by David Carr
He said the fact that I was a white male who possessed skills that made me employable, and that I had a supportive family, made my odds better. Not great, but better.
“You were a man of good intent. You had a sense of remorse of what you had done to the people around you. It is a soft piece of the statistical end of this business, but you had the ability to be hopeful. It was a steep hill you were walking back up—I sort of remember the odds as seventy-thirty against, but I thought, ‘This guy might have a chance.’ I thought it was worth pushing a few buttons for you.”
He had to push those buttons more than once. I was not, as they say, a first-time winner in the program of recovery.
19
WHEN ELEPHANTS DANCE
Tommy and I are sitting in a hotel in midtown Manhattan. At the end of the summer in 2007, we are finally getting together after a number of false starts. He is in town to do Letterman for no particular reason, just because Dave has liked him ever since he was the ne’er-do-well husband of Roseanne. I was there the night they met in Minneapolis, a particularly debauched one, and I failed to notice that they were interested in trading something besides jokes. I had done a story or two about him when he was first taking off as a comedian, and we connected. He was the most outlandish, off-the-hook version of a drunk and addict I had ever seen. When Tommy was using, he made me look like Mister Rogers in a leather jacket.
That was a long time ago. Tommy has since moved on, landing a few good movie roles, along with a few television shows that did not pan out. He has been counted out so many times that he is something of a running joke, but he has been on a tear lately, working with talented directors in indie films.
In spite of his reputation as a buffoon among people who don’t know him, he has played a substantial and steady role in my recovery. Because he’s antic in manner—his leg is always bouncing—people think he’s still a cokehead, but as I know him, he is coming up on almost twenty years of recovery. I sobered up before he did and helped him along a bit, and in turn, when I relapsed, he was very much a presence. I have been to meetings at his house, he has called friends of mine who were new in sobriety to help them along, and he is known as a go-to person in Hollywood for people who need a hand up with addiction issues.
Tommy is a loyalist. When he first went to Los Angeles, he dragged along a whole gang of knuckleheads, many of whom work in the entertainment business still. After I got custody of the girls, he gave me a Roseanne spec script to write, which was approved but never produced, and I used the money to buy our first decent car. I stood up at his weddings—two of them—and I continue to see him now when I get out to Los Angeles. The only time he ever lied to me was when he first started seeing Roseanne, but then again, he was selling information to the National Enquirer at the time to stay in coke money. He eventually moved out to Los Angeles and ended up going to the hospital with a massive nasal hemorrhage. I talked to him on the phone that day, as I did whenever he got out of his box. He wanted to know what he should do. And I would always tell him the same thing: If your nose hurts, quit sticking things up there. Tom sobered up, and he and Roseanne would have the girls over whenever they were in town.
When I arrive at his hotel, he is downstairs working out. While he showers up, I look around his room, which looks like it has been hit with several bombs. Suits, workout clothes, magazines, and several phones are in the mix. Hollywood people, regardless of who they are, never seem to travel light.
The day before I got fired in 1987, the day before the Night of the Gun, we had gone out on Saint Patrick’s Day. It was huge, murderous fun, as it was almost every time I was with him, and it ended badly, as it usually did.
In his room, Tommy and I work to remember how it went down. Tommy was a rapacious, reflexively offensive comedian, the kind of not-always-jolly guy who lived for the presence of a ripe heckler. On that Saint Patrick’s Day, there was a loudmouth there at the Knights of Columbus hall, a guy named Sarge, who sort of unofficially ran the joint. I told Tommy to lay off of him when he did his routine. Small tactical error on my part.
“You said to me, ‘Don’t fuck with Sarge,’” he said, the leg bouncing as he warmed to the task. “I started fucking with him immediately and for the whole act. It was death. First of all, the people at the Knights of Columbus hall, they weren’t there to see me or my version of comedy, and it just got ugly. I threw beers at somebody’s face, almost hit somebody in a wheelchair. I didn’t know they were in a wheelchair, and I immediately apologized, but it was too late. It seems to me that the repercussions from it were mostly directed toward you.”
