Back from Oblivion

Back in the day, not every night out with David Carr ended at Moby Dick’s, but I don’t recall ever being in old Block E’s most heavily policed watering hole without him. That’s another way of saying Carr always led the way in.

If you ran with Carr as a twenty/thirtysomething back in the early and mid-eighties—as a remarkably large number of local writers, musicians, scenesters, and players did—you knew that Carr, then writing for the Twin Cities Reader, was off his game if the night didn’t “finish” at Moby’s. At least that’s where it finished for everyone else. Those of us who’d hitch up with the Carr Local for four or five stops after work, all the time thinking we were the wildest damned cowboys west of CBGB’s, would eventually peel off and head home, working up some weak excuse for a glaring spouse. For Carr, though, the “finishing game” usually went on into the night, past dawn, and through the following day.

Eventually there was no start or finish. It was a constant cycle of booze, grimy bars, coke, crack, some dealer’s hellhole apartment, a circle of junkies licking their lips over someone’s fresh rock, and multiple failed trips through rehab before cratering with no place left to go other than Eden House, a druggie boot camp. There, Carr explains, confronting the colossal fuck-up that you’d made of your life and the misery you’d inflicted on everyone around you was the first step toward restoration.

It is a moderate-sized miracle that Hopkins–born Carr is both alive at fifty-two and enjoying something close to star prominence as media columnist and roaming lifestyle/trends/Hollywood feature writer-at-large for The New York Times.

This month brings publication of The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own, what Carr calls a “reported memoir” of his sometimes hilarious but more often nearly fatal junkie rampages through low-life Minneapolis during the 1980s and his long climb back to credibility. The book, which he largely wrote last summer at his weekend place in the Adirondacks, will be irresistible to anyone who knew him. And he being a gregarious, quick-witted, charm-you-out-of-your-shoes Irishman, those “who knew him” describes an impressive number of people around these towns.

Carr’s research for the book involved traveling to wherever old friends and victims of his former excesses live today and encouraging them to recall what a slobbering loser he had degenerated into way back when. The process included a visit to Tucson, Arizona, and a not exactly cheery walk down memory lane with the mother of his college-age twin daughters, conceived when both Carr and the woman—then a major coke dealer—were in the depths of full-blown crack addiction.

Working through concerns about “commoditizing” his bad behavior, worries about the effect his revelations would have on family, and the usual writer’s fears of doing a full-out “faceplant” (a favorite Carrism) in front of the media cognoscenti, the boy has turned in a remarkably engaging book, trading on the sordid horror to turn a nice buck—Simon & Schuster handed him an advance in the neighborhood of $300,000.

As someone who was close to the action, I’m probably not the best judge of broader audience appeal. Whether Carr advances our understanding and sympathy for the junkie life, whether he has moved the ball of “junkie lit” further down the field, I don’t pretend to know. What I do know is that from the day I first met him nearly thirty years ago, I knew he had talent. He understood the fundamentals of storytelling. A dogged reporter—a guy who fundamentally wants to know, and be in the know, about stuff—Carr could always weave the basics of an otherwise garden-variety news item into a narrative with setting, characters, and drama. Into a story. He still does, as readers of his Times material, his Monday media column in particular, know well.

But in The Night of the Gun, Carr’s writing is free of establishment journalistic fetters. Whether you have an interest in the often pathetic tale of a smart, glib guy in a self-immolating death spiral, the scenes flow—fresh, jangly, jargon-rich, and cinematic. Considering the material, the effect is ironically entertaining and compelling.

Publication of the book, with the accompanying publicity obligations, comes at a particularly busy time for Carr. In addition to his usual assignments, the Times, for reasons not entirely clear to him (it may be that they’ve picked up early favorable buzz about the book and want to exploit his ratcheted-up profile), is dropping him into the paper’s Democratic and Republican convention coverage, with tacit instructions to find and tell stories beyond the predictable ritual of these overscripted sales events.

You cover the media for the Times so you’re certainly familiar with the memoir genre, even the junkie memoir subgenre. What did you see in your story that convinced you it was distinctive enough to tell?

I’m not the one who needs convincing. Clay Shirky, a professer at NYU, told me that narcissism inhabits all demos, and I guess that includes me. In technical terms, the arc of my story—goofball who trips into pathology followed by redemption—is a very common one. But there are a few ripples in it—single parenting, cancer, professional luck—that give it narrative texture. And sometimes stories are less important than the way they are told. Whatever knack I have for storytelling is in this book.

Perhaps more to the point, I really did not prepare financially for my twins to go to college. When I checked the cupboard, it was a little bare, save for my sordid backstory.

What were the obvious memoir paradigm pits you swore you wouldn’t fall into?

That part about your lying your ass off is something I thought I might steer clear of. And by going back and talking with other people who were present at events, I thought it would give the reader some hope of a truer story. And I do think bathos—which comes easily to me and so many other writers, especially when writing about the self—was something I did my best to stay away from. There are people who have lived through truly horrifying things. I’m not one of them. I grew up in Hopkins with a nice family and took that set of great cards and gradually set them on fire. I think the focus on self should not tip over into thinking and writing that there is something unique and ennobling about any bumps you may have had along the way.

You’ve mentioned to me an unease with “commoditizing” your life experiences, in particular your worst behavior. In the end, what argued in favor of ignoring the trembles of conscience that motivated that unease? Is every person’s story theirs to trade or sell?

People have the right to trade or sell everything they have—souls, bodies, family heirlooms. The wisdom of that choice is another matter. Part of my trouble with taking on the book is that many people told me for years that I should write about the fact that I used to be a crackhead and I consistently said I never would. Too common, too clichéd. I eventually came around to the idea that reporting the story rather than just ginning it up from memory had literary—and perhaps economic—value. Once I got the idea, which was really just a notion, I wrote the proposal in two days and my agent sold it the following week. So my bluff got called.

Beyond that, there is an audacity to the genre that belies a proper humility. Hubris both enabled me and nearly killed me, so there is risk in the relentless focus on self. And, for the record, I’m not over my unease, but I cashed the check and opened up the vein. The blood will be flowing to a bookstore near you soon.