Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Viviane is angry that she had to get in the middle of it, and scared by my reactiveness. So am I. The next day, when I have time to reflect on what happened, I feel a deep shiver of fear at how easily that one moment could have led me back down a terrible path.

  For so long, I was seeking confirmation of my toughness. From my early teenage years, no matter what I did, it was never quite enough. I always needed more. Now, for the first time in maybe twenty-five years, I’m not looking for more confirmation. But prison made me very sensitive about establishing my space and boundaries. It ingrained in me how important it is not to give anyone the idea that you’re a pushover. I avoided a lot of problems that way. But I’m the last person who can afford to get in a fight now. And fighting is hardly the only way to show toughness or command respect outside of prison. I try to stay away from crowded situations. It’s hard, since I ride the subway all over the place.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Kaminski talks about planning for the past, instead of planning for the future. He means making decisions based on how you’ll look back on them. I want to look back on this time and have good memories. I’m trying to enjoy the moment.

  I’m continuously adjusting to a different, non-prison way of thinking. My initial spite toward people I didn’t feel had been in touch enough while I was in prison melts away, and I reach out to some of them, like my old friend Taylor. Now I see, being out here myself, that life is going on. It’s a little more complicated out here, and the tit-for-tat prison mentality doesn’t really apply. I recalibrate my expectations for people.

  I’m still capable of feeling hope, but now, instead of using it to rationalize terrible things, I apply it to realistic, healthy goals. I still value the thrill of adrenaline, but where I used to get it by sticking up liquor stores or getting in fights, I now know that I can get it by landing jobs, finding success, competing healthily, traveling, trying new things, being inspired. It’s a good feeling: I’m doing what I said I was going to do. I’m reaping what I sowed during those dark, difficult years in prison.

  There’s that old saying: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. My teacher just had to be razor wire, hardened felons, and the loss of my liberty. How else would I ever have found myself in a situation where I was alone, surrounded by enemies, and had to come to terms with that? After a lifetime of cocooning myself in groups of people, unable to be comfortable by myself and needing everybody to like me, I learned to truly be on my own and be okay with that. It gave me confidence. It taught me something about myself. Having to push forward alone through adversity was the missing piece that I desperately needed in order to have a fulfilling, productive life. It’s also an essential quality for an actor, and I don’t know how else I would have achieved it. I was such a stubborn person, so stuck in my ways.

  That’s something I’m trying to make up for now. I wasn’t around a lot for my family during those years. I didn’t feel guilty then, but I do now. I’m sorry I wasn’t a more productive and involved family member for all that time. Now I’m trying to be as present as possible.

  I feel overdue gratitude. Mom and Dad have supported me long after their parental obligations required them to do so. I’ve caused both of them a lot of pain, and they’ve never turned away from me. When I was in solitary, Mom’s daily letter writing to me verged on heroic. Because of the regular long drives she made to visit me, bringing my siblings with her each time, I have close bonds with each of them, which I cherish. Now that I’m out, I see them and Mom every week.

  Dad, too, wrote and visited consistently, and he has spent a lot of money over the years getting me out of jams of my own creation. He still bounces around a lot, but when he’s in town we make a point of seeing each other. I’ve always enjoyed watching sports with Dad, but I want to find another activity we can do together. He’s been playing golf for twenty years and is obsessed with it. I used to go with Granny to her country club, where she played, and I’d hit the ball every now and then. Now I take my first lesson, an hour with a pro at Chelsea Piers. Even wearing gloves, I get serious blisters. The pro says I’m sort of a gorilla: I hold the club too tight and try to hit the ball too hard. But I connect with it, and think there’s some potential.

  * * *

  —

  On a Saturday in early July, I fly out to L.A. to visit Pappy for a week. As the plane lifts off from Newark Airport, I become emotional. For eight years, the planes I saw flying over me, and made up stories about, symbolized freedom. Finally, I’m on one of them.

