Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

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  The acting classes have an unexpected effect on me. For the past seven years—and really for a much longer time—I’ve been perplexed by my failure to grieve over what’s happened to me and what I’ve done to myself. After being numb and closed off for so long, acting is forcing me to access long-buried experiences and emotions. It’s really cathartic and also exciting, because I’m realizing how much I have to draw from as an actor and finding that I can access it readily. I knew the emotions were there, because I know myself and I knew they had to be, so it makes perfect sense, but I was nervous I’d never be able to access them, that I was permanently numbed out. For years, in fact, thinking about what impact those buried, unacknowledged feelings and experiences and memories might have, I worried about what outlet they would find, and exactly how I might let them breathe and not just rot and die somewhere deep inside me.

  I have a lifetime of deflected emotion to catch up on. I think about those years when I would run into people in New York and be unable to recall anything about our relationship, other than that it had been significant at some point. I think about everything I missed, like seeing Granny before she died. One day in late May, I’m walking Truck when for some reason my childhood friend Paul comes strongly into my mind. Paul is the friend who overdosed when we were in our early twenties. I was sinking into my cocaine addiction then, and I never really felt anything. Now I see Paul’s face, and I get choked up. I stop where I am on the sidewalk to gather myself. All these moments with Paul, buried inside me, start bubbling up. When I get back to my building and into the elevator, I let myself cry. I mourn the loss of my friend, feeling what I should have felt seventeen years ago.

  In retrospect, I feel that during all those years I was too angry to cry, too deeply infuriated by how my life was shaping up to make room for any other emotion. Now, increasingly, when I speak about anything from the heart, like telling Dad or Mom or Viviane or friends how much I love them, I get a knot in my throat. It starts happening so often that I think I’m going to need to learn to control this and rein it in, or else I’m going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. I’m touched, watching the Olympics, seeing people giving their all to be the best. I weep while watching the animated film Coco, especially the last thirty minutes, about a family’s reconciliation.

  I’d thought that my sessions with Dr. Kaminski might become a regular Noah’s flood of snot and tears too, and sometimes, digging around my history with him, I do get emotional. But we actually don’t talk that much about my past. Dr. Kaminski, who speaks with a heavy Israeli accent, is very smart and has lots of accolades and is very expensive. He’s well worth it, but he does most of the talking.

  35

  2017: Planning for the Past

  In March, I switch to supervised release, which is parole for federal inmates. It will last for five years. I’ve had six months in a halfway house (and another three months under halfway house supervision) without incident, and two and a half years in prison before that without a major shot. I’ve been expecting that now I’ll just have to check in from time to time, but otherwise be able to live like a free man.

  I’m in for a bucket of cold water. In addition to my continued weekly sessions with Dr. Kaminski, several stipulations made by Judge Berman in my original sentence eight years ago kick in. It’s an invasive regimen. Every night after eight o’clock, I call a number and punch in a code to hear a recording that tells me whether or not I have to report to the probation office the next day. If I do, then I have to go there, give a urine sample, and meet with my probation officer, or P.O. Sometimes she shows up unannounced at my apartment building with another officer and calls from downstairs to say they’re here for a spot visit. They come up in the elevator wearing bulletproof vests and carrying handguns.

  But the rigidity is in line with my intentions. I like to be out and about, and someday I will be again, but right now isn’t the time for that. I don’t want to be partying or catching up with casual acquaintances. I want to focus on building a new life. I’m reading less but am watching a lot of documentaries. I still meditate every day. I work out. I work.

  Every time I report to the probation office, which is in the same building as the courthouse where I was sentenced, I see the MCC next door. When I was in there, I’d look out the one non-frosted exterior window on my unit and see people down on the street, going about their lives, and think that one day that would be me, and how nice it would be then to look up at this building from outside. It is nice. I’m back where the nightmare began, but now things are going well. Sometimes I’m hit with a wave of euphoria. I stop whatever I’m doing and think: I made it. I’m here. It’s an amazing feeling.

  I’m still readjusting to civilian life. The day I left prison, I weighed 190. More than a year later, the scale says 161. I think it must be broken. I’ve been trying to stick to a gluten-free diet, and sometimes that has meant not eating when the right food wasn’t ready-to-hand. But I don’t want to be less than 175. Up in Westchester County, where Dad lives, I get my learner’s permit to drive a car; my license had lapsed before I went to prison. I still need to take a five-hour course on defensive driving, and then take a test, to get my license.

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  —

  My sobriety feels strong. I was able to kick heroin for good in an environment where it was easily available and most people could and would do it from time to time. I generally no longer feel the acute lack of something that long-term opioid dependence caused me to feel even as recently as a couple of years ago. It was a constant discomfort in my own skin, a feeling of anxiety and discontentment, of a roughness in my life that could only be smoothed by one thing. Now I’m finally coming to terms with not having heroin to turn to, with letting go of that security blanket.

  I do smoke pot sometimes. It’s not allowed under the terms of my probation, and Dr. Kaminski wants to get me a prescription for medical marijuana. It has been found to help people with opioid dependence, and an increasing number of states are legalizing its use for PTSD, which Dr. Kaminski also thinks I have. But it’s not currently prescribable for either diagnosis in New York.

