“Don’t you love me anymore, Dad?”
“Of course I love you, Cameron. You’re my son. But I’m not going to nurture a relationship with you, because I think you’re going to die. I don’t want the same life Pappy had. I don’t want to be going into my seventies and eighties trying to solve your problems. I’ve been seeing a therapist about it.”
“What?”
“I think you’re going to overdose, or someone’s going to kill you, or you’re going to kill someone. I’m trying to prepare myself emotionally for that.”
11
1995: King of the Shits
Returning to California for eleventh grade, I was ready for a change of mindset. Mom wanted me to go to Laguna Blanca, a private school in Hope Ranch, but I told Dad that I wanted to go to Carpinteria High. Most of my friends, and all the ones who were more interested in getting into trouble than in studying, including my fellow Sewer Rats Dave and Jay, went to Carpinteria High. And it was a public school. By now, being a tough guy had become a priority for me, and you couldn’t be a tough guy if you went to private school. Maybe because Dad felt guilty for forcing me to go to Eaglebrook, or for his years of absence, he sided with me and overruled Mom.
I’d been brought up traveling all over the world, surrounded by extremely smart and successful and beautiful people—intellectuals, artists, leaders—in a cultured environment. I’d gone to elite private schools—Birch Wathen, Eaglebrook, George—where I’d been offered a level of education that the public schools around here didn’t come close to. I had grown up in the most rarefied enclaves, in exquisitely beautiful homes. And I was aware of how fortunate I’d been to experience all of that. But I also found myself drawn to the rougher, more struggling life of the poor-to-middle class.
Carpinteria was the sheep town near Santa Barbara, rife with lower-middle-class delinquents. The high school had surfer kids. It had cowboys from ranches up in the hills. There weren’t many black kids, but there was a significant Mexican gang presence. The bad kids, some of them members of the local Mexican gang called the Carpas—and not the rich preppies of Santa Barbara—were my people.
I took pride in navigating that world comfortably, in having street instincts that were authentic and allowed me to blend in. I didn’t feel like I was posing or slumming. I was making a choice based on what I wanted to do, rather than following a script determined by my education and upbringing. It was a way to feel free of the weight of my last name and the expectations that came with it. At the same time, ironically, I was unwittingly practicing the family craft—acting—and doing a good job of it.
* * *
—
I’d been stubbornly committed to the idea of going to school with my Santa Barbara friends, and now that it was happening, just as Mom and Dad were finally pulling the trigger on a divorce, I made a conscious decision about how I wanted to be seen—as a wild, dangerous kid—and acted accordingly. My friends who’d stayed in California had avoided the softening influence of East Coast prep schools, and I was insecure about my own toughness compared with theirs. They still thought New York was crazy, the concrete jungle, and I tried to confirm that idea, carrying myself in such a way that guys in Carpinteria would look at me and respect me and want to hang out with me.
My friends came from families of average means; I was an oddball. I learned that I had to be just a little bit wilder than everyone else, a little bit meaner, to get people to go from Oh, that Douglas kid, he’s a fucking rich spoiled pussy to Oh, that Douglas kid, he’s the real deal. We surfed and fought and did coke. I’d played football since I was ten, and I started out the school year on the Carpinteria High team, the Warriors. But skateboarding, more conducive to partying, was becoming a much bigger part of my life, and I soon quit football so I could devote myself to my new lifestyle.
Quitting the football team was a big deal for me. I’d never quit a sport before, and I took pride in that fact, but I told myself that I was quitting now because of my parents’ divorce. Maybe, in a roundabout way, I was; somehow, I felt that the divorce justified doing what I really wanted to be doing, which was running around with my friends, getting high and drinking 40s, and not spending a couple of hours after school every day at football practice. Some of my football teammates pushed back, challenging my decision, but when I hit them with the divorce, which was so public, what could they do except to express sympathy and say they understood.
I knew this was a pivotal moment. It was an outwardly insignificant shift that was committing me to a doomed path. Even then, I was conscious that things were going to be different going forward, and not necessarily for the better. I was giving up on normal life and saying: Fuck everything.
After I quit football, I’d still show up when everyone congregated for Friday night games, but I felt guilty being there, reminded of my choices, and I’d try to leave before the game started. I spent some of my newly free time on music. I was increasingly interested in DJing and break dancing, which I explored with a different set of friends, foremost among them Isaac, who’d grown up poor until he was eight, when he went to live with his godmother, a gay Native American woman whose tribe had money. Dad had bought me a set of turntables, and I’d make mixtapes and play parties and small raves.
Mainly, though, I was focused on being a badass. This involved sleeping with girls but not having relationships with them. If I had a girlfriend, I’d have to hang out with her. I wanted to hang out with my skateboarding friends. I loved my friends like they were my family, truly. I think I would have taken a bullet for a few of them.
Ice plants, a succulent groundcover, grew wild all over Carpinteria. As a surface, they created a low-friction cushion. We’d take the trucks and wheels off our skateboards, strap a couple of feet of inner tube under the deck, and slide down hills blanketed with the plants.
