I think of myself as being more in drug logistics than drug sales. I never cut drugs up or sell them to users, though I’ve been known to slice open a key and throw it on the table for guests. I get drugs from point A to point B. I know some people here and some people there, and by putting them together I’m able to support myself and my friends and our drug habits, plus some toys and trips.
Do I have a knack for logistics that I could apply to a more law-abiding pursuit? Nothing else would bring me the kind of money I’m making now. And I don’t want to be in the professional logistics business. I don’t want a 9-to-5, or to be a private investigator. I want to be an artist, or I want to be a drug dealer. And being an artist isn’t accessible to me. If you want to make art and have a sustained career and be good at it, you can’t be a drug addict. DJing and acting aren’t viable options either. Heroin muffles passion. Anything that inspired me before, now takes a back seat to my job of getting and staying high. Heroin is a ball and chain, not conducive to the sustained focus and presence of acting, or to traveling from place to place as a DJ, as I’ve confirmed with my performance in Ireland. Drug dealing, on the other hand, lets me keep getting high, stay where I am, focus on making as much money as I can, and push forward in building my business.
* * *
—
I’m becoming more aggressive, more demanding of respect. A girl I know in Hollywood, who used to be in a novelty pop group, now has a busy trade in meth, coke, heroin, and 8-balls, and she and some of the girls who deliver for her have been getting robbed. I offer my protection, for a fee. Gabriel contracts with some buddies to go and scare the last person who robbed her and to ride with her drivers on their riskier deliveries. Our longer-term plan is to take over her territory. As I embrace my new career, I find myself wondering: How is it that I’m not in prison? If I’m not, who is? What did they do, and what do they look like? Am I like them? Do I just not know it yet?
* * *
—
One weekend, Erin and I are up in Carpinteria, and I run into a friend from high school, a white kid who was associated with the Carpas gang. Kevin and his wife and kids are staying at the same motel as us. He’s clearly struggling, and he says he can get me a pound of crystal for $11,000. Compared with the usual $12,500 I pay, it’s a great price, and because I’ve known him for so long, I break one of my cardinal rules and front him the cash. For insurance, he points to his family. They’re in the room next door to us, and he’s not about to take off without them.
As the afternoon turns to evening, Erin and I periodically check to make sure the family is still there. I’m starting to get a little suspicious, because Kevin isn’t picking up the phone when I call, or else he picks up and gives me some kind of runaround. When I have to leave to do an errand, I tell Erin to keep an eye on his family.
When I come back to the room, Erin is passed out and the family has left. I start calling Kevin, and when I get him on the line he invokes the standard drug-dealer sob story, claiming to have been robbed. He’s down in Oxnard, and I somehow convince him to meet with me to talk.
As Erin and I get near to the bar where we’re going to pick him up, I tell her to move into the back seat. When Kevin gets in, I’ll lock the doors and Erin will hold a gun on him, and we’ll take him to see Gabriel, who’ll have ideas on how to handle this. Kevin is standing with a couple of Mexican gangbangers when we arrive, and he gets into the car. I start to pull away.
“What’s up?” he says.
“Dude, I’m going to tell you right now: Erin’s behind you, she’s holding a pistol on you, we’re going to take a little ride and figure this out.”
I start picking up speed. I’ve locked the doors, not realizing that any door can still be opened from the inside. He simply opens his door, jumps out at more than twenty miles per hour, gets to his feet, and takes off running.
I go looking for him but don’t find him, and never get my money back.
* * *
—
In November, I invest in a nightclub, Stereo, which a friend is opening in Chelsea in Manhattan. I put in $150,000 and Gabriel puts in $50,000, and we fly into New York for opening night. I’m moving three to five pounds of crystal a week. I make $10,000 profit from each pound, meaning a net weekly profit of $30,000 to $50,000. As a cash business, the nightclub will be good for laundering our profits.
