by David Carr
“You were full of enthusiasm and joy of life,” Lizbeth told me on a visit to New York in 2007. “We were sophomores and juniors in college. I think you had as many hopes and dreams as anybody else. That’s how I remember it. We were all together and moving along. I was more surprised that you ended up tipping off the deep end than that you ended up being successful.”
I traveled a lot after River Falls, all domestic, but saw people and things that had nothing to do with my little world of suburban Minneapolis. I sensed all kinds of possibilities, but not my place in them. I spent a lot of nights alone on the road, traveling in the West, checking out star-filled skies and making plans that contained no real plans.
5
MUSKIE TALE
…Gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race…
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK
When you go to those meetings, the ones with the shitty coffee that are knee-deep in aphorisms that keep millions alive, including me, they never talk about the fun part. Bad form, not done, not in keeping with the spirit of the occasion. But when chemicals and karma combusted into bliss, it was mad, mad fun. If not for those moments, why would people spend the rest of their lives chasing that feeling? Rats—humans too—continue to push on the bar in the cage of our existence looking for a reward past the point of reason because, every once in a while, something unthinkably delicious comes down the tube.
For the record, I had fun, some of it with David B. He is a friend, a professional colleague, and the guy who sat over my shoulder when I wrote my first story. David taught me a lot, including that a lot was two words, not one. He is one of the many people in my life who hung a right or a left long before I went down a road that ended with a bridge out and twisted human wreckage. Happily situated with a family and a freelance career, he agreed to meet with me, and we found ourselves ruminating not on the wages of sin but its splendors. It was a fun hour.
“There was one epic experience where we were up, I think, at your place or your parents’ place, some place up north,” he said, remembering an old fishing camp my family had bought, but I actually think it was my friend Joel’s cabin. Both locales were the scene of multiple capers, and, like a lot of them, this one involved watercraft, LSD, fireworks, and long peals of laughter. He was out on the water with Brownie, a dear friend of ours who was almost always game for organized foolishness.
“All of us were around on the Fourth of July weekend,” David said, probably recalling a night in 1983 or ’84. “Brownie and I, we were all on the same green blotter. It had been done a lot around town, so we all knew it was good. And Brownie and I took a canoe out into the middle of the lake to get a look at the fireworks that were going on over the tree line all around us. And we were having a great old time being just high in the right way on acid, just the colors and all of that. Super sensory perception.
“And all of a sudden, Boom! Turns out you and Donald, maybe Eddie, all you guys are on the dock shooting big fucking bottle rockets at us,” he said. “So here we are, we’re blissing out, and the fucking criminals on the dock are trying to hit us with fireworks.” I told him we were trying to make it better.
“And you did. It was meaningful, and it definitely added. So I turned to Brownie while we’re out on the canoe—we’re on acid, so once we get over the shock, we’re kind of digging it—and I say, ‘You know what, they’re higher than we are. Something is going to happen.’ And sure enough, we look over and the dock is on fire. One of the rockets had gotten into your fireworks stash, and they were all going up. And you guys were just screaming and running in all directions.
“Pretty much all of my near-death experiences have come with you,” he said. “I don’t know how close we ever were. I remember skittering over some back roads and into the drainage ditches in Wisconsin with you driving, not knowing how we were going to fucking live. I can still remember that vividly.”
Another time David and I were in Mankato covering Minnesota Vikings training camp, and we got pulled over one night when David was driving. They gave him the once-over, and he got back in the car. “We’re driving away, and I’m sure my heart’s beating a hundred miles an hour. And you say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, I’m really glad you passed that test, because there’s a big spoonful of cocaine right under the front seat.’”
In those days, there was always one more edge to run the fingers along, no matter how dumb or ill considered. David, who had and has more common sense than many of us back in those days, said he tried smoking crack back then because he wanted to inhabit my skin for a night.
