The Night of the Gun

by David Carr

  Apart from an inability to execute what were really errand-boy duties, I would disappear for long stretches for other reasons: I was still very much involved with Doolie.

  “You lied to me completely for months about that,” she said, just stating it as fact, without a wisp of accusation. I had forgotten how she actually came to know the truth. “She called me and threatened to kill me,” Anna said. Again, very matter-of-fact. I do not know that to be true, but I asked if she took the threat seriously.

  “Not really. ’Cause at the time I was winning. I was rolling,” she said. “Things were going good for me, I had a beautiful home, and I had two beautiful children, and I had a sports car. And I just thought, I wanted you, and this woman was just not gonna have you, you know, and whatever happens, we’re gonna—not duke it out physically—but she was going to have a fight on her hands.”

  So the sense of possession, of entitlement, was not just mine. She was a girl who had gotten used to getting exactly what she wanted.

  “I was not an addict yet,” she said. “Because I didn’t like it that much. I liked money more. I liked to travel, I liked nice things, I adored my children, I just really didn’t have a clue what it was like to be an addict. I looked at people around me and could not understand what was wrong with them; why they were making the decisions they were making. It wasn’t until I became an addict that I understood at all.”

  Certainly she got a primer from her adjacency to me. As someone in the supply business, she had observed that the difference between snorting and smoking coke was vast. But after a time, she decided to see what all the fuss was about. “We fought for about six months about it, and then I joined you.” She tipped over almost immediately. “The person who invented crack is so evil,” she suggested. Someone walking by our table at the hotel did a double take when she said that, but she continued. “You have to be really self-destructive to stick a needle in your arm, do all of the preparation, where it’s so easy to stick this pipe in your mouth, suck in some smoke, and the next thing you know, you’re in hell.

  “At one point I was so in love with you that I was willing to give up, basically, my soul, you know? I don’t know exactly why,” she said. “You’re funny, you’re gregarious, you can be an extremely charming guy. You also were the first man I felt wanted to protect me—if anybody did or said anything to me, you made sure that they knew who I was and you were my boyfriend, and you said, ‘Don’t do it, or you’re gonna be in trouble.’ You were my protector—you could say bad things about me, but nobody else could. I never had a father who stuck up for me; it was the first time I ever had an old man that would go to the line for me.”

  It was, she recalled, a strength occasionally taken to weakness.

  “You had a tad of paranoia,” she said, letting the understatement hang. “I can remember we were at a party one time, and somebody took a picture of me. I said I didn’t like that, and you grabbed that person by the neck, took the camera, crunched it, made this huge scene, and I was like, well, I didn’t want that either.”

  By the fall of 1987, her business was in disarray, I had lost my job, and then, oh yeah, she was pregnant. Her friends begged her to have an abortion. We were fulminating crackheads, and her ex-husband, who came by to take care of her two kids, was the only semiresponsible person in the house. Anna locked herself in her room for hours on end and would occasionally insist that Doolie was actually roaming around the rafters of her home. I explained to her how that was sort of impossible from a practical perspective, but there had been so many lies by that point, she had no idea what to believe. Both of us were chronically, psychotically high, and I was spending all of my time lifting the blinds and peeking out at a world that I was increasingly scared to venture out into.

  “I can remember before I knew what was going on, you were always peeking out windows,” she said. “I said, ‘Motherfucker, if you don’t get away from that window, I’m gonna kill you.’ I didn’t think I was really aware of what was going on, but you had yourself planted at my front door, and you would not leave. You were looking out those little windows, and that was all there was to it. You weren’t budging.”

  And there was a really bad Fourth of July, her birthday, in 1988. Anna was set up as the supplier at a country music festival in Detroit Lakes, and I was coming over from my cabin in Wisconsin. Halfway there, I was speeding around a bend and came very close to plowing into a station wagon full of kids. I can still see their faces in the back window. I grabbed a ditch to avoid an accident. I ended up in the Brainerd, Minnesota, jail, celebrating our nation’s independence by arcing lighted matches across the darkened cell. When I finally got out and arrived in Detroit Lakes, I found out that as a birthday gift, her friends had surprised her with a naked young man hanging from the ceiling of her cabin. I was livid.

  “I can remember being at my cabin, and you giving me a black eye and breaking my rib and throwing me off the dock,” she said. I had not remembered that last part, but as soon as she said it, I knew it had to be true.

  I did not so much move in with Anna as suddenly become someone who did not leave. Regardless of who is doing the remembering, some nasty, ineluctable truths lie between us. She was in the habit of slamming doors in my face—I called her “Bam Bam” in part because of that—and I was in the habit of coming right through those doors and choking her. She was using crack when her water broke, signaling that the twins had arrived two and a half months early. I was the one who had brought her those drugs. I treated her as an ATM, using her drugs and money almost at will, while she seemed more than willing to make the trade. In spite of the fact that I was the one who stepped up and raised our children, who shook off the Life, there are times when the moral high ground rests with her. I hit her, for one thing. For another, whatever she did, she did out of a kind of love. My presence in her life was far more mercenary.

