Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  In a Vanity Fair article that comes out in early March, Dad compares our upbringings, suggesting they’re similar. I shake my head, reading it. Yes, we both grew up in the shadow of a famous father. But otherwise, the idea is laughable. He had a rock-solid nuclear family, and Granny and Uncle Billy raised him in Westport, Connecticut, away from the craziness of Hollywood. They had a wonderful marriage and were a loving, constant presence in his childhood.

  Maybe Dad will never entirely forgive me for decisions I’ve made in my life. I feel like I’ve been very forgiving of the decisions he’s made, but maybe deep down I also harbor things I can never entirely let go of. Maybe that’s how it’s always going to be.

  * * *

  —

  At this point in my stay at MCC, my stress levels are through the roof. I’ve still been unable to get the prescriptions Dr. Millman wrote for me, and Meg worries about me. The attorney visiting rooms line a corridor and have glass walls, but other than an occasional check by the officer who sits at the end, we have privacy. I can tell that Meg is starting to fall in love with me. Every day, she stays for the entire hours-long window permitted for lawyers’ visits. She says that she can’t picture me going through whatever I’m going through in prison, and she wants to be here for me, to give me attention and support. She knows I have a hard time being alone. I’m starting to develop feelings too.

  Erin, who has been at MCC for seven months, is sentenced to time served and released. Meg tries to get me to say my relationship with Erin is over, but I tell her that I love Erin and care about her, because she’s always been there for me. At the same time, I know that what’s developing with Meg would hurt Erin if she knew about it, but in my mind, the two situations are unrelated. And the harshness of prison has a way of awakening the most selfish instincts: all you want to do is try to maneuver things so that you have your needs met to the best of your abilities. The ethics of civilian life take a back seat to surviving.

  Meg has been outraged, on my behalf, by the BOP’s refusal to fill my prescriptions for psychiatric drugs. One day in March, she agrees to bring me Xanax. The next day, when it’s time to see her, I go into my cell, put my finger in a tub of commissary moisturizer, and smear a dab of it behind my ear.

  When I see Meg in the visiting room, she walks over to buy a bag of vending-machine chips. Then she sits down across from me at the table and reaches into her bra. She pulls out a lumpy balloon and puts it in the potato chip bag, which she passes to me like she’s sharing her snack. I palm the balloon, surreptitiously lubricate it, reach into my pants, and press it inside me. Meg seems into being gangsta. She tells me she listened to Biggie Smalls while she was ballooning up the Xanax and some loose tobacco. I swear to her that I won’t share the pills with anyone.

  Back in my cell, after pushing the balloon out and emptying it, I take a Xanax suppository-style. It’s the next best thing to injecting a drug. I’m still in my isn’t-federal-prison-romantic phase—Clancy was recently released, and I took over his hooch production—and I take vain pleasure in having this connect, in having my lawyer doing the smuggling no less. I’m making moves, making things happen. I want the respect of people like Dave Hattersley, and I share the pills with him and a few others.

  * * *

  —

  In the months leading up to my sentencing, several dozen friends and family members (from Pappy to my ex Amanda to my first-grade teacher to Pat Riley) write long letters on my behalf to the judge, Richard Berman, and I’m grateful for their love and support. But in their efforts to make me sympathetic, and to try to mitigate my responsibility, the letters add up to an excavation of my parents’ divorce. Many of them fault Mom or Dad or both of them in harsh terms. Mom and Dad, in their own letters to Judge Berman, seek to put me in the best light, and one of the ways they do this is by alternating between blaming themselves and blaming each other. Dad acknowledges his substance abuse and careerism, but he also notes that Mom was “a young mother without any parenting skills handed down from her own parents.” Mom talks about her “scarred childhood” and youth and immaturity when I was growing up, but also about Dad’s “mercurial behavior,” “conditional” love, and parenting decisions she believes were motivated by guilt.

