The Night of the Gun

by David Carr

“In the stock market, it can take six months to find out if you made the right decisions. With betting, you lay down a bet, and you know that you made a mistake three hours later when a shot by some jerk you’ll never know rolls off the rim,” he told me during an interview in 1987. I sat next to him in front of the television a few times when that happened, a bad bounce taking tens of thousands with it, and he always smiled, laughing at the absurdity of his disenfranchisement. Roger—his pals called him Bongo—made above-average picks for the sports information service, but that did not prevent him from heading steadily south as a gambler.

  “It is very important for you to understand that handicapping and gambling are two separate things,” he told me for the story. “Gambling is money management. I have never had much success managing money. I was successful enough in the beginning to get away with being reckless, but I just continued to gamble more until I got in trouble. I had trouble with the downside.”

  Don’t we all? It is the stopping, the quitting, the walking away that we cannot abide because the ceaseless activity keeps the accounting at bay. The mania of addiction, as expressed by anything—coke, booze, betting, sex—finds renewed traction every time it halts because once the perpetrator stops and sees how deeply and truly his life now sucks, there is only one thing that will make him feel better: more of same. Often the only thing that imposes limits on someone who is hooked on his own endorphins is money.

  “I don’t care about money until I run out of it,” Roger said, speaking for me and many, many others. “Then I have to crawl around and beg people to borrow me some. Then it becomes very important.” Roger had over a million bucks when he was going good. I asked him if it would have made any difference if another zero had been added to that first big winning streak.

  “Now you are beginning to understand. It wouldn’t have mattered how much I won. Eventually I would have bet until it was gone. I would be in exactly the same position I am right now.”

  Listening to him, I began to hear the parallels in our narratives. I had gotten started with a good job, no huge financial burdens, and eventually had Anna’s kilos more or less at my disposal. Now I was headlong on my way to nothing. All addicts are gamblers working with a bad hand. The chance that you will pick up a substance that had kicked your ass before and somehow manage to walk away whole are so low as to be immeasurable.

  “I seem to be living a cliché,” he said finally. “The one about all gamblers dying broke. There’s a lot of truth in those clichés. Things like how you don’t pick your passions, they pick you. I think that’s true.”

  So there, poised on what would be my final run, I had all I needed to know about how it would end. I was fired before the story came out, but reading it two decades later, it was a manual that foretold all that followed. Roger knew the score, he just couldn’t bet it correctly. And neither could I.

  After Anna found out she was pregnant, she went into treatment at the end of 1987. I watched her kids with the help of her family. When she got back, she seemed to have some new friends from treatment and began disappearing. One night I confronted her at the front door and began fishing around in her pockets, not precisely sure what I was looking for. My index finger came out of her shirt’s front pocket stuck to a needle. I raged, lectured, talking about the dangers of overdose, but probably sat down with her and began shooting cocaine later that same day. It was a dangerous, bloody activity. I feel a profound sense of shame even typing about it. No one can really describe how lost you have to be to get on the treadmill of sticking a needle in your arm, leg, foot, or hand every twenty minutes.

  By the spring of 1988, both Anna and I had been through treatment and relapsed, both of us in an intense state of cocaine dependency. Things became more unpredictable still. I was in and out of Anna’s place, and in and out of work at a weekly football paper where I had landed.

  One of the few people who was present during those days was Steve, Anna’s ex-husband. He came over to take care of the two kids she already had. He chipped a bit when it came to the coke, but many times he was the only one sober enough to function. Oddly enough, Steve and I always got along very well. After I met with Anna, I called him in Colorado, where he now lives with Anna’s son. I asked him about those months before the twins were born, in part because I had almost zero recollection of those murky, chaotic times.

  “You were drunk every day,” he said. “You would slug a pint on the way to work. Those were rough days, weren’t they? Very tough times. You beat yourself to death. I’d say that you are lucky to be alive at all. You didn’t give a shit one way or another. You were on a monthslong bender. The jobs weren’t going good, you had all the powder you could use and all of the alcohol you could drink, and that’s what you did.”

