by David Carr
Scotty, who said he started doing drugs when he was eight years old, said that most of the abuse I handed out landed pretty close to home. He hinted that I was a couple fries short of a Happy Meal, a person who made a habit of punishing himself.
“Beatin’ yourself up; you were all about self-abuse.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Well, not ‘whatever,’” he said, pulling me up short. “You were abusive to yourself. You liked that part; that’s kind of sadistic. It is what it is. Right?”
Probably more masochistic, but I get the drift. His concern for me, then and now, is genuine, but then he says this: “The drug thing really fucked my life, fucked up a lot of relationships, like with Anna. We have not talked since ’86 or ’87. I mean, to be frank with you, Anna and I were planning on killing you at one point.”
Well.
“There was a hit on you for taking the twins. She wanted me to do it, and I was like, I hate the motherfucker enough right now that it would be no sweat if I could come up and pull a Tupac on him, but I’m no killer either, right? She was pissed off to beat the band, man. It happened to me too. My daughter was taken away from me when she was eleven months old,” he said.
Was she really pissed off enough to talk about killing me?
“She was venting. You’d have to ask her.”
36
A LARGE UNGUIDED MISSILE
By my recollection, when the twins went into temporary foster care, I handed them to some faceless, kindly county bureaucrat. I could not recall that moment with any specificity, but it had to be freighted with tremendous sadness: besieged by unseen forces within, the father, with the gentle encouragement of his parents, admits that he is worthless and that strangers must step into the breach, pry the children from his hands, and take them to a safe, happy place.
Never happened, at least that way.
A while ago, I stopped in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, to see Zelda, who with her husband, Pat, had been temporary foster parents to the twins. With their own children mostly grown, Zelda was in search of something else. She saw a Phil Donahue Show about the need for foster parents in New York, figured there was a need in the Twin Cities, and called Catholic Charities. Erin and Meagan were two of six children they ultimately cared for. When I stopped by to see Zelda, we got so busy talking about the twins as they are now that we never talked about those months.
In retrospect, the twins and I were incredibly lucky. The girls were randomly but fortuitously assigned to two incredibly talented and committed foster parents.
I called them back in the middle of book writing because I was confused about how the handoff had occurred; the specifics of who had brought them my children. Because the twins were eventually returned to Anna and I, Catholic Charities had none of the relevant records. Zelda picked up and had Pat get on the other phone so we could all remember together. As they spoke, a memory I had lost returned to me.
They reminded me that two days before Thanksgiving in 1988, I arrived at their home with seven-month-old Erin and Meagan, my mom, and all of the clothes and stuff we could carry. I was between detox and Eden House, still using, but about to shut the door. They loved those babies from the minute they saw them. Their father? Not so much.
ZELDA: You were very serious, very somber, and it felt kind of belligerent, like you really weren’t interested, like you really didn’t want to talk to us much but we were a necessary evil. This was a good place to put the girls. You were that way and—
Pat interrupted. And you were high.
ZELDA: You were a bit disheveled.
DAVID: So, disheveled and high.
ZELDA: Yes.
PAT: And you fell on the floor.
DAVID: What?
PAT: You just kind of lost your balance and fell on the floor, and I remember thinking that if one of the babies was there, the baby would have suffered some pretty severe injury.
ZELDA: You wanted them perfectly taken care of. You were very blunt. Adamant, blunt, and direct. I don’t remember what you said, but you were aware enough and alert enough to want only the best for these kids, and did we meet the test, and so you did ask us direct questions.
PAT: I remember thinking, this will never work.
ZELDA: Why?
PAT: I guess maybe your mother had told us that you had been in treatment before or something, and looking at you, you were so far out of it. I just thought that this was a way of exiting the scene, the responsibility with your children. I read it all wrong.
When I got out of Eden House, we all went out to dinner at a barbecue joint. Erin and Meagan showed some of their dad’s skill at putting away food and some gestural elegance with the rib bones as well.
ZELDA: The next time I saw you, you were a different man. You were so good with the girls, and you’re not the kind of father that [baby-talked] to your girls. You talked to those two little girls just like they were two little people, like they were right on your level, and the three of you were doing a great job.
PAT: I was really impressed with you as a parent. Like Zelda said, you treated these little babies as adults. You conversed with them as being on the same level as you were.
They picked me up at our place on Dupont, which, truth be told, was kind of not so great.
ZELDA: Your car looked like it would hardly go. You didn’t have a cleaning lady—you could tell that, the place was a bit disheveled—but you had all the stuff they needed, like their snowsuits, and you put those kids in those snowsuits like lickety-split and zipped them up, no fooling around, and it was so great to see you so capable and so competent and so efficient. Efficient, capable, ‘Let’s go, guys,’ and they were in their suits and out the door and down the steps. You just took charge.
Probably the same snowsuits, or some other hand-me-downs. But a different guy was zipping them up.
37
MATERIAL WITNESS
For years, I beheld my children framed by guilt. Not just for what I did when they were in utero and when they were very young—my amends are in the choices I have made since then—but I felt a share of remorse about how I ended up with sole dominion over their lives. Anna has always maintained that I stole them at a weak moment in her life. And without ever saying it aloud, especially to her, I thought a case could be made. Was I a steadfast single parent or a kidnapper with a good attorney?
