Soon after shooting wrapped on the movie, I went to Brazil to DJ a wedding and play a few clubs and parties, and I ended up having one of the most amazing travel experiences of my life. For a month, I was largely incommunicado. Mom and Dad had no idea where I’d gone, and when I got home, they were relieved.
Mom had never liked drugs, had had a lot of conflict with Dad about them, and saw me repeating his ways. Dad, on the other hand, seemed to have settled into a view of my drug problem as being a manageable if unfortunate undercurrent of my life. I was booking lucrative corporate DJ gigs. I’d exceeded expectations in making the movie. Yeah, I could be wild, but I was keeping my priorities in order.
Right before the release of It Runs in the Family, Dad invited me to take a bunch of friends to Wildcat, his ranch in Aspen, without him. This meant a lot to me. We all did mushrooms and snowboarded and played on Dad’s virtual-reality golf system, hitting balls against a screen on the wall onto which you could project any course in the world. In pictures I have from the trip, my friend Curtis is wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and I’m driving a car shirtless, with a bright boa wrapped around my neck. Dad’s caretaker Mike, who spoke with a cowboy drawl, was there. When I talked to Dad, he just said, “I asked Mike how things were going, and he said, ‘Those boys are havin’ a pretty good time up there.’ ”
* * *
—
It Runs in the Family wasn’t a good movie, but I got favorable reviews—“a splashy acting debut” (New York Times), “the film’s big emotional moment is handed to him, and he comes through beautifully” (Los Angeles Times), “Cameron Douglas’s unforced portrayal…feels like the channeling of his own genuine, though flawed, humanity” (Washington Post). A movie career seemed right there waiting for me.
In the week leading up to the premiere, I received several invitations to try out for compelling new projects. Acting had felt comfortable to me, and I’d taken to it, but the job had come so easily that I undervalued it, let the attention go to my head, and made little effort to take advantage of the opportunities that followed.
After a three-day coke bender at the Winter Music Conference in Miami, I was due in Chicago to appear on Oprah with Dad and Pappy. I missed my flight out of Miami and had to catch another one the next morning. The strawberries in Oprah’s greenroom were the biggest I’d ever seen, like little crab apples. Oprah herself, when she came in, made a comment about them, saying that when she saw the strawberries she knew someone important had to be coming in. By this point in the promotion of the movie, I was comfortable doing press, but it was still impressive to be there, knowing Oprah’s influence and vast audience.
I was burning bridges in my DJ work, backing out of already promoted gigs at the eleventh hour. With doors now opening for me in the acting realm, I freaked out. I was feeling the weight of the moment: I was the next generation of a storied acting family, and everyone around me expected me to take my place in the dynasty. At the same time, I was very concerned that the responsibility of a career might get in the way of feeding my addiction. Ambition and a serious coke habit couldn’t coexist, and the coke was my priority.
I was also naive. Because I was receiving accolades after expending only modest effort, my head got big, and I thought I was more special than I was. I failed to understand that the industry has no time for that, because there’s always someone else there to take your place. For a week, I stayed at the Mondrian hotel in L.A. I didn’t have a car, and my friend John came down from Santa Barbara to drive me to auditions. Agents were courting me, and I chose a two-woman team at William Morris. But after I got food poisoning and broke out in hives in the taxi to meet them, I called to cancel the meeting, not a great first impression. Then I got close to being cast in a Spike Lee network pilot, but I partied late the night before the final audition and choked.
Having been poised to move up in the movie business, I would take many steps down, appearing in a straight-to-video National Lampoon–branded comedy called Adam & Eve, directed by Jeff Kanew, a friend of Pappy’s.
* * *
—
As I retreated further into my growing coke addiction, I developed acute paranoia, which was compounded by two very real threats. I was still living on Thirty-Seventh Street, where I had a whole turntable setup, and because I often stayed up DJing through the night there, I antagonized fellow tenants, including a local newscaster who started agitating for building management to evict me. There was also Amanda. When I’d finally summoned the courage to end our relationship for good, she’d assumed that, as in the past, I wouldn’t be able to stick to it. When I did stick to it, she went crazy. She started staking me out, waiting outside the building and berating mutual friends she saw entering.
