The Night of the Gun

by David Carr

  “We’ve been working on this story for months,” I said. “And people who live on the block tell us they are ‘waiting for the Atlantic story.’ Well, aren’t we all? We will be out months before you.” Michael, who had retained an eminent urban writer who lived in the very place we were talking about, ignored my challenge.

  “Did you hear about what’s going on at the Washington zoo?” he said. “I hear the zookeepers are fucking the pandas there! Huge scandal! You guys need to turn some attention that way. It’s a great big story.”

  Funny guy. We came out first. The Atlantic’s story smashed ours flat.

  Michael was a reporter in his bones, and I would hang up the phone after talking with him wanting to go through walls. He talked me into the homeland security story measuring various vulnerabilities, something I was manifestly unqualified to do, but through a kind of hypnosis, he convinced me I could do a credible job. (And he was right. For years, I have gotten a residual check from a military college because the story is part of its curriculum.)

  But working at home on and off for two different magazines, I missed the metabolism and urgency of a newsroom, the feeling of being a part of something. I got a call from Dave, the media editor at The New York Times, who had read some of my work at Inside, and he asked if I was interested in talking about a job. I thought it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard. My dad, on hearing about the discussion, said, “Well, you’ve always wanted to work at The New York Times.” Which is a damn lie. I had never said that in my life.

  Like every other working journalist, I had read and admired the paper all of my life, but I never saw myself as a Times guy. Besides, I felt I had unfinished business, especially at the Atlantic. I called Michael to say that I had been tentatively offered a job at the Times. He said, and I am paraphrasing from memory here, that since I had received what seemed to be a nice offer, he would buy out my New York contract, give me a raise, and quit changing my job around every other month.

  “There,” he said, “that is my offer to you as your editor.” And then he said this, and I remember every word: “As your friend, I need to tell you that if you go to that place, and they like you and you like them, it will change your life. I can’t offer you that. Why not take the job, see how you like it, and if you don’t, just come back?”

  I took the job. Michael, a reporter who could not resist a good story, set down the editor’s pencil and went to cover the opening of the Iraq war. After the first Gulf War, he had written the book Martyrs’ Day and went back to write a second book. During the initial dash to Baghdad, he was killed when his Humvee came under fire and overturned into a flooded ditch. I wrote his obit at the Times.

  55

  THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

  When I interviewed at the Times at the end of 2001, I was doing fine until I bumped into Al, a large, indomitable masthead presence. He glanced skeptically over my background of magazines, alt weeklies, and dot-coms—not a whit of daily newspaper work—and probably saw a hot dog. The only way I got out of his office alive was by stating in plain terms that I clearly understood that the needs of the many frequently supersede the needs of the one. I could see him brighten when I said I was more interested in fitting in than sticking out.

  I meant it. I felt like an eight-year-old boy who wakes up inside his father’s body and is handed his briefcase. Shouldn’t someone more competent, more skilled, more grown-up be doing this job? Still, I went to work in the business section, writing stories that were put through edit and published for all to see.

  Dave, the media editor, broke me in, and he was old school all the way. I picked up a few corrections early on—a dread that snapped me awake in the long sewery parts of the night—and he talked me off the ledge, patiently explaining that my tendency to lard a lot of detail into my stories was a great way to pick up minor corrections. “If you aren’t absolutely sure, just rip it out. Who’s going to know? You can’t get in trouble for something that didn’t run.”

  That basic newspapering stuff was not lost on me. The baked-in folkways at The New York Times have made most people who ever worked there, including me, better than they were. Imagine working in a place where everybody—the dour middle manager, the fresh-faced gunner down the hall, the big cheese who walks by every once in a while—is trying to make it better. Even when they are stapling you to the wall, or pointing out an error in your work, or changing it fundamentally after you thought you were finished, they are trying to make it better.

  The New York Times is weird—freaky, even—that way. I am the first to admit that the majesty of the endeavor is much more apparent to the people who read the paper than to those who make it, but the institutional muscles of the place are hard to deny. The people who run the paper have generally kept me away from breaking news, but I have caught a few red balls—working against an impossible deadline with little information, no time to write and bombs going off everywhere. And just when all is lost, when you are quietly but noticeably freaking the hell out, the place picks you up and carries you across the goal line.

  If some of the darkness that lives in the walls there got to me—big-city journalism is a very serious undertaking that, done incorrectly, can ruin lives—the broader impulse of making it better had a profound effect on me as well.

  The Times sort of shifted under my feet and everyone else’s in 2003. Howell, the executive editor, seemed like he would be lord god of everything for eternity, and then he was gone. Jayson was the necessary figure, a guy who spent a great deal of time on the margins of the newspaper and then moved to its white-hot center before setting himself on fire. He created a massive scandal. Howell and his deputy, Gerald, left the paper after it became clear that Jayson had invented stories and sources out of whole cloth.

