After he called the three of us to come outside and head out, I found my dad moving quietly around in the dark, leafing through papers on his makeshift desk. He was breathing heavily. I asked if he was okay. He turned to me, and his eyes were bloodshot. I had never seen him like this. He muttered a semblance of a response that indicated I was not to ask any more questions. I felt silenced and uncomfortable. He was the one making us late.
“I’m hungry,” I told him.
“We’ll eat on the road,” he barked back.
As we started our drive away from our home in Montclair, the yellow lines began to swerve underneath us. We looked at one another, totally unsure of what to do. Meagan was the first to speak. “What is going on, Dad? You don’t seem all right. You need to pull over.” He sighed loudly, turned on his blinker, and moved the wheels to the right, hitting the gas pedal. There was a loud blaring honk as a big SUV missed us by inches. The horn felt like it lasted for minutes.
“What is wrong with you?” I yelled as he turned off at a gas station. My baby sister and twin were fearful and quiet. Meagan got out of the car and dialed a family friend who told us to call a cab. Dad insisted we get back in the car, and we drove the eight minutes back to our darkened house in New Jersey. He had been drinking. He could have killed us and himself that night. He drank more when he got home. We called Jill and told her what had happened. She was horrified but not surprised. He had been off the wagon for months.
There would be a few more nights like that one in his life, a few more relapses before he got clean again, but nothing that quite matched the level of terror for me of that first one. Months later he was pulled over driving to my high school for a college informational seminar for parents on finding the right school and paying for it. He never made it to the seminar. The cops arrested him en route and my dad was forced to forfeit his license for more than a year. Who drives their kids drunk? Who drinks on the way to a parent-teacher conference? I learned quickly that the circumstances did not matter when it came to my dad and alcohol. He was powerless.
* * *
—
He called one morning, and I knew something was wrong the second I heard him at the other end of the line. I was in year two at VICE and just trying not to drown. His voice was raspier than usual, and his speech was careful and deliberate. It sounded like he was on the street when he should have been in his cube at the Times. He asked if I had time to meet in Williamsburg later that evening. I said of course, without hesitation. The call ended abruptly and without him telling me he loved me, which was odd. I had to sit at work for the next six hours wondering what on earth he was going to tell me.
I met my dad at El Moderno, a bar in Williamsburg off the Lorimer Street stop of the Brooklyn-bound L train. I rushed there, a knot of fear resting in my stomach as I walked the fifteen minutes from my desk to the bar. He was already there when I arrived. What greeted me looked like my dad, and yet it didn’t. He was seated in a booth, his eyes unfocused and glassy as he squinted at his BlackBerry. Next to him sat an empty martini glass, still frosted from the chilled vodka. I approached the table. He looked embarrassed but stood up and pulled me into a bear hug, both of us holding on a little too long. His eyes remained downcast until I threw my messenger bag on my side of the red leather booth.
“So, this is starting again,” I muttered, unsure if I should go with humor or seriousness when approaching my dad’s relapse. It had been years since the last time. We thought he had experimented back then, and once recovered, it was over. That is how the recovery narrative goes. Alcoholic gets and stays clean. Your brain and body know what is forbidden territory.
“You know, I am not quite sure how I got here,” he mused, almost as if I wasn’t there. As if he were talking to someone else. “But I have some guesses.” A cute waitress sauntered over to our table and asked if he wanted another round. He ordered a martini. I ordered a glass of pinot grigio. This would be the first drink we ever had together. It felt nothing like a celebration. Not even close.
I could sense that he was at least a couple of drinks deep when we started to talk and that slur came back. I knew it because I had heard my own voice fall into it on occasion.
“Where in the relapse are we? Did this just start?”
He shook his head. To lighten the mood, I started to tease him about the shirt he was wearing. It was an oversized blue shirt with a sort of gingerbread man on it. It seemed a bit childlike, not at all his typical uniform. He stared at me and said, “Don’t you say that. My sweeto gave this to me.” We were back to silence. The wine didn’t help me much; I would need a couple more glasses before I felt any sort of effect.
Finally, I asked the only real question that mattered: “Why are you drinking and do you want to stop?”
“I do want to stop, I know I need to stop.” He described to me what life had been like lately: Twitter, covering the glittering parties, the deadlines that followed. He continued, “It’s just all the stuff at work, the parties, the people. I just felt like I wanted to be part of it for once.” He looked down. He knew how he sounded. He added, “It’s hard to come into middle age. It doesn’t feel like I should be here yet, but I look in the mirror and this is what I am left with.”
His mind was quick as ever, but his body and his health made it clear that he needed to slow down. As a deeply ambitious person, he resented it. I was unsure how to respond. It wasn’t something I had ever really thought about. For the first time, my dad was revealing himself to me to be a flawed human being, not just my father. Not just the writer. But even then I understood that middle age had not led to the relapse; he himself had. That was what I needed to focus on.
