Sheila looked at me with her brilliant brown eyes and said, “Nope, that is not the least bit interesting to me. Who cares?” I could feel a grimace coming on. Andrew looked unfazed as he changed topics and began to pitch something else. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I could feel my golden opportunity fleeing.
I stared at Sheila. She interrupted Andrew, turned to me, and said, “Your eyes make me nervous.” I doubted this. Very little made Sheila nervous. I smiled in response and for the next two hours we discussed Christianity, circumcision, nuns, Russians, Warhol, mortality, and her dreams. I brought up a story I had read about in Gawker about Gilberto Valle, nicknamed “the Cannibal Cop” by the New York tabloids. Valle was an NYPD officer convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, rape, torture, and eat young women. The case was an unusual one. The defendant had never actually kidnapped anyone; he’d just thought about it and wrote about it in an online fetish community. A definite First Amendment rights issue. Now we were talking. I had unlocked some sort of interest in Sheila, and after one of the longest meetings of my life, it was time to hug goodbye. She looked at me and said in a teasing manner, “I don’t like your ideas, but I like you. Andrew and you will make a good team. Bring me back something I like.”
Turns out she did like one idea, because in the weeks that followed we were given a small development deal and the opportunity to turn the Cannibal Cop documentary into my directorial feature debut. Andrew was thrilled and said that it was a great meeting. As I walked away in the November chill, I felt electrified. Maybe my firing had happened for a reason. I called my dad and described the meeting. He said the words I heard so often but that had never felt so meaningful until that moment on the sidewalk in New York.
“Who knew? We knew.”
19
Liability
“Remember. Eating b4 drinking. Sleep b4 rocking. And measure twice.”
While my career had righted itself, my drinking had not. Coming off my successful meeting with Sheila, I was excited to celebrate and share the news at an engagement party for my friends Will and Cary. I was one of the few former co-workers invited and I counted myself lucky to be included in these smart, chic people’s lives. Had I always been sweet on Will? Sure, but who hadn’t? He was that kind of guy. I wasn’t worried about it, but I was aware that my drinking had been a little above and beyond lately, even for me.
After being cut loose from my job I had more free time than ever, and the wine was coming earlier in the evening than I cared to admit. As soon as the clock on my monitor hit six, an economical bottle of wine was produced from the fridge and drank in its entirety. Sometimes I would pour Yunna a glass, but more often than not, she demurred when it came to drinking with me. I drank five or six nights a week, always a bottle of wine or more. Wine calmed my fears about freelancing and the dark subject matter that I was engaged with on a daily basis. I knew alcohol was part of the reason I’d been fired, but I rationalized it whenever it popped up in my brain—the broken camera, the hangovers. I knew sobriety was for “later,” not now. I needed alcohol.
As I got ready for the engagement party I made the conscious effort to look myself in the mirror and say, “You are going to have no more than three drinks tonight; you are not going to do any coke.” I decided to put an Adderall in my pocket to reward myself for keeping to three drinks. This is the kind of bizarre logic I resorted to. If I verbalized my limits I would sometimes adhere to what I had set out to do.
I met a mutual friend on the walk over and felt myself growing more and more anxious. It had been ten months since I left VICE, and this was one of the first times I was going to see some of my former co-workers. I was embarrassed to admit that I was no longer at the job that I had left the company for, and the development deal with HBO, while exciting, didn’t feel very tangible. Nerves and a party had always been a toxic combination for me, but I pushed the feelings away as we made our way toward the venue.
The party was at a production company space that looked like a film set, full of stuffed birds and glass jars. The first half hour of a party is usually very dull, but drinking white wine helped ease the boredom. I stared at my hands and feet and thought about what made sense to talk about with other guests: the happy couple, the endless winter that we had been having. Suddenly and without consciously noticing it, I began to feel the effects of the three glasses of wine. I heard the men laughing next to me as I put my hand on my hips and grinned. I instantly felt more attractive as I went into the bathroom to reward myself for keeping on the three drinks train. I snorted the Adderall instead of popping it, deciding that it was probably best to save half for later.
There was a champagne toast and I was confronted with a familiar choice: Say yes to another drink, or say no and stick to the plan I had set out for myself. I always chose the former. Whenever the question of to drink or not to drink arose, the answer for me was almost always a hard yes. I was unable to control or moderate my drinking once I had already consumed alcohol. I drank that champagne, my fourth glass of wine, in a matter of minutes.
That was the last conscious decision I made that night. The following details were told to me after the fact because I was blackout drunk at the time. I decided that it was time to make a speech about how I felt about the groom. I meant well, but instead of a quick, thoughtful toast, I rambled on and on, offering up flirty innuendos at Will and making completely inappropriate remarks, including saying I was jealous of the bride-to-be, but she was pretty hot, too. Eventually, after falling down on the dance floor for the third time, I was asked by a family friend to leave the party. One of my good friends and favorite drinking buddies, Kathleen, helped get me into a cab. I pleaded with her to hit up another bar with me, but she shook her head, begging off and saying that she wanted to go home. The night was over for her but not for me. I made the taxi stop at the bodega near my home where I grabbed a six-pack of tall boys, content to sit on my computer and drunkenly Gchat until the sun came up. Three drinks had turned into ten.
