by David Carr
At a certain age, I suggested he said that because he had a lot of good friends and not much money. When my dad and mom got older, it was clear that they were going to be OK but limited in their retirement. And then one of my dad’s dear old friends took care of a few financial things. Nothing crazy, but it took the heat off. Things don’t matter, people do.
I was not the only guy in our family who worked for some rough cats. My dad grew up the son of a very successful clothing store owner in Minneapolis. In 1961 he went to one of those newfangled shopping malls in the suburbs and opened up Carr’s Fashion for Men. It was just about the time chain stores moved in on retail, and his store failed. He never declared bankruptcy and paid back every nickel.
My dad was drinking at the time—he would soon quit for good—and the business setback left him at loose ends. He ended up stumbling along, hooking up with a variety of outfits that sold mutual funds. He eventually ended up working with Deil, a local banker with a lot on his plate, and a guy named Roger, his right-hand man. My dad was the nice Catholic boy they sent out to perform cashectomies on rich widows. But behind all the afternoon drinks, the talk of big deals down the pike, they screwed him. My dad sobered up, went back into the clothing business, working the floor as a salesman for Liemandt’s, eventually running several stores for them. My dad was and is a success by any objective definition.
The same could not be said for Deil and Roger. “They were really bad guys,” my dad says now, sitting on a deck above St. Alban’s Bay on Lake Minnetonka. Long after my dad had stopped working for them and I had become a reporter, Deil ended up in a very serious jam. He had leveraged his banks into ownership of the Tropicana casino in Las Vegas and was riding high. But he extended credit to the Kansas City mob, a violation of federal law, and they ran up debt in the millions. When they said they couldn’t pay what they owed, he said he would lose his casino. Then they told him the good news: They were his new partners. The skimming began immediately, and Deil started kiting checks at his banks back in the Twin Cities to stay solvent. After he was charged, it was thought he was going to roll on the Kansas City mob. Before trial, he went up north for a weekend of boating. There was an accident, and Deil lost his right hand. There was a lot of speculation about how that hand got severed, but he did not implicate others at his federal trial, which I covered with deep interest. Roger testified against Deil and he was convicted, spending forty months in prison. I remember that the prosecutors were impressed by my understanding of the nuances of the case, but I don’t remember telling them how I knew what I knew.
When I was out in the weeds, my dad, sober, loving, and furious, came after me with the nets a couple of times, trying to shove me into treatment and pull me back from what he saw as certain doom. But I mostly eluded his efforts to get me into some puzzle factory to straighten out. In one memorable instance, he and my brother Jim broke down the door to my apartment and rushed in, only to find my pal Fast Eddie and a couple of girls hanging out and me nowhere in sight. Sensing that things were getting a little out of hand, I agreed to meet with Dad on neutral ground, at the Perkins restaurant out on Highway 100 in Edina. By this time, I was out of work, with no visible means of support, and had a new girlfriend named Anna, who was keeping me in drugs and money. I don’t remember my specific mental state, but it could be narrowed down to: high, about to get high, or crashing. He was waiting in a booth by a window. I wasted no time telling him I did not want for anything, that all of my needs were being met by my new friend.
He returned the favor and got right to the point.
“You are a whore.” In a more Christian spirit—Jesus loved prostitutes as God’s children, after all—he added that his prayers, the prayers of my mother, the prayers of his friends, the prayers of nuns, were going to straighten me out. “Nuns are praying for you.”
(My friend Nimmer reminded me that he put a word in with the nuns as well, so I had a lot of women with Godly connections dialed in on my behalf. And my dad has since explained that while nuns may have prayed for me, and he may have told me as much, a whole bunch of others did, too, including his lay fellowship group, Cursillo. “Petitions for your recovery were rampant.”)
In our large family, someone is always the problem child, the hot potato, the one the others are talking about, worrying over, bitching about. I had my turn more than anybody. My sister Lisa said that the tug of the family—insistent, nagging, and never-ending—kept me from flying off the edge in irretrievable ways.
