Long Way Home

From the scion of Hollywood royalty--son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas--a moving, often shocking, ultimately inspiring memoir detailing his struggle to regain his dignity, humanity, and place in society after many years of drug abuse and almost eight years in prison. Cameron Douglas is born into wealth, privilege, and comfort. His parents are glamorous jet-setters, his father a superstar, his mother a beautiful socialite, his grandfather a legend. On the surface, his life seems golden. But by the age of thirty, he has taken a hellish dive: he's become a drug addict, a thief, and--after a DEA drug bust--a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added to his sentence while incarcerated. Eventually he will spend two years in solitary, where he manages, nonetheless, to hold fast to the brutal ethos of prison survival . . . until: he begins to reverse his savage transformation, to understand the psychological turmoil that has tormented him for years, and to prepare for what will be a profoundly challenging, but eventually deeply satisfying and successful, reentry into society at large. Sparing no one in his sphere--least of all himself--Cameron Douglas gives us a raw and unstintingly honest recounting of his harrowing, remarkable, and, in the end, inspiring life story.

“Frank, compelling, at times heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant.” —Variety

"Gripping." —Rolling Stone

“Family permeates Douglas’s book. . . . Long Way Home is [an] unsparing account of how he pursued what he calls his ‘demented death wish,’ chasing addictions to heroin and liquid cocaine, shaking off rehabs and forcible interventions, and nearly getting himself killed numerous times.” —The New York Times

Auteur

Cameron Douglas is an actor, writer, and filmmaker.

Texte du rabat

On the surface, Cameron Douglas had everything: descended from Hollywood royalty (son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas), he was born into a life of wealth, privilege, and comfort. But by the age of thirty, he had become a drug addict, a thief, and-after a DEA drug bust-a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added while he was incarcerated.

Through supreme willpower, a belief in himself, and a steely desire to alter his life's path, Douglas began to reverse his trajectory, to understand and deal with the psychological turmoil that tormented him for years, and to prepare for what would be a profoundly challenging but successful reentry into society at large.

A brutally raw and honest memoir, Long Way Home is a powerful story of one man's descent into the depths of addiction and self-destruction-and his successful renewal of family ties that had become almost irreparably frayed.

Résumé
On the surface, Cameron Douglas had everything: descended from Hollywood royalty (son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas), he was born into a life of wealth, privilege, and comfort. But by the age of thirty, he had become a drug addict, a thief, and—after a DEA drug bust—a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added while he was incarcerated.

Through supreme willpower, a belief in himself, and a steely desire to alter his life’s path, Douglas began to reverse his trajectory, to understand and deal with the psychological turmoil that tormented him for years, and to prepare for what would be a profoundly challenging but successful reentry into society at large.

A brutally raw and honest memoir, Long Way Home is a powerful story of one man’s descent into the depths of addiction and self-destruction—and his successful renewal of family ties that had become almost irreparably frayed.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1

2004: “Don’t Gaslight Me”

Ever since Mom and Dad’s divorce, they’ve shared custody of S’Estaca, their cliffside property in Spain, on the northwest coast of the island of Mallorca. Mom has it July 15 to New Year’s Day. Dad gets it the other half of the year.

On a breezy July day when I’m twenty-five, Dad, my friend Erin, and I are eating lunch on the veranda, which is shaded with a vine-covered trellis and overlooks the sea. The woman serving lunch comes over and tells Dad he has a phone call. He leaves to take it in the bar, a good twenty-five yards away. A minute later I hear a high-pitched sound, a keening moan that is human, but I can’t tell who it is. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” I stand up and run toward the person, realizing finally that it is Dad. My heart drops into my stomach. I’ve never heard him make that sound. Something devastating must have happened. He puts down the phone and turns toward me. He’s crying. “We’ve lost Eric,” he says.

Eric is Uncle Eric, Dad’s half brother. The call was from the New York City Police Department. Someone flagged down a cruiser after finding Eric in his apartment this morning. He had overdosed on a mix of alcohol, tranquilizers, and painkillers and, at the age of forty-six, is dead.

As long as I can remember, Eric was battling some pretty serious demons. He was always having conflict with Pappy, my grandfather, who’s been amazing to me but is a tough guy and, as I understand it, could be hard on his children. Pappy is known to the world as Kirk Douglas, the international box-office star of the 1950s and ’60s, a Hollywood legend nearly as famous for his conquests (Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth) as for his illustrious career acting in movies like Champion, Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Spartacus. He scored three Best Actor Academy Award nominations in the process, rebelled against the studio system by starting his own independent production company, and also broke the Hollywood blacklist, hiring Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus under his own name. In the summer of 2004, Pappy is still vital at eighty-seven, and despite experiencing a stroke eight years ago, he has now outlived one of his sons.

We all knew that Eric was gay, but he wasn’t out. It’s something he clearly wrestled with, and I believe was tormented by. Although I think the family would have accepted his sexuality unreservedly, he may have feared otherwise, given that Douglas men tend toward a square-jawed breed of masculinity.

Eric tried on many hats, professionally. Beyond a handful of roles (like a made-for-TV movie in which he played the younger, flashback version of Pappy’s character, and an episode of Tales from the Crypt, in which he played the son of Pappy’s character), he got little traction as an actor.

In recent years, he’d been trying to make it as a comedian. He wasn’t great at it. He was angry, and most of his jokes made fun of Pappy and Dad, known to other people as Michael Douglas. From Eric’s point of view, Dad, given the success he’d found, should have looked out for his brothers more. Dad had tried to be supportive, going to several of Eric’s comedy shows, but then he had to sit there and listen to a series of flat jokes ridiculing him and Pappy and, most painfully, Eric himself: “There’s Kirk, Michael, and me. Oscar winner, Oscar winner, and Oscar Mayer wiener.”

Eric and I had a warm relationship, but he had a hair-trigger temper that could be frightening. I remember once, when I was a toddler, being with him at a convenience store, where he got into a fight and was beaten up in front of me. Eventually, his drug and alcohol problems became so severe that brain damage slurred his speech…