I eventually passed out, then woke up at noon to shooting head pains. I searched my bed for my phone to take stock of the previous night’s damage. It was nowhere to be found. I looked at the empty beer cans and slowly realized what I had done the night before. A shiver of embarrassment worked its way down my spine. What did I do at the party? My memory of the night appeared to me in quick flashes, but the flashes were troubling. I needed to get in touch with Kathleen. While we saw wildness in each other, she would no doubt reassure me (as she had in the past) that my behavior hadn’t been so bad. I tracked her down in a nearby café where she was having brunch with her boyfriend like a civilized adult. She had my phone. I was limping for some godforsaken reason, and when she saw me she immediately looked concerned. “Hey, you okay?”
I nodded my head as nonchalantly as I could, but I knew I was at some sort of breaking point. It wasn’t that something horrific had happened; it was the simple and irrefutable fact that I could not control or moderate my drinking. I’d set a boundary for myself and once again had blown past it. I needed to try something different.
I crawled toward the subway. The shining sun mocked the deep regret that was setting in. I needed to tune out. I frantically searched for my headphones and discovered that the drunk version of me had jammed them into my borrowed iPad. Somehow I had broken my headphones and only had the jack inside. Ugh, what an idiot. My phone was dead, the iPad was toast, and I was alone with my thoughts—the thing I used alcohol to get away from. I felt like such a cliché, a bored mid-twenties adult who had succumbed to my genes. No amount of smarts, or history for that matter, had taught me anything different.
As I sat on the subway ride home, I knew for certain that my drinking was way beyond the range of normal. My skin was cracked and dehydrated; I didn’t know what to do next. The answer, however, was obvious to my dad.
“You need to give it a break.”
“For a week?” I countered.
&n
bsp; “More like a month.”
“I can try.”
A month away from white wine seemed like a ridiculous amount of time to me, but definitely more doable than forever. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my dad, a member of AA, was twelve-stepping me, showing me a way out of alcoholism, one day at a time.
I went home and dumped out the half-finished bottle of wine I had in the fridge, along with the unopened bottle of champagne I was saving for a special occasion. I felt like throwing up while I did this, watching the liquid and dollars wash down the drain. I ordered the generic pad Thai from the restaurant down the street and hunkered under the covers.
Weeks later, a mutual friend of the engaged couple posted about the cute invite she had received for the wedding. I had already checked my mailbox for the day: nada. It was days later when I realized I was waiting for something that would never arrive. I emailed Will to finally apologize for the behavior and wreckage I knew I had caused. I received a blistering response, calling me out and saying it was time to take a break from the friendship. I completely understood, but I deleted it immediately, unable to withstand having the email even exist in my inbox. He knew the truth, and I knew it, too. I needed to try a program of recovery.
20
Ninety Days
It had been ninety days since I got that email from Will, and something sort of magical had happened since receiving it. I had not had a single drink. I had become sober.
My life became routinized. I attended AA and therapy regularly, feverishly worked on my HBO project, and in my off hours hung out with my boyfriend’s dog, Gary. After years of battling daily headaches, I had forgotten what it felt like not to be even slightly hungover. I felt like a superhero.
As a matter of AA tradition, I invited my dad, who was also sober at the time, to my ninety-day celebration meeting. It fell on the same day as my stepmom’s birthday. I knew we would be having a big party for her the following weekend, one replete with a mariachi band and a delish taco truck. I definitely wanted him to attend this significant event in my life, and as childlike as it may have been, I wanted him to pick me. I signaled as much to him in a passive-aggressive exchange.
To: David Carr
From: Erin Lee Carr
Date: 06/04/2014
Subject: Better on email
Dad, thanks for calling me. I am feeling uncomfortable with saying this on the phone so email felt like a better bet, we can follow up and chat tonight but I wanted you to hear me out.
I am sure it was a hard phone call to make but it was a hard phone call to receive. I’m also sure it sucks being put in the middle but I just wish this had been handled better. I called last week and said that it would be significant if you could come to my 90 day meeting. You know as well as I do, its a big deal and one that I have fought hard for. While I totally understand why Jill’s birthday and 50 is a big deal, you guys are having a big party on Saturday to celebrate it. I know rationally that my sobriety does not take precedence over anyone else’s life but my own but this is something that makes me sad. Jill is going to have GG and Grammy Diane tomorrow, I will have no one as it is a closed meeting.
That said, I think it would be better if you respected Jill’s wishes for tomorrow but we can chat about it.
As was his fashion, he considered this for a whole thirteen minutes before typing back his response.
To: Erin Lee Carr
From: David Carr
Date: 06/04/2014
Subject: Re: Better on email
Very well said. Heard. See you there one way or another. Quick dinner cuz closing piece.
I adore you and love your ability to come to your own behalf. Tell me where to be for meeting. Looking forward.
