by David Carr
These many years later, I made the amends as I could, telling her that part of the reason I was so frantic, so brutal, was that I was obsessed with her. But then she asked a quiet, logical question, with no accusation attached: “Then why would you go away?”
The answer was the same as in every other aspect of my existence at the time: I chose coke above all. And there was a part of our relationship that was twisted beyond repair. She pointed out that when I finally sobered up, I came back, and I was so fat that I could hardly walk, but she let me in. For a time, we were addicted to each other’s saliva, remaining together far past the point of reason or common sense.
She was acting at the time, and after I got out of treatment, I would wait for her outside auditions. “I was a terrible actor,” she says now. I thought she had a good role as some hottie in a play I have now forgotten. “They put me in tight dresses, a lot of makeup and hats, a lot of things like that. I was tarted up a little bit.”
When we began dating again after I sobered up, I had company: my twins from my relationship with Anna. We did our best to find what had brought us together with such ferocity, but crawling across all that wreckage was too exhausting. We met, as they say, in each other’s weakness. I was a slow-motion kidnapper, and Doolie served a long, brutal stint in my custody. But now anybody walking by the park bench in Chicago would have seen two old friends, laughing, sharing stories, smiling at each other.
Doolie is a terrific storyteller, generous in her recollection—this is a person who gave up a kidney for her father, so it is in her nature—and a bear trap for dates and memories, noting the prominence of the full moon at all of the glorious and sordid inflection points in our relationship. She knows a thing or two about me, too.
“You had an admiration for the bad guy. You had an admiration for the wiseguy,” she said, pulling her knees up under her chin. “I think you would have been a wiseguy if you weren’t a nice guy. You wanted to be the catcher in the rye. When people were in trouble, you would catch them. Or if they weren’t, you pushed them.”
She said I liked to collect stories, my own most avidly. She had heard that long after I sobered up, quit the booze and the coke, that I tried drinking again. She was not surprised.
“That’s part of the tale too. You knew no matter what happened that it would never get that bad again. So then that would be a real good story too. Is that insulting?”
I told her I did not have a lot of capacity for the received insult.
“That’s because you have a very high opinion of yourself, and that’s OK.”
She bid me good-bye as an old friend. Nothing to it, she said. “You don’t remember this, but we left it nice.”
15
THE HOUSE OF MANY DOORS
Who by now could know where was what? Liars controlled the locks.
—NORMAN MAILER, THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
No one who knew either of us would have been surprised to see Patrick talking to me in a prison visiting room in the summer of 2007. Patrick, a political adept who helped invent the version of Paul Wellstone that voters were willing to make their senator, was always in my corner. When I was a young reporter, he was one of my best sources, the hyperwired political consultant who gave me guidance and helped me break news occasionally. He gave me work when I was tipping over into addiction and then did it again when I sobered up. Later, when I got sick, he and his wife, Cathy, were the first people to stop by, armed with reams of medical information about how I might proceed. But people in our circle who watched our improbable friendship in the eighties and nineties would have been surprised at the end of the visit, when I got up and walked out into fresh air, and Patrick went back to his cell.
Patrick had been such a moral beacon to me that once I sobered up, I would never so much as smoke a cigarette in his presence. Although he was a few years younger than me, Patrick taught me much about how to conduct business at the greasy intersection of politics, media, and money. As a reporter and his source, our relationship had always been on the up-and-up, with him exercising great deference for my position as a journalist. And later, when we worked on various communications contracts, he was a complete straight arrow, never cutting a corner or padding a bill. He rarely judged my relationship with chemicals, but he found my involvement in illicit narcotics reprehensible and stupid. A guy who came of professional age on the Iron Range of Minnesota, where a tradition of mine unionism was often matched by public corruption, he was the counterexample: a guy who got involved in politics for all the right reasons and was a consistent voice for rectitude and truth.
So did he make up that guy, and was he just waiting for his shot? I don’t think so. It is a long story, but Patrick, who could be a bit of a hot dog, decided that he wanted to own a bunch of minor league hockey teams. He cut some bad deals to get started—the numbers were never going to work—and when it tumbled, he began bilking his friends and partners for reasons no one who knew him understands to this day. He ended up millions to the bad and earned a long prison sentence when he was finally caught. Patrick has some mental health issues that attenuated his relationship with reality once he was in the thick of things, but that explains everything and excuses nothing.
No matter. He was my friend then, and he is my friend now. By my reckoning, you are issued about a dozen friends in life, and if one of mine happens to be in a prison jumpsuit, well, better him than me, but that doesn’t erase the bond. Patrick screwed up, he is in the midst of the consequence, and during our visit, we concentrate on the good stuff. His children and mine, his release date, the job he has as a baker. I asked prison officials for permission to interview Patrick, but after I told them it had nothing to do with my day job at The New York Times, they would not let me bring so much as a pencil into the visiting room. So after I visited, I asked him a few questions by mail.