“We were raised with values of family and church and all that stuff, but mostly family,” she said, the two of us sharing a cigarette at her kitchen table in the spring of 2007. “No matter how screwed up you were and how you screwed Mom and Dad over, there is always somebody calling you up on the phone, brothers or sisters, saying, ‘What’s going on?’ There is always a good cop and a bad cop, but we always had each other.” She said that even at my worst, when I would either be snorting coke in the bathroom of my parents’ town house or passed out on the couch, no one gave up on me. Prayers, lectures, ultimatums, they all added up in their own way. “I think you’re blessed,” she added, smiling at me.
So nuns prayed for me?
“I think nuns prayed for you.”
In September of 1988, my cousin Tommy died. Nice kid who came from the best kind of big, throbbing Irish family, with a father who was a political leader in his community and many very accomplished siblings whose shared characteristic was decency. Tommy was a little younger than me, married to a lovely woman with a bunch of nice kids and a bad, long-running thing with coke. He finally sobered up for some months and went to work selling cars. One day after a big sale, he went to a no-tell motel with some coke and pushed a chair up against the door. He died there.
I had been out of touch, but when I heard about how it ended for Tommy, I knew that I had to make an appearance at the wake at O’Halloran & Murphy. You don’t skip wakes in our family. His family pulled together around this wound, but it was a miserable affair, full of sorrowful smiles and sobbing at the memory of Tommy. I straightened out as much as I could and came by for a quick toe-touch, avoiding the gaze of my family as I expressed my condolences. I tapped my father’s arm on the way out as a good-bye. He leaned in and hissed, “Take a look around you. Is this what you have planned for us?”
14
TIME HEALS, TIME FORGETS
For all of the pharmacological foundations of his stories, Mr. Thompson was a reporter, taking to the task of finding out what other people knew with an avidity that earned the respect of even those who found his personal hobbies reprehensible.
—FROM A STORY I WROTE FOLLOWING HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S DEATH
Mornings for an addict involve waking up in a room where everything implicates him. Even if there is no piss or vomit—oh, blessed be the small wonders—there is the tipped-over bottle, the smashed phone, the bright midday light coming through the rip in the shade that says another day has started without you. Drunks and addicts tend to build nests out of the detritus of their misbegotten lives.
It is that ecosystem, all there for the inventorying within twenty seconds of waking, which tends to make addiction a serial matter. Apart from the progression of the disease, if you wake up in that kind of hell, you might start looking for something to take the edge off. Nothing like the beer goggles and a nice bracing whiff of something to help you reframe your little disaster area. Hmmm, just a second here. A little of the hair of the dog. Yep. Now, that’s better. Everything is new again.
But it was a very different morning at my apartment at 3208 Garfield in the spring of 1986. Next to me, there was an arm, long and languid. I followed the contour over a back marked only by tan lines, the kind of thing you see in classic, figurative sculpture. This gorgeous girl smiled when she slept, each tooth a greeting to the morning, to me, to the night before. Then I remembered: Doolie.
I had known her when I was about to get married and she was the chubby, nondescript baby sister of my dear
college friend Kat. I barely noticed her, and she did not give me the time of day. A few years later, Donald and I—I was now about to be divorced—were at the bar she worked at downtown, and things had changed. She was just back from Europe and looked exquisite, with a bookish, wisecracking way that stayed with me. More remarkably, she found me charming and funny. I saw her again at the Uptown bar, celebrating her pal Tony’s birthday. Tony, a cook she worked with, was leaving for the night, and Doolie seemed content with my company.
The moon was full. I suggested a trip to Cedar Lake, one of the gorgeous lakes decorating the city. We did some coke and stopped at her apartment at her request. She came out with a blanket and a bottle of wine. I was used to hustling women by talking all kinds of smack talk, overwhelming as much as seducing. Not this time.
That night I saw Doolie plain as day, her smile an array of little moons illuminated by the light of the larger moon above. The smile, the way it made me feel, was still there in the morning. I rolled back from her and the reverie she induced and glanced at the clock—and then it came to me that I was supposed to be somewhere else.