  He had a front row seat, so I had to ask him: Did I take Anna with me as I headed into the ditch?

  “The trouble for her was inevitable,” he said. “You didn’t cause it. You certainly didn’t help it, but you didn’t cause it. You end up losing it with that shit anyway. It is pretty hard for anybody to keep it together.

  “People would come over, and you guys would start cooking that shit up. It wouldn’t be five minutes into the deal, and somebody would lose something or drop something. Everybody would be crawling around on the floor looking for something, and other people would be standing there with a piece of lint in their hand, thinking they had found something. It was all so crazy. I smoked it a few times, but who in their right mind would want to get like that?

  “You guys were completely, completely off your rocker. I was in no great shape, but I could not do what you guys were doing. No one could for long.”

  Anna and I were as far out there as you can get. Anna’s business was crumbling. A shipment came in, and we took a kilo to a suburban hotel to break it up. In addition to the newly arrived merch, we brought an elaborate glass pipe, a box full of fresh screens, and a blowtorch. We planned on staying one night to prep the goods and make deliveries the following morning. We stayed in that room for three days, sliding $100s under the door to pay for another night when housekeeping came by.

  Somewhere in there, I passed out, and I can remember waking up and seeing Anna at the table in the room, her face covered in soot from the pipe, going back at it. The phone rang constantly, each time an insistent voice saying a lot of people were waiting on us. No matter. We did what we did. When we finally left, geeked and spent, we got out to the car and realized we had left thousands of dollars in the couch. Anna told me to go get it. I fetched the money at her command.

  When you are so far gone that you spend time only with people who are enmeshed in the drug lifestyle, it falls to the only people you see—dealers, fellow hypes, and drunks—to tell you that your shit is out of pocket. Tony the Hat was on my case almost constantly. Tony was a full-on gangster who talked with an accent straight from the mining towns of northern Minnesota; he was a joyful piece of work in his own way. He was wrapped in his particular dialect and folkways. To do business was to “wrang,” as in wrangle; a full-on sweat was called a “lath,” for lather; and he always, always called me “Fridge.” He always marveled at my ability to do all sorts of cocaine and still stay fat. Boys liked Tony, girls did not, except his sister Dee, who was devoted to him.

  Tony was a talented athlete and had been on his way to pro hockey, but a catastrophic knee injury ended that. He would have made a fine goon—even with a blown knee, he skated with a great deal of finesse. He and Dee had a pretty serious retail drug business in South Minneapolis. You didn’t just bring anybody by—he was a moody dude—but if the stars were aligned, it could be off-the-hook, buck-wild fun. One night a huge rain created a flash flood by the creek down the hill from his house. The rest of the cokeheads stayed bent over the mirror, but Tony and I went outside and swam out into the rushing water overflowing the creek. A car came floating by, and Tony jumped on it and pulled me up. We rode it for blocks, shouting like loons.

  Nobody ever sat in Tony’s chair
; more of a throne, really, with a cooler for coke on one side and sometimes a big handgun on the other. He wasn’t one to wave it around, but he was a guy who just felt more comfortable with a piece. One night right before my friend John was leaving for Central America, where he worked as a reporter, we stopped at Tony’s, and Tony bought John’s car right off him for cash.

  I called John in Bogotá, Colombia, in the summer of 2007 to ask him about his recollections of Tony the Hat. “He was a very menacing guy, even compared to some of the narcotrafficantes I had covered. He offered me, like, one hundred dollars for this crappy VW Rabbit I had, and it sort of seemed like the kind of offer you couldn’t refuse.”

