David Carr worked until he died. It's been more than five years, and for some reason that feels totally insane (
see his Twitter
https://twitter.com/carr2n?lang=en; he passed away February 12, 2015). He was too young to die, not yet 60, and yet after reading
The Night of the Gun, one is not surprised by the eventual toll that excessive drinking and drugging can inflict on the human body. It should go without saying that this automatically goes onto the Best Books list, written as it was by someone with such a sharp literary mind and deeply-embedded BS-detector. The self-examination in this book is merciless:
"I got out, locked the door, and walked away, pushed from behind, pulled by what was inside. I clearly remember solving the math out in the car, but not much of the rest of it. Just a bit of a pick-me-up while I am here, I probably said, glancing at the door as I did. Of course, I told no one in that forlorn circle in the studio that I had, um, friends waiting in the car. There were no windows in the place, and the outside likely disappeared in a flurry of consumption. My kids may or may not have been safe, but inside, a transformation--almost a kidnapping--was under way. The guilty father was replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time passed, one thing begot another, the machine bucked, whistles blew, smoke came out, and eventually I was thrown clear.
Leaving, I remember that. Out the metal door and then out the front door with its three bolts onto the porch and the hollow sound of my boots on the wood floor. A pause. How long had it been, really? It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a clod dread in all corners of my being.
I cracked the front door, reached around, unlocked the back, and leaned in.
I could see their breath.
God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment I had made a mistake He could not easily forgive. I made a decision at that instant never to be that man again." (164-165)
The plot of the book is roughly this: Carr grows up in Minnesota and eventually works as a journalist for the alt-weekly
Twin Cities Reader, lives a life of adventurous debauchery, attends rehab, gets sober for twenty years, finally "makes it" and lands at the
New York Times around 9/11, does excellent work and relapses, and finally ends at a point where he decides to write this memoir and investigate the self-mythologized "Night of the Gun."
The Night of the Gun was March 17, 1987 (33 years ago from the date of this writing). Carr had just lost his job, effectively choosing to quit rather than attend rehab, as his employer offered. He instead goes on a major bender, and goes after his friend Donald, who had ditched him at a bar, and confronts him back at his house, who then asks him to leave while brandishing a gun. But Donald later says, he never had a gun. The gun was yours, he tells him.
This memoir traces the intersection of memory and fact, as if they were two concentric circles in a venn diagram, and attempts to merge the circles completely. There is some truth in every memory, but Carr's professional background compels him to search mercilessly for absolute objectivity, as painful as it may be to see himself as his most monstrous. He brings a video camera and tape recorder to meetings with friends and acquaintances from his extensive "drug period" about twenty years after the fact, goes over all his memories with each person, and obtains confirmation or denial as to the depths of depravity that he reached.
There is a lot of indie rock in this book, which is not all that surprising given that most of the heavy drinking and drugging took place in mid-1980's Minneapolis. There may be a reference to Husker Du, but Carr was definitely a fan of the Replacements. There may even be one overlapping story with
Trouble Boys, but it's not like it would be revelatory or anything. He probably just did some coke or smoked some crack with one or more of its members.
Crack is a major subject of the book. Crack has always struck me as a disgusting drug. And while it still does, Carr normalizes it to an extent. It does not seem more deadly than coke. Yet that is always how it has been painted. Coke is for rich white people and crack is for poor black people. And I'm not sure, but it seems like the only major difference is that a certain amount of coke will last longer after being to turned into crack:
"...Lots of the people I knew who loved coke took a long, hard look at crack and demurred.
But not me. Here's the thing: If you snort a great deal of cocaine, eventually your nose gets full and your synapses get bored. Crack cocaine offers all the benefits of injectable drugs--a complete and immediate rush, the possibility of easing up to overdosing without actually having it befall you--without all those messy needles, track marks, or exposure to bloodborne contagions.
When smokable cocaine first came on the scene, it involved very complicated processing to produce what was then called freebase cocaine. Powdered cocaine was dissolved in a strong alkaloid solution such as ammonia. Then ether, or some other highly flammable solvent, was added to further refine the mixture and conjure a smokable substance. It yielded a purity that could be eye popping, but it had its pitfalls. Just ask Richard Pryor.
Crack, on the other hand, required just four elements: fire, water, coke, and baking soda. The mix is heated, and the impurities from manufacture boil away. The remaining solid bonds with the baking soda, or base, and a rock is formed. To wit:
Coc-HCl + NaHCO3 --> Coc + H20 +CO2 +NaCl.
