by David Carr
A few decades later, Scotty and I are sitting talking outside the same house. One of his lovely daughters now lives in the room where I was doing God knows what every night of the week. He doesn’t say so, but I think they burned some sage before they moved her into the room. I was sure he regretted his generosity even though by my count I set the house on fire only once, but sitting in the backyard many years later, he said it was a fair trade.
“You supplied me with a social life by moving in,” he said. “You brought the parties here and brought the people here. There were many wonderful times, often on week nights, school nights. That was always kind of a challenge.”
Scotty liked my company just fine, but my lifestyle corrupted him osmotically. He’d plan on turning in early, reading a book, and I would come plowing in after the bars closed with a crew of rowdies and a pocket full of dry goods. The best intentions frequently met their match around me.
When I was living with Scotty in the winter and spring of 1986, some guys I knew had a commercial music company—jingles, stuff like that—and they hired me to write a brochure for them. Seemed like easy money, a layup. I pulled an all-nighter to make the copy deadline and brought it to one of the guys’ house to get a final approval. On that cold March day, he sat with the check in his hands and said he was leaving for Sun Valley, Idaho, later and needed a little, you know, to take with him. “Well, I’m in the brochure writing business today, not the ‘you know’ business. Besides, I gotta go to work,” I told him. “Where do you expect me to cop at nine-thirty in the morning? I’m fresh out.”
“Just a gram,” he pleaded. “I told the other guys you could make it happen.” He still had my check, significant money, in his hands.
One call. I said I would make one call.
I called Phil.
Phil’s coke, at least what he sold me, was not the best, but he was almost always open for business. A guy with long hair and a penchant for feathers, he could scan as a Sioux Indian or a Hell’s Angel, depending on the day. We had family connections going all the way back, and his brother, Steve, was a pal who ran First Avenue, the rock palace downtown.
Phil was in the Life full-time, including having a kind of office/rec room near downtown in a festering hotel that was wobbling toward closure. Called the “Blue Room,” as in “Meet me at the Blue Room,” it could have been named for the paint on the wall or for the things that went on there.
Raised out in the cushy suburbs near Lake Minnetonka, Phil seemed as if he were born on a cellblock. His familiars, Monker and Red-eye, lacked the IQ of a box of doughnuts between them, but their smushed-in faces and large hands were plenty articulate when they came knocking. (They called my house one time when I was behind with Phil on a payment. I came home and Kim said, “Some guy named Red-eye called, and he said to meet him and Monker at the Sunshine Bar. What’s that about?”)
Phil was the real deal, although after three federal stints, he is both officially and unofficially retired. We scheduled for coffee, and he pulled up on a Harley Springer—nothing tricked out or silly, just a stock bike in mint condition.
Many years ago I told him I hated the name Dave, which was a mistake. He still calls me “Davey Dave” on greeting, perhaps to double the insult. He can be rugged company when he is feeling sideways and taking the whole boss-of-all-bosses thing seriously, but he is big hearted, never hurting anyone who doesn’t have it coming. The girls—smart ones, pretty ones—liked him, maybe because he made them feel safe anywhere on the planet. (Judging by some rather awkward times I spent in the Blue Room, he got them deeply in touch with some other feelings as well.)
He could be fun as hell when he wasn’t “conducting,” which is what he called dealing, full of street lore, philosophy, and mind games. Some guys look tough. Some guys talk tough. Some guys are tough. Phil hit for the cycle. I lost many hands of poker to him, woke him up more than a few times because I had a need, and became sort of a hobby for him. Sitting there all those years gone, Phil said that he thought that at a certain point, I was frittering away whatever talents I had on the wrong endeavors.
“You asked if you were a good businessman. Nah, I don’t think so.”
But there was some fun on the way.
“Yeah, socializing, woman chasing,” he said, not looking much worse for wear for taking both to epic lengths. “You kinda just did what you wanted, when you wanted, how you wanted it. It may sound glamorous, but it has consequences. Things catch up with you. You let things go, it will catch up with you. I did get worried with you, David.”