He knew that he could not force sobriety on his kid. For most of the time he was parenting me, he’d abstained from drugs and alcohol. It affected the way I saw him. He had this secret way of living that protected him against the clear bottle and the chaos that it brought along with it. I wondered if I was play-acting. Had my drinking gotten so bad that I needed to totally abstain as well? Where did this fit in with my idolizing tendencies?
Before the meeting, we went for dinner at a local empanada joint in my neighborhood. We both ordered Mexican Coke and cheered to the ninety. I could tell he was curious to see if I would keep it up. I had made it past the month that we had first talked about. I caught him staring at his phone; he eyed me and put the phone back in his bag. So, what’s next? he asked. But I had a question for him.
“Do you think I’m an alcoholic?”
He answered immediately with another question: “Did your life get better when you removed alcohol from the equation?”
I meditated on this while taking a sip of my Coke. Well, there were no hangovers. I was sleeping well. I could get to business meetings on time. My newish boyfriend seemed happier when I didn’t ask him for the sixty-seventh time to repeat what had occurred the night before. My professional life and the HBO film I was making seemed fragile, at a bit of an edge. But the movie had not gone away like my job had. I said as much and he said, “Well, that seems better to me.”
We headed over to a small room in a church basement in the old-fashioned Italian part of Brooklyn to mark my achievement. I can’t say much more about what went on, per AA rules, but I had a big internal grin when he raised his hand to speak. If I was a betting woman I would have placed heavy odds he would pipe up; rarely did he leave a room unaddressed. I loved it, though; I loved hearing what he had to say about his own attempts at ninety days, how hard-won it was, and what it was like to see his kid get there. I didn’t care if people in the room knew he was my dad. I was proud to be with him, and I felt lucky to have him.
Earlier that morning he’d emailed me the following note:
I have been knowing you for a long time, but I can’t think of a time when I have been prouder of you. you go to 90 the old school way, crawling on sometimes bloody fingers a single day at a time
it speaks to your willingness, your seriousness and your humility. you have earned your chair, you are an important, vital part of the fellowship, and so central to my happiness and joy.
congrats on counting and piling up all of those one day at a times.
dad
all is well. writing. and listening to? The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. the ep. it’s weird when you get alone time with your iPod and you realize that there is stuff on there that you love that you don’t even know about….
I like that you are being patient socially and looking after yourself. and in terms of being comfortable with the self, I struggle a lot with that. if something cool happens or I see something grand, did it really happen. watched meteor shower in the middle of the nite and somehow it seemed less valid, less cool, that it was only me and the dog. think it is a defect of character. but I have made enormous progress in being by myself and looking after myself. making good food that only I will eat, having little treats like This American Life that are mine and mine alone….
xo
d
21
SOS
“Do the work.”
In our household, when I was growing up, there was no TV allowed on weekdays, only books. We were going to be strong readers, come hell or high water. As a teenager I fell in love with movies instantly and read all the books on cinema I could get my grubby little hands on. Every Monday, I knew what went huge (or fell flat) at the box office that weekend and would often recite the statistics over my Honey Nut Cheerios at the breakfast table. My bible was Entertainment Weekly, and in a tribute I hung up my favorite covers, plastering every wall in my bedroom. When my dad invited Jay Woodruff, then assistant managing editor of EW, to visit my EW shrine, he said, “So this is what it feels like to be stalked.”
In my ongoing obsession, I compiled a list of hundreds of movies to discuss with my dad. If th
ey were rated R he had to determine whether my fourteen-year-old brain could handle it. I loved spending time with him in this way. From City of God to Donnie Darko to an ill-advised screening of Stephen Frear’s The Grifters (which showcased a doomed love affair that involved incest and was a little too awkward to watch with my dad), movies were our thing.
My father always budgeted lots of time before the movie started (he was a freak about getting an aisle seat), and when we strolled up to the snack bar he would say the magic words “Get whatever you want.” Giant buckets of popcorn (with plenty of chemical butter), a large fountain Diet Coke, and Sno-Caps—never forget the Sno-Caps. We would play a game before the movie started. We’d watch the trailers for five seconds before judging the film—would it be thumbs up, thumbs neutral, or thumbs down? We didn’t agree; I was the harsher critic of the two, giving the majority of the films a thumbs down. I told him I thought the trailers felt watered down. He rolled his eyes. We agreed to disagree and had fun spending time together all the same.
Now the time had come not to watch a movie, but to actually make one and deliver it to HBO. I wasn’t sure how to begin. My journo instincts told me I needed to get to the man (the assumed cannibal) at the center of the story.
Gilberto Valle had been found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap by a jury of his peers in March 2013. The prosecution alleged that this former NYPD officer had dossiers on sixty-plus women on his home computer and was looking up potential victims on the police database in his squad car.
But there was another side to the story. His defense team stated that he had never actually physically stalked any women. They argued that while the young police officer’s thoughts and Google searches were terrifying, they were just thoughts, and he was within his rights to think them. The defense lost that argument, and Valle was sent to a federal prison in lower Manhattan. He was housed in solitary for his own safety. He was a former cop, after all.
All That You Leave Behind Page 12