Paul, a core member of our crew, was goofy and maniacally indifferent to safety. He had a 1950s Ford pickup truck with a passenger door that didn’t close, and he liked to make sharp left turns, flinging his passenger outward as the door swung open. When this happened to me, I found myself outside the car, clinging to the door, until Paul pulled me in by my belt. Another time, we were with Jay and Hans, one of our wilder, more aggressive friends, doing mushrooms at Tar Pits, a Carpinteria beach. We were under a tree, up on a tall bluff that abruptly plunged to a section of sand where there were huge boulders. Paul started bouncing around, flapping his arms as if he could fly. He walked to the edge of the cliff, stood there a second, and stepped off. He landed on the rocks and should have died, but he only broke several bones.
Recklessness was the norm in my life. It was present in the way I rode my motorcycle in Mallorca, in the way I drove a car in California, in the way I interacted with people if I went to a party where I didn’t know anyone. It was just how I approached the world. The very real possibility of something going terribly wrong felt okay at the time, but maybe it’s also what, together with years of drug addiction, later morphed into the intense anxiety I always felt.
I was the ringleader of our group—the maker of plans, chooser of destinations, finder of trouble—and the one most likely to keep a bender going for days on end. A lot of the time, we’d all hang out in my pool house. I had good manners and an easy rapport with adults, and my friends’ parents would say things like, “Cameron’s such a nice boy.” Mom disapproved of my friends, and Dad called me King of the Shits, but given all that was going on with them, they were hardly present to impose structure on my life.
* * *
—
In that particular California environment, you gained respect by having the courage to stand your ground and fight, not run.
Until now, my fighting experience was limited to:
some little-kid fights in football
a couple of fights at Eaglebrook
the time my tagger friend Tony and I got jumped by some guys, and I swung my skateboard around violently to fend them off
wrestling, which w
as fighting minus punches
One weekend that October, I went to Avofest, the California Avocado Festival, which shuts down Carpinteria every fall as tens of thousands of people crowd the streets, listening to music and sampling the World’s Largest Vat of Guacamole.
Dad and me.
Jay and Jesse and a girl named Kate and I were running wild, stealing beer from a grocery store, acting like we owned the place, and generally being hooligans. Having recently arrived from New York, I still had a conspicuously East Coast style, defined by polo shirts and a baseball hat worn askew. We were getting dirty looks from a bunch of Carpas. At one point, I got separated from my friends. I was looking for them on Linden Avenue, the festival’s main drag, when two Carpas rolled up on me, calling me “kid” and telling me to get lost.
“You got a problem with me, motherfuckers?” I said. “All right, let’s go handle it, let’s do it.”
I was apprehensive, and hoping my aggressive talk might scare them off, but it didn’t. We headed down a side street, and I just started throwing punches at one of them. I must have surprised him, because I quickly got the upper hand and was giving him a good ass-kicking. His friend jumped on me, and I threw him off and started beating him up, too. Then an older, larger Carpas member came out onto a porch across the street, holding a baseball bat. At that point I took off running, but I was pretty pleased with myself—this was the first time I’d beaten two guys at once—and when I found Jay and Jesse and Kate, I bragged about my performance.
Twenty minutes later, I noticed a couple of cops pointing at me from across the street. I thought maybe I was being paranoid. Five minutes after that, I was in handcuffs and being charged with disorderly conduct and public intoxication.
I was put in Juvenile Hall, which was in Goleta, for the rest of the weekend. I was anxious going in—would there be a whole other level of more intimidating tough guy here that I hadn’t encountered before?—but was relieved to find myself among the same kinds of kids I was already hanging out with, and it felt like a badge of honor to cross this new threshold.
The cells in juvie had toilets in them, and I learned to hang a sheet for privacy. Juvie was also my first exposure to strict racial segregation, aimed at keeping gangs apart. The two main ones in Santa Barbara were the Eastside gang and the Westside gang, both Mexican. There was also a white Northside gang, but most of the kids in juvie were Mexican.
On Monday, I went before a juvenile-court judge and was released on probation.
* * *
—
I think Dad chalked up the incident to standard-issue teenage misbehavior, but I could almost hear Mom’s bubble popping. I’d by now been kicked out of more than one school and become an apprentice juvenile delinquent, but until my arrest she had seemed to be in denial about what was happening. She’d introduce me to her society friends and talk about where I’d be “going to school,” even as that path became increasingly unlikely. She kept asking if I wanted my childhood bedroom redecorated, but I insisted she leave the painting of a carousel on the wall and not throw out the big stuffed polar bear I kept in a corner of my room, or the gorilla who sat on my shelf wearing a three-piece suit, a cigar in his mouth. My attachment to the gorilla, at least, wasn’t due to regressive fantasies about my childhood; the vest’s watch pocket was where I stashed my drugs. After the arrest, Mom struggled to reconcile my imaginary future and my real present. She seemed not to fully understand the seriousness of my situation. One time, she brought thirty burgers and fries for all the kids in juvie, which was sweet but of course not allowed. I’m pretty sure the staff ate the food.