  Though it’s standard for letters like these to be part of a public court file, several of the people Meg Salib solicits a letter from are left with the impression that it will be read only by the judge. When the letters are made part of the public record and are quoted in newspaper articles, a number of people, including Amanda and my friend John, are mortified and find themselves apologizing to Mom or Dad for various comments.

  The focus is now on my sentencing and ultimate designation. Mom picks out a suit for me to wear in court, and I read up on different prisons, trying to figure out which one to request. Nick has told me that he’s hoping to get me less than five years.

  * * *

  —

  On the day of my sentencing, Nick brings the suit to me in the bull pen before I go into the courtroom. There’s an overflow crowd that also fills a second room with a closed-circuit TV showing the proceedings. Mom and Dad have momentarily set aside their differences and arrive together. This—me, my problems—is really all they have left to talk about with each other. It’s been a catalyst for them to be in contact, and I don’t think Mom ever stopped loving Dad. She was so young when they met, and he was formative, the first strong male figure in her life.

  “Therapeutically,” Judge Berman tells the courtroom, “we all need to get over the theme that Cameron Douglas is a victim.” He faults my lawyers’ submissions, and the letters from my family and friends, for not acknowledging the impact on the community of my drug dealing. He says, “I think this case and this sentencing may well be his last chance to make it.”

  When I’m given a chance to speak, I apologize to my family and loved ones “for putting them through this nightmare of my making—and for my behaviors that have caused a rift between us in the past.” I apologize to the judge. I talk about how I’ve let so many opportunities go to waste.

  Then Judge Berman imposes a sentence of sixty months—fifty months for the meth and coke conspiracy count, and ten months for possession of the heroin that Erin smuggled in for me—followed by five years of supervised release, 450 hours of community service, a $25,000 fine, forfeiture of $300,000, and weekly drug testing.

  Nick seems pleased with the sentence. The attitudes of Mom and Dad seem closer to five years is better than ten, but it’s still a long time. I feel detached from what’s happening. My mind is all over the place. I’m overwhelmed and confused. I feel like these things are happening to me and are beyond my control. I’m angry. Of course, I know exactly why I’m here. Of course, my choices have caused it. But my introduction to the system, my experience with my lawyers and the stress of it all, made me feel so powerless initially, like I was being pulled along by an overpowering current. And in my gut and heart, I feel guilty and ashamed about my cooperation deal.

  When I arrive back on the unit, everyone has heard about my sentence on the news. They clap and offer congratulations. I was facing the possibility of eleven years, or worse, and I got five.

  * * *

  —

  A place like MCC tends not to allow people with criminal records to visit, so Erin can’t visit me. But Meg’s still coming to see me every day, and sometimes we’re assigned to the visiting room farthest from the guard’s station. In her final visit before I’m transferred out, Meg brings one last balloon full of Xanax. This one is big and loosely tied, like a beanbag, and when I try to push it inside me, it won’t go in. I start sweating from the struggle. The guard hasn’t checked on us in a while, and could come back at any moment, and finally Meg says, “Give it back to me.”

  “No, I’m not giving it back.”

  “Do you have any idea how wide the human sphincter can dilate? Get it up there.”

  And so I do.

  It has been a revelation to me just h
ow much contraband the lower bowel can accommodate. I know guys who’ve traveled from joint to joint with two cell phones or a knife fully concealed inside their body. But in May 2010, when I leave the Manhattan Correctional Center for Lewisburg, the federal prison where I’ve been designated, I’m muling only a small payload: a pinky-sized roll of Xanax tablets, wrapped in cellophane and tied in a balloon.

  24

  2010: Camp

  Nick requested Lewisburg LEC because it’s the minimum-security camp closest to my family and friends, and the judge approved it, but my journey there takes a few days. This is my introduction to so-called diesel therapy, the infamous use of extended transit as a disciplinary tactic by the Bureau of Prisons. We’re in uncomfortable restraints, poorly fed, and left to wait in bland rooms for indeterminate lengths of time, bored and anxious, in limbo, with no routine. You lose weight on these trips.