Awww, he’s giving me the David, not Davey Dave. Kind of chokes me up.
I told Phil I had this memory of a robbery at the Blue Room involving him, Red-eye, and me that seemed more like a dream—every bit of it unreal. I still had a hard time believing it, but then I saw all kinds of stuff in that room—it had the vibe of a Chinese opium den with a chaser of absinthe—and breaking it down into hard-and-fast data points does not reflect the reality that hung there.
“Were you there?” Phil asked at the coffee shop. Red-eye’s dead, so no help there. Stories take on an apocryphal lilt, even when they describe specific events, like getting robbed at gunpoint in a dimly lit dope house. Some of it was just so profoundly weird that I had a hard time believing it really happened. I tell him exactly what I remember, and after awhile, we both decide I was there.
It was 1985, and I must have been doing a drive-by at the Blue Room to pick up something quick. I was standing there with Red-eye and Phil, talking about nothing special, when the rippled glass in the corner of the window in the locked door was suddenly broken. Could have been the cops, but instead a handgun, a big one, came through the hole, backed by one beady eye. “Stay put,” the guy said, while his other hand snaked in and flicked the lock.
Before us stood two of the twitchiest heroin junkies I had ever seen. They were obviously in the throes of dope sickness. Phil and Red-eye did not back up, so I didn’t either.
The junkies came closer, told us to empty out our pockets. They grabbed a quarter ounce of coke off the table. There’s more, they said. They were right. Three feet to my left, there was a hole punched in the wall, and I knew that on the two-by-four just above it sat a quarter pound of coke.
“That’s all there is, boys,” Phil said, all friendly like. They argued for a while, and then the junkies said that if that’s all there was, they would need his watch and necklace, a big chunky dope rope of gold.
“Naw, you don’t want that, because you’ll have to come over here and take it off me,” Phil said evenly. “And you don’t want to do that.”
I looked at the twitches with the guns, all freaky and nervous as Phil menaced them with his voice, the only weapon he had handy.
“Phil, give them the fucking dope rope,” I said.
“Naw, you don’t want my jewelry,” Phil repeated. “A couple hundred bucks, a quarter ounce of coke—I’d say that you boys had a pretty good day so far. I have some people coming by to see me, and they aren’t going to be happy to see you here. You’d better go.”
That was Phil in a nutshell, running the show while he was getting gun-robbed. The junkies keened and argued, backing up the whole time, and then they were gone. I heard that Red-eye and Phil found them within days—Minneapolis is a pretty small town—and fixed their hands so that they wouldn’t be pointing guns at anybody else for a while.
Phil ran a pretty tight show with his customers as well. He grew tired of my antic phone calls, and when I called him on that morning in 1986, he was not happy to hear from me. Reluctantly, he picked up a beep I sent him about the guy going to Sun Valley who wanted some, you know.
“Naw, Davey Dave, I’m on a social. I’m at the Skyway. You should give it a rest anyway. It’s nine-thirty in the morning. Go to work.” As he gave me this lecture, he was sitting at the Skyway Lounge, a titty bar on Hennepin Avenue full of desiccated, worked-over girls dancing for an even more bored clientele. Phil always seemed more worried abo
ut my job than I was. I explained that it wasn’t even for me, that it was for this guy I did other business with, and the errand was sitting between me and a big, legit check.
“Hurry up then, I ain’t going to be here all day,” he said.
I waved off a drink when I got there. It was two blocks away from work, and I had to be at police headquarters by eleven for an interview with a cop who knew stuff about street gangs. In the half-light of the bar, Phil palmed me a film canister jammed with coke.
“You know what a gram looks like, Davey Dave. Don’t get greedy,” he said, words that would ring for years afterward.
