The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own by David Carr

2008 Simon and Schuster

Sometime last year, a writing teacher handed her students, myself among them, a list of memoirs she considered to be excellent. David Carr's The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own was among them. I got to reading the book this spring and brought it along with me on a recent trip down South, where I made a stop in New Orleans.

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Thirty years ago I had also overnighted in New Orleans. This visit was no different, except I hope it will serve as an amuse bouche for future and longer ones. This stay, orchestrated by friends who had grown up in proximity to New Orleans, included reservations at a funky hotel across from the jazz museum on Esplanade and a late Sunday lunch at Galatoire's on Bourbon Street. I had been told that Galatoire's was a New Orleans institution, a spot where locals came after church on Sundays and where men who showed up without a sports jacket could choose one from the abundant collection racked near the entrance. In the old days, Galatoire's patrons could even request their favorite waiter upon arrival. My friend recalled a fellow they called "Sleepy" because of his decrepitude.

This trip, I had time to kill before meeting my friends for our 3 p.m. lunch, so I decided to walk off the beignets and Cafe du Monde coffee by scouting the route from Jackson Square to Galatoire's on Bourbon Street. Finding Bourbon Street in the French Quarter is not difficult. As I undertook my trial run, an odor overcame me. "New Orleans has its smell," my friend warned me. Indeed, it's the fetid odor of rotting garbage that permeates the streets of New York and other cities on hot summer days. 

"What a pit. I don't ever need to come back here," I thought. My recollection of Bourbon Street from 30 years ago was the same, but as soon as I left that thoroughfare, the city was different, less sordid. It was different at different times of the day, too, easier to take in the late afternoon and early morning, when the heat and humidity seemed less an affront. 

Just as you can't accurately form an impression of New York City by walking up Broadway from the high thirties to Forty-Fourth Street, so too you cannot judge the Crescent City by Bourbon Street on a hot early Sunday afternoon. 

Better to be seduced early on a Monday morning walking along Chartres to Croissant d' Or on Ursuline or along Royal just before dusk when the musicians roll by toting their instruments.

Late Sunday afternoon, the jackets in the foyer at Galatoire's were still there, awaiting the ill-equipped. The host, direct out of central casting, could double for most any country club manager a little worse for the wear. Our waiter, however, was anything but decrepit. Young, professional,  and filled with energy, he didn't hesitate to recommend the almondine sauce for the rockfish, which arrived amid a pile of toasted slivers swimming in butter. By the time dessert arrived, Galatoire's was all out of its famed bread pudding, but the black bottom pecan pie was no second fiddle. As difficult as it was to break the brownie-like, hard-as-nails crust, the effort yielded a mouthful of decadent chocolate bathed in runny whipped cream and pecans.

In the final hundred pages or so of Night of the Gun, Carr recalled his own time reporting from New Orleans. He mentions friends who lived on Esplanade, the location of my hotel, and Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood my Jordanian cab driver had pointed out to me. One of the many joys of reading is when stories intersect with one's own real life in real time.

David Carr was 58 years old when he dropped dead at The New York Times. By the time of his 2015 death from cancer, he had risen to become her celebrated media columnist. Prior to that, he had built his journalistic chops in Washington, D.C., and before that in his hometown, Minneapolis. During those early Minnesota days he lived a dual life as a coke addict and alcoholic, eventually fathering twin girls with a fellow crackhead. Soon he lost work and any shred of dignity, but eventually he achieved sobriety after attempting to raise the babies on his own, chronicling his story two decades later in a genre he seemed to frown upon, the addiction memoir.

Our paths, Carr's and mine, crossed, so to speak, not only in New Orleans, but farther up north, too. The book revealed that while writing for The New York Times, Carr lived in Montclair, New Jersey, two towns over from where I grew up. Indeed during a relapse, he was stopped for driving under the influence on a street near my childhood home. His daughters attended Mount Saint Dominic Academy in my hometown, a school I had attended for a year, and from which my mother and sister had graduated.

The Night of the Gun is a compelling story of addiction, recovery, relapse, and sobriety, peopled with a wide variety of characters, from those who do time and others who put out the paper of record. I was just sorry that I did not know of Carr's work when he was alive, but I am glad he wrote this one book. Despite his passing and as a result of the gift of reading, I was able to walk along with him briefly, navigating both the thrill and hell of his various escapades.