by David Carr
10
FUTURE SHOCK
In the fall of 1978, some of the people around me grew concerned that I was headed beyond party boy into something more pathological. I went to see a hipster therapist, Peter, the kind of guy who would talk about the amazing Talking Heads show we’d both seen earlier in the week before exploring why I ended up with my head in a toilet many hours after the show. Peter developed some renown as a guy who did not buy into the whole disease concept of addiction. But if there was such a thing, he was pretty sure I had it.
PETER: Do you believe in the pathology of addiction?
DAVID: Yes.
PETER: Well, in my opinion, you have all the significant indicators.
DAVID: I’ve known that for a while, but I always thought I could knock around for ten more years.
PETER: You probably can.
I entered treatment for the final time ten years later.
I went looking for Peter to confirm the conversation, but he had lost his license and disappeared off the map. After I finished the book, DonJack, a reporter who helped me track down loose ends, found Peter’s daughter in Chicago, and she promised to pass on a message. Peter called me back from Norway. As it turned out, there had been some fiasco with one of his patients, and he had left the country soon after. He remembered a great deal about my case: the fact that I was a cokehead, the fact that I was married to somebody I should not have been, and the fact that I remained employed and respected professionally despite my hobbies. He didn’t remember the exact conversation that is so burned into my memory.
“I may have said something like that, that if you believed you were an addict, then you probably were,” he said. “I remember there was a lot of alcoholism in your family and that you were having a lot of trouble in your marriage.
“Look, who knows what was going on with you? You were in a culture at the time that saw coke as nonproblematic, even though it was clearly creating problems for you. You were very young, and you were writing, like, half the paper at the time, like three thousand words a week. You were stressed and burning the candle on every end.”
And the ten-years part?
“I wasn’t trying to be prescient or anything. I just figured, at twenty-four, yeah, you could probably keep it up for a while, and eventually you would hit a wall. I guess you did.”
11
A MAN IN FULL
If Tony Soprano never killed anyone, if he actually loved Carmela and treated her with respect, if all he ever did was drink and laugh and pull a few capers, he might be in the same zip code as Fast Eddie. Long retired from the bad old days and the bad old ways that went with them, Fast Eddie and his girlfriend Laurie run a restaurant in a refurbished old building in a cool little river town on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi. He misses the old corners and the fools who worked them like a rock in his shoe—he feels the absence, and it feels good.
Not to make out like he is or was a pussycat. My old neighbor Ralph insists that Eddie came to collect one time with a sawed-off, but Eddie waves this off many years later. “He only thought I had one. There was no fucking gun.” (It’s funny how many of our stories include the specter of guns, but twenty years later I found that nobody ever owned one.)
Eddie is a good storyteller but not always great on the details, an infirmity we share. But he was around for most of it, the good and the bad, and I was happy for any excuse to be in his presence. He, Donald, and I had a bit of a reunion in the summer of 2007. I used a crowbar and a few imperatives to get Donald out of his little shack in Newport. “Road trip, asshole!” I barked into the phone. “I’ll be by at nine.” Donald came out fully armed, with rods and tackle boxes, and we ripped down over the river to Eddie’s joint. We took a boat out to an anchored fishing barge, and Donald immediately caught a walleye.
I continued to fish while Donald and Eddie ducked around a corner of the barge for a joint just to add to the sparkle of an early summer day. Donald, always concerned about supply, had brought along a half gallon of Old Grand-Dad. All these years later, did I wish I could help him along with the jug of whiskey? I did not. I’m the kind of guy who would have been even more worried about the amount on hand if I joined in, half gallon or not, trapped in the middle of the river. None for me, please.
Eddie is a man in all that noun means. He pays his bills, works his ass off, plays decent golf, and does not cheat on strokes, rules, or his girlfriend. I have seen him in some very tight corners, and he never pussed out, never blamed anybody without cause. He was happy when he was rolling and philosophical when he wasn’t. Having Eddie as a friend—he is the godfather to my youngest and something of a father to my twins—makes all the mayhem from those days almost worth it. If I hadn’t made a detour, if I hadn’t bush-whacked my way to the darker side of town, I never would have met him.
He comes from a family that includes some real, actual hoods, people who were all smiles and hearty welcomes but were always looking for an angle. They ended up in jail on and off, whereas Eddie ended up owning a couple of nice restaurants. He worked the front of the house while Laurie spent her days and nights making it happen in the kitchen.
It has always been thus for him. While others acted like gangsters and used like junkies, Eddie took care of business. “Numbers always worked for me,” he says now. There was a lot of pot—cross-country trips in cars jammed to the gunwales—and eventually quite a bit of coke. The rest of us ended up burning whatever money came our way, but more came his way, and Eddie managed to stash a few coffee cans here and there. His only small fault was his generosity. Eddie feels naked without big gobs of cash, and he tended to spill it around for the rest of us. “Coupons” is what he called money. I have seen him take out a wad the size of a ham sandwich in the meat-packing district of New York, a ski town in Colorado, a townie bar in Wisconsin, and half the joints in Minneapolis, and it was always the same. That fat wad evinced power, like a gun, only friendlier. People—strangers, even—gave respect to the guy with the pocket full of bills, the ack-ack laugh and the tendency to kiss his male friends. I’ve always been in that number. He taught me a lot. How to count, how to collect, how to shoot straight with crooked arrows. Eddie taught me manners.
One time we were at a stripper bar in St. Paul. I knew a girl there, an idiot cokehead but exquisite to behold. She used that physical gift to grind dollar tips out of goobers on sniffers’ row. She was fascinated by me—actually, by the coke that was always in my pocket, but why put such a fine point on it? Let’s call her Misty or some other stripper name…say, Cherri. I couldn’t remember her name, real or stage, if it would end world hunger. She finished her set, gathered up the singles, and came bounding naked over to our table and plopped on my lap, which was all I was there for, really—that moment when I took custody of the fantasies of the other men in the room.
“Honey, you know that place across the street, like right over there?” she said, pointing out the door. “The place with the really nummy tacos? I am soooooooo hungry, and I have to get ready for my next set. Will you just run over there and get me a couple of beef tacos?”
“Sure, cookie, no problem,” I said, as she rushed backstage to put on a different costume that she would take off a minute and a half into the first song of her next set.
Eddie went quiet and then spoke. “If you fetch tacos for that cunt, I am never speaking to you again,” he said, almost in a whisper. And then louder: “We do not fetch tacos for strippers.”
We left. More than twenty years later, I ask Eddie about that night at the Green Lantern.
“Well, it was actually the Lamplighter, so you’re close,” he said, laughing.
Close was always good enough between Eddie and me. Back then he showed enormous patience for my wobbly skills when it came to business. “You did all right. We ended up at zero,” he said, taking a sip off a nightcap. “The balance was zero at the end, so it worked out well, compared to a lot of people. A lot of ’em were negative.”
Neither of
us ever got smacked hard by the law. “Stone cold luck,” Eddie says now, from a distance.
For much of the time when Eddie and I were ripping and running, I was dating Doolie, a gorgeous waitress-student who adored Eddie above all my friends. The three of us were doing some daytime drinking in 1987 with other pals at McCready’s, our little clubhouse downtown. Somewhere in there, Doolie made a sign out of a coaster and a cocktail stick that said, “Just Kidding.” Someone would say something patently outrageous, mean as hell, and then hold up the sign. It was more hilarious than it sounds, but then, we were pretty hammered. Flying down to Chicago for the night came up, one thing led to another, and we called Leaping Lenny, a pilot we knew. Eddie had met him while taking pilot lessons. Although Eddie had soloed, he was not licensed to fly other people around, and he could not rent a plane on his own. But Lenny, who was fully qualified, if not exactly a Mensa, was incredibly game.
“It was your idea,” Eddie says now. “You were always full of ideas.” It was a trait that went well with Eddie’s pocket of cash.
