by David Carr
Our first big deal was more sitcom than criminal enterprise, and, as in all my dealings with Schedule 1 narcotics, it eventually went to shit. The girl who hooked it up, Julie—short and cute as bugs’ ears, a tough little broad from northern Minnesota—took us over to an apartment in South Minneapolis with some pretty serious guys and then left, kissing me on the cheek as she went. There we sat, two suburban rubes with two older black dudes. The bigger one talked in a street patois for ten minutes straight about our various options for buying two ounces: rock versus powder, packaging, pricing, that kind of stuff. He may as well have been speaking Mandarin. Frank and I looked at each other nervously when he finished, not knowing what to say. The other dude, Bart, finally broke the ice and said to his partner, “These white boys have no idea what you are talking about. Slow down and talk straight.” (Bart eventually became a friend, and I saw him years later. “Look at you now, all prosperous and shit. I knew you back when you couldn’t count. You remember that.” I do.)
But when we finally figured out what we wanted—“one bag pure, one powder”—we found out we had to go somewhere else. This dope peddling stuff was full of surprises. We went to the West Bank of Minneapolis, near the university, and up a set of stairs on the outside of the house to an old, nasty apartment. They took our money, went into another room, and we stared at each other, not knowing if they were going to come back through the door with the drugs or guns. Eventually they came back with the drugs, and we left, both of us relieved and happy that we had pulled it off. Given that I was the brains of our operation, such as they were, I felt somehow responsible and tender toward Frank even though I had opened up a door to serious, felony weight and the kind of crooks who went with it. After I sobered up, I had enduring shame about taking what had been a good gesture—being a big brother to a kid who had lost his real one—and morphing that relationship into something toxic.
After being out of touch for more than a decade, I found Frank on his hobby farm west of the Twin Cities. When I pulled up, he came rolling out the door with a little bit of a beer gut, but otherwise, same old Frankie. Like a lot of guys from the old days, he really only had one question. “Where you been?” Long story, I said. We caught up for a while. He’s married after a fashion, with nice kids, and working hard as a printer. We walked out to a huge shed that was really his clubhouse, full of tools, a fridge, and a huge wooden boat he is going to fix up one day.
When the story of that first dope deal came up, we both found ourselves giggling and holding our stomachs. What dorks we were. The dope house was a scary-looking place, and as Frank remembers it, it got scarier when we opened the door. “Before we even entered the room, there was an older black guy sitting in the chair, rocking back and forth with a gun laying across his lap. I remember the barrel on it was about…”
I tell Frank I think that’s total bullshit. A quirk of memory. He remains steadfast.
“He had a gun laying on his lap sideways with a barrel on it that was about eighteen inches long, and he was running his hand across it, and I immediately went, OK—I’m the guy with the two grand in my pocket, and I’m thinking, Hey, what’s gonna happen?”
I remember that feeling, at least. How well did I really know Julie, anyway?
They came back with the stuff, just like they said. And more, Frankie remembers. “They said, ‘Is this all you want? Oh, look what we got!’ And they opened up a garbage bag full of pot. And then the guy whipped out a magazine full of pages of LSD, and I said, ‘We came for the first thing right now; I think we’ll just take that and go.’”
My junkie pride kicks in while he tells the story. I tell Frank it makes it sound like he ran the whole thing—at what, nineteen years old? True, I did not know my ass from a hole in the ground, but I was definitely the senior member of the team.
“Hey, man, I was there alongside you,” Frank finally allows.
That’s better.
We chat a bit about our partnership, and he mentions that I was always too fond of my own product to make any real money, especially after I started smoking it. “I believe I turned you on the first time,” Frank said, his smile somewhere between shit eating and shame ridden.
So he was the one. “Shut up, man. Don’t you think I felt guilty about that the rest of my life?” I am secretly thrilled. It sort of made us even, in a weird way. Guilt about Frank had rattled around behind me for years in sobriety. Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.
As Frank tells it, when I found out that he knew how to freebase, something I had only heard about, I insisted he come over to my house during the day. I also invited Crazy Ken, a chess champion, nudge, and all-around freak who had access to coke that was a very rare level of purity.
“This guy pulled out a sack of shit—had to be a quarter pound, I ain’t kidding,” Frank recalled. While Crazy Ken and I watched anxiously, Frank spent time working two grams on the stove and took the first hit.
“All right, let me give it a test go here. And I fire up the blowtorch,” Frankie said. “Holy shit, man! I could just—my knees were going weak. ‘That’s it, it’s good, yeah, it’s fine.’ I remember Ken asking what it was like, and I told him it was kind of like snorting, only better.”
Sort of. Unless you have the tiniest little gene or penchant for paranoia. Kenny did his first hit of crack. He stood up immediately. Before I even had a chance to do my hit, he was out my back door and picking up garbage can lids, peering down into the cans looking for, I dunno, federales or something. I watched with interest, but I was more concerned with getting my turn. “He’ll be fine,” I said, turning back to Frank.