  When I went to see Anna, it had been ten years since we had seen each other. There was very little context for our meeting other than the children we shared. Of all the trips I had taken in pursuit of the past, this was the one in which a common truth was unlikely to emerge. Each of us has a need to find someplace to put our time together that does not leave either of us immobilized with shame. Very separate narratives had been constructed in that time away from each other. (As Daniel L. Schacter wrote in The Seven Sins of Memory, “We often edit or entirely rewrite our previous experiences—unknowingly or unconsciously—in light of what we now know or believe.”)

  Anna is now living in a trailer in Tucson. A series of bad choices involving men, including me, some heavy legal stuff, and health matters had left her in a diminished state. Her life had become one long, punishing tumble, the kind of thing you see in dark indie movies. She once called me and said that she had missed a court date because her front tooth had fallen out and the dog had eaten it. She said she was sober now, but years of use meant that some of her five children—including the twins we had together—had been scattered. Her oldest daughter, stunningly beautiful and congenitally optimistic, was still around, looking after a baby she’d had recently and, sometimes, her mom.

  We should hate each other, and sometimes we do, but not today. I was speaking at the Biltmore in Phoenix in 2006, and I drove down to Tucson to see her. At a certain point, she had gone her way and I went mine. The twins stayed with me. Anna has always been very vocal about the good job I did raising them—in between reminding me that I stole them in the first place—and I made it a habit never to speak ill of her in the presence of her daughters.

  For a time, I sent them down to Arizona or Mexico, wherever Anna was, but it became clear that she was involved in a lifestyle that put them at risk after she had been beat up, gun robbed, and arrested. I stopped sending the girls. We stayed in touch sporadically after that.

  Anna, who never had much of a career besides the drug life, was now working with other people who have drug problems as an intake person at a social service program. She has a car, a house, an
d a paycheck, but is just living month to month. She has gained weight and lost ground; there is very little evidence of the diminutive kingpin I knew back in the day. We did not belong together, then or now, but something profound knit us together and brought us to this day, this table, this conversation.

  “I went to the doctor, and there were two heartbeats,” Anna recalled of a day late in 1987. “You heard that over the phone. I said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ and you said, ‘What!?’ I said, ‘I want you home,’ and you said, ‘No, no, no! Tell me, tell me, tell me!’ and as usual I caved, and I told you, and I think that probably sent you off on a three-day bender.”

  Do I recall that? Of course not. The bender is safely assumed. But what did I think? Did I actually attempt to process the implications of bringing not one but two new sentient beings into the Valley of Death I was walking through? Did I look in the mirror and say, “You have no business inflicting yourself on anybody small, dependent, defenseless”?

  I did not.

  In that year, I got fed up every other day and quit smoking crack, sending the pipe wheeling into the dark night air, finding some small, idiotic satisfaction in the crunch when it landed. Well, that oughta do it. Even while I was filling the pipe with another hit, with Anna mostly, the conversation was always the same: “We gotta knock this shit off.”

  And then the pregnancy. Together Anna and I drew many lines in the sand and then stepped across them, usually with me leading the way.

  The friends we had left had no idea what to say. My twins were gestated in an environment that was akin to Baghdad, with IEDs going off all over the place. My friends tended to blame Anna, and her friends tended to blame me.

  I tracked down LeAnn, a pal of Anna’s at the time, to ask her what it was like to watch that pregnancy proceed. She and her sister Cheryl had known and loved Anna for many years, but they were speechless at the prospect of her carrying to term, especially with me standing there and enabling her. Like a lot of people who are still around from those days, LeAnn is sober. We sat in a booth at Archie’s Bunker, a joint where I used to hang.

  “She went downhill pretty quickly. I remember Cheryl coming over to my house once and going, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m really concerned, I just don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘Well, we could have him hurt,’ talking about you.

  “Just to get rid of you,” she clarified. “I don’t mean dead.”

  21

  DIAGNOSIS: NARCISSISTIC ASSHOLE

  It was a running conceit of mine that even though I did not tend to prosper after treatment, I was a star pupil in the various programs I went through. Blessed with a gift for both blarney and psychological jargon, I often felt as if I had served in an unpaid consulting role while working my way through some institution. Although I failed to get the hang of some of the fundamental tenets of recovery, I believed I was an asset to every treatment center I wheeled through. A highly verbal person who still tested well for intelligence in spite of a punishing history of chemical abuse, I took a keen interest in the well-being of my fellow patients and was always willing to give an assist to the counselor when he or she seemed stuck. Some of those counselors were hard on me, but I always secretly believed that they were struck by my intuition and synthetic medical insights.

  But then in the course of researching my medical records, I found one from a treatment at St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center from the start of 1988, the beginning of the end. (I also found that I had entered and left a rehab at Hennepin County Medical Center a month before, which would give me a grand total of five trips through treatment, when I had always thought the number was four, but who’s counting besides me?) Anna was pregnant, I was jobless, so this time I really needed to get and stay sober. The record reflects that I had no real understanding of the stakes at hand.