But even though I’m done using coke, I become increasingly aware during this trip east that it isn’t done with me. It has taken a lingering toll that is only now revealing itself. Visiting New York, I run into people I’ve spent years with who greet me as a close friend, and who I can’t quite place. I cross paths with women and know that we have years of history but not what that history is. Did we have sex? Did we work together? Are we friends? This happens a lot and creates awkward interactions. It feels as if an alien entity hijacked my body and lived my life for me, while I slept. It’s sobering to think I was so out of my mind, and how narrowly I escaped permanent injury or worse.
* * *
—
If I’m seeing Pappy and Granny during this period, it’s very rarely. A couple of times, I go with Dad to see Pappy on his birthday. None of them knows I’m using heroin. My dad thinks I’m taking Suboxone and everything is under control. To explain my newfound prosperity, I tell Dad that I’m organizing parties, which is plausible given my DJ history. He seems to buy it. He sees that I’m living in a nice place, and have some nice toys, but he doesn’t know the kind of money I’m making, or the extent to which I’m taking care of other people. He invites me and Erin to join him and his family over the Christmas holidays, first in Bermuda, then on a charter cruise around the Bahamas. Just before leaving L.A., Erin and I send a pound of crystal to Emmanuel. During our layover in New York, I receive an e-mail from him: “Please call me ASAP, still no package / your east coast friend.” Erin checks FedEx tracking and sees that the package has been delivered to an address in L.A. When she Googles the location, we’re in for a shock: our crystal is sitting in a branch of the Los Angeles Police Department.
16
1996: Booty Juice
On a rainy day in late October, when Dad was busy shooting The Game, and I was three weeks out from completing the La Posada program, I went to my friend Isaac’s house for our friend Arianne’s birthday party. I was still wearing an ankle monitor and was allowed to drive only between home, school, and AA meetings, so our friend Sean, whose soggy mattress I’d lost my virginity on, drove me and my new Doberman puppy, Sultan, to the party in Mom’s car, a GMC Jimmy.
At Isaac’s house we drank 40s and snorted crank, and by the time Sean and I left several hours later, we were both pretty faded. He was driving us down State Street, the main drag in Santa Barbara, when he rear-ended a stopped car at a red light. Our car’s back window was open, and Sultan bolted. Sean jumped out of the car too, and fled the scene. I would have joined them, but the car was registered in Mom’s name, so running away wasn’t an option.
It was a minor fender bender. I was still on home supervision, and I thought I could keep this from becoming something bigger. I slid behind the wheel, intending to pull alongside the driver of the other car and talk before police arrived. Suddenly, a man in a suit with an earpiece lunged through my window and tried to grab the keys out of the ignition. I panicked, unsure whether he was a good Samaritan or a lunatic, and punched the gas.
I flew down State Street, blowing red lights, thinking I’d made a clean escape. Four blocks away, as I screeched left onto Cabrillo Boulevard, I clipped a taxi. I lost control of the car and spun through the intersection, crashing into the Dolphin Fountain, a local landmark featuring a trio of breaching dolphins.
I must have been out for a while, because when I regained consciousness my face was mashed into the pavement and a cop’s knee was on the back of my neck. Complicating matters, it turned out that the man who’d lunged through my car window was a U.S. Secret Service agent in the advance detail of President Clinton,
who’d be stumping at a local campaign rally a few days later. And after I’d floored the gas, the agent had held on to the car, and I’d dragged him until I crashed. Miraculously, neither of us sustained serious injuries. But I knew I was in deep shit. Dad drove up from L.A. late that night.
I was furious with Sean for ditching me. He had his license, and was allowed to drive, and at worst would have gotten a misdemeanor DUI charge. The stakes were much higher for me. But Sean ducked my lawyers’ calls, and I was sentenced to four years and change in the California Youth Authority. CYA was where the kids Los Prietos couldn’t reform got sent: kids who did drive-bys and stabbed people and committed sex crimes. Repeat offenders. CYA could hold you until you were twenty-five, and it was famously vicious. People got killed in CYA. Prison gangs started there.
