by David Carr
I made it through the weekend, but another spiral commenced. In August while Jill was traveling in France, I drove the girls to the cabin in the Adirondacks. It was late, I was bombed, and got lost because of a detour. When we stopped to get gas, I nearly pulled into an oncoming car. Only Meagan’s shout from the passenger seat stopped me. The gas station attendant, a man who spoke very few words of English, saw me, saw the girls, saw what happened.
“Go home, mister. It is time for you to go home.”
I remember the silent vow that I made to those children when I took custody of their lives, that I would lay low anyone or anything who put them at risk. What to do when that malevolence comes from the self?
Sitting at that same cabin near the end of the summer of 2007, Erin remembers it vividly. Of all these interviews, the ones with the twins are the most uncomfortable. I still have an enormously tender relationship with each of them, one that was built early and strong, but it took a huge hit when I started drinking. It wasn’t that I drank around them a lot. I would often wait until they went to bed, but that only meant that when things went wrong, they were all the more surprised. They had never seen me drunk or high in their entire lives, and they certainly weren’t expecting it.
Erin looks at me for a second when it comes up, and then looks away into the camera. She says I told them to stick around on that Friday night, that we were going to drive to our place in the Adirondacks, which was three and a half hours north under the best conditions.
“We took off from work for it, and you said we couldn’t be with our friends, so we just kept waiting and waiting, and we kept asking when we were going to go, and you’re sitting outside smoking on the porch and kind of bumbling around. And I was like, What’s dad doing? What the hell? I was just frustrated. You came in the room, and you’re all packed up, and your face was sort of red, but I didn’t grow up with you drinking. I have no idea what that is. I had never seen that before.
“We got in the car, and you seemed out of it, but I thought you were tired. Maddie whispered to me, ‘I think Dad’s been drinking.’” Maddie was eight years old at the time. “I was like, ‘No! What are you talking about? Shut up, don’t say those things! That’s not true.’ Meagan was like, ‘I don’t know, Erin, I’m a little nervous about it.’ We were still in New Jersey, I think only, like, twenty minutes from the house. We had to pull into a gas station, and you didn’t see an oncoming car, and we were, like, this close to hitting it. That’s when everyone knew for sure that you were just completely ass-faced drunk. It was the most irresponsible thing you could ever do.”
She is still pissed. And I am still sorry. It did not rub out the fourteen years of sobriety that came before it, but it placed more import on the years of sobriety since. She could have happily gone through life without ever seeing me head into the ditch.
What looked like a quick spiral into alcoholism—to my kids, and, really, to me—looked a lot more like a long, slow slide, with plenty of rumination along the way, once I started reporting it out.
I stopped in South Minneapolis to see my friend Cathy, whose ex-husband Patrick is now in prison. She knows plenty about how things can appear to be wonderful but still go very wrong.
She mentioned something odd that I said back in 2000, when she and her husband, along with their daughter Grace and son Jack, who is my godson, were staying in my house and visiting the sights in the city. “You were bringing us to the airport, and you said, ‘Hey, I got something to float by you guys. You think I could pick a city and go there and drink there and then walk away from it?’”
I was joking, or thought so, but she said I had a city all picked out: New Orleans.
When Hurricane Katrina happened, I was adamant about going, but Jill was dead set against it, worried that I would slip again and suffer the consequences. I went down a few days after the flood, and the work went fine, but when I wasn’t working, I was lurching around a chaotic, dark New Orleans with a bottle of brown liquor in my backpack.
With most of the city under water, hotel rooms were at a premium, and I invited Brett, my pal from both the City Paper and the Reader, who was now the restaurant guy at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to stay in a room I had cadged off a colleague. We did our stories and went out at night, but I stayed up long after he went to bed. I went to New Orleans to talk to Brett about those chaotic days. We sat at the back of his house in the Faubourg Marigny, which had made it through Katrina.
“It was a difficult professional situation. I’m a restaurant critic, and I was all of a sudden doing a very different duty and also wondering what this was going to mean for my life because I live here. That was a very difficult time for me.
“I didn’t see you as a wreck. Part of it was because I don’t feel like your personality changes dramatically when you drink. You’re not a person who is, you don’t have a lot of inhibitions, so it’s not like loosening up for you. That’s the way I’ve experienced your personality; you’re very uninhibited.”
And the context provided cover. “At that time, a journalist going off on some kind of bender is going to blend in quite nicely.” And it did. I had plenty of company.
“I remember admiring the stuff you did from here,” he said. “I thought it was really well written and had the right level of empathy and irreverence, even, and I remember thinking that you were able to twist that off.”
My brother John called me when my second column from New Orleans ran, amazed that someone who was living a sober life could walk the edge and not go flying off. I merely thanked him for the read and got off the phone as quickly as I could. And when it came time to look back, I checked the clip. You could smell the whiskey. Good work, but not the kind of approach to a story that I could sustain:
The French Quarter, which has served as the television backdrop for so many stories, is empty, save the drunks and lunatics at Johnny White’s, a bar that never closes. The rest of the Quarter is block after block of pitch black. Is this Bourbon Street or Royal Street? Which way is the hotel? Is my flashlight running out of batteries?
