by David Carr
The math had been solved. I was at zero times zero.
INTERMISSION
Gonna rise up Turning mistakes into gold
—EDDIE VEDDER, “RISE”
PART TWO
30
RX FOR GARBAGE HEADS
Sobriety checklist (tear out and use as needed, but never as a coaster for beverage alcohol):
1. It helps to crater in Minnesota. Apart from the whole “Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers” trope, it is a state that still has a functioning health-care system, even for a four five-time treatment loser.
2. Accept the gift of time. A low-bottom drunk or junkie will take months just to remember who he or she is or was.
3. Enter the booby hatch. Preferably a place you never, ever want to go back to. Avoid treatment centers with duck ponds, good food, or a record of admitting Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan.
4. Form alliances with the lame and infirm. Consort with others who have smashed their lives to bits and are humbly looking around for the pieces.
5. Don’t date people in recovery. Every transaction will take on a therapeutic lilt: “That’s not what I hear you saying…” “Oh really? What I said is what I meant, you twit. Did I just say that aloud, honey?” Date civilians. Don’t expect them to “get” you. Expect them to love you.
6. Take on new responsibilities: making coffee at the meetings you attend, helping others who are new in recovery, or obtaining sole custody of infant twin daughters. If you are thinking about sailing into the abyss, you’ll probably consider others that will fly off the cliff with you. To do for others is to do for self.
7. Respect the power of mood-altering chemicals, but allow for hope. When the inner pirate in your subcortex is seeking permission to come aboard, consider that if you get through that day, there may be many others. Trust God, not the pirate.
8. Develop new obsessions. Nineteenth-century literature. Bonsai. Ping-pong. Flourless tortes. Extreme skipping.
9. Avoid writing or reading junkie memoirs. The line between prurience and pratfall is razor thin. Nothing doing here, nothing but triggers, keep moving.
10. Party but don’t use. A drunk alone with himself is in a terrible neighborhood. Resume life in civil society and go out, but always plan your own escape route just in case a glass of whiskey begins whispering your name.
11. The problem with your life is behavior, not disclosure. Secrets are what addiction calls foreplay. If you want to live a life that you can be honest about, live one that is worthy. The answer to life is learning to live.
12. Don’t drink. Go to meetings.
31
A FEARSOME GOODNESS
All angels bring terror.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
About a month after arriving at Eden House, I was surprised to see John, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, walking through the joint with a staff member. He was taking a tour because he wanted to see for himself where some of the casualties of the crack epidemic were washing up.
I stopped him and said hello. Obviously surprised to see another journalist, he asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m one of the knuckleheads, John,” I said. “I live here.”
“Ohhhhhh, undercover, huh? Smart move,” he said.
Not exactly. In the last month of 1988, and for the first five months of 1989, this was my place, and these were my people. And while it is one thing to find yourself in a place full of lunatics, crackheads, and career losers, it is quite another to notice that you fit right in.
When I called John in the fall of 2007—he’s now a big-time fiction writer—he remembered bumping into me.
“It was kind of strange to see you there that way,” he reflected. “You were a well-known journalist, and suddenly you walked up to me in this place. It was very helpful for me because I had talked to a number of people, and they were really stupid, just sort of dumb and clueless. They were lost souls. But in talking to you, your mind was clear, and you were obviously smart. You had a real serious appreciation of your problem and everything that you had lost. And yet you were not sure that you could stay off cocaine. It was clear that it was tearing you up, but you couldn’t just turn your back and walk away. You said that it wasn’t that simple. That was useful to me because it gave me an understanding of the complexity of the problem.”
The place where I gave John a tutorial on the wages of crack had long been known as a last stop. Eden House, at 1025 Portland Avenue South in Minneapolis, was a therapeutic community because the nuts ran the nuthouse. The other clinical term would be shithole. It wasn’t dirty, it wasn’t really dangerous, but there were enough skeevy guys there to make it seem like a holding cell on some days. Petty beefs would blow up and occasionally get physical, there were rats in the kitchen, and the counseling staff—mostly people who had seen their share of bad times—was unaffected by the keening and neediness of the clientele. It was a no-bullshit place packed to the rafters with bullshitters. Dan, who ran it, knew every scam in the book and had run a few of them himself. Its clinical motor suggested that the population was not in need of rehabilitation but habilitation. Eden House was brimming with slogans. This was the main one: “The answer to life is learning to live.” We would say that, loudly and with a great deal of emotion, at the conclusion of each group meeting.
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That’s some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them—the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the clichés, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing ironic about being a crackhead and a drunk, or recovery from same. Low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque, a theater of the absurd that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost.
It is what it is, which is a slogan we used to say a lot at Eden House. Most of the clients were criminal justice referrals, guys who had either gotten early release or avoided jail time by agreeing to go there. I came with trial dates for a bunch of misdemeanor stuff hanging over me, which in the aggregate might have added up to some jail time, but I flopped into Eden House primarily because it was the only place the county was willing to fund me. When the guys there complained that they were in on a bum charge, that someone had ratted them out for something they didn’t do, Jerry, one of the counselors, would say, “OK, so stipulated. Let’s say that’s true. And then let’s just say that you are here for all the other stuff you got away with.”
