ME AND MY GIRLS

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.

I was lonely, but not alone. The house belonged to Anna, my girlfriend
and dope dealer, who had two kids of her own and newborn twins by me.
One night, Anna was out somewhere, and I was there with the kids. I
had a new pipe, clean screens, a fresh blowtorch and the kids were
asleep. It was just me and Barley, a corgi mix I'd had since college.
When I was alone and tweaking with Barley, I'd ask her random
questions. Barley didn't talk back per se, but I heard answers staring
into her large brown eyes.

Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this stuff out? Apparently
never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything, including
the blind.

Trapped in drug-induced paranoia, I began to think of the police as
God's emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a
truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved
consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm's way.

On this night -- it was near the end -- every hit sent out an alarm
along my vibrating synapses. If the cops were coming -- Any. Minute.
Now. -- I should be sitting out in front of the house. That way I
could tell them that yes, there were drugs and paraphernalia in the
house, but no guns. And there were four blameless children. They could
put the bracelets on me, and, head bowed, I would solemnly lead them
to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the
money. And then some sweet-faced matrons would magically appear and
scoop up those babies and take them to that safe, happy place. I had
it all planned out.

I took another hit, and Barley and I walked out and sat on the steps.
My eyes, my heart, the veins in my forehead, pulsed against the
stillness of the night. And then they came. Six unmarked cars riding
in formation with lights off, no cherries, just like I pictured. It's
on.

A mix of uniforms and plainclothes got out, and in the weak light of
the street, I could see long guns held at 45-degree angles. I was
oddly proud that I was on the steps, that I now stood between my
children and the dark fruits of the life I had chosen. I had made the
right move after endless wrong ones. And then they turned and went to
the house across the street.

Much yelling. "Facedown! Hug the carpet! No sudden movements!" A guy
dropped out of the second-floor window in just gym shorts, but they
were waiting. More yelling and then quiet. I went back inside the
house and watched the rest of it play out through the corner of the
blind. Their work done, the cops loaded several cuffed people into a
van. I let go of the blind and got back down to business. It wasn't my
turn.

Twenty years later, now sober and back for a look at my past, I sat
outside that house on Oliver Avenue on a hot summer day in a rental
car, staring long and hard to make sense of what had and had not
happened there. The neighborhood had turned over from white to black,
but it was pretty much the same. Nice lawns, lots of kids, no evidence
of the mayhem that had gone on inside. Sitting there in a suit with a
nice job in a city far away and those twins on their way to college, I
almost would have thought I'd made it up. But I don't think I did.
While I sat there giving my past the once over, someone lifted up the
corner of the blind in the living-room window. It was time to go.

On the face of it, I am no more qualified to take my own inventory
than the addict with the fetid dreads who spare-changes people on the
subway while singing "Stand by Me." Ask him how he ended up sweating
people for quarters, and he may have an answer, but he doesn't really
know and probably couldn't bear it if he did.

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread
versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she
needs -- you need, actually -- to keep them at a remove. Let's
stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sauteed
my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment,
there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or
not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more
opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a
cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children,
the job that impresses.

Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much.
But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason
than I was there.

I was born a middle kid in a family of seven children into a John
Cheever novel set on the border of Hopkins and Minnetonka, suburbs on
the western edge of Minneapolis. It was a suburban idyll where any
mayhem was hidden in the rear rooms of large split-level houses. My
home was a good one; my parents were kind; no one slipped me a Mickey,
and if they had, I would have grabbed it with both hands and asked for
another. It is baked into my nature.

Let's skip high school. I graduated and traveled out West, hopping a
bus of the so-called Rainbow Family, and on the ensuing ride, they
gifted me with peyote, a profound sense of life's psychedelic
possibilities and a tenacious case of the crabs. I came back to
Minneapolis and took crummy jobs, including working at a
hydraulic-tube assembly plant where my boss was a dwarf who took Dolly
Parton's breasts as his central religious icons. I eventually enrolled
in two land-grant universities where I had many friends, very little
money and what Pavlov called "the blind force of the subcortex." I
subsisted on Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew, along with LSD, peyote, pot,
mushrooms, mescaline, amphetamines, quaaludes, valium, opium, hash and
liquor of all kinds. Total garbage head.

On my 21st birthday, a dealer who dropped his money on Dom Perignon at
the fancy restaurant where I worked palmed me a cigarette tin and told
me to open it in the bathroom. I did the powder inside and it was a
Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! My
endorphins made a Proustian leap at this new opportunity, hugging it
and feeling all its splendid corners.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first
hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right
there. By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling,
crack.