On Wednesday night in the midst of the gloom, at St. Louis and Royal streets, the shadow of a figure over a big kettle appeared. Finis Shelnutt, the owner of Kelsto Club, had cooked up a huge batch of jambalaya and had a cooler of cold beer to go with it. It was a hopeful gesture, not a commercial one.
“I don’t want your money,” he said. “I just want to know what you think of the food. Right now, I need to give back, not take.” A group of newspaper people—print journalists filing string that may or may not be used—nodded their assent. For the record, the jambalaya was incredibly spicy, with a burn that provided a shock, in a good way, to the ghosts and sleepwalkers who came by to eat.
Perhaps the Katrina story resonated so keenly because somewhere inside me, muddy waters were rising and beginning to overtake me. I filed my stories and wanted to stay, but Jill heard something in my voice she did not like. When a second hurricane threatened, she barked me onto an airplane. I made it, but this time I could not bring it in for a landing.
When I returned to New York, I started in right away on a story about Caris, an actress who was incapable of forming memories because of a brain injury. A former Broadway ingenue, she was putting on a one-woman show with the aid of note cards. Jill and I went to see her play on Sunday, September 25, 2005. This is what I wrote:
The first time I met Caris Corfman after her one-woman show at the Flea Theater, she looked—almost stared—into the very backs of my eyes as I told her how I enjoyed her performance. She was flattered and incredibly gracious.
The second time I met Ms. Corfman, she again stared and responded graciously. But she had no idea who I was. It was exactly five minutes later.
She can’t remember. Ten years ago doctors detected a benign tumor in her brain. A series of four operations removed the tumor but damaged the part of the brain that regulates short-term memory. As a result, she not only forgets who she met five minutes ago, but she also
can’t remember if she took her medicine, if she ate, if she should go right or left or just stay put.
That I found her riveting may have had something to do with the fact that I was in the middle of forgetting something very important: that for a guy like me, forgetting could be a fatal error. Or as she put it in her play, “No memory, no life; no memory, no career; no memory.”
Because I had spent three years on and off booze, but mostly off, I had been able to stop in the past. Not drink like a normal person—my idea of a social cocktail was sitting alone on the porch of my house drinking four ounces of vodka on ice, followed by four more ounces on ice, followed by vodka from the bottle mixed with spit until a fifth was gone—but stop drinking long enough to do the normal things like go to work and attend functions. But somewhere in there, a progressive pathology took over, and I could not stop. The Sunday after Caris’s performance, I drank on the patio of the TriBeCa Grand with Jill, lulled by the martinis and the gorgeous surroundings into thinking all was well.
I struggled through work on Monday, all itchy and clock watching, which is not my way, and then drank Monday night. On Tuesday, September 27, I got halfway through the day and left work, my skin crawling and my cells—my very synapses—now devoid of relevant memory, calling out for beverage alcohol. Up until that time, I had never left work to drink. I wandered up Eighth Avenue, drinking at anonymous bars with others like me, people who stared at the bartender and wondered when he was going to get around to pouring them another goddamn drink.
I called Jill, and she knew I was off my rocker. She said it was college night at the girls’ high school, and I should not come. I said I was coming. She said I should take the train home. I said I would drive. She said they were leaving without me, and she hoped I did not make an appearance. I drove home to an empty house. For reasons that I’m sure were clear to me at the time, I showered and put on a suit. There is some logic there. If you can’t be sharp, look sharp. And then I drank about a half bottle of vodka.
I was late, drunk, but nicely coiffed. At the crest of the hill heading into Verona on the way to the girls’ school, the guy in the left lane slowed, and I gunned the engine and sped by in the right lane.
58
STUMBLEBUM
Through the windows, bright red strobe lights flashed across the walls accompanied by a high-pitched wailing. The sound was nagging and accusatory. It was nothing, nothing like song.
—ANN PATCHETT, BEL CANTO
59
RE-LOADED
So now what?
The drinking life provides a few signs that things are not going your way. Arrests tend to be a good indicator, and I had a few new ones under my belt. An inability to confine drinking to appropriate times of day would be another. But as Jill and I sat on the back porch staring at each other on the morning after my arrest, the options seemed limited. I had been in treatment four times—five, actually, but I didn’t know that at the time—and I had been a speaker and consultant on recovery issues. I could give a pretty good presentation off the top of my head on the disease concept of alcoholism, so more information did not seem warranted. Nor did further research, given that I was fresh out of handcuffs and in the midst of physical withdrawal from alcohol. Being a drunk does not require the lunacy and lawlessness that coke addiction provokes, but it will still take down your life one brick at a time and leave you a shuddering, needy mess.
