The Night of the Gun Read online

  Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don’t soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person’s hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones. There’s even a formula for the phenomena:

  In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory, and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled until they become little more than chimeras. People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived. I loathe guns and, with some exceptions, the people who carry them, so therefore I was not a person who held a gun. Perhaps in the course of transforming from That Guy to This Guy, there is a shedding of old selves that requires a kind of self-induced Alzheimer’s.

  In this instance, the truth didn’t seem knowable. At best, there was a note on a long-lost precinct nightly sheet about some lunatic at Thirty-first and Nicollet. In the matter of the gun, Donald and I are both unreliable witnesses, given the passage of years and our chemical résumés. But Ann Marie was there. I called her in the midst of my attempt to report something in dispute. She said that she remembers me showing up in a state of complete agitation, but nothing about a gun. Then again, she said, “I didn’t exactly stick around.” Perhaps her brother or I had the decency not to wave one around in her presence. The change in custody of the weapon made no sense. It’s true that I was fully involved in the drug lifestyle at the time, buying and selling coke, but weapons were not part of my corner of that scene.

  Bat-shit crazy or not, the weight of a large-caliber handgun in your hand is not something you’re likely to forget. I’ve held a few as a cop reporter, and I was always stunned by how dense and formidable a gun felt. As I thought about it, I realized I would have had to walk over to his house with one jammed in my pants. I’m not obsessed with my own privates, but I’m not one to point a pistol at them, either.

  Donald was the first person I went to see when I decided to put my own memories up against those of others. By turns, it became a kind of journalistic ghost dancing, trying to conjure spirits past, including mine. Donald was my first stop because he was and is incredibly dear to me. And if I were being honest, I thought that addiction, which had come close to killing me, would take him out, and I would miss my shot. He was plenty lucid and hilarious while we talked, but the bottle was winning over the longer haul, exacerbated by a methadone habit that served as a rubber band, always pulling him back to that same terrible place. (Sometimes addiction seems more like possession, a death grip from Satan that requires supernatural intervention. Absolution from end-stage chemical obsession tends to force otherwise faithless men to their knees.)

  Other mysteries would pile up as I made my way, but the Night of the Gun stuck with me. Maybe Donald didn’t know what he was talking about. Perhaps his memory was even more compromised than my own. Those were very busy days—I was on the run a lot—but I remember some of it with a great deal of acuity.

  In that same year, near the end of 1987, I got in a fight with my girlfriend. The last time we had fought, I ended up going to jail because I assaulted her, so this time I was smart enough to call my friend Chris to pick me up. Chris was one of the saner people I knew, and I used to call him whenever I got in a jam. That night, I called him for a ride, threw my stuff in some garbage bags, and fled out the back of my apartment. It’s the kind of thing you see on Cops—I was even shirtless, to add to the verisimilitude. Chris was and is a kind man, and he never seemed to run out of patience with me. As I panted in the cab of that truck, he told me everything would be OK even though we both knew better.

  In the summer of 2007, a year after I talked with Donald about the gun, I went to New Orleans to see Chris. He is now a professor of creative writing at Loyola University and the godfather to one of my children. Sitting in his backyard, we caught up on family stuff, and then I asked him about that night.

  “I remember showing up,” he said. “I had this GMC pickup truck. You put the garbage bags in the back, and that was it.”

  Then he said something else: “I went back into your place once you’d taken off. You sent me back to get a gun that you’d left there…”

  Oops.

  “You were worried about the cops going through the place, and so you’d asked me to go back and get some things that you had stashed. You had, I think, a .38 special,” he said evenly. “I don’t know where you got it. It was toward the very end, and you were starting to act real…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to.

  “Yeah, you did have one—for I don’t know how long,” he said. “Somewhere in the closet, up above the shelf or something. And up above the refrigerator you had some drug paraphernalia or something, and you wanted me to just go there and clear out anything that would be incriminating.”

  Given that Chris was able to describe where the gun was stashed in the closet of my apartment near Donald’s house, it probably happened the way Donald remembers it. It started to ring some distant, alarming bell. Oh yeah, my gun. Maybe so.

  But if I was wrong about the gun, what else was I wrong about?

  3

  WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, ME OR YOUR LYING EYES?

  The moral question of whether you are lying or not is not settled by establishing the truth or falsity of what you say. In order to settle this question, we must know whether you intend your statement to mislead.

  —SISSELA BOK, MORAL CHOICES IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

  On the face of it, I am no more qualified to take my own historical inventory than the addict with the fetid dreads who spare-changes people on the subway while singing “Stand by Me.” Ask him how he ended up sweating people for quarters with off-key singing, and he may have an answer, but it won’t be the whole story. He doesn’t know it and probably couldn’t bear it if he did.

  To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep them at one remove. How, then, to reassemble that montage of deceit into a truthful past?

