Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  With my Scarface ambitions thwarted, at least for now, I have little to fill my days, and I sit around the house in my mellow heroin haze, playing hours of Oblivion through a TV system that projects the game onto the wall.

  I often see and hear young kids playing on the deck of the house just above ours on the hill. One day, I realize I haven’t seen them in weeks.

  “Erin, have you seen that family in a while?”

  She shrugs. “I guess not.”

  “I swear to God, I saw a camera lens in the window just now, pointing this way.”

  “You sound like you’re back on coke.”

  Even with the more modest house, and a lower monthly rent, the money goes fast. I’m offered a small part in a B movie called Loaded, playing a California drug dealer (big stretch), which brings in less than $10,000. By the end of the year, we can barely pay our rent.

  To stretch our remaining cash as far as possible, we stop paying our cell phone bills, and Erin’s mom mails her a TracFone just so she can check in and make sure Erin is okay. We live above a canyon, and we coast to the bottom in neutral to save money on gas. We scrounge for change in the couch cushions. At Whole Foods, we clean out the free-sample stations. Nero takes pity on us and comps us heroin.

  * * *

  —

  My relationships with Mom and Dad have recently consisted of alternating closeness and estrangement, punctuated by invitations to one-off events: a premiere, a party, a vacation. Mom calls at least once a week and leaves voicemails. Every three months, maybe, I return the call. My dynamic with Dad is seething frustration on his part and wounded sensitivity on mine.

  Many months after I began my research into breeds to mate with Junior, I found a dog called a Boerboel. In aesthetics and demeanor, it seemed like the perfect complement to Junior. I started out looking for an all-black Boerboel but settled on a brindled one I named Eve, since she will be the mother of a new kind of dog. She’s still too young to breed, but when she’s ready, I’ll mate her with Junior to create the world’s first Boerbador.

  Dad invites me to a dinner party in Malibu at his old agent Ron Meyer’s house, where there are a bunch of celebrities, and says, “Oh, Cameron, why don’t you tell them about how you’re going to make a new breed of dog.”

  I’m feeling like a failure, and anything coming out of Dad’s mouth sounds contrived to needle me and treat me like a child. Probably he just thinks it’s a good story, but I burn with self-consciousness.

  * * *

  —

  During a storm one night, after Erin and Jay and I have moved to the house on Walnut, a eucalyptus tree falls on the roof. It doesn’t cause too much damage, but coming only a few months after the mudslide at the Cole Crest house, Erin believes we’re cursed. She thinks it can’t be a coincidence that so many bad things have happened to one set of people, and she feels that more bad things are coming. When I shrug it off, she says I’m in denial. I have to admit that it’s a pretty bad run of wet luck, especially considering that California is in the middle of a historic drought. I wonder if my years of being out of alignment with who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing are finally bubbling up and causing this turmoil. When our landlord Winn, a male model turned house flipper, comes by a few days later, he yells at us for not letting him know about the tree immediately.

  * * *

  —

  I frequently experience night sweats, which I chalk up to my body purging itself of toxins. Before I go to sleep, I kneel at the foot of my bed and pray. I visualize what I want. I focus my energy on desirable abstractions like inner peace and prosperity and a sense of purpose. I’m not religious, exactly, but I figure that praying can’t hurt. I’d hate to find out, too late, that it’s important, and that I’ve neglected it my whole life. Praying is the only thing I’m disciplined about. I’m like the guy whose whole life is fucked but who religiously buys a lottery ticket every day. I’m multiplying my chances of success, covering my bases, giving this one thing my best shot. I’m sure not giving my best shot on so many other levels.

  I grew up thinking that crying isn’t a manly thing to do, but I do cry sometimes. Usually it’s not in response to something sad or difficult but something redemptive and inspiring. I’ll see a seventy-year-old homeless guy on the same corner every day, putting his best foot forward, and being friendly, and that’s the thing that will bring me to tears. Maybe it’s because I empathize with his struggle in a weird way, and admire the dignity with which he carries his burden.