“What will happen if you continue drinking?” I wondered out loud. “It’ll just get worse, I imagine. We’ve watched this episode before.” I reminded him of the detox that followed his drunk-driving arrest a few years back, the rebuilding of family trust. The necrotizing pancreatitis that left him with diabetes. I knew that alcohol and diabetes could be a lethal combination, and yet here we were.
He seemed genuinely mystified but knew it had to be a short run. His forehead wrinkled as he joked about being one of the incurable ones. We both ordered another drink. I knew it was bad form to drink with your relapsed parent, but I was going to need a drink if I was going to get through what came next.
He told me Jill was upset with him; I knew how she felt. I felt resentful seeing him repeat the same behavior, for putting his health in jeopardy right in front of my eyes. But I didn’t have it in me to reprimand him. Instead I held my anger deep within. I was twenty-three years old and didn’t have the faintest idea about what advice to offer my dad. He didn’t care; our relationship knew very little in the way of boundaries. I could yell at him, but what good would it do? He already hated himself.
Then he said something that made me panic. “I was standing on the platform, trying to get here on the L train. I thought, just for a second, about throwing myself down into the subway and just letting it fucking hit me.” He stared at me. I asked if this was a joke, and he noncommittally shrugged. I had never heard him admit a suicidal thought before. He was hurting. We needed to get him into treatment. Again.
I felt a mixture of emotions as we made our way through our drinks. I felt a responsibility to let him know that I loved him unconditionally. I also knew, from previous experiences, that there needed to be consequences for addicts that did not change. I felt stuck and unsure what to do or say.
And then it was over. After my second drink and I am guessing his fourth, he called it a night. I hailed him a cab, feeling frantic about the idea of him on a subway platform. I asked if he could go to a meeting tomorrow or a detox. He assured me he would figure it out and would be on his way back to sobriety, back to being my dad. He held me close as we said goodbye and thanked me for loving him no matter what. I started to cry and he said, “None of that, now. You are a Carr
. You are strong.” A tear leaked down his face as he said this. He finally climbed into the car and told the driver to head toward Midtown. I slammed the yellow door closed and looked at him through the window, for a second wanting to get in and make sure he got home okay. I smiled weakly and he waved. The cab pulled away and I stood there for a moment taking it in, sobbing.
I sped toward my local wine store and grabbed a big bottle of cheap white wine. Tears lined my face and the cashier made no attempt at small talk. I took it back to my apartment and said nothing to my roommates, drinking it glass by glass until I was numb and pretty much blackout drunk. I thought about emailing him, but I had nothing to say. I was too far gone.
12
The House of Many Felled Trees
“Austin was kind of a revelation, you need to move here and then I need to follow.”
My dad loved Twitter. With twenty-nine thousand tweets and a follower base of more than four hundred thousand, his feed was the perfect mixture of high- and lowbrow content. People followed in droves to read his honest, funny, and human interpretation of the world around him in 140 characters or less. I was one of those 400K, and as a blood relative I got a follow back. I was one of the few.
After his death, a sexbot hacked the account and started posting highly disturbing content on his page, so The New York Times handed the reins over to me. I downloaded the archive and began sifting through the deluge of information. I tapped a friend to create a data set for my dad’s Twitter account. I sent her the feed, but felt strange doing so. What was I trying to find, and was it my information to even give away?
I was unsurprised when she handed me his most hashtagged phrases: #SXSW was number one. South by Southwest is an annual music and film festival in Austin, Texas. The carnitas tacos are deluxe and so is the town. Janet Pierson runs the epic film portion of the festival and she and my dad became fast friends when he started going in 2009. It was one of his absolute favorite events to attend. He told me resolutely that I would feel the same.
I was in the middle of my second year at VICE in 2012 when I raised my hand during a meeting with my techie overlords. “SXSW is coming up, and I think I should go and interview for a series of roundups with the smartest people in town.” I stammered when I spoke, still unsure of my place within the larger system. “I think we can share our brand and get video with people we wouldn’t normally have access to.” It was a fine idea, but in reality I just wanted to go to SXSW to meet up with my dad. The bearded guy with glasses typed it into his computer and said he would think about it. I set about stalking the forums to see who would be attending that might be open to being interviewed. I needed a way to justify the trip.
My boss bought my story, and in a few short months I, along with my co-worker Sean, was boarding a plane to Dallas where we would pick up a rental car and drive to Austin. All the direct flights were long gone, but I didn’t mind as I was on a paid work trip. I felt like this was the start of something great. I emailed my dad and updated him on my arrival status. He responded in minutes.
Hoped u packed warm hoss. In the badge line, which is epic.
The badge he was talking about was a golden ticket to all things festival related. I had gotten press credentials and the thousand-dollar entry fee waived, and this was my key to the festivities.
We arrived at our Airbnb. Some smart Austinite had rented out their one-bedroom apartment, where we would switch off between the bed and the couch for four hundred bucks a night. After dropping off our stuff, we walked toward downtown, the hot, dense air sticking to us. There was an energy in the air, music wafting in waves from streets we had yet to walk. I was filled with a sense of hope and possibility—I could do the things I dreamed about all those years ago in my pop-culture-covered bedroom in northern New Jersey.
