by David Carr
To the normal person, it can seem completely baffling. In my case, why would someone who was quick out of the gate as a writer with nothing but future piss it all away through self-seeking self-destruction? But civilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I’ve watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?
Regular people, people who are not drunks or addicts, will drink too much, get a horrible hangover, and decide not to do it again. And then they don’t. An addict decides that there was something wrong with his technique or the ratios. Too much coke or not enough. It was the gin; from now on, brown liquor only. And water, I forgot to drink water. Or maybe it was the lack of food. Next time I think about doing shots on an empty stomach at three in the afternoon, I’m going to order a grilled cheese. That should make a huge difference.
Addicts are not types. They walk among us. The quiet, prim girl maintaining the computer servers who is sick a lot. The manically controlling überbitch sales manager. The meek, undermining quisling who runs the office and is up in everybody’s business. The back-slapping boss who seems so happy about everything every day that it calls for just a couple of pops. Drunks all. Pill heads. Coke fiends. All flavors, all living nights full of desperation and longing, followed by fitful, mortifying mornings filled with desperate oaths to never let it happen again. But it will.
Jay, the editor of the business magazine who gave me a choice of treatment or unemployment, said the fact that I was able to work again had to do with a reputation for industriousness that may not have matched my penchant for spreading mayhem, but it was measurable.
“It’s a small town, and you had a big reputation,” he said. “Everyone knew what to expect, everyone knew that there were some high positives and high negatives, that there was going to be some irregularity, pushing on the deadlines, you might not get precisely what you were expecting. There would be too many words, and also it would be highly readable and that it would be engaging to anyone who is going to read it. The risk was always worth it, and people would want to read your story and see how that turned out. Beginning, middle, and end, you thought through them. You had the ability to write prodigiously, write four thousand words in a six-or seven-hour stretch.”
A lot of people take the geographic cure after they sober up by engineering a move so that they don’t have to hang around the same corners. If you evacuate the scene of your crimes, you don’t have to beg your way back to solvency by asking for work from the same people you screwed over a scant few years before. Some different editors were in place, but much of my reentry into journalism was at the Twin Cities Reader and Corporate Report, both places where I had fallen through the ice. Leaving town was not really an option—I had an entire support group that I would have been a fool to walk away from.
At the Reader, I did a variety of things as a freelancer, including a cheesily dubbed column, “Politics as Usual.” Given the benefit of hindsight, I was wildly wrong in some of my predictions—I said that guy named Wellstone never had a shot until it seemed like he did—but the discourse was very modern, almost bloglike, with a directness and pithiness I sort of wish I could access now. I still covered crime—one of the more important stories was about a serial rapist who had a bead on the women in Minneapolis, but the police remained clueless. I often got ahead of the dailies by simply stating what was in plain sight instead of submitting to the straitjacket of spokespeople and prepared statements and pat answers.
I called Tony, the former chief of police I bumped heads with on occasion—when I wasn’t pinballing through arrest and booking a floor below him. Chief Tony had a collection of misfit cops that he took a special interest in—sometimes the more wounded the better—and I found the same soft spot back when I was using.
“You were a serious working fuckup, no question about it.” He may have heard a few things about what I did when I wasn’t working stories, but nothing that rose to a level requiring investigation. We had in common a high regard for cops and a low regard for the politics of butt covering. “You were tough, but you were not cynical and did not want favors. You were a tortured soul trying to get it right, and I was impressed,” he said. “There was something real about you, not facile or smooth. You were always kind of a struggler, and I loved working with you.”
Sometimes a professional history that had its share of tin cans clanking along behind it had its upsides. Other people who’d had a public stumble figured that someone with his own empirical knowledge concerning human frailty might be less apt to make snap judgments about others. People with complicated stories didn’t mind, and in some cases sought out, someone like me who had a complicated past.
Lyle Prouse, a captain with Northwest Airlines, was a ramrod former marine who began the morning of March 8, 1990, with his usual thirty push-ups, even though he and his crew had been out drinking hard at the Speak Easy bar in Moorhead, a Minnesota town just across the border from Fargo, North Dakota. He went out to Hector International Airport in Fargo to captain a 6:00 a.m. flight to Minneapolis, and an official from the FAA was there to meet him, having received a call about some hard-drinking pilots. There were some concerns about the so-called “bottle to throttle” rules, which called for a full eight hours before anybody who had been drinking got into the cockpit. There was a series of conversations, some confusion, and while the FAA guy was on the phone, Lyle and his crew took off with fifty people on a 727 to Minneapolis. After they arrived at nine-fifteen, a blood alcohol test was administered, and Lyle’s result was .128, over the legal limit for driving a car. Hello, Jay Leno punch line; good-bye, career. Lyle was sentenced to sixteen months in a federal prison.
