by David Carr
On June 16, 1999, my brother John called me and told me to meet him at Washington National Airport. My mom, diagnosed a few months before with lung cancer, was dying. The hospice nurse had not been sure she would still be alive when we arrived in Minneapolis, so we phoned my mother. “I’ll wait for you,” she said as we both leaned in on John’s cell.
When my brother and I walked in, dozens of people were streaming in and out of her room. My father was leading them in an impromptu song/prayer. The whole thing gave me the willies. They all gathered around, singing songs, telling jokes, talking about “their” Joanie. I didn’t even know some of them and found it completely weird. But my brother Joe reminded me, “Hey, kid, that girl always loved a party. Why should today be any different?”
The twins—my twins, her twins—were one of her crowning achievements. She insisted they call her Jo-Jo, which I thought was off-the-hook dorky, but they joyfully complied. When the room finally emptied out for a bit I read the last few entries of her journal: “…my cup runneth over, Lord. I will be with you in days,” said one. I leaned in and reminded her of the times she taped bows on the girls’ heads because they had no hair. Of all the matching outfits. Of how their clothes arrived at our house magically folded and matched. She didn’t talk, but she smiled.
And then a new group of people came wheeling through. My mother collected people along the way: the homeless, the learning disabled, the knucklehead son. She taught me how to button a shirt and iron it as well, how to serve, how to pray, how to be a mom, and now she taught me how to say good-bye. Watching her die was like watching a giant parade float roll slowly and gracefully into the water.
In 2000, five years after I first started working at City Paper, I started to get itchy. I worked for nice people, the town and its story were highly engaging, but just about the time the people I’d trained were doing great stories, they’d leave for bigger jobs. Although my bedside manner as a boss had improved somewhat, I was frustrated by always typing into the work of others, nipping and tucking their work to make it presentable. It was a lot like parenting but without the added benefit of helping build people that you brought into the world.
Brett, my buddy from Minneapolis who was now writing about food for the City Paper, said he had seen news reports about Inside.com, a digital media news site being put together by Kurt, one of the guys who had launched Spy magazine, and Michael, an editor from New York magazine and Spin. Why didn’t I apply? he wondered. “Brett, those guys could swing a dead cat the next time they are out for lunch and find five people more qualified to write for them than me,” I lectured. He shrugged and walked off.
An hour after that, some dweeb at a party, in between showering me with a fine mist of beer and pretzels, began hammering me about how the City Paper needed to start covering the Hill, where the stories were “falling from the sky.” Staring at his congressional ID badge, I repeated a conversation I’d had dozens of times and explained to him that when he came up at the Dupont Circle Metro station, there were thirty newspaper boxes. Only one of those boxes contained a paper about the District itself: City Paper. He said I just didn’t get it.
I walked the few blocks to the office, even though it was past two in the morning, tapped out a note to an address I had seen for Kurt, attached links to some of my clips, sent it, and forgot about it.
A few days later, Kurt appeared on my e-mail and invited me to take the shuttle up to New York to talk. I rode in from LaGuardia Airport looking at the density of the city with new eyes, as a guy who had a family of five, and began shaking my head. The whole dot-com thing was beginning to look a bit shaky, I had a good job, and who knew if I could even cover media in a city where I had never lived?
Inside.com’s offices were at the end of a freight elevator ride in the Starrett-Lehigh Building on the West Side. There were rows of jelly-bean Macs and people sitting at them who had worked at the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and McSweeney’s. All of the dot-com trademarks were there: the cappuccino machine, the gee-whiz whiz kids, and an ambient insouciance that all of the rules had changed. If there had been a big vat of Kool-Aid, I would have jumped in and started backstroking.
That explains me, but why did Kurt walk by all of the people he could have acquired with a flick of the wrist?
I called Kurt. He said he didn’t exactly remember, but took a guess.
“I figure it must have been your e-mail; you know, your quirky and ineffable charm was evident in your e-mail. And then I read your stuff and thought it was good,” he said. “I liked the idea of working with someone else over forty, somebody who had some interesting miles on the tires. And you told me right off about your druggy past—and I was probably impressed by the fact of it, both the grisliness and the recovery, and by your candor about it. And I think I thought the down-and-dirty alternative-paper experience was a good thing to have on our make-it-up-as-we-went startup team.” He paused. “And I thought you’d be fun.”
53
DAVID BOWIE DID NOT SING TO ME, BUT HE COULD HAVE
Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car.
—LEONARD, A MAN WHO CANNOT MAKE NEW MEMORIES AND IS SEARCHING FOR HIS WIFE’S KILLER, MEMENTO.
