The Night of the Gun

by David Carr

  As a family, we were ferocious toward one another. My brothers Jim and Joe developed whatever skills they have as pugilists by using me as a punching bag until I started hitting back. “We kept it up until you became a kind of monster, and then we kept our distance,” Joe said. But we looked after each other. It was tribal stuff, something far older and more durable than the suburban idyll we grew up in. I can remember being a new freshman in high school when some upper classmen took me into the corner of the gym to pound me. I saw my brother Jimmy over their shoulders, running toward us. I assumed he wanted to join in the fun, since he had been doing the same thing for years. He was small, but not to be fucked with. We still call him Savage. He jumped on the guys’ backs and did not stop until they ran. Tribal shit. Irish stuff. Nobody screws with anybody in our family. Still.

  In a family of seven, there is a universe of skills. The youngest, Missy, got bossed around a lot and gave love in return. My sister Lisa was the only one in our family who got in the common-sense line when God was handing out that piece of treasure. Coo was an innovator, a what-if, blue-sky kind of gal. Joe was my mom’s favorite—an unspeakable truth, but there it is—whose ability to charm did not end with her. And my brother John was the oldest, a man who helped negotiate peace in our family when he wasn’t doing so in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, working on behalf of the Catholic bishops. Jim was the only Carr who could count. A former repo man with a good touch for collections, he knew and understood credit problems in a family that had a few of them. After I finally began to stabilize, I had about $30,000 in debt.

  “Send me the file,” he barked when I asked him for advice. It was a grocery bag of menacing letters, past-due notices, and threatened garnishments. Savage knew every corner of the game and negotiated on my behalf, using his unique touch with the phone, an instrument that turned him into a rapacious animal. He wrote letters, loaded the gun, and shot every bullet: I was a crackhead, cancer victim, single father of two, enclosing a clip to boot. He, um, fibbed a bit and said he was willing to pay the debts himself, but that was a limited-time offer. Most of my creditors eventually begged to settle for pennies on the dollar.

  3/14/94

  Betty Marks

  Citicorp Legal Department

  Re: David M. Carr

  Betty, per our conversations last week, attached is an article outlining some of the problems David has had in the past.

  As you will notice, he had quite the lifestyle, to say the least. He has kicked the cocaine problems and had a few other situations of note enter his life.

  David is a single parent of twin 5-year-olds Meagan and Erin. Their mother, they were never married, had the same chemical problems as David and “took off” when they were young. David now has full custody of these great little girls.

  Another situation that confronted David was cancer. David was diagnosed with Hodgkin [sic] disease a year and a half ago. After months of therapy and radiation, it appears to be in remission.

  I have told David that he should write a book about his little adventure over the last 10 years, but who would believe all of these things happening to the same guy.

  Now for reality: David is in the process of getting his life back together, and the last major stumbling block has been his past credit history. To say the least, it is not very good. I helped David out on several occasions in the past including buying him a car which he “lost” (literally, he actually didn’t remember where he left the car, and it never turned up). I paid off some other judgments he had so his ex-wife could get their home released which she sold, and he paid off a student loan which had turned to a judgment.

  David has no money, but he does have a brother who knows that given the opportunity he can be successful and raise those two great kids. He can’t get credit or buy a home as long as this judgment is still out there.

  He is working, but the medical bills, child care and day-today living expenses do not provide enough to pay off an obligation as large as he has with your company.

  Here is the deal: I will pay you $750.00 cash for full and final settlement for all monies owed by David—that includes the account at the agency.

  This is my money, and it is all I have to take care of this obligation. If one of my debtors offered me 20¢ on the dollar on the principal after 7 years, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

  Your kind consideration of this matter is greatly appreciated.

  Jim Carr, brother of David Carr

  Even though we pounded each other with abandon when we were young, as we grew up, we became wise enough in the ways of the world to know that there is significant safety in numbers. We were remarkably different people but had shared characteristics, including an overly fond relationship with John Barleycorn—only Savage and my little sister Missy seemed to have dodged that bullet. One by one, four of us wheeled through the door of recovery, a path that had been laid down by my father. My oldest brother, John, was a former seminarian who ended his studies for the priesthood when he bumped into Linda, his soul mate and, eventually, his wife. A high-ranking official with the Catholic Church, he worked to very good effect on behalf of the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless. And then, in spite of continued success in professional and family life, his turn to admit he was powerless over at least one aspect of his life came some years ago. He saw his addiction as something of a weakness, a lack of personal rigor. When he went to treatment, I sent him a long letter detailing our family history in order to remind him that his father, his sister, and two of his brothers had been down this road. He sent me a copy of that letter after I interviewed him for the book.

  There is a part of you that still sees drinking as a moral failing, but there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. You are both an alcoholic and a moral man. You don’t cheat on your wife, or your taxes (not much, anyway). You have raised great kids with sound moral principles and demonstrated the power of faith in both personal and global ways. That makes you a good guy. But you are also a drunk.

  So what is a drunk?

