by David Carr
“Oh, that,” mused Carr, 36. “It’s there to remind anyone who walks into my office who’s in control.”
Even coming from a man who can match wits with close friends like comedians Tom and Roseanne Arnold, Carr’s remark smacks more of irony than humor. Sure, Carr’s résumé includes the Minnesota Monthly piece in which the late Minneapolis councilman Brian Coyle revealed his fight for life against the AIDS virus; Corporate Report Minnesota’s chilling two-part series about John Chenoweth, former executive director of the Minneapolis Employees Retirement Fund who was found shot to death; and Corporate Report Minnesota’s confessional profile of the Northwest Airlines pilot who flew drunk.
But David Carr in control? For more than a decade, Carr could hardly control himself, much less a group of others.
Nice, flattering words, but probably not the kind of thing that was ultimately good for a guy who already had some trouble sizing himself correctly. The quotes from me in the story are ridden with hubris and possessed very little in the way of humility or awareness.
Given that my primary management experience was collecting week-old drug debts, followed by a domestic stint running around after twin five-year-olds, there was a bit of a learning curve. Because the newspapers I ran were good, it has always been my quiet conceit that I was a wonderful boss, even though objectively, as seen through the memos and talking to the people who worked for me, I was loud, crude, and demanding.
“When I took this job, I said we were going to beat the shit out of the competition. That has not happened,” read one memo from those early days. “I am proud of the strides we have made, and I think the papers of the last three weeks clearly indicate we are capable of putting out a book that is worth reading. But I can think of many, many other papers that I read with my eyes crossed because I didn’t really wanna see how bad they, meaning we, were.”
A newcomer to management, even the small-bore stuff I was involved in, I experienced the terrible beauty of power, and in the process, formed the kind of crucible that Nietzsche talked about, where people were annealed by my will. I was a parody of a boss, someone who knew how to motivate people to take a hill, but not that great at picking hills. And my tendency toward linguistic idiosyncrasy—what were known as “Carr-isms”—led to the development of a running database of translations that could be given to new arrivals, only half in jest. “I gotta be honest with you”—a trope I opened all manner of conversations with—suggested that I was less than honest the rest of the time. Stories needed to be “ramped up” (improved), because the reporting was too “open mouthed” (naive), resulting in a “C-minus” (crappy) story filled with clichés that were “on ban” (forbidden).
One of the people who made his way through the linguistic thicket was Brett, who was a runner for advertising when I first met him at the Reader. He wrote about rock music, and later, at the Washington City Paper, he became a restaurant critic, a move I had offered him because he always seemed to be sweating people for their food at lunchtime. The son of a former governor of Minnesota, he blossomed into a remarkable writer who now works in New Orleans.
Brett liked working for me, but, then, we were friends. In his taxonomy of supervisors, I would be known as a yeller. “Some people just can’t hang with getting yelled at. I’m not one of those people,” he said, sitting on his patio in Faubourg Marigny, near the French Quarter. “Some people don’t like the volatility.
“I always thought you were fair and honest. Honest not just about the work of your employees but also about yourself. When you blew up, and we had some sort of disagreement, I knew that you were open to the idea of being wrong and admitting it.” I was, he said, a man in a hurry who expected others to hew to my schedule. “I thought you were trying to make up for lost time,” he said. “I thought you were trying to make a better paper than the other guy and prove yourself and racing with the clock. I think you felt like you’d wasted maybe a decade of your life, and that while you were getting high and getting drunk, people who were less talented than you were climbing the ladder above you in your chosen profession. I don’t think that set well with you.”
Many good things happened while I was at the Reader. The next publisher, R.T., who would go on to become mayor of Minneapolis, engineered a deal to take us out of the horrid suburban office building we were in and bring us downtown, to the city we were trying to cover. I hired Rose, out of a T-shirt shop, who went on to become a very talented investigative reporter; Burl, a laconic but gorgeous and funny writer; and an assorted crew of misfits. We made a great paper and fought tooth and nail with City Pages, a very well-done weekly that had overtaken the Reader in the early nineties.
Some of my defects of character made it hard for me to run the place credibly. It was a fast and loose environment, full of smack talk. I stepped over the line more than once. People were complimenting the blouse that one of my coworkers was wearing, and I commented that it was hanging on a very “nice rack.” Near the end of my tenure, I was pulled into the publisher’s office and told that I made some of the women in the office uncomfortable. I failed to understand that my tendency to pop off about any old thing in any old way I wanted was less than adaptive now that I was in management. I made it a policy going forward not to offer any sexist annotation about people I was supervising and to keep my hands to myself. I grew up at the expense of the people around me, a persistent motif.
Claude became the managing editor at the Reader. When I was a freelancer and he’d put me through a tough rewrite, I vowed to hire him someday if I had the chance. Talking with him a dozen years later in Minneapolis, I got a clear feeling that he was describing a cartoon, one that more or less drew itself.
“The story meetings were always amusing. Oh my God, they were hysterical. They were fun, but you would read people’s beads, and you’d jump up and down and get mad at people if they didn’t have story ideas and if they were coming unprepared or didn’t have anything to bring to the table.