Dear. Mother. Of. God. It was ten-thirty. I had an appointment at the governor’s office at eleven for a final interview on a story about discrepancies in public bonding in St. Paul. Big story. Big interview.
In a panic, I woke her as gently as I could and went into the bathroom, taking a quick shower and an even quicker snort of coke. I grabbed a sport coat that looked like it had been made out of asbestos and a hopeless tie. We walked out together, and then I ran for it, swearing and muttering to myself, but some part of me was still back on the beach with all those little moons.
The governor was running late, I was told when I got there. Sweat poured from my brow, into my hair, and then dripped down my neck to my back, pooling at my waistband and below. I ran to the bathroom and used fistfuls of paper towels to mop myself. I started to settle down. This would be OK.
Governor Rudy was from Minnesota’s Iron Range, and whatever he lacked in finesse, he made up for in pure humanity and street smarts. A Democrat, both big D and small d, he was a good guy. But when I walked into his office, he stayed behind his desk, flanked by a couple of suits I didn’t know. Lawyer-type guys. Before I got two questions in, they said that they knew I was just carrying water for the Republican state auditor; that he had surely slipped me the documents about the bonding.
Gee, this wasn’t going so well. The fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in, and I started schvitzing anew. Especially above my lip.
“Are you all right?” the governor asked. He looked really concerned.
Fine, fine, just a little hot in here is all. No, he said, your nose, I mean.
I put my hand up under my nose, and it came away blood red. One of the lawyer guys slipped me a tissue, but it was not a one-tissue affair. I continued the interview with a huge wad up one nostril, my head filling with blood as I struggled to finish. If someone had lit a truth candle, and the governor asked me why my nose was bleeding, I would have said it was because I had been sticking things up it all night long. That would have thrown Governor Rudy, a meat-and-tatties guy, for a loop.
Why in the world would someone do that?
No special reason, I guess. It’s just all the rage.
Soon after Doolie and I began dating, her roommate was raped by a stranger who creepy-crawled into their apartment. I was good in a crisis, perhaps because I had generated so many of them. I looked after her roommate in the near term, offering practical advice and soothing bromides. She eventually moved out of the apartment and did not come back. It then seemed like a good idea for Doolie to stay over a lot.
I needed no instigation. I found her riveting. Academically she was lost, floundering around in pursuit of a reason to be in college. But that didn’t mean she didn’t know a lot about a lot. She was raised in a family of bright sisters, with learned, successful parents, and it showed in both her manners and brawny range of knowledge. And not just book smart; she had just gotten back from living in Barcelona, Spain, and as someone who got on planes mostly to make short-hop drug runs or to party in crappy towns, I thought it sounded magical.
She was an epic dancer, my friends adored her, and, most importantly at the time, she did not see anything unusual about the fact that in between work assignments, I careened through all manner of drugs and alcohol. She had her own issue with substances—teeny compared to what I had going—and was, for a time, charmed by my excesses. We went to see Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and the Grateful Dead all on the same bill at the Metrodome. I can still see her walking up Fifth Avenue in a sundress and cowboy boots, laughing with anticipation of the huge concert.
In the months that followed, there was a lot of bar hopping, and we both enjoyed the fact that I was a known commodity; that people seemed glad to see me and the coke that generally accompanied my arrival. But you know what they say: Everybody laughs and has a good time until someone gets an eye poked out. Or sticks a crack pipe in their mouth. Soon after we got together, I began disappearing. She became clingy. She swore something was wrong, that I was up to something. I told her she was a psycho. She said I was a liar. In truth, I had met Anna, who had oodles of coke and plenty of time for me. As Doolie became more accusatory, I became scarcer and, strangely, more possessive. We had epic fights. I began, and there is no nice way to say this, smacking her around.
I had always remembered that I hit her—my face hot each time that I did—but I told myself that it was always in response to some physical provocation from her. I knew when I saw her again, without even reconsidering, that that was a lie.