"Crackhead" is an embarrassing line item to have on a resume. If meth
tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown -- meth
makes you crazy and toothless -- crackheads would be at the bottom of
the junkie org chart. In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you
with childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town
and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only
one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk
walk around the block to clear one's head. Most people who sample it
get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.

Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn.,
staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead
version of me.

"As good friends as we were, as much as I loved you, you weren't you.
I wasn't talking to my friend David; I was talking to a wild man. You
were a creature. I was afraid."

If the subject of careers or majors came up, I told people I was a
journalist, with only that uttered noun as evidence. But then I caught
a real, actual story for the local weekly and the fever to go with it.
I was a dog on a meat bone when it came to stories; I could type --
and sometimes write -- as fast as the next guy, and I had an
insatiable need to know more. My work got noticed, and some of the
more unfortunate aspects of the guy who produced it were overlooked. I
got jobs, nailed investigative targets and won a few awards.

During the day, I took the slipperiness of public officials personally
- -- my moral dudgeon is freighted with irony in retrospect -- and
displayed significant promise as a reporter. But as time wore on, I
combined a life of early promise as a writer with dark nights full of
half-baked gangsters and full-blown addiction. I became a dealer for
the creative community in Minneapolis, selling coke to colleagues,
comedians and club kids. I was a frantic fan of the amazing
Minneapolis music scene at the time -- Soul Asylum, the Replacements,
Prince -- but the only thing I played with any regularity was
drug-addled fool. I moved grams, eight balls, ounces, quarter pounds
- -- no one trusted me with a kilo for more than a few minutes. Every
day I would wake up to a catalog of my misbegotten life -- jobs,
money, girlfriends and family were all subject to the ineluctable
entropy of the junkie lifestyle.

There were signs early on that the center would not hold. In the
mid-'80s, I was working on a running story about a suspect who had
been accidentally shot dead while he was being taken into custody by
the police department's decoy unit. In the middle of the reporting, my
phone rang, and one of the cops from the decoy unit was on the line.
"You know, I've been asking around, and your life is not without
blemish," I remember him saying. "You better watch your step." For
weeks afterward, I would drive somewhere and see the van from the
decoy unit in my rearview.

Some of my running buddies went to prison, but I was more of a
misdemeanant, spending hours -- and every once in a while, days -- in
various county jails. I lived by this credo: moderation in all things,
especially moderation.

My duplicity around women was towering and chronic. I conned and
manipulated myself into their beds and then treated them like human
jewelry, something to be worn for effect. And when I was called to
account, I sometimes responded with violence.

One night in 1986, I was at a party for Phil, my longtime coke
connection who was going away to federal prison. I met Anna, who had
better coke than Phil and soon developed a fondness for me. She was
selling serious amounts of coke and allowed me to pretend I was her
partner. We were an appalling mix, metastasized by her unlimited
supply. In less than a year, I lost my job, and she lost her business.

It would have ended there, but on April 15, 1988, Anna had twin girls.
My daughters. Our remaining friends had begged us, quite reasonably,
to abort them. Pals began to boycott our house because it had become
such a grim, near-scientific tableau of addiction's
progression.

Eventually we both went to treatment, and our kids went into foster
care. I sobered up; Anna did, too, until she didn't; and I obtained
physical custody of the twins, Erin and Meagan. As a power trio, we
worked our way off welfare. I married somebody grand, we had a baby
and professionally, one thing led to another, and I ended up working
at The New York Times. I have lived most of the last two decades
showered by those promises that recovery delivers, with luck, industry
and fate guiding me to a life beyond all expectation.

But was it really all thus? When memory is called to answer, it often
answers back with deception. How is it that almost every warm bar
stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his
amazing stories?

If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would
you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered
addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare
and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer?
Now we're talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a
self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a
remove, I'm inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a
single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother
when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect
others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

The arc of the addict, warm and familiar as a Hallmark movie with only
the details pivoting, is especially tidy in the recollection:

I had a beer with friends.

I shot dope into my neck.

I got in trouble.

I saw the error of my ways.

I found Jesus or 12 steps or bhakti yoga.

Now everything is new again.

In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan
past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel
better about themselves. (Here's a taste: When I got to detox for what
I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought
me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my
scabrous, pus-filled track marks. They dropped pills into my mouth
from several inches away as if feeding a baby bird, and even the
wet-brain drunks wouldn't come near me. See how that works?)

Today I am a genuine, often pleasant person, I do solid work for a
reputable organization and have, over the breadth of time, proved to
be an attentive father and husband. But drugs, it seems to me, do not
conjure demons; they reveal them. So how to reconcile my past with my
current circumstance? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I
make up?