“And then the interns,” he said. “You would say something like, ‘If you don’t get this done by tomorrow, I’m going to have my foot so far up your ass you’re going to be on the fifth floor.’”
He reminded me that we had a wonderful time, made a great paper, and I had a very loyal staff. Actually, by the time I left the Reader in 1995, I had half a ferociously loyal staff. The other half thought I was a coarse, abusive lout and could not wait for me to leave. A case could be made.
50
SHAKING HANDS WITH THE FUTURE
I never saw any reason to go looking for a wife.
By 1993 my physical and romantic interests no longer traced the edge of pathology and instead found expression in serial monogamy that may have lacked seriousness but was diverting enough. The waitress at my friend’s restaurant whom I had a mad crush on; another smart, lovely waitress who had a crush on me; some women I met in recovery or parents’ groups, or professionally. I was cancer free, working out at the Y, and was no longer fat, drunk, or addicted. Not a catch, exactly, but not nothing.
One night in the spring of 1993, Sarah, a Republican operative I had once waited tables with, said a bunch of people were getting together at the Monte Carlo, a downtown bar where lawyers, politicos, and journalists hung out. She said she had a friend she wanted me to meet. I told her that all of her friends smoked really long ciggies, drank too much brown liquor, and, besides, were probably Republicans who hated poor people, and I nearly qualified. Just come, she said.
I arrived with a date—we were going to a rock show later—but Sarah came up to me and said her friend was there; that we should meet.
“Well”—I indicated my attractive friend—“why would I want to meet anybody?”
“We’re over by the bar,” she said, walking away. (Jill had no idea that some sort of set-up was under way).
I liked Sarah. She was a friend and a source, and so after a bit, I excused myself and walked over. She introduced me to Jillie, a brown-eyed blond who was classically beautif
ul with a Lord & Taylor sort of refinement. We shook hands, and I heard Wagner, my face got hot, and I lost track of my surroundings. We just kept shaking hands and looking at each other until the people around us began blushing.
Everything right about her was wrong for me. I had generally gone out with women who had a lot of dark hair falling into their faces, bee-stung lips, and remarkable leather jackets, with more tattoos than jewelry. As my friend Eddie once observed, “The women you date don’t just look bitchy. They are.” This Danish-Icelandic-Norwegian-Irish girl had worked in the U.S. Senate for a Republican, had her own house in South Minneapolis, and was just coming off a sales job and getting ready to go to grad school to become a teacher. Not. My. Type.
My kind, though.
Sarah said that my memory of meeting Jill was not at all embellished. “I’ve never experienced that phenomenon in my life where I introduced you two, and it was like the rest of the world didn’t exist. It was stunning. It was this chemical thing, an intellectual, chemical thing that is so rare that when you see it, it’s spectacular.”
I still stare at the girl, still wonder why she is with me.
Our first date, on Saint Patrick’s Day of 1993, was a marathon, thirteen hours, but not in the way you’re thinking. I picked her up for lunch, and she was leaning on a parking meter in downtown Minneapolis, smiling and looking all freaking adorable. Lunch dates usually mean no kissing. But when I got out of the car, I walked over and planted one right on the lips.
We went a few blocks away to a steak house called J. D. Hoyt’s. When we sat down in a booth, she reached into her pocket and pulled out an antique green bow tie with shamrocks on it. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a green lightbulb for the lamp hanging over the booth. The mutuality of the gestures, unknown, unrehearsed, yet connected, was filled with portent. Until in the course of removing the bulb that was already there to replace it with the green one, I dropped it onto the table. Kismet, albeit now decorated with shards of broken glass.
We talked families. Her dad was bright, drunk, and itinerant. She grew up with her mom, a cancer nurse. “Is she retired now?” I asked helpfully. “My mom is eleven years older than you,” she said. Hmmm, so lots of productive and wonderful time ahead of her. Her mom, she explained, was the kind that anybody would want—empathetic, intuitive, and careful with her opinions except on very significant matters.
She blew off work for the rest of the day, and I took her over to St. Paul, where my mom’s side of the family, the O’Neills, were hosting a Saint Patrick’s parade after-party at my cousin Giggle’s joint. She met the whole messy tribe that first day: the drunk, the recovered, the loony, the successful. My folk. We proceeded on to Hopkins for my mom’s kooky annual parade, and then I suggested dinner at my house. We picked up Jillie’s dog at her house and my twins from day care, and then I made her dinner. Mac-and-cheese for the girls, Dover sole sautéed with plantains for us.
Things went quickly after that. We drove to Taos, New Mexico, in her new Saab for some skiing just weeks after we met. We skied together and we skied apart, with me getting tossed around the narrow, steep black diamonds on the high traverse. The butt-kicking I took on those huge moguls opened up my internal midline incision, and I started bulging like one of the crew members in Alien just before the monster came out. I palpated the spot until my insides went back in—I would get surgery when we got back. Rough and ready, she just rolled with it, no worries. On the whole trip, we had just one argument. When we crossed over into Iowa, I slipped in Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair. “If you think I’m going to live in her personal concentration camp for five more seconds, you’re crazy.” I decided right then and there I’d marry this sassy girl if I could talk her into it.