People often use personal fables as a way of answering the question of who they are. My current fable is that I fell off a turnip truck in Lower Manhattan—at night, of course—in 2000, and the city, as is its habit, clutched another émigré to its ample bosom. I may or may not have been a rube, but I didn’t know anyone or anything. In the first three months before my family arrived, I sat in a bug-infested rental in Independence Plaza and read the daily papers, trying to diagram this new, strange place. A lot of my tutorial came from Page Six in the New York Post, where I kept reading about this large, powerful movie guy named Harvey, who could block out the sun. Sometimes when I was taking my ease at the window with the papers, I would look out and see a big black car pull up; a large man got out, and everyone around him on Greenwich Street would begin scurrying. He would be flipping pages in his hands, barking orders I couldn’t hear, and then disappear into the TriBeCa Film Center. Some weeks passed, my worlds merged, and I realized that the man on Page Six was the man on Greenwich Street. And sometime after that, I ended up in that car interviewing Harvey for a story.
That’s how I think of my introduction to New York, but thinking, with its symbolic and representational constructs, is actually the opposite of remembering. Memories may be based on what happened to begin with, but they are reconstituted each time they are recalled—with the most-remembered events frequently the least accurate. What one is remembering is the memory, not the event. And memory uses the building blocks of fiction—physical detail, arc, character, and consequence—to help us explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. As such, remembering is an act of assertion as much as recollection. The neuroscientific term is reconsolidation. We accessorize the memory with the present tense.
Sitting in the space between dendrites, memories wait to be brushed by a smell or a taste, and then they roar back to life, but it is always in service of the current narrative. Who is really to say that our mind, which is to say our brain, is not engaged in some biological poetics when we are not looking? A dialogue is often under way in the subcortex that has nothing to do with the conscious participation of the host. Throughout my life, I have turned out the light on some knotty, insoluble linguistic or logical issue, only to wake up in the morning with a fully formed fix in mind. I was asleep, but someone, or some part of me, was awake and processing. So why wouldn’t memories frolic in a REM state, rearranging themselves into a more coherent narrative, conjuring a history that comports with the present moment?
If, by virtue of neuroscience and human nature, every soul is a fiction of his own creation, what happens when those fictions come into conflict with someone else’s memory of hard-and-fast events? Who wins? The one who tells the story the loudest? The one who remembers the most detail, however false? Or is it
the one who finds the lie in the other’s tale first?
More than once I have told a story about my first night out living in New York. The shopping magazine Lucky was getting its opening bow at Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street. As the publishing reporter for Inside.com, I was aware of the fashion subtext of the event—a magazine about shopping, for chrissakes—so I decided to wear a houndstooth shirt under a houndstooth suit coat, my own dweeby attempt at sartorial fashion transgressiveness. You know, so wrong it’s right? (It was just wrong.)
So in this memory/story/myth, I am pinned against a wall. I don’t drink, you couldn’t smoke, and the room was incredibly packed, mostly by the same two hundred girls who are at every New York party. After a time, I decided I either had to speak to someone or leave. I picked out a guy with a Pet Shop Boys haircut who looked harmless enough. I gave him a rat-a-tat hello, saying I was from Inside.com, that I was a reporter, and that I covered the magazine industry. “So that’s me,” I said, all gee-whiz-nice-to-meet-ya. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m James Truman, I’m the host,” he said.
Shit. I knew that. Certainly, I knew he was the editorial director of Conde Nast, intellectual swami of the death star. Actually, I had no idea. I slunk back to the wall.
A woman, impossibly tiny, noticed me standing bereft and wobbled over on shoes that were tall enough to qualify as superstructure and outré enough to make a statement.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, but in a friendly, nice way. No shit. We had a flirty, fun few minutes, with her reassuring me that this gossamer world would all too soon take on prosaic, predictable dimensions. We later had lunch, and, as I recall, she invited me to a David Bowie show. It was—again, as I recall—an incandescent night, with seats in the VIP area next to Iman and a serenade from Bowie from about four feet away, who was probably singing to his wife. In my version of the story, Mim, my guide to this splendid new place, leaned over and said, “You’re in.”
I called Mim. We have remained friends, even though by the time I met her, she was completely bored by a scene I was just feeling my way around. My daughters thought she was the coolest person they had ever met. I found her intimidating and remarkable. A New York writer and editor with a massive, throbbing brain, she was and is neurotically brilliant, as capable of winning a throwdown over rock trivia as debating government black ops during the cold war. I have never won an argument with her, and this one would be no different.
She said she did not come up to me at the party, we were introduced. She did not say I did not belong there. She said that although we did see Bowie, we did not sit anywhere near Iman. Iman was sitting stage right, Mim said, and we were stage left. And she did not say, “You’re in.” Mim speaks forcefully in the recollection. I believe her, not my own story.
“We had excellent, incredible, privileged house seats,” she said. “They have always been very, very kind to me, David Bowie’s people, and we had a little table that was in the best spot. That was thrilling to me also because I usually don’t have enough clout to merit the little table, the best little table.”
So it was groovy, but not Iman-sitting-next-to-you, David-Bowie-singing-to-you groovy?
“He did not sing to us particularly, but it was a really, really good show. He sang to us and everybody else in the Roseland because he is Mr. Bowie. They did every song on Station to Station except for ‘Word on a Wing’ and ‘TVC15,’ about which we later talked.”
There is, she said, “nothing that you told me about our meeting that I know to be wrong, because I was a firsthand witness to it,” but then added, “From what you’re saying now, your memory is emotionally honest. It’s just factually wildly inaccurate.”