Patrick said he learned back in those days that getting what he needed out of me as a reporter required some clock minding.
“I finally figured out at some point that if I wanted to give you political news, I really needed to do it between about 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m.,” he wrote in the summer of 2007. “You were always crashing in the morning and too fucking high at night to deal with.” Once I had washed out of journalism, he tried to pull me in on the Minnesota effort for the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign. Patrick liked my writing and recalled that I was “desperate for money” at the time, so he thought there might be a fit. It was not, he wrote, a wise strategic move for the campaign. “I spent the first week nicely trying to get you to come to meetings as part of your job—the earliest you ever showed was 12:30 p.m. I was finally ready to fire your ass, but you just quit showing up, a perfect ending.”
We eventually patched things up and went out one night to watch the Twins. We went bar hopping and ended up at Stand Up Frank’s, the kind of place where a screwdriver was a glass full of vodka that the bartender whispered the words “orange juice” over before handing it to you. He said that when I pushed two of the notoriously strong drinks on him, he went into the bathroom and hurled immediately. We moved on to B.J.’s, a nearby strip club. In the letter, he wrote that after he parked, he noticed I was “fiddling around with some white powdery substance inside of some tinfoil.” For some reason, I believed that the state director of the Dukakis effort would be more than happy to share a car with narcotics. “I told you to get the fuck out of my car and left you there.”
Later we bumped into each other at the airport. “I remember thinking how paranoid you looked. I saw you a few weeks later, and you told me you had smuggled in a ton of coke by taping it to your body that day.” Hmmmm, mighta, coulda happened, but I can say for sure that if it did happen, it was a domestic flight and that I didn’t say much about it. Now or then.
Every time I drop a letter in the mail to Patrick, I do a double take on his federal prison ID. He was too smart, too careful, too much of a do-gooder to get jammed up by some kind of hustle. But I’ve seen enough to know that we
all carry a measure of guilt and innocence along with us. If someone is going to suggest he is eternally damned for what he did, it probably won’t be me. We all contain multitudes.
16
THIS IS HOW WE ROLL
How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to “change our mind.”
—WILLIAM JAMES, THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 2
There are moments in the party lifestyle when you know in your bones that you are at the epicenter of something spectacular; a moment that couldn’t be replicated no matter how much cunning and planning came before it.
Walking into a ski bar near Breckenridge, Colorado, with Eddie, Scotty, and Dale, we meet the suspicion of the locals and the bartender with blunt force: cash and cocaine. Eddie made a three-foot pyramid of champagne glasses and poured bottle after bottle until they were filled. I walked away from the bar with a local I met and found the boys out on the black-diamond runs of Copper Mountain the next day.
Witnessing U2’s first tour, as Bono came out and threw a glass of water up into the lights, the drops misting down and my sister Coo and I swim into the mosh pit at First Avenue until the tops of our shoes were black from getting stepped on.
Buying a party bag in Washington Square with Donald while he was doing some photo work in New York. It was filled with all manner of controlled substances, including some really epic acid. “How can street drugs be so good?” I asked Donald in wonder as we tripped and walked from deli to deli all night, buying cans of beer. “Because we will be back tomorrow.” We were.
The great thing about sober life is that you can reliably plan for what might come next. That’s also the bad thing. As a certified maniac, you have an expectation that almost anything can happen if certain forces align, and sometimes they do. A fight, a new friend, a road trip, or all three on the same night.
Sitting in New Orleans talking with Chris, the guy who fetched the gun I thought I never had, we talked about that moment of ignition. He remembered one night when we were at Stand Up Frank’s, probably in the summer of 1987.
“We were drinking whiskey, and we were coked up,” Chris said. “It was near closing time, and you became convinced that there was some guy down at the bar that was giving you a dirty look, and I kind of physically had restrained you from going over there and confronting him. You were talking loudly, and I was pretty sure things were gonna get ugly there.
“That was the night we ended up getting in my truck and driving to Detroit Lakes. It was just on a whim to see Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson or some country music festival up there. You know, closing time at Stand Up Frank’s.”
Detroit Lakes was five hours away, near the Minnesota–North Dakota border. Anna was already up there, ensconced in a cabin, seeing music and attending to the consumer needs of the musicians.
“We stopped somewhere along the way—I don’t even remember—stopped at a bar that was open inexplicably,” he said. “We chatted up some girls and talked one of them into going with us. I still never could quite figure that out. That was you and not me.”
For reasons he can’t readily fetch at the moment, fatigue probably, he let me drive his giant GMC pickup. “All of a sudden you just swerved down into the ditch with it, slammed on the brakes, stopped in the ditch, jumped out, laid out some lines on the hood of the truck. We got out, snorted the lines on the hood, and then jumped right back in, and then back onto the road.
“And then we got all the way up there to the festival, and we’re standing in line to get some hot dogs, and you got into it with some guy behind us in line. Somebody squirted mustard on somebody—I don’t know if it was you or him—you got into this shoving match with this guy, and we got kicked out of the festival fifteen minutes after we bought the tickets and got in. So we drove all the way up there and never saw a single bit of music.”
