The Night of the Gun

by David Carr

  We had a nice lunch in 1991 at Lawry’s, a restaurant in South Minneapolis, and I bragged about how splendidly things had turned out, how my life of duplicity and corruption was finally behind me. She listened acutely, smiled, and congratulated me on my good fortune. Then she gave me a business card from her private practice, saying I could call if things ever got bumpy.

  As I recall, I phoned her the next week.

  I called because underneath the whole Ward Cleaver/punk-rock dad thing, I was still hanging on to a part of my former self. I had maintained ongoing relationships with some of the darker women I knew out on the street, none of whom had anything to do with the kind of loving, sober bonds I was supposed to be developing. Sexually, I was still a perpetrator, with late-night visits from women I only had sex with and sometimes gave money to, in part because I no longer had pockets full of drugs. Some of them were party girls just trying to get from one high to the next, and others were working girls I had known.

  The low point came when I was driving down Lake Street near my house on Pillsbury one night when the twins were away at my mother’s, and I saw Rita, a girl I knew from the old days. She waved, and I stopped. When she got in the car, it quickly became clear that her jaw had been wired shut after it had been shattered by a beat-down from her pimp. I asked what in the world she could be doing for johns on the street in that condition. Rita offered to show me, and my stomach lurched. I gave her some money instead and dropped her off a ways down Lake Street.

  For all appearances, I was dating normal women—women I knew in meetings, women I met doing this and that—but I still was leading a double life, using women who had already been knocked around plenty. I was allegedly raising my daughters to be nobody’s object, yet I was willing to objectify and use someone else’s daughter. For all the real things I was accomplishing in terms of family and business life, the perpetrator within me, the addict trying to get over, was still drawing quiet breath. And that feeling of being a fraud is a toxic, slippery way to go, one that endangered everything else. I showed up at Barb’s office and told her that I wanted to be the man I pretended to be.

  “Then quit pretending,” she said. Week by week, appointment by appointment, she helped me integrate being a man, a father, and a human, which was all very complicated business for somebody who’d lived as I had.

  Fifteen years later, I was again sitting across from Barb, this time on a patio in South Minneapolis. She’d had her own share of travail, but looked great and was still the same alloy of steel and empathy that I had so admired.

  In order to get through a lot of the reporting, I had adopted a sort of clinical tone when I interviewed people, even those whom I’d hurt or maimed or loved. But this was different. The custody of the conversation reversed almost immediately. Not only was I revisiting behavior that anyone, even me, would find revolting, but I was doing it with someone who knew every inch of me, the history, the good and the odious. Barb was glad to see me, but none of the apparatus of reporting—the video camera, the tape recorder, the notepad—put me at a safe remove. Part of it was her clinical expertise. She was a licensed social worker, not some multidegreed nutcracker MD, and had ferocious instincts where I was concerned.

  More to the point, I was twitchy because I was talking with Barb about stuff that happened when I was stone-cold sober, when everyone around me was marveling at the turnaround in my life. The question of whether chemicals induced behavior or revealed character seemed to hang a little too close for comfort when I was sitting on that patio with Barb.

  Back when I was her client at both Parkview and in her private practice, she had watched me work the recovery stations of the cross: the defiant first-time treatment dude, the repentant relapser, and then the fully sober guy who was still capable of virulent pathology that had nothing to do with chemicals.

  “You were kind of hard nosed,” she recalled from treating me as an inpatient at Parkview. “I don’t remember you needing the Kleenex that much.” Years later, when I saw her in her private practice, the Kleenex, big fistfuls of it, came in handy. “You would never have stood for someone else treating your daughters the way you treated women.” She fixed me with a gaze that was freaky in its knowingness. “Never.”

  She made it very clear that she thought I was sexualizing the atmosphere of the home—that even if the twins didn’t know precisely what was going on, they knew something was wrong. “You had to make the changes at home with your girls if you wanted them to be little girls and have a respectable dad,” she said, suggesting that a jerk who would hook up with women in meretricious ways could not be the same guy who tucked in his babies with a story and a prayer.

