The Night of the Gun Read online

  In this time, many of my friends went to prison, but I was more of a misdemeanant, spending hours—and every once in a while, days—in various county jails. When things got way out of round, my family—usually my dad—would swoop in and intervene. After long, tortured family discussions about all the promise I was frittering away and all the misery I was spreading around, I would go to treatment (four times in all) and promise to mend my ways. But treatment or not, I continued to live by Emerson’s credo: moderation in all things, especially moderation.

  But as time wore on, I combined a life of early promise as a writer with dark nights full of half-baked gangsters and full-blown addiction. I became a steady dealer for the creative community in Minneapolis, selling coke to musicians, comedians, and club kids. I moved grams, eight balls, ounces, quarter pounds—no one trusted me with a kilo for more than a few minutes.

  I did not date women, I took hostages. I married Kim for all the wrong reasons and pillaged our bank account with an ATM card. (I half-believed at the time that ATMs were invented by a drug cartel to keep the hard cash flowing at night.) There were nights when I would come in and go to bed like a normal person next to her, and once she fell asleep, I would slip out of bed and go between the houses across the street to a woman I knew. Once Kim and I divorced, I fell into a relationship with a woman named Doolie and slowly drove her insane. She was gorgeous, witty as hell, and drew stares in the bar, which led to many ensuing beefs. My duplicity around women was towering and chronic. I conned and manipulated myself into their beds and then treated them as human jewelry, something to be worn for effect. It certainly did not have much to do with how I looked. Far from clinically handsome, I have a face that looks like it could have been carved out of mashed potatoes, and my idea of exercise was running the length of my body.

  One night in 1986, I was at a party for Phil, a long-time coke connection who was going away to federal prison. I met Anna, who had better coke than Phil and soon developed a fondness for me. We were an appalling mix, metastasized by her unlimited supply of coke. I taught Anna how to smoke it. Later, in 1987, she came home one day with a needle in her pocket, and I joined in the fun. I lost my job, she lost her business.

  It would have ended there, but on April 15, 1988, Anna had twin girls. My daughters. Our remaining friends had begged us, quite reasonably, to abort them. We were smoking crack the day Anna’s water broke, and they were born two and a half months premature, fewer than three pounds each. Friends began to boycott our house because it had become such a grim, near-scientific tableau of addiction’s progression.

  Eventually we both went to treatment, and our kids went into foster care. I sobered up, Anna didn’t, and I got the twins, Erin and Meagan. I then lived most of the last two decades at the end of a firehouse of those promises that recovery delivers, with luck, industry, and fate guiding me to a life beyond all expectation.

  But was it really all thus? Shakespeare describes memory as the warder of the brain, but it is also its courtesan. We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future. The prototypes of the lie—white, grievous, practical—make themselves known when memory is called to answer. Memory usually answers back with bullshit. Everyone likes a good story, especially the one who is telling it, and the historical facts are generally sullied in the process. All men mean well, and clearly most people who set out to tell the truth do not lie on purpose. How is it, then, that every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?

  Most of my stories are not nice ones, their heroic aspects dimmed by the fact that the hand which struck me was my own. Truly ennobling personal narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire. I can easily admit that I did bad things for no good reason but stop at copping to being overtly evil. I was a screwup who took aim on himself and may have created collateral damage along the way. What I found twenty years later was darker, more meretricious, but in the memory, those stories tended to be bathed in pathos, coating the pieces of the past in rich goo that make them go down smooth. Even absent the urge to tart up the past, there are practical impediments to communicating the baseline reality of addiction, because when every day is built around obtaining and consuming a substance, those days run together and fail to gain traction in the memory.

  There is also an almost irresistible consistency bias. Memory is an expression of hindsight as much as recollection, so my rear view must incorporate the fact that I was eventually redeemed from a life of drugs, alcohol, and mania. In this construct, the moments when I stumbled across a life-changing epiphany are vividly preserved, while the more corrosive aspects are lost to a kind of self-preserving amnesia. To be fully cognizant of the wreckage of one’s past can be paralyzing, so we, or at least I, minimize as we go. Nowhere is that imperative more manifest than in memoir. Popular literature requires framing a sympathetic character, someone we can root for or who is, as they say on the studio lot, relatable.

  If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote I was a recovered addict who obtained custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare, and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I’m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions to my children as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together.

  So what if I had the gun? A drunken rampage after getting fired has its charms, but waving a gun in the face of a best friend? That behavior creates a large rift in the bigger narrative of me as a knucklehead who was pulled along by a ring in my nose into matters that were beyond my ken. If the gun story is as Donald and Chris remember it, it would put me on the far end of the continuum from victim to perpetrator.