  Addiction, which Oliver Sacks defines as “a form of self-induced catatonia, a repetitive action bordering on hysteria,” is a little preoccupying. And if the apparatus is impaired, what of the will to be truthful? Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. I generally test well for intelligence, but if you caught me after a punishing night-and-day run back then with a simple “What happened to you?” I was usually stumped.

  I learned early on as that it was probably OK to lie to my parents, but once I had skipped out into the world, not so much. It is dumb to lie to cops, a lesson that was tattooed into me at a tender age. Later on, when a cop asked me a direct question about something that would implicate me, I would always say the same thing: “I can’t help you with that, officer.”

  Even so, give or take a died-in-the-diagnosis sociopath, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, you are in the hands of someone who used his mouth and his words to constantly create one more opportunity to get high. But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason than I was there.

  HERE IS WHAT I DESERVED: Hepatitis C, federal prison time, HIV, a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

  HERE IS WHAT I GOT: A nice house, a good job, three lovely children.

  HERE IS WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT HOW THAT GUY BECAME THIS GUY: Not much. Junkies don’t generally put stuff in boxes, they wear the boxes on their heads, so that everything around them—the sky, the future, the house down the street—is lost to them.

  To the extent that I remember, this is what I know:
I was born a middle kid in a family of seven into a John Cheever novel set on the border of Hopkins and Minnetonka on the western edge of Minneapolis. It was a suburban idyll where any mayhem was hidden in the rear rooms of large split-level homes. I sought trouble even though I had to walk a long way to find it. My home was a good one, my parents were wonderful, no one slipped me a Mickey, and if they did, I would have grabbed it with both hands and asked for more. I drank and drugged for the same reason that a four-year-old spins around past the point of dizziness: I liked feeling different. Three of my siblings have the allergy to alcohol. My dad is in recovery, and while my mother may not have been an alcoholic, she knew her way around a party. That girl could go.

  Let’s skip high school. I mostly did, smoking doobies like they were Pall Malls every single day of those four years. I went to an all-boys school I loathed and hid behind red eyes and long hair that hung in my face. The day after I finished high school, my friend Greg and I hitchhiked to the yippie camp-in at Spokane, Washington, near the site of the 1974 World’s Fair. I became a hippie at precisely the instant that it had lost cultural salience. The camp-in was pathetic—Nixon was on the way out, the draft and the war were over, it was mostly just loadies trading food stamps for pot and eating the gruel that the Krishnas were handing out with beatific smiles. I ended up hopping a bus of the so-called Rainbow Tribe, and on the ensuing ride, they gifted me with peyote, a profound sense of life’s psychedelic possibilities, and a tenacious case of crabs.

  I came back and was working in a jelly bean factory, Powell’s Candy, where we wore helmets, beard guards, and earmuffs while we cranked out trays of rolled sugar. My foreman called me Curlicue because of my long ringlets and rarely spoke to me without using his index finger on my sternum as a punctuation device. I worked in a hydraulic tube assembly plant where my boss was a dwarf named George who took Dolly Parton’s breasts as his central religious icons. Here and there I dug ditches, worked at a golf course, and washed dishes.

  Obviously on a roll, I decided that the time was not right for college, but my father thought otherwise. He drove me to a branch of the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, a small farming town near the Minnesota border. He dropped me off in the middle of campus with my beanbag chair and chest of bongs and gave me a check for $20. It bounced.

  My crowning achievement came early: As a brand-new freshman, I won the beer-chugging contest, drinking five twelve-ounce beers in under twenty seconds. My new pals clapped me on the back as I vomited minutes later. I stayed for two years and moved in with a lovely girl, Lizbeth, whom I soon wore out. I ended up working at a local nursing home, where I found myself the lone male on night shifts full of townie girls. It was a good life until one night when I was doing laundry at one of their trailers and the ex-husband came by drunk as a goat and pointed a gun at me. I left town soon afterward. (Never, ever get mixed up with townies.)

  After some months of traveling in the West, I came back to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota, a massive campus in the middle of the city. I worked nights in a restaurant called the Little Prince—one of two straight guys on a very large gay and female staff, so, again, I was blessed with friendly odds—and during the day, I hung out in parking garages at school with pals, mostly lesbians and pot smokers. Throughout college I had many friends, very little money, and what Pavlov called “the blind force of the subcortex.” Ring the getting-high bell, and I was right there.

  I subsisted on Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew, along with less nutritious substances: LSD, peyote, pot, mushrooms, mescaline, amphetamines, quaaludes, valium, opium, hash, liquor of all kinds, and—this is embarrassing—morning glory seeds. (Rumored to have psychedelic properties, they didn’t work.) Total garbage head.

  On my twenty-first birthday, I went out with Kim, who worked at the Little Prince and would become my wife. I also did coke for the first time. The relationship with the coke was far more enduring and would define the next decade.

