by David Carr
Leaving, I remember that. Out the metal door and then out the front door with its three bolts onto the porch and the hollow sound of my boots on the wood floor. A pause. How long had it been, really? It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a cold dread in all corners of my being.
I cracked the front door, reached around, unlocked the back, and leaned in.
I could see their breath.
God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment that I had made a mistake He could not easily forgive. I made a decision at that instant never to be that man again.
I went to see Kenny. He was out of the Life and living near Seattle. We drove a long way to his house, chitchatting our way through the people we both knew, and then I broached the topic of that night, which was a huge inflection point for me, but a night like any other for him. I stopped, I copped, maybe paused to do some shooting, and then on to next. He never knew the twins were parked out there that night. A multiple felon, but a good-hearted man in his own way, he would have talked me into leaving had he known. He wouldn’t have gotten all judgmental about it, but he would have nudged me out the door.
Everyone I talked to—from Anna, to Sarah, to Donald—was filled with regret when talking about the old days, always the bad old days. But not Kenny. Now in a good job in a helping profession, he regrets none of it. As a coke dealer, he ran with comedians, rock stars, gorgeous women, and although he ended up going to jail a few times, he would not change a thing. Kenny actually has a lot of fondness—in clinical terms, it would be called “euphoric recall”—for those days.
We talked about the room in his house where all the action was.
“Totally soundproof. It had a big, heavy locked door, central air-conditioning, the floor was multitiered levels, with yellow pegboard throughout.”
Check.
We talked about what went on there.
“There was, like, lots of interesting, talented people, beautiful women. And oh yeah: People went to excess there, definitely.”
Check.
We talked about trading all our marbles for coke.
“When Freud did coke, he wrote about how when you reached a level of toxicity with the drug, it brought out your innermost paranoias, so that’s not a new thing. After you’ve done enough of that drug, there comes a point where you have to stop because it just brings out the negativity.”
Check.
I told him about what happened that night.
“Yeah, that’s the downside of it—you can tend to lose your responsibilities and your sensibilities, and I read about that kind of thing in the paper once in a while, where people do that, leaving their kids in their car. Yeah, it takes over.”
Check.
We talked about having newborns while still in the Life.
“That situation at your house there, things really fell apart. The house looked like hell. People were concerned about the girls, their welfare.”
Check.
So me and mine were a source of pity and concern from one of the most active coke dealers in town. Even given who I was talking to, my face was hot with shame.
In Minneapolis nineteen years later, I stood on the spot outside Kenny’s where I had parked that night. The car was, according to my brother Jim, aka Savage, a Chevy Nova. He sent me the title: ’79 Chevy Nova with 89,950 miles on it, plate number NHS 091, reminding me that later I had literally lost that car on the streets of Minneapolis, never to be found again. I remember standing by the car, I remember looking back. I remember the math. And I remember the snowsuits.
But that’s where the plot thickens and the facts collide. Erin and Meagan were born on April 15, 1988. Whenever I felt compelled to explain myself and the cold facts of our history, that night outside Kenny’s was the necessary moment, the bottom of the Aristotelian tragic fall.
In the story that has been told through the years, that horrible night occurred very soon after they were born. I thought I quickly went to treatment because even though I had been an unreliable employee, a conniving friend, a duplicitous husband, nothing in my upbringing allowed me to proceed as a bad father. The twins then were whisked into temporary foster care soon after their birth. After that, it’s a Joseph Campbell monomyth in which our hero embraces his road of trials, begins to attain his new goals, and hotfoots it back to the normal world. In that paradigm, my recovery was not just an act of self-indulgence followed by self-realization, but a kind of mitzvah to the world.
Nice story if you can live it. Or prove it. For one thing, the snowsuits made no sense.
If the girls were born in April, and I went into treatment a few months afterward, as I have always said, where did the snowsuits come from? Minnesota is cold, but not that cold.
Perhaps in owning my behavior in all its abject glory, I needed my choice to be even worse than it actually was. Apparently it was not enough that the twins were left alone in a car in a bad neighborhood while I was in a house doing drugs. As a natural storyteller, perhaps I knew that the threat of the cold would add drama and horror to the narrative I told myself and very few others. Still, I remember the snowsuits best of all. When I started making calls for the book and wondering aloud about why the most vivid detail in the story rang false, the past changed. In my recollection, I was a drug-addicted new parent who quickly recognized the error of his ways and went to treatment. But when I was talking to my brother about the make of the car and mentioned the snowsuits, he said, “That’s easy. You didn’t go to treatment until sometime in December, like eight months after they were born.”
He’s almost right. I did not enter Eden House, a six-month inpatient treatment program in Minneapolis, until November 25, 1988. So the presence of snowsuits on a cold November night were undoubtedly real. That part about me straightening out right after they were born? A fantasy. Total bullshit, a myth, but not the kind Joseph Campbell had in mind.
