by David Carr
9
THE LOST BOYS OF ELEVENTH AVE.
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us, we’ll have fun.
—RALPH, LORD OF THE FLIES
The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, “Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.” But in his or her own time, the person who was preoccupied by beer pong and doobie cruises begins to notice that life has other aspects—careers, families, homes—serious matters in need of tending. But being an addict means that you never stipulate to being an adult. You may, as the occasion requires, adopt the trade dress of a grown-up, showing responsibility and gravitas in spurts to get by, but the rest of the time, you do what you want when you want.
Keeping shame at a minimum while you fend off maturity requires that adult activities are seen as the province of goobers—squares whose idea of a night on the edge is playing quarter poker with the boys and drinking a six-pack of imported beer before catching some tube and hitting the sack. But as screens in bedrooms up and down the block begin to flicker, signaling another day is being tucked in, the addict will come alive.
There is value in that choice. Too many nights of Johnny Carson back then, and before you know it, you’re watching The Tonight Show in a nursing home, and hey, who is this Leno guy anyway?
In 1977 I went on the road in the West. In Montana I saw my friend Dale, who was working the railroad; in Denver, a college friend named Sue; and I made some new friends in California. I moved around without purpose or urgency, hitchhiking and remaining unspecific when I got in a car. Where you going? Somewhere else, I’d say.
Eventually the challenges of sleeping alone wherever I found myself wore out. Under a bridge? Snakes. In the woods? Was that a bear or a bird I heard? A flophouse in Cheyenne? Um, that cowboy looks rough and tough, but he seems a little too friendly. I came back to Minneapolis later that year and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. It was less about a renewed sense of purpose than boredom from living without one. To finance my return to civil life, I ended up working at the Little Prince, where I met Kim, my first wife.
Kim won’t talk to me about those days. “I am very happy to no longer be part of any of that, and I don’t want to go back there.” It is not that she does not wish me well. She is married to a friend of mine from college and their response to the excesses of those early days was to move toward church and God. They seem very happy. But when I drove out to see her, about an hour outside of Minneapolis, it was extremely awkward; the equivalent of a burglar stopping by to ask you what it felt like to have part of your life stolen. She had no intention of taking a walk down memory lane. She is a bright person, capable of cold-eyed assessment about all matters, including our time together, so it is a significant loss in the effort to find the truth of what I did and why. But I secretly admired her unwillingness to engage my needs, my narcissism, one more time.
No one can really explain why I married her, including me. Not that she wasn’t pretty, and pretty fun. But she was the kind of girl who had started collecting ironing boards and vacuums at a young age. Talk of marriage came soon after we met. For all my rebellious posturing, I failed to be honest with this woman or myself. The picture of me arm in arm with my parents in the vestibule of the church on our wedding day tells the entire story: a portrait of a nervous young man who knows he is making a very grave mistake.
I was a completely immature twenty-three-year-old kid who was a hard worker but clearly under the sway of mood-altering chemicals. My family knew I was nowhere near being ready to be married, and her family, decent farming people and fundamentalist Christians, had no idea what to make of me. Everybody decided to smile and wear beige and sort of hope for the best.
She thought, as the cliché goes, I would change. And me? I didn’t really have a tiny thought in my noggin. But it became clear as I got a job, as we bought a house, as we tuned in to Carson and got ready for bed, that yes, I had made a big mistake. You can’t become normal by pretending you are.
When I was married to Kim and living in South Minneapolis, there was this guy across the street, “Ralph,” who was small but powerfully built, with a voice that could knock you off a sofa. (Ralph is a pseudonym.) His hair was cut short, his arms were big; almost more like legs in their heft and power. He worked asphalt, but he was canny, street smart, and brutally handsome. By the time I was getting to know him, he had already been there and back with the coke—moving quarter pounds in and out of Florida, among other endeavors—and now was newly unmarried and on a bit of a tear. We would stay up night after night, talking shit and doing our coke.
Ralph was a fairly robust man in all of his endeavors, no more so than when he laid down a line of coke. If the piles he did had been flour, you could have made doughnuts with them. He did not mess around with little toots of this or that. At Ralph’s house, it was more Scarface than Studio 54.
Ralph was a bit of a whack job, but he was not a loser. He went to work, no matter how little he slept, and kept himself in coke—no small task, that—with all kinds of gambits, some of which veered toward scams but were just this side of legit. But he could go dark in a heartbeat, an ambulatory mix of barely contained rage and atavism, so we had a couple of other things in common.
On any given night, one of us might have decided to take it easy, to give it a rest, and then the other would send some luminous fiber out over Eleventh Avenue in South Minneapolis. Just one, I’d say. Just a bump, he’d say. Then it was on.
It was not all darkness and pathology between us. There were cross-street bottle rocket fights, lots of very serious Frisbee (if there is such a thing), along with orphan Thanksgiving dinners and goofing with all the kids on the block. We had wonderful friends in common, put on lots of great barbecues, and looked after each other in the way good neighbors do.