  Everyone in the Life loves to talk about how old-school he is, but Tony lived it. He had his own code about what it meant to be a man. One night in 1988, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension came in—riot gear, forced entry, all get-the-fuck-down and keep-yer-hands-where-we-can-see-’em. Luck of the draw I was not there, but some of the guys went all girly-man when it happened, freaking out and crying. Not Tony. True enough, it was his place, but Dee was really the boss, which is not how he put it to the cops. He protected his sister and caught a significant county sentence followed by probation.

  Tony had some other ticks. He loved Warren Zevon—too much—and hated crack and the people who did it. Bad for business, a bunch of twitchy fucking paranoids in the basement messing up the wrang, made it unpleasant. Sometimes when he sold me coke, he made me snort it right in front of him. “Don’t be sneaking off and making crack balls out of that, Fridge,” he’d say.

  I pretended I wouldn’t, and he pretended not to notice when I did. One night before he got busted, I called him very late. He sounded happy to hear from me. When I got there, the usual mopes were not hanging around the basement. I got the sense that Tony had dismissed them. He was not what I would describe as a public intellectual, but he respected the fact that I was a writer; that I did something besides knucklehead stuff. And he surmised correctly that I was in the process of screwing that up.

  “Fridge,” he said, setting out a line, “I hear stuff about you. Bad stuff.”

  “It’s probably true,” I said. I liked Tony enough not to bullshit him now that it was man-to-man.

  Both hands went to the arms of the chair, and the knuckles went white.

  “You know what I could do to you?” he said. “Don’t fucking lie to me. You are deep into the crack shit. I hear you’re shooting up too.”

  Yes to all, I said. He looked like he might jump out of his chair and choke the living shit out of me. His nostrils flared, he tugged at his long hockey hair, and then he softened and looked at me. “You see what it does, you see who is doing it, you know how it goes. That is not a way for you to go, Fridge. Do you hear me?”

  That’s how I recall it and it will have to suffice. Tony sobered me up and became a hockey coach, but that big, scary heart gave out in 2000.

  23

  MUGGED: A COMIC TRAGEDY IN THREE ACTS

  When I was very little, my dad would tell me stories about “Billy the Lucky Pup.” Billy’s doggie buddies were constantly getting in jams, careening toward the brink of something, and Billy would always, always come charging over the hill. With no more than a “ruff, ruff,” he would signal that the cavalry had arrived—that Billy was on the case, and disaster had once again been avoided. In those months of relentless havoc, I’d arrive at an odd moment of consideration, and I would think, Where the fuck is that dog, anyway?

  Once you start getting in jams, you develop a halo of flies. The cops smell fear or, more likely, the taint of the loser. They sniff the out-of-date plates, the missing headlight, the wobble in your step, and they decide to take a look. And then they find the detritus that lies at the feet of every addict: the two-month-old warrant, the bag of pot, or the glass tube with cocaine residue on it. In eighteen months of 1987 and 1988, I was arrested at least nine times—not a felony among them—but a lot of trips through booking. I was stunned by the number when I finally tallied it up. I knew that I’d gotten in a spot of trouble here and there, but the record indicated that I could not go down the street to buy a six-pack without getting into some kind of trouble. I ran out of people to call to bail me, and the cops ran out of adjectives for the reports. My speech was “regional” and “obscene,” I was “married” and “single,” my eyes were “blue” and “brown,” I was “stocky” and “obese,” I lived on “Garfield,” no “Oliver,” no, I was homeless. At the time, I was surprised that the cops and the turnkeys were so indifferent, so bored by me. “Lemme guess, lurking with intent to mope, right?” said one of the cops in booking, recognizing a frequent flyer when he saw one. I became just one more part of the human chum that courses through the creaky apparatus of the criminal justice system.

  24

  INCOMING

  If in a shimmering room the babies came,

  Drawn close by dreams of fledgling wing,

  It was because night nursed them in its fold.

  —WALLACE STEVENS

  Man, them are little babies, where’d you get ’em?”