  I arrive at Pappy’s house in Beverly Hills in the afternoon, put my bags in the guesthouse, and go right into the main house to say hello. Seeing Pappy after so much time, I feel like I can let out a breath I’ve been holding for too long. Right away, he checks out my muscles. The next morning, we have breakfast, and it lasts three hours. He’s one hundred years old, and his stamina is so impressive. He has so much curiosity, asking endless questions about prison life. “Were you in a gang? Did you fight a lot? Did you kill anyone?” Oma is here too. She’s ninety-eight and also completely lucid, with an amazing memory. In the evening, we have a family dinner with Dad and Catherine and Dylan and Carys, who are in town, as well as Peter, Pappy’s son with Oma, and his kids.

  Over the next week, Pappy and I have breakfast together every morning and dinner most evenings. I feel grateful to have the chance to spend all this time with him, and soon we’re over the hump of me being an awkward guest and us getting reacquainted. Pappy proudly shows me the pastel drawing of me and him that I’d commissioned from an inmate artist at Loretto as a gift, and which Pappy has framed and hung on his bedroom wall. I show him my tattoo of him and Dad. I’m not sure how he’ll react, given Dad’s seeming discomfort, but Pappy is really taken with it. Every time a guest comes over, Pappy calls me over and has me show off my abs.

  And actually, Dad says something nice about it too. He and I have lunch most days while I’m here. One day, he says to Pappy, “Hey, Dad, did you see the tattoo Cameron got of us?” Pappy says, “Yeah, it’s amazing. What do you think, Michael?” Dad says, in front of me, that he feels honored and that it’s really good work. The men in my family have notoriously thin legs, and Dad also makes a point of showing off my muscular legs to Pappy. It’s nice to watch them interact; they have a lot of love and respect for each other. There are also traces of the rivalry that has always been part of their relationship. Pappy keeps bringing up how much Dad was recently paid for one week’s work in China, which he can’t get over.

  * * *

  —

  I’m itching to work, but I’m trying to be discerning. I turn down an offer from American Idol’s producers to be the subject of a reality show. I’ve read a lot of scripts over the past year, and so many of them are bad. Finally Dechen Thurman, one of Viviane’s mentors at Jivamukti, brings me something interesting, a short film a friend of his is making called Dead Layer. I’ve been hired to play a graffiti artist who’s trying to make it as a gallery artist when he gets caught up in a murder. I also recently completed my first paid, post-prison acting gig. Pappy’s putting out an audiobook version of a collection of letters between him and Oma, and I did his voice for the letters, going to the publisher’s offices in Manhattan to record it.

  While I’m in L.A., I have a good meeting with agents at United Talent Agency, who’ve agreed to represent me. A year ago, I met with one of them in New York and got the distinct sense that he was there only as a favor to someone. This meeting, the feeling is very different, and I don’t question their sincerity. If agents feel like you can help them further their careers, they’re all in, so their enthusiasm is reassuring. But when they ask if I can come back out to L.A. for auditions in the near future, I have to say no, not yet. My pot violation has slowed down the timeline for a move. It’s frustrating.

  While I’m here, though, they’ve booked a couple of auditions for me. One is for the part of a religious leader in a sci-fi trilogy, Chaos Walking, cowrit
ten by Charlie Kaufman, with Doug Liman set to direct. It’s a video audition, as an increasing number of auditions are these days, and I film a bunch of takes on my iPhone. I go over them with Dad. He tells me which ones he thinks are best and what to do differently next time. He says not to push so hard, because I have a strong presence naturally. Dad, talking about the acting lifestyle, has told me, “Hopefully the good things outweigh the bad things.” He has also said it takes “ninety percent hard work, ten percent talent.”

