all of them his friends. Finally, at 5 a.m., Mom kicked everyone out. Afterward, she decided she didn’t like show business or the people in it. This would be a problem, since that was Dad’s life.
* * *
—
Dad soon bought a ranch-style house on Tower Grove Drive. It had a panoramic view and would later gain notoriety as the headquarters of Heidi Fleiss’s prostitution business. Mom and Dad were living there when Mom got pregnant.
Mom didn’t have a lot of emotional support. Surrounded by ambitious and successful people fixated on a single industry, it was hard for her to carve out an identity of her own. Dad was immersed in producing and acting in The China Syndrome, and pregnant Mom, thinking maybe she could act, had a small part in the film.
* * *
—
I was born on December 13, 1978, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I was a bald baby, and Mom and Dad called me Swifty, after the hairless superagen
t Swifty Lazar. Mom, as an only child who’d been raised largely by a governess and had no family nearby, was overwhelmed.
Soon after, with Mom not having warmed up to Hollywood, we moved to Santa Barbara. But Dad needed to be in L.A. for business, and he spent half of every week there. As his acting career took off, he’d be gone for months at a time. When he was home, and even when he wasn’t, all of the attention was focused on him, which created tension between them. She didn’t approve of his friends or their drug-fueled hedonism.
* * *
—
Six years into the marriage, when I was four, Fox greenlit Romancing the Stone, making it clear to Mom that her often-absent husband would be even scarcer in the coming years, and she asked him for a separation. They didn’t say anything about it to me, and I was used to Dad’s absences, so at the time I had no inkling of a formal change in their relationship, and within months they decided to give things another try and ended the separation.
What I do remember is that while Dad was shooting the movie down in Mexico, Mom, one of her artist girlfriends, me, and our dog got in a Toyota jeep with a tank of gas on its roof and headed south across the border, down through the Baja peninsula. We stopped in little towns, at one point having the engine changed out because ours wasn’t compatible with the available gas, and at another point driving onto a car ferry, until we finally reached Careyes, a fishing village.
We watched tortoises being born on the beach. We saw migrating monarch butterflies. I learned to scuba dive in the hotel pool. And I remember the scorpions: As we rode horses one day, a scorpion fell out of a tree onto Mom’s shoulder. Another night, there was a downpour, and scorpions swarmed through cracks in our hotel room walls, while Mom and I stood on the bed panicking over whether they were crawling up the bedposts. Some evenings, Mom would go out with friends, leaving me in the care of a Mexican babysitter who, although I was already five, pressed me to her naked breast and tried to nurse me.
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