Fortunately, I never hurt anyone too badly. Sometimes when I came out on top, the other kid would turn around and want to be my best friend; and sometimes when I lost, I’d find myself drawn to developing a friendship with the other kid. Scrapping became a social tool for me, the way I established myself in peer groups.
At home, too, I was rewarded for my toughness. If Dad had a friend over, he’d say, smiling, “Hey, Cam, tell that story about that fight you got into the other day.”
* * *
—
I was a chronic truant. I knew where the best parties were, and most weekends I’d lead a caravan of half a dozen cars down to L.A. to a rave; so many of our friends wanted to go with us that one night a kid named Kevin rode the whole way in the trunk of Jesse’s Mustang, which hadn’t had its shocks replaced in a long time. On Halloween, I was the kid in a hoodie with a bandanna over my face so you could only see my eyes, reenacting the vandalism scene in Stand by Me as we drove down a street and I leaned out the window with a baseball bat, taking out one mailbox after another. When I added a few stints in juvie to the mix, the kids I was hanging out with looked at me in a respectful new light.
Knucklehead me with Mom.
That fall, I had my first experience with heroin. It held a certain allure for me. It was another line to cross, one more step away from people’s expectations of me, so I was curious to try it. My friend Jaime was in Carpas, and his uncle, who was also in the gang, shot me up. I was afraid of the needle but eager for the experience, and I was pleased that these two gangbangers deemed me worthy of inclusion.
I wasn’t prepared for how physical heroin would be. I felt it saturate my body, and I threw up, but then I felt warm all over, and relaxed and happy and content. Wow. Wow. The feeling carried over to how I associated with people: I was more at ease talking to them and being around them. I wasn’t worried about getting addicted; at that time, heroin didn’t really suit me. It’s a private, antisocial drug, and I wanted to be out and about—snowboarding, having adventures—not staying home and nodding out. Cocaine was the drug for that—until it wasn’t.
* * *
—
The terms of my probation included a curfew and random drug testing, and I continued to rack up violations, spending increasing amounts of time in Juvenile Hall, with the stays lengthening from a weekend to a week to a month. My general strategy, going into new situations like juvie, was to try to avoid people finding out who I was. Douglas was a common enough last name, and I usually had about two weeks before everyone figured out my background, which gave me enough time to get established, make connections, and have people form opinions of me that didn’t have to do with my family.
In juvie, everything was geared toward rehabilitation. A nice man named Peter Claydon came to visit me once a week. He was slight and soft-spoken, with a big head of curly hair and a British accent. He was a psychologist who specialized in troubled youth, and he was always taking notes. He was very interested in my anger. “Are you sure you’re not angry? It’s okay to be angry.” I didn’t feel like I was angry. I’m sure, in retrospect, that I must have been, and was stuffing my feelings and numbing them with drugs and alcohol, but at the time I felt like I was living exactly the way I wanted to. And I felt that in a place like juvie, dutifully answering a therapist’s questions was just part of the package. Really talking out your problems was what friends were for.
There was a swimming pool at Juvenile Hall, and on Sundays the staff would take a group of us there and hold competitions for candy and snacks from the commissary cart. I was a fast swimmer and could hold my breath a long time, and I won many of the competitions. I started getting pulled out to play volleyball with the staff, who called me the Great White Hope.
The din of juvie reminded me of a dog pound: animals lined up in cages flanking a center path, quiet until a handler came in, at which point they’d go bananas, barking, jumping up, desperate for food and attention. In juvie, if someone came in, everyone started screaming and yelling. When Dad came and visited me, he said, “You know why it’s so noisy in here? ’Cause they can’t read.”
Ironically, it was during the intermittent periods of quiet in juvie that I discovered a love of books, reading Wilbur Smith’s historical novels, Louis L’Amour’s cowboys-and-Indians novels, Stephen King’s The Green Mile, everything by Tolkien, and nonfiction books about history. Books made me feel less alone. Each one was a spaceship or time machine that took me out of my current situation to a different place or period, or a powerful lens that brought the present into focus by shining a light on the past.
* * *
—
On home supervision, I had an electronic ankle-bracelet monitor. The probation office installed a receiver in my house, connected to our phone line. If I went beyond a 100-foot radius when I was supposed to be at home, the receiver would alert the probation office.
During these periods of relative freedom, I had to attend a group called Klein Bottle, on Milpas Street. The counselor was a recovering addict named Dave Vartabedian, a California-ized Armenian with dark hair and a mustache who’d spent seven years in state prison and now worked with at-risk youth. When my driver’s license was suspended, he’d pick me up from school, making sure I went straight home. I looked up to him. But when he showed us pictures from prison, I thought: Seven years in prison…What the fuck? I couldn’t imagine what that was like, how someone survived it, how anyone could fuck up so badly that they ended up with a sentence like that.
* * *
—
In November, Dad went to South Africa to shoot The Ghost and the Darkness with Val Kilmer, about the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo. Over Christmas break, Mom and I flew to visit him on location. While Dad worked, Mom and I took a lot of pictures with local tribespeople. It was our last time together as a family. As far as I was concerned, the divorce was long overdue.
