Gun Play

Sure as a gun.

-- Don Quixote

The voice came from a long distance off, like a
far-flung radio signal, all crackle and mystery with just an
occasional word coming through. And then it was as if a hill had
been crested and the signal locked. The voice was suddenly
clear.

"You can get up from this chair, go to treatment,
and keep your job. There's a bed waiting for you. Just go," said
the editor, a friendly guy, sitting behind the desk. "Or you can
refuse and be fired." Friendly but firm.

The static returned, but now he had my attention. I
knew about treatment -- I had mumbled the slogans, eaten the
Jell-O, and worn the paper slippers, twice. I was at the end of my
monthlong probation at a business magazine in Minneapolis; it had
begun with grave promises to reform, to show up at work like a
normal person, and I had almost made it. But the day before, March
17, 1987, was Saint Patrick's Day. Obeisance was required for my
shanty Irish heritage. I twisted off the middle of the workday to
celebrate my genetic loading with green beer and Jameson Irish
whiskey. And cocaine. Lots and lots of coke. There was a van,
friends from the office, and a call to some pals, including Tom, a
comedian I knew. We decided to attend a small but brave Saint
Patrick's Day parade in Hopkins, Minnesota, the suburban town where
I grew up.

My mother made the parade happen through sheer
force of will. She blew a whistle, and people came. There were no
floats, just a bunch of drunk Irish-for-a-days and their kids,
yelling and waving banners to unsuspecting locals who set up
folding chairs as if there were going to be a real parade. After we
walked down Main Street accompanied only by those sad little metal
noisemakers, we all filed into the Knights of Columbus hall. The
adults did standup drinking while the kids assembled for some
entertainment. I told my mom that Tom the comedian had some good
material for the kids. He immediately began spraying purple jokes
in all directions and was wrestled off the stage by a few nearby
adults. I remember telling my mom we were sorry as we left, but I
don't remember precisely what happened after that.

I know we did lots of "more." That's what we called
coke. We called it more because it was the operative metaphor for
the drug. Even if it was the first call of the night, we would say,
"You got any more?" because there would always be more -- more
need, more coke, more calls.

After the Knights of Columbus debacle -- it was
rendered as a triumph after we got in the van -- we went downtown
to McCready's, an Irish bar in name only that was kind of a
clubhouse for our crowd. We had some more, along with shots of
Irish whiskey. We kept calling it "just a wee taste" in honor of
the occasion. The shot glasses piled up between trips to the back
room for line after line of coke, and at closing time we moved to a
house party. Then the dreaded walk home accompanied by the chirping
of birds.

That's how it always went, wheeling through bars,
selling, cadging, or giving away coke, drinking like a sailor and
swearing like a pirate. And then somehow slinking into work as a
reporter. Maybe it took a line or two off the bottom of the desk
drawer to achieve battle readiness in the morning, but hey, I was
there, wasn't I?

On the day I got fired -- it would be some time
before I worked again -- I was on the last vapors of a young career
that demonstrated real aptitude. Even as I was getting busy with
the coke at night, I was happy to hold the cops and government
officials to account in my day job. Getting loaded, acting the
fool, seemed like a part of the job description, at least the way I
did it. Editors dealt with my idiosyncrasies -- covering the city
council in a bowling shirt and red visor sunglasses -- because I
was well sourced in what was essentially a small town and wrote a
great deal of copy. I saw my bifurcated existence as the best of
both worlds, no worries. But now that mad run seemed to be over. I
sat with my hands on the arms of the chair that suddenly seemed
wired with very strong current.

There was no time to panic, but the panic came
anyway. Holy shit. They are on to me.

The editor prodded me gently for an answer.
Treatment or professional unallotment? For an addict the choice
between sanity and chaos is sometimes a riddle, but my mind was
suddenly epically clear.

"I'm not done yet."