It is one thing to type those words, but quite another to be sitting on a park bench in Chicago with Doolie, talking about what happened two decades later. I had flown there to see her in the middle of the summer of 2006. I was incredibly nervous, less about seeing her than the prospect of talking about odious things that occurred. If my behavior ever tipped over from drug-induced pathology to something darker, more evil—the joy in the unhappiness of someone else—it was aimed at this woman.
There is electricity between us when we meet at a coffee shop, but it has very little to do with bygone romance. We are resuming a conversation that ended abruptly. Sure, we had talked about who did what to whom, but we never really talked about what happened. When we came together back then, we sped through joy, passion, conflict, hatred, and heartbreak in just a few short years, and eventually we each walked away. But more than once in those years, I have wondered, What was that? What happened to me to do those things to her? When I thought of Doolie, it was with fondness and deep, deep regret.
We walk to the park near the shore. She is still beautiful, but settled in a way she never was when she was with me. Married to a smart, very successful guy, she is writing plays and raising their son. It is immediately clear from Doolie’s recollection that there were times when I hunted her down.
For a time, she lived at Thirty-eighth and Cedar, just down the street from the Relax-a-Lounge, a massage parlor/whorehouse where I had some customers. As she talked, I remember I had stopped there to drop something off and then went to Doolie’s place, and we got in some kind of argument. She reminded me that we ended up out on the lawn, with me kneeling on her arms and hitting her.
“You hit me, and you somehow pushed me down. Do you mind if I do this?” she asked, as she put her hands on my shoulders. “It might be kind of pathetic, but you had me on each shoulder, and you were hitting me back and forth and were saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’”
The demonstration was not meant to shame, only to create a clear picture of what it felt like to be her, restrained and pummeled at the same time. The memory comes pouring back to me as she describes that day. Every word of it was true. I had done these things. More than once in those days, she walked away with a black eye and started to get thin and spooky from the long nights with me. Her parents tried to get her to come home to North Dakota, but she hung in, even after she found out about
Anna.
“The smart girl would walk away,” she said. “But no, I didn’t. I stayed there and took it for another year.” She is smiling when she says this, smiling at her own lack of self-regard. What easily could have hardened into hatred and blame, has, over the years, become something more complicated. There is a mutuality to our discussion—what I did, what she did—that I had neither expected nor really deserved. In the course of an interview, blank spots filled in and mysteries resolved themselves.
As we talk, it becomes clearer that she allowed me to drive her insane over time, coming and then leaving, loving her and then hitting her. She lost her bearings. She ended up taking over my apartment somewhere in there, but details are unclear here. On January 18, 1988, Doolie jumped me when I came into the apartment on Garfield. I say she had a knife that she was threatening to cut the phone line with, and, by inference, me. She says it was a cigarette that she put out on me. Whatever, it was a minuet of misery—once sensible, decent people now hanging in to hurt and maim each other. I tortured her, mentally, verbally, and, eventually, physically.
“Not without my permission. I tried to put a cigarette out on you. I had a cigarette in my hand. I think I have a streak of violence, though, too.” We don’t dwell on it, but I’m sure as I sit there that it was a part of herself she never would have known existed had she not known me.
It was a bad piece of reality television, replete with goofy neighbor.
“The neighbor down the stairs called the police. Remember?” Doolie said, finding room for a laugh. “She goes, ‘I can’t get through, I can’t get through.’ Turns out she’s calling 411. So it was, like, this really weird, hilarious moment.”
This is what the cops found when they got there:
Sqd 530 responded to a heavy domestic. Upon arrival off’s were met by vic who was sitting with a neighbor in apt 2. Vic stated that her and def had just had an argument and that he had struck her with his open hand on the left side of the face. Vic stated they had had argument concerning his infidelity at which time he became upset and slapped her. Off walked upstairs to apt 4 and confronted def who stated they had had an argument and he admitted to slapping the vic. Def was searched for weapons, cuffed and escorted to rear of sqd. He was then transported to HCJ and booked for above offense.