Real Change News | Trigger Happy

September 24, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 40

Arts & Entertainment

Trigger Happy

"The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life, his own" by David Carr, Simon & Schuster, 2008, 389 pages, $26

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Is there a name for a prop that recovering addicts keep around to remind them of their former selves? You know, a memento of the bad old days: a shard of glass, a cop’s report, a cirrhotic liver, a broken mind.

Or a book: In David Carr’s case, an account of his years of brown liquor, white rock, and needle marks in the neck, years as remembered by himself, somewhat — with the gaps filled in and well-placed inaccuracies corrected by fellow travelers, innocent bystanders, and collateral victims of his multi-decade experiment with controlled substances.

It’s a memory aid, a means of describing your self to yourself.

Carr appears to have needed it, like most of us do. In our memories, where time bends and loops, we are the authors of our own personal histories. We suit our memories to the stories that most suit us. None of us bother to check the facts. But Carr has, going back to bosses he screwed over, friends he caroused with, lovers that, it turns out, he hit. They help him fill in the gaps: How many times did I drop out of treatment? On the night of the gun, who, again, was brandishing it? Why in the world did you give me another chance?

In recalling his own dark days, he’s also written a personal history of the drug underworld of the ’80s — which the longtime journalist might have been interested in reporting on then, if his place in it hadn’t been so compromising. His ex-girlfriend and the mother of his twin daughters was the world’s most petite coke dealer, a Minneapolis homeowner who, once Carr turned her onto crack, smoked up her close ties with the Medellín Cartel.

Crack turned Carr from party boy to dope fiend, and he writes about it so luridly you can hear the dry pops in the pipe’s bowl and get a whiff of the electrical-fire smell.

Carr can pound out freshly tuned colloquialisms, and his descriptions of old friends and lovers are ardent and real. His dealer ex “worked dead drops in storage spots, safe deposit boxes, and mules to keep her at a remove from the nuts and bolts of the drug enterprise. That girl knew how to count — click, click, click went the bills, with an occasional swipe of the thumb to the lips to maintain traction. And when the piles were too big to hand-count, she had a digital scale that weighed piles of twenties.”

Talk of what a bear addiction is doesn’t get preachy, since Carr sources his earnestness from the best point of origin: experience. He also spares us the ironic detachment that’s frequent in his genre: “reading all the junkie memoirs that ridicule various programs of recovery makes me laugh. As opposed to what? Free will? Moderation? A flash of self-realization followed by a lifetime of self-control?… Millions of lives have been saved by gathering like minds in a church basement. You don’t like the slogans? Make up some new ones.”

As 14 years of sobriety bloom, at times you wonder why Carr couldn’t just stop at the New York Times Magazine article, where he neatly captured the farce of writing one’s own bildungsroman. But there’s more of merit here, especially when Carr backslides into the role of a nice suburban drunk. One drink leads to another, troubles multiply, and in short order he’s endangering the lives of the kids whose advent, he’s always said, saved him. Sober again, he wonders: What brought that on? Perhaps a very human tendency to self-sabotage, or, more simply, just a matter of forgetting that he’s not simply someone who doesn’t drink or drug, but an addict and alcoholic who cannot be trusted with mood-altering substances. A lapse of memory, for which he made amends by writing the book.

Carr by all appearances is sitting pretty these days, with a glamorous job (the New York Times, no less), a beautiful wife, darling kids — most of all, he’s made his life whole with his craft. Enviable, but instructive. The Night of The Gun is a reminder of how lucky we, I, you are to be drawing breath, probably in spite of ourselves, and how deep a hope we can draw from that fact. I imagine researching and writing an investigative memoir of this caliber is even better and only slightly less frightening than being born again.

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