Things moved quickly after that. After a stop at my
desk, I went down the elevator and out into a brutally clear
morning. Magically, my friend Paul was walking down the street in
front of my office building, looking ravaged in a leather coat and
sunglasses. He hadn't even beaten the birds home. I told him I had
just been fired, which was clinically true but not the whole story.
A folk singer of significant talent and many virulent songs about
the wages of working for The Man, Paul understood immediately. He
had some pills of iffy provenance -- neither he nor I knew much
about pills -- maybe they were muscle relaxers. I ate them.

Freshly, emphatically fired, I was suffused with a
rush of sudden liberation. A celebration was in order. I called
Donald, my trusty wingman. A pal from college, he was tall, dark,
and compliant, a boon companion once he got a couple of pops in
him. We had first met at a crappy state college in Wisconsin, where
we tucked dozens of capers under our belts. We had been washed down
a mountain in the Smokies inside a tent, created a campfire out of
four stacked picnic tables at Wolf River, and casually taken out
picket fences and toppled mailboxes during road trips all over
Wisconsin. Our shared taste for skipping classes in lieu of hikes,
Frisbee, and dropping acid during college had been replaced by new
frolics once we both moved on to Minneapolis.

We worked restaurant jobs, pouring and downing
liquor, spending the ready cash as fast as it came in. "Make some
calls!" became the warm-up line for many a night of grand
foolishness. We shared friends, money, and, once, a woman named
Signe, a worldly cocktail waitress who found herself wanly amused
by the two guys tripping on acid one night at closing time at a bar
called Moby Dick's. "Let me know when you boys are finished," she
said in a bored voice as Donald and I grinned madly at each other
from either end of her. We didn't care. He was a painter and
photographer when he wasn't getting shit faced. And at a certain
point, I became a journalist when I wasn't ingesting all the
substances I could get my hands on. We were a fine pair. Now that I
had been fired for cause, there was no doubt that Donald would know
what to say.

"Fuck 'em," he said when he met me at McCready's to
toast my first day between opportunities. The pills had made me a
little hinky, but I shook it off with a snort of coke. Nicely
prepped, we went to the Cabooze, a Minneapolis blues bar. Details
are unclear, but there was some sort of beef inside, and we were
asked to leave. Donald complained on the way out that I was always
getting us 86'd, and my response included throwing him across the
expansive hood of his battered '75 LTD. Seeing the trend, he drove
away, leaving me standing with thirty-four cents in my pocket. That
detail I remember.

I was pissed: Not about losing my job -- they'd be
sorry. Not about getting 86'd -- that was routine. But my best
friend had abandoned me. I was livid, and somebody was going to get
it. I walked the few miles back to McCready's to refuel and called
Donald at home.

"I'm coming over." Hearing the quiet menace in my
voice, he advised me against it; that he had a gun.

"Oh really? Now I'm coming over for sure."

He and his sister Ann Marie had a nice rental on
Nicollet Avenue in a rugged neighborhood on the south side of
Minneapolis, not far from where I lived. I don't remember how I got
there, but I stormed up to the front door -- a thick one of wood
and glass -- and after no one answered, I tried kicking my way in.
My right knee started to give way before my sneaker did any damage.
Ann Marie, finally giving in to the commotion, came to the door and
asked me what I was going to do if I came in.

"I just want to talk to him."

Donald came to the door and, true to his word, had
a handgun at his side. With genuine regret on his face, he said he
was going to call the cops. I had been in that house dozens of
times and knew the phone was in his bedroom. I limped around the
corner and put my fist through the window, grabbed the phone, and
held it aloft in my bloody arm. "All right, call 'em, motherfucker!
Call 'em! Call the goddamn cops!" I felt like Jack Fucking
Nicholson. Momentarily impressed, Donald recovered long enough to
grab the phone out of my bloody hand and do just that.

When we met again through the glass of the front
door, he still had the gun, but his voice was now friendly. "You
should leave. They're coming right now." I looked down Nicollet
toward Lake Street and saw a fast-moving squad car with the
cherries lit, no siren.