On its face, it seemed ludicrous. While Jillie began working as a scheduler in the U.S. Senate right out of college, I was working on my nascent career as a drug dealer. A sorority sister at the University of Minnesota, she had manners beyond reproach; I was, in general, reproachful. She liked guys with pressed trousers and nice loafers; I had two pairs of pants, both black, both jeans, and wore sneakers. She was a trained ballet dancer who grew up in the Minnesota Dance Theatre, while my dancing style could best be described as white soul on a rampage. While we both had deep, lasting roots in the Minneapolis music scene, she thought my taste in all other matters was appalling. She was irresistible in her audacious opinions, her decisiveness, who she was, and what that meant. Her status as a committed, converted Catholic who actually went to church sent my mother into spasms of joy. I never really expected to get married, and if I did, I didn’t think it would be to someone like her: a churchgoing Republican who had done her share of fooling around as a kid but was now a grown-up in all regards.
Before I decided to ask Jill to become my wife, there were certain matters to attend to. I did not remember precisely how I shared the news with the twins, but then I remembered I had written about the conversation for Family Times. Annie the editor sent along a clip I did not have.
In addition to getting the twins’ approval, I needed them to keep a secret. I was hoping surprise would work in my favor in getting Jillie to say yes. In the days before Christmas of 1993, I said to her, “I’m going to get you something that you don’t know you want but are really going to like.” Jillie is a complete busybody—we call her “Krav,” as in Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched—who has to know everything, and it drove her crazy. She surveyed my history, my penchants, and my former girlfriends, and then finally said, “If you get me a leather jacket for Christmas, I’m going to hate it. I’m going to be really pissed, and I will never wear it. Never.” I played along, getting a huge box that might hold such a jacket, wrapping it elaborately and placing it under the tree.
On Christmas Eve I made her wait for hours while Santa Claus put toys and clothes all over the living room for the girls. She sat down, and I finally handed her the big, heavy box. Inside was a large antique teddy bear. He had a small box between his paws. She opened it and beheld a custom engagement ring with a moderate-size diamond. Jillie put it on and admired it, speechless. Meanwhile, I was on a knee chanting something about her marrying me and making me the happiest man alive. She continued to admire the ring. I finally told her that if she liked the ring, she’d have to also accept the two hundred pounds of goofy that it was coming from. She said yes.
It was a massive wedding: cops and robbers, judges and crooks, politicos and fixers. Erin and Meagan were heartbreakingly beautiful flower girls standing beside Jill, whose appearance in the doorway of the church made me catch my breath. The gospel was the parable of the prodigal, but I felt that I was coming into riches that far surpassed any fatted calf.
Our partnership was romantic and practical, with the pants going back and forth between us as the situation required and a shared appetite for adventure driving us around every bend, together. If marriage is about deciding to love on a daily basis, I have woken up to a no-brainer every day since.
Jill was raised by a single parent, so she had a regard for what me and mine had accomplished, but she had trouble finding a place to stand in a family that was already rolling. If there has been a disappointment, and it is a significant one, it is that she never knit together with Erin and Meagan in the way that I had hoped. When they were little, it was easy for everyone. But as they grew, I frequently found myself in the middle of a quiet but very real struggle for my loyalties. The girls felt her watchful eye every time they moved about the house, and sometimes the disapproval that went with it. It is the common strife of blended families of all kinds, but I felt like I needed goggles to protect my eyes from all the estrogen. When I was granted custody of Erin and Meagan, I made a commitment in my heart that I would protect them from anyone and anything that got in their way, but I had no idea that part of the trouble would come from such an intimate distance; in this instance, the person I chose to marry. Jill was a good parent, making the kind of home that anyone would be proud of, while working hard at good, interes
ting jobs. But even though she clearly loved the twins, there were times when she didn’t seem to like them very much. Part of it was predestined: She did much of the heavy lifting of parenting, but the twins took her for granted and then treated me like I hung the moon when I walked in from a day’s work.
Like all functioning families, we have made accomodations and found a place to put our disappointments. In the main, it has been a long and glorious run, anchored by two people who shook hands on the future the day they met.
Jillie had watched me come and go for a year on the book, digging up a past that she had some awareness of but little experience with. When I sat down with her in our cabin in the Adirondacks at the end of the summer of 2007, she said she never doubted for a minute that we would have a grand life together. Still, when we first met, she had every reason in the world to keep her distance. My reputation was still trashed in some corners. We knew people in common, some of whom did not hold me in high esteem.
“There were people that were leery of you, and maybe not so much in your present state when you and I met, but certainly of your past. I don’t remember what they said, but they implied, you know, ‘Stand clear, be clear, be leery of him.’ You had quite a reputation as being a maniac and a troublemaker.”
So why not take the advice?
“Because I sensed something very different. I knew, when I started to learn of those things, it was mainly through you because of your very honest disclosure, and so I was never uncomfortable with your image and the reputation that preceded you and who I felt I was getting to know. I was never afraid of you. I never said, ‘He gives me the creeps; I don’t want to be around him,’ never once.