by David Carr
“The girls were back there in their cribs, and we took care of them—changed their diapers and got them put to bed—and then sat around the dining room table. There was literally a pile of coke sitting in the middle of the table. So I was always conflicted about it.”
Fast Eddie recalled getting invited over for dinner, but dinner never arrived.
“There were friends of Anna’s that were there, and the babies were being kind of tossed around, and everyone was holding them, and it was kind of scary,” he said. “You were going at it pretty strong. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock rolls around. We haven’t eaten yet. Lots of vodka. We got really, really drunk, it was eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock, and we left without ever eating.
“We left your house, we drove home—we were too drunk to drive; we never should have been behind the wheel—but we got home, and we said, ‘That is the scariest thing in the world. Can you believe those babies in that environment?’
“And what do we do? How do you respond to that? You were my friend; what am I gonna do, call child protection on you?”
Actually, they were already on the case.
25
WELCOME TO THE FAMILY OF MAN
26
HAIL MARY
The sewer ran only by night. The days were the same as they had ever been.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, LIGHT IN AUGUST
In the summer of 2006, I made my first trip back to Minnesota to start setting up interviews and gathering personal and public records. I was filled with immediate regret about the undertaking. It is one thing to talk about how back in the day you were a narcissistic, abusive loser. It is another to show up two decades later in apparent sound mind and body and proceed to engage in reporting on your own life, a vainglorious endeavor that is presumptuous in the extreme. It would make sense that when people washed their hands of me, they wiped off the memory while drying their hands. Who is to say that they ever gave me another thought, let alone wanted to share any of them with me?
And yet there I was, poised to come rolling back into their lives. The fact that I had gone on to good things was less important to many of them than that I had gone. Reporting can be obnoxious no matter who is asking the questions about what, but all this was the more so because the reporter wanted to ask deep, probing questions about himself. Even for me, it was a new level of solipsism. Fact-checking what I remembered is a fine idea in the abstract, but as a practical matter, it made me feel like a golem of my own abasement. The process conceits of the book—all interviews videotaped and audio-recorded—made it seem both more conscientious and frivolous at the same time. After I taped some interviews, I watched some of the subjects staring at the camera and then staring at me, wondering what precisely I was up to.
The journalism was meant as a fig leaf, enough of a gimmick so that I wouldn’t have to confront the fact that I was adding to a growing pile of junkie memoirs. But now, when I landed in Minneapolis with a list of reporting stops, some of them fairly toxic, I fervently wished that I had stayed in my basement office in New Jersey to crank it out. People could love it or hate it or ignore it, say I lied with great ease or showed tremendous personal courage, that I was an inspiration or a remorseless, entitled thug, but I wouldn’t be present when they did. The process I had chosen managed to seem cloying and reckless at the same time.
As I walked to the luggage carousel, I wondered what it would be like to plop myself in front of women I had dated, friends I had endangered, bosses I had screwed. I didn’t have to wonder very long. While I waited for my luggage, I stepped outside to have a smoke. A guy pulled the door open for me.
Todd. The last guy I had worked for as a fulminating addict. Here was a man whom I had inarguably put through hell. Nice, smart, sweet Todd, the kind of manager who didn’t even need pom-poms, he was so enthusiastic. I took it as a sign that he was the first person I bumped into. Whether it was meant to be or not, it was on. Todd, genetically gracious, agreed to see me later that week.
When we sat down, he recalled that he heard at the end of the summer of 1988 that I was out of work. He asked me out to lunch to talk about a weekly paper about the Minnesota Vikings that he was publishing along with Tommy, the team’s quarterback. We had worked together at the Reader, and I always admired Todd’s unalloyed optimism. I proceeded to take his faith in me and trash it, creating enormous havoc in a little office he had put together. He found out soon enough that I was unemployed because I was unemployable.
I had always assumed that back in the fall of 1988—I had been out of work for months—that I talked him into giving me a job, no doubt reassuring him that all the trouble was behind me. My take, my memory, was not even close.
“No, you actually said, ‘I don’t think we should have lunch; I don’t think I’m your person.’ I persisted because you were MIA,” Todd recalled, sitting in his downtown office. “You had shown a great talent and had good energy in the publishing setting, and I thought here is a weekly job where you can be the editor and control what happens with this publication, and it should be an exciting way for you to step back in. I went to sell you on doing this, and you reluctantly agreed to have lunch. At lunch you came around to say, ‘I do need to get back in, and I can do this. Thanks for getting me out of my shell, and let’s go do this.’”
