Every time I try to explain David Carr to a friend, I say something like "That dude is the real deal." Carr is a media/culture columnist for The New York Times, and he's a better writer and a tougher human than I'll ever be. I've corresponded with him a few times over the years about stories he was working on, or whatever, and I met him in Los Angeles when he came to visit Boing Boing tv for a piece he wrote about our launch.
So, I've been *really* eager to see his new book come out, ever since I learned he was writing it -- and I'm so excited to say that it's out in a few weeks, and there's a preview in the NYT today.
The Night of the Gun recounts David Carr's life as a crack addict, pieced back together through interviews with people who were part of his life at the time. It's an amazing book. You have to read this thing.
I hope I'm not revealing any spoilers here, but when I asked Carr about the project last in LA year, he told me about reconnecting with one of those old friends, and trying to recover the facts about one night when he was out of his mind high on speed, something about jumping through a window and police showing up and a huge fight with the friend, the sort of high velocity drug-o-drama you'd see on COPS. In the hazy, semifictional way an addict can try to remember things that happened when he was high -- he's always remembered his friend pointing a gun at him, at one point during the climax of that crisis. When Carr went back years later to interview that friend, the friend said something like, "no, you were pointing the gun at me." I believe that's where the title comes from.
Here's a snip from the excerpt in today's NYT:
Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like 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” and finding my own pathetic resonance in the lyrics. “Any place is better,” she sang. “Starting from zero, got nothing to lose.” After shooting or smoking a large dose, there would be the tweaking and a 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. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.
After a while I noticed that the blinds on the upper duplex kitty-corner from the house were doing the same thing. The light would leak through a corner and disappear. I began to think of the rise and fall of their blinds and mine as a kind of Morse code, sent back and forth across the street in winking increments that said the same thing over and over.
W-e a-r-e g-e-t-t-i-n-g h-i-g-h t-o-o.
They rarely came out, and neither did I, so we never discussed our shared hobby.
Here, read more of the excerpt; photos and multimedia stuff here too.
Me and My Girls [New York Times]
Buy the book: The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own. [amazon]
Website, with first-person video: Night of the Gun [Simon and Schuster]
