by David Carr
“I just think we were of like minds. Not that I was like you or you were like me, but we just connected in a way that we wanted to be around each other, and we felt that our time with each other was cooler than our time without each other.”
And the fact that I had kids?
“You were in a tough, tough situation, and part of your appeal to me was how you could be this amazing person, work your ass off, and be raising these two small children. That was entirely attractive to me,” she said. “You were doing that alone, and you didn’t have very much money, and all the while having a really good attitude. Just seeming like, well, yeah, this is what I do, this is who I am.”
Sometime before we were engaged, we were lying in the bedroom of her little house on Pleasant Avenue. The room was painted Chinese red, with an arrangement of decorative tree branches and white lights on the ceiling. It was singular and compelling, like the girl who slept there. As couples will when they may have a future in common, we were discussing our dreams going forward.
“You said that your intention was to become a major figure on the national media scene,” she recalled.
Just like that?
“It didn’t strike me as weird at all. That’s the kind of thing you can say, and maybe it will be and maybe it won’t. People can have dreams.”
Given that I was fresh off welfare, cancer, and had my first real job in years as editor of the Twin Cities Reader, it seems obnoxious and farfetched to have made that kind of assertion even in the intimacy of a lover’s bedroom.
“You work hard, you’re smart, you are, um, without fail. I can’t think of anything in our time together where you failed and screwed up and just blew it off and didn’t care. Never once, can’t think of a time.”
Sort of cunning as well?
“That implies negative, and I would say none of it was negative,” she said. “Not cunning; probably a planner, but in a kind of methodical way and a big-picture way without maybe connecting all the dots of how that comes to be.”
I watched her as she talked, thinking back to our honeymoon, when I spent a fair amount of time staring at her and thinking about my great, good fortune.
We talked for a bit about the blending of our little family, the fact that although as partners we were deeply in love, we had some significant bumps as I sought to look after both the girls and her. She said I was just being who I was.
“You were very empathetic, very lovey, affectionate, a lot of natural inclination toward responding to needs, way more so than me,” she said. “I tried to do what I was good at. I wasn’t very empathetic. The fact that there were two was never that easy for me, either. If one was zigging, the other one was zagging.”
Regardless, she said, I almost always took their side. (They say precisely the opposite was true, by the way.)
“That comes from your family. You are tribal in every respect. Obviously there was a great deal of indebtedness that you felt you owed them. You needed to make up for the fact that their mom was who their mom was, and that when they came into this world, it was a less than perfect situation in a lot of ways. So you were not only just being the best dad you could, you were making up for a lot of crap too.”
Apart from my decision to start drinking again later in our marriage, we rarely fought, even about the twins. But when I brought up the idea of moving to Washington, DC, a place she had just left after four years, to become editor of the City Paper, she went off on me. She was glad to be back in Minneapolis, glad to be back near her mother, and planning on having a baby near her.
“If you think I am moving thousands of miles away to a place I have already left and having a baby so far from my mother, you’re crazy.”
We moved to Washington a month later.
51
WELCOME TO OUR NATION’S CAPITAL, YOU APRIL FOOL
When I got to Washington, I was excited to exercise new muscles over the Washington City Paper, a much bigger enterprise with a history of excellence. But I quickly found out that I was landing in a complicated place. My reputation had preceded me.
NEW EDITOR FOR CITY PAPER
Washington City Paper, the District’s feisty free weekly, has a new editor who is a recovering cocaine addict. David Carr, whose appointment was announced yesterday by the alternative paper’s Chicago-based owner, comes here from Minneapolis, where for the past two years he’s been at the helm of the weekly Twin Cities Reader.
“As a person in recovery, I have a fundamental belief in the redemptive power of people, of human beings and mayors and all that, and so, yes, I do feel some kinship [here],” said Carr, 38, from his hotel yesterday, where he was taking a break from house hunting. “I am pro-District. I think the city has lots of potential.”
At City Paper’s offices, the announcement got a lukewarm reception. “There’s been guarded dismay, guarded optimism,” said one staffer who asked not to be identified. “His colorful background has been the source of chuckles, but no one’s passed judgment.”
Carr, who says he’s been clean for six years, takes pains to point out that he also was for five years the single parent of twin girls, now 6 (he married four months ago), and is an experienced journalist. “I was clearly the best person for the job,” he says. “I’m a person who’s been places and done things…I’m not interested in coming to this town as ‘the man who stuck things up his nose.’”
“He put it on his résumé,” said Mike Lenehan, an owner of Washington Free Weekly in Chicago, of Carr’s drug use. “It was never an issue for us.” Carr replaces longtime City Paper editor Jack Shafer, who resigned in November.
—THE WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 1, 1995
52
THE SKUNK AT THE GARDEN PARTY
A long shot for the job of running one of the best weeklies in the business, I was running a small newspaper in Minneapolis and the interviews did not seem to go well. But Jane, the head of operations for the outfit, surprised me with a call and an offer. In the summer of 2007, I called her to ask why they’d handed me a job that seemed a bit beyond my ken. By then, she had retired from most of her duties.