  A drunk is a woman, born with birth defects of her own, who suffers terribly as a teenager, making significant mistakes. This woman finds a good man, makes a new life with him, but brings the bottle with her. Eventually a child is born to her who also has a birth defect. And that woman sobers up, loves that child and her others with all of her might, lifting them up, pulling them up, showing them a life that is good and true. She becomes a tower of quiet strength to everyone around her, a dynamo of unshowy love. That woman is a drunk, but one who has found recovery.

  A drunk is a guy who lives a life of self-seeking. He is a good-time Charley who spreads joy where he goes. He is a lover of life and his family of origins, and he is loved in return. But a penchant for partying eventually overwhelms him, and he finds himself in the weeds time and time again. The good times recede and are replaced by a DWI, a solitary life of drinking in hotel rooms, and many mornings of ruthless suffering. Eventually he tires of the loneliness, the pain, the shittiness of it all and goes to treatment. He sobers up just in time to be there for his mom who is dying. And in the course of that, finds a woman from his past and true love with it. He marries that woman, and takes her into his arms, along with her children, and finds a way to make a new life among the chaos of little money and teenagers in full bloom. His new love is felled by illness, and he is there for every step back to stability. When the man’s sister dies, he all but grabs the wheel and sets all her affairs in order. His love is huge, as are his abilities, and he spreads a lot more than good times where he goes. That man is a drunk, but he is living sober day to day.

  A drunk is a guy who gets in trouble early and often, tumbling into a world of darkness and drugs. An early life of professional promise is snubbed out by a life of venality, of the endless search for the next high. Somewhere along the way, he gets his dope dealer pregnant, and the twins that pop out become his and his alone. He sobers up, sitting in a shithole for six months while he tries to remember who he is supposed
to be. He finds a new way of living and begins to take responsibility for his own life and the lives of those who have been given to him. He struggles through cancer and many other threats to his health, but remains sober. He finds the love of his life, his professional career resumes and prospers, and he finds happiness he has never known. That man is a drunk, but one who has chosen to embrace his powerlessness over alcohol and drugs, to win the fight by surrendering.

  A drunk is a guy who is born to a good station in life, who has a leg up, but stumbles when he sets out on his own. He has many children with a woman he loves, starts and loses a business, and begins to drink too much. He hides bottles in the basement, slurping surreptitiously when he can get away with it. His business life is a mess, he is blown about by forces beyond his control until one day he decides that the grand experiment is over, that if he gets back in the ring with booze, he will surely be knocked on his ass. He sobers up, learns humility, and takes a job working for people half his age. He succeeds on his own terms and retires, having mentored many. In the fullness of time, the man prospers spiritually, becoming a leader of men and women. The woman he loves becomes very sick, and he nurses her with slavish love and attention. He comforts her within an inch of her life, and when that too is at end, he is completely present for her. He mourns, finds a new love, and settles into a life that is rich and full. He continues to love and parent his children for all they and he are worth. That man is a drunk, but one who has found God afoot in his life, a God that has left him awash in the promises of sobriety.

  A drunk is a guy who comes out of the gate quick and stays there, a tremendously talented and charismatic leader. Instead of putting his talent to work building wealth for himself, he becomes a steward, a man who mines and encourages compassion. He finds and marries his true love, and his influence grows. He sits among world leaders and the least of us with equal ease. People come for miles to hear the man speak. But in the midst of it all, the man finds himself drinking far too much, using alcohol to blunt the pains that the world dishes out. His career continues to soar, but his soul is dark and tortured. Much of his work and effort is dented by the reckless and godless behavior of others. He sinks further into depression, one that cannot be fully ameliorated by the wife and family he loves so much. And then one day he wakes up and says quietly: Enough. He enters treatment filled with apprehension, but goes nonetheless. That man is a drunk, but one who has taken his first step into the light of his future.

  49

  MY PLOT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD

  I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate can be interesting to the public as a narrative, or as being connected with myself.

  —JOHN STUART MILL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  After I went to Sam, my boss at The New York Times, to let him know about the book, we talked about what such a project might look like. “You know that part about where you dust yourself off and take over the world?” he asked. I said, yeah.

  “That shit is sooo boooooooring. Nobody wants to read about that.”

  Still, the fundaments of the genre require me to run close and careful analysis on how exactly I reversed course from certain damnation and came to a professional life beyond all expectation. So here goes:

  I worked a lot.

  If memoir is an attempt to fashion the self through narrative, dreams simply reverse the polarity on the same imperative. The future is even more fungible than the past: We can make it up, assert it will be so, and no one can say it won’t happen with any surety. Herman Melville, in talking about history, said that the past is the textbook of tyrants, while the future is the bible of the free.

  Excelling in the rat race, whether it is hunting down the biggest boar or getting the biggest piece while others do the killing, is an act of self-deception. To begin with, the striver must believe that the world is a fundamentally meritocratic place, that hard work will out, that winning is a matter of effort. And if the goals are accomplished, that person will believe he lives in a just, beautiful world. And if things don’t go well, he will be down at the bar muttering bitter oaths into cheap whiskey about what might have been.