In retrospect, you could say that Todd got what was coming to him, but it was not like that. Normal folk cannot be blamed for expecting that someone, even someone with a history of chemical abuse, will eventually decide to act in his own self-interest. A rational person would look at me, look at my professional history, and figure I might want to get back in the game. But Todd had the misfortune of extending a friendly hand at precisely the moment when I was destined to break every bone in it. Nothing personal—when we got back together, I told him I was sorry, deeply sorry—but at the time, I was firing on all cylinders of addiction: clinically alcoholic, a volatile coke user who had graduated to intravenous use, with two newborn twins and two women I was trying to keep on the hook. I was like Fat Elvis without a wisp of the talent or legacy.
Viking Update was a weekly fan paper, meant for people who spent the off-season reviewing the last one and plotting the next. During the season, it would offer deep game analysis and lots of face time with the players. As a matter of necessity, the publication had a very high metabolism. The final paper was put together a few hours after game day and then shipped quickly to the waiting stalwarts. I have no fear of deadline writing—my first thought is often my best—so in theory, there was a fit.
In practice, I was drinking when I got up and shooting all the coke I could find. Just sharing a drink with me could be a drama, let alone trying to work with me. I can remember vividly one day when I was feeling pretty ragged, but I dug out a nice pressed white shirt, a rarity for me. But after I put it on, I noticed the crimson blood stain in the crook of my left arm.
“You would go to your desk, and we would be working, and we would come back, and you might be asleep at the keyboard,” Todd recalled. “We had to get it out and printed and out on the street by Monday morning because it’s timely. So we would fuss about it, and we would keep doing our part, and then all of a sudden you would say, ‘OK, it’s all done.’ The writing would be great. Maybe not by your standards now, but it was lucid and had energy, and we would go, whew.
“You were just lost to us—except for the salient moments when you would kick it out so that we could do it, and then you would be lost again. It unraveled. Part of me wondered if—again, trying to put a good face on it—I got you up in the game, and you just realized you’re just in big trouble.”
Well, sort of. That and a hundred other things big and small. The Vikings ended up going to the NFC divisional playoffs that season, but by that time, I was in the booby hatch, watching it on television. Todd ended up with a good editor, my friend David, and the little weekly became another success in a career that had its share. Todd was right about one thing: It would have been a
perfect way to get back in the game. Instead it became one more horribly broken play.
27
GOD SEES EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THE BLIND
Where does a junkie’s time go? I know how it goes: in fifteen-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside Anna’s house, doing her coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” over and over. “Any place is better. Starting from zero, got nothing to lose,” she sang. I sang along. I would shoot a large dose of coke or smoke some crack, start tweaking, and then go to the front window and pull up a corner of one of the blinds to look for the squads, which I always expected would be forthcoming. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring. After awhile I noticed that the blinds on the upper duplex kitty-corner from Anna’s house were doing the same thing. The light would leak through a corner and disappear. I began to think of the rise and fall of the blinds as a kind of Morse code, sent back and forth across the street in winking increments that said the same thing over and over.
W-e a-r-e g-e-t-t-i-n-g h-i-g-h t-o-o.
They rarely came out, and neither did I, so I never made their acquaintance to discuss our shared hobby. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.
One night I was there with all of the kids, and Anna was out somewhere. I was working on a particularly remarkable batch of coke. I had a new pipe, clean screens, a fresh blowtorch, and the kids were asleep. It was just me and Barley, a Corgi mix I’d had since college. When I was alone with Barley, I’d ask her random questions. Barley didn’t talk back per se, but I saw the answers by staring into her large brown eyes.
Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this shit out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything.
I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall and well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way. On this night—it was near the end—I was on highest alert, my subcortex sounding out the alarm.
The massive hit I took to quiet my vibrating synapses put a megaphone to them instead. If the cops were coming—Any. Minute. Now—I thought, I should be sitting out in front of the house. That way I could tell them that yes, there were drugs in the house and enough paraphernalia to start a recycling center, but there were no guns. And there were children. Four blameless, harmless children. They could put the bracelets on me, and I would solemnly lead them to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the money, while some sweet-faced matrons would magically appear and scoop up those babies and take them to that safe, happy place. I had it all planned out.
Barley and I walked out and sat on the steps. My eyes, my heart, the veins in my forehead were pulsing against the stillness of the night. And then they came. Six unmarked cars riding in formation with lights off, no cherries, just like I pictured. It’s on. A mix of uniforms and plainclothes got out, and in the weak light of the street, I could see long guns held at 45-degree angles. I was proud of myself. I had made the right move after endless wrong ones.
And then they turned and went to the house kitty-corner. Much yelling. “Face down! Hug the fucking carpet! No sudden movements!” A guy dropped out of the second floor window in just gym shorts, but they were waiting. More yelling and then quiet. I went back inside the house and watched the rest of it play out through the corner of the blind. Their work done, the cops loaded several cuffed people into a van that had been called in. I let go of the blind and got back down to business. It wasn’t my turn.
