The devil and David Carr

The veteran newspaperman discusses his alternately horrifying and uplifting memoir about the journey from crackhead to crack New York Times reporter.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Drugs, Andrew O'Hehir, Books, Memoirs, Cocaine, Addiction, Interviews, The New York Times, Authors, Books Interviews

Aug. 8, 2008 |

A few years ago, when I was moonlighting as an instructor at New York University, I led a group of incoming journalism students on a tour of the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street. When Times reporter David Carr saw me across the newsroom, he jumped up from his desk, leaving whatever fast-breaking media-business story he was working on, and spent the next 20 minutes showing the awestruck freshmen around the paper of record, narrating in his gravelly Minnesota drawl.

It wasn't like we were bosom buddies. I've known Carr as a professional colleague since 1994, but we don't socialize and I've never met his family. Still, to use an appropriate Middle American idiom, David Carr is a stand-up guy. If he knows you and likes you -- and David knows and likes a lot of people -- he's likely to do you a solid. I don't have to wonder whether he would try to help me if I were in dire straits, because I already know. When I lost my job as editor of SF Weekly in 1995, David called to ask if I wanted an inside-track recommendation for his old job at the Twin Cities Reader in Minnesota. Nothing personal, Gophers, but I moved to New York instead.

I dimly understood that Carr was in recovery, but that amorphous term captures lots of people I know. His battered visage and bourbon-and-ciggies voice only augmented his hard-boiled reporter persona -- and as anyone who has read Carr's media-business coverage, his post-Katrina reporting from New Orleans or his Carpetbagger blog during Oscar season is aware, he's one of the craft's consummate professionals. The David Carr I know is a charmer, a survivor, a party boy turned family man.

I definitely don't know the David Carr who can't remember being arrested for beating up a Minneapolis cab driver, can't remember one entire stint in rehab, can't remember going over to his best friend's house dead drunk and pill-addled with a gun in his hand. I don't know the guy who, by his own account, was smoking crack on the day his twin daughters were born (as was their mother), or the one who describes himself in his memoir, "The Night of the Gun," as a fat, coke-dealing thug who beat up women.

But here's the problem Carr confronts in "The Night of the Gun," which is, on both a technical and a philosophical level, the most challenging memoir produced to date by the ex-cokehead mea-maxima-culpa genre: He doesn't know that guy either. Carr's book has two overlapping and arguably contradictory narratives, one of which follows the Dostoevski-by-way-of-Oprah model of abasement and redemption the reader expects and the other of which, let's just say, does not.

In the first instance, Carr's story is an inspirational, almost miraculous one: A massive fuck-up who had blown out his journalism career and virtually been abandoned as a hopeless case by friends and family, finally gets sober after his baby girls are born. He rescues them from their increasingly dysfunctional mother, gets them off welfare and raises them as a single dad. (Yes, Carr reports, unspoused fatherhood is indeed an effective chick magnet.) Along the way he survives cancer, falls in love, gets married and has a third daughter, prospers professionally and finds himself, in his 50s, with a great job, a beautiful family, a house in the suburbs. Yes, there was a fairly recent relapse -- alcohol, not cocaine -- but that, too, is almost a ritual element of the narrative.

When that guy, that middle-aged recovering cokehead, decided to go back and tell his own story, he brought the tools of his craft with him. Rather than relying on a faulty and poisoned memory, Carr tracked down old friends, ex-lovers, former dealers, bosses who'd fired him, disbarred attorneys, de-licensed shrinks and a rogue's gallery of other characters. (One of Carr's old Minnesota partners-in-crime is the comedian Tom Arnold, who appears here with no attempt at concealment.) He recorded every interview on audio and/or video, and scanned in every legal and medical document he could find. He hired two private eyes and a backup reporter to gather loose threads behind him.

This means that Carr's book isn't likely to have any major truthiness problems, à la James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," but all that reporting has produced other, more interesting consequences too. One of them is the book's Web site, a masterwork of commingled confession and self-promotion that includes a large trove of the documents and videos yielded by Carr's research, along with such things as a letter from the mother of his twin daughters that is almost too painful to read.

Carr's journey into the past leads him to his second story, a confrontation with a not-so-pleasant version of himself. He didn't go into this project knowing that he would discover arrests he couldn't remember, or that his ex-girlfriend Doolie would demonstrate how he used to beat her up. Or that his old friend Donald would tell him that it was David who packed a pistol during the late-night standoff that gives the book its title.

Considering that evening, Carr wonders: "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 so, so 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?"

Although he's a confident and tenacious reporter, Carr has the perspicacity to see that his methods are not likely to yield some unalloyed, unambiguous version of the truth about himself or anything else. All of us, he suggests, would likely face similar problems if we looked at our own past through the eyes of others.

The problem with "The Night of the Gun," you could say, is that Carr wants to have his epistemological cake and eat it too. He engages difficult questions about the constructed and self-serving nature of memory and about the fungibility of that mystical entity called the self, but he also seeks to deliver the final, redemptive hug (his word), the promise of better things that the recovery fable demands. Perhaps there is no contradiction, only the fact that we want to see clear-cut moral narratives in human life where none exist. "Which ... of my two selves did I make up? Carr asks himself. The only possible answer is neither. The fat thug and the stand-up guy are both real, and bear the same name. The passage that led from one to the other can be explained as a chemical or physiological or spiritual transformation, but what really matters is that it happened, not why.

David Carr met me at Salon's office for an extended conversation about "The Night of the Gun." We hadn't seen each other since that day at the old Times building. As you'll see, some tension arose between us when I suggested that his account of his relapse into alcohol abuse (circa 2002-05) might not adequately address the loss of trust some readers may feel, reasonably or not. The way I phrased the question was, in fact, chickenshit, but it's a legitimate question anyway. (To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.)

Video: David Carr on his memoir

Next page: Losing a car? Funny. Smoking crack the day your kids are born? Less funny