The place had some talented, intuitive counselors and leadership, but its remarkable efficacy in treating the untreatable had more to do with the passage of time. Eden House was a six-month residential treatment program, which would seem like an extravagance, but for most of us, it was the bare minimum. A year before, I had gone through a twenty-eight-day program at St. Mary’s, my fourth crack, and the counselor predicted I would land at either Eden House or a state mental hospital.
At the time, I dismissed state institutions as beyond the pale. As a reporter, I had been in and out of those places to do stories, and left on a dead run every time. People either had wild, feral looks or were so heavily medicated that they needed bibs to catch the drool. And Eden House? It was in a neighborhood I knew well for all the wrong reasons. Before I moved in, I would see the clients coming and going looking like nothing so much as a bunch of corner boys who were between opportunities. I had been to enough recovery meetings in town to see them arrive as a group and leave the same way. They might as well have been tied together with a piece of fucking yarn. I mean, good on them and all, but David Carr just did not roll like that.
Except there I was—for six months, no less. I could have done twenty-eight days standing on my head, gaming and grinning,
but this was twenty-eight times six and then some. I can remember sitting on the skinny little mattress the first few nights, sketching out a calendar and staring at my distant discharge date. But once I jacked into the place, time roared by—it seemed like I had just gotten my wits about me when it was time to hit the street and use them.
In that time, I did not accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. I did not have a moment of clarity. I did not have a therapeutic breakthrough. Instead, slowly, somewhere along in there, I remembered who I used to be. In the fullness of time, I had walked away from the life of a normal person—in small increments at first, and then at a breakneck pace—and it took a long time to conjure a map to find my way back. Every day of that six months was important to me. It took a full month for the vestigial, drug-induced psychosis to wear off. I came in so addled that I could not even take in any new information. As the program required, I made my bed, went to the meetings, and avoided getting into any jackpots.
And I ate. Jesus, did I eat. Eden House sent out a van at the end of the day to various bakeries to pick up the unsold surplus. Doughnuts, crullers, and coffee cake; every night the bounty was laid out on tables in the kitchen. After years of sticking things in my mouth—ciggies, bottles of brown liquor, other people’s body parts, and crack pipes—I was somewhat orally fixated. My addiction found expression in white flour and sugar. I ended up running the kitchen while I was there, which was less an expression of my background than a manifestation of my preoccupation with all five food groups and any of their cousins that might go down with a glass of sugary purple juice.
I had been a bit of a foodie during my years in the restaurant business, but I quickly dropped the pretension for a far more catholic range of edible interests. While instant mashed potatoes may not be an intrinsically interesting food, I discovered that they were a highly effective medium for conveying gobs of surplus butter down my throat. By my math, I gained 90 pounds, give or take, which would mean that on each day of the 180 I was there, I put on a half pound. That sounds a little far-fetched, so let’s be more judicious and say I gained 60 pounds. (I can’t find relevant medical records for that period.) That’s still a very impressive one-third of a pound a day. Photos suggest I was pushing 300 pounds by the time I was released, and that much is corroborated by Doolie, who began dating me again after I left. “You were sooo fat,” she recalled, “you could hardly walk.”
Um, gee, that was sort of mean. All the more so because it was clinically true. I was a man about my groceries when I was at Eden House.
Eden House was a place of what are called “trips,” which had nothing to do with acid and everything to do with consequences. Someone who slipped out in the dead of night and came crawling back in the morning would have to sit on a bench in a hall for days on end—it was called The Bench—and beg for readmittance.
Getting into something physical with another client might have you scrubbing the stairs from the first through third floors with a toothbrush. My trips came from my tendency to stick my beak in where it did not belong. For a week, I wore a huge metal kitchen spoon around my neck, a totem of my propensity for spoon-feeding other clients. I also got to carry around a crappy vinyl briefcase for a few days, a symbol of my inclination to lawyer on behalf of other clients.
All the assets I had—an ability to verbalize, intellectualize, and filibuster—got no play at Eden House. In at least a few other treatments, I was often seen as baby Jesus, a counselor’s pet who knew all the jargon and the right buttons to push—or at least I thought so. At Eden House, I was seen as a fool, and a pretty soft one at that. Early on, I got crossways with a guy named Tad—some silly stuff about the television—and I had to show teeth and a willingness to take an ass-kicking to find a place to stand. It wasn’t Abu Ghraib, but it wasn’t the treatment place with the elliptical machine and a staff nutritionist, either.