When Dad was back in Santa Barbara, his oversight of me was light and sporadic. In an effort to maintain his relationship with me, he had rented a place in Montecito not far from our house on Hot Springs Road, and the probation office installed a second ankle-monitor receiver connected to a phone line there. I stayed with him when he was in town, and it sometimes felt like we were two bachelors palling around. When I missed curfews set by Dad, usually because I’d been out making mischief with friends, I found that an excuse which worked on him more often than not was saying that I’d been with a girl.
I’d always been afraid of his anger, but during that period when the divorce was happening, I think he just didn’t have the energy to be my disciplinarian. He probably felt some guilt. We didn’t spend much time together, and maybe he wanted what time we did spend together to be harmonious. We were both trying to avoid confrontation. I never lost respect for him, but I was willful. I don’t know that his discipline would have had any effect.
When he wasn’t present to check my behavior, Mom lost any control over me. When she spoke to me in Spanish around my friends—she hoped I would become bilingual—I’d redden and answer in English. At the time, for me and my friends, nothing was more important than being who you were and standing firm on what you believed. I was full of shit, of course. Motivated by my need to belong among my friends, I wasn’t standing firm on what I believed. I was being someone I wasn’t.
One night, the Santa Anas were blowing, making their ethereal gusting sound, and I was drinking beers with Jay and Isaac down at the pool house. This was nothing new, but for some reason Mom lost it. She called probation, and a home supervision officer came to the house. He asked her if this wasn’t something she and I could work out between us, because the penalty for violating my probation, at this point, would be harsh and complicated. But she insisted he take me back to juvie. She was my legal guardian, and he had to defer to her request. I was taken back into custody.
A few days later, I was brought to the courthouse, shackled to a line of other juvenile defendants. When my name was called, I shuffled into the
courtroom. I knew Mom was in the room, and I suspected she felt guilty. No doubt she was expecting me to be released back home that day. But when it was my turn to face the judge, he said that Mom clearly couldn’t handle me, so the state was going to take that responsibility out of her hands. He was making me a ward of California.
When he said that, I glanced back at Mom, the architect of this disastrous development. She looked stunned, and I could see panic building in her eyes. I glared at her: I hope you’re happy now. I felt bitterly, self-defeatingly joyful: she had gotten what she deserved. It hadn’t yet sunk in that I was the one who’d have to carry this weight. When the guards re-cuffed us and led us outside to the bus that would take us away, I stared straight ahead, not looking at Mom, who years later wouldn’t remember this day at all.
13
1996: The Juvie Archipelago
After I was made a ward of California, I was sent to a short-term group home, a rehab in Oxnard. From there I moved on to drug rehab at Hazelden, in Minnesota. I had no interest in getting sober, and I didn’t see the benefit in talking to a shrink. In one of the group meetings I had to attend, we were given an exercise: Draw a picture of where you might be if you continue heading in your current direction. I drew a prison wall with a prison tower. I didn’t really think that was a possible outcome, but I thought drawing it made me look tough and would show the lightweights around me that I was the genuine article.
I was supposed to go home after thirty days, but then the administrators told me they were going to move me into their extended program, which had no fixed duration. I didn’t like the sound of that. I called a taxi and told it to wait a block away, then I ran across a field to meet it. I called Emmy, a friend from the George School, to ask her to buy me a bus ticket. I don’t remember how the situation was resolved, but according to Hazelden’s records, I left “at the request of the staff.” Dad says I had violated Hazelden’s zero-tolerance substance policy.
* * *
—
Next, I was sent to a group home in a poor section of St. Paul. Sherburne House received kids from different states’ juvenile systems. During the day, we’d be bussed to a nearby school, and once a week we were driven fifteen minutes away for an AA meeting. Soon after I arrived, I received a fax from Dad, who was on vacation with his friend Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi, an automotive heir and playboy and a very sharp guy:
Dear Cameron, I’ve been thinking about you a lot. I’m sending this fax to you by satellite on Johnny’s boat. I don’t understand how these things work—but we’re a hundred miles from the nearest road, off the coast of Baja in Mexico! It’s been very quiet for the four days I’ve been here; getting a lot of rest, snorkeling for sea urchins, reading a good book, and a couple of scripts.
Dad was often doing that, telling me about the latest amazing, far-off place he found himself. I tried to think positively about it. It made me happy to think that someone I loved was enjoying himself. I also wondered whether he was hoping to motivate me by showing me what I was missing.
I’ll be back tomorrow night and will call you. I hope things have calmed down for you Cameron—that you’re able to let go of some of the anger. You have a lot of family and friends who really care about you—and it is going to get better! I pray for you every night—and can’t wait to see you real soon! Love, Dad
Everyone was always telling me that I was angry. I felt offended by the idea. Having other people telling me what I was feeling: that made me angry. Why the fuck does everyone insist that I’m angry?
One day, bored during an AA meeting, I wandered out back. The woman who lived above the meeting room was just returning to her apartment, and we talked a bit. Liz was eighteen and had a hustler vibe. We made a plan to meet again when I returned the following week. This time she invited me up to her apartment, and we had sex. I started taking an hour out of each AA meeting to go upstairs and hang out with her. By now, I’d stopped taking sex for granted. A relationship might last only a few days, but for me it was always romantic. It was as important to me as the sex, if not more, that there be an emotional connection.