  The other audition is with a major casting director. On the way to meet her, I take the same street I used to drive to get to Granny’s house in Sherman Oaks. I think about Granny often, and really wish that I could see her and she could see me now. For today’s audition I’ve memorized the text, and the casting director feeds me my first line. Then I freeze, my mind blank. The words come back, but when I leave I don’t feel great about my performance. Later, my agent says the casting director is notoriously prickly and cold and I shouldn’t be offended. That’s my first inkling that maybe things went okay, because actually she was really warm and enthusiastic about my acting; and then my agents get positive feedback from her too.

  I’m hoping to move here in the next few months, and, optimistically, I spend a fair amount of my time in L.A. looking for a house to rent. Driving around the city, I can’t get over how much it has changed since I was last here. It’s weird to see all these stores selling marijuana legally. The development is nonstop. It feels like every third car is a Tesla. I’m struck anew by the size of the freeways—five, six lanes in each direction. The traffic is still terrible, maybe worse. Now it’s bad even during off-peak hours. I wonder if Uber has something to do with that. Even the Hills are now crawling with cars following Waze-suggested shortcuts. It seems like there are a lot more people everywhere than there used to be.

  I drive around the flats of West Hollywood, down Sunset and Franklin, places where I spent a lot of time in the years before my arrest. I pass storage places, UPS stores, gas stations I pulled into a million times. When I see my dear old friend Isaac, who I used to break dance with, and his family, we end up eating lunch at Swingers, a restaurant on the ground floor of the Beverly Laurel, my old hideout. I look up through the hotel sign to the corner room behind it where I used to stay all the time. These are the same places as before, but they feel a world apart. My life was so different then, and it seems like a lifetime ago.

  I’d love to live near the beach, but you get less for your dollar there, and, what with the traffic, I also don’t want to be so far from the studios. I move my house hunt to the Hollywood Hills, which I know and like. I think I nail down a place, but the owner decides to go with another family, which is a bummer. I imagine that my legal status may have something to do with it.

  * * *

  —

  Back in New York, Judge Berman gives me the go-ahead to move to L.A., but in the meantime my apartment lease is expiring, so I fill out a bunch of applications for places to move into as a stopgap. I’m in a much better position than most other ex-cons, but I keep getting turned down. My broker says that the landlords get prickly right after they do a background check on me. Finally, Viviane and I move into an Airbnb in Hell’s Kitchen, which Viv can book in her name. It’s me and Viv and two dogs and, soon, a baby in a 650-square-foot space. My huge houseplant, George, takes up literally 5 percent of the apartment.

  It’s funny: Dad is starting to get really involved in my plans. We talk for an hour on the phone, and he says, “Cam, you have to realize, I’m the grandfather of this child, I want to make sure your priorities are in the right order.” It’s nice. For my birthday, as I turn thirty-nine, Dad takes me out for a sushi lunch at Zuma. We talk and laugh, and he gives me fatherly advice about money and relationships, which I appreciate, as well as his old car, which is still pretty sharp. When I get his and Catherine’s Christmas card, I see that it says it’s from them and Dylan and Carys and me, with a photo of us all. It feels good to be included.

  On the night of December 17, when Viviane is scheduled to be induced, there’s a big football game between Pittsburgh and New England, and Viviane is such a good sport, seeing how much I’m enjoying the game, that she puts off our trip to the hospital until it’s over. At NewYork–Presbyterian, on the East River, a nurse and I take turns supporting Viviane as she goes through labor. Viviane really wants to have a natural childbirth, but after hours of pushing, the ob-gyn convinces her that she should have a C-section. I scrub up and join her in the operating room, peeking over the curtain to make sure everything’s going smoothly. Finally, Lua is born. She’s 7 pounds, 9.3 ounces. A nurse hands her to me, and while the doctors sew Viviane up, I sit in the other room, holding my new daughter as we look into each other’s eyes. She’s so beautiful.

  Last Christmas, I was at the halfway house. This is my first Christmas with my family, and I spend it at Mom’s house. She does a beautiful job. My relationship with her is really good. When the twins are done with high school, she wants to follow me to California with Imara. Her years of drama, which took a real toll on her, are well behind her. To pave the way for a West Coast move, she has already put her farm on the market and is looking to downsize her city home. Having a child does change how I see Mom and Dad. I already have more respect for them, a glimpse of insight into what they were going through with each other and with me, and a new appreciation for them. I also now have another thing—parenting—in common with them.