29
THE LAST WORST NIGHT
Yeah but except so how can I answer just yes or no to do I want to stop coke? Do I think I want to absolutely I think I want to. I don’t have a septum no more. My septum’s been like fucking dissolved by coke. See? You see anything like a septum when I lift up like that? I’ve absolutely with my whole heart thought I wanted to stop and so forth. Ever since with the septum. So but so since I’ve been wanting to stop this whole time, why couldn’t I stop? See what I’m saying? Isn’t it all about wanting to and so on? And so forth? How can living here and going to meetings and all do anything except make me want to stop? But I think I already want to stop. How come I’d even be here if I didn’t want to stop? Isn’t being here proof I want to stop? But then so how come I can’t stop, if I want to stop, is the thing.
—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, INFINITE JEST
Sometime soon after that night at Kenny’s—it could have been days or weeks—I became convinced that something brutal and unspeakable was about to land on all of us, including the kids. The twins were being neglected, along with Anna’s other two kids, and her customers were leaving in droves because we were reliably unreliable.
I had been fired from the football paper and was not even pretending to work on various freelance projects. In the journalism community, the word was out—stay far, far away—and even some of my wildest running buddies wanted nothing to do with me. My family, which had long worked to tug me back from the edge of the abyss, had pretty much given up. Anna’s situation was no better. Her Colombian amigo shut her down for nonpayment, so absent the amazing connection and sales, we became just a couple of day-to-day addicts. And each of us had graduated from smoking crack to shooting cocaine.
As hobbies go, shooting coke is the worst. At least with heroin, people nod out for hours. With IV coke use, the addict has to reload every twenty minutes, find a new way in. That’s a lot of equipment, a lot of blood, a lot of mayhem. After awhile it was needles, blood, b
abies, and piles of dirty clothes. High or not, it was hellish to behold. I just wanted a moment’s peace, a respite from the chronic waking thought—drunk or sober, drugged or not—that I was perhaps the lowliest bastard who ever lived. A couple of days in detox with microwave macaroni and cheese, mooched ciggies, and sleep—blessed, elusive sleep—sounded like the beach in St. Bart’s.
Just before Thanksgiving in 1988—on November 18, 1988, as I later found out—I called my parents and told them that the twins were not safe, and I needed to bring them by. “You told us that there were no adults in the house, that it was a dangerous place for children to be,” my dad recalled. He said I promised to enter detox right away.
I drove in Anna’s Maxima to Hopkins and carried the girls up the narrow stairs of my parents’ townhouse—first Meagan and then Erin. (Funny what you do remember. Meagan could not abide being left alone for even a moment, so she always was the first in the door.) The girls sat cooing in their baby buckets, making friendly noises and faces at their grandma and taking in my dad behind her. We all just looked at them, their innocence of the matter at hand a comfort to us all.
No one knew what to say. My parents were speechless, in part because it was hard to say what came next, a bold new world having been opened up by my abasement. Poised in the moment between hitting a new kind of bottom and, perhaps, going into detox, I was a walking bundle of loose ends.
Did I say good-bye to the girls? I can’t remember, and neither can my dad. My mom, who would have been running the show, is gone now, so no help there. Did I tell them I’d be back, um, someday? Yeah, probably. And then I left. Having benchmarked a new kind of bottom, I needed gas and a boost, so I stopped at the station just up the street from their house. The attendant noticed I was getting busy in the car and called the cops, but I was none the wiser. I drove down Excelsior Boulevard and turned left to go north on Highway 169 with a cop trailing me all the way. The drugs, the booze, the shame, all of it overtook me, and I gunned it to eighty and fishtailed onto the highway. The cop had seen enough and flipped his lights. The jig was not only up, it was about to be placed in bracelets. I pulled over so fast that he went into a ditch. He was pissed when he walked up, breathing real hard and fast. I knew I had a problem, so I came to my own defense and spoke up.
“I have a suspended license, sir. This,” I said, indicating the glass of vodka in the console, “is an open bottle. I know I am going to jail, and I don’t want to make a problem.”
His face relaxed. He nearly apologized as he cuffed me and said he would put them on loose for the short ride to the station. He put me in the back of the car and went rummaging around through the bottles, marijuana roaches, and other detritus in the Maxima.
When we got to the station, he saw me in the bright light and stared at the welter of needle marks on my arms. He immediately asked me where the drugs were. I said nothing. He went out to his car and came back red faced. He tapped a packet containing what seemed to be several grams of coke in the palm of his hand.
“I found this under my backseat,” he said. “You put it there.”
“I can’t help you with that, officer,” I said as politely as I could manage.
He put me in the cell and told me to think it over, telling me to keep in mind that I was not leaving until we got that package of cocaine straightened out. Three cops wheeled through my cell. Good cop, bad cop, medium cop. I told all of them that I was happy to cooperate, but I couldn’t help them with that package. As the night ticked on, that last hit in the car wore off, and just when my resolve slipped and I thought I might do something stupid, they kicked me loose.