Eden House was a complicated place. Some of the people who were there were straight-up jailing it. No thought of recovery, just trying to do their time quicker and easier. Rick, one of my running buddies there, had no real issues with chemicals. He was just a gangster. Great cook, quick with a funny story, but a guy who pulled well-planned jobs on occasion—ornate affairs with lookouts and cash box extrications. I stuck by him because he was a man of honor in almost all regards, and although he was not much over five-foot-five, he weighed about 250, much of it angry muscle that could be brought to bear on any kind of situation.
Many of the guys there were so-called dual diagnosis, MI-CD, which stood for mentally incompetent, chemically dependent. I can remember having a conversation with a kid named Brett one night about the angels that were all around us, even as we spoke, and how they would look after both of us going forward if we said a prayer right then and there. I mumbled along.
One of the people who grabbed recovery with both hands lived a few doors down. Dave was on his second tour of Eden House. He was a smart guy who had done tough stuff and had a long, checkered résumé as a drunk and an addict. He had thirteen DWIs, among other credentials. But he had made a palpable decision that he was through. David was a giant man, with a booming voice and a real sense of justice. He talked of all the things he would do when he left there, and he went out and did all of them. But at the time, we were both so far back on our heels, we had nothing. My doughnut habit had pretty much reduced me to sweatpants from the swag pile, and near the end of our time at Eden House, we were tasked with going out into the world to look for work and attend recovery groups. Dave had a single pair of navy blue pants that still fit him even though he had put on a few, but I had borrowing rights. I can still remember standing at his room door and asking, “Are you wearing the pants tonight?” I’m sure some of the guys within earshot thought we had a little more going on than a strong recovery-based friendship.
There were no clanging bars there, but it was a noisy place, with a PA system that was constantly paging clients. With a lot of the clients raised on the corners and jails beyond, nobody ever spoke below a shout unless he was planning a caper. And there were plenty of those. Early in my tenure, Craig, the so-called “chief elder,” the big cheese, not only went out and copped heroin and whiskey but brought it back to his room and got caught upstairs with a bunch of other guys having a big old time. The place had it all: drama, stakes, and conflict.
Things were actually going fine for me until I got my first pass on Christmas Day, a month into treatment. Anna had the babies on loan from foster care, and I was allowed to pick them up and take them to my parents’ place. Except that when I was in Anna’s back room, getting the twins ready to go, I noticed, tucked into the corner, a juice can filled with ashes that had obviously been used to smoke crack, with a lighter laying next to it. I made no conscious decision; I put a lighter to the can in a kind of see-and-smoke reflex baked in over the years. There was nothing there, not even a remnant, and I put down the can and went back to the business at hand. It was a moment of temporary possession, and it passed.
When I got back to Eden House the following day, there was an all-house meeting. It was the kind of free-for-all where grievances got aired, and anybody who had something on his chest was encouraged to unload. I shared what had happened at Anna’s, thinking how impressed they would all be that I had made it back without taking the next giant step.
My admission had precisely the opposite effect. No one believed that I had made a failed attempt to use and then left it at that. The clients who were postured in leadership allowed that my story was not plausible. Empty can, yeah, sure, they said, empty suit. Nate, a giant black guy I grew to love, would mime smoking an empty can when I walked by. (I saw him on the streets a year later, skinny as hell, and he still had it in ’im to give me the empty-can salute.)
Derision aside, I took that Christmas Day as my new sobriety date, one that would stand for almost fourteen years. Somewhere in those days, I developed a belief that if I could make it through a given day sober, no matter what, there might be other days t
o follow. Hope, in other words. The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large. If an addict knows in his heart he is going to use someday, why not today? But if a thin reed of hope appears, the possibility that it will not always be thus, things change. You live another day and then get up and do it again. Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.
The implications of a misstep arrived every weekend. My parents would come by with the twins after having picked them up from the foster care family. Zelda and Patrick, a middle-aged couple who took the girls in through Catholic Charities, were incredibly gracious, easy to deal with, and they clearly adored the twins. I adored them too, but I’m not entirely sure that they knew who I was as they toddled toward their first birthdays. Erin and Meagan responded well to me, but then they were happy with everybody. In between the times that I saw them on the weekends, both in foster care and Anna’s care, they learned to walk, they learned to talk. They grew from an abstract notion of potential responsibility and/or shame and became small people whom we would set in the middle of the visiting room at Eden House and watch in wonder as they spun and bounced off each other.
I can remember one of the women counselors—Beth, maybe—coming in and marveling at Erin and Meagan and asking no one in particular who they belonged to. It took me just a second to realize the answer.
“That would be me.”
She seemed surprised, and deep down, so was I.
While I was at Eden House, I wrote a horrid first-person account of being in the place for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. John, the columnist who’d seen me there, had wired up with Deborah, the editor. It had practical value in that it let every editor in town know with some certainty why I had constantly screwed up. The downside was that all of the people I owed money to knew where to find me. I was sufficiently addled to think there was value in a big tub of written claptrap. Suffice it to say that I don’t include this piece in my clip file of greatest hits, with its odd combination of prissiness and sanctimony: