by David Carr
Before we came in, he said, “You and I had had jobs, we had families, we had hobbies, things like that before we went off the deep end. A lot of the people we went through had none of those things. I had a guy in my office the other day who was forty years old and had never had a job. He wasn’t proud of it, he just stated it as a fact. How’s that guy going to make it when he leaves here?”
Still, each of us arrived with our big old tin cans clanking behind us. Tak had a massive heroin habit, and I had four treatments under my belt. We had done terrible things. I asked Tak if we were just gimped in some fundamental way, or if the drugs created a kind of temporary mania that was now behind us.
“We did what we did, and we each brought something to the table when we got involved with chemicals. Some of that stuff was not very nice,” he said.
So then, those inner dope fiends were still standing at the ready, outriders on our current life?
“Sure,” he said. “That’s why you have to make sure that you don’t turn into That Guy again.”
Tak said that the time he spent after he first arrived with more senior clients demonstrated that we were not necessarily doomed to systematically screw up the rest of our lives. “You could see the guys who were about something, the ones who were picking up the cigarette butts and making sure that the place looked as good as it could. There was a kind of pride in being there, and a willingness to show others the way.”
This time in treatment, either because of the stakes, the duration, or perhaps fatigue with living the Life, I was less interested in being some kind of junior counselor than in actually digging in and doing the hard work of recovery. I was, over time, a man about my business; the business of staying sober a day at a time, no matter what.
“By the time I got there, you gave me a sense of reality, a real no-bullshit attitude that went right to the core of what we were trying to do.” Tak recalled. “I wasn’t embarrassed to be who I was around you.”
A lot of us brought in a huffy street pride, apropos of nothing. Part of breaking down that brittle facade was a mandate at Eden House that all clients went on public assistance. This meant that some of our food and lodging was paid for, and we got a check for $46 every month from what was left over. “For guys like you and me who had always managed to make our own way, who never had to rely on the state to get by, that brought some humility into the picture.
“You took me down to the line where we got general assistance,” he said. At three months in, I was a so-called level 2 and allowed to take other clients out on errands. “I can remember standing in the line to fill out all those forms and talking to you about how weird it was to be going on public assistance. And you said, ‘Wait until we go upstairs, and you get your picture taken, and they hand you a welfare card.’”
33
MOTHER HENNEPIN LOOKS AFTER ONE OF HER OWN
What if I had not been born in Minnesota, the land of abundant lakes, ample treatment centers, and endless forgiveness? What if I lived in a state or a country or a time—like now, for instance—where after the second or third treatment, they said, “Gosh, Mr. Carr, you seem to be having trouble getting the hang of this. Is this really a good use of the hard-earned tax money of the citizens of our state?” The state of Minnesota, along with the Feds, paid for at least three treatments, gave me general assistance while I was in the booby hatch, and, when I got custody of my children, issued me food stamps to feed them. A few years later, I got cancer, and it paid for all of that too. God bless the welfare state, God bless Minnesota, God bless the milk of human kindness.
Not a bad investment, in retrospect. Not only did the state not have to bear the burden of permanently placing the twins in foster care, but I had been a very good candidate to graduate from jail to prison, which is a very expensive proposition. As a citizen with the wheels glued back on, I have probably kicked back more than $300,000 in federal and state taxes. I’m hoping they drop a little of it on a loser like me. Insurance companies now treat rehab like a tune-up, funding a couple of weeks at most. But some are sicker than others. Redemption comes on a schedule known only to God, and as a civilized people, it’s probably best to put good money after bad, hoping that the lightning eventually strikes. Am I right, or is that just me?
34
THREE-QUARTERS OF THE WAY THERE
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
—HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Recovery in a serious therapeutic community will harden one’s resolve, freeze it like a big orange popsicle, with shiny, gleaming surfaces and nice, firm edges. But then it is time to take the popsicle for a walk out onto the hot, throbbing streets. And more times than not, the popsicle melts and leaves behind a sticky mess. I knew the syndrome and was now worried about what that sticky mess might do to my family—not the family of origins that I had tortured for decades, but this new one that I accidentally made.
So there I was in June of 1989, Chauncy Gardner just before he steps out into the world, six months of sobriety in my back pocket, on welfare, no job prospects, and pretty darned fat. Over the course of my treatment, I had watched my pal Dave. Dave was an old-school addict and drunk, and he was completely old-school in his recovery. Be accountable to self, make your own way, but do for others. He had a cartoonish, booming voice and a perpetually surprised affect. “Really!!!!!???” he’d exclaim in response to the tiniest thing, his massive, bushy eyebrows hula dancing as he said it. Dave made everything seem like some sort of grand caper, and his favorite metric in human affairs was whether something was “greasy.” He had a finely tuned sensibility when it came to greasiness, and he saw plenty of it baked into my grand program of recovery. I decided to stick close to him.
Dave had wired up a three-quarter-way house on Oakland Avenue in South Minneapolis. Three-quarters (as opposed to halfway house) meant no hours to be kept, no minders, no ritual of morning prayer. Just a pack of addicts who found one another in weakness and formed a tribe. Use and you leave. Stiff on the rent, you’re out. Simple stuff like that.