There was a mad scramble for “the get,” the big interview before he went to jail, including Oprah and Geraldo. Peter, a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney, caught the mother of all DWI cases. I knew Peter three ways: He did a lot of federal criminal work, which put him on my beat, we both drank at McCready’s back in the day, and a couple of times when I got in jams, I called for free legal advice. He called me and offered me the exclusive, which I wrote up for Corporate Report. Instead of being a tabloidlike story about the lunatic who flew a plane drunk, it detailed a far more nuanced version of events, including the shades of gray that live in all good narratives:
Since his arrest, Prouse has been dealing with his alcoholism, spending 60 days as an inpatient and uncounted hours subsequently in various support groups. The former captain explains that, by giving an interview, he hopes to help get out the message that people can and do recover from the disease of alcoholism. He is noticeably eager to share the message of recovery, but chuckles bitterly at the suggestion that he might be on the type of “treatment high” experienced by newly recovered people who seek to let the rest of the world in on their secret.
“I certainly don’t have anything to be high about,” Prouse says. “For 52 years, I set very high standards for myself and the people around me, and I was lucky enough to hit most of them. Then this happened.”
I went back and asked Peter why he gifted me with a huge exclusive. “You were in recovery, you knew the score, and Lyle trusted you,” he explained. “It wasn’t more complicated than that.”
Lyle did his time without complaint or excuse, made amends, and ended up not only back in the cockpit but training other pilots.
Given my habit of going on and off the wagon as much as a stagecoach driver, people in the racket were leery of me even when I had a couple years of sobriety under my belt. I didn’t blame them. When I set about climbing out of the ditch I had sailed into, I viewed any assignment as a terrible kindness, a selfless act on the part of some editor who did it instead of giving to the March of Dimes.
No editor gave me more time or more significant assignments early in recovery than Terry, the editor of Corporate Report. I was surprised that he gave me the time of day, let alone a two-part series on a pension fund chief who had been found shot dead down by the river with his pa
nts around his ankles. And there was the story of Lyle, the airline pilot. I had always assumed that Terry, a skeptical man with a huge laugh, had a soft spot for me.
In August of 2006, I stopped by his St. Paul office, where he worked as a reporter for the Star Tribune. We walked over to the Saint Paul Hotel for lunch, and I could tell he thought the book was a stupid idea, built on the kind of self-involvement he would never truck as an editor. His soft spot was nowhere in evidence, in part, I think, because deep down, he was always amazed that I had gone a very long way with a fairly modest skill set. It was less professional jealousy than curiosity. He knew, as I did, that he was every inch the journalist I was, if not more. I can remember time and time again back in the early nineties walking into his office with flow charts of pension funds or a thick book of FAA regulations and having him stare silently at the stack for a while, chewing on a pen, and then play it back to me in a precise but casual explanation that would have taken me days or weeks to figure out.
After many years, we sat down in a booth and ordered lunch. When I got out the digital video camera, he said nothing, but you could tell from his expression that he thought it was the dumbest thing he had ever seen. As soon as I put the camera on his mug, it captured the mix of sourness and skepticism. We got started when I made some awkward reference to his kindness in working with me at a time when others were not exactly lining up. He said it was not like that at all.
“Um, no, in fact, there was probably a lack of charity in it. I didn’t know you, and I had a pretty negative view. I think some people got really caught up in the romanticism of it. There was just a kind of a Hunter S. Thompson view of you, kind of romantic, and I had sort of the opposite view. You bowl a lot of people over with your charisma, I think, and me being the sunny, dramatic person that I am, I never listened.”
He reminded me that he first started working with me because I happened to be attached to a big, fat exclusive about Lyle the pilot.
“It was exciting to think about. I can remember pitching it to our publisher, and I was fairly new at the job. I didn’t just want us to be a business magazine. I wanted us to be a great magazine, and of course I was just thinking the biggest possible things, and then the biggest possible thing sort of landed in front of me.
“It’s a national exclusive, so first of all, it’s attractive right there,” he said. And the guy who brought it in? “Maybe I was too egotistical to think about the possible repercussions or the difficulties of a big story, that you went out and got it, but maybe you’re not in game shape yet.”
Then again, he said, it wasn’t like I had been “lying around in a bunk bed eating Cheetos or anything like that. You were back working, and you had a reputation for doing and getting big stories. It wasn’t as if you were a fabricator or some ridiculous thing like that. It would be a great story if I said I was somehow helping you to get back in the game, but that would be ridiculously egotistical and untrue. It was much more pragmatic than that, I think.”
He said that I prospered because people liked to tell me things. As he talked about those days, which were heady ones for both of us, I think that some of the excitement came back to him about the fact that the little business magazine in the Midwest was going to break a huge story. Like a lot of good editors, Terry has a way of talking about the business that makes clichés ring true.
