by David Carr
DAVID: No.
ANNA: After you stole my money, ruined my business, ruined my life, really, you can’t fucking find it in your heart to spend a little money to send them to me!
41
NO, THANK YOU, BABY JESUS
Like a lot of people fairly new to recovery, I was not one to keep my light under a bushel even though I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I brayed about my new purchase on life to almost anyone who would listen. As time wore on, I began to speak in service to others. I spoke to youth detention centers, prison inmates and guards, detoxes, and in one memorable instance in 1990, to a committee of Catholic bishops. My brother John worked with them and arranged to have the bishops hear from his little brother, one of God’s wayward children.
When we got together to talk at a coffee shop in Minneapolis in 2006—he was visiting from Washington, DC—he recalled that when I was using, I drove my mother crazy. “She’d say, ‘I don’t want him dead, but I want him hurt bad enough so he stops.’”
After I finally managed to stop, John had me speak to the bishops. He felt I carried the message very well, had an impact on the assembled, but pointed out that I was a handful afterward. “We were having lunch or whatever, and you leaned over to Cardinal Hickey and you said, ‘What’s it feel like to be called Your Eminence?’”
When John got home, he sent me a copy of my remarks from that day.
Those folks who manage to stay clean for a month are really still very sick, vulnerable people. In that sense, the unconditionally loving arms of the Church could possibly mean the difference between somebody living or dying. It was hard to avoid a spiritual dimension in my own recovery. I woke up to a miracle every day that I was clean and crawled into bed each night grateful.
Part of the program that I am living every day requires that I take a fearless moral inventory of myself and share it with another person. The priest listened impassively as I described leaving my children parked outside the crack house on a cold winter’s night. He didn’t react when I talked about leaving them hungry while I took another hit. When I was finished, I was crying. I asked how I could ever be forgiven. Each sober breath you draw is an act of grace, my friend said. You are making amends every day you do not use. I found enough comfort in what he said to forgive myself…
I am not a big believer in the “war on drugs.” There is no war, and there are no sides. There is only addiction and the human and social consequences that go with it. The Church can do more than mitigate the gravest of those problems. In my opinion, by demonstrating a willingness to minister to those afflicted with this disease, the Church becomes better…The Church has the proximity and the people to make a difference in what seems like an insoluble problem.
In today’s environment, drug addicts have become almost like lepers. It seems like it is an entirely appropriate place for the Church to serve. Helping people rebuild their lives sounds like noble work to me.
42
POWER TRIO
When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances or has kids out of wedlock, and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, a burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a male, and he becomes a crown prince. See the lone white male doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! (I found out later that regardless of that conceit, I was not Erin’s and Meagan’s mom. Their mom was their mom.) Why is it that the same series of overt acts becomes somehow ennobled by gender?
I’m not saying that raising children, especially by yourself, is a trip to the Caribbean, but single parenting is as old as reproduction. Families declare themselves in all sorts of versions, and ours happened to be two adorable toddlers stapled to more than two hundred pounds of large, white male. Still, people who knew our circumstance marveled at its idiosyncrasy. And people who had known me before the twins wondered all the more. My mom, who knew me best, did not doubt my intent, only my constancy.
I knew how to change a diaper. Having worked in nursing homes, I had cleaned up ancient crones, young mentally retarded kids, and surprisingly strong old men who did not like some stranger pulling down their pants. And I had good, fast hands from my days as a waiter. But what of my heart? Had years of self-seeking left it atrophied, incapable of responding to the pitter-patter of little feet? Not so, as it turns out.
Having children has an enormously simplifying effect on life. Farranging, drug-induced ramblings about the meaninglessness of life defined by Sisyphus on one pole and Kierkegaard on the other were replaced by a more prosaic—and ultimately more engaging—issue: Now that I have produced these children, how will I hunt and kill enough food to keep them thriving? (Other questions came along for the ride: Is frozen corn a vegetable? It is when I am doing the cooking. Do those awful pink-meat hot dogs count as a serving of protein? Here, have two. How many times a week can you legitimately serve generic macaroni and cheese? I say five.)
Like most single parents, I was constantly impaled on a fence between making money to meet my kids’ physical needs and being present to meet their emotional ones. There was almost no work I would not do. I wrote for a state-sponsored drug policy newsletter, I did rock band profiles. I wrote a politics column for the Reader, I did features for the Minnesota Twins baseball program. I did a collective profile of the meanest divorce lawyers in town for the city magazine. The magazine editor, Claude, thought the first write-through was flat—he was right, I was incredibly busy and mailed it in—and called to say I could take the kill fee or try a rewrite; it made no difference to him. The stakes were high, with $700 hanging in the balance. It might as well have been $10,000. I drilled in and wrote it with all my might. Claude called back and said, “I like it. It’s got people, it’s got mood, it’s fun and well written.” I hung up the phone and dropped to my knees and wept, muttering a prayer of thanks and relief.