That is my recollection. I also recall that we left quickly.
“Very quickly. It was a posse situation,” he said.
We had become very skilled in the art of leaving quickly, or if cornered, fighting our way out. Tommy was 86’d from many of our regular haunts in Minneapolis, and it was rare for him to be out on the road doing shows and not end up getting booted out of the joint where he was appearing. He recalled that he was at McDonald’s in Rochester, Minnesota, after a gig and got kicked out before he had a chance to go to the bathroom. He went in the parking lot instead. When the cops came, midstream, they asked what he was doing. Tommy told the cop he was making him a cocktail. All of that would have been pretty routine, except Tommy was due the following day in Los Angeles for Roseanne’s first big HBO special. Calling in incarcerated would have been a profoundly bad career move.
He called me in a panic, contrite, but the Rochester cops were plenty pissed. I called Ron, the biggest criminal defense attorney in the state. He knew people, Tommy got sprung, made the late flight to L.A., and nobody was the wiser. “You saved my ass,” he remembered.
We had a lot in common. Both large guys back then, we could take over a room or turn it against us with a flick of the wrist. In the summer of 1987, Tommy stiffed on a coke debt from the night before—he still denies this, but some things I do remember. Like a lot of us, Tommy was better at doing drugs than paying for them. He was not one of those guys who would steal your dope and then help you look for it, but he did what he needed to to stay high.
I will cop to hassling him a little bit too much about that. Then I remember him, out of nowhere, attempting to remove my left eye. In my mind, it had always been one more bit of tomfoolery gone bad, no big deal. We had joked about it many times, but when we really got down to cases and were talking about it at length, I realized Tommy felt bad about it.
He said it took place at Anna’s house on Oliver Avenue, with a bunch of rockers from bands like the Replacements, Soul Asylum, and the Flaming Oh’s. His girlfriend at the time, Melanie, was a gorgeous R & B singer who had a vocal in “Funkytown,” the smash 1980 single out of Minneapolis.
“Honest to God, you were subtle at first, but you kept coming up to me, and you’re fucked up. I told you that I didn’t have the money on me but I’d give it to you; we could talk about it tomorrow, not now. Melanie is here, the guys from the band are here, I’m trying to get some work.”
But I kept coming in close, hassling him, my voice growing from a whisper into something more menacing. I had a history of throwdowns in bars and backyards, but my win-loss record was grim, and even though I was tenacious, my pugilistic skills would not have been out of place on a Bum Fights video.
“Finally, I felt in my heart that this was one of those times where you just wanted to be punched out,” he said. “I warned you though. I said, ‘OK, seriously, the next time you do that, I’m gonna hurt you. I’m really gonna hurt you.’ I just wanted you to really believe that.”
He said I was embarrassing him, embarrassing myself in front of our gang.
“You’re bitching, first of all. Everybody knows why you’re mad; they think I owe you money or whatever, that I’m not paying my coke debts. You did a lot of people a lot of favors, people liked you, sometimes people didn’t like me. You’re coming over, and it was like, fuck, I had two choices: either hit you right in the throat, or
I’m gonna get you and stick my fucking hand in your eye. You weren’t a small guy. It’s not easy when you’re fucked up, so I feel my fingers so deep in your eyeball that it was—I don’t know.”
I remember what happened next, and so does he. I went down to the ground, slowly, making girly-man screams about him poking my eye out.
Later, in the cab ride downtown for dinner, he feels compelled to explain himself more even though I didn’t lose my eye, and I really had something like it coming.
“It wasn’t going to be easy. I would have just thrown you to the ground or something, but I have seen you be tough, and I didn’t want to have to go there. I told people that you wanted to have your ass kicked, that I was doing you a favor,” he said, not laughing.