By Sherburne House criteria, I was doing well—participating, going along with the curriculum, and, as far as they knew, staying out of trouble. But I’d noticed that a couple of boys, including my friend Victor, a wild, good-looking, wealthy kid from New York City, had been there for as long as two years, which seemed forever to my seventeen-year-old self. I had no intention of staying there anywhere close to that long. I went to the head counselor, Neil, and asked how soon I could leave if I kept doing everything right and didn’t get into any trouble. He was noncommittal: “We’ll just have to see how you progress.”
That was the thing with the juvenile system and its focus on rehabilitation. It depended on involuntary, open-ended, Cuckoo’s Nest–style commitments to institutions that had full discretion over how long they kept you. Their funding was based on how many kids were there, and the facilities were often run by adults with their own psychological issues.
“Two months? Four months?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“What, six months?”
“I don’t know, I don’t have an answer for you.”
Fuck that, I wasn’t going to be there for years. I started bucking, hopping the fence and running to a little liquor store down the street, where I’d grab 40s for me and Victor and another friend of ours.
* * *
—
I eventually told Liz that I was thinking about running away, and she said I could stay with her while I figured out my plans. A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, I climbed out of the second-floor bathroom window at Sherburne House, dropped to the ground, and was on my way. It took me an hour to jog-walk across town, and when I got to Liz’s place, just before dawn, I rang the buzzer. No one answered. I kept ringing. Still no answer.
It was the middle of the summer, and I waited there all day. Eventually, a kid who rode past on a BMX said I could take refuge on his screened-in porch nearby. It had a couch I could sleep on. The next day I was back at Liz’s door, buzzing and waiting.
Finally, she showed up. I was so relieved. When I popped out of the shadows, wide-eyed, I think I scared the shit out of her. A guy was with her, and she told him she’d see him later. I went upstairs with her, sprawled on her couch, and cracked a cold beer. At that moment, I felt safe and content, and I spent the night. But the next day, when Liz took me to lunch, she was distant, and I started feeling paranoid.
That evening, at her apartment, she got a phone call. A few moments later she said she had to go downstairs, and she’d be right back. She left the door to the apartment open. My spider sense tingled. Then I heard a police radio. I grabbed my jacket, darted out the door, and ran down the hall, away from the staircase. Around a corner, there was a door slightly ajar. I slipped through it into a room where a fat man on a couch looked up in surprise. I put a finger to my lips. “Don’t worry,” I said quietly, “I’ll be out of here in a moment.” He didn’t look like he was buying it. I could hear the police down the hall, confused that I wasn’t in Liz’s apartment.
I made for an open window, climbed down a fire escape, and sprinted back to the BMX boy’s porch. All I had with me was my address book, in my jacket; the boy and his obese mother let me use their phone. First I got in touch with Chuck, a kid who I’d met at Hazelden and was now living in a halfway house in St. Paul, and he came and picked me up and gave me a ride to the bus station. Then I called Mary, my friend Jesse’s mother, back in Santa Barbara. She bought me a one-way Greyhound ticket to New York City. Soon I was on a bus heading east.
When the bus made stops, I was careful not to get off, but in Cleveland I decided to stretch my legs. I was standing on the sidewalk, shaking out my cramps and talking to a girl from the bus, when a police detective approached me and started asking questions. I told him I was with my older sister, and we were on our way to New York. He looked at the girl standing next to me and go
t a blank stare that didn’t give him confidence in my story. He told me to get into the back of his cruiser while he investigated further.
I returned to California in handcuffs. As I strode through LAX, flanked by police detectives, I enjoyed imagining the scenarios people in the airport had to be conjuring about who I was and what was happening. I rode in the back of a police car from LAX to Santa Barbara Juvenile Hall. The window in back was rolled down a few inches, and I held my cuffed hands outside the car so that people could see them—maybe in a bid for sympathy, or in the vain hope that someone would rescue me.
* * *
—
At that point, I was designated to spend four months at Los Prietos, a boys’ work camp that was part of the Santa Barbara juvenile system. It was tough there. My head was already shaved, but everyone else got sheared when we arrived. We slept in barracks-style housing, and the program was like boot camp. Los Prietos stood on seventeen acres in the Los Padres National Forest, and we spent most of each day clearing trails and removing dry underbrush that might fuel wildfires. We had to do calisthenics every morning. There was a pool, and we’d box underwater, to dampen the force of our punches. Then it was off to bed, to start all over again in the morning.
Mom and Dad and Pappy and Jojo and Granny all wrote me letters during this period, but the ones that really stuck with me were from Granny, who was unfailingly supportive, encouraging, inspiring, and filled with wisdom.
Boys’ camp felt like pre-prison. In juvie, there’d been some pretty innocent kids. But here, there were boys on their way to more serious incarceration. There were also a lot of knuckleheads, kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t follow the rules and viewed this as a notch in their belt. I was one of those knuckleheads.
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