While I waited to be designated to a CYA facility, I was back in juvie, in Goleta. San Marcos, a high school, was next door, and I was brought there in shackles to take my GED exam. At night I’d lie in my rack, listening to the San Marcos Royals football games—“First down…Diego Viera makes the tackle”—which somehow drove home how badly I’d fucked up, and how much I was missing out on. It was a nice time of year, and I was stuck in this tiny cell, and I felt something rare for me—regret. I was scared about what lay ahead. But Dad had assembled a high-powered team of lawyers to represent me, and thankfully they were able to convince the judge to send me to an educational lockdown facility instead of CYA. I turned eighteen right before I was sent off to Utah, wearing handcuffs.
Me and Dad, 1996.
* * *
—
The writer Sean Wilsey, in his memoir Oh the Glory of It All, describes the “therapeutic boarding school” he attended in California—the Cascade School—as a cult-like, militaristic penal colony for alienated teenagers. But when the teachers at Cascade wanted to really scare the kids, Wilsey writes, they’d threaten them with a more extreme alternative called Provo Canyon School. “ ‘If you don’t make it here, then you’re going to Provo,’ ” a teacher named Neil liked to say. “ ‘And at Provo they’ll bend you over a bunk bed and shove a dick up your ass.’ ”
I was going to Provo. It had separate boys’ and girls’ campuses and a five-level system. Everyone started out at Level 0 and was released at Level 4. How long you stayed there depended on how fast you could work your way up the levels.
Level 0 was Orientation. They shaved our heads, replaced our street clothes with gray sweat suits, left us in a room watching The Price Is Right for hours, made us walk everywhere in a single-file line, and wouldn’t let us call our parents. The idea was that you’d earn small rewards for each new level you attained.
The staff were mostly Mormon, and many of the orderlies were hulking South Pacific Islanders. In Orientation we met the department heads, and each of us was assigned a counselor who’d oversee our particular case. A staffer named Cynthia was especially friendly toward me. She was in her thirties, blond, Mormon, and kind of hot. On a cross-country ski outing soon after my arrival, I thought she was acting flirtatiously.
By this time, I felt like I connected well with girls and women. I preferred their company to boys’ and men’s, and sometimes felt that I brought out a mothering instinct. They saw potential, and at the same time they thought I was lost or crazy, and they wanted to be the one to change me. They felt that I needed them. I probably did.
That night, I asked a kid who’d been at Provo for a while if this was typical behavior for Cynthia, because if it wasn’t, I thought she might be into me. “Don’t get too excited,” he said. She had a husband and kids, and “that’s what she’s like with everyone.” I set aside my daydreams of erotic private lessons, reviving them only for jerk-off sessions.
If you failed to comply with any of Provo Canyon’s many rules, you’d be told to “take a chair,” which meant sitting in a chair facing the wall until a teacher deemed you sufficiently chastened. You also might be put “on investment,” which meant getting sent to the Investment Unit, either “short-term” or “long-term.” Investment was a big locked room where all the kids who’d been sent there had to sit on a bench, staring at a wall. Short-term meant you had to do this for hours. Long-term meant you had to do this for days or weeks. You were forbidden to make eye contact with one another, and a guy sitting at a desk up front monitored you the whole time.
I got sent only to short-term a couple of times, once for getting into a fight on the basketball court. But it was pretty fucked up. If you spoke while you were on investment, the monitor would reset the clock and you’d have to start over from the beginning. If you acted out or were disruptive, a staffer would “dial 9,” calling in reinforcements who’d stab you in the ass with a syringe full of “booty juice” (the antipsychotic drug Haldol) and put you “on observation.” That meant isolating you in the Solitary Room in back, which was a concrete cell with a drain in the floor that was your only option if you needed to relieve yourself.