I wasn't limping anymore. I had eight blocks to go
to my apartment, full tilt all the way. Off the steps, 'round the
house, and into the alleys. Several squads were crisscrossing.
What the hell did Donald tell them? I thought as I
sprinted. I dove behind a Dumpster to avoid one squad coming around
the corner, opening up a flap of jeans and skin on my other knee. I
had to hit the bushes and be very still as the cops strafed the
area with their searchlights, but I made it, scurrying up the back
steps to my apartment in a fourplex on Garfield Avenue. I was
bleeding, covered in sweat, and suddenly very hungry. I decided to
heat up some leftover ribs, turned the oven on high, and left the
door of it open so I could smell the ribs when they heated up. And
then I passed out on my couch.

Every hangover begins with an inventory. The next
morning mine began with my mouth. I had been baking all night, and
it was as dry as a two-year-old chicken bone. My head was a small
prison, all yelps of pain and alarm, each movement seeming to shift
bits of broken glass in my skull. My right arm came into view for
inspection, caked in blood, and then I saw it had a few actual
pieces of glass still embedded in it. So much for metaphor. My legs
both hurt, but in remarkably different ways.

Three quadrants in significant disrepair -- that
must have been some night, I thought absently. Then I remembered I
had jumped my best friend outside a bar. And now that I thought
about it, that was before I tried to kick down his door and broke a
window in his house. And then I recalled, just for a second, the
look of horror and fear on his sister's face, a woman I adored. In
fact, I had been such a jerk that my best friend had to point a gun
at me to make me go away. Then I remembered I'd lost my job.

It was a daylight waterfall of regret known to all
addicts. It can't get worse, but it does. When the bottom arrives,
the cold fact of it all, it is always a surprise. Over fiteen
years, I had made a seemingly organic journey from pothead to party
boy, from knockaround guy to friendless thug. At thirty-one, I was
washed out of my profession, morally and physically corrupt, but I
still had almost a year left in the Life. I wasn't done yet.

In the pantheon of "worst days of my life," getting
fired was right up there, but I don't remember precisely how bad it
was. You would think that I would recall getting canned with a
great deal of acuity. But it was twenty years ago.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't,
recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is
reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but
other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal
narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood
flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created
to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the
present.

But my past does not connect to my present. There
was That Guy, a dynamo of hilarity and then misery, and then there
is This Guy, the one with a family, a house, and a good job as a
reporter and columnist for The New York Times. Connecting
the two will take a lot more than typing. The first-date version of
my story would suggest that I took a short detour into narcotics,
went through an aberrant period of buying, selling, snorting,
smoking, and finally shooting cocaine, and once I knocked that off,
well, all was well.

The meme of abasement followed by salvation is a
durable device in literature, but does it abide the complexity of
how things really happened? Everyone is told just as much as he
needs to know, including the self. In Notes from
Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky explains that recollection --
memory, even -- is fungible, and often leaves out unspeakable
truths, saying, "Man is bound to lie about himself."

I am not an enthusiastic or adept liar. Even so,
can I tell you a true story about the worst day of my life? No. To
begin with, it was far from the worst day of my life. And those who
were there swear it did not happen the way I recall, on that day
and on many others. And if I can't tell a true story about one of
the worst days of my life, what about the rest of those days, that
life, this story?

Nearly twenty years later, in the summer of 2006, I
sat in a two-room shack in Newport, a town outside of the Twin
Cities, near the stockyards where Donald now lived and worked at a
tree farm. He was still handsome, still a boon companion. We hadn't
seen each other in years, but what knit us together -- an abiding
bond hatched in reckless glory -- was in the room with us.

I told him the story about the Night of the Gun. He
listened carefully and patiently, taking an occasional swig out of
a whiskey bottle and laughing at the funny parts. He said it was
all true, except the part about the gun. "I never owned a gun," he
said. "I think you might have had it."

This is a story about who had the gun.

Excerpted from THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter Investigates the
Darkest Story of His Life. His Own © Copyright 2011 by David
Carr. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster. All rights
reserved.