Of all my memories, this one seemed the most fantastic. I waited for the cops, and then they came, but it wasn’t for me. But there are no records to support the recollection. The Minneapolis cops did not begin indexing crimes by address until the 1990s, and I received no hits in the database on the names of the people that may have lived across the street. DonJack, the reporter that I hired to come behind me, worked the back copies of community papers that covered the area, but no luck. We were able to establish that the house had been a longtime problem property with a history of drug sales, but there was no specific incident to go with my memory.
I sat outside that house on Oliver Avenue on a hot summer day in 2006, staring long and hard to make sense of what had and had not happened there. The neighborhood had turned over from white to black, but it was pretty much the same. Nice lawns, lots of kids, no evidence of the mayhem that had gone on inside. Sitting there, in a rental car with a suit on, with those little babies now on their way to college, I almost would have thought I’d made it up. But I don’t think I did. While I sat there staring at the place, someone lifted up the corner of the blind in the living room window. It was time to go.
28
SNOWSUITS
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand.
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
I remember driving to a dark spot in between the streetlights at the rounded-off corner of Thirty-second and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.
The Nova, a shitbox with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I checked the rearview. I saw two sleeping children, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. Their mother was off somewhere, and I had been home looking after them. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny, but he was plenty busy. “Come over,” he said. “I’ll hook you right up.” In that moment of need, I decided to make the trip from North Minneapolis to South, from Anna’s house to his.
I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put, to do the right thing. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. It was late, past midnight.
Then came the junkie math; addled moral calculation woven with towering need. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed, or very much wanted. Five minutes, ten minutes tops. They would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.
The people inside would be busy, working mostly in pairs. Serious coke shooting is something best done together. The objective is to walk right up to the edge of an overdose, to get as high as humanly possible without actually dying. The technique was to push the plunger in slow but push it in large. One would be pushing, watching as the other listened to his insides—to the sound of blood and nerves brought to a boil. Push the plunger in until the ears ring and then back off. Are you good? Yes. No…Just, um…ah…that’s perfect.
As shooting galleries go, the house had much to commend it. Kenny, the guy who ran the place, brought a touch of the mad professor to his retail coke business. With weak eyes behind thick glasses, he was a straight shooter and always seemed to be in a good, if amped, mood. He and I traded credit, depending on which one of us was flush or on a run. Kenny’s lip-licking coke rap was more ornate, somehow more satisfying, than that of most of the losers I dealt with. His worldview was all black helicopters and white noise—the whispering, unseen others who would one day come for us. It kept me on my toes.
Back when business was good, Kenny refurbished the sound studio in the place, an old musician’s house, now decorated with various out-of-tune guitars and a trashed drum kit. That way the people who came and went, mostly white-boy crackheads and girls who lived for a hit, could pretend they were there to jam or to listen to the real musicians who were part of the client base. But it was plain as the pile on the scale what we were all there for.
When Kenny was tweaking, which was often, he would insist that we were being monitored by tiny video cameras in the holes of the acoustic tile that c
overed the room, a studio where only the needs were amplified. One night Kenny was particularly frantic about surveillance issues, and in a gesture of junkie solidarity, we each claimed a panel and peered into hundreds of holes looking for tiny cameras. Ironically but diligently, we marked the ones we had checked with the slash of a pencil. Kenny clearly appreciated our efforts and spilled more coke to assist in finishing the task. We ran out of coke before we ran out of holes.
But tonight I had company. I certainly couldn’t bring the twins in. Coming through the doors of the dope house swinging two occupied baby buckets was not done. Children did not mesh with a house full of skanky people sitting around with rigs full of blood and coke hanging off their arms. Not pretty. Not done.
Sitting there in the gloom of the front seat, the car making settling noises against the chill, the math still loomed. Need. Danger. A sudden tumbling? Naw. Nothing to it, really. In that pool of darkness, I decided that my teeny twin girls would be safe. It was cold, but not really cold. Surely God would look after them while I did not.
I got out, locked the door, and walked away, pushed from behind, pulled by what was inside. I clearly remember solving the math out in the car, but not much of the rest of it. Just a bit of a pick-me-up while I am here, I probably said, glancing at the door as I did. Of course, I told no one in that forlorn circle in the studio that I had, um, friends waiting in the car. There were no windows in the place, and the outside likely disappeared in a flurry of consumption. My kids may or may not have been safe, but inside, a transformation—almost a kidnapping—was under way. The guilty father was replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time passed, one thing begot another, the machine bucked, whistles blew, smoke came out, and eventually I was thrown clear.