17
A CONFEDERACY OF JUNKIES
Moderation is a memory.
—LIZ PHAIR, “JOHNNY FEELGOOD”
The nomenclature of addiction, the nouns that go with it—junkie, drunk, crackhead, doper—would tend to suggest that all people involved in the life are the same. They are not. Neil Young was right about junkies being like setting suns, including coming to untimely, but not entirely unforeseen, ends. Speaking of which, we might pause for a moment of silence for those I knew or ran with who are no longer with us:
TOMMY—my cousin and familial doppelgänger, who died trying to go back at it one more time. The difference between my status above ground and his below is luck and nothing more.
AARON—the first person I advised in a program of recovery. A gorgeous kid with a fondness for heroin, he jumped off the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge connecting Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin.
PHIL—not my dope dealer, but a former porn actor and member of our tribe whose girlfriend died when a car he was driving while impaired went off the road. The night before he was to be sentenced—he would have gone to county for a year at most, which ain’t nothing but doable—Phil used a massive hypodermic to inject an eight ball while lying in the bathtub, with “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” by Meat Loaf playing in the background. Always with the drama, that one.
FRED—went for a short swim and never made it back.
BOB—the guitar player who could not stop the music or the dope.
But there are plenty who have made it. The heroin people, that’s completely understandable. Heroin has a pickling effect. Heading out into the world once or at most twice a day to cop, heroin people spend most of their time on the nod, watching soaps and listening to Leonard Cohen. Not a lot of risk there, other than copping a bad batch.
Cokeheads, well, that’s a different story. All that ripping and running sparks a kind of corrosion—no sleep, lots of booze to take the edge off—that wears even the hardiest souls down to a nub. It is a lifestyle that leaves marks: the scar from the casual swipe of the box cutter during some beef, the burned extremity because he or she went to sleep with the blowtorch on, and the eyes that saw too much because they did not close often enough.
Booze has a nice, fat track record, dating back to soldiers toasting their victories under Herodotus. Drink a little, no big deal. Drink a lot every once in a while, not a problem. Drink a lot all the time, and your innards will swell up, giving you the look of a pear with legs, and if organ failure doesn’t get you, your esophagus might bleed out, or you could just pull a lamebrained move like blacking out and face-planting for good.
In a broader sense, addiction can be enormously simplifying. While other people worry about their 401(k)’s, getting their kids into the right nursery school and/or college, and keeping their plot to take over the world in good effect, a junkie or a drunk just has to worry about his next dose. It leads to a life that is, in a way, remarkably organized. What are we doing today? Exactly what we did yesterday, give or take.
A drunk or a junkie will end up finding fellow travelers in the course of things. If you are a drunk, the guy down the bar who falls off his stool and then gets up, sits down, and orders another is your friend. He may be a peckerwood who makes speeches about the Twins or the Vikings or the mayor, but he is, after a fashion, your guy. In the same way, an addict will find his or her own level and his or her tribe to go with it. As in a lot of cities in the mid-to-late eighties, coke was ubiquitous in Minneapolis. But while vast swathes of people did a line here or there, there was a self-selected tribe who did little else.
To be a daily user of cocaine is, by definition, to be part of the coke economy. Unless you are a trust-fund kid or are lucky enough to be hooked up with one, all that getting and using is generally accompanied by the buying and selling. I was always more interested in writing about crooks than becoming one, but I began dealing coke in service to my habit.
I had some experience in moving dry goods. During the end of college, I sold pot, mostly for Eddie. It was a simple, lu
crative business, although it involved a lot of lifting. I would show up with a garbage bag of pot, maybe fifty pounds, and come away with a grocery bag of cash, $15,000 to $20,000. It was a sane, civilized activity with regular-guy clients.
Coke was more complicated, even in small amounts. I worked mostly with ounces or fractions thereof, stepping on it a bit by adding lactose powder and then parsing it out to friends and friends of friends, and, in a few reckless moments, people I did not know from a load of hay. On larger stuff, I took preorders and went to fetch, telling the connection I would be right back, and I usually was. I have middle-manned a kilo, making almost $10,000 walking from one room to the next. Of course, the person who had the kilo did not want to meet the person buying the kilo, so the risk, along with some of that money, was mine.
The drug business, like all commodities, runs on the twin rails of price and quality. The truism still attains: You get what you pay for. Anybody who oversold his product or stepped on it too much was soon out of the business. And with Schedule I narcotics, there is the added frisson of serious federal time if things go wrong. I was careful some of the time and lucky when I wasn’t. When the Hennepin County sheriff moved on some of Eddie’s storage spots that were jammed with all manner of whatnot, he was out of town, and I called him with the bad news, but that was as far as it went. When the feds nailed Phil, I hammered his beeper for a week while he was in custody, but they never came for me. I got involved in some deals with big numbers, but I never was more than a gofer with really good connections.