Shooting Adam & Eve with Emmanuelle Chriqui.
* * *
—
I turned back to booking DJ gigs, met Erin, and she and I moved into the apartment near Washington Square Park, along with Jay, my DJ friend Eyal, and his girlfriend, Adi. It had a pressed tin ceiling with skylights cut out. The decor was a hodgepodge: besides the large, hand-carved opium bed from Bali, which Mom had originally imported for a furniture store she owned, there were Christmas lights, a Jim Brown blaxploitation poster, a painting of a wave, a poster that said SEXY, conga drums, and a huge African tribal mask. There were skateboard decks all over the place, and in back Eyal and I set up a music studio, with turntables and foam soundproofing. In my bedroom, I hung a photo of Dad smoking on a couch at S’Estaca and a picture of a chameleon, because my friends sometimes called me “Cameleon” in honor of my ability to adapt to any milieu, whether a White House reception or a correctional facility.
I still had trouble being by myself. It wasn’t solitude that was the problem. If I were dropped on a desert island, I’d be okay. It was more an inability to tolerate the idea of people not wanting to be with me. If there were people around who could be with me, and they weren’t, that made me intensely anxious, and sad, and filled with a feeling of loneliness. When I was alone, I felt like I had somewhere to go, something to figure out. So I always had a little group around me. Women I slept with accepted my post-Amanda terms of engagement, or disengagement. Dad viewed my roommates as freeloaders—the new Shits. As far as I was concerned, we were a family.
* * *
—
My coke use took a turn. I’d been disenchanted the few times I’d tried crack. It always ended with people bickering over who’d get the last hit and desperately searching the couch and carpet for crumbs, and it produced a hangover three times as awful as powder cocaine. But then Jay stole Adi’s fertility needles and introduced me to shooting coke.
Cocaine, when injected, feels like an entirely different drug. Your blood brings it up into your tongue, and you can taste it. It’s a surge of feeling. You hear sounds that aren’t there, like train whistles. Once I’d shot coke, any other way of doing it felt like a waste.
At first, I thought the needle was romantic. I’d hide my behavior, going into the walk-in closet, which had a chair and table and built-in shelves, to shoot up. But I also sort of wanted people to know what I was doing. The needle and what went along with it—the pain, the blood—had an aura, evoked a struggling, misunderstood artist. It set me apart from normal people who do drugs from time to time. It was exciting and new and dangerous. And it laid down a marker: if what I was doing was going to be an issue for you, then I didn’t want you around me. Partly I was weeding out people who might judge me, and partly I was testing the loyalty and love of my friends.
Then I became a slave to the needle and was incapable of hiding it. I’d go into the closet for hours, scrawling gibberish in notebooks and eventually emerging in some crazy costume—ski goggles, tighty-whities, dress shoes. I’d think I was being hilarious. Everyone else was just scared of me and for me.
My paranoia got worse. Because the first couple days of a bender were the most intense, I had to be up on coke for at least three days before I started having a good
time and not giving a fuck. The first twenty-four hours, I’d be a mess, always worried someone had called the police. I’d end up staying awake for days, then crashing for eighteen hours, then doing it all over again. Getting high became much more important to me than a career.
* * *
—
Eddie, my manager in L.A., came to New York the night before a gig he’d booked for me and said he wanted to come over to see me. I was days into a bender and geeking out in the closet when he arrived. I told Erin to greet him and tell him I’d been abalone diving and ruptured my eardrums, so I couldn’t hang out for long. When I emerged into the living room, I had Q-tips sticking out of my ears, and I started bullshitting about having seen a great white shark but forgetting to equalize and busting my eardrums. I was still going to make the party the next night, I promised, but I couldn’t talk now. It was a ridiculous story, and Eddie stared at me evenly, not saying anything. After he left, Erin said, “Cameron, what the fuck are you doing? Couldn’t you at least have waited until Eddie left?” Soon Eddie stopped sending me jobs.
