BOOKS
Night of the Living Crackhead
New York Times reporter David Carr's new crackmoir, The Night of the Gun, gets excerpted in this weekend's New York Times Magazine. In it, Carr recalls the days before he landed his hotshot beat at the Old Gray Lady--when he was a full-blown crackhead. The book's premise is that the journo's heavy crack use, Swiss cheese memory, and unabashed, good old fashioned American desire to lionize--read "bullshit"--his personal history propels him backward in time to unearth what really happened when he was too busy suckin' the pipe to tend to his newborn twins who appear to have been born with the decidedly negative effects of having been installed in the womb of a woman who was coked out of her head. "Were we in the midst of giving birth or participating in a kind of neonatal homicide? The water beneath her became a puddle of implication. Now look what we did." Charming. The addict may have put down the pipe to pick up a pen, but what never ends, even in this meta-true account, is his desire to get everyone around him to believe that the drugs are the enemy, he is the victim, and what's due him is pity--an act that will no doubt result in selling his story for a million-plus in the coming weeks--when, in fact, a more appropriate response would be a kilo-sized dose of sober revulsion.
by on July 18, 2008