This was the early eighties, and we both kept it together, sort of. One weekend somebody booked a cabin up in western Wisconsin on Lower Clam Lake, blew a whistle, and before you knew it, it was on. On the way up, we got nailed in Siren, Wisconsin, for shooting big rockets out of my convertible, but the sheriff was a good guy and said that if we promised to head straight to our rented cabin, he would not effectuate any arrests.
Ralph had already been on a three-day bender, working his way through a rock of coke the size of a baseball. By the time we got to the cabin, it was down to the size of a golf ball—still impressive, but subject to ineluctable entropic forces.
Ralph was more than happy to share until it looked like he actually might run out and that time was nigh. We were all partying on the porch, and he sat in the corner with his golf ball, glowering and doing lines. We all worked on the little odds and ends we had, sweating him for more, but to no avail.
Ralph, who had done at least two grams of coke in the past two hours, nodded off like a common heroin junkie, with a mirror and a ball of coke on his lap. We knew what to do. I said his name a couple of times, louder as I went, and he did not wake up. I got a pair of tongs from the kitchen—Ralph had massive, ropey forearms, and I didn’t want to get clipped if he woke up—and reached in with a surprising amount of dexterity and proceeded to remove said ball of coke. We took it into the kitchen and tee-hee’d as we carved it equally on all sides, taking a few grams off of its remaining girth so that it still looked like a nice ball of coke, only slightly smaller. I placed it back on the mirror in his lap.
Somebody had some quaaludes. I always had trouble with dosage around pills. They seemed so small, so edible, so why have just one? After two or four or whatever it was, I took Donald and a girl named Jennifer for a ride at sunrise. I saw what I felt was a nice hill to climb to see the sun come up, but it was more like a swamp. I buried my glorious Pontiac convertible up to the wheel wells.
We were walking on the road, and the same cop from the night before came by.
“Is that your car back in the sw
amp?”
Yes.
“Get in.” He brought us to the cabin where we were staying and told the folks there to keep me inside for a while.
So I got away with, not murder, but some bonehead moves. And that shrinking golf ball, I got away with that too. I’ve always felt a little sheepish about it. I think the technical legal term for what I did was, um, stealing, but Ralph sort of had it coming. Still, I wondered if he knew.
All these years later, I was sitting at a picnic table in a small town in the midwest with Ralph, and even though we have long since parted company, we still have a lot in common. Both of us are off the coke, we each have a daughter about the same age, and both of us got hooked up with women who eventually went to jail. Ralph’s wife got into the coke a little, and then, almost right away, it became the only thing.
Ralph looked good, but then he always did. I edged up to that night at Clam Lake.
“You fell asleep with that golf ball on your lap, and we, um, reshaped it,” I finally stammered out.
“You did! I never knew! Twenty years later. Reshaped it, and it was a smaller golf ball?!” He sounded impressed, which I was relieved to hear.
You could scan Ralph’s résumé and see the lifetime of pushing asphalt and people around, the multiple wives, the dealing in heavy weight, the booming full-of-shit voice, and think he was a knucklehead. But he had buried a little dough along the way and bought a house in a nice town. He was now managing, at nearly sixty years old, to still hit the job every morning, dropping his daughter off at day care before sunup and then coming home after dark. In the winter he chilled out and took his daughter on little trips. His ex-wife was in prison again after several escapes.
Ralph knows his way around a story or two, and he told me a few I had forgotten. Like the time he came out with a woman to the Anchorage, a seafood restaurant in a hotel where I worked in the eighties. It was a nice joint. I have only the vaguest recollection of this story, but he tells it with a great deal of detail. His date was a madam, but she scanned as a pretty, normal woman. By prior arrangement, he was seated in my station, and I played it on the down-low for the whole dinner, never letting on that I knew him. We had curtained booths, so I gave them their privacy and would announce myself before poking my head in.
As Ralph tells it, after they had dinner, I parted the curtains with a dessert tray, which probably featured a flourless torte, a mousse, a liqueur pie, and a small plate that was domed in silver. I leaned into the booth and explained each of the desserts in vivid detail and then, with a flourish, removed the dome to reveal a giant rock of cocaine along with a gold razor and straw—an aperitif he had given me in advance to be presented thusly.
“This girl looked down at that and looked at me and looked at you and looked there and looked at me and looked at you—and I was, well, ‘You know, that looks quite good; why don’t we have that for the night, would that be OK with you?’ And she was looking at me and looking at you and looking at me and going, ah, yes. And you just played the whole thing off, ‘OK, very good, sir, that is a good selection and a good choice. I think you’ll enjoy that.’ And you closed the drapes up, and away you went.”
For the record, I did not reshape that golf ball before I presented it as a dessert.
As we talk, supply—having lots and having none—becomes a motif in the recollection. During the early eighties, Donald, Ralph, and I were booked to serve as groomsmen in our buddy Orv’s wedding, which was held in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where his fiancée Patty’s parents lived. My wife, Kim, sensing a high probability of mayhem, had declined to attend, and I can remember thinking with satisfaction that she had it all wrong, that she was missing a spectacular time. Our reputation preceded us, which meant that we would be tethered to some kind of Emily Post lady for the weekend. It was her job to keep us on schedule and prevent us from trashing the proceedings.