  “That was part of who you were and what you brought into that home to your girls,” she said, still holding my gaze. “Sometimes you even brought the women themselves home, and because the girls were asleep, or they were off for the weekend with their mom or whatever, you told yourself that it didn’t hurt them. What I wanted to help you see was, they’re going to be affected by this because this is part of you.”

  She said that I presented some therapeutic challenges.

  “We all need boundaries, but yours, um, were tough. For some people, I think you would have been hard to crack because you had that street sense about you. But there was also that other side of you that could be a parent of two little girls who otherwise wouldn’t have had a parent. You’re very duplicitous in that sense; it was kind of in and out, in and out. There was this hard-core addict part of you, but there was also this really genuine, nice guy, fun guy, intelligent guy—what the hell is he doing here? It was just back and forth, and I would kind of go, ‘What happened to you that you’re wrecking your life with this?’ Because I just thought, Man, this is just nuts. You could have it all.”

  Eventually the street and the women who were part of that life became part of a past that I could no longer visit, even as a tourist. Like my friend Tak, the former client and now counselor at Eden House, told me, when you come in from the street, from the game, some of those slimy, loathsome reflexes come with you.

  “You played games with everybody,” Barb said. “There’s that side of you that—I don’t know…you lie or you put on kind of that, oh, arrogance is the only word I can think of that fits.”

  Beyond her expertise, part of her effectiveness had to do with gender. It took a woman to explain to me that you couldn’t compartmentalize life—be Ward Cleaver one day and some street version of Casanova the next. I had to learn to be a man, no pretending involved.

  46

  STILL LIFE WITH ALIEN

  And here might be the moment to squirt one perfect tear, all bittersweet and shimmering with dreamy resignation. Except that as the serpent once sunned its coils in Eden, patiently awaiting the opportunity to let the biggest cat in eternity out of the sturdiest bag, so a pack of Camel cigarettes stands in these wings, waiting to come on and do its most unexpected stuff.

  —TOM ROBBINS, STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER

  Cancer is the alien among us. One day you are just ambling along when a little spaceship lands somewhere in your body, and you are abducted from within.

  I had the odd experience of self-diagnosing the invasion. Late in November of 1991, I was rushing out the front door of our house on Pillsbury. There had been some melting and refreezing, and a gutter over the front steps was broken. When I hit the bottom step, my right leg folded back underneath me. It hurt so much that I threw up. I slid back up the steps on my butt and rang the bell, and the sitter who was watching the girls called an ambulance. I had pretty much shredded the meniscus in my right knee. It was surgically removed on November 21, leaving me on crutches with twin two-and-a-half-year-olds. It was pathetic, and about to get more so.

  On the night of December 8, 1991, I noticed that a couple of weeks on crutches had built up my neck muscles on the left side. Like, remarkably. The next morning, I got up to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and when I looked in the mirror, it was noticeably bigger. Overnigh
t.

  Lemme see, uncontrolled growth right over my lymph nodes. Gosh, I think I got a little touch of cancer here.

  I wheedled the twins out the door, and we went to CUCH clinic, a low-cost public health clinic affiliated with the University of Minnesota. Soon after I was examined, a bunch of other doctors and medical students came streaming in for a look at the giant tumor on the left side of my neck. Son of a bitch.

  The twins were sitting together on a single chair, happy they weren’t the ones being poked and prodded, but looking up in wonder at the number of doctors filling the room. I was referred to the University of Minnesota for a biopsy, but I already knew that things were not going my way.

  I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, and a “good” cancer if it is your turn. Curable if found in its early stages—and we were in pretty early days in spite of the tumor’s impressive growth. Now all the doctors had to do was go most of the way toward killing me in order to save my life.