The God thing was weird. All the theological debate seemed at one remove, and a higher power was in our midst simply because we needed one to be there. It solves some practical issues—I had no time to come up with my own version of a creation myth, so that all-powerful God of the Catholic realms that I had been raised on came in very handy. In July of 1989, we went to St. Stephen’s, a church in inner-city Minneapolis, to baptize the white-cosseted twins into a community of faith. My family, Erin’s and Meagan’s new godparents—my brother Jim, my sisters Missy and Coo, and my friend Chris—and the folks from the rest of my life were present for the big occasion.
We had a picnic in Powderhorn Park afterward, and I can remember standing on the hill overlooking the party, watching as Erin and Meagan were passed around like treasure. It felt glorious, like I wasn’t really faking it, that I was in fact a parent and my kids belonged somewhere. The guest book from that day is full of raves about the demeanor and coiffure of the twins, including the little ribbons my mom taped to their mostly bald heads.
“A picture of loveliness,” wrote my friend Nick. “And then there’s the father.”
If Anna was in and out of the lives of the children, Doolie came in and out of mine. The things that brought us together were still there—intimacy and mutual attraction, a shared sense of humor—but now they had to travel across far too much rubble from the past. Doolie was happy that I was flexing my muscles as a parent, but she knew where the babies came from and what a duplicitous, violent bastard I had been. She forgave by turns but could not forget, given that Erin and Meagan were constantly entwined in our legs when we were together. There was some drama, nothing like the past, and we gradually began to go different ways.
I joined a single parenting group where I was the lone male in the room and began to develop connections in various programs of recovery. The twins were not a burden in dating matters. Precisely the opposite. Among the pieces of business I put together was a column called “Because I Said So” for my friend Marci’s family newspaper. The picture that ran with it communicated innocence and decen
cy, not generally what I featured.
Readers would look at that picture and the cloying copy that went with it and come away with a nice first impression. Oh, he seems sweet, sitting there with those nice babies and all. Doesn’t it look as if he could use some help? I wasn’t exactly working the Mr. Mom thing, but I didn’t bury it, either. For one thing, anybody who dated me had to know that if there was any finishing game involved, it would be at my place. It was important to get the babysitter off the clock as fast as possible. The columns made our little upper duplex, generally a nexus of mayhem, sound like a kind of wonderland.
Men who fancy themselves players will often get a really cute, frisky dog, a warm-blooded accessory that precedes them down the sidewalk, wagging its tail and making nice. Now, I never was much of a player, but I can tell you that twin girls—friendly, sweet, adorable—make every dog seem like a pit bull by comparison. When I was out and about, the twins signaled many things about me: That I was already involved and hence not a threat. That I was in touch with my androgynous-man-woman spirit. That I was responsible enough to be let out of the house entrusted with two gorgeous little girls. Only the last part was true, and only because there was no one to ask for permission.
Our first place together was at 2612 Dupont Avenue, an upper duplex that was sort of creepy and mouse-ridden, but it was ours, giving us defendable space that was not in my parents’ basement. We did not have a car that worked, and we ended up schlepping to buses on many brutally cold winter days. (To this day, living in suburban New Jersey, where a bus to New York is a way of life, I detest riding it, in part because it arcs back to a time when I had no choice.) We went through a couple of junker cars and eventually bought a rolled-over white Volvo wagon that the twins called “Beauty,” not because it looked good, but because it ran. My pal Billy pounded out the dents, sold it to us on the cheap, and then made sure it kept running, one of the many not-so-random acts of kindness that helped us achieve normalcy.
I was a single parent from the time my girls were one until they were six. Whenever the subject comes up, people always wonder “how I did it.” I didn’t. People rooted for us, in part because of the novelty, and in part because of the stakes.
Nancy, a pal I had a long-running crush on from the days when I worked with her at the Little Prince, conjured a home for us using a black belt in thrift shopping and glue guns. When we moved into a place on Pillsbury, she found giant rugs, cool lamps, toy boxes, couches, and on and on.
My mother dressed those children and gave me constant lectures on the importance of good grooming, if not for me, then for them. She knew that if it were left to me, they would walk around in gunnysacks, and dirty ones at that.
Every Sunday I went to a meeting that I needed to go to because my friend Dave showed up, rain or shine. Even though I had stepped out on Doolie and had these girls with another woman, she was more than happy to stop by and take them off my hands for a few hours. My pal Rick from Eden House, now back in the middle of his old quasi-gangster life, always seemed to have time to drive us wherever we needed to be. Chris, their godfather, was the same way.
Fast Eddie was my ace in the hole. On a bitterly cold morning in November of 1991, my unfortunate Grand Prix threw a rod on Excelsior Boulevard near Lake Calhoun. He was there in ten minutes, bundling the twins into his warm car.
Some of the interest in us was not so sweet: A checkout lady at Rainbow Foods watched Meagan melt down over a pack of gum and prattled on about how “Daddy is having a little trouble with the babysitting.” Having heard this more than once, I turned to her and said, “It’s called parenting, you twit.” Without fail, when one of the kids got hurt in a public place, skinning a knee, some woman would swoop in out of nowhere. More than once I had to elbow aside someone with a hiss. As far as I could tell, taking care of my children did not require ovaries.