  * * *

  —

  Dad has invited me to spend Thanksgiving with his family in New York. I always rush out the door at the last minute when I have a flight to catch, and now, as I leave to go to the airport, I grab a backpack recently borrowed by my friend Patrick, who dates a former Pussycat Doll, to use as a carry-on bag. When I go through the TSA line at Bob Hope Airport, in Burbank, I’m pulled aside. A supervisor riffles through the backpack, and in the outside pocket he finds several knives, including a switchblade, apparently left there by Patrick. “You know it’s illegal to bring these on a plane, right?”

  I protest that the knives aren’t mine, and I’m charged with disturbing the peace. Later, Patrick will write a letter assuming blame for the knives and testifying to my good character, and the charge will be dismissed. I’m released after a couple of hours, and Erin and I catch the next flight out.

  When our plane lands at Newark Airport, we’re five hours past our last shot, and we beeline to a restaurant that has silverware, sit down and order a Coke, then take turns in the bathroom using a spoon to liquefy tar and injecting it.

  * * *

  —

  Erin and I check into the Rivington, on the Lower East Side, where a manager I’m friends with gives me a good rate. We hang out in our room, shooting cheeva. Erin is going up to Connecticut to her sister’s house for dinner. Dad and I have agreed that I’ll come to the apartment on Central Park West at 4 p.m. As the hour approaches, Erin keeps telling me to get moving, I’ll be late. But I’m having trouble finding a vein, and I tell her to leave without me. She heads off to Grand Central to catch her train. I finally get the needle into a vein and push the plunger, then lean back on the sofa and zone out for a while before leaving.

  By the time I reach the Kenilworth, my old home, it’s 7:30 p.m. The doorman buzzes up and speaks to someone. “Yes, sir,” the doorman says, hanging up the phone, then turns to me and says, almost apologetically, that Dad has left for his place in the country. I’m crushed. I call Erin, who’s still at Grand Central. “You sound so sad,” she says. She tells me she’ll wait for me at the station; I can have Thanksgiving with her family in Greenwich. Erin’s parents, who I’m sure suspect that we’re addicts, believe Erin when she tells them she’s happy, and have told me that I can call them Mom and Dad.

  With Dad, Catherine, and Steven Soderbergh on the set of Traffic.

  I feel hurt, and angry, and wronged—Dad didn’t even call to ask where I was, or give me a heads-up that he was leaving—and we don’t talk for a while. I’m incapable of absorbing his point of view, of understanding how Dylan and Carys were waiting for me by the elevator, excited for my arrival, at four o’clock, or how it broke Dad’s heart to see them disappointed, or how in fact he did try calling me “ten times,” in his words. He’s not ready to tell me that he was upstairs when I arrived, and hadn’t left for the country; he was just so pissed at me by then that he couldn’t bear to see me.

  * * *

  —

  A few months later, on Erin’s birthday, a couple of L.A. Sheriff’s cars pull up outside the house on Walnut. Erin answers the door, and Jay and I, in the back, can hear the cops asking about us and starting to move through the house. Thinking they’re here because they have outstanding warrants against us, we run out the back door and take off up the hill, not stopping until we reach our old place on Cole Crest. The owner is there, who we got along well with, and we’re sweating, and we try to play it off like we
just happened to be in the neighborhood and stopped by to say hello and take a dip in the pool.

  In our rush out of the house on Walnut, we forgot to grab our cell phones. As we’ll soon learn, the sheriff was delivering an eviction notice, and Erin had to be escorted from the premises. Then she had to repeat the humiliation after the cops called Dad’s business manager, Angela, and said they needed Erin to return to the house to get our guns out. As neighbors gawked, she retrieved the guns and put them in the trunk of the Beemer. Then our landlord, Winn, invited a TV crew from Inside Edition into the house, which he had apparently staged to look like a trashed drug den. Winn was interviewed and pointed to something that was definitely not crack, saying that it was crack.

  Erin comes to pick me and Jay up. The three of us look like the Beverly Hillbillies, in a car overstuffed with our dogs, guns, hastily packed suitcases, and loose possessions. Jay goes to stay with our old landlord Carine, who he’s sleeping with, and Erin and I move into the Beverly Laurel.

  We live at the motel for three months. Heroin has obliterated everything else in my life by this point. I owe Nero thousands of dollars. One day, he says he can’t give us any more cheeva. Erin hands him her watch, a Movado with diamonds that she was given before I knew her, and says he can hold it as collateral. I give him my Ducati, and I pawn my turntables and boxes of records that took me years to amass. Afterward, I cry.

  I put everything else in storage. Mom and Dad have both relocated to New York—Mom from Santa Barbara, Dad from Bermuda—and I’ve decided to move back there too, which makes them happy. I’m thinking I’ll go back into DJing to make some income, and possibly get back into acting, too. A production company out of England has offered me a role in a sci-fi movie.

  PART TWO

  Just a Dash of Good

  For this trill is the only music

  My soul has to dance…

  And

  My soul must dance

  For my soul must Live

  This

  Permits my essence to breathe

  Without that breath

  That most beautiful part of my design

  Will wilt and die

  And

  Surely with this foundation gone

  What remains of God’s creation

  Will soon follow

  So I listen

  With great intent

  For THE music

  Where and when there is none to be heard

  I turn within

  To find my heart beating a rhythm

  For my soul to dance

  Flawless is God’s ambition

  In New York before my arrest.

  21

  2009: Yes It’s Really Me

  In New York we get a tenth-floor room at the Gansevoort Hotel, in the Meatpacking District, with a decent view looking north toward Chelsea. But even with the discount from a manager I know, it’s costing $475 a night, and we’re down to our last few thousand dollars. I’m already embarrassed that I’ve had to ask Dad to put the hotel on his credit card. I tell him I’m looking for my own place, and I’ll pay him back. And the cost of our heroin habits has shot up. On the West Coast, $500 would buy us two weeks’ worth of tar. Here, for powder, we’re easily spending $500 a day.

  I want to rent an apartment in Brooklyn, but I have no credit other than a $500-limit Visa card. My only option is to pay a year’s rent up front. I could ask Dad for the money, and maybe he’d give it to me, but in my mind asking him for more help is the one route not open to me. I don’t look great, and Dad knows why, but I let myself believe that by acting like I’m okay, I’m selling that I’m okay.

  Despite the money pressure, though, I feel relief. I’ve been out of the drug business for more than a year, and now that I’ve moved to New York, away from the West Coast DEA, I’ve dodged trouble by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. Today, I’ve scheduled a routine checkup for Junior, Eve, and Scooby. Erin and I take better care of them than of ourselves. At this point, four and a half years into my heroin addiction, I’m shooting up five or six times a day. I’m pale and soft, but at least diligent about varying injection sites, favoring obscure places like my ribcage, upper butt, and armpit. Erin is careless. She’s out of shape and sweats all the time, and her legs are swollen and bruised in a cheetah pattern because she always injects in the same small area of her thighs.

  Before we leave the room, I shoot up. I’m not expecting to be at the vet that long, but I’d rather not take any chances.

  We leash the dogs and head toward the elevator.

  * * *

  —

  “Oh hello, my West Coast friend.”

  I hear him before I see him. Erin and I are just coming out of the West Village Veterinary Hospital when that familiar thick French accent reaches me. Emmanuel. It’s been a few years since I last did business with him, but even as he crosses Eighth Avenue toward us, walking his own small dog, I’m thinking, Maybe this guy is going to somehow provide money for me.

  “This is Diva,” he says, nodding at his Italian greyhound. Diva and Eve and Junior and Scooby are now sniffing each other and having a dog convention, and Erin, who’s holding our dogs’ leashes, stands off to the side while Emmanuel and I catch up. He suggests we have dinner later.