If you were going to pick a spot in which to immerse yourself in the economy of addiction, Oakland Avenue was a pretty good choice. A single step onto our crappy little patio and a shout of “Looking!” would have produced a score without getting out of your bathrobe. Crack whores walked a circuit, and there were bottle stores up and down nearby Lake Street. On some mornings when I was out early searching for work, I’d see some of my old running buddies making their way home, geeked out of their minds.
Which brings us to an odd, little-known corner of the junkie canon. When my name came up around the pipe, my former cohorts might have talked smack about me going in the booby hatch or probably suggested that I owed them money, but when the sober version of me saw them out in the world, they kept a gracious and respectful distance. No, they didn’t want to join me in some circle of sober solidarity, but neither were they the crabs in the pot who sought to pull the potential escapee back into the boiling mire. They were happy that they were not me, but they were also happy that I was not me, at least the one they knew. Now, if I’d stepped toward them and told them that I was back in the game, that would have been fine and all—not much of a surprise, really—but a small, warm part of them would have been sad.
I had my moments when I would wobble, but then I would play it out in my mind. “Just this once” would become “just one more” and then “just a bit more,” and then all would be lost, probably in the space of hours. I had no idea how Anna was really doing, but I had a notion that if I face-planted one more time, my temporarily displaced children would be lost to me forever.
Did I love them? Yeah, I loved them like someone loves puppies. They were cute, harmless, and tiny, exquisite examples of God’s and nature’s hand in forming perfect creatures. But were they mine? Really, really mine?
For most of my life, infants were pink little puddles that others assigned deep meaning to. I don’t see myself when I see my children—I see the opposite, really. How c
ould the likes of me have anything to do with the likes of them? But I learned to love them, even if they seemed more like remarkable beings on loan to me than my progeny.
That whole fruit-of-my-loin thing never did much for me. I’ve never loved my children because they were mine. I would make the perfect adoptive parent, give or take a set of character defects a mile wide. I love small people, think they are endlessly fascinating, and find questions of provenance and genealogy fundamentally uninteresting. My kids became mine through a series of overt acts, and when my patrimony was called into question later, I couldn’t have cared less. It would not matter what the tests said. I knew they were mine because they became so in tiny steps across my soul.
While I was still in Eden House, the kids were returned to Anna from foster care. She had been through treatment and was working hard to stay out of trouble. Once I got out and began living in the sober house on Oakland, I’d bring them for overnights. Every sitcom cliché came alive when they visited. Here were these remarkable creatures in a house full of junkies, being passed around with hands that bore marks from injections, knife fights, and myriad bar brawls. These were hands that had hit people, mugged them, that had slid into their pockets and come away with filthy, stolen lucre.
And yet, there we all were, watching Erin and Meagan try to make their way around a blanket that had been laid out against the unknown history of the carpet. Dave was a father, and he taught me plenty about not just being a father but a man. One of the girls would produce an improbable amount of human waste, the kind of thing that merited goggles, and his huge, meaty hands—I often thought of him down the road when I watched Shrek—would scoop her up, and off we’d all go.
There was no plan. That whole one-day-at-a-time thing extended to all of my endeavors. When I first got out, I was busy just trying to do the next right thing. I never articulated to myself or anyone else that I would rebuild my life and eventually gain custody of the twins. Anybody who knew me, drunk or sober, would have found the notion preposterous. We kept it simple. Leave for the grocery store, actually buy some food, and then come back to cook and eat it. Go to recovery meetings and be of service. Empty ashtrays, stack chairs, make coffee.
Professionally, I was extremely small potatoes and kept it that way. Get a writing assignment from someone, work it, and turn it in on time. Everybody I worked with knew the score with me: I was fine until I wasn’t. Editors broke off small pieces of work for me and then stood back to see what would happen. Good things, mostly.
Over time, life began to leak in. Dave’s grand scheme about opening up a painting company actually became a viable enterprise. My stories began to take on heft and seriousness. We relaxed a little. Played poker. Went skiing. Took the girls on playdates.
Dave never let go of me. Even when I got my own place, and the girls began to grow, he came by every Sunday night so that I could go to a meeting—paying for babysitting was out of the question. He never made a big deal out of it, even after the girls caught the drift and began wailing at the top of their lungs because they realized that every time this giant lumbered into the house, I would be leaving. “Go to your meeting, we’ll be fine,” he’d say, peeling Meagan off my leg. When I moved into a nice house on Pillsbury Avenue in a crappy neighborhood, he bought the joint and moved in upstairs with his girlfriend Nancy. With his loud voice and massive footfalls, it was like having God as an upstairs neighbor.
While I went back into journalism, slowly, Dave stayed in the fray, working at a gigantic homeless shelter downtown, opening sober houses, and employing endless numbers of drunks and lunatics in his painting business. He married Nancy, a smart girl who knew what she was getting into and loved most all of it. His kids came floating back to him, the painting company that he formed with Tom, another Eden House graduate, prospered.