I already had a paper bindle folded. I went to the skanky bathroom at the back and locked myself into a stall. I tapped out the correct amount—I could eyeball a gram from ten feet away—and folded up the packet. I took the opportunity to take a pee, and it occurred to me in that thirty seconds that I might need a bump to get through the day. I’d been up most of the night. The bathroom door opened and closed, and from the stall I could see the heavy black shoes of the guy as he took a leak. I unfolded the paper, knocking a few more tenths into it. The shoes moved suddenly.
“You roll a noisy joint, pal!” the uniform cop said as he snapped open the door. I threw the canister in the toilet, but the bindle bounced off the rim. I was just reaching for it when his knee came so far up my ass I saw stars.
“Whaddayaknow, I got myself a felony narcotics!” he cried with joy. “It’s my lucky day.”
I was wearing a Lakeland leather coat with lots of pockets. Cops loved going through that coat, and this guy was no exception. Phil appeared behind him, giving me some kind of high sign. Oh, I get it, you want us to jump an armed police officer. Great idea, Phil. I must have shaken my head. The cop turned and barked Phil out of the bathroom.
All of this is etched in my memory, but cops tend to write with a bit more economy than either junkies or journalists. Here is how Officer Quinn described his good fortune:
While on foot patrol I observed the deft. with a white paper in his hand. When I confronted him he dropped the paper which when recovered appeared to be narcotics. Deft was placed under arrest and transported to HJC. Narcotics inventoried.
He cuffed me, and we started walking toward the front, out into the cold, bright morning. People, including some I worked with, were on their way to work. We took a right on Hennepin Avenue, toward the City Center mall. My dad would be heading in right now to open up Liemandt’s clothing store, which he managed. As we turned up Seventh Avenue, alongside the downtown mall, my head started to swivel in all directions.
“Calm down,” Officer Quinn ordered. “I parked over on Nicollet. Didn’t know I was going to have company.”
He held me sideways, so I had to crabwalk the block of Seventh on the way to Nicollet, walking the length of the City Center. I was never so glad to get in the back of a squad. We drove to the cop shop, and I went to booking for printing and photo. On my way to the holding cell, I looked up at the clock. Eleven sharp. I should be one floor up, taking notes with Lieutenant Freddy, a detective in the auto division, about the criminal scourge overtaking our city. I spent the day in a holding cell with three guys who admired, then coveted, my sneakers. Mickey, a criminal attorney Phil had on retainer, got me out very late that night by signing for me, and in the ensuing months, we had to keep going back to court, shopping for the right judge until I was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor violation of the city’s drug laws. I felt like—no, I clearly was—a moron, a greedy little two-tenths-of-a-gram-chipping moron. I was at large because I was white, employed, and Phil had hooked me up with his in-the-know attorney.
Phil, wiser, older, the guy who now lives to pull a lunker out of Lake Minnetonka, said you can’t regret the past. But you can learn from it. Phil had one last thought about my choice on March 3, 1986. “You shoulda gone to work anyhow that morning, David.”
I wanted to talk to Mickey, the attorney who made it all go away. Mickey caught a case of his own involving client funds and had been disbarred. Phil didn’t know where he was, and no one else seemed to. DonJack, my reporting pal, eventually tracked him down in suburban Minneapolis. Mickey was more than happy to get the call—the files were now gone—and I was thrilled to have a chance to thank him. Because of Mickey, I went from one more jamoke in lockup getting the hairy eyeball from his cellies to a citizen back on the streets and breathing free air. Even another day in jail would have been hard to explain back at the paper. Why hadn’t I called? It was one thing to be known as the hard-partying reporter who somehow managed to hit deadline and quite another to admit that I had been felony-charged by a police department that I often covered. Micket recalled I was in a bit of a jam.
“I do remember that when Phil called me—he would call me every once in a while with a friend of his, an associate of his, whatever, when they would get jammed up—and I do remember he said, you know, ‘You gotta go down there and get him out; you gotta get him out right away.’ I remember him telling me that. I was on a phone with a judge before I ever got to the jail to see you.”