  When Emmanuel calls at six, he proposes a Japanese restaurant, Ono. Ono is in the Gansevoort. What are the chances? I never mentioned where I was staying. “Great,” I say.

  “Look how perfectly everything’s lining up, Erin,” I say after hanging up.

  “I don’t know, Cameron.” She’s shaking her head. “This doesn’t smell right.”

  Three years of surveillance by the DEA has made me habitually cautious, and I briefly consider texting Emmanuel the spyware that would give me access to his phone.

  “Put it on his phone,” Erin says.

  I say I don’t think that’s necessary. “Maybe this is God’s way of letting me get back on my feet.”

  “Don’t talk to him about drugs,” Erin says.

  * * *

  —

  Over a two-hour sushi dinner, Emmanuel asks if I’m still active in the business, and I say I’m not. Then he starts talking about a deal he’s involved in that isn’t working out but—“Maybe is better we continue this conversation in my room?” His room? He’s staying right here, at the Gansevoort.

  “No way, me too.”

  We get in the elevator and I ask what floor he’s on.

  “Ten.”

  “No way, me too.” This is meant to be.

  I say I have to stop by my room for a few minutes, and it turns out he’s in the room next door. What are the chances? Back in my room, I shoot up. I tell Erin how fortunate we are; all these coincidences are lining up so well. I wonder aloud if I should take my bug detector to Emmanuel’s room.

  “One hundred percent,” Erin says.

  But in my mind, I’m done with all that. And I’ve just done a shot, and I’m high. I say, “Nah, it’s good, I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

  In Emmanuel’s room, he tells me how he made this huge investment, and this guy was driving back from California with the stuff and didn’t show up when he was supposed to, and Emmanuel’s in really bad shape, and he has people waiting for him, and blah blah blah. Can I help him out?

  Quintessential drug-dealer sob story.

  I throw a price at him, $30,000 for a pound, which is high enough (normally he’d pay $24,000) that he almost certainly won’t go for it. But he does. He must be desperate. This is clearly meant to be.

  We talk logistics: I’ll get two burner phones for us to use; I’ll switch phones every two weeks; I’ll text him the new phone number, flipping the sequence of digits as a simple cloaking device.

  The next day, Emmanuel comes to my room with the money. He says he was only able to get $15,000, so I say I’ll only be able to get him a half pound of crystal.

  “Please count it,” he says, pushing the cash toward me.

  “No, that’s fine, I trust
you.”

  “No no no, let’s count it.”

  “It’s fine, I trust you.”

  He won’t let it go. He takes the money and starts counting it out loud himself. Kind of weird, but my profit on this and a few more projected deals with him will be enough to get me an apartment. Everything is falling into place as I’d hoped. I hand him his burner and say he’ll have the crystal in a week to ten days.

  * * *

  —

  Erin and I head to California, leaving the dogs in their $475-a-night luxury hotel room, where our friend Patrick will stay with them. In L.A., we hole up at the Beverly Laurel. Erin sits by the pool while I meet with Nero in the room. A few days later, I send Erin out to Bath & Body Works, while Nero returns with a mini-duffel and pulls out a Tupperware container full of what look like shards of clear glass. I pay him $7,000 for the half pound of crystal, and he leaves. When Erin gets back, she’s carrying a white gift basket: it holds a package labeled TROPICAL BREEZE, which contains body gels, lotions, a loofah, and soap; a Zen Pack with rocks, bath tea, washcloths, a candle, and shea butter; and three tin canisters of bath salts. We wear latex gloves as we empty the canisters, stuff them with Ziplocs full of the crystal, rewrap the basket with cellophane, tie it with a bow, and scrub everything down with Lysol disinfectant wipes.

  Erin and I cab to a UPS store on Sunset, at the base of Laurel Canyon, and pay cash to send the basket to New York, addressed, as Emmanuel requested, to a Paul Smith at a P.O. box on Third Avenue in the Thirties.