The compounding of consequence, the meager ends, the bad luck of my own making followed by worse, all seemed too pathetic to be true. Had I really been so feckless as to give up my children and get thrown in a jail in the space of the same hour? I spent a great deal of time searching for records that would back up my memory, but the Hopkins police did not keep records going back that far, and there was nothing in the court files other than some bare-bones charges. I began to think that the last worst night was a figment of my darker imaginings. But as I dug deeper, I realized that when I eventually entered treatment, those charges must have been extant. Someone had to have helped me put that case to rest. I had a dim memory of my cousin Steve, a lawyer, helping me out at some point. In the fall of 2007, I called him and asked if he had represented me at some point. “I certainly did,” he said. “I still have the files.”
Officer Wilentz goes on to say that I had outstanding warrants from an incident in Crow Wing County and that I was released to a friend—that would probably be Anna—for bail in the amount of $613. He does not mention the back-and-forth over the package of cocaine, but then he wouldn’t because it was left unresolved.
Steve was yet another relative who I ended up getting flopped on, probably through my dad. He said I was engaging in a pattern of conduct, however misdemeanor, that the court would not look kindly on.
“You’re a DAR, driving after revocation, there were some alcohol-related incidents. I think there were two or three of them, so you were looking at a potential license revocation. You were inimical to public safety to the point where they could pull it for good.”
Steve also sent along another charge he handled that stemmed from an incident on March 2, 1988, at 2:20 a.m. It made for interesting reading because I had zero recollection of the events described. According to the Minneapolis police report Steve sent, I was parked in the Maxima with two other males behind a house at 1801 Third Avenue. The cops flipped their lights. They said that when I got out of the car, they observed the “defendant’s balance to be very unstead [sic], his breath smelled of an alcoholic beverage, and his eyes were watery and bloodshot.” I failed field sobriety tests, had a revoked license, and was placed in the squad. But I was not charged with DWI, only careless driving and driving after revocation. Given the facts described, it made no sense, but deeper in the file, I found a letter I had written to Steve:
“Enclosed please find info you requested. Note that I was not charged with DWI, although there is more than a little indication that such a charge would have been appropriate.” The break, I wrote, came because the cop who pulled me over was someone I knew from my reporting days.
It was a surprise that cut many ways. Not only did I come across one more jam I didn’t remember, but I had skated on part of it because I knew the cop. I had always steadfastly maintained that I had observed a bright line between my job as a reporter and my career as a screwup, but here was hard evidence that I had cut at least one corner because after many nocturnal interactions with the Minneapolis police, I had finally come across an officer I knew. I wonder what I said when I was in the back of that squad.
It was a nice gesture on the cop’s part, so I’ll leave his name out of it, even though it rings no bells. But if his intent was to put a scare into me and help me get back on the straight and narrow, it didn’t help. I spent the next nine months in and out of handcuffs, in and out of jail, until it all ended on Highway 169 near Hopkins in November. I got out of jail and went to detox three days later at a suburban facility near my parents’ house.
Right after I got admitted, they walked me to a table in the middle of the room. Detoxes are really human aquariums, a place where large, Librium-infused humans bob here and there, watched by the staff through thick plate glass in case one of them freaks out or starts flopping around. My job, as it turned out, was to settle my arms up to my biceps in a large tub of Dreft detergent, a nice low-tech way of disinfecting my track marks without involving a lot of hands-on work by the staff. I had become a white trash untouchable, all festering pus and contagion. They dropped pills into my mouth from a few inches away while I waited like a baby penguin, open-mouthed and expectant.
Did I have an epiphany in that suburban aquarium? No, I had a moment with the macaroni and cheese. It had been awhile since I had eaten. I did what I was told. I ate the macaroni and cheese. I ate the pills.
A few days later, my parents had Thanksgiving dinner, and I came straight from detox. My babies were there. I drank the nonalcoholic grape juice and shared in the family ritual of saying what I was thankful for. I have no idea what I came up with.
After dinner, my parents spoke to me quietly, off to the side. They were too old to handle the twins and had a lot of other things going on in their life. They had spoken to my older brother John, a guy who worked in leadership for the Catholic Church, and he had wired up temporary foster care through Catholic Charities. Erin and Meagan would be placed with a family, safe and warm, while I went “to deal with things.” It was decided that I would go straight to Eden House the following morning.
So that was it. Only it wasn’t. When I was in New Orleans talking to Chris about that time, he reminded me that the night before I went in to Eden House, I had to go back at it one more time.
“You had called me and wanted me to pick you up some rocks, ’cause you were going in the next day, and you wanted to get high one more time. And I did. I think it was the only time I’d been to your parents’ house, but we were in your basement or first floor, the bedroom down there. I had to open up the car door for you because your hands were all swollen up, your arms were all bruised up from—”
Um, shooting coke?
“Yeah, I think it was kind of a moment for me,” he said.
Me too. A new day was upon me, give or take one more flail at getting high. The last rung was in view, and the fullness of my dispossession was at hand. I was a treatment washout going in for another stint, the twins’ mother was headed off to a different facility, and my children, both of them cooing away in their baby buckets upstairs while I sat in my parents’ basement—the last stop of all losers—getting high.
Job? Gone. Girlfriend? History. Dignity? Please. Money? As if. Children? Orphans.