As a veteran journalist, I decided to report the story. For two years
on and off, I pulled medical and legal documents and engaged in a
series of interviews with people I used to run with. By turns, it
became a kind of journalistic ghost dancing, trying to conjure spirits
past, including mine.

Some people I interviewed wanted me to say I was sorry -- I am, and I
did. Some people wanted me to say that I remembered -- I did, and I
did not. And some people wanted me to say it was all a mistake -- it
was, and it was not. It felt less like journalism than archeology, a
job that required shovels and axes, hacking my way into dark,
little-used passages and feeling my way around. It would prove to be
an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals
of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had
not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.

In drug-gangster movies, the kingpin is always some guy with a
pock-marked face who has goombahs on his flanks on the way into the
restaurant, sits with his back against the wall and always gets the
big piece of chicken. But the most successful person I did business
with was just a touch over five feet, cute, with a full head of dyed
blond hair, a little mouth and a fondness for maniacs in matters of
the heart, if not business.

When I met Anna, I was more or less living with Doolie, a woman I
adored. I began stepping out on her because Anna was in high effect,
moving what she said was a kilo a month from straight-up Colombian
sources through a series of reliable associates who were also her
pals. She worked dead drops in storage spots, safe-deposit boxes and
mules to keep her at a remove from the nuts and bolts of the drug
enterprise. When the piles of money were too big to hand-count, she
used a digital scale to weigh piles of 20s. She had two kids in a nice
house in north Minneapolis; the serious dope business was done elsewhere.

On our first date, we mowed through my eight ball of indifferent coke.
She sent me to a safe under the carpet of her steps, and I beheld a
pressed kilo of pure cocaine. Decades later, we were talking outside a
hotel in Tucson. She still had no trouble recalling the dimensions of
a kilo of coke.

"It was about as big as a book, about this big," she said, framing the
air with her hands. "It still had the snake seals; I mean, it was
right from the Medellin cartel."

It had been 10 years since we had even seen each other. Of all the
trips I had taken in pursuit of the past, this was one in which a
common truth was unlikely to emerge. We each need to find a place to
put our time together that does not leave either of us immobilized
with shame. I ended up with our kids, but the moral ground curiously
rests with her. I hit her, for one thing. And whatever she did, she
did out of a kind of love. My instincts were far more mercenary.

In her version, everything was going swimmingly until I came along,
and then I seduced her into smoking cocaine. In my version, I lumbered
into her life, succumbed to abundant blandishments and descended into
a violent, destructive mania.

For a time, we were both riding high. I had a budding reputation as a
reporter, and she was one of the most respectable sources of serious
weight in the city. Anna introduced me around to her pals as her
trusted associate, but they all knew precisely what I represented: the
guy who would ruin a good thing. Certainly she got a primer from her
adjacency to me, observing that the difference between snorting and
smoking coke was vast.

"We fought for about six months about it, and then I joined you," she
remembered. She tipped over almost immediately. By the spring of 1988,
six months after we had gotten together, her business was in disarray,
I had lost my job and then, oh, yeah, she was pregnant. Together Anna
and I drew many lines in the sand and then stepped across them,
usually with me leading the way.

When Anna's water broke in her living room on Oliver Avenue, I had
just handed her a crack pipe. (Anna, by the way, swears such a thing
never took place. I have my memories, and she has hers.) She had just
entered her third trimester. 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.

"Man, them are little babies, where'd you get 'em?"

The kid, about 8, saw me coming out of the hospital with a twin in
each arm in May of 1988. I was speechless. How could a child this
small, this unknowing, tell at a glance that these children had landed
on me from a very great distance?

They had been patients in the neonatal intensive-care unit for a
month. Born at 2.5 and 2.9 pounds, and each just over 15 inches,
Meagan and Erin arrived two and a half months premature. According to
medical records, which I requested almost 20 years after the fact,
Erin "cried spontaneously, but each time her crying stopped, her heart
rate decreased and her respiratory effort became poor. She was
intubated in the delivery room. . . . " Meagan "had umbilical, artery
and venous catheters placed on 4/16/88 for blood pressure and arterial
blood-gas monitoring and for delivery of emergency medications." Once
the jaundice of their early birth wore off, they were small pink spots
surrounding by an array of tubes and machines, the organic part of the
apparatus.

As I stared at them in my addled state on visits to the hospital, my
mind wandered to bath time, something I had heard that you did with
babies. What would we use, a teacup?

Once we got the girls home, the heart and respiration monitors seemed
specifically designed to terrorize us. One of them would shift
positions or spit up a bit, and the alarms would go off. Recently, I
went to see a pal, Chris, now a professor of creative writing in New
Orleans, who watched the unfurling disaster back then.

