All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(37)

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





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 they 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.