Unlike all the other places I’d been, which focused on reforming budding criminals or rehabilitating drug abusers, Provo also had students with serious emotional problems, and the tough-love approach didn’t seem to help them. Once, when I was on short-term investment, a kid named Roman, who seemed not to be all there, wouldn’t stop asking questions, and stood up. The monitor told him to sit down, and when Roman refused, orderlies literally dragged him to the Solitary Room, where he screamed bloody murder. It sounded like they were beating the shit out of him.
I had it easier than other kids. At eighteen, I was older than most of them and had my GED, so while they were at the Learning Center taking high school classes, I had my own schedule. I could bounce around and audit courses as I wished, which usually meant English or art, which was taught by a woman who played Enya CDs relentlessly. I also took some home-study courses from Brigham Young University, and I spent a fair amount of time doing odd jobs for staff, which put me in their good graces. I wasn’t doing any drugs for the first time in a while, and I started a regular meeting for students, focused on substance abuse. I was a role model, someone the staff turned to for help handling other kids.
* * *
—
One day, Cynthia asked if I’d like to play chess sometime. My fantasies instantly revved up again: She wants me. But a couple of weeks passed with no follow-up, and I began to think my imagination was overactive. Then, as I was going into the chow hall one day, she saw me and challenged me to a game right then. It’s on. We headed toward the staircase to her office…and passed it. Damn. It’s not on. We were going to play in the Learning Center. She found a vacant classroom, where she pulled two desks together and began setting up the board. The door to the room had a huge window that large guards—paid to patrol the corridor to make sure teachers were okay—could walk past and look through at will. This wasn’t fertile Penthouse Forum territory.
We were still developing our pawns when I felt something brush my leg. Was Cynthia playing footsie with me? No. It was my hormones again. I really needed to stop thinking that there was—
Holy shit! Her legs had clamped around one of my legs. Staring at me, she said, “Cameron, you have really cool eyes.” I leaned in for a kiss. She leaned in and kissed me back. Holy shit! And phew! And holy shit! After a few seconds of this, we broke off the kiss and, with the door’s large window in mind, began packing up the chessboard. She asked if I wanted to finish our chess game at a later date. Yes!
I didn’t see her for a few days. Then, when I did, she was aloof. Another two weeks passed, and I began to question whether our kiss had even happened. One day, when I was in line in the chow hall, I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was Cynthia, who asked if I’d like to finish our chess game. I followed her out of the room. This time, we took a right toward the staircase that led to her department’s offices. Instead of her office, though, she took me to my counselor Stephen’s office. He was gone for a week at a convention. There was a couch in there, and we fucked on it.
C
ynthia and I started having hardcore, uninhibited sex every day. At first, it seemed like a dream come true. Cynthia would appear in the dorm, in the chow hall, at the basketball court, and call me out. We had sex all over the compound: in her office, in an auditorium bathroom, in a recreation shed where all the balls were kept. Once, I convinced her to have a three-way with me and my friend Danny, a charismatic, athletic kid from Orange County, in the activities shed.
Though Cynthia had a family, and was in a position of authority, she was clearly developing strong feelings for me. I started to dread her impromptu requests that I stop whatever I was doing and come with her. It felt like I was her indentured servant, if not her sex slave. She made a poor effort to conceal what was going on, as if she couldn’t help herself. She’d come to my unit at night to fetch me, and the unit cop would wink at me and say, “Cameron, time to get back to work again, buddy.”
Eleven months after I got to Provo, I had worked my way up to Level 3 but was mysteriously unable to progress to Level 4. Staff who were in positions of authority had to unanimously agree to advance a student to Level 4, and a staffer I was friendly with told me that Cynthia kept blocking my advancement. She wouldn’t sign a release form. I explained to Cynthia that in order for there to be anything between us, she needed to let me go. She relented, and not long afterward Dad flew to pick me up in a small charter plane that took us from Provo to Santa Barbara. On the flight, I told Dad about my exploits. “Sounds risky,” he said, “but I can’t be mad at you.” I basked in his pride. We were both optimistic about my future.
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