  During a surprise spot urine check in April, I go into the testing room, which has mirrors everywhere, including the floor and ceiling, and do my business under the gaze of a technician whose job it is to watch me piss. I test positive for THC.

  This is a big setback. Ben Brafman, who’s now my lawyer, is worried that Judge Berman will revoke my probation and send me back to prison. We have a hearing, where Dr. Kaminski explains to the judge that my pot use was deliberate and moderate and not indicative of a relapse. My P.O., Ms. Josephs, whom I have developed a mutual respect with, is supportive too, saying, essentially: These things happen. Ben is so worried about Judge Berman’s possible reaction that we’re voluntarily proposing an even more rigorous package of requirements for me. I’ll attend ninety AA or NA meetings in ninety days, and be escorted to them by a sober companion who’ll vouch for my attendance. I’ll also attend a weekly hour-and-a-half group therapy session focused on substance abuse.

  I haven’t been in front of Judge Berman in nearly five years. At the hearing, he has a chance to see me, and I have a chance to speak my piece. I become emotional. I tell him it’s been a long road, that I’ve spent a lot of time in high-security prisons and two years in a cement box, and that I kept using heroin for a few years into prison. I tell him I’ve done everything I can to get my life back together, and now I spend all of my free time either working on building a career or being with my family. I think he hears me. He says he knows it’s been difficult, and that he’s confident I’m on my way to a promising life. I feel like the hearing has turned a negative into a positive.

  After my violation, I have to wear an adhesive sweat-absorbing patch on my shoulder. It’s designed to be tamper-proof, and the probation office will switch it out for drug testing once a week. I hate leaving the office with something of theirs att
ached to my body. At first, I have an allergic reaction to the patch: my eyes itch badly and my hands swell, and I have to go to an urgent care center to get an epinephrine shot. The patch, which has a serial number on it, is also embarrassing. It’s summer, and it pains me that when my shirt is off at Mom’s house, my brothers and sister can see it. Sometimes I tell people the patch is a homeopathic screener for toxins. My P.O. agrees to at least move it to my back.

  Family portraits with Pappy and Oma.

  I’m ambivalent about my other obligations. I like my sober companion, whose name is, of all things, Mescal; and AA and NA are great programs that have given hope to a lot of people who were hopeless. I find it inspiring to hear other addicts’ stories. But I happened to overcome my addiction in a weird and painful way that I’d never recommend to anyone else. I’m not sure the Twelve Steps are for me. And in my group therapy session, every Wednesday evening and way uptown, I feel miscast. The rest of the group are kids between twenty and twenty-eight, from very wealthy families, who are currently running wild with drugs and booze. I kind of become the big brother in the group, dispensing advice, which is something I’d like to do more of in the future.

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  In the spring of 2017, Viviane and I get wonderful news. She is pregnant. We’d been trying. Phew. I guess my sperm wasn’t eradicated by my drug use. And I’m going to have a child, which is something I very much want.

  When I tell Mom, she’s really excited, even gleeful. “I can’t wait for you to have your own kid,” she says. “Now you’re going to see what I went through.” She says she hopes I won’t unconsciously perpetuate my own family dynamics, which she calls “the invisible cross.”

  I don’t tell Dad the news right away. I know him. I’m pretty sure that he’ll think I’m not in the best place to be having a kid. That a child could be a financial millstone, for one thing. Sometimes I worry that Dad sees me as a burden and doesn’t entirely trust that I will stay on the path I’m on.

  When I call Dad to tell him the news, he’s quiet. Then he says, “Okay.” He’s quiet again. I say, “All right, okay, Dad.” I hang up. My feelings are hurt. Two days later, he starts calling my phone, and I don’t return the calls. When I get home that evening, there’s a message on the answering machine for Viviane: it’s Dad and Catherine and the kids congratulating us and saying how excited they are, and how Catherine wants to be called “Zeze” and Dad wants to be called “Bubba.” It’s nice. I call Dad. “I just needed a little time to digest the news, Cam.” He invites me up to Bedford.

  When I go there for the weekend, Carys and Dylan are excited about the baby on the way, and Dad already seems to have come around on the subject. He says he thinks I’m ready for it, and that it’s going to be a good thing. He knows I’m planning on moving to L.A. as soon as the judge permits it, but thinks it might be a better idea for me to stay on the East Coast, where I’ll have family around. I don’t really envision him or Mom doing much baby duty, but in time I’ll find that I’m mistaken.

  Viviane and I go in for an ultrasound and see the baby moving all over the place. It’s a girl. I’m glad. Somehow it seems simpler, for me anyway. Viviane suggests a name, Lua, the Portuguese word for moon, which I like. For a middle name, I suggest Izzy, as Pappy was known before he became Kirk. Lua Izzy Douglas.

  My relationship with Viviane is extremely different from my past ones. I’m approaching life in a very different way, with a functioning moral compass. I saw Amanda a few times after I got out of prison, but the old bitterness quickly rose to the surface, and we don’t talk anymore. I’ve spoken with Erin on the phone, but I really have no business being in touch with her, given my relationship with Viviane.