  I tend to keep my mouth shut when the subject of my cancer comes up. It came and went, nothing to see here, keep moving. But after spending time with my massive medical file and reading a story I wrote later for the Twin Cities Reader, it is clear that my time with the alien left me marked. My own private Area 51.

  From the time I was little, I loved watching movies about aliens. Years after I saw the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, my dreams were filled with steel-noggined guys who spoke in detached, tinny voices as they ordered the world to submit. The aliens at hand were different. They were in me, after me, creating a self that I could not quite recognize, with an intimacy that made them infinitely more confounding and scary.

  During the time of occupation, I answered my phone with excessive cheerfulness, wrote reassuring notes to old girlfriends, and smiled knowingly whenever someone in a white coat revealed something sharp in his or her hands. I put my fingers in my ears and hummed tunelessly until someone told me the aliens were gone.

  The flat, routine call from the surgeon confirming the bad news was an anticlimax. I asked him how bad the bad news was. “Well, it certainly is not a good thing,” he said, getting in touch with his inner Martha Stewart. I hung up the phone and went in and looked at the girls, asleep already, and then went and looked in the mirror. I saw myself going away. Not dying, but not present.

  I kept waiting for someone else to panic, but the doctors and nurses went about their business with remarkable calm. From the outset, I mimicked the detachment surrounding me. My general penchant for blind aggression in almost all matters receded, and the medical records from the time noted my plucky mien. I was described over and over in the medical record as a “gentleman,” a term that did not land in my neighborhood a lot.

  There is something embarrassing about having cancer, as if I had woken in the night and found someone I did not know touching me. Once the diagnosis was clear, I broke up with a girl I had been seeing—a smart, pretty girl I’d known in recovery—because I could not bear to have someone I knew casually watch me while I was under attack. Others were abashed by the diagnosis, preferring to refer euphemistically to the disease of cancer. There was enough avoidance in all that concern that I began to think I had a case of “It,” instead of cancer. How is It going? Did they get all of It? What’s Its status? Oh, do you mean this giant cancerous tumor on my neck that is tipping my head over? “It” seems to be doing fine. The host is a little freaked out, though.

  I had many thoughts about what a juicy target I presented, the equivalent of the big-chested blond with suspect morals in the monster movie, the one who’s got to be got. With a long, venal history of cigarettes, narcotics, and Pop-Tarts, having “It” should not have come as a surprise. But Hodgkin’s is more random than that. It is a kind of malignant infection, an uncontrolled proliferation that lays siege to otherwise healthy people, regardless of their history. My suspicions came to rest on my old microwave. It had been a fixture in my parents’ home for many years, an ancient appliance of doubtful structural integrity that throbbed and buzzed with radiant energy when I used it to make popcorn. Maybe, I thought, my microwave leaked cancer into my life.

  Even though I had very little money and no insurance, I received excellent care—that Minnesota thing again—as I made my way from waiting room to waiting room. The guy who ran my case was an eminent hematologist named Greg, a man possessed of social skills rarely seen in his profession. We found ourselves cast in a 1960s-era television medical drama. He’d say things like, “We’re going to beat this thing, David,” and I suppressed a shameful urge to giggle, instead giving him the dude nod, full of resolve and confidence.

  Some of the diagnostic work was misdemeanor—CAT scans, MRIs juiced with the injection of contrast dye—and some of it was appallingly aggressive, even though they called it the most “conservative” approach. In order to avoid chemotherapy, first they had to make sure the cancer had not spread.

  I was a lucky guy in the context of some of those waiting rooms. Over the course of my treatment, I sat next to an eight-year-old girl who was being burned within an inch of her life by full-body radiation and a friendly dairy farmer from Luverne who had a steel hoop screwed into his skull so that they could pinpoint the tumor during radiation treatments. They may have smiled—humans generally respond to the absurd with some display of humor to make those around them feel better—but theirs were horrible battles, full of desperate measures and, often, disappointment.

