Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

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  Guys in prison compete to have the best photo books, little binders ideally filled with pictures of scantily dressed girls. I’ve put together a pretty decent one over the years, which I take pride in. Even G-rated photos of friends and loved ones make a huge difference to us all.

  I’ve been away so long that I’ve lost touch with a lot of people. I remember, before my arrest, hearing about an acquaintance being sentenced to ten years in prison, and writing him off in my mind. I feel like people have forgotten me. I’m sure some of them are angry with me, and disappointed, and ashamed. I’m extremely fortunate to have a hardcore group of family and friends who’ve consistently visited and written and been there for support. That’s extremely rare in prison, and a blessing. It makes me feel still relevant.

  I get a letter, with some photos, from Hans, one of my old crew from Carpinteria. In the years since our days of teenage mischief, he got heavily into using crystal meth, dealt it small-time, and did a stretch in prison. His reaching out means a lot to me, because so many other people I’d have expected a lot more from have done a lot less: girls I’ve been involved with, friends I was close to, family friends who’ve known me well since childhood. Hans is one of a different set: people I’d have expected less from who do more. In prison, you develop a mentality of I do for you, you do for me; you don’t do for me, I don’t do for you. I really appreciate the people who’ve popped out of the woodwork and made an effort.

  Early in my first September at Cumberland, I ask the unit manager for a special visit to see my family, who I haven’t seen in two years. He says, “We’ll have to ask the warden, but it’s not very likely.” Three weeks later, as Dad accepts the Emmy for Best Actor for his role as Liberace in HBO’s Behind the Candelabra, he makes an emotional speech: “My oldest son, Cameron, I’m hoping I’ll be able and they’ll allow me to see him soon.”

  Mom, Hudson, Imara, and Hawk visiting me at Cumberland.

  I learn about it from another inmate. It makes me feel so good to hear that Dad said that. The speech gets a lot of media coverage, and not long after, my unit manager suggests that I put in a request to the warden.

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  The warden grants me separate visits with Mom and Dad. Dad comes first, flying down to see me. In the visiting room, there’s the usual swiveling of heads that happens wherever Dad goes. “Holy shit,” Dad says, looking at my muscles and tattoos and short haircut. We’re assigned to sit in connected plastic bucket chairs that face in the same direction, so that the two of us are next to each other, with neither of our backs to the guards. We have to twist our upper bodies to talk.

  It’s a little awkward at first. Over the past two years, we’ve talked on the phone from time to time, but there was a long period during my solitary months when we didn’t speak, because I’d usually use my phone call on Erin. It’s hard for anyone to understand what it’s like to be in a small cement box twenty-four hours a day, and Erin was my emotional center.

  It’s really nice to see him. Seeing the seriousness of Cumberland, he’s a bit more curious and worried than usual. I’ve begun to feel like things are finally shifting for me, for the better, and I feel like something has shifted in him, too. There’s a level of respect there that wasn’t present before. It gives me hope that we can have a solid relationship.

  Mom visits the following weekend with Imara, Hawk, and Hudson. Mom has lived on hope for seven and a half years. We have a new lawyer. Now we’re halfway through preparing the document. Now we’re submitting it. Now we’re going to get it heard. Now we’re down to the last twelve months. Now he’s going to get out…Finally, something real is happening. We’re seeing each other for the first time in two years. It’s a joyful day.

  Right after that, I put in another request for a special visit. “We’re starting something new in the BOP,” the associate warden tells me. “If someone’s visits have been taken away for an extremely long period of time, and we feel that they have good behavior, and it serves no purpose for them not to see their family, we’ll reinstate their family visits. You’re the first person we’re trying this with, so do a good job.”

  Mom starts driving to see me every other week, a 600-mile-plus round-trip journey. She calls the visits “prison pilgrimages” and brings the kids with her every time. In the visiting room, we sit in the plastic chairs not facing each other and play gin rummy, checkers, chess, Connect Four, and board games on a little plastic table we set up in front of us. Mom brings coins in a Ziploc bag, for me and the kids to use for vending-machine junk food. It’s always the same inmates in the visiting room. Only a handful of prisoners have people who come to see them.

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  My first December at Cumberland is when I was originally to have been released. As the date passes, I think of Ben Brafman’s words about watching it pass me by. It’s impossible not to wonder if I made the right choice when I reneged on my cooperation. Until I arrived at Cumberland, I didn’t even receive the benefit of that decision, since inmates knew the headlines about me without knowing the details. Here, I’ve had a different experience. I’ve finally been rewarded for my decision. I have the friends, and the reputation, and the acceptance of a stand-up convict. I have self-respect. My feeling of vindication blunts the pain of watching another birthday and Christmas behind bars come and go.

  Jojo and Dad visiting me at Cumberland.

  32

  2014: The Boy with the Nazi Tattoo

  Maybe a year after getting to Cumberland, I see a new guy on the yard, noticing him right away. He looks very convict, with a matrix of tattoos that includes swastikas, and a six-inch throat scar that starts at his jugular. He’s the kind of hard- and dangerous-looking person I’m particularly alert to, wondering if he’s going to cause me problems.

  His prison name is Snake, but he introduces himself to me as Michael Bridge. He speaks with a rasp. As I’ll learn over time, he’s in his mid-forties, has been in prison most of his life, and has a serious jacket. He’s affiliated with the Nazi Low Riders, a notoriously violent prison gang that began in the California Youth Authority in the 1980s and does the dirty work for the Aryan Brotherhood. Mike’s paperwork comes up to my knees. From a civilian perspective, he’s done terrible things. From an inmate’s standpoint, he’s fucking Rambo. Cumberland is Mike’s first non-penitentiary in decades.

  He’s originally from L.A., too. We become handball partners and sign up for some of the same classes at the education center. He makes me a sticker that reads KILLA CAM to put on my MP3 player. Our biggest bond is poetry. Mike writes a lot of it, and some of his poems really impress me. We have little poetry sessions on the yard, our shirts off, reciting our latest works to each other. In spite of all of our differences, I come to consider him a friend.

  Before I went to prison, I’d see guys with full face tattoos and keep my distance, thinking they were crazy and to be avoided. I’ve gotten to know some of them here, and they’re regular guys; they just have tattoos on their faces. A face tattoo doesn’t tell me much more than that its bearer is 100 percent dedicated to his gang or lifestyle. Some people with face tattoos are dangerous sociopaths, but a lot of the more aggressively tattooed guys I’ve met in prison are relatively normal people—certainly by prison standards—who have just chosen to mark themselves as an homage. It may be intimidating to other people, but in prison that’s a good thing.

  In the real world, though, their tattoos will make a terrible first impression and be severely limiting. Mike Bridge and I talk about it. One day I say to him, “I know your life is in prison, but you’re going to get out of here someday, and you can’t have swastikas all over you. It’s super offensive. You don’t even think like that, but you won’t be able to explain them away.” His mom really wants him to get rid of them too. Between thinking of her, and taking my advice, he gets most of them blacked out. He has a tattoo on his side, of a guy giving a Sieg heil! against a
Nazi flag backdrop, changed to a guy holding a gun. He’s not sure yet how to handle the enormous swastika that covers his chest, but getting rid of some of them is a major step for someone like him. It wasn’t easy to earn those tattoos. They’re intertwined with his identity. They carry a certain status in prison. But it’s like he’s having a midlife crisis—for the better.

  Talib would never hang out with someone like Mike, but even between them, there’s a level of mutual respect. Tattoos like Mike’s swastikas are so prevalent in prison that, inside, they have a different meaning than on the street. Out in the world, Mike and Talib would have nothing to do with each other, but in prison you have to deal with everyone, walk past them, do business with people holding extremely different worldviews. Mike’s not running around screaming Nordic chants. I can’t say he’s not a racist—anyone who’s been in prison as long as he has, with the kind of anger that fuels, is prone to using race as the easiest outlet for it—but he’s not extreme about race. And since everyone’s guilty of racism, they tend to be able to cohabitate peacefully in spite of it, unless someone’s specifically trying to offend someone.

  It’s at Cumberland that I get most of my tattoos. I’m lucky to be on a cellblock with one of the compound’s best artists, Charlie, the same guy who Easy believed ratted him out. Though tattooing is technically against the rules, in higher-security places like this, where the administration’s main concerns are drugs and weapons, cops tend to overlook it.

  Charlie works on me in his cell in four-hour sessions. Prison tattoo guns tend to be a MacGyvered combination of a motor from beard-trimming clippers and a battery pack with a variable number of batteries, depending on the desired speed—four for really fast, three for medium fast, three shitty ones for slow. A typical needle is a piece of sharpened guitar string. Charlie has fancier three- and five-prong needles he’s had soldered together.

  I buy my own set of needles from him, taking them with me after each session to wash in my sink. I also bring my own ink, which I buy from Hafer. Hafer doesn’t have a single tattoo of his own, but making pigment is one of his hustles. He cuts a can in half, pours baby oil into it, puts a wick into it, and burns it in a three-foot-high box made from taping twelve cardboard soda six-pack holders together. The box captures the black soot, which Hafer shakes out and sells. Every tattoo artist has his own recipe for the best, darkest ink, mixing the soot with mouthwash or shampoo, or adding coffee grounds.

  When I get an idea for a new tattoo, Erin does Google Images searches and mails me printouts of photographs and illustrations. I probably spend 160 hours getting tattooed by Charlie. On my left bicep, I get a half-sleeve still life with an unspooling cassette tape marked THIS IS MY LIFE, musical notes, a key, a broken heart, a hammer and sickle, and a woman holding an umbrella. In the center of my chest, over the butterfly, I get a compass. To one side of it, I get NY and the Washington Square Park arch and a leaf; to the other, I get LA and some palm trees. On my stomach, I get a pyramid with an all-seeing eye, which many inmates insist must mean I’m connected to the Illuminati. On one shoulder, I get a hammer, and on the other an anvil. Across my clavicle, I get TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME. On my right side, I get a Kodiak bear coming out of the water with a salmon in its mouth. I don’t like to explain my tattoos. The whole point of inking images on your body is to let them speak for themselves. If there was simple verbal reasoning behind one, I wouldn’t bother distilling it into a picture on my skin.

  Mom is not a tattoo fan, and on one visit, when she sees all the work I’ve had done, she says: “If you really want to be an actor, don’t typecast yourself. They can cover up the ones you have with makeup, but don’t get any more. You’ll get pigeonholed.” I’ve already paid for a whole right-arm T-shirt sleeve, but she makes me promise not to get it.

  With Mo at Cumberland.

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  My most significant tattoo, which I get across my abs, is a pair of portraits depicting Dad and Pappy. I’ve never been able to overcome my conflicting feelings about my last name, my pride in it and at the same time my discomfort with having it define how other people see me and assess me.

  With Mike Becraft at Cumberland.

  But Dad has really made an effort to come and visit me at Cumberland. As we’ve started to spend time together more often, I’ve felt something rekindle inside of him, like he’s changed his view of the prospects for my life, and for me, and for our relationship. It feels like he hasn’t given up on me entirely, that he sort of believes in me. That’s an important feeling for me. I’ve always had so much respect for him and Pappy, and maybe because of the self-respect I’ve gained in prison, I’m able to acknowledge to myself that they are a huge part of who I am. When I get their faces tattooed on my body, I feel ready, finally, to show an uncomplicated pride in them.

  When I show the tattoo to Dad, he seems embarrassed.

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  A year into my time at Cumberland, Erin tells me in a phone call that Junior has cancer. I’m devastated. She’d mentioned that Junior had been acting lethargic, and I’d told her to take him to the vet. All those times I asked her to have his symptoms checked out, she hadn’t, until he passed out, bleeding from his nose, and she couldn’t ignore it any longer. Now it’s too late. His body is riddled with tumors.

  She coordinates for me to call her on a borrowed cell phone when she takes him to the vet, so that I can listen; but the vet says there’s nothing he can do. The cancer is so far along that it’s inoperable. Erin takes Junior home with her to die. I make Erin promise to have the vet extract some of his cells so we can clone his DNA later. For the next couple of weeks, I call every day, and Erin puts me on speaker, and I talk to Junior. One morning, Erin says she had to have Junior put down in the middle of the night.

  I’ve been wrestling with my feelings about Erin for a while now, and Junior’s death pierces me. Nothing has so painfully made me face my powerlessness. I’ve been counting on Erin for a few things, one of them being to take care of our dogs. She knew how important Junior was to me. She’s had her struggles these past few years, but Junior didn’t have to die as soon as he did. I resent her flakiness, and I suspect she may have fallen back on old habits. It causes a rift inside of me, as far as my feelings toward Erin go, my confidence in her priorities, and my belief in her.

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  Around this time, I get a letter from Viviane, a woman I knew well before I went to prison. I first met her at a fashion show in L.A. a decade ago. I was out there shooting Adam & Eve. Viviane was a model from Brazil, and she was wearing a huge blue Afro as part of her costume. We were chatting backstage and I told her, “I’m trying to take you seriously, but your hair is making it difficult.” Over the next several years, we had an intermittent romantic entanglement. I knew she had strong feelings for me then. But we were both partying at the time, I was living with Erin, and then I got lost in my heroin pit. I last saw Viviane a couple of weeks before my arrest at the Gansevoort, when I ran into her at a club in the Meatpacking District.

  Viviane has written to me several times in prison, but this letter feels different. She has gone through a lot since I last saw her, switching paths from the one she was on—working in nightclubs and staying out late partying—to a much more spiritual, thoughtful one. She has stopped using drugs and has gotten into yoga and spirituality. She has spent a lot of time in India and has just returned to New York from her latest trip there. She tells me that she was recently at dinner with a friend, talking about love, and her friend asked if she’d ever met someone she felt was her soul mate. Viviane named me. Using the Bureau of Prisons’ online Inmate Locator, she found my latest address.

  Viviane visiting me at Cumberland.

  Now I get to know her in a whole new way. We’re both very different people than when we last spoke. I know the strength it takes to make the decision to change, and then to take the necessary steps to actually do it through sheer willpower. I do
n’t think I’d have had the strength to do it outside of prison, and really respect that she was able to. I think that’s what initially draws me to her.

  I still don’t have friend-visitation privileges, and at first we write letters and e-mails back and forth, until we’re e-mailing every day using the inmate e-mail system, TRULINCS. When my phone privileges are finally restored—three hundred minutes a month—we start talking almost every day. I send her photographs of me out on the yard with my inmate friends, who she cuts out of the pictures.

  We’re becoming reacquainted; it’s an important time for us.

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  In the spring of 2014, the U.S. Sentencing Commission changes its guidelines: The amendment, called Drugs Minus Two, lops time off of the sentences of many offenders imprisoned for nonviolent drug crimes. My lawyers are sure I’m going to qualify for it. While I’m waiting for confirmation, in August I enter the RDAP program, the nine-month residential drug treatment program that trims a year off your sentence. With RDAP, you want to time it so that you finish as close as possible to your release date, because if you come out of RDAP and get a serious shot, the BOP can add the year back to your sentence. Assuming I qualify for Drugs Minus Two, I’ll get out of prison just when my RDAP stint ends.