The next day I, along with a few dozen others, received an email invitation from my dad.
From: David Carr
To: David Carr
Bcc: Erin Lee Carr
Date: 03/10/2012
Subject: An invite from Jenna, Brian and David at the House of Many Felled Trees
To all the talk about SxSW being a goat rodeo that has jumped the shark on the way to nuking the fridge, we’d like to say: Not so fast. We are part of the crowd, the ones that love it here. Especially when we end up eating food from a truck and drinking beer from a tub, as we will on Sunday night at 6pm, outside our room at Hotel San Jose on South Congress. Management here has apparently caught on and Carr is upstairs in room 54 this year, so no big mud patio and a much smaller gathering on two balconies. Please RSVP if you are coming and don’t pass along or post about it. We’ll be done by 8.
The secret invite to his party. He was known for throwing raucous parties with bathtubs full of beer that he did not drink. It had now been a year since his most recent relapse. He would crank up Beck’s album Guero and showcase his ridiculous Midwestern moves on the dance floor. He did not care who was watching, and it showed. One might guess that this would be embarrassing for his mid-twenties daughter. One would guess wrong. Frankly, I was impressed. It was one of the many things I learned from how he chose to live his life—be your own damn thing.
I wandered into the San Jose in my lace shirt-skirt combo, very New York and off-scene. I took in the party while I cracked a bathtub beer. My dad was hosting with known wunderkind Brian Stelter and the effortlessly cool Jenna Wortham. All three worked at the Times and were mingling comfortably with the tech glitterati. I went in for the hug with my dad, and he started introducing me as his kid who worked for VICE. People were kind, but I could tell instantly that I was not who they really wanted to be speaking with at such an event. I returned to the bathroom to retrieve another beer from the tub, and before I knew it I was seven beers deep. I didn’t like to drink around my dad, but I couldn’t really stop myself. I didn’t like being watched by someone who understood what that need felt like for me: less normal and more of an impulse I couldn’t ignore. I found myself getting louder, funnier, even joining in on the dance party.
When the shindig grew too loud, my dad decided it was time to move the crew to the Bravo tent. He drove us there, sober as a nun, laughing the whole way. I marveled at his ease in navigating conversations, relationships, different age groups. Even with early twentysomethings, he never looked uncomfortable. He wanted to be where the action was, and the action wanted him. In the flashy tent, I guzzled the blue shots being passed around. I went to the bathroom and put my head between my legs and took a deep breath. I felt fuzzy and knew I was nearing the line between consciousness and a blackout. My body said stop, but my brain said drink a little more.
Next on our bar crawl was a dance party for Foursquare. With the exception of my dad, everyone was buzzed at this point. I wondered if it was starting to get boring for him. Stories were repeated ad nauseam. The dance music drowned that out so we busted a move.
In the wee hours of the morning, my dad decided to call it a night and suggested I do the same. If he was concerned about my drinking, he didn’t say so. I was one of many kids having a wild time at the festival. I had interviews to conduct the next day. I obliged but only because there was no more free gin. I made my way out to the front of the club, waved over a rickshaw, and gave the sturdy-looking driver my Airbnb address. The sky started to spit out water, coating me in a small mist. I searched my purse for my phone and took my badge off to put in said purse. The rickshaw hit a bump and my drunken hands lost their grip on the thousand-dollar badge. I watched as it sailed out onto the street behind me. I knew I should say something to my driver, but my drunken stupor rendered me silent. I faced forward and felt the rain on my face. Blackouts have a way of creating apathy.
Dancing like everyone’s watching at SXSW.
The next morning I woke up and realized first thing that my badge was missing. I immediately headed back to the expo center where I spotted the sign: WE ARE NOT RESPONS
IBLE FOR LOST OR STOLEN BADGES. Curious how I missed that the day before. I wondered if my Irish charm could convince the lady in the booth to take pity on me. I steeled myself as I walked up to the woman, who in slow-motion shook her head. I continued to plead my case, to no avail. I was the idiot that lost her badge on the first night of the festival.
I had interviews set up back at the Airbnb so I raced back, golden-ticket-less. I attempted to get through a sit-down with Iranian activist and journalist Saman Arbabi, but I felt waves of nausea grip me as I asked him about the Internet and how it related to promoting dissent. My vision blurred and my stomach began to churn. I excused myself and vomited in the bathroom as quietly as possible, running the faucet to drown out the sound. I returned to our makeshift set and kept my eyes cast down until I started asking questions again. Was the camera even rolling? I felt like I was going to pass out.
I made it through the interview, but as soon as I closed the door behind my guest, someone I had been thrilled to speak to, I reviewed the interview tape. It was unusable. My questions were incoherent and the back-and-forth was a mess.
Waves of self-hatred began to wash over me. Why was everyone else able to drink and do their jobs? I was mystified and miserable about my inability to stop drinking past a certain point. My lack of control around alcohol was affecting my work life. It was undeniable at this point.
All That You Leave Behind Page 7