“People might not believe me, but part of the reason that I wanted to do it, aside from just innate curiosity, was that I wanted to see what was going on with you, because you were at a whole different level. I don’t know how to describe it. There were always complications, and it was complicated, right? Being with you is complicated. A lot of fun, but a lot of logistics. Some emotional ups and downs, some legal complications. But there was just a whole level of foregoneness, of hollow-eyed looking around, absorption, self-absorption. It was just different. It was clearly beyond the power of any of us to do anything about it.”
So in addition to teaching David to just keep typing until a lead came to him, I showed him how to smoke crack. “I’d done cocaine plenty by that point, but this was like—this was surprisingly smooth and powerful and nice,” he said. “The second time I did it was where I kind of learned the difference between the addictive gene and the non-addictive gene.”
Smart boy. He never smoked coke again.
David was incredibly supportive when I sobered up. There came a time after that when the editorship of the Twin Cities Reader, which we’d both worked for, came open. David campaigned openly and loudly for the job. He often talked to me about what he might do with the paper. I stayed in the cut, quietly sending the publisher a note saying that if I got the job, I would change most of the people there. I got the job.
“I kind of laid out my hopes and dreams and plans, and you nodded and gave me some feedback and whatever, and the truth is that you were getting ready to bust a move,” he said, not huffy, just matter-of-fact. “And what I thought was, well Jesus, if you’re even thinking about doing it at that point, a friend says, ‘Hey, shut the fuck up, I’m going for the same job.’ And you didn’t do that. And later on when I got up the nerve to confront you—you who was the alpha male in my life—the answer I got back was I should have known better. It was my fault.”
I didn’t tell David because I did not want to put the people who had doubts about me—they were legion, and their skepticism was well founded—on notice that I was gunning for the job.
Of course, it would be easy to say that David’s memory is now being bent in service of the present, but when I asked my wife, Jill, about his version of events, she said, “You should have told him.”
In the early eighties, I threw a boys’ weekend. The party invite had a picture of a muskie—a large, predatory freshwater fish—and Senator Ed Muskie. The copy read, “Your chances of seeing either muskie on this weekend are about equal.”
Muskie fishing is an apt metaphor for the lot of the common man. You could make as many as twelve thousand casts on average before you caught one. If Sisyphus were still around, he’d be a muskie man. In Hayward, Wisconsin, it was not uncommon for people to get lawn chairs and binoculars when someone got a big one on, because it could take hours. Epic Saturday fishing show shit. Muskies were blurry fast, ferocious fighters, and overfished to the point of rarity, but they loved to eat: I saw an item in the Hayward paper about a forty-nine-inch muskie that was caught, and when they opened him up, there was a twenty-nine-inch fish inside him. And he was still eating, still going for the bait. That’s a fish.
Jim, a pal at the time who signed up for the ride, was a gifted and funny writer, but he did not strike me as a guy born to wrangle
bait, live or otherwise. Still, before we went, he insisted, “I’m going to catch one of those damn things.” For a while, I patiently explained that the trip was not actually about catching a muskie—“It’s a metaphor, numbnuts”—but he still kept talking smack.
We had a little problem with pacing on Friday night. There were psychedelics and coke, and we all got drunk as goats. We went to a stripper bar near the cabins, the kind of joint where they handed out miners’ helmets for those who wanted to sit close and shine a light on the talent. Two of the dancers came back to the cabin, but it was social, not business. Once they had their clothes on, the boys were curiously bashful and polite. I can remember shaking hands with one of the dancers at the end of the evening, saying it was a pleasure to make her acquaintance. It was three-thirty in the morning. We tumbled into five ramshackle cabins for a few hours of sleep.
There were over a dozen of us, and at seven o’clock—it was a freezing fall day, raining intermittently, and hungover is not an expansive enough term to cover the collective gestalt—we traveled to Lac Courte Oreilles, a chain of interconnected lakes, to meet our lone guide. A former fighter pilot, he took one look at us and asked who was in charge. I wobbled to the front.