  I leave MCC at 4 a.m., in shackles: handcuffs and ankle cuffs, both attached to a belly chain. In the predawn light, our bus speeds north and west for a few hours until we reach Waymart, Pennsylvania, home to United States Penitentiary Canaan, which serves as a transport hub for the BOP’s northeast region. At Canaan, we’re split up by custody level. Those of us bound for minimum- and low-security prisons are funneled into one holding cell, while people heading to Mediums and Highs are put in a separate cell. Both have large windows and face each other, and I take a good look at the men in the other cell. The guys next to me for the most part look like civilians who made a mistake. The guys across from us are visibly in a different category. They have more aggressively placed tattoos, more scarred faces, warier eyes, more worked-out bodies, and above all an intense, animal alertness. I briefly picture myself among them and feel lucky that I’m not.

  When I’m eventually moved to a unit at Canaan, after several hours of standing around, there’s no clock, no phones, no computer access, no books. I don’t know if I’ll be here for two days or two months. It’s dislocating. When I go to take a shower, I’m overpowered by the stench: someone has taken a shit in one of the shower stalls.

  After the months of worry and uncertainty building to my sentencing, I feel some relief. I was hoping for less than the five years the judge gave me, but it could have been so much worse. Now, with time off for good conduct, another year off for taking part in a nine-month Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) at Lewisburg, plus the ten months I’ve already served at MCC, I’m facing just another two years and some change. And despite what the press has reported, I feel like I’ve managed my situation without jeopardizing anyone else. But the old anxiety has been replaced with fresh apprehension. A new place means new people. I know I’m going to have to readjust, which is always difficult.

  USP Lewisburg.

  * * *

  —

  Lewisburg is only 115 miles away, but I spend two nights at Canaan. Early on the third morning, a guard calls my name, and soon I’m on a bus, sitting next to an Irish kid from Queens who’s coming from a Low, where he was doing time for his involvement in a marijuana ring. There are only five convicts on the bus, but the two of us sit together to ensure that no weirdo sits next to us, and only once we’re on the road do we separate to spread out. After a couple of hours, the bus stops at FCI Allenwood, a Low, where a couple of inmates get off. Then we drive on, passing a truck full of chickens and a horse-drawn buggy carrying an Amish family. We’re surrounded by the cheap, remote, unpopulous farmland that has made Central Pennsylvania a favorite of the people who choose where to locate prisons.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes later, we pass through improbably grand black gates, topped with gilt finials and bearing gilt letters that spell USP LEWISBURG. On the left is a cluster of pretty guards’ houses. The road straightens out and for half a mile slopes gently upward between tallgrass fields. Then it widens into a parking lot and dead-ends at an ominous brick building. A thirty-foot-high wall extends from both sides and terminates in huge gun towers. Behind it is the Big House, a supermax penitentiary. A con’s name is called, and he shuffles off the bus in his chains.

  I feel a grudging admiration for his higher security level as well as a ripple of gratitude that this isn’t where I’m going. The Big House, opened in 1932, is one of four penitentiaries built in that era to cage a generation of rum-runners and bootleggers. It’s a beautiful structure, with Gothic arches and terra-cotta battlements: When the prison opened, the uplifting architecture was meant to embody the institution’s progressive ideas about rehabilitation. Over time, it has held the likes of Al Capone, Whitey Bulger, and John Gotti, as well as Jimmy Hoffa, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and Alger Hiss. But the year before my arrival, the prison was converted into one of three Special Management Units, or SMUs, in the country, created to house the most violent and hard-to-control inmates in the federal system.

  Our bus continues along a service road and a few minutes later pulls up outside the administration building for the minimum-security camp, which stands on the penitentiary grounds but is outside the walls of the Big House. The BOP locates its camps to provide cheap labor for the maintenance of its higher-security facilities. A guard calls out two names, including mine, and we shimmy out of the vehicle.