“My memory is, we decided to hire the person, not the paper,” she said. “We wanted a leader. They were a dysfunctional bunch. They were not very mature as employees. It was clear that we needed someone who would be a leader in whatever peculiar kind of leadership style you have or had at that point. It looked to us that you would be able to, maybe not happily, but you would be able to wrangle them.”
With its history of narrative glories, City Paper was a kind of literary fantasy to the likes of me. I could recruit from the top of a class of nascent journalists, young people in a hurry who had come to Washington, DC, looking for a fast track. The staff ran the gamut from Eddie, a former ice-cream truck driver who generated legendary portraits of entropy; to John, who wrote tart political features with frightening ease; to Stephanie, with her big investigative heaves; to Amanda, a student of the District life, who did amazing profiles. We had Jason on cops, Erik doing the “Loose Lips” column, and Brad, an arts editor who was actually a newsman. Darrow, a quiet, hugely talented photographer, gave the paper its trademark black-and-white elegance. And when I was finally able to recruit and publish great black writers who reflected the majority culture—Neil, Ta-nehesi, Jonetta, Jelani, Holly, Paul—it gave the paper a new measure of credibility and salience.
When I first arrived, in 1995, I was full of plans and full of shit. At our first meeting, the staff got a load of me and my brutal Midwestern accent and decided I wouldn’t last long. They had run the interim editor out on a rail with such ferocity that he had felt compelled to leave behind a dead fish in the ventilation system.
It was not that they weren’t talented—many of them went on to do great work at the City Paper and elsewhere—they were just privileged young people who had never experienced much of life beyond the hot-house of the fancy colleges in which they had come of age. There was a lot of smirking, eye rolling, and note passing—it remi
nded me a lot of high school. I took their manifest disrespect as a kind of provocation. They were, collectively, smarter than me. But tougher? Not so much. Having been in rooms with people I owed money to—people who had guns and unknown intent—working in an office where people gossiped about what an idiot I was did not make a strong impression.
There were some issues of adjustment. Coming from Minnesota, a land of white people who eat white food in a frequently white landscape, Chocolate City, with its black middle class, political leadership, and cultural legacy was a complete mystery to me. My first week, Jonetta, a black writer with deep connections in the political community, wrote a scathing indictment of the talent and intentions of the city’s leadership. Always in search of a snappy headline, I slapped this one on the cover: “Black Hole: Why Isn’t the Black Community Producing Leaders Worth Following?” I got mau-maued from every corner, but it both reminded me to watch my cracker mouth and steeled me to push back when it was required. Some marginal dude self-selected as a spokesperson would call and say, “We in the community have discussed your most recent issue…” and I’d say, “You mean the community I work in, live in, my kids go to school in, and I pay taxes in, or some other community I don’t know about?” Or they’d begin with, “You can’t say that,” and I would respond, “Well, we just did, so let’s work from there.”
Headlines got me into trouble more than once. A few years in, having noticed that there was an entire class of self-seeking party kids from far-flung lands—embassy brats, the progeny of international power brokers, minor royalty from places you never heard of—I came up with a headline in search of a story that read, “I’m OK, Eurotrash.” Roberto, the son of an ambassador, wrote a scabrous social portrait of the denizens of Georgetown nightlife who screwed around, did dope, and drank like goats. For reasons I am at a loss to explain, I ordered up party pictures of real people to decorate the piece. Ooops. The ownership, which had left me pretty much to my own devices and supported me in good times and bad, was tested by that fiasco.
Erik, who worked as a freelancer, a columnist, a deputy editor, and eventually ran the place, talked about that when I went to see him on a trip to Washington in 2006.
“I do believe that I heard whispers among really smart people around Washington or people who had known you that held the view that your ambition was greater than your skill. There was a disparity there that was eventually going to have to play itself out.”
As I had done in the past, I wrote a column that used media as a prism on the broader aspects of culture and began to demonstrate an understanding of the place.
Jill, in spite of her adamant misgivings, loved our little house in American University Park and found work as the director of administration for the Republican National Convention, where they anointed Robert Dole to go down in flames.
My daughters thought the place was amazing. “I remember pulling up in Washington, DC,” said Meagan, “Erin and I bickering about something, and pulling up to the actual house and seeing it and how big it was and being utterly convinced that it was a mansion. There were more doors then we were used to. More windows, there was a yard, there were other houses on the street like it. It was different.”
It actually was a tiny three-bedroom house, but given what they had come from, it probably looked gigantic.
In 1996 Jill got pregnant. It was joyful news, a new step for all of us, and she was thrilled. I could not wait to see the little round ball of love as she grew. But Jill was, without a doubt, one of the meanest pregnant ladies who ever lived, like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, guns blazing in all directions. The twins and I cowered behind furniture for the duration. When Madeline popped out on November 13 with a full head of dark, curly hair with inexplicable white tips, I took her from the nurses and plopped her into Jillie’s arms. My wife took one look at her and said, “Had I known it was you, I wouldn’t have been so crabby.”
Maddie was the real wiseguy in the family. At eighteen months, she would respond to a long, loving look by saying, “Don’t see me.” But it was kind of hard to look away.