Twenty years later Frank and I sat in the gloom of that shed, arguing and talking smack about the old days, the whole highlight reel: the time I took down a door-length mirror and put down a line of coke from one end to the other; or the time the bad guys were after us for real, and we had to find their money, like, right this goddamn minute; or the time when we wrestled and I broke his ribs. But the memory that I had corrupted him, led him down a path? Not so much.
As it turned out, I was the one who needed the big brother.
“Well, there was a time when I took you inside and said I was gonna lock you in my basement, and I’m gonna pull you out of it,” he said. “It might be the time you broke my three ribs. That’s I think what it was. I said, ‘I don’t like what I’m seeing anymore.’ So that was my telling you you’ve got to get out of it. And you didn’t like it at all. Take you home, lock you in my basement till you pull out of it. That would have been something, huh?
“I think you got pretty screwed up. I’m not gonna take responsibility for it,” Frank said, hands on his knees. “We were kinda tit for tat, I guess.”
7
MOBY DICK’S
The vigour necessary to prosecute two professions at the same time is not given to every one, and it was only lately that I had found the vigour necessary for one.
—ANTHONY TROLLOPE, AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I was at my parents’ house one day in 1982 when my dad told me about his pal Peter, a guy who ran Catholic Charities. He watched as a couple of beefy cops pounded two black suspects already in custody. Peter stepped toward them to ask why they were beating up those guys and got a piece of same. It sounded outrageous.
“Somebody should do a story about this,” I said to my dad.
Maybe, my dad said, it should be you. I called the editor of the Twin Cities Reader. He sounded interested, in a bored, yeah-sure kind of way, committing only to read what I came up with.
I pretended I knew what I was doing—isn’t that what most of life rests on?—and fumbled my way through police reports, disciplinary records, and relevant witnesses. With my pal David over my shoulder, I wrote it up. When it came time to deliver, I found myself chattering away in front of Brian, the editor, unable to hand it over.
“Ah yes, the selling of the story,” Brian said, sitting in
his house in 2006 when I went to see him. “‘Yes, fine,’ I said, ‘just give me the goddamn story. Tell you what, what if I read it and decide?’ It was a kind of spoken-word performance, I recalled. You were twenty-five years ahead of your time,” Brian said, laughing.
It worked out, running on the cover of the weekly on February 4, 1982.
He was a visitor from another part of town, and he had seen enough. He stepped out of the crowd and asked the police the wrong question. “Why did you have to do that?” That question bought [Peter] a trip downtown. A short stop at the jail for booking and then over to the hospital to get the answer to his question looked at.
The story was followed by many others. A person who hated to miss anything, I had found something where finding that last little thing was considered an asset. I was not a maniac; I was a journalist, a head case with a portfolio. The manic, grabby tyrant inside me had found expression in an activity that would bring me recognition, a measure of recompense, and a reason to do something besides trip from high to high.
“There was a higher energy level, a compulsion, obsessive compulsive—whatever it is that makes you do it and do it well, somewhere in there,” Brian said. “There was a force of nature thing, which was a huge part of your appeal—to me, anyway, and I think to a lot of other people. You could roll in, ingratiate yourself immediately, and sustain it for long period.”
Brian and I had adjoining cubicles, with a word processing machine that was shared in the window between us. “It’s nine-thirty in the morning, which was rare for me to be there at all, and I’m typing away,” Brian recalled. “I look up, and here comes Carr, who looks like he probably has not slept at all, or if he did, he slept in his clothes. ‘Hey Dave, how are you doing?’ ‘Good, Lambert, good.’ Sits down, and I continue to type, and rustling of papers here and there, drawer underneath the typing carousel on his side slides open, and I’m typing away, and the next thing I hear is a big hovering sound followed by an expression of satisfaction. It’s now ten in the morning, and we got the sales crew walking by, and I said, ‘David, are you OK?’ ‘Yeah, man, I’m fine, really good.’ I don’t remember where you had been the night before or how soon the morning had come upon you, but that was a vivid moment.”
Our office was just off the grubby Block E, the home of Moby Dick’s, a place that served “a whale of a drink.” We often went there late, when the muse seemed in need of one more quick shove.
Moby’s was one of the few places where the races mixed in a state where even most of the food was white: lutefisk, lefsa, endless seas of milk—skim, 2 percent, whole. Even the butter was white. The queen of the state fair was carved out of white butter. White like the paint factory in The Invisible Man. White like me.
Moby Dick’s was not white. The butter queen did not hang there. Clarence worked the door and let me in no matter how trashed I was, because I always minded my manners and tipped like the former bartender I was. There were deals to be made in the corners, but the drug of choice there was booze. Separators, kamikazes, a rainbow of shots. It was long rumored that people who had been awarded medallions as tokens of their sobriety could plunk one on the counter and get started again on the house. I never tested that.
It was as close to a big city as I could get; like Cheers, only with pimps, working girls, and hustlers. I loved it there. Moby’s was less slumming than slamming, big-time fun, a place that didn’t observe the clock or weekend cycle of normal people. It always rocked.