  I knew Jayson as a friend in recovery who I smoked cigarettes with. He was plugged into the paper in a way I never was and never will be, so I always learned something juicy when we talked. Jayson was socially adept, the kind of high/low cat who could hit almost anyone’s happy buttons, unless that person was trying to supervise him. I knew that he was viewed as a handful—he had been in and out of jams working in the metro section—but I was no longer in the business of supervising or judging young reporters.

  Near Christmas of 2002, I was sitting in the smoking room back when there was such a thing, bemoaning that when I walked out after a play in New York, I took custody of a wish list from some kids whose families couldn’t afford presents. It was full of all manner of urban wear that was not only beyond my budget but beyond my ken. Jayson grabbed the list, gave it a once-over, and said he would split it with me. We went shopping. He negotiated with clerks, enrolling them in what we were doing, and soon enough we had a big bag of presents. He had forgotten his credit card that day, natch, but he promised to deliver the presents to the house in outer Brooklyn. He came back and described how the mother’s eyes were shiny with tears and the kids totally freaking because we had pretty much nailed their Christmas list.

  Things seemed to get better for Jayson, who got a hot hand in the fall of 2002 as a reporter during the story about the Washington, DC, snipers. But the stories he filed proved to be his undoing, and by extension, Howell’s, who had pushed his thinly sourced, partly fabricated reports onto the front page. Early in 2003, I was sent down to Washington to do a story about Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary. I called Jayson while I was on my way down and asked him where he was staying, and he mentioned the Jefferson. I asked if they had broadband. He said yes. We made plans to have dinner at Georgia Brown’s, an upscale restaurant with down-home cooking. Almost immediately Jayson called me back and said he had been called out of town to Virginia Beach. When I got to the Jefferson, there was no broadband, and they had never heard of Jayson. All of that should have sent my bullshit meter to 11, but I just kept rolling. He called me when I was on the train home, saying he was coming back to DC.

  We didn’t work in the same department or cover the same stuff, and
I didn’t buy into his theory that the masthead was out to get him. I believed him to be a good-hearted guy who had recovered from a go-round with crack cocaine and a real, if somewhat conflicted, journalist. As it turned out, he deceived his editors and his readers, and brought tremendous shame to the paper. His caper was an ornate one and involved all sorts of machinations. I remain convinced that simply going and doing the stories would have been easier, but then again, I’m not him.

  When it became clear that a massive con was under way, I was dumbfounded. On the day he left, Gerald, the managing editor, was less worried about Jayson the journalist and more concerned about what might happen to Jayson the human being. He sent me out to look for him. I found him just down Forty-third Street with his friend Zuza. I was worried he might do himself harm and/or tip back over into crack. It was an emotional moment. Part of me wanted to strangle him for lying, lying to me about lying, but there was plenty of that to go around, so I thought I should show compassion. I gave him a panicky little speech, but I don’t remember any specifics. Later, when his book, Burning Down My Masters’ House, came out, that moment was in there. He describes standing there with Zuza and spotting me.

  We could see him across the street, standing alone, his black bag over his shoulder, black sunglasses on. He was nervously rocking back and forth.

  “Carr!” I yelled.

  David made his way across the street, and I introduced him to Zuza.

  “Oh God, I am so glad you are here,” he said, giving her a big hug. “I am so glad you are here.” David embraced me. He was crying, tears pouring down his face under his sunglasses. “You’re not going to go west, are you?” he plaintively and emotionally wailed. West was toward where the drugs were, my spots. “I don’t want to man, I don’t want to.” I too was crying.

  “Don’t go, don’t go. I don’t want you to die, man. I don’t want you to die. Listen, I don’t know what happened, but I know that you were not honest with me, and a time will come when we will sort that all out, but I just don’t want you to do something stupid. I just don’t want you to go west, I don’t want you to pick up, I don’t want you to kill yourself, and you know that picking up is just killing yourself slowly. Whatever shit you have going on that you think it will make better, it’s just going to make it ten times worse. Ten times worse, and you are just going to kill yourself. This time it might not be all that slow. Don’t do it. Just don’t do it.”

  Here’s the weird thing: Give or take hyperbolic description, it was probably word-for-word what I said, better than anything I could have done from memory. This guy was in the middle of the worst day of his life, and months later he writes a book and remembers almost exactly what I said. It was almost like a parlor trick. When it came time to write my book, I called Jayson and asked him how he did it.

  “I think I recounted it and replayed it in my head when I was in the hospital, and I was worried about going out and, like, not having a job and being in the middle of New York City—having some money in my pocket, at least forty dollars, and being able to use, and I recounted that story to myself even when I got out of the hospital.” (After he left the Times, he entered the hospital to deal with some mental health issues.)

  I read his book and ingested all the coverage about the scandal after he was fired, and I still have no idea why he did what he did. He more or less grabbed a rope, tied it around his neck, tied the other end around all of our feet at the newspaper, and then jumped. But I did have some basic questions. What about the time when you were at the Jefferson in DC but maybe in Brooklyn?

  “I don’t know about that specific date, but in the beginning of the sniper shootings, I was at the Jefferson,” he said, adding that he stayed in another reporter’s room.