It’s odd. It hurt at the time, but I never gave it another thought, really, and here he is explaining himself to me. He might be a comic and an actor now, but back in those days, he was fresh out of the meat-packing plant. And although he is now much bigger than I am—cancer and some other things shrunk me back to life-size—back in those days, I was probably the kind of guy who could have made a problem. He still could have kicked my ass, but it would have been a long, painful event for both of us and for everyone watching it. Maybe he did do me a favor. Even with the occasional bit of combustion, we spent a fair amount of time together, including nighttime visits while I was working on stories.
“We were going to smoke some crack or something, but first you had to interview some kid that was living off the streets and write a poignant story, hard core, like a poignant, sweet story. Then after that, your dealer showed up,” he said. “But you always treated everyone the same way. No different.”
Unlike almost everyone I talk to about the old days, Tom thinks the reason that I sobered up had less to do with the twins and more to do with an ambition we had in common:
“I think your career means more to you than you would admit,” he said. “I think you’re like me. I pretend like I would be happy to be nowhere, but I don’t want to fuck it up and go backward and go back down that far.”
20
BAM BAM
In drug gangster movies, the kingpin is always some guy with a pock-marked face who brandishes money, women, and weapons as a kind of jewelry, worn or used for effect. They are loud, menacing figures—they are flanked by goombahs on the way into the restaurant, sit with their back against the wall, and always get the big piece of chicken.
But the most serious and successful person I did business with was just a touch over five feet, cute, with a full head of dyed-blonde hair, a little mouth, and a fondness for maniacs in matters of the heart, if not business.
When I met Anna, she was in full effect, moving a kilo a month from straight-up Colombian sources through a series of reliable associates who were also her pals. She worked dead drops in storage spots, safe deposit boxes, and mules to keep her at a remove from the nuts and bolts of the drug enterprise. That girl knew how to count—click, click, click went the bills, with an occasional swipe of the thumb to the lips to maintain traction. And when the piles were too big to hand-count, she had a digital scale that weighed piles of twenties. She had two kids in a nice house in North Minneapolis; the serious dope business was done elsewhere. We met at a bon voyage for my old connection Phil, who was going away to do some federal time, so the timing was inspired, or at least seemed so then.
In 1986 I was in the midst of a professional transition from the Twin Cities Reader to Corporate Report Minnesota, an excellent business monthly owned by the same company. The idea of working as a business reporter had never occurred to me, but it represented a step into new subject matter and additional money. Doolie had moved in with me on Garfield Avenue in South Minneapolis, and we were in our usual cycle of intense romance mixed with incendiary arguments. I loved her, as much as I cared about anything besides myself, but she required maintenance and reassurance that I had little time for.
Over the course of the fall of 1986, I began seeing more and more of Anna, under the guise of doing business for a while, and then it became clear to Doolie and others that something other than dry goods was being exchanged. As a consumptive, grabby four-year-old in the body of a grown man, I wanted to hang onto everything simultaneously. I lied to Doolie about Anna and to Anna about Doolie, keeping each off balance and me in the middle. The meretriciousness of my life was etched on slips of paper in the wastebasket, traces of perfume on my collar, missing underwear, and newly acquired T-shirts. Everything implicated me except my mouth, which was in a constant state of explanation.
Anna and I came together slowly at first, with our first date at a Minnesota North Stars hockey game followed by dinner. We were both still only snorting at the time, and we mowed through the eight ball—3.5 grams—of indifferent coke that I had. I had no idea that Anna was anything but an enthusiast like me.
We were in her room at her house at the end of the night, and when the coke ran out, she sent me to the safe under the third step down to fetch some more. I came back empty-handed, telling her that there was only a large white brick in there. “That’s it, you nitwit,” she said. “Just break off a corner and bring it.”
Decades later, we are talking outside a hotel in Tucson, and she still has no trouble recalling the dimensions of a pressed kilo of coke.