When I was in the Parkview treatment facility in 1984 for the first time, a nice place in St. Louis Park with good food and serious counselors, I did not know much about booze and had no physical addiction. My roommate, Mike, a retired dentist from International Falls, was near the end of his treatment, which had gone very well. Mike was the old head in group, a reasonable guy with a sort of Norwegian Zen about him. All is well, he’d say, all is well. He returned from a weekend pass and confided to me that he had drunk a fifth or two during his time away and was going to act as if nothing happened. But something did. The next morning while we were getting dressed, he went into withdrawal, and his upper dentures—go figure, a dentist with no teeth—came clattering out. I called the nurse, there was all this stuff on the PA about code blue and Mr. Red, but it was all to no avail. He left our room dead on a gurney. I was dumbfounded.
By both heritage and preference, I was a substantial drinker, mostly brown liquor and lots of gin, which I always thought made me win, until it did not. But that same genetic loading meant that I could drink for years without suffering grievous medical consequences. And the pace of my lifestyle and the heedlessness that went with it masked the fact that somewhere in there I crossed a line to clinical alcoholism. By the time I got to my third treatment, at St. Mary’s hospital in early 1988, I was drinking a fifth a day in one form or another. Some hours after I was admitted to St. Mary’s with a garbage bag of stuff, I came up to the nurses’ station, telling them that I felt unwell, my vision was blurry, my skin felt tingly, and my heart was pounding.
“You are in withdrawal from alcohol,” the nurse said flatly. “We will give you something to ease the transition.”
The sheer horror of that almost dropped me. I was fine with being a coke addict—there was some measure of transgression and hipness in that—but a common drunk? And now, twenty years later, those shakes that rattle the soul and everything else were back. Alcohol withdrawal is profoundly uncomfortable to host and no picnic to stare at. I was a pitiful wreck. In desultory fashion, Jill and I went through all of the people we could call or institutions we could check out. And then Jill said, “What about that guy at work? The one you told me you saw at a meeting. Didn’t he say to call if you needed help?”
What about that guy? I didn’t really know him other than the fact that I had seen him at a meeting, he had seen me, and that he had a significant job. After some false starts, I got ahold of him.
I said that I did not want to put him in any sort of position because he was a boss at the Times but that I was pretty much flat on my ass with the drinking stuff. Should I go to the booby hatch, call my supervisor, what?
The guy told me that work was a nonissue, that he was interested in helping me in any way he could. He was full of concern and empathy in spite of the fact that he did not really know me from a load of hay. He listened as I ran my story. He said it sounded like I needed to go to detox. I said I might have to go somewhere after that. What would I tell work? He said I was an employee in good standing, with no work issues, none, and a lot of time off coming. “Tell them nothing.” The guy said to call him when I got out of detox, and we would take it from there.
Sam, I decided, was another matter. He was both a friend and a direct supervisor. I would fill him in.
It is a rule of thumb that when it comes time to detox, it’s best to head for the sticks, but for reasons having to do with insurance and a lack of clear thinking, Jill and I decided that I would go to a detox in the city the following morning. I got very drunk that night and made a fool of myself saying good-bye to my children. The suddenness, the uncertainty of it, along with my intoxicated apology, scared all of the kids.
“I don’t remember you ever being unreliable,” Meagan said. “I don’t remember ever feeling like you’re making choices that could put us in danger, and when it did happen—even though it was for a limited time—it was very scary. You’re a stable parent, you’re the good parent, you’re all those things. When it’s not there, it’s pretty scary.”
In the morning, we went to the detox in Midtown, and I knew I was in for a complicated few days. It was a medically advanced, serious place, but a quick look around the waiting room indicated that most of the patients were heroin folks off the street; there were no special accommodations for the sloppy drunk from the suburbs. But the place had a bed, and Jill pretty much did not know what else to do with me. I wondered what lay upstairs on the unit, but I was sure there would be no duck pond.
I got up there and it was epic, like a B horror flick that was scheduled to run continuously for day
s. Plastic mattresses, twitches scratching themselves, and me, sweaty and shaking apart. I paced in my room for a half hour, looking out at the city through a dirty window and thinking about all the overt acts that had brought me to this place. Rube that I was—I really had become a nice suburban alcoholic—I took a fresh pack of cigarettes into the smoking room. A dude with greasy dreads and very live eyes started sweating me right away.
“In here, we share and share alike,” he said.
Oh, really, like what?
“Like you give me half that pack to share with the people in here, and you keep the other half,” he said, not smiling. Everybody else in the smoking room turned away from the television and looked at me.
“How about we keep this civilized. You ask me if I have an extra cigarette, and I give you one,” I said.
Otherwise what? he wanted to know.
“Otherwise I poke your fucking eyes out.”
Now he smiled and looked me over in all my sweaty, shaky glory. “You don’t look like you’re going to be poking anybody’s eyes out.”
“Maybe not today,” I said. “But I will be better tomorrow.” He snatched the cig out of my hand and walked off.
When I saw the doctor, he asked what my objectives were at the detox. I said I wanted to get detoxed from alcohol as quickly as possible and get back home. He wrote me up an order for Librium and said that if I woke up on the fourth day and could function without it, he would discharge me.
I battened down the hatches and went fetal in my room. My friend John from the Times walked over and left cigs, a phone card, and small money for me downstairs. I used the phone card to call Jill and whine about how mean and shitty the place was. I was pathetic, a drunk and a big fat baby.