12
1995–1996: The Most Troublesome Douglas
With my Avofest victory, even the kids from Carpas started to respect me. As I grew wilder at the school we all went to, I became friends with some of them. Even at George, I’d been wearing my socks pulled up, but now I started blending more cholo elements in with my polo shirts: wifebeaters, sagging blue and brown Dickies khakis, bandannas, plaid flannel shirts, and Nike Cortezes, the official Cali gangster shoe. Cortezes were super light, and great for break dancing, and I liked the way they looked. Mom and Dad might make a comment about my clothes now and then, and if I needed to dress up for something of theirs, I would, but that was the prevalent style for kids in that place at that time.
* * *
—
A concrete storm trench across the street from Carpinteria High was the preferred battleground for students. It was off campus, so no teacher was going to arrive to break things up. Every day, there’d be a fight there with a crowd looking on, and I was in a few of them.
There was always some kid looking to score points off my last name, and part of what animated my fighting—what made it mean so much to me and gave me so much satisfaction—was the feeling that I needed to carry my last name in a way that was respected in that world. It was a world that no one in my family had really experienced, with the possible exception of Pappy when he was young and poor. But I parked myself in it. That was important to me. I wanted people who lived in that element to say: “Cameron Douglas is not a coward. Cameron Douglas will go there.”
If you challenged someone to fight in the storm trench, they knew there was no getting out of it, and that there’d be an audience. I looked for any reason to demonstrate my fierceness. If someone so much as mentioned my family, or gave me a look, or did anything I could take offense to, I’d fight. Some kids would talk endless amounts of shit and then not show, knowing they’d be embarrassed. I began to see that there are people who can pull the trigger, and people who can’t.
I wanted to prove that I was as tough as the tough Carpinteria kids, and that desire emboldened me. I was drinking regularly, and using coke and some crystal, which only fueled my aggression. Down in that ravine, I got my ass kicked plenty of times, but as I started fighting more often I found that, because I’d wrestled competitively for a couple of years, experience tended to give me the upper hand. A fight might start standing up, with a couple of punches, but generally it would turn into grappling on the ground, where I knew what I was doing. I realized that even getting beaten wasn’t the end of the world. I became a bully of bullies, seeking them out and baiting them; if they went for it, we’d fight, and if they didn’t, I’d ridicule them.
Carpinteria High had a lot of tough gangbanger kids, but I became known as the crazy white boy. If you were looking for a fight, you were going to find one. If you were coming at me with your friend, I’d be coming at you with a rock, and I was going to hit you with it, in the head. I usually had a buck knife or switchblade on me. In my car I kept a baseball bat, and also a roll of quarters. If I was getting ready to fight, I’d grip the quarters in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other, giving my punches instant knockout power. I learned to take my shirt off before I fought, so that it couldn’t be pulled over my head and used against me. An older kid taught me how to do a head butt if someone was right up in my face.
In the years since, Dad has asked me how I became a good fighter. I’ve said: “I’m not a good fighter. I’m just not afraid to put my chin down and swing my fists around.” And that’s what I did. It turns out there are only so many people who are willing to go to that extreme. For whatever reason, I was one of them.
* * *
—
I was endangering myself and other people, but I didn’t think I had a death wish. I was just being a wild and crazy teenager. The mood among me and my friends wasn’t dark. We were having fun, and what we found most fun was doing things that made us feel more alive, more sure of ourselves, more full of ourselves—testing ourselves and pushing boundaries.
Jesse and I knew a kid named Griffin at Santa Barbara High whose dad had a big weed stash, and we went to his house to take it. We weren’t friends, but I’d been there before, and I knew where Griffin’s room was. We scaled the second-floor balcony and found the sliding door to the room open, then made our way to his dad’s bedroom closet, where we f
ound a good half-pound of weed in a basket. Before leaving, we went downstairs and grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge.
Griffin was part of a white gang that called itself the Militia. Soon after our break-in, we heard that his crew was having a keg party, and Jay and Jesse and Sean and I went, and Griffin came up to me and said, “I know you fuckin’ robbed my house.” I wasn’t sure how he knew, and we were surrounded by his gang, but I said, “If I thought that you robbed my house, and I was standing right in front of you, I’d be down your throat so fast you wouldn’t know what happened. So what are you doing flapping your jaws? If you think I did something, let’s do something about it. Otherwise, you’re a fucking bitch.” I was taking a chance, but I also had a reputation that preceded me for being volatile and aggressive. Griffin started mincing words, and I started pushing him. I said, “You say that one more time, I’m going to fucking blast you just for saying it.” He walked away. My friends and I waited just long enough so it wouldn’t seem like we were fleeing, and then we left. As soon as we got in the car, everyone looked at me and said: “Dude, are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Did it fucking work?” I said. “Right. So shut the fuck up.”
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