We had a nice chat, but at the time he was representing me, we seemed to be at cross-purposes. I was mortified and terrified to be in the Hennepin County Courthouse—a place where I had covered many stories—as a defendant. But he knew that if I were to step before the wrong judge on the wrong day, the carefully arranged plea would fall apart.
“I negotiated the case with the prosecuting attorney to get the charge reduced, but then we had to be concerned about what the judge was going to do to you after you entered your plea. You pled guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge.”
It was not a layup, Mickey said. I could have been stuck with the felony, which would have changed almost everything. “You could’ve done some substantial time in the Hennepin County Workhouse, and I was trying to avoid that. So we kind of delayed a little bit until I was comfortable with the judge we had, and then we went ahead and entered your plea.”
The hard part, he explained, was managing his client.
“You were very embarrassed, and you did not want to keep having to go back to court. I kept telling you, ‘David, it’s for your own good. I know it’s embarrassing for you, but we have to do this to make sure you get the best possible deal.’ I don’t think that you were ever convinced until after the case was over with.”
He was happy that we got a good result but not sure back then that I had seen the error of my ways. “I saw that you were going down the wrong trail and that you did in fact have a lot to offer, and if you kept going the way you were going, you were gonna end up putting yourself into a situation that you wouldn’t be able to dig yourself out of.”
Like any good criminal defense attorney, he gave me some lectures at the time in addition to legal advice.
“You agreed with everything I said and [then] did what you wanted to. You were full of shit, like any junkie. Not a crook, a junkie. That’s what I saw. I saw the chemicals, and I saw what you were doing to get yourself someplace where you wanted to be in your head, but it wasn’t doing you any good as far as your career was concerned.” He said he told me that as much as I cared about being a good reporter, about doing good stories, none of it meant anything as long as I spent my nights acting the fool.
But everything turned out, give or take. I remember back then being profoundly grateful and thinking that whatever I had paid him had been worth it. But like so much of my past, it pivoted when I made further inquiry.
“You stiffed me, but don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago. Statute of limitations is run. I have no idea how much you owed me, but I do remember you did because I stopped by one time. Your office was, I think, on Excelsior Boulevard in St. Louis Park, and I came knocking on your door one day, and you weren’t in. As a defense attorney, getting stiffed was not an unusual event.”
13
NUNS PRAYED FOR ME
My father is a man who swears frequently, goes to church every day, and lives his towering fait
h. I am a man who swears frequently, goes to church every Sunday, and lives in search of faith. He is a man who believes that I am not dead because nuns prayed for me. I am a man who believes that is as good an explanation as any.
After three boys, in 1956 my parents were looking forward to having a baby girl. When my mother went into labor on September 8, the anniversary of the birth of the Blessed Virgin on the liturgical calendar, it was ordained that the baby’s name would be Mary. I arrived instead. That same day, their car was stolen from the church parking lot. Plans, well laid, well prayed, were like that. They still loved me within an inch of my life. Always. Even later, when I got in jams, got divorced, got fired, slipped after treatment, my mother said the same thing: “You are mine. We choose you no matter what.”
When I was little, I used to get up at the ass crack of dawn to go to church with my father. He was impressed by my burgeoning faith, but the truth of the matter was that I loved sitting in the pew with him. As one of seven children, I rarely had him all to myself. He was my higher power. (I look at my own children when we are in church and feel the corollary. I go there to stand next to them.)
In our family, we had money, or at least it seemed like we did. The nice house, good cars, vacations like anybody else. And then one day I came home from caddying, and the electrician was there shutting off the juice. Things got a little hairy after that. We had never wanted for a damn thing, it’s just that with seven kids and my dad’s bumpy career path, we were always just a little beyond our means. My dad always said, “Things don’t matter, people do.”