“Only three of you in my boat at once,” he said quietly. “Anybody pukes in my boat, they are out.”
There was a fair amount of puking once we all got underway in a number of boats. Some of the people had never laid hands on an outboard and scattered into a vast horizon of bays, floating islands, and mysterious lakes. I never got in the guide’s boat, and it fell to me to round up the truly lost boys at the end of the day. I finally found the last boat—“Thank God you’re here, we’re down to our last two beers”—and we caravanned to shore. There stood Jim, next to the guide. Next to the muskie they were weighing. I came up for a look. It was a keeper, but looked grim. Something about the eyes. I asked the guide about the fight to land this whopper, and he focused on the sunset while he told me that it “just sort of came straight in.”
“I got one! Told you I was going to get one! And I did,” Jim interrupted, doing a happy dance.
That night, we went to the Ojibwa Club, a grand Wisconsin supper club, and all ordered Fred Flintstone–sized rib eyes that overwhelmed the plates and dripped grease onto the oilcloth. Much tribute was paid to me at the head of the table, the mighty one, the one who had organized the splendid hunt.
A few weeks later, Donald and I were out at the bar, and I was boring someone for the hundredth time about the amazing muskie posse I had organized. I saw Donald giggling out of the corner of my eye. I’ve known him for a long time and sweated him until he finally told me that Jim had brought along a dead muskie that he had somehow acquired. Everyone on the trip knew except me. The righteous punking I took taught me that even those things that I thought I knew, that I had seen with my very own eyes, were subject to revision.
In 2007 Jim was in New York City because he had been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and we sat down in Bryant Park to walk back the cat on the Muskie Tale. Jim has an amazing memory and the storyteller’s voice to make it all sound real.
I remembered one of the strippers as genial and cute, especially given the rustic backwater she was working in. Jim remembered a few other things.
“There was one that was skinny, no cosmetic enhancement,” he said. “But her tits looked like she could have fed Romulus and Remus, the ones that were nourished by that wolf. She had a very smiling, kind-looking face.
“There was this big, fat, drooling guy who was giving her money, and he was sitting near the catwalk. At one point, he reached up and touched her leg, and her face just went from angel to demon. She grabbed him by the ears and just slammed his head on the wood and said, ‘Don’t you ever touch me.’ I just remember that was a bit of a buzz kill. You probably partied with her, and she was nicer after that. I was drinking, but I was not part of the cocaine contingent.”
I never knew much about the provenance of the fish. As it turned out, Jim went to see a wildlife artist for a story he was doing on duck stamp fraud, and noticed that the artist had a muskie he posed to use as a model.
“I knew I was going to this muskie fishing thing, and I said, ‘Are you done with the fish?’”
It was a great snow job, one that I remember admiring at the time, but even all these years later, Jim worried about how it had landed on me. “It’s possible that you thought that I was doing the muskie thing to kind of spite you—not spite you, but just pull one over on you. It was never like that. I just thought this was a perfect opportunity.”
I wondered why he was telling the story so gingerly, but he reminded me that it was not all fun and games between us back then. I had bumped into him at the office of the Reader and confronted him about something I had heard he said.
“You threatened to kill me, and I was kind of shaken, and then you said that you were going to punch me,” he said. “There were a couple people there, and I was eyeing the exits, but you were like a linebacker back then. I feared a little bit for my health, and there were a couple people that overheard that tried to calm you down. I apologized profusely, and I couldn’t quite understand what I had done wrong. I learned later that you had a cocaine problem.”
So, a little bit of an anger management issue. And what I had always conjured as good, clean fun—a frolic—seemed darker and more portentous to fellow travelers many years later. But could I throw a party or what?
I was, in retrospect, a complicated asset as a friend: a guy who presented significant upsides—when it was fun, it was really fun—but in pushing people past their boundaries, I eventually lost track of my own.
Daniel, a pal of mine who is now a filmmaker in Los Angeles, recalled in an e-mail that the muskie weekend had its share of frolic, but there was some darkness on the edges.