While I was in Eden House, Anna went to inpatient treatment and came out determined to parent not only our children but her other two as well. The twins spent three and a half months in foster care and then, with approvals from the county, were returned to the care of their mother. She was making an earnest attempt at sobriety and creating a safe, happy environment for her children.
It was clear that absent the handcuffs of addiction, Anna and I were not going to be together. While I was in Eden House, she began seeing other people, and I had started to sneak out to see Doolie, my old girlfriend. When Anna came to visit me, we got in a fight, and I gave what I remember as a playful bite on the lip on the way out. She remembers it more vividly and probably correctly as one more time—the last—that I assaulted her, and this time I was not high.
As a sober person, Anna could be incredibly competent. But she’d never had a real job, at least not for long, and so the money that went with the drug lifestyle was very important to her. Even in those first few months after she got the kids, she felt a need to keep a hand in the Life, to keep the money and the connections rolling.
I also wanted to get back to business, but my business was writing. I cut ties with all of my drug buddies, except the ones I owed money to. (At Eden House we were told to get straight with everybody on the outside—even dealers we owed money to—unless, of course, getting in touch put our sobriety or lives at risk. When I met with one guy that I owed, I told him that I was done but needed to make good with him. I can remember the dumbfounded look he gave me as I handed him a couple hundred bucks in twenties.)
But Anna really had no choi
ce other than welfare. True, she had real friends, but in professional terms, she was a commodities trader whose product and skill was a trigger back to the old ways. I would come by on weekends in the early summer of 1989 to pick up the kids, and even though I tried to keep my eyes slightly crossed, I knew in my heart that she was dealing and probably using, if for no other reason than she had no visible means of support.
But who, really, was I to judge? I was staying sober in increments sometimes measured in hours, crawling along on bloody stumps and hoping to make it through the day. If she was using, my response was simple: “better her than me.” The kids seemed OK, her ex-husband, Steve, was around to help, there was food in the house, and I was living in a three-quarter house where there was no room for anybody else on a permanent basis. Weekend visits were fine, fun even, as they cuddled up in their baby buckets for the night, but I mostly took them out to my parents and stayed there because they had cribs in the basement. It was a cobbled-together existence, but it was working.
But then, as the summer progressed, things started to look grim at Anna’s house. I would arrive, Anna would be nowhere in sight, and Steve would say nothing but roll his eyes and nod his head upstairs. I knew from experience what was going on up there, and I knew that it was my job to stay downstairs.
Other times, when I came by, Steve would be gone and Anna would be tottering around the house. She had a way of moving and talking when she was geeked, almost delicately, with a great deal of deliberation. Clothes started to pile up, and sometimes Erin and Meagan would be thirsty and wet. Anna’s two other kids were at loose ends, running around, and I would open up the refrigerator and find very little. Diapers, the coin of the realm with two toddlers, became my responsibility. I brought them and small money whenever I picked up the girls. But it seemed to be turning back into the kind of mess that a pack of Pampers was not going to fix.
A normal person would have called somebody, anybody, but I felt a loyalty and a lack of judgment toward her that is difficult to explain now. The idea that anyone like me, with my history, would point a crooked finger at someone else seemed preposterous. I worked my little stories, hit my deadlines, went to recovery meetings, and came and went quickly at the house on Oliver Avenue.
Going back over journals from those days—the newly recovered tend to memorialize everything—I was clearly feeling my way in a new world I did not fully understand. I knew how to be The Problem, the one who had to be managed, but being cast as a grown-up—a parent, no less—was a leap I couldn’t quite conjure. When I talked to Anna all these years later, she clearly believed that I had a plot to snatch those kids, but in those early months, I never actually thought those twins would be mine to look after for the long haul.
Reporting it out, I realized that you cannot steal what someone gives you hand over fist. Not because she didn’t love them—she did and still does—but because she was so buried in a vortex of dysfunction that left her no choice. Journals, legal records, and interviews with people who were there demonstrate a pattern of attempts at accommodation and reconciliation on my part that were followed by disappointment and busted deals.
The twins were certainly not the problem. All of those nightmarish stories about crack babies may have tugged at the heartstrings, but I don’t know how much truth they actually contained. I can say with certainty that these little babies born to addicted parents seventy-five days before their due date were prospering. Their medical records indicate that they had breathing and heart issues that resolved once they were in a postnatal environment that was somewhat healthier than the prenatal one. Meagan was fussy and needy, while Erin was reflexively happy. I called Meagan “Noodles.” I’m not sure why, but it may have been a nod to her preference for pasta and a bit of an ode to a cartoon gangster on TV who went by that nickname. Erin was nicknamed “Beefaroni” because she loved her vittles, and that passion was reflected in her cheeks.
If I took those children, I took them in very small increments. I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to parent them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some brutal, smelly event at a McDonald’s. Let them wheedle their way into your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off every single night of their young lives. Gradually, slowly, the three of us developed a routine at bedtime when they stayed over, with baths, prayers, and stories—stuff I had been raised on or had seen on TV.
