by David Carr
In the third week of November 1989, she and her other two kids took a long, brutal bus trip to Texas. Many years later, sitting with me outside a hotel in Arizona, she doesn’t remember things any better than I do.
“I started using again; I knew I needed help,” she said. “I felt like I had taken care of the kids all this time, I felt like you could help me. I never in my wildest dreams thought you would take them from me and never return them.”
Me either, really. Sitting with a camera trained on the mother of my children, I feel like a voyeur, less O. J. Simpson than Kato Kaelin, a bystander at terrible events. Anna is a talker, direct in her speech, but she has correctly surmised that talking about my life will mean talking about hers. Today is ugly, not on purpose, but it is a moment defined by savage, intimate things between us, long buried. In the ten years since we had seen each other, the past came up only in bursts, a sudden screaming match when the patina of civility between us crumbled. We were two people terribly disappointed in our former selves and terribly disappointed in each other. She talked about leaving Minneapolis back then.
“I knew I needed a change, I knew I needed something. Going to my parents’ house, that was not what I needed. It takes about six months for your brain to start working again. It’s a six-month deal. You don’t get it in two weeks, you don’t get it in a month, you don’t even get it in three months, you get it in six months, minimum. So I gave it my little shot, and, of course, I couldn’t do it. I think I was at my mom’s a month or two, and I was served with child abandonment papers, and I felt like a wounded animal.”
It was actually six months later. In that time, she came back to Minneapolis in early December for a few days and saw the kids twice, for about two hours. She was in the bars drinking, which was a new and unwelcome trend. We dropped her off at the bus station, and she called a week later from Texas, saying she had been assaulted on a date. In February of 1990 she called and said she needed money to come back to Minneapolis to be with the kids. I sent some small money, but she called a week later and said her plans had changed. According to a journal I kept at the time, she called on March 2, on March 16, on April 7, on April 15—the girls’ second birthday—and April 23, each time saying she was on her way back to Minnesota. It became clear that she wasn’t coming back any time soon.
We made do, and the new normal set in. My family began to believe that I was actually about something, that I had finally made a commitment that I could live up to. My mother went to garage sales in the tonier suburbs, coming back with barely worn matching outfits that were very much in style. And she didn’t just drop off those clothes—she came back every week to pick up laundry and leave clean clothing, organized by color and folded into daily piles for fear that, left to my own devices, I would make poor choices. My sister Lisa began providing day care for the twins at some insanely low rate as I worked more and more. Each day when I came back to pick up the girls, they were a bit more schooled in becoming young ladies. My sister Coo was the source of fun and regular dinners out. Friends would drop by without announcement, knowing we were mostly around and that the twins would always have some new trick up their sleeves.
I began consulting with a lawyer on a regular basis because at some point it became clear that what had started out as a temporary patch was settling into something more permanent. On May 11, 1990, I filed a petition with the court for temporary sole physical custody.
In Anna’s eyes, I was a thief, something I had never believed about myself. Through the years, she had come to believe that I stole her drugs, her money, her heart, and finally her children. If not for me and the misery I brought, she believed, everything would have turned out OK. She is not great on the details that went off in the maelstrom we created, beyond pointing out that any narrative that suggests that I was a fair and good man is a false memory.
39
LESSER EVIL
Personal myths are described by William James as a badge of fallen nature, a way of helping the self elude unspeakable truths. I have mine, and Anna had hers, and much of it would not be reconciled.
I remember being supremely confident that not only would I prevail in the matter of the ultimate custody of the twins, but that I would be an adequate and perhaps gifted father. But as a matter of history, I had not demonstrated that I had the capacity to take care of a friend’s ficus plant for a week, let alone play a singular role in nurturing and raising twin baby girls. Perhaps because history has acquitted the outcome, I always believed that the legal case was open and shut.
In this formulation, when I started pursuing custody, I was just a beefier version of Mother Teresa, all selflessness and calm, and Anna was a nasty basket case. Eighteen years after the case was decided, I went to see Barbara, the attorney who helped me obtain custody of my daughters. Back then she was a junior associate at my uncle Joe’s law firm in St. Paul. At the time, he was still trying to find a place to put the death of his son, Tommy, and I think it gave him comfort to know that he was helping me and mine find our way. Barbara had never been involved in a family-law case, and I was manifestly unable to pay, so we were something of a match.
Barbara is now, as irony would have it, a remarkably successful family law attorney in the suburban Twin Cities. In truth, I was there mostly to say thank you. I had spent enough time looking into the history of our little family to know that Barbara had done an amazing amount of legal work to bring our future forward and had received exactly nothing in return, save the knowledge that she had represented my interests avidly. Because I was confident in how I came to be chosen to parent Erin and Meagan, driving out to her office was a courtesy call, with not much thought to any reporting to be done.