“Anybody who was prepared to get in trouble on a given night would be there, and they all knew you by your first name,” Brian said.
I spent many late nights bouncing between Moby’s and work, the job and the Life, getting information and obtaining substances. My colleagues appreciated the work I did for the paper, but they had to notice the train wreck that came rolling down the track with it. One day I dropped off Mary Ellen, a colleague who constantly covered my ass at work, to pick up a movie schedule for the paper while I waited in the car.
“I came out, and the cops had you against the wall; the backseat of your vehicle had about three thousand parking tickets in it,” she said.
For every working screw-up like me, there had to be a Mary Ellen, a pal who told me when my behavior was out of pocket, or that the boss was up to here, or made phone calls to patch over some fiasco I had created. When I went over to her house in North Minneapolis in the summer of 2006, she got out the T-shirt that said “I Am a Close Personal Friend of David Carr.” She generally earned it, but as I recall, on that day with the parking tickets, she pretended not to know me.
“I actually did say, ‘What’s going on with my friend?’ I did say that. ‘Ma’am, go back and sit in the car.’ It gave me a chance to hide the pot.”
I was booked on warrants and then let back out. Two decades after she watched me get hauled away, I visited Mary Ellen, and she drank enough whiskey for both of us as we talked deep into the night, arguing and laughing the whole time. Her boyfriend Michael, a talented songwriter-musician, had been at that thirtieth birthday party, and we all recalled that he had come up with a song for the occasion, “You Might Be Surprised,” which flicked at my tendency to disrupt best-laid plans. He grabbed a guitar and sang it note for note, with words that sort of captured my ethos at the time:
So don’t be chicken, about something that you never tried.
You might feel like you might fail.
That’s just fear and foolish pride,
So go ahead and give it a try.
Don’t give up and don’t be shy.
You might not succeed at first,
But you might be surprised.
Or horrified, or pulled over, or out a lot later than you had planned.
The clips in the basement from those days are stuck together and hard to read, but the profiles of politicians, cops, and a few robbers still read well enough. Still, any pride in the work is circumscribed by what a jerk I must have been while I put them together.
After Brian moved on to writing, Mark, the publisher, put his wife, Deb, in the editor’s job. She had no journalism experience and was far too demure for the job, but she also had a very firm grip on what she did not know and set about quickly learning it. She was a woman who defined propriety, and I was a walking offense to it.
I was working for Deb in 1984 when I went to treatment at the urging of my first wife. Deb showed up for a meeting at the request of my counselor. She handed me a 6,200-word story I had written about Noam Chomsky the week before. It looked like a piñata at an eight-year-old’s birthday party, a once-delicate thing that had been bashed by sticks.
We sat on the edge of Loring Park many years later, laughing about my ability to write something vastly more turgid than even Chomsky himself. I made an immediate amends for putting her through that hell and dozens of others. She would have none of it.
“We broke some great stuff. You had more access to the more interesting aspects of political life in the city than almost anyone else who was writing. You cultivated all those people, and even when you were revealing things that they maybe didn’t want revealed, you had it right, and you didn’t abuse them. The calls that I would take, inevitably, they would say you were a loose cannon, they didn’t think you were very professional. But then I would say, ‘Show me what is wrong in this thing. What’s wrong about it?’”
In her rearview, she failed to recall the remnants of coke mixed with salt and mustard packets at the bottom of my desk drawer or the wreckage I made of the weekly news cycle.
“When you ask me about all the negative stuff, I so long ago flushed that away,” she said. “That’s not the parts that are remembered at all. Other than in a vague sort of interesting, colorful way. That’s not the vivid stuff that I remember. I remember the good work.”
8
SPOT REMOVER
In 2006 and 2007, as I looked for documentary evidence of my past, it became obvious that my timing was off by quite a few years. If I had started earlier, ma
ybe my defense attorney would not have vanished after being disbarred, taking my files with him. Some of the criminal files—misdemeanor stuff, mostly; there’s one felony narcotics charge—are still there, but there are significant gaps. Arrests that I remembered as epic were just a blip, and more bizarrely, I came across a document that seemed to be about the arrest of someone named David Michael Carr that I knew nothing about. He seemed like a piece of work:
That’s me.
And that’s me too.
No idea what the beef was and how I effected to “remove” the guy from his cab. Was he still rolling? And who is William Y. Mikhil? I couldn’t find him, but DonJack, a reporter I hired to come behind me to further investigate what I could not find out for myself, traced Mikhil, actually Mikhail, to Melbourne, Australia, and then he disappears. So is he still mad, or did his citizen’s arrest bring him a sense that justice had been done? I can’t make amends or get other details of how we got into it. But the part about “no apparent reason,” no driver’s license, and, suddenly, no car? I have to admit that sounds like me. I was clearly out of my box when I began “punching the complainant,” apparently right in front of a squad. I remember nothing, except that I’m pretty sure he must have started it.