  A dealer who dropped his money on Dom Pérignon at the restaurant palmed me a Balkan Sobranie cigarette tin when he found out it was my birthday. He told me to open it in the bathroom. I saw the powder and knew what to do.

  It was a Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! Cold fusion, right here in the bathroom stall; it was the greatest thing ever. My endorphins leaped at this new opportunity, hugging it and feeling all its splendid corners. My, that’s better. You can laugh all you want, but Proust had a similar epiphany eating a madeleine: “…a shudder ran through me, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that had happened to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”

  Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. The chase is on, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—in my case, for years on end. I could get high just having coke in my pocket, knowing that I had a little edge that few others had. I had spent my life terrified that I would miss out on something, and now I didn’t have to. If I had delved deeper, I might have also noticed that coke accessed something in me that was unruly and ungovernable, but there would be time for that later.

  In school and out—I attended classes when I could while working at the Little Prince—I told people I was a journalist, with only that uttered noun as evidence. Then I caught a real actual story for the Twin Cities Reader, a local alternative weekly, and the fever to go with it. I developed an intense interest in the craft immediately.

  But working on stories and the attention that came with them was never enough. Tucked in safe suburban redoubts, kids who had it soft like me manufactured peril. When there is no edge, we make our own, reaching for something that would approximate the cliché of being fully alive because we could die at any minute. That search for sensation leads to the self divorcing from the body, à la Descartes, and a life of faux peril. Everything that brought me joy involved risk. Yes, let’s do mescaline, and, sure, let’s wander out onto that trestle bridge hundreds of feet over the St. Croix River. I’m pretty sure we’ll hear a train if it comes, right? My friends would do LSD and stare at the marvel of their own hands. I’d drop acid and organize a road trip.

  Early in 1986 I tried this newfangled thing called freebasing and, later, crack cocaine. Another eureka moment—This is, like, the best. Only better, faster. The smoke became a pharmacological rocket in about four and a half seconds. I quickly became an autodidact, learning to make crack, dropping some coke and baking soda into a spoon over the stove, and, voilà, we were rocking.

  During the day, I was doing stories for the Twin Cities Reader. I took the recalcitrance and slipperiness of public officials personally—my moral dungeon at the time is freighted with irony in retrospect—and aligned myself with sources who I thought were doing the people’s work.

  Crime stories riveted me from the beginning—it is often a short walk from cops to robbers. But when I got in a jam of my own, I never worked any connections within the department, I just tried to lay low and duck any uniforms I knew while wheeling through booking. Some of the wiseguy stuff I picked up at night helped me in my day job, but I prospered mostly in spite of my addiction.

  In the fall of 1983, I did a story about a food bank that was mismanaging funds and its mission, and, later that year, a story about a neighborhood’s effort to shut down a huge food line for the homeless. In 1984 there was a piece about a massive federal civil trial that suggested the makers of the Dalkon Shield had knowingly distributed a product its own research had shown was dangerous. That year I covered politics extensively, including local favorite Walter Mondale’s campaign for president. I also exposed a prolific con man who had charmed his way through others’ millions.

  My worlds began to collide a bit in 1985 and 1986 when I did very detailed reporting at a large detox center—I would later be back as a customer—and, along with another reporter, came up with a lavis
h and loving portrait of Block E, a downtown square block of urban pathology and lore. I did investigations of the supercomputer firm Control Data Corporation’s extensive role in supplying infrastructure for the government of South Africa and broke news about the rise of big-city street gangs in what had been a fairly quiet Midwestern burg.

  There were signs early on that the center would not hold. During this time, I was working on a running story about a tough cop who ran the decoy unit of the Minneapolis police. A suspect had been shot accidentally while being taken into custody, and another reporter and I investigated and found out that the cop who ran the unit had entered, but not completed, chemical dependency treatment. State laws required that he give up his gun for a period, and when I called he was civil and serious. But a few days later, my phone rang and he said—I am recalling this decades later—“You know, I’ve been asking around and your life is not without blemish. You better watch your step.” For weeks afterward, I would drive somewhere and see the van that the decoy unit used in my rearview. It both scared me and cramped my style. I eventually had a very uncomfortable conversation with the police chief complaining that some of his officers were following me around. He made them stop.

  But for much of the 1980s, I was about my business, all of it, simultaneously. In my little provincial world of Minneapolis, I felt like a king. I had a job, coke, and lots of friends. On my thirtieth birthday, September 8, 1986, a friend gave me some mushrooms and took me into the back room of McCready’s for a quick snort. The door opened, revealing a band, streamers, and more than a hundred people—rockers, comedians, drug dealers, lawyers, journalists, and wiseguys—all wearing T-shirts that said, “I Am a Close Personal Friend of David Carr.”

  You don’t say.