  The kid, about eight, saw me coming out of the University of Minnesota hospital with a twin in each arm in May of 1988, Anna walking behind me. I was speechless. How could a kid this small, this unknowing, tell at a glance that these children had landed on me from a very great distance?

  They had been patients in the NICU, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, for a month. Born at 2.7 and 2.9 pounds, and each just over fifteen inches, Erin and Meagan were born two and a half months premature. They weighed a bit more than a kilo, a term of art in our current context. They were infinitely more valuable, of course, and far less commodifiable. Both girls had to be intubated immediately because they could not breathe on their own. According to medical records, Erin “cried spontaneously, but each time her crying stopped, her heart rate decreased and her respiratory effort became poor. She was intubated in the delivery room…” Meagan “had umbilical, artery, and venous catheters placed on 4/16/88 for blood pressure and arterial blood-gas monitoring and for delivery of emergency medications.” Once the jaundice of their early birth wore off, they were pink spots surrounded by tubes and machines. Meagan was a tad bigger, but only relative to her even tinier sister. They were the organic part of the apparatus, but all of it seemed to throb with life.

  That would be Meagan. By now, I know her by heart.

  But at the time, none of it—not their early birth, not my part in it, not their existence—was real to me until we left the hospital, respiration and heart monitors in tow. They were so, so tiny. My mind wandered to bath time, something I had heard that you did with babies. What would we use, a teacup?

  When Anna’s water broke in her living room on Oliver Avenue, I had just handed her a crack pipe. We stared at each other, each of us running the numbers in our head. She had just entered her third trimester. It was hard to tell whether we were in the midst of giving birth or participating in a kind of neonatal homicide. The water beneath her became a puddle of implication. Now look what we did.

  When we got to the hospital, we were honest about what we had been doing prior to our arrival, which meant that the twins got the benefit of informed, exceptional medical care. And it also meant we became “those people,” the ones all the staff knew about. And even if we hadn’t confessed, they would have surmised what they needed to know. I was a complete mess every time I came in to see Anna or the girls.

  Sitting outside my hotel in Tucson, nineteen years after the twins were born, Anna suggested that I had, on one occasion, smoked crack in her hospital room. There is no personal recollection of doing so, but I have no reason to doubt her. Anna had made efforts, significant ones, to stay off her drug of choice while pregnant. And then every once in a while—or maybe more often; who can remember through all that shame?—she would use. I was completely unsupportive, save for not joining the chorus of people chanting at her to have an abortion. Otherwise I slipped in and out
of her life, staying for a time and then disappearing. Once the twins were born, I started hanging around more often, for all the good it did.

  Once we got the girls home, the heart and respiration monitors seemed specifically designed to terrorize us. One of them would shift positions or spit up a bit, and the alarms would go off. Shit! Fuck! It was less the interruption than a panic that it might be meaningful, that while they had survived a hostile prenatal environment, something terrible would happen now that they were out in the world.

  In my memory, in my soul, I remember this as a very short time. A couple of months max. I always thought that I came to my senses fairly quickly and made changes to ensure that my kids were out of harm’s way.

  Anna and I kept thinking it would get better. In spite of our shared pathology, we had the biological attachments that all new parents develop. The twins were loved, just not in a way that meant much of anything.

  My parents heard the news and came by the hospital, did their best to be polite and not reveal the full extent of their repulsion, but once we took the girls home, they were no longer invited to visit. Friends who cared about us would come by to see the kids, but they rarely came back. Others hung around and did what they could. “We were never out of touch for that long, I don’t think, primarily because of the twins, and I was around quite a bit, and that’s when I spent time with Anna,” my friend Chris remembered when I went to see him in New Orleans. “One winter night you called me late and said ‘We’re out of diapers, we don’t have diapers,’ and you thought somebody was watching the house. You guys were paranoid and getting high, and you said, ‘I think the cops are watching the house, I can’t leave,’ and so I went to the convenience store, got some diapers, drove over with diapers and milk or something.