NY Times columnist David Carr is probably the best media critic on the planet, as evidenced by his claiming the Mirror Award for Commentary, given out by media types to those who do the best job of covering the media, each year.
David Carr was also a raving crackhead lunatic in another life, assaulting women, injecting liquid cocaine, and even, at one rock-bottom point, leaving his infant twins in the car amidst a freezing-ass Twin Cities winter to engage in a lengthy drug session.
It’s all in his memoir The Night of the Gun. But unlike other junkie memoirs, Carr actually treats the memoir as a reporting project–not trusting the memory of a crack and booze addled brain, he goes back and interviews the people involved in his former life–treatment counselers, dealers, ex-girlfriends, former bosses, the twins he left in the car, even old drug buddy Tom Arnold (Yes, Mr. Roseanne). It’s a novel way of connecting the dots of one’s former life.
Anyway, jump ahead a few decades, and Carr is living straight and claiming those Mirror Awards every year. The bane of his existence these days? That shitty bus commute from Montclair to Times headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen.
This bit from The Night of the Gun looks at Carr trying to piece his life together after getting out of detox (yet again) and taking over parenting responsibilities of the twins (hard to believe, but the twins’ drug-dealing mother was even worse off than their father).
Our first place together was at 2612 Dupont Avenue, an upper duplex that was sort of creepy and mouse ridden, but it was ours, giving us defendable space that was not my parents’ basement. We did not have a car that worked, and we ended up schlepping to buses on many brutally cold winter days. (To this day, living in suburban new jersey, where a bus to
We went through a couple of junker cars and eventually bought a rolled over white Volvo wagon that the twins called “Beauty” not because it looked good, but because it ran. My pal Billy pounded out the dents, sold it to us on the cheap, and then made sure it kept running, one of the many not so random acts of kindness that helped us achieve normalcy.
[image: Gawker]