To feel the trust and dependence of small beings is a terrible and beautiful thing. Not ennobling, precisely, but it allows anyone, even me, to access his better nature. One night I was crashing on a brutal deadline. I decided at about three in the morning that I needed to just lie still for a moment. I went to my bed in the next room and laid down, but left my feet on the floor so I would not fall asleep for the night. Dozing in that state, I heard a noise from the office: the sound of my air-conditioner being set on the floor. I sat up, and when I walked in, there was a geeked-looking crackhead halfway in the window. With the girls sleeping behind me a few rooms away, it was fight or flight. Slam the door and call the cops? Naw. Fight.
I would love to say that I advanced and kicked his face so hard that it gave him a mouthful of bloody Chiclets, but it was really more of a shove with my foot than a kick. He left.
But at some point, everyone would go away, and it would be just us. “Just us,” I would say. “Just us,” the twins would say.
It could be glorious, but it was also capable of being its own fresh hell. On some nights I would find myself outside the door of our apartment, saying a prayer that was really a mix of swearing and muttering. Dear God, please know that these little girls have me on the run.
Meagan was not a good sleeper, which meant that she would wake up Erin, which would mean that I would be up, sometimes night after night with one or the other. Absent alcohol or coke for artificial stamina, I began to wear out. Wendy, a playwright who lived downstairs from us on Dupont and loved the girls, called the cops one night because she was absolutely sure that no one with a pulse could sleep through Meagan’s wailing. But there I was, in a coma born of exhaustion.
My journals from the time are filled with desperate entries that sound like they were written from a foxhole. Like a lot of newish parents, I wrote longing sonnets about sleep and often wished there was someone, anyone, to take the weight. Women often marry men in the belief that they will grow into something else. That never worked on me, drunk or sober, but these little women landed on me with profound effect.
My pal Dave the businessman, a very successful guy who adopted me in recovery, seemed to know when the cavalry was required. Our first Christmas on our own was looking a little lean. He came over, peeking around to make sure the girls were in bed, and then carried in bag after bag of presents. He and I crept around my house, stashing goodies.
Many years later I told Dave that given the amount of help we had, it was not as difficult as some of my friends and family thought. He disagreed. “You were living in a shithole,” he said, taking a bite of a burger at a joint in Edina. He said I had “no money,” that I was “fat, smoking, eating all the shit you shouldn’t eat; you were like a time bomb. I thought to myself, This guy is just hanging on, just barely hanging on. Rarely did you smile, did you laugh—that’s one of the things I remember the most. Unless you were with your girls.
“But what you didn’t talk about was how hard it was for you to stay straight. You always knew that you were just one second from going right back over, but you knew your girls depended on you, and you were bound and determined to do it.”
43
TYPING TOWARD BETHLEHEM
In the years since I reentered the journalism business, I have always been convinced that I got back on the horse through the kindness of others. True to a point, but only to a point. After talking with editors I worked for and with, it was clear that I mostly hacked my way back in.
“You made an assault on the profession,” Erik said, sitting outside the Les Halles restaurant in Washington, where we both had turns editing the Washington City Paper. “It was a full-on assault. There’s no other way to describe it. Your ambition and your energy and your every move were calibrated very closely. You don’t look like one, but you are a climber.”
At bottom, most of my success has derived from a fairly common characteristic in reporters: The most interesting thing to me is what I’m told can’t be found out. When I hear that, an autodidactic impulse kicks in, and I will turn over every single rock. And because I had been in some tight corners before and had known real fe
ar, if I found something that was true, I was happy to just write it up and deal with the fallout. No big.
In those early years back as a working reporter, I wrote media coverage that deconstructed the shortcomings of the daily paper. My political coverage was savage and ill tempered—I once said that a U.S. senator from Minnesota let “his moral compass spin like a prop on a C-130.” When one of the biggest lawyers in town bilked his firm, I did forensics on his motives. I wrote stories that suggested developers were getting one over on the city, that local officials had manifest conflicts, and that the liquor industry had outsize influence.
Looking at the clips from those days, the reader does not hear my twin girls racing around in the background, or the dormant addict keening for just one more romp. The clips are all of a piece—a reporter in command of his information and revelation of same.
There was plenty of professional awkwardness to begin with when I was attempting to rehabilitate my reputation after a very public pratfall. Part of the problem with authentic recovery is that you are stuck with the same rhetorical set that you had when you were chronically relapsing. This time, I’m really about something. No, this time. No, now, I really, really mean it. That was then, today I’m completely done with that shit. OK, I know I said it before, but once and for all, it is over. Unless it isn’t.
The addict shares the skepticism of those who behold him. Part of it is practical—you have to do the hard work of staying sober—but part of it is mystical. Guys I thought were perfectly fine, running a better show than I ever dreamed of, were the ones who jumped off a bridge, ate a shotgun, OD’d. Yeah, sure, better them than me, but shit, what if it were me? The defining characteristic of recovery from addiction, or any other chronic health issue, is that you are fine until you are not.