Then I was approached by a major booking agent who had a formula for how she represented people, starting with having professional photos taken. With her, too, I flaked on a significant booking, though I don’t recall the specifics, and after that she, too, dropped me. I can only imagine all the promoters around the world who hate me because they spent money on plane tickets and developed events around me, and then I let them down.
I slowly lost my friends. They didn’t want to be around me anymore. Even Jay, who I still considered my best friend and brother, would do something passive-aggressive every now and then, seeming to betray a resentment of me as his benefactor. I’d gone on a safari with Mom and Zack Bacon and his daughter, Isabel, a few years earlier and come back with a cherished video of me wakeboarding on the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Just days after I showed it to Jay, he recorded over it. It felt like only Erin was truly loyal to me, and I prized that. It was me and Erin against the world.
* * *
—
Everybody has their own threshold with cocaine, the dose beyond which you’ll seizure. I crossed mine near the end of my time on University Place. It was the middle of the night. Erin shot me up in the closet and walked away toward our bed. She’d later tell me it sounded like I was laughing. Then I fell to the ground. She rushed over. I was rigid and convulsing. Erin ran across the apartment to Eyal’s room and woke him up. He stayed with me while she called 911. The paramedics arrived, but by then I was coming out of it. The EMTs said they needed to bring me to the hospital, and Erin rode with me in the ambulance. As soon as we got back to the apartment, I shot up again.
It wasn’t long afterward that Uncle Eric’s housekeeper found him in his one-bedroom apartment on Twenty-Ninth Street, on the floor, apparently having fallen off his sofa. Police called his death at forty-six an accidental overdose.
20
2008: A Cascade of Unfortunate Events
Even as my coke operation has grown, my heroin addiction is getting dark. At first, it was a potent medication, with few side effects. Now it’s a ball and chain that weighs 1.5 grams a day. I can’t go more than a few hours without shooting up, and even that seemingly simple procedure has become a high-pressure drama.
When I started shooting coke, I had no idea what I was doing and wrought havoc on my body, blowing out the veins in my arms. A silver lining is that this has forced me to range far and wide in search of fresh veins, so I’ve been spared the abscesses and scarring and infections of addicts who fixate on one spot. But it now can take me literally hours, and many tries, to find a vein. It’s a game of hide-and-seek. I’ll see a vein, and just as the needle touches my skin it vanishes. Sometimes the veins simply collapse. I resort to going into tiny capillaries. When I miss a vein, it burns painfully. Some of the brown is low quality and stings like battery acid.
Friends come to the house to pick me up to go out, and I’ll be in the bathroom still trying to get a shot in. Sometimes I make a friend wait forty-five minutes while I’m just searching for a vein. The longer it takes, the more anxious I become, which only makes it harder to find a vein. When I emerge, finally, I’m angry and sweating and frustrated and embarrassed, and getting sick because I’ve gone too long between shots. A couple of times, my friend Adam gets fed up and takes off while I’m still in the bathroom. If I’m shooting up with Erin, I always insist she shoot me up first, and when it takes too long I yell at her, as she sweats and shakes and tries to spot a surface vein anywhere. It’s gotten to the point where I have vein envy. I appraise everyone’s arms, and if they have fat, bulging veins, I’m jealous. Jay has beautiful veins. He always finds one right away, and never misses.
Finally, I have a stroke of inspiration: I find a doctor in the Valley who a friend has mentioned seems crooked, and I make an appointment. I tell him I want to inject vitamin B12 for working out and wonder if he can implant an IV port. The kind of port that old people who can’t find their veins have surgically installed to take their meds. The doctor cocks an eyebrow. He clearly doesn’t believe me. He just looks at me evenly and says, “Sorry, I can’t help you there.”