While we lived in the District, I went to recovery meetings but was far less connected to recovery than I had been in Minneapolis. There, every Thursday night, I went to a meeting at the House of Charity food center with a group of men who knew my story. Millionaires, cabdrivers, junkies, common drunks, and lots of new guys rolling in off the street. I liked a men’s meeting—still do—because I can’t help but be strategic in my communication around women. It’s a kind of gender-based Heisenberg principle, where the presence of women changed what was said. In the District, I sort of hopped around, sat in the back row, and didn’t get connected. Every time I went back to Minneapolis, I remembered how much I missed that meeting.
And I partied. Not drinking or using, but lots of going out, lots of dinners, lots of people over. The work was objectively good. My job was not to screw up a good paper, and I managed that. We beat the Washington Post on a couple of important stories, and published a paper that people talked about—perhaps not always with a great deal of fondness.
I still had some growing to do as a manager. I often treated people’s carefully wrought stories as little more than dots on the screen and then more or less dared them to take issue with what I had done. Not that I could not pull good work out of people—I just had a tendency to grind them down at the same time. The office of Brad, the empathetic and talented arts editor, was known as the Cape of Good Hope, while my end of the office was known as Cape Fear.
One of the people who taught me how to be a boss was Amanda. She would come in to talk about a story, and I’d wave her off and tell her to just bring me copy. “Carr, you have to talk to us. You have to take the time to work through these stories,” she’d say.
I had never been good at the nomenclature of editing. I have good skills at the keyboard—I can imitate almost any voice—but was weak on structure and organization. I shoot off my mouth and think with my hands, but Amanda and others gradually introduced me to the concept of reasoned discourse about editorial strategies, writing, and execution. She busted my balls plenty along the way, and even though she is a diminutive person, I always thought her comic impression of me was brutally close. She reminded me of my sister Coo, a small person who made a large impression, mostly by taking the big people around her down a notch.
I e-mailed Amanda—she was in the middle of writing a real book about something besides herself, so I didn’t want to interrupt—about my reputation as a despot.
“You were the best boss I ever had,” she said. “Although that was also the only job I ever had that gave me chest pains. I was twenty-two and I used to get chest pains walking up Champlain Street. I went to the doctor, and he told me it might be my job. Sometimes you were an asshole, but I think it was a strategy to motivate us.
“But mostly we worked really hard at CP because you had that ineffable effect on a room. That energy that good and dangerous leaders give off. That kind of aura that makes you want to please them, even when you’re not sure why. I don’t know what that comes from. Partly passion for the job, partly credibility. But some part of it you’re born with. And you have it. I’d say ninety-nine percent of managers don’t have it.”
The newspaper turned over, as young reporters with lots of future advanced to other jobs, and the staff was gradually replaced with other talented skeptics, but ones that I had hired. My management skills had grown, but not that much. My tendency toward linguistic invention often left the people I worked with more confused than inspired. Neil, who moved on to a great career in New York, came out of my office after one of my special closed-door talks and told people, “I either just got fired or got a raise, but I’m not sure which.”
At one point, in the middle of my tenure at the City Paper, I got a long voice mail from my pal David, who was one of the people writing and producing The Corner, an HBO series about drug dealing in the projects. I got very excited because I thought he might be looking for so
me script work. Instead he said, “I have a one-line speaking part for a white-boy drug buyer, and I think you’d be perfect.” There I was in one of the episodes, pulling a car up to “Fat Curt” and handing him some money. “You’re coming back, right?” Even though I had very little acting experience, it was not much of a reach.
On January 1, 1999, I appointed Michael, a twenty-five-year-old former Fulbright scholar, as deputy editor of the City Paper. On January 3 I tipped over into the hospital with something called acute necrotizing pancreatitis. I was in the ICU for four days, the hospital for sixteen days, and off the job for a month. I was so sick and full of pain that they filled me with narcotics and put me on complete bed rest, which meant no eating or drinking. Jill, who had never seen me high, came to the hospital one night when I was really flying. I ripped out all of the tubes and went storming down the hall, telling her and anyone else who would listen that I was actually a member of the Kennedy family and had important things to do. “You were incredibly nasty,” she now recalls. “I got a glimpse of what you must have been like back in the old days.”
I didn’t die, but it sort of looked like I might. Again. The pancreatitis failed to fully resolve, and I was left with a cyst and chronic abdominal pain. I received a lot of lectures about the mysteriousness of the pancreas at medical institutions all over the region, including Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins. I ended up at a pain clinic where a doctor gave me a relatively new drug called OxyContin. It made the pain manageable but put me at risk because of my other chronic health issue: the tendency to use mood-altering chemicals to excessive ends. I ended up obsessing over and counting the pills, and finally called the doctor to tell him that I needed to find another way. He offered me a different narcotic. I flushed the massive supply down the toilet, but I was on and off pain meds because of the pancreatic issues and surgical adhesion for years to come. At the time, it seemed like a necessary evil, but it left a huge gap in the perimeter of my defenses, a place where the pirate could slip through. The illness had other legacy effects, including leaving my pancreas impaired enough so that down the road I developed insulin-dependent diabetes.