Different ratios of baking soda to coke yielded different outcomes. I preferred the very prosaic 1:1. Most crack ranged from 75 percent to 90 percent pure, based on seizures by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. When the coke is cooked with the sodium bicarbonate and water, it tends to make a popping, crackling sound, hence the name
crack." (113)
It goes on longer but you get the idea. If one ever needed a how-to manual on drugs, this would not be a bad place to start. I have not read
A Million Little Pieces, but it was quite in vogue at the time that Flying Houses launched. A random reference or two may be found to it in the early reviews (note also: a quote from the
first book ever reviewed here serves as an epigraph to Chapter 38). Carr was aware:
"Suddenly, writing about the idea of self-fashioning, of coming up with a history that allows you to make your way in the present, began to seem like a worthy intellectual pursuit. At the same time, one of the most successful hood ornaments of the genre--James Frey's
A Million Little Pieces--was coming apart in very plain view, a story I covered. I began to think that there might be room for another memoir from a lost-and-found soul, a work of recollection that was based on reporting and fact-finding." (178)
Apart from Frey, Carr also includes a few highly-entertaining pages charting his (mostly endearing) relationship with another famous spinner of tall tales:
"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." (344)
Apparently, Carr "discovered" Lena Dunham (seeing
Tiny Furniture as SXSW), so perhaps Adam Driver owes a certain debt to him. But that happened after this book. There is a chapter about David Bowie potentially singing to him at a concert on what I believe would have been his last tour, back in 2003. This is another example of false memory. However, he is able to remember that Bowie played every song off
Station to Station except "Word on a Wing" and "TVC15." He was quite a hipster. It would be inaccurate to call him a star****er. In any memoir, or opportunity to reach a broader audience in the appropriate context, stories about celebrities are generally "content-worthy." In this case it comes in the form of an entire chapter about Tom Arnold.
He is referred to as "Tommy" and he is part of the tough crowd he ran with that did lots of coke together. Basically. He was doing stand-up comedy in Minneapolis at the time. Near the end of their Bender, he is married to Roseanne and she has started her show. So there are some really titillating tidbits:
"We had a lot in common. Both large guys back then, we could take over a room or turn it against us with a flick of the wrist. In the summer of 1987, Tommy stiffed on a coke debt from the night before--he still denies, but some things I do remember. Like a lot of us, Tommy was better at doing drugs than paying for them. He was not one of those guys who would steal your dope and then help you look for it, but he did what he needed to stay high.
I will cop to hassling him a little bit too much about that. Then I remember him, out of nowhere, attempting to remove my left eye. In my mind, it had always been one more bit of tomfoolery gone bad, no big deal. We had joked about it many times, but when we really got down to cases and were talking about it at length, I realized Tommy felt bad about it." (122)
One of the main reasons that Carr slips so deeply into addiction is Anna. Anna is the mother of his twin girls. Anna provided very easy access to an incredible amount of cocaine:
"Decades later, we are talking outside a hotel in Tucson, and she still has no trouble recalling the dimensions of a pressed kilo of coke.
'It was about as big as a book, about this big,' she said, framing the air with her hands. 'It still had a snake seal; I mean, it was right from the Medellin cartel.'
'I sold a kilo a month for seven years,' she said. 'It cost me twenty-five cents a gram. It was twenty-five thousand dollars a kilo and there's a thousand grams. And I turned around and sold that for one hundred grand.'" (127)
There are few valid criticisms that I feel I can make about this book. Perhaps Carr is sometimes too self-congratulatory, sometimes a little repetitive, but his story is an admirable one. It appears that he had made his appropriate amends and ultimately made out quite well with his time on earth.
Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary worth watching, and approximately 50% of the reason is getting to see Carr in action.
I feel like there was something else I wanted to say about this book, or about how Carr might have prevented the NY Times from running some of its less respectable headlines in recent years, but he likely had no such authority. He does however randomly mention Harvey Weinstein in his first paragraph about moving to New York City:
"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 emigre 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 7ease 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." (333)
I know this review was really heavy on quotations, but I do that so people get a flavor for the prose. I highly recommend that almost everyone read this book, especially those looking to go into the fields of journalism or memoir-writing. And of course, those in recovery.
Grade: A
