"THE NIGHT OF THE GUN"
A NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER PROBES HIS OWN SORDID PAST
By MARTHA FRANKEL
Last updated: 5:17 am
July 20, 2008
Posted: 4:16 am
July 20, 2008
Imagine James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" on a dose of truth serum, suffuse it with some cynical humor and a good handful of self-deprecation, and you get David Carr's remarkable and immensely readable memoir, "The Night of the Gun."
Memory is faulty, memory is unreliable, Carr insists. We make ourselves out to be better than we were. Or worse. We remember that things happened one way, but then find out that we were mistaken, that they happened in a completely different way.
So when Carr, now a well-respected culture and media reporter for the New York Times, decided to find out about the four years (or was it five? Seven?) that he spent as a drug addicted, crack smoking, coke selling screw-up in Minneapolis in the 1970s and '80s, he approached it the way he would any good story - he brought along a tape recorder and a video camera, rounded up his old arrest and hospitalization records, and sat down with over 60 people who had known him back then. He spent two years investigating himself.
What he found was not pretty.
Carr was the kind of guy who never knew when enough was enough. When the last bar was closed for the night, he'd invite everyone back to your house, eat all your food, drink all your booze, and oh yes, steal the rest of your coke stash on the way out. "Always looking for the next caper, I was a lot of fun until I was not."
The first half of "Night of the Gun" recreates Carr's descent into addiction and a life that was so sordid that you want to hide your eyes. As an old friend tells him during an interview 25 years after they had last seen each other, "When you would come over in the morning to get a cup of coffee, which you dearly needed, you would have crap on your tie, on your shirt - your breath would smell so bad of puke, it would be hard to talk to you across the room. And I would say, 'Geez, David, aren't you gonna clean up?' And you'd go, 'No, I gotta go, I gotta go.' "
Then there's the night of the gun. Carr remembered that he and his friend Donald had been thrown out of a bar. They were very drunk and very stoned. Donald was furious and went home. Carr followed. They argued and Donald pulled a handgun.
But when Carr interviews Donald, his friend remembers the drinking, the drugs, the fight. "He said it was all true, except the part about the gun," Carr writes. '"I never owned a gun,' Donald had said. 'I think you had it.' "
I'm not a gun guy, Carr thinks, but other friends remember that gun, too. They remember picking it up or hiding it from him. And while they were drug addled as well, the one thing they all agree about is that the gun belonged to Carr. He was the villain of the story.