  I had enough medical history to be something of a connoisseur, and I preferred competence and directness. The guy who did my bone marrow biopsy had little of either. Bone doesn’t anesthetize well, but has a surprising number of nerves. The doctor was nervously furtive and kept slipping off the pelvic bone he was attempting to perforate. He made grunting noises, and I even heard him quietly swear once, but he said nothing to me until he asked me to shift positions so he could get a more direct angle. “You might experience a bit of sharpness here,” he said. He slipped again, driving the huge biopsy needle deep into soft tissue. Seeking to calm his nerves and steady his hand, I cracked wise: “Sharpness, huh? Where did you intern, Dachau?” He said nothing.

  After the diagnosis, all the news was good, with nothing indicating that the alien was on the march. Dr. Greg recommended that we do a staging laparotomy, which involved making a midline incision in my abdomen, removing my spleen and squeezing it for evidence of cancer, and then taking out some lymph nodes and small chunks of my other major organs for further inquiry. I told Dr. Greg that it sounded a lot like something I had done to a frog in my high school biology class. The frog had been dead while I did all those things to it. “Yeah, well, it’s a little like that,” he said, but added that he thought it was the most prudent course of action.

  People around me, some of whom I did not know very well, came alive with opinions. Wheatgrass, they’d say with surety. Vitamin C, others would say. Had I thought about yoga? No, I thought about cancer. I was all for sending in a fully armed medical landing party that would lay waste to anything it found. I was, after all, the one with cancer, and if they thought that burning sage and meditating would do the trick, they could give it a whirl when their turn came.

  My parents were heartbroken and scared. They had watched me flop around for years, and finally, when I managed a bit of stability, it was DefCon 4 again. I can remember riding in the back of their car on the way to the staging laparotomy the day after Christmas. I don’t remember who watched the twins that day and in the days that followed while I was hospitalized, but I thought of them constantly.

  A half hour before the surgery to remove my spleen, a doctor whom I had not met came into the room and introduced himself as an oral surgeon. He and his “team” had determined that my mouth was going to be subjected to a great deal of radiation because the cancerous node was high in my neck. The team had decided to take out all of my molars as a preventive measure against radiation cavities and ensuing necrosis of the jaw. My parents merely nodded the
ir assent to his brimming authority, but sitting in my surgical gown, I was loath to make a major life decision without my pants on.

  I gathered my thoughts enough to tell the doctor, whose name I never knew, that his timing was poor and that on that particular day, I was willing only to donate my spleen. Without looking up from his chart, he indicated that I was going to dearly regret my decision and sent in a nurse to show me pictures of people whose faces had fallen off after necrosis of the jaw had set in. I remained steadfast, telling him I thought I had plenty on my plate. He smiled quietly and said, “I’m pretty familiar with the procedure you’re going through today, and, believe me, you are not going to even notice that your teeth are gone.”

  My, thanks for that. I told him we were finished for the day. When my surgeon came in, I told him that if that doctor was in the operating room, I was going to get up off the table and leave.

  Even three days after the operation, when I was short a spleen and immunocompromised, the oral surgeon was still after my teeth. I found out he was a visiting resident, and it gradually dawned on me that he had some kind of gap in his résumé he was trying to fill. I finally threw such a fit that the chief of residents came to talk to me. He flipped through my chart and said, “We don’t want your teeth.”

  Good, I said, “howzzabout telling Dr. Joseph Mengele here?” I think of that asshole every time I order steak.

  Treatment regimens for cancer are full of painful realities and powerful ironies: Radiation can cause cancer and wipe it out. Toxins in the body can create an opening for cancer as well as be used to shut the door against it. In order to fight cancer, you have to sit very still. A conservative approach required tactical aggression. It was, and still is, confusing. In that long clinical narrative, I am meat—diseased, if not condemned, meat. The meat is called “the patient.” Patient is as patient does, sitting oh-so-still, waiting with hands folded and eyes gently closed, waiting for someone to blow a whistle and say that the patient is fine.