  We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process. “Stories are for books,” Phil, my dealer once upon a time, said to me. I was plaintively explaining how despite my best intentions, things had gone wrong, people had disappeared, and I did not have his money. He put me into collections, sending his boys over to talk to me. Stories are for books.

  And so they are. Even if you are a civilian who leaves a few gulps in the bottom of the second glass of wine, you know them by heart. The arc of the addict has become as warm and familiar as a Hallmark movie: the textured childhood, the abasement, the epiphany, the relapse, the ultimate surrender. Dead addicts don’t leave behind an uplifting tract, so the narratives are generally told by people who can go on Oprah and stand like a barker in front of their abasement.

  In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel better about themselves. (Here’s a taste: When I got to detox for what I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my scabrous, pus-filled track marks. Even the wet-brain drunks wouldn’t come near me. See how that works?)

  I read some of the classics of the genre, debunked and not. After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it. No I didn’t. I knew he made it up. It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth. Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history—the facts of what happened—is both immutable and mostly unknowable. Can I somehow remember enough to type my way to an unvarnished recitation of what happened to me? No chance.

  As I sit today, I am a genuine, often pleasant person. I am able to imitate a human being for long spurts of time, do solid work for a reputable organization, and have, over the breadth of time, proven to be an attentive father and husband
. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstance? Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

  But there is a way, not to Truth, but fewer lies. When I set out to write a memoir, I decided to fact-check my life using the prosaic tools of journalism. For the past thirty years, give or take time served as a drunk and a lunatic, I have used those tools with alacrity. I decided to go back and ask the people who were there: the dealers I worked for, the friends I had, the women I dated, the bosses I screwed over. There would be police reports, mug shots from my short career as a crook, and some medical records from my serial treatments.

  Left to their own devices, addicts—or people who are attempting to impersonate them for reasons I have never fully understood—end up in the business of wish fulfillment, becoming a composite of their own making to feed specific public appetites. I have always thought that reporting, while onerous, was easier than making it up: There are many great reporters and very few truly remarkable novelists. As a writer, I prefer to get bossed around by my notebook and the facts contained therein. They may not lead to a perfect, seamless arc, but they yield a story that coheres in another way, because it is mostly true. As many of the cold facts as I can uncover and lean on, woven with the networked memories of the people I interviewed, will produce enough seeming fantasy and unreality as it is. But to report out a story I was this close to I would need reinforcements.

  In the spring of 2006, I went to Best Buy outside Minneapolis. I told the kid who was helping me that I wanted a set of gadgets that would help me document every inch of a book I was reporting. This time, I thought, I want to remember everything, or at least put it somewhere it can be found. He sold me a video camera, a digital tape recorder, and an external drive to capture all of it. The devices would do what I could not, which is remember everything, code it into ones and zeroes and serve as digital witnesses.

  For two years on and off, I would call a long-lost person, set up a time, and then come in with a bunch of questions, the video camera and a voice recorder. I would engage in small talk and then point to some huge scab from the past. “Do you mind tearing that off?” It was a profoundly embarrassing exercise, but it brought with it no small number of epiphanies. I was wrong about a lot of things. In the novelized version of my life, I was basically a good guy who took a couple of wrong turns and ended up in the ditch. In the reported version, I was a person who saw the sign that said dangerous curves ahead and floored it, heedlessly mowing down all sorts of people at every turn.

  Some people I interviewed wanted me to say I was sorry—I am and I did. Some people wanted me to say that I remembered—I did and I did not. And some people wanted me to say it was all a mistake—it was and it was not. It felt less like journalism than archaeology, a job that required shovels and axes, hacking my way into dark, little-used passages and feeling my way around, finding other pieces that did not fit, and figuring out that I was working off the wrong map to begin with. It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.

  This is what they told me.

  4

  TIME’S WINGED FEET

  Because I once worked in nursing homes and spent a lot of time with people on the way out, I learned early on that the passage of time does not accumulate, that it does not transform into something corporeal that you can rest on and be comforted by. We are prisoners of the moment—“bugs trapped in amber,” as Vonnegut wrote—some looking forward, others looking back.

  I took care of a guy named Seth in a River Falls nursing home where I worked during college in the midseventies. Time’s winged feet had had their way with him, and he was a tiny, curled-up ball of a man. A human C. But despite his circumstance, he was consistently cheerful, not one to go on about his needs or discomforts. One night I was feeding him lime green Jell-O that had been cut up days before and had developed a rubbery exterior. He began choking on one of the cubes, and by his color, it was clear that his windpipe was completely obstructed. I ran to the door of the room, yelled for the duty nurse—it was an understaffed place—and no one responded. I tore back to the bed, came up behind Seth, and put my arms around his midsection, giving it the quick thrust of the so-called Heimlich maneuver. The pellet of Jell-O shot six feet and bounced off his old black-and-white TV. I asked him if he was all right.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, in a nasal Norwegian accent. And then he added, almost as if it were beside the point, “I think you broke my ribs, though.”