As we spent more time together, they began to know me, and I came to adore them—madly, deeply, truly. We developed other rituals. When it came time to actually turn off the light, I would sing a song of my own making:
[To the tune of nothing in particular, but very uptempo]:
Oh, I’ve got the nicest girls in town,
I’ve got the nicest girls in town.
They are so nice, they are so sweet,
I love them twice, they can’t be beat.
[And then a real strong Broadway finish, with every note
held and punished (with apologies to Ethel Merman)]:
Oh. I’ve. Got. The. Nicest. Girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrls.
Innnnnnnnnnn.
Townnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!
If that sounds like some after-school special, with the fat ex-junkie dad singing to his misbegotten daughters, well, it is what it is.
As the summer of 1989 progressed, what had been weekends of responsibility deepened. Anna began missing the twins’ medical appointments, so I took over those. And at least three times, she did not show up when it was time to pick up the kids, setting off a mad scramble to find her or find a place to put the kids while I worked at a legal paper. For two feature stories a month, I was able to rent the apartment owned by the publisher of the Minnesota Lawyer, and I did all the freelance writing I could get my hands on.
The unmanageability of addiction does not begin and end with the addict. All those around them begin to pivot and react to the pathology in their midst. After awhile, I came to understand just a small bit of the mayhem I had inflicted on bystanders. In October of 1989 I found a sheriff’s note on Anna’s door, saying that the house was being foreclosed on. She was inside, surrounded by a collage of junk, puttering around and saying that it would all work out, that she had some money coming in soon. On October 20, I stopped by to get the girls. They looked remarkably out of sorts. Anna talked absently about being short on diapers again and that Steve had said he was bringing some food over, but he had not come. In truth, he had mostly pulled out a couple of weeks before, no longer able to abide what was going on.
I mumbled something about bringing them back soon, and we went to the nearby 7-Eleven on Penn and Dowling avenues in North Minneapolis. The twins were frantic, wailing their heads off, so I could not bring them in the store. More so than most parents, I was freakish about leaving them in the car, a body memory gripping me when I stepped away even for a second. I waited until the spot right in front of the door opened up, and I went and quickly bought diapers, milk, new bottles, and some bananas.
While I changed them, they each drained a bottle of milk. And then another. They ate the bananas with an animal intensity while I stood outside the window of the car and stared at them. I decided not to bring them back, not really knowing what that meant other than the fact that I would need more clothes and more money.
On a trip back to Minneapolis in 2007, I sat outside the convenience store, which had changed names and owners many times. I stood in the snowy parking lot with the nineteen-year-old version of the twins and tried to remember if I had really thought about what I was doing. Did I sense that what seemed like a rolling tragedy was actually the beginning of a spectacular adventure? Not quite, but something about standing on that forlorn patch of tar gave me goose bumps.
38
A VERSION OF NORMAL
In my replies, I tried to console him by pointing out how hard it is for human beings to think beyond their immediate situation. It is a matter of feeling and not of reason: prone to consider the presen
t their abiding lot, they are incapable, so to speak, of seeing round the corner—and that probably applies more to bad situations than to good ones.
—THOMAS MANN, DOCTOR FAUSTUS
Where do victims come from? Are they conjured by fate, manufactured by punishing circumstance, or is the hand that strikes them seemingly from out of nowhere actually their own in disguise?
Anna’s life has been a litany of woe. She pushed through a tough upbringing by being smart enough to see an opportunity and take it. Still, much of the rest of her life has been like a bad indie movie: a tableau of trailers, health fiascos, bad men, and busted dreams, along with the occasional pair of handcuffs. The Irish in me wanted my children to be loyal to her—she was family—but I was at a loss to explain why things always went so badly for her. I have heard enough of her version, often at very high volume on the phone, to know that I am cast as a cunning narcissist who tipped her over, took what he wanted, and kept moving. But I have been out of her life for years, and even stipulating the damage I inflicted, things still refuse to go her way.
When her house was foreclosed in November of 1989, Anna was very much at loose ends. The twins were with me, her other two children remained, but something was about to give. They too wanted to come with me when I left, not because I had been good to them—I had been in an accident with her son in the car while I was no doubt intoxicated and I was a monster for much of the time they knew me—but because even at the tender ages of five and two, they could see the trend. In the second week of November, I called her family, and they intervened, sending Anna to detox. She came out and began using. Her children were now scattered to her family and me, and she was in a house full of the detritus of her past, with a cord from a neighbor providing a little bit of electricity. The appliances had been sold. It was, as I recall, the saddest place on earth. My father, who always liked Anna and understood the mania of addiction, went with me to try to help her with her next move. She refused to go back to treatment and said that she would travel to her parents’ house in Texas to regroup. It took her a week to pack up what she could carry. It was hard to watch, even for somebody like me who knew every inch of the bottom. When she left, I told her that I would send the kids along in six months after she got settled. Did I mean it? I have no idea. I didn’t know what she was going to do from one day to the next, and I did not have much in the way of plans myself.