* * *
—
A friend convinces me to meet with a tweaker named Luke, who deals to a lot of meth addicts in L.A. He has always seemed thirsty to meet me, and I’m suspicious of him, but my friend convinces me he’s good money, and we meet in a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s late in the afternoon, and Luke is talking about wanting coke. He’s essentially a street dealer, and it doesn’t really make sense that he’d want to do business with me, since I deal in weight. “Why would you want to do that?” I ask, and he doesn’t have a good answer. He also proposes deals that make no sense, like asking me to sell him half a key for half the price of a key (usually, there’s a markup for a smaller quantity), which will keep me from making any profit.
I want to see if he’s wearing a wire, so I suggest we pay our bill and continue the conversation in his car, where I’ll be able to use my bug detector less conspicuously than in a restaurant. When we reach his car I say, “Luke, please forgive me, but before we do anything, I’m going to do this.”
I hold up my bug detector, a pocket-sized black plastic device with a silver antenna that lights up and sounds an alarm in the presence of a listening device. Luke’s eyes get big.
“Is that okay?”
“Of course.”
I turn on the detector and it lights up. I look at Luke. He looks at me. I get out of the car and walk away. I don’t hear from Luke again.
* * *
—
Every time Erin and I ship drugs now, we fret over whether we’ve hidden them well enough. We worry that they will be intercepted. Things get so tight with agents following me, finally, that we send a last shipment of two keys, and then I stop distributing coke. I’d feel some relief, except for a cascade of unfortunate events.
* * *
—
Soon after we moved to Cole Crest, we took Dylan and Carys to Universal Studios for the day. When we picked up the kids at Dad’s, we left nine-month-old Oscar, Erin’s dachshund, there to play with his dogs. We were at Universal when Dad called.
“Does Oscar have tags? He isn’t in the yard.”
We rushed back.
Dad said, “You should have told me to keep an eye on him.”
Erin was distraught. We searched the neighborhood on foot and by car. We drove to pounds. We posted flyers. We never found him. I bought Erin another dog, Scooby, who we keep calling Oscar or Oscy, but since then Erin has become prone to seeing anything bad that happens as part of a cosmic jinx.
* * *
—
Shortly before I stop shipping cocaine, Erin and I return to Cole Crest after two days in Santa Barbara, where we’ve been making weekly trips to pick up the machined drug-shipping devices. Erin is several yards ahead of me, and has disappeared down the steps next to the house, when I hear a scream. De
spite my other security precautions, or maybe because of them, I never lock the doors to the house when I’m away. If someone wanted to get in, they could, but so far they haven’t.
When I hear Erin’s yelp, I race down the steps and around the corner. Erin is standing, frozen, staring at the living room’s glass walls. They are fogged over on the inside, but I can see through the glass well enough to have a view of the four inches of mud covering the entire floor. The carpets are buried. The couches are ruined. Two huge flat-screen TVs, which are only a couple of inches off the floor, are partly submerged, as is all of our furniture. We tie plastic bags around our feet and trudge through the house, seeing if there’s anything we can salvage.
Our landlord says a water main up the hill burst, unleashing thousands of gallons of water. We don’t have renter’s insurance, and she won’t do anything to help us. That night, we sleep at the Beverly Laurel. The next day, we return to do a more thorough damage assessment. I spend hours looking for a lockbox I’d hidden behind the house, containing $60,000 in cash. It’s been swept away by the mudslide, and I never find it. It may still be buried on that hillside.
We hire a company to come in and clean up, staying at the Beverly Laurel while they do it, but when our lease expires a couple of months later, we move.
* * *
—
Even before the mudslide, I’d wanted to get away from the Cole Crest house, certain that it was the focus of a federal investigation. Our new place is on Walnut Drive, lower in the Hills, and it’s a downgrade. This house isn’t on stilts and doesn’t have a pool. I have some cash banked, but with no new income, I need to conserve money.
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