  And so I had. He was still grateful, because he knew he would have been a goner otherwise, and I was proud that I had osmotically absorbed enough medical training as an orderly to be of service to another human being. I worked nights, and Seth was not much of a sleeper, so I would find myself in his room, chatting and rowing back through the years with him. As a young man, I had an affinity for old people, demonstrating an interest in the ancient that I never displayed toward my contemporaries.

  The details of Seth’s history—the journey from Norway with his parents as a young man, a hard life of farming, the girl he met and married at church, the cows that they milked, her death that left him alone for the last twenty years of his life—were stories I was happy to listen to. He had led a good life; no big splashes for the highlight reel other than farming accidents and the occasional battle with the pig farmer next door, but still, not a bad run.

  At the end of one of these nights, his milky eyes looked into mine, and he pointed at me, as if in a Dickens novel, and said, more by way of observation than complaint: “It goes so fast; so, so fast. Never forget that it goes by very fast. One minute you’re sitting there, just like you, a young man, big and strong, and the next, you are lying here like me, all dried up and almost done. I have memories, but my life is mostly gone.”

  Driving home from work that night in a ’65 Mustang with rotted-out fenders, careening up Happy Valley Road, where I rented a farmhouse with my girlfriend Lizbeth, I can remember thinking about what he had said. It goes so fast. Even then I was terrified of missing anything. I wondered whether my own personal velocity, the mad to-ing and froing of my everyday life, was a fearful response to the thought that life would get away from me.

  Somewhere in there, maybe as a sophomore in college, something changed inside me. Bumping along, hanging out with my adopted tribe, smoking pot, and taking classes was not going to get it. I began to think of possibilities, of growing up, of having jobs that didn’t involve name tags and bosses whose tiny lives found meaning only in ordering me around. I wanted to be something besides a pothead who played a remarkably inept harmonica. I decided to leave River Falls.

  On my way out of town in 1976, I stopped to see Professor Robert in his office. His fingers and beard were tattooed with nicotine. His eyes peered into me with a kindness, but they unnerved me. He tapped out a Pall Mall for me and indicated matches next to an ashtray that looked like a Paul Manship sculpture, almost heroic in its texture and abundance. I was leaving, not so much for greener pastures but someplace where you could smell them with a little less acuity.

  After slinking around the small Wisconsin campus for the first few quarters, I had enrolled in Robert’s literature class. People, including the stoner in the corner of the room with the beaded roach clip attached to greasy jeans, sat up when he spoke. Professor Robert died in 1996, twenty years after we talked, so this may have been gussied up a bit by the passage of time, but not intentionally. When I stopped to see him before I left, he tilted me toward my future by having the decency to tell me the truth about the heedlessness of my current state.

  “The last time I saw you, you were riding around in a convertible late at night on the sidewalks in the middle of campus, waving madly like you were in a parade. It was, um, impressive,” he said in his mid-A
tlantic lilt. Again with the kind eyes, which I avoided. “You’re a smart boy, David. Very bright, actually, but you don’t know anything. You haven’t read anything.”

  That wasn’t precisely true. After a nun in fourth grade told me no, my parents would not be in heaven when I got there, I laid awake long into the night for about a year, chewing through all of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drews, and Black Stallions my parents’ basement could hold. They filled my head with words and stories, and I have been spitting them back ever since. But sitting there with Professor Robert, I had no concept of writers, let alone of being one myself. Professor Robert reached into a drawer and handed me a list of sixty contemporary American authors. This, he said, is just a tiny slice of literature, but read this, and at least you will know something.

  Over the next few years, I read the books on the list. Faulkner, Mailer, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Wolfe, Hemingway. I read them in a hammock with headphones on and Led Zeppelin cranking. I read them on break from smashing up patios with a 100-pound jackhammer. I read them when everyone else went to sleep. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t want to be stupid.

  The journalism part, well, that was just something I told people. An art and English teacher at my high school had sent me to a journalism day at River Falls, and I noticed that people’s estimation of me seemed to rise when I mentioned that major. A few years after Woodward and Bernstein had done a number on a sitting president—saved the goddamn republic by typing, fer Chrissakes—reporting was still viewed as something to be admired.

  Not that I did any. My only real experience was my tenure as editor of my eighth-grade paper. Handing off the baton at the end of the year, I was typically modest—“We are proud of our achievement and would like to see it go on”—but after that I never actually wrote anything other than reports for class. I did short internships required by school at weekly papers—“Local students took a bite out of the Big Apple last week”—but I avoided the school newspapers and the nerdy can-do people who worked there. Too square. Too uptight. Too intimidating. But I was looking for something like they had.