“You had that drive back then; that need to find the lines and then cross them, or consume them in some cases,” he said. “You also seemed to have the need to push others to cross those lines with or without you. That was your challenge, and it was constant and relentless and bold and even beautiful at times.”
Ah, finally, someone recognized me as the crown prince of all clown princes. But then he wrote this:
“But it could also get pretty fucking ugly. Because as often as not, at the end of the day, when you and the rest of us were spent and sick from the drugs and the drinking and whatever other mischief we had gotten ourselves into, and there was nothing left, you were still pushing.”
6
MY BROTHER’S ENABLER
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
—OSCAR WILDE
It was assumed that I would go to Benilde High School, a suburban all-boys Catholic school where my older brothers had gone. We were expected to work summers and pay half the tuition. I caddied at a Jewish country club, came up with my share, and hated nearly every second of it. Benilde had the same triumvirate that existed in every high school at the time: jocks, nerds, and freaks. I self-assigned to the freaks.
In an all-male environment, worth is signified by athletic prowess and the ability to get in a girl’s pants. I was a decent but indifferent athlete, and I had enough friends who were girls that I didn’t feel comfortable talking about the ones I managed to sleep with. I smoked pot instead. Going to school on boy island, a place where idiosyncrasy was pathologized, made getting stoned every day seem like a reasonable activity. We listened to Queen, playing stoner air guitar, and smoked endless amounts of crappy Mexican reefer. Greg, Tim, Fred, John, and Dan. A few others. Every once in a while, we set down the bong and got into some trouble—I was questioned but never charged in the theft of a yellow Maverick from the car dealership across the highway from the high school. We were not stupid guys, we just did stupid things. In retrospect, getting chronically stoned, even in high school, was dumb, like driving through life with the parking brake on.
Fred was farther out in the weeds than most of us. He did not pretend
that grades, discipline, and convention were of any special significance. Eventually he was kicked out or dropped out and hitchhiked to California. He came back on a glorious summer night just after school had let out junior year.
We made plans to meet later. He and Greg were at Shady Oak Beach in Hopkins, working through some serious downers while catching up, and I was at the other end of town, sitting drunk and stoned on the roof of somebody’s parents’ house who had left for the summer, looking up into the gorgeous night. Under those stars, I zoned out. And a few miles away, Fred went for a swim.
Authorities said that [Fred], 16, died at Methodist Hospital Saturday following a swimming accident at Shady Oak Lake in Minnetonka. [Fred] had been in critical condition since the mishap occurred Wednesday.
[Fred] and a friend attempted to swim about 50 yards from the dock to shore when [Fred] went under water, authorities said. He was pulled from the water by lifeguards and taken to the hospital.
—MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE, JULY 1, 1973
The funeral was wretched. All those jocks whom I loathed, who never gave Fred the time of day, coming up wobbly with loss.
Fred’s family was bereft, including his little brother Frank, who was about nine. In my family, we were taught to be of service. Middle-pew Catholic stuff. I told Fred’s parents that I would try to fill in some of the gaps, and I did, taking Frank to the zoo, ball games, and playing Frisbee. I also dated Fred’s sister, who had a musical, generous laugh.
Frank and I stayed in touch through the years, and by the time I came back from traveling out West, he was out of high school. Things had changed for us both. Frank knew this guy in his neighborhood who would put money out on the street for high interest. I was acquainted with someone at the University of Minnesota who knew coke people who had access to serious weight. Neither of us had any clear idea of what he was doing, but late at night at my house in Minneapolis, we scratched out numbers on a pad of paper that showed us getting high and making lots of money. It didn’t factor in self-induced shrinkage, the good-guy discount to pals, the free coke to the willing girls—not to mention that one time we weighed up a quarter ounce in a dark little room in my basement, decided to do a taste first, and when it came time to weigh it, it was gone, scattered into the detritus of the cellar. Nobody copped to knocking it over. We were idiots, what did we know?