  And what about the big bag of presents and the touching family story?

  “You should note for your story that you and I talked a couple times after it all happened, and then there was a period of silence,” he recalled. “I called you, and you said, ‘The one thing I want to know is, Is it true?’ And I’m like, ‘Is what true?’ And you say, ‘Did you take the presents to them?’ And that just blew me away. I don’t know how to describe how I wasn’t offended by it, because it fit within the whole genre of everything that was going on, but I was, like, it made me think people are even questioning that shit.”

  So I asked again, is it true?

  “One hundred percent,” he said.

  I believe him, but maybe that’s just me.

  56

  THE VILLAGE TAKES A HIT

  I haven’t seen you in ages, but it’s not as bleak as it seems. We still dance in my outrageously beautiful Busby Berkeley dreams.

  —MAGNETIC FIELDS, “BUSBY BERKELEY DREAMS”

  I took a flight on February 27, 2004. I wanted to remain there, in the brutally clear blue sky, where the sun was shining on everyone, including my sister Coo. While I was up there, Coo, a bad singer, a good dancer, and a person with a fetish for both power tools and her nieces, was still alive. “Coo was the fun one,” Erin says now. While Coo was cooking dinner for her partner, Laurie, an unseen hand in the form of an aneurysm reached up and snatched her. She was still breathing, but gone. I wrote my way to her bedside and then said good-bye. I later published what I wrote in the Family Times.

  Our family loves drama. Take any misdemeanor—the stumble of an alcoholic brother or a new boyfriend for the baby in the family—and we can crank up a hailstorm of phone calls full of theoretics, palliatives, and advice. We recount these dramas to each other, and they usually end sweetly, with the teller and the family held harmless, a life beyond real consequence. The last sentence of those stories has become a family trademark: “And nobody died.”

  My sister Coo is/was the master of the nobody-died stem-winder. A gifted communicator who could talk more smack than a corner boy, she was able to take and hold the floor in a family full of loudmouths. She was a smart one, with perfect comic pitch arrayed over stories that were the audible manifestations of her expansive range of interests.

  This story began the night before. My brother in Washington called to say that Coo had fallen down and begun babbling incoherently. Her partner, Laurie, called an ambulance, and they went to a nearby hospital. It was determined that she had suffered an aneurysm and had to be stabilized and transported to another hospital for surgery.

  The ticktock of calls through the night each carried more weight, more portent. I dozed with the phone in my hand. In the morning there was one bump of hope as the drugs lowered her blood pressure and stanched the flow, but then new leaks, new horrors. There would be no transport, at least not to another hospital. Shaking off the shock, but not the implication, I booked the earliest flight. As I frantically packed, Jillie nixed the black suit as too morbid.

  Fifteen minutes before my plane left Newark for Minneapolis, the call from my brother Joe came to me saying that Coo’s big throbbing brain was dead. There would be a reassessment later, but all indications suggested we would have to make some decisions when we arrived.

  I will need that suit. But before we bury Coo, we have to go to the hospital and admit that she is dead. Admit that the otherwise lifeless slab whose chest is animated by a ventilator has nothing to do with my sister. I know without checking that she is a donor—generous of spirit with a massive heart.

  I know how it will go. My older brother John, a man who spends many of his days defending the sanctity of human life in all its iterations, will nonetheless lay out the endgame after meeting with the doctor. There will be no side doors, only a long, dark hall we walk down with my sister and then come out, one by one, without her. We will pull the plug—the scrim of our Irish ancestry has taught us that you don’t mess around with death. You shake its hand grimly, and then look for a bottle of brown liquor, or if that might kill you too, a meeting with other like minds.

  But for now, I want to stay up here where my sister is not dead, where the blue is endless and the clouds are just decorations, not wisps of d
read.

  Two years younger, she loved me with inconsistent ferocity, a hurricane of sibling love when she was not otherwise occupied by a complicated, busy life. Her fealty to me—in a big family, we were a powerful alliance for a time—was payback for times in her young years when I beat the hell out of anyone who dared tease her about her nasal voice and stubby nose, legacies of a cleft palate. When she turned twenty, she saved her money and had bones in her face surgically broken and the original intent of the creator restored. After that, she was unstoppable.

  Moderation is something she and I were always moderate about. I lovingly corrupted her for years, taking her to throbbing punk bars and parties full of skeevy people. We shared a manic dancing style, and most of my great rock moments include her joyous, upturned face. She was down for a taste of coke, but she mostly did line after line of everything around her. She inhaled whatever was on hand—people, far-flung lands, weirdos of all manner.

  I eventually began moving around, while she switched jobs, towns, and affectional preferences. We shared secrets, but only when things were really bad or really good. Last week, when I called her for some family gossip, she self-described as “Fabulous.” She remains fabulous, because I am in the air, and I will keep heading straight for a horizon where my sister is still alive. Still fabulous.

  57

  ADDITIONAL RESEARCH