The last word: The life I don’t really deserve

Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like he’s a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside a house in north Minneapolis, doing coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” over and over. I would shoot or smoke a large dose, tweak, then start my vigil at the front window, pulling up the corner of the blinds to look for the squads I was always convinced were on their way. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring.

I was lonely, but not alone. The house belonged to Anna, my girlfriend and dope dealer, who had two kids of her own and newborn twins by me. Trapped in paranoia, I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way. They could put the bracelets on me, and, head bowed, I would solemnly lead them to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the money.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, HIV, a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

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Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much. So how do I reconcile my past with my current circumstances? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

Some time ago, I decided to report the story. For two years on and off, I pulled medical and legal documents and engaged in a series of interviews with people I used to run with.

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 would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. But I did squeeze something out of the effort.

My childhood was a good one. I was born a middle kid in a family of nine in suburban Minneapolis. Let’s skip high school. I graduated, traveled out West briefly, and took crummy jobs when I returned. Eventually I enrolled in two land-grant universities, where I had a lot of friends and subsisted on Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew—along with LSD, peyote, pot, mushrooms, mescaline, amphetamines, quaaludes, Valium, opium, hash, and liquor of all kinds. On my 21st birthday, a dealer who dropped his money on Dom Pérignon at the fancy restaurant where I worked palmed me a cigarette tin and told me to open it in the bathroom. I did the powder inside and it was a Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling, crack.

In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you with child-like wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. Most people who sample it get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.

Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn., staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead version of me. “As good friends as we were, as much as I loved you, you weren’t you. I wasn’t talking to my friend David; I was talking to a wild man. You were a creature. I was afraid.”

“Crackhead” is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. But there it is. If the subject of careers came up back then, I told people I was a journalist, with only that uttered noun as evidence. But then I caught an actual story for the local weekly and the fever to go with it. I was a dog on a meat bone when it came to stories. My work got noticed, and some of the more unfortunate aspects of the guy who produced it were overlooked.

There were signs early on that the center would not hold. Some of my running buddies went to prison, but I was more of a misdemeanant, spending hours—and every once in a while, days—in various county jails. My duplicity around women, on the other hand, was towering and chronic. I conned and manipulated myself into their beds and then treated them like human jewelry, something to be worn for effect. And when I was called to account, I sometimes responded with violence.

I met Anna one night at a party for Phil, my longtime coke connection who was going away to federal prison. Anna had better coke than Phil and soon developed a fondness for me. We were an appalling mix, metastasized by her unlimited supply. In less than a year, I lost my job, and 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. Pals began to boycott our house because it became such a grim, near-scientific tableau of addiction’s progression—all needles, blood, babies, and piles of dirty clothes.

I remember driving to a dark spot between streetlights at the corner of West 32nd and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.

The Nova, a junker my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I saw two sleeping children in the rearview, the fringe of their hoods outlined against the back seat. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. But I was fresh out. I called Kenny.

Anna was out, and I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. Then came the junkie math. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed in five minutes, 10 minutes tops. The twins would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

The people inside would be busy, working mostly in pairs. Serious coke shooting is something best done together. The objective is to walk right up to the edge of an overdose without actually dying. The technique was to push the plunger in slow but large. One would be pushing, watching as the other listened to the interior sound of blood and nerves brought to a boil. Are you good? Yes. No…. Just, um ... ah ... that’s perfect.

I certainly couldn’t bring the twins in. Even in the gang I ran with, coming through the doors of the dope house swinging two occupied baby buckets was not done. Sitting there in the gloom of the front seat, the car making settling noises against the chill, I decided that my teeny twin girls would be safe, that God would look after them while I did not.

I got out, locked the door, and walked away. Inside, a transformation—almost a kidnapping—got under way. The guilty father was replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time passed, one thing begot another, and eventually I was thrown clear.

Leaving, I remember that. Out the front door with its three bolts and the hollow sound of my boots on the wooden porch. A pause. How long had it been, really? Hours, not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a cold dread in all corners of my being.

I cracked the front door, unlocked the back, and leaned in.

I could see their breath.

God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment that I was in the midst of a transgression He could not easily forgive. I made a decision never to be that man again. Soon after that night, I called my parents and said that if they took the kids, I would go to detox and Anna would go to treatment.

Did I say goodbye to the girls? I can’t remember.

History suggests that things turned out as they should have. But I was not the obvious choice to be awarded custody of the twins, as I eventually was. When I went back and looked at the record, it was obvious I had won a tallest-midget contest with Anna, nothing more.

Last year, when I called Pat and Zelda, the twins’ temporary foster parents, they told me they loved those babies from the minute they saw them, the minute I dropped them off. The girls’ father? Not so much.

Zelda: “It felt kind of belligerent, like you really didn’t want to talk to us much, but we were a necessary evil … ”

Pat interrupted. “And you were high.”

Zelda: “You were a bit disheveled.”

Pat: “And you fell on the floor.”

Me: “In what way?”

Pat: “You just kind of lost your balance and fell on the floor.”

Pat had his doubts about ever seeing me again.

In the end, the lie that I learned to tell myself during rehab—that I was made entirely new by my decision to lay off drugs—kept doubt at bay. If I had really examined my fitness in all of its dimensions, I would have been paralyzed. It was a fairy tale that kept me alive and allowed me to make it come true. Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine.

I’m not saying that raising children, especially by yourself, is a trip to Turks and Caicos. But single parenting is as old as reproduction: Children teach you how to care for them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some brutal, smelly event at a McDonald’s. Let them wheedle their way into your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off every single night of their young lives. As we spent more time together, they began to know me, and I came to adore them—madly, deeply, truly.

The two years I spent reporting my story also paid off. In reductive psychoanalytic terms, I achieved a measure of integration, not just between my past and my present, but between what Carl Jung would call my masculine and feminine sides. You are always told to recover for yourself, but reproduction has an enormously simplifying effect on life: Are you willing to destroy others, including little babies, in order to feed the monster within?

Not in my case, though it was a close call.

I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve. But then, we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.

From the book The Night of the Gun by David Carr, adapted from a longer excerpt that originally appeared in The New York Times. ©2008 by David Carr. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.