We tore out to the airport, putting Lenny on standby for our arrival because we wanted to be on State Street by nightfall. Our luggage consisted of some Thai stick, several bottles of Dom Pérignon, Eddie’s usual bankroll, a half ounce of mother-of-pearl coke in a grinder—and a “Just Kidding” sign. Locked and loaded.
“It wasn’t Dom,” Eddie corrects. “It was the one with the flowers on it.”
I suggested that there were six of us on the trip, but Eddie corrects again. “It was a four-seater.” (Doolie, upon reflection, recalled there were six people on the trip, including Belinda, Eddie’s girlfriend at the time. Eddie later agreed that she was right.)
We flew in a Cessna, probably a 205, a kind of minivan with wings. We got drunk and high the whole way, Wisconsin unfurling below us as the sun set. We laughed at the schmucks who were stuck on the interstate and toasted our good fortune with the champagne. As I remember it, our pilot abstained until we landed.
“I can’t imagine that Lenny ever would…” Eddie said with mock seriousness, and then said, “Of course he did!” For the length of the trip, Eddie, what with the flight school and all, sat in the front and lectured ceaselessly on the nuances of aviation. Enough already with the lectures, Johnny Quest, will you pass the fucking grinder back, please?
After two hours in the air, we all had to go to the bathroom. Eddie threaded a pee into one of the empty bottles of champagne and tried to hand the now warm bottle back. Doolie spoke: “Bad for team morale, Eddie.”
When we finally got over downtown Chicago, it was dark, and we had trouble picking out Meigs Field jutting out into the blackness of Lake Michigan and had to make several passes. We landed just before the lights on the field went out for the night and tore into the city.
Chicago was a big deal for some guys from Minneapolis on a spontaneous holiday. We okeydoked our way past a huge line at the Limelight. (“We walked in, threw a few twenties on the floor, and then left,” Eddie said.) We then drank ourselves silly at the Kingston Mines till four in the morning while Sugar Blue played harp, and we didn’t have hotel rooms. (“Yes we did, at the Marriot; we just didn’t use them,” Eddie said.) We watched the sunrise on Lake Michigan and then ripped through the next day, with stops at the Billy Goat Tavern and a number of lesser-known bars.
By the following night, Eddie, no longer alert to the glories of private aviation, collapsed into the backseat and went to sleep. I sat in front next to Lenny, who was equally burnt. We flew under O’Hare’s frantic traffic pattern, with me freaked out the whole way. “Two o’clock, Lenny, looks like a big one. Not that way, there’s a bigger one over there.” By the time we hit the inky black skies over Wisconsin, I had developed some resentments.
“Lenny, can we turn out the lights in here?”
Lenny understood immediately. “I can shut down the running lights too. And if you want, I can rough up the engine a little.” Everything went black, and the engine began to sputter some as he eased out the choke.
“Eddie, wake up!” I shouted. “We got no electrical, no navigation, we’ve lost the horizon, and the engine doesn’t sound so good!”
I repeated these facts several times while Eddie came to. It took him a few seconds to understand the apparent gravity of the situation. He sputtered as he leaned forward, and then Lenny flipped on the lights. Eddie stared down at the “Just Kidding” sign in my hand. A hoary old story, told many times, this time with a few factual emendations from Eddie. It ends the same way, though.
“You got me,” Eddie said, slapping his knee and filling the room with ack-ack-ack.
Sometime in the middle of 1987, I stumbled across a line, and Eddie’s laughing stopped. I don’t remember precisely how our enduring friendship hit a cul-de-sac, but Eddie does.
Taking a sip of his nightcap, he remembered that he had passed out at my apartment in South Minneapolis and woke up at dawn. I was standing in the kitchen with some other losers, going back at it one more time. “I see you and these two hollow-eyed junkies with a spoon cooking,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell was in there, but you had something going. All I remember is the three of you over this blue flame. It was early in the morning, like six o’clock, and I remember looking at it, and it just turned my stomach. And you were getting ready to shoot up, but I don’t know what it was. I went to the bathroom, and I came out, and I remember looking at you, and I said, ‘David, I gotta go home.’ And I just left. I went home. It was shortly after that that we had that conversation.”