  * * *

  —

  “Alexa, change your location to California. What’s the weather forecast?”

  “The forecast in New York City is partly cloudy, with a forty percent chance of rain.”

  “Alexa, recalibrate your system to California. What’s the weather going to be like today?”

  “The weather in New York City is partly cloudy, with a forty percent chance of rain.”

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  Anyway, we’ve moved into a beautiful house in the Hills, and the weather here has been predictably amazing.

  Truck loves it. Every morning I put on shorts, no shirt, and Chucks, and walk him to some vacant land next door to us, where we play fetch with a tennis ball and Truck takes dips in the swimming pool of a neighbor who, kindly, doesn’t seem to mind. It feels like people are nicer out here, which takes some getting used to. In New York, you keep your eyes down. Here, people are chatty and have no hesitation about asking a lot of questions.

  My new P.O. is a straitlaced, thorough, by-the-book guy, with a big office downtown. The first time I meet him, he tells me I need to register with the LAPD.

  “What, like I’m a pedophile?”

  “Yeah,” he says. There are three crimes that require it: arson, sex offenses, and drug offenses.

  The ghosts of my past keep showing up. On my drive back from a looping session for Dead Layer in Burbank, I pass the Chevron where I used to meet with Gabriel, and the Carl’s Jr. parking lot where I’d meet my heroin dealer. I’ve found an NA meeting I like, in Venice Beach, and every time I drive there I pass the building on Sawtelle where I was living when I was arrested with a gun and sent to county jail for six months.

  Ideally, I’d like to land a part in one of the flood of great new TV shows coming out. A bunch of auditions, including one for a part opposite Elizabeth Banks in an indie film, come and go without callbacks. I want so much for myself, and from myself. I struggle to be patient.

  Because there was a time when everything did come to me—and I took it for granted and blew it—I have to catch myself when I’m feeling that everything should come to me. It’s an attitude, unconscious if I’m not vigilant, that before I went to prison made me feel like: I’m important, people should come to me with offers. What do you have for me? Even when I came home from prison, I probably still had it. I need to get over it. It just takes away from me going out and doing the legwork and pushing to succeed. One day, after moving to L.A., I meet with Jeremy Barber, a partner at UTA, and he’s up-front
and honest with me: I have a hole to dig myself out of, and I need to take acting seriously if I want to be taken seriously. There are a lot of talented people out here working their asses off. It’s been a learning curve. Finally, I feel open and not defensive, and ready to see and understand my sense of entitlement and how it gets in my way.

  Everything takes time. I try to be satisfied with steady, incremental progress. These are the ups and downs of life, which I insulated myself from during all those years of addiction. I’m giving it my best shot, understanding that it’s not always going to go my way. I’m more accepting of uncertainty now. I don’t need instant gratification the way I used to. For better or worse, I’m optimistic. I’ve always been my own worst enemy, but I’ve never doubted I could be an actor.

  Looking back on it, I feel like I’ve been acting for most of my life in one sense or another, and doing a pretty good job of it. Now I’m trying to do something worthwhile and make a career out of it. I hope that one day people will look at me and my past and find hope and inspiration.

  My time in prison is never far from my thoughts. I think about my friends; about Talib. He’s up for parole again, in the next six months. It will be so tragic if he’s turned down again. He was convicted of violent crimes, but he was a juvenile, and he’s done everything imaginable to merit release. I pray he’ll get it. (And, in August, he will!)

  Flipping through channels on TV one night, I stumble on Intervention, the drug rehab show that Candy Finnigan, my old interventionist, is on. I’ve never actually seen the show before, and I watch the episode. It brings up so many memories about the stranglehold of addiction, and I’m really moved.