“There’s a passion, there’s a knowing,” he said, eyeing his food as it got cold. “In a way, you almost have to know how to be a journalist before you commit to being one.” He paused, putting two large hands flat on the table. “If you find out something you can do well, I don’t care if it’s whittling wood, or fixing a car, or writing a lead, if you find out you’re good at being a reporter, you just want that over and over again. You want that reinforcement, you want that feeling. I know what I’m doing. It feels good to know what you’re doing. A lot of people walking around don’t know what they’re doing, in anything. In any way. And this is something that is pretty easily measured. Did I win today?”
Terry won a lot and helped a bunch of others, including me, take a few victory laps. It was a privilege to listen to him ruminate about this thing of ours, all the more so because he dropped dead unexpectedly a month to the day after we talked. He was forty-seven, and not only one of the good ones but one of the best.
Journalism may involve typing, but excellence is dependent on the respect and trust of others. People have to be inclined to tell you things, but those relationships aren’t made over a drink after work or a quick lunch. Sources are built one story at a time. They tell you stuff, you report it out, you write it up, you get it right. On to the next—and sometimes bigger—story.
One of my best long-term political sources was Brian, a gay former activist who became a highly effective Minneapolis City Council member. Some saw him as preening and self-regarding, but he was a consistent voice for downtrodden folk who did not get a lot of play downtown. He was a master of playing the press to his own ends, and I was one of the violins that he picked up when it served his or his constituents’ purposes.
In January of 1991, I was pretty much back in the swing, and I got a call from Brian, summoning me to his office. Most of the time, talking with Brian was like spending time with a particularly large, handsome Siamese cat. He would narrow his eyes and think of something delicious he was about to share, all but licking his paws at the thought. I have no record of the following conversation, but Brian asked me if I was comfortable with keeping a secret. I was. He said this was a very big secret. I told him not to make me say it twice.
“I have AIDS,” he said. Ever the conductor, Brian wanted to roll out the story in his own way and on his own schedule. We/he decided that Minnesota Monthly, a literate local monthly that was owned by public radio, would be the right place to drop the bomb. We diagrammed the sourcing, the reporting, and a black-box agreement with the editor there.
The day the story dropped, at the end of April, we had copies delivered to all of the local television stations just before the six o’clock news, all but forcing the anchors to read right out of the magazine. “Our story,” as Brian would call it at the time, was all about living with AIDS, but that’s not how it turned out for him and many other people who were diagnosed back then. Sometime at the beginning of the summer, I put down the notebook and became part of Brian’s care team. The whole journalism thing lost salience, and I accessed skills I had learned from working as an orderly.
Brian headed toward that last door regally, a pasha surrounded by his beloved Oriental collectibles and a care group peopled by family and friends. There was something appalling about what was under way, but he brought his own catty humor to the matter at hand. I drew night duty one week, which meant sleeping near the hospital bed he had installed in his living room. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard nothing. No coughing, no stirring, no nothing.
I crept up to his bed in the darkness, terrified by the silence, and leaned in very close. Very. Close. A bored voice broke the silence:
“I’m still breathing, David. Go back to sleep.”
Brian died that August.
44
CALL US BACK WHEN PIGS FLY
Fresh off some fairly well-received exclusives, I thought I could buy me and mine a bit of security by getting a real job, perhaps at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
45
WARD CLEAVER’S LITTLE PROBLEM
Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.
—GIACOMO CASANOVA
Erin and Meagan grew up with a broad understanding of what “normal” was supposed to be. They knew from spending time around both their mom and me that there were all sorts of approaches to making your way in this world. They didn’t judge our lack of money, in part because they never wanted for much. My friends were gay and straight, black and white, lawyers and
junkies, filthy rich and dirt poor. We might spend an afternoon swimming at a pal’s mansion and then on the way home stop off to see a buddy who worked in a homeless shelter. It was less about some crunchy, encompassing notion of all God’s children than a measure of my fairly textured life.
One of my favorite pictures was taken when the girls were about four. We were at Loring Park in Minneapolis on a Monday night for movies and music. I don’t remember what the movie was, but the band The Wallets played, and my kids cruised the crowd and profiled like the scenesters they were. They were confident young ladies, pretty and very much together.
Much is visible in that picture. Erin’s bear hug on her sister and the world continues to this day, and Meagan’s attempt to please both me and the camera with an outsize smile in spite of the fact that she is being choked a bit reflects her principal engagement with life. There was nothing pitiful or weird about us. And they heard from their mom often enough to know that she loved them as well.
Around that same time, I bumped into Barb, my first treatment counselor at Parkview. I went through Parkview twice in the mid-eighties, first as an inpatient and then as an outpatient. She had my number the whole time I was her client, and knew who I was—probably better than I did at the time. Barb was very touchy-feely with a lot of her clients, but she always hopped around on one foot near me because the other was up my ass. She frequently suggested that I was (a) full of shit, (b) often unwilling to do the hard work of recovery, (c) a manipulative, deceitful person around women, and (d) a decent man under all of the arrogance and defensiveness.