  A motley crowd of inmates, some in regulation khakis, some in after-work sweats and shorts, stand watching. They’ve heard I’m coming, and in the monotonous blur of prison life, the arrival of an inmate with my last name qualifies as a welcome break from routine. It’s a bit of a spectacle, and it makes me uncomfortable. A corrections officer takes off our shackles and tells us to go into the building. Just walking those ten yards is pleasant: this is the first time in nine months that I’ve been outside without handcuffs or chains.

  We’ve missed dinner, and inside, a C.O. with a big gut, gradient-lens sunglasses, and an unlit cigar in his mouth hands us each a foam clamshell with a still-hot serving of spaghetti. It’s better than anything I’ve eaten in a long time. Then he gives us our bunk assignments and hands us some basics we’ll need—including a bedroll, sheets, blanket, towels, socks, and underwear—and turns us loose to find our own way to our assigned bunks. This feels like freedom. The compound is…beautiful. It’s big. There’s grass.

  The camp has three residential buildings: L-shaped, two-story Units 1 and 2, and the rectangular RDAP. I’m assigned to Unit 1. I enter a dayroom where some men sit at tables playing cards, while others watch TV in rooms to the side, behind a glass wall. I can feel eyes on me as I pass through another door onto my range, one of eight in the building. It’s a long corridor lined with five-by-nine cinder block cubicles with five-foot-high walls.

  My two cubies are waiting in mine, which has a bunk bed and a third bed. “I’m Gavin, from Boston,” the bigger one says, shaking my hand. “This is your knucklehead other cellie from New England.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the smaller one says. “I’m a fuckin’ knucklehead, fuck you.” He offers me a hand. “I’m Renato,” he says.

  This is the uncomfortable stage when you’re new to a place, but my cubies are both really friendly. Gavin is an outspoken roughneck who ran a local for the Tunnel Workers Union in Massachusetts and was convicted of stealing from it. He’s finishing up a seven-year bit. “We heard you were coming,” Gavin says, “and we cleared out that locker for you.”

  * * *

  —

  Renato, Portuguese and goofy and in on a low-level drug charge, offers to show me around, and I throw my stuff on the vacant top bunk and follow him out. He starts with the bathroom on our range, which has four showers and three toilets in stalls with doors. Outside, Renato leads the way to a little pond, and past that to a pair of volleyball courts. Next to them are some pull-up and dip bars, and a softball diamond with a track around it. A couple of guys are hanging out next to a shed near third base.

  “Look at fuckin’ Renato,” one of them says. “He thinks he’s a fuckin’ tour guide.”

  “Fuck off,” Renato says.

  The othe
r one offers me a cigarette, and we move behind the shed to smoke unseen.

  Then Renato continues his tour. There are two football fields and a 6,000-square-foot gym with free weights, StairMasters, and cable machines.

  “What’s that?” I ask, nodding toward a small domed structure in the distance, which looks like the bones of a tent, minus the fabric.

  “That’s for the Indian ceremony,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  Renato explains that a group of inmates has a weekly Native American gathering, which they’re Constitutionally entitled to do. “It’s pretty sweet,” he says. “They smoke a peace pipe and everything.”

  Maybe this is going to be okay.

  Before I go to sleep, I go into a toilet stall and push out the Xanax. They’ll help with the stress of getting adjusted.

  * * *

  —

  Before I can be assigned a job at the camp, I have to go through an orientation, and the next one won’t be for another ten days, so for a week and a half, when everyone else goes off to work each morning, I sleep late and take advantage of the feature that most starkly separates Lewisburg from MCC: it’s an outdoor compound.

  At MCC, I was indoors twenty-four hours a day except for three hour-long trips each week to the caged-in roof. Lewisburg, by comparison, is paradise. There are no fences. Unlike higher-security prisons, where there are controlled movements—ten-minute windows after the bell rings each hour to get from one place to another—here you can go pretty much wherever you please. The pond has turtles and ducks and benches alongside it. There are birds and skunks and stray cats. There’s a garden, tended by inmates, which in summer produces fresh tomatoes and watermelons for both the camp and the penitentiary.