That conversation?
“About if you’re going to kill yourself, go ahead, but I can’t be there anymore, I can’t do it.” The living room of his old place was suddenly quiet. He said he spoke to me man-to-man back then, all business aside, telling me that he could not abide me turning into one of those nitwits who lived to suck on a glass dick. And then he walked away.
I ended up with a whole new crop of running buddies, people who lived and breathed the coke life with little regard for other pursuits. One by one, my pals from the old days drifted away, checking on me every once in a while and, seeing that there was nothing to be done—I would not listen to anyone at the time, no matter what they said—eventually leaving me to my obsession.
When I finally sobered up, Eddie was the first one in line to help me glue the wheels back on, buying me Diet Cokes with the same gusto he exhibited setting me up with whiskey. If he missed the maniac version of me, he never said so and took more pride in my subsequent professional accomplishments than I ever did. Best man at my wedding, best man in my life.
12
PERP WALK
Only need a little, but you want a ton.
—THE REPLACEMENTS, “DOSE OF THUNDER”
On paper, specifically newsprint, the mideighties were very good years for me. I was breaking stories, winning some awards, and beginning to feel my range and strengths as a journalist. When I got on a story, I was a dog on a meat bone. There were stories that pulled back the blankets on a food bank that was better at feeding its executives than its clients, and a piece that received national attention about how a Minneapolis policeman had used a surveillance program, “Target 8,” to go after a personal enemy. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I won five Page One Awards during this period, but if I received a bunch of Lucite tchotchkes for my success, I can’t find them now.
Street gangs, long a fixture of life in bigger cities, were pulling into Minneapolis and St. Paul, grabbing the drug corners, infiltrating nonprofits, and occasionally killing people. Nobody took much notice until a young white girl was killed. Christine Kreitz, a confused young girl who became an associate of the Gangster Disciples, had been mistaken for a snitch—she wasn’t—and executed in a park near where I lived. Working at an alternative weekly and under the spell of the so-called New Journalism, I tended to render my reporting with a giant purple crayon. The story began this way:
Christine Kreitz died a loyal Disciple. S
he believed the Disciples were her family. She believed they meant what they said when they said they loved her. She believed way, way too much. Christine gave her life to the Black Gangster Disciple Nation. She kept her mouth shut, did what she was told, and in return the Disciples executed her.
—TWIN CITIES READER, JULY 16, 1986
I got clobbered from both sides when the story came out. The police chief at the time suggested that I was conjuring some nascent monster through overheated coverage and ridiculed me. And people in black organizations felt that I had pathologized and indicted a huge swath of the community. I was invited over to what I thought would be a nice little meeting sponsored by the St. Paul Urban League and showed up alone after a long night and not much sleep, figuring I could fake my way through it. There were over a hundred people in a very hot, dark basement, with the only lights turned on me. I was hammered by the crowd for ninety minutes straight, and people showed teeth as I left, including some gangbangers I recognized. I walked out real slow, not wanting to show that they had me going, but I was covered in sweat by the time I got to my car.
I found it all bracing in the main. But beyond the day job, all was not well. I was in trouble in my first marriage for draining our bank account, being MIA for days at a time, and for failing to act like either a husband or an adult. At my wife’s request and my family’s demand, I entered treatment in 1985. A model patient, I said and did all the right things while I was an inpatient and made gestures at sobriety when I came out, but I had no ongoing program of recovery and soon backslid into using. When I reentered treatment in 1986—this time as an outpatient—my marriage was all but over. Kim was more than through with me—me of the long nights, the ravaged bank accounts, the evasive answers to simple questions. A smart woman with plans that used to include me, she wanted to get on with her life. And I left on a dead run. Scotty, a pal I worked with, let me flop at his house for a few months.