When I moved to work in New York, I asked my pal Amanda how she thought I’d like it. “It’s a fight. And if you want the fight, it’s great. And if you don’t want the fight, it sucks.”
I liked the fight. Unlike Washington and Los Angeles, where people rise and fall based on some secret chart, New York is a place where the wiring diagram is very visible and fundamentally, oddly, just. If you are good at what you do, work hard, and don’t back down, you can make a place to stand on the island.
The trick of enjoying New York is to not be so busy grinding your way to the center of the earth that you fail to notice the sparkle of the place, a scale and a kind of wonder that put all human endeavors in their proper place. One night soon after I started working, I was on the thirteenth floor of the Starrett-Lehigh, staring out at the lights of New York as dusk fell, a Midwestern rube literally gaping up at the tall buildings. I was in full reverie, and my mouth was probably open at the majesty of it. “It keeps on happening,” said Kurt, another former Midwesterner. “You never get tired of looking.”
I don’t. After a year at Inside, the money ran out, and I found gigs as a contract writer for New York magazine and the Atlantic Monthly. And then, suddenly, that view, which I had already come to cherish, changed for me and everyone else.
54
A COMMON STORY
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
—E. B. WHITE
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in the wrong state for a newsman. Jillie was in the city and called me at nine o’clock at home in Montclair, New Jersey, and said that a plane had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I turned on the television while we talked and remarked that they were replaying the crash, that someone had got it on tape, and she said, no, you are seeing a second event.
I went to the top of the hill over Montclair and watched the towers burn for a few minutes, and by the time I got back to my house, my editors from New York and Atlantic Monthly had both left messages saying my presence was required in the city. I grabbed maps, water, a kerchief, food, a flashlight, notebooks, and put on every press ID I had ever owned. Traveling in from twelve miles west of the city was like rowing upstream. Everything was cordoned off every which way. I drove over medians, highway cones, and the wrong way down a ramp up above the helix. And I finally got to the tunnel and told the cop standing there that I had talked to the Port Authority, and they said if I got there, I could park at the Port. He said, “I am the Port Authority, and you are full of shit.”
I eventually talked my way onto one of the evacuation boats at Hoboken—I had to turn on the water works, weeping and saying I would lose my job, but I made it. I crossed the Hudson and started walking downtown. By the time I got there, it was past noon, and both towers were down, and, of course, the dust was everywhere. I had no specific instructions, so I began interviewing everybody walking around. One man in particular was full of information. He told me that after the south tower fell, dust obscured the entire bottom of the north tower until it fell. And he said that minutes later, he had seen someone jump from very high up and land on a fireman or a policeman walking near the base of the north tower. Both things, of course, could not be true. His memory, confronted by the most horrible human events imaginable, was beginning to rewire what he had seen into a narrative he could understand.
Like everyone else down there, I was just improvising, trying to be of some small use. I would get close and then get barked back out to the perimeter. I was standing at Church and Chambers streets, and a guy who ran a bodega there saw my notebook and started talking to me. “You see this spot right here?” he said, pointing to a large depression in the dust. “A jet engine landed right here. The FBI came with a truck and took it away.” We were six blocks up the street from the site, and I just wrote down what he said, shaking my head in disbelief. On a day when so many terrifying things had happened, why would people manufacture more?
At 5:20 p.m., I was standing near that corner, and Building 7 fell, sending a wall of debris up the street. I dove under a car and found a lone pigeon and a book, torn and full of dust, that had blown out of the towers. The Elements of Style, E. B. White’s ur-text about writing.
Jillie stayed in the city that night and wa
s able to get the key to a friend’s parents’ place, a massive apartment in the seventies on the Upper East Side. She had gotten through to our nanny and spoken with Erin, Meagan, and Maddie. After a long walk to the apartment, I plopped down on the couch and began watching the images of that day. No one knew less than the people who were down there about what happened, including me. And I watched the video of the second plane, hitting the southeast corner of the south tower. The engine broke loose and was clearly visible, flying up Church Street and landing where the guy at the bodega said it did.
I worked for great editors. Caroline and John at New York magazine found me amusing and gave me a desk and some nice assignments. I was the staff rustic in a room full of cool, gorgeous people. Immediately after September 11, they guided a room full of reporters more used to covering the gossamer exterior of the city and went tactical, producing a weekly magazine that rose, and then rose some more, to the occasion. My own stories were terrible—all dust and mood and no substance. But Caroline got me involved writing text and headlines for a photo book about that day’s events, and I finally felt like I added a small bit to a very large story.
Michael, the editor of the Atlantic, was the king of mission creep, having hired me to do media stories, but then changing his mind after the attacks. I had gotten to know Michael back in Washington. Jason, our cops reporter at the City Paper, had zeroed in on a square block of Capitol Hill that had a murderous history—it seemed to present the perfect urban ecosystem for violence. While he was working on the story, it became apparent that the Atlantic was doing the very same piece. I called Michael, and we engaged in a round of strategic blarney.