She did not look much different from when I showed up at her office back in 1989. I quickly ran the CliffsNotes version of the case, with special emphasis on how recovery, nascent as it was, had left me qualified to take control of these girls’ destiny. These many years later, Barbara hesitated when I ran that bit, and then told a different story. She began with the moment I first walked into her office.
“You were rough…you looked, you looked unwell,” she said. “In the first place, you weighed, I bet you weighed close to three hundred pounds. It was in the winter, and you had on a very heavy coat, but it obviously didn’t fit you, it was raggedy. If I had seen you on the street, I would have thought you were homeless, because you were very rough. Your hygiene was bad, your eyes were rheumy.”
But even so, I was a man about my business, right?
“I wanted to help you, but I’d never seen anybody look rough; I’d never seen a client look like that,” she said, looking at me to see how all of this new information was landing. “I wasn’t used to having clients look like you. I didn’t do criminal, I represented banks and mortgage companies, and so to have you come in and want custody of two little babies, um, I struggled with whether or not that was even a realistic goal that we should consider, because I didn’t know if you were in a place physically, emotionally, or financially to provide for babies. I didn’t know if you had any idea what it meant to be a parent and raise children, and it wasn’t my job to have that discussion with you. I couldn’t tell if you were following along well enough to understand the impact of what this would mean to your life.”
Her recollection created some significant dissonance with what I had thought were indelible memories of the time, but then, she had been the one taking notes. Our every transaction and conversation had been memorialized in comprehensive form in a file she gave to me.
“I had no idea what you were using,” she said, admitting that she preferred not to. “Even to this day, I don’t think I ever knew.” I told her that my last stop before I sobered up was shooting coke. “Oh, my good God, David.”
So other than being addled from an unspeakable habit, a little smelly, and a touch on the amazingly obese side, I was good to go. Ready to star in one of those car commercials where the kids crack wise in the backseat while the dad says so
mething sage and knowing into the rearview. Except I didn’t have a car. And the kids did not belong to me. I had never married their mother or established my paternity. I had no insurance, and I had not paid taxes in several years.
Instinctively—Barbara was and is a brilliant attorney—she became my player-coach, working to help me build a life as much as build our case, even though she barely knew where to begin. She started with the health of the babies and then got into the basic blocking and tackling of raising them.
“The girls were crack babies, and I remember we were concerned that you understand fully the impact, if there was any impact on their development, and so we tried to get that checked out,” she said. “And we talked about how you take care of babies. Then when the babies were finally with you, you kept extensive notes about what you did, because I was really concerned that if a judge saw you in that shape, his first impression would be similar to mine, and we wouldn’t have a chance. It didn’t matter what Anna looked like.”
She was a lawyer in possession of a bad set of facts who made do with what she had.
“I remember asking you, ‘Keep track of when you feed them and how you make the bottles and how many times you change their diapers, and when you do the laundry, and how you put them to bed, and get a routine established for your day so that there’s something predictable that you can count on and get yourself into a routine with the kids.’ I asked you to keep journals, do you remember that?”
Revisiting the issue with Barbara, I talked about how we managed to convince Anna to take a drug test when she finally did come back from Texas. We made visitation conditional on a clean result, and she agreed to be tested. She came up positive for cocaine and pot, a slip that we exploited. I remembered this as a clever linchpin in our legal strategy, but Barbara reminded me that Anna had failed that test over and over, that she moved in with one dope dealer when she got to town and then moved in with another. How she missed appointments to see the kids, missed court dates, switched lawyers, and eventually just gave up.
I didn’t steal these children. One day I didn’t bring them back, we moved in for a bit with my parents, and then I found a place. But I did not take them; they were given to me. A four-inch-thick file that Barbara gave me was full of Anna’s nice tries, broken promises, and full-on face-plants.
I would drop them off for a visit with Anna, and Meagan would cut her own hair, or end up in the ER because she had stuck eyeliner in her eye, or had cuts all over her legs from using a razor in the bathroom. Anna would be sober and reasonable for a while, and then something would happen, and she would fall down.
In her affidavit at the time, Anna describes it differently. Because I had served time as a wrecking ball in her life, she felt that I was hardly entitled to pull this holier-than-thou crap in court and that she deserved custody regardless of her fitness at the time. In her filing to the court, she said I had:
1. Ruined her life. True, but it was sort of tit for tat.
2. Physically and psychologically abused her when we lived together. Dead bang true.
3. Left her when she became pregnant. False.
4. Forced her to leave for Texas by my abusive behavior. False. I was long past terrorizing her; she was doing a pretty good job of it herself.