And after a long, good run, he started to get sick, his body reflecting years of hard living before he sobered up. There were other medical issues, and they began to pile up. Tom called me and said that it was probably time to come see Dave. He was in a hospice bed in a lake house he had bought with Nancy. No more booming voice, no more points of the crooked finger at greasy behavior, no more capers. He was swelled up and dying. Nancy let me be with him for some minutes. I held his hand, talked about the old days, about the pair of pants that we had shared at Eden House, about the house on Oakland. I gave his hand a squeeze and went downstairs in the house for a meeting a group of us were having in the basement. But I came back afterward and leaned down close to tell him this:
“I owe you every fucking thing in the world. You’ve done plenty. Now safe home.”
35
HEAVY IN THE GAME
The past is at once perpetual and ephemeral.
—JONAH LEHRER, “PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST”
Scotty is or was a run-of-the-mill junkie who had star power; just something about him. He has always believed he was this close to joining friends who have gone on to big things: rockers, writers, comics. “Here’s the thing about that. Just through sheer repetition, perseverance, doing something over and over, after awhile, everybody’s got a good movie in them, everybody’s got a good book in them, everybody’s got a good song. Seriously. My dad used to tell me that,” Scotty said. “We all got that in us.”
I’d agree. Fate and circumstance, along with a willingness to punch in, is often all that separates the lucky from the luckless. Scotty was ready to talk when I saw him. While others thought that the idea of reporting one’s past was odious and nonsensical, he thought it made perfect sense. Everybody should have a book about himself, right? We met at a coffee shop in South Minneapolis, his joint. He had on one of those muffin hats that is, depending on whose head it’s sitting on, either very rock or totally dorky. Other than some dental work ahead of him, he looked fine.
As we sat outside, Scotty seemed to know everyone who happened by, and the camera I set up to film the interview added to the theatricality of the moment. I felt a bit like I was interviewing a veteran rock star like Iggy Pop. At every turn in the conversation, he made it clear that back in the day there was a game going on at a whole other level, one that I knew little about.
As he recalls it, we met at the CC Club, a South Minneapolis nexus of rockers, dopers, and scenesters. We had some drinks and then went across the street to where Tom the comedian was living with a bunch of other maniacs. For reasons I can’t recall precisely, both underwear and pizza boxes had been affixed to the wall with very large nails. There was a card table framed by guys without shirts who probably should have kept them on. There was a lot of sweating going on, Scotty said.
“There’s like two ounces of crack on the table, and you and I were kind of hitting the booze, and we thought this was pretty funny, I think, at the time.”
By my version of events, he was a chipper like me who occasionally got in on some larger action, but he made it clear that he was a player. I thought I had middled the space between him and Anna, working that gap for cash and a taste.
“Between you and I? Nah, between Anna and I more so than you and I. You tried to run middle ground, but I already knew her from Kenny, you know?” he said.
The dope business, like all commercial endeavors, is built on relationships, and those alliances are brokered, commodified, and one-upped. Having someone between you and a source was not just a hassle, it was expensive. The straightest lines are the cheapest ones. The term of art for one’s source is “my connection.” There are many aspects to that, by the way. Wiseguys always describe each other as “connected,” so there’s that, but if you run with the metaphor a bit, a junkie’s connection was a route to life itself. That primary relationship was nurtured; tribute, along with yesterday’s dope bill, was paid.
I have since covered both politics and Hollywood, cultures where abject fealty is refined to an intricate art, but you haven’t seen ass kissing until you have seen a roomful of junkies surrounding someone who has a bagful of coke. A wan little joke from someone who i
s holding becomes an occasion for everyone to jackknife with guffaws, holding their stomachs as if they had just heard the funniest thing ever. I’ve been both those people before, the one with the coke slut in front of me who was doing every fan dance in her repertoire, and the one who is all damp and sparkly at the every utterance of the one with the dope. It’s sickening to think of, even now.
Like a lot of veteran dopers, Scotty knew how to float and ingratiate in opportunistic ways.
“You introduced me to a whole set of crew that I would never have come in contact with had I not met you, and probably I had some ins that you would not have met had it not been for me,” he said. “It wasn’t like we all became friends or anything like that. You know, when you’re a junkie, you’re out for yourself. It’s that sad, and that’s the truth. It’s like looking back on relationships with all of those people, you know, the drugs took priority.”
Scotty understood and articulated the fundamental transaction between people with a common affliction. He mentioned how we both used Dave, the bouncer at the Uptown, as a bit of muscle to be called on when required. Big scary guy, fiercely loyal and lionhearted, someone you could unchain from the hood of the car when the need arose.
We had an alliance of convenience, but as Scotty recalled, there were some bumps along the way.
“We were at the CC Club. It was the third booth back, in the red booths. We were in the bar. It was one of those moments where I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t do anything to you; you were like a brother to me. I didn’t understand it. You were like, ‘If you ever fuck me over, I will kill you.’ And you had this crazy look in your eyes. You weren’t attacking me; you just put your hands around my neck, and you looked me in the eye, and it was like, ‘If you ever fuck me over, I will kill you.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, what did I do?’ I was dumbfounded. And I figured out that it was psychosis. You were psychotic at the end, and you scared me. Your addiction was frightening to me.”