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  June 14, 2017, is the one-year anniversary of my release from prison. Since I got out, whenever I’ve seen people I haven’t seen in a long time, they’ve all had the same reaction: surprise. I think they assumed I’d emerge from prison a mess, and they see that I’m in the best place I’ve ever been.

  Their surprise is understandable. Most people in prison, in my experience, are slowly degraded over time. The longer they’re in there, the more diminished they become as people. Someone who made a mistake spends years in that element, surrounded by those people, making those ties, and now you have a real criminal on your hands. The time breeds anger, resentment, and prejudice. You carry these things with you, and you try to keep them at bay, but they’re there; and the longer you’re in there, the more they stack up. It’s all you can do to hang on to whatever positive changes you’ve made.

  I was a hard case, and it seems like I needed to learn my lesson the hard way. It was only in the depths of bleakness, when all my hope was gone and I could barely get out of my rack each morning, that I started to turn things around and try to make each day mean something. And it was a couple of years after that that I finally saw that heroin didn’t fit with my new priorities, and finally stopped doing it.

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  In July, I learn that my childhood friend Hans died two years ago. I was at Danbury then, and we’d spoken on the phone just months earlier. I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it from our mutual friends. When I get the news, I rub my head and shake it. My voice gets husky. What a fucking shame. Hans had wanted to come and visit. I’d told him it didn’t make sense at that point, but I’d see him after my release.

  I find a couple of articles about him online. One, which describes Hans as a “transient,” says he choked his girlfriend unconscious with a cord at the Premier Inn in Thousand Oaks, California, and left her for dead. After he fled, she came to and called 911. Police arrested Hans in Venice Beach and charged him with attempted murder. While he was being held in a jail in Ventura, he hung himself in his cell. He was thirty-eight.

  Hans and his girlfriend had been on their way to Orange County. It probably had something to do with meth; Hans was in a meth cycle. God, you just turn into such a fiend. That’s what the lifestyle has in store for you. Either you change, or you go to prison for the rest of your life, or you die, or you, I don’t know, squirm through life. There comes a time when the party’s over and…what do you want to do with your life? You had your days of being a wild stallion, and there was an appeal to it, and it was cute to some, and you were tough and doing all these crazy things. Then that ends, and what remains is just wreckage. It’s not cute anymore. It’s not cool. It’s not crazy. It’s just disgusting. Unfortunately, when you get to that point, you’re so roped in that for some people, like me, nothing short of a monumental, life-changing bomb exploding has even a chance of changing things.

  I think about what my life would look like if I’d never been arrested and gone to prison, if I was still out there, just living that borderline existence that I’d always told myself I never would—barely making it, far from living at the level I’d been aiming for. Is there a chance I’d be a successful, extremely rich, worldwide drug dealer? A small one, I guess. But more likely than not, I’d be in some fucking hotel room, acting like a fool.

  So many moments, when I look back on them, could have ended differently, and so much worse, than they did. Fuck, I don’t even know where to begin. More friends dying. Me being killed. Me killing someone. All these terrible things were very real possibilities that didn’t materialize. What did materialize was my doing a lengthy prison sentence. So when I went to prison, and even when I got my time doubled, part of me felt like: This is fair.

  I can almost say I feel blessed by my prison experience. Not in every way, but it was in prison that I began to get my life together. I got my priorities together. I answered questions about myself that I’d always had. When I went in I was thirty, but mentally I was seventeen. Right up until my arrest, I wore my pants sagging all the way down, like I had my whole life. I’d always wondered: At what point do you pull up your pants? Then I got to thirty, and it still hadn’t happened, and I was like: I guess never. I kept doing it thro
ugh my entire time in prison. But when I was released, I found that I rarely did it anymore. I’d gone into prison a boy, and I came out a man.

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  —

  One afternoon in New York, Viviane and I go to a party on the roof of a hotel. Back in the day, I’d have rolled up with five guys, cut to the front of the line, received comped drink tickets, and generally been lavished with VIP treatment. Now I wait in line like everyone else.

  I’m wearing white pants, a blue collared shirt, and red boat shoes. It’s a beautiful evening, and we listen to music and take in the sunset while I catch up with old friends. But I also find myself wondering: What am I doing here? It’s a struggle to make small talk. We have to yell to hear each other. Nightlife isn’t that appealing to me right now.

  Viviane and I leave, and as we walk downstairs a good-looking guy on the way up, a little taller and younger than me, gives me a once-over and says: “Fucking clown.” I’ve never, even in prison, been so blatantly disrespected. Without thinking, I jump on him, grab him, and start hitting him. He instantly wilts and folds. Viviane is hitting me and biting me, and I snap out of it. A couple of security guys pull me off the kid. I say, “I’m here with my girlfriend, she’s pregnant, I didn’t come here looking for trouble.”

  The security guys escort me out to the street. I don’t know if the kid recognized me, but I get really lucky. No one took out a phone and snapped a picture. No one Instagrams it. The kid could have called the police, and he would have just gotten kicked out of the party; I would have had to go before Judge Berman, and very possibly could have been sent back to prison.