We flew to Chicago, rented a Lincoln Town Car, and drove to Detroit. We were pretty torn up by the time we got there. Knowing Ralph’s tendency to consume ungodly amounts of coke, I stashed a bit in the car when he wasn’t looking, so that when we ran out—a moment that was bound to arrive—I’d have a bit in reserve.
Orv and Patty were fittingly happy and good-looking—they are still very well married to this day—and we kept it between the rails for the most part. The reception was held at a lovely high-end country club, and as the band started to wind down, Ralph came up to me and said he was out.
“What a coincidence, me too,” I said, not letting either eyebrow move.
“You have nothing?” Ralph asked. Technically it was almost true. Whatever I had—not much really; a snootful that would last me awhile but be gone in a single blaze of Ralph’s voracious left nostril—was out in the car.
After a few minutes, he asked me for the car keys. I handed them over without worry. What I had was buried deep. He would not find it.
The reception began to empty out, and Donald and I went out front and looked for the car, which was gone. Minutes went by, and then we saw Ralph driving back and forth out front, the interior lights on so I could see his smile. He had taken the car hostage and was screwing with me. He would veer in close and then split. Ralph’s junkie radar told him I was holding, somehow, some way, and he just wanted to show me that he knew.
He finally tired of the game and pulled up with the window open. I got the jump on him, pulled him through the window, and before he knew what happened, he was facedown in the flower bed in front of the country club. Donald and I got in the Town Car and drove away.
Back at the hotel, Donald and I were having a few more laughs when there was a knock at the door. There was Ralph, chest heaving, dirt still on his tux, wielding a butter knife, of all things. He was no longer pissed about the coke or the beat-down. But friends don’t leave friends facedown in a country club garden. (Sort of like Donald leaving me at the Cabooze.) By the time hotel security got there, Ralph was working me over, and I was upside down against an adjoining hotel room door. I did not fare well. My hand was fractured, my head was lolling to port, and I had a limp.
It was quiet in the Lincoln on the drive back to Chicago in the morning, and we sat in separate rows flying to Minneapolis. Kim picked us up, her anger mixed with the satisfaction of knowing that she had made a wise move staying home.
Both Ralph and I have our regrets, even some about that night. But not much by way of explanation.
“Well, drugs and alcohol,” Ralph said through his shades, his arms resting on the picnic table. “I think it might have been the alcohol more than the drugs. Everybody’s doing coke and drinking, and, you know, how much can you drink? How much can you drink?”
A bunch.
“So in that particular incident, you know, that’s all vague to me—I remember it about the same way. Maybe not the particulars. I don’t know, you’re asking one guy who is drunk and stoned if his memory matches the other guy’s who’s drunk and stoned.”
Donald is dim on the details of the weekend. He remembered ripping his tux to shreds rather than taking it off, he remembered we ran out of coke, and he remembered Ralph taking me apart at the hotel. And, oh yeah, he remembered that I had it coming.
Our friendship—the nascent journalist and the wizened asphalt guy hanging out—was one small expression of the pub theory of life, that we are all of a common fabric once we have a pint in our hands. Or, by extension, a line of coke between us. Even two decades later, I never understood how Ralph could get up and confront that roaring truck, the hot asphalt that needed to be shoveled around, the foreman who never seemed satisfied. I was managing to keep it together, but good God, he was doing real work. As it turns out, he was a lot more worried about me.
“When you would come over in the morning to get a cup of coffee, which you dearly needed, you would have crap on your tie, on your shirt—your breath would smell so bad of puke, David, it would be hard to talk to you across the room. I would often wonder, How are you gonna go out like that? and you didn
’t seem to know. And I would say, ‘Geez, David, aren’t you gonna clean up?’ And you’d go, ‘No, I gotta go, I gotta go.’
“You would leave, and I’d wish you good-bye, and I’d fill your coffee cup, and I’d just shake my head and think, Good God, how are you able to keep a job looking how you are?”
Ralph stayed out in the Life for a while, but here we were, handing creased wallet photos of our daughters back and forth, discussing the merits of day care, the perils of single parenting, and dating while being a single father. We were two former roughnecks now in a position of explaining to their daughters why their mothers weren’t around and why our households were not like the other kids’.
The comedy of how things played out—the sheer, brutal irony—hung for a while. We were men who had ruined or nearly ruined the lives of every woman we had ever hooked up with. And then Ralph explained something that I probably knew but had never been able to articulate.
“In my other marriages and with my other kids, I justified what I was doing because they had their mothers,” he said. “So I was not a good dad, but they still had a sound home, going to church on Sunday and everything else. But all of a sudden, I was them. I had a daughter. Now what do you do? I had to become them.”
He became the one who rushes to get the daughter from day care, feeds her, tucks her in, and then flips on Leno and falls asleep before he finishes the monologue.
“I’ll tell you what: After I saw my daughter, I became everybody else in my life,” he said. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the shades, but I knew we were sort of having a moment. “I became my former wives. I saw them. And what a fucking dick I must have been, because it’s horrible to be married to a drug addict. It made me not want to do it. I didn’t want to be what I was seeing someone else be. Does that make sense?”