“It was about as big as a book, about this big,” she said, framing the air with her hands. “It still had a snake seal; I mean, it was right from the Medellin cartel.
“I sold a kilo a month for seven years,” she said. “It cost me twenty-five cents a gram. It was twenty-five thousand dollars a kilo and there’s a thousand grams. And I turned around and sold that for one hundred grand.”
Anna was plenty sharp in business matters, and for a dope dealer she was on the girly side, with lots of alluring frocks and a good, deep laugh. When I first met her, she had a beefed-up Nissan Maxima, a nice family, and a very successful wholesale coke business. Anna liked me because I had a real job and did not let her boss me around. All the men in her life, including her ex-husband, worked for her. I liked her because she was her own damn thing from some backwater Minnesota town who took shit from no one and had an unlimited supply of pure coke.
Chris, my pal in New Orleans, remembers Anna as a “good-hearted, stand-up person. When I first met her, she was a smart, tough woman doing well for herself, you know, in a difficult and illegal enterprise and something that is generally male-dominated. You don’t see a lot of women at that level conducting that kind of a business. And, you know, she owned a house, she had kids she was taking care of.”
For Anna and me, no moment was unalloyed by drugs. Chemicals define a vast swath of intimate relationships in the modern world. The doleful, uninvolved husband who works through a twelve-pack in front of the TV and side trips to the garage to visit a pint of vodka. The wife whose headaches require a steady stream of Klonopin. The fifth-grade daughter who is wired on Adderal. The teenager who sustains himself with one-hitters in his bedroom. Ships passing in a mood-altered murk, each regarding the other through the lens of pharmacology.
For a time, we were both riding high. I had friends all over the city, and Anna was treated as royalty whenever she went out, which was not that often. She had been married to Steve, a good guy who ran the coke business until he got in trouble by doing the product. He ended up in a deep hole, and when Anna flew to meet the Colombians he owed tall money to, they agreed to work out a plan with her. She became one of the most respectable sources of serious weight in the city.
In her version, everything was going swimmingly until I came along (which is sort of true), and then I seduced her into smoking cocaine (more or less true). In my version, I lumbered into her life, succumbed to abundant blandishments, and tipped over into a violent, destructive mania, a drug-induced psychosis. Which is sort of true, but only as far as it goes.
In every city, even a smallish one like Minneapolis, there is someone like Anna, the respectable person doing the disreputabl
e work of dealing to the various elites. She had lawyers, medical doctors, and serious business people on her client list. By dealing with someone like Anna, who had a home, kids, and real friends, they could keep their dirty secret from seeming dirty, not really acknowledging that they were involved in consuming serious narcotics. It wasn’t like they were out copping on some street corner.
She was an especially handy person to have around when there was visiting rock royalty. If some Major Name was playing a big gig, you would find Anna backstage, looking for all the world like just one more rock chick, but with a purse in tow that contained enough coke to fell an elephant. People looked after her, made sure she was comfortable and happy, because she had the goods, was not a crook, and did not look like a gangster. When I met her, Anna’s approach to running her business made all sorts of sense to me. Never mind that it was, in legal terms, an ongoing RICO, it was still an impressive achievement. She recalled that the professional regard was mutual.
“I had a lot of money when I first met you, and I felt that you had a lot of good connections, you worked, I admired your job, what you did for a living,” she said, lighting up a cigarette. “I was just impressed, and I thought, Well, maybe between the two of us, we can go somewhere.”
Anna introduced me around to her pals as her trusted associate, but they all knew precisely what I represented: the guy who would fuck up a good thing. As a business person, she probably sensed the same thing, but she still wanted me to wear the pants every once in a while.
“Steve, my first husband, I kind of emasculated him, and I learned a lesson that I never wanted to do that to anyone else,” she said. “Well, by giving you drugs and money and making you run around, that was by no means making you masculine, either. It never worked. You never had the money, you never had the shit—once in a while it might work, but rarely. Rarely did it come back.”