  In possession of my chemical health and professional life, finally or at least temporarily, I had a general goal. I wanted to have enough juice and accomplishment so that if somebody got up in my grille in an untoward way, I could simply say, “You are not the boss of me. Fuck. Off.” And then go on to something else. I had watched my father get pushed around by lesser men, men who lied as much as they spoke, and I decided that was not how it was going to end for me. Or at the very least, if I was going to be bossed around, it would be by women and men of accomplishment, people who knew things and were willing to teach me. Properly inspired, I am a worker among workers who requires a minimum of maintenance.

  My professional life benefitted from the wisdom of others. The guys I ran with were still maniacs; they just didn’t drink and drug. After I was sober for a while, we rented a houseboat and went down the Mississippi for some golf, onboard cooking, and a little fishing. It had rained a lot that summer, and the guy who rented the boat to us took one look at the motley bunch—even though we had not had a drink or a drug in years, we looked like the wall of the post office brought to life—and warned us to stay in the main channel. Many of the backwaters had flooded and looked inviting, but they were shallow and could take out the hugely expensive stern drive if we were not careful, he said gravely.

  We were not careful. We made a try for the lee side of an island and got stuck, pinned hard against the current as we tried to back out. The motor became mired, and we more or less used it to dig through the mud bottom in an attempt to crawl back to where we were supposed to be. Just when we were about to make it, something snapped, and the high-pitched whine told us that there was no longer a connection between the motor and the screw driving the boat.

  Magically, we floated back into the main channel and were able to beach on the side of the island where we should have been in the first place. Before one of us flagged down a passing boat, we huddled on the deck: eight guys who knew their way around a story trying to come up with a version of what happened. “Yeah, we were just idling along, and it let go.” Or: “There was a huge submerged log, and we didn’t see it until it was too late.” The stories, all of them false, began to gather at our feet as we tried to come up with a version of what happened. My pal Steve, a big-deal musician and artist who once was showing off on the balcony of a New York loft and face-planted a few floors below, cleared his throat.

  “The truth is always simpler,” he said. When the guy came by, we simply told him that we broke it by going where we weren’t supposed to. The truth, simple and unvarnished, is a kind of gift, as long as you accept it.

  In my basement, there is a file called “Career Stuff”. It’s full of memos pitching for jobs, memos for setting course once I got them, and memos about course correcting thereafter. They reflect decent editorial thinking, a real urgency about excellence, and, oh, one other thing: The guy who wrote them seems to be a real jerk.

  In 1993 the top editorial job at the Twin Cities Reader came open. The once-feisty weekly had moved to the suburbs and grown up, maybe a little too much. But without saying anything to anyone, I dropped a note to the publisher, Jeff, suggesting that his paper had lost its way and that if he hired me, I would arrive with a box of grenades.

  Some of the people you will be considering for the position are no doubt very bright, competent people, but I, frankly, wouldn’t follow them out of the room. You need someone with a commitment to excellence who can communicate in a meaningful, direct way, offering a message and a demeanor that will motivate people to consistently surpass themselves. By definition, an editor should be a person with a strong sense of purpose and conviction—people in and out of your shop will tell you that I have my share of both. I’m frankly only interested in the job if I can rock the boat out at the Reader. If you’re looking for someone who can respect precious staff sensibiliti
es and maintain the status quo, I’m not the person you’d want to talk to. That said, I’d love the opportunity to chat with you about interests we may have in common.

  I had no idea what Jeff thought of the paper, I only knew what I thought, and I said it: The paper needs work, anybody else you talk to will be too much of a pantywaist to change things, and I will menace or fire anybody who gets in the way of making it better. Jeff bought it. I called him after all these years and asked why he put his money on a maniac.

  “I talked to several people, and several of them warned against you just because of the history,” he remembered. “A few were indifferent, and a few were like, ‘Yeah, David knows what he’s doing, he’s a good guy if you can keep him on the straight and narrow, everything is going to be fine.’”

  That’s a pretty big if.

  As soon as I had thought there was a small chance that I would get the job, I had every lawyer, political hack, and business person I knew fax him, suggesting that I ranked right up there with sliced bread in terms of mankind’s achievements.

  “I thought we needed someone who was a little irreverent, someone who would project personality back into the paper. You knew what was going on. You had friends in high places—not to be gauche about it, but I was impressed by the number of calls I got in support of you; you did a great campaign.”

  For seven years at the Reader and later at the Washington City Paper, I was the boss. A penchant for personal franticness was now writ large over a roomful of people. Being the kind of person who is afraid of missing something is an adaptive skill for an editor, but you might not want to work with him. Paul, a writer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wrote a profile when I got the job that was triumphal in the extreme, a very kind and generous piece of work.

  Under a massive headline, it read, “David Carr: Survivor, Reader Editor Beat Cancer, Cocaine, Custody Battle.” When David Carr applied for his new job as editor of the Twin Cities Reader, he told the weekly’s publisher, “If you’re not ready to rock the boat, don’t call me.” As if to emphasize his point, a huge Super Soaker, a machine-gun-like water pistol, now hangs from the ceiling above Carr’s desk.