5. Ignored the fact that she had been sober and fully employed since she moved to Texas. True to an extent, at least in terms of the ignoring part, because it was all lies.
6. Reneged on an agreement to send the children there along with child support after six months. True, but I had my reasons.
7. Ignored the fact that she called constantly when she was in Texas. Almost never, and if she did, she was geeked or drunk.
8. Used her absence to make a move on custody. True, to a point. I had the children, but no portfolio to go with that fact. And she continued to say she was coming back and never seemed to pull it off.
There is an embedded bias in the legal system toward the mother in custody matters. And once push came to shove, she decided that maybe I wasn’t their actual father. Those were confusing times, after all, she said. Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less—I had already decided I was their father—although there would have been profound legal consequences had it been discovered that the kids I had been taking care of did not share my genes. On June 6, 1991, a letter arrived saying the following: “Based on testing the genetic systems shown on the attached protocol, falsely accused males can be excluded in 96 percent to 99 percent of cases. The results obtained in this case do not exclude David Carr.” The dry scientific rhetoric did not disguise the fact that most people who ended up being tested were hoping to be excluded, while I was looking for precisely the opposite result.
While I was going back through the journal entries Barbara gave me, I saw that I had been nominated for something called the National Victory Award. Each state has a nominee, someone who has overcome some difficulty, and there is a ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and coffee at the White House. Although I generally loved attention, this version of it was keenly embarrassing, which may be why I never mentioned it to anyone after it happened. One of the nominees for the Victory Award had been shot, lost his sight, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean by himself, or something really extraordinary like that. And then there was me. People at the various events for the award would politely ask me why I had been selected to represent Minnesota, and I never could think of the right thing to say. “Um, I used to stick things up my nose, and now I don’t anymore, and, um, I’m raising the children that I brought into this world.” We stayed at the Watergate and I journaled the trip:
It was still a sweet, sweet time. My mother and I flew with the twins, and we both had suites at the Watergate Hotel. I was very excited about the trip—I went to Brooks Brothers and bought an unfortunate pink dress shirt, which I still have. The file from Barbara noted that the day before we were going to leave, Anna tried to get a judge to stop me from taking the kids out of the state. Nice.
As my attorney, Barbara had an iffy, nonpaying client and a lot of other question marks. “I guess I’m competitive enough, I wanted to win,” she said, “especially since Anna didn’t have a lawyer for part of the time, and I thought, ‘If I can’t even win a case without a lawyer on the other side, what kind of a lawyer am I?’”
It was not, however, a popular case back at headquarters. “Inside the firm, they started questioning,” she recalled. “‘Why are you spending all this time on David Carr? He’s not paying us, this is a free case. Just put in your appearance. He’s a drug addict, Barbara, this is a lost cause.’
“Your journal started out being kind of random ideas that weren’t connected. There’d be no organization, no rationale from point A to point B,” she said. “And over time you became a writer again. Your journal started making sense, and it would tell a story—had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The random ideas were minimal at the end. And I would say that’s kind of a metaphor for what was going on in your life at that time, because you were putting your life back together too.”
Speaking of exhibits, after much adjudication and negotiation, the Hennepin County Court eventually decided that I was “a fit and proper person to have the permanent care, custody, and control of said minor children.”
History suggests that things turned out as they should have, but Anna’s suggestion that I was not the obvious choice for the twins’ custodial parent found significant traction when I went back and looked at the record. I had won a tallest-midget contest with Anna, nothing more. Each of us had a history of relapse, and mine was far more extensive than hers. The lie that I told myself—that I was made entirely new by my decision to lay off drugs—kept doubt at a safe remove. If I really examined my fitness in all of its dimensions, I would have been paralyzed. I was sober, Anna was not, and therefore I was not only eligible to take custody of human souls, but qualified. It became a fairy tale that kept me alive and allowed me to make it come true. Everything good and true about my life
started on the day the twins became mine.
40
CALL WAITING
MARCH 1990
ANNA: Why can’t you just spend a little money to send them to me? I’m asking you, begging you, to send money so they can come see me.
DAVID: No.
ANNA: I can’t fucking believe that you took those babies from me, stole my money, stole my drugs, and you don’t even have the decency to send them to their mother!
JULY 2007
ANNA: I have not seen those kids in ten years. Ten years! I’m asking you, begging you, to spend a little money so that they can come see me.