  COUNSELOR’S DISCHARGE SUMMARY

  PRESENTING PROBLEMS:

  The patient entered treatment in need of detoxification and also suffering with the flu. He reported prior treatment followed by relapse. He also admitted symptoms sufficient to support the ongoing diagnostic impression of substance dependence. Specifics included daily use exceeding one month, compulsive use to intoxication, and increased tolerance. Areas of the patient’s life that had been affected by his usage included vocational, physical, financial, emotional/psychological, spiritual, and familial. Impression: Substance Dependence.

  COURSE OF TREATMENT:

  The patient attended most unit functions of lecture, group, and adjunct therapies, including relaxation therapy, spiritual care, and individual counseling. The patient presented himself as considerably passive/aggressive and somewhat narcissistic. He tended to victimize group members and attempted to be a junior counseling [sic]. He was challenged repeatedly by his group for behavior involving two women, with whom he had relationships. The patient was instructed in the preparation of a personal character inventory (AA Fourth Step). He verbalized that inventory to a Spiritual Care Counselor (AA Fifth Step) prior to discharge. At discharge, the patient had still not taken responsibility regarding relationship issues. He was seen as manipulative, victimizing, and apparently unwilling to make decisions. He did superficially verbalize an understanding of the recovery processes within the framework of the Twelve Step Program and verbalized the need to enter a supervised living facility after treatment.

  PROBLEMS PRESENT UPON DISCHARGE:

  The patient continues to need work on his passive/aggressive personality style and his self-centeredness, as well as issues of honesty and commitment.

  AFTERCARE PLAN:

  There is to be no further use of any mood-changing substances. It is recommended that the patient immediately enter Progress Valley (an intermediate care facility) and complete their 90-day program. The patient is to regularly attend AA in the community where he lives (two to three times weekly), as well as NA groups. He is to have follow-up psychiatric consultations with Dr. Routt. It was also recommended that the patient attend a domestic abuse group. Al-Anon was recommended for family members. In the event of relapse, it is recommended that the patient enter long-term care in either a therapeutic community (such as Eden House) or perhaps a state institution, such as Moose Lake, Fergus Falls, or Willmar.

  Prognosis: Poor.

  Poor? No shit. I began using two days after I left.

  22

  BONGO, TONY THE HAT, AND STEVE

  If memory is fungible, then time is its wingman, stretching and compressing to conjure a coherent story. In restrospection, I’ve always thought of my career, both as a journalist and an addict, as a series of rapid ascents and declines. Sort of like this:

  But after a year of investigating my past, it became clear that I had been chugging along pretty nicely until 1986, and then dropped off the face of the earth in 1987 when I started smoking cocaine. What I had remembered as four years of struggle had actually been about eighteen months. Documents, interviews, and pictures suggest that I kept all of the balls in the air until I didn’t. Sort of more like this:

  Who knew? I lost my job in March of 1987, and by the end of the next year, I had multiple arrests, and I was in long-term treatment at Eden House. In the recollection and the telling, I had always thought I washed out of journalism for many years, but it was more like a single year, counting the time I spent in the booby hatch, and even in there, I wrote stories. Regardless of what happened to me, I rarely stopped typing. Perhaps I was worried I would disappear altogether if I did.

  At the start of 1987, the components of my jerry-rigged life started flying off in all directions. The longer deadlines at the monthly business magazine created more room for mischief and unaccountability. Everything I did was somehow transformed into an adjunct to my addiction. In the final months of my employment at Corporate Report, it was decided that I would do a story about Roger, a prep-school teacher turned bookie turned “sports betting consultant.” It was a match: We were both guys with some history of professional accomplishment and smarts who were
now in a barrel heading over the falls.

  Roger was brilliant and mordantly funny. He was romantically involved on and off with Rebecca, the city’s chief madam, who ran a bunch of massage parlors. She was a source and subject I had covered on and off. The story about Roger was supposed to be about a guy who had found a way to make a living off of what he was good at even though it was not technically legal. The assignment quickly became a story about addiction—his jones written through the prism of mine. In a series of conversations at the marginal office spaces he rented and frequently slept in, he schooled me in gambling, which I did not know much about. Those daytime reporting trips morphed into late-night conversations with lots of booze and coke, which continued even after I was fired and the story had been published.

  The profile, entitled “Playing the Game within the Game,” was a weave of his wiseguy and academic philosophies. Roger had been a highly respected teacher at the St. Paul Academy. He had a nice touch for betting pro football, and his wins eventually tipped over a St. Paul bookie, who handed him the business to pay him off. He ended up out of teaching, caught a couple of federal cases, and did some prison time. The sports information service hosted a phone bank that gave out tips to subscribers, but Roger was no longer living on the vig, and his betting touch had soured. He was in debt—six figures, probably more—and had tapped his girlfriend Rebecca for some of his losses. He was increasingly dependent on a madam for money, while I was leaning on a drug dealer to help me get by. We made quite a pair.

  Roger had a good mouth, even though he hated guys who made speeches and was laconic in the extreme.