"One winter night, you called me late and said, 'We're out of diapers,
we don't have diapers,' and you thought somebody was watching the
house," he recalled. "You guys were paranoid and getting high, and you
said, 'I think the cops are watching the house; I can't leave,' and so
I went to the convenience store, got some diapers, drove over, with
diapers and milk or something."

Chris did what he could, but other friends thought of calling the
authorities. A document I found in the twins' medical files suggested
they were already on the case: "The parents have appeared to be open
about their drug use. They have stated their intention to attend A.A.
meetings and provide a chemically free environment for their children.
This may be difficult without intervention considering the long
reported history of drug use," said a letter dated April 22, 1988,
from the medical team to Child Protective Services of Hennepin County.

I remember driving to a dark spot between the streetlights at the
rounded-off corner of West 32nd and Garfield. Right here, I thought.
This would be fine.

The Nova, a junker with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of
pity, shuddered to a stop, and I saw two sleeping children in the
rearview, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the
backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty,
the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been
there. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny.

Anna was out, and I could not bear to leave them home, but I was
equally unable to stay put. So here we were, one big, happy family,
parked outside the dope house. Then came the junkie math. If I went
inside the house, I could get what I needed in 5 minutes, 10 minutes
tops. The twins would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where
their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

The people inside would be busy, working mostly in pairs. Serious coke
shooting is something best done together. The objective is to walk
right up to the edge of an overdose without actually dying. The
technique was to push the plunger in slow but large. One would be
pushing, watching as the other listened to the interior sound of blood
and nerves brought to a boil. Are you good? Yes. No. . . . Just, um .
. . ah . . . that's perfect.

Kenny's lip-licking coke rap was more ornate, somehow more satisfying,
than that of most of the dealers I worked with. His worldview was all
black helicopters and white noise -- the whispering, unseen others who
would one day come for us. It kept me on my toes.

But tonight I had company. I certainly couldn't bring the twins in.
Even in the gang I ran with, coming through the doors of the dope
house swinging two occupied baby buckets was not done. Sitting there
in the gloom of the front seat, the car making settling noises against
the chill, I decided that my teeny twin girls would be safe, that God
would look after them while I did not.

I got out, locked the door and walked away. Inside, a transformation
- -- almost a kidnapping -- got under way. The guilty father was
replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time
passed, one thing begot another and eventually I was thrown clear.

Leaving, I remember that. Out the metal door and then out the front
door with its three bolts onto the porch and the hollow sound of my
boots on the wood floor. A pause. How long had it been, really? Hours,
not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket
and a cold dread in all corners of my being.

I cracked the front door, reached around, unlocked the back and leaned
in.

I could see their breath.

God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at
that moment that I was in the midst of a transgression He could not
easily forgive. I made a decision never to be that man again.

In Minneapolis 19 years later, I stood on the spot outside Kenny's
where I parked that night. The car was, according to my brother Jim, a
Chevy Nova. He sent me the title: '79 Chevy Nova with 89,950 miles on
it, plate number NHS091. Thinking back through all those years, I
remember standing by the car, I remember looking back in. I remember
the math. And I remember the snowsuits.

But that's where the plot thickens and the facts collide. Erin and
Meagan were born on April 15, 1988. Whenever I felt compelled to
explain myself and the cold facts of our history, that night outside
Kenny's was the necessary moment. In the story as I recited it, that
horrible night occurred very soon after they were born. I thought I
quickly entered treatment because even though I had been an unreliable
employee, a conniving friend and a duplicitous husband, nothing in my
upbringing allowed me to proceed as a bad father. The twins were then
whisked into temporary foster care soon after their birth. After that,
it's a Joseph Campbell monomyth in which our hero embraces his road of
trials, begins to attain a new Self and hotfoots it back to the normal
world.

Nice story if you can live it. If the girls were born in April, and I
went into treatment a few months afterward, as I have always said,
where did the snowsuits come from? Minnesota is cold, but not that
cold.

When I was talking to my brother about the make of the car and
mentioned the snowsuits, he said: "That's easy. You didn't go to
treatment until sometime in December, like eight months after they
were born."

He's almost right. I did not enter Eden House, a six-month inpatient
treatment program in Minneapolis, until Nov. 25, 1988. So the presence
of snowsuits on a cold November night were undoubtedly real. That part
about me straightening out right after they were born? A myth, but not
the kind Joseph Campbell had in mind.

Sometime soon after that night at Kenny's -- the week before
Thanksgiving 1988, as I would later find out -- I became convinced
that something brutal and unspeakable was about to land on all of us,
including the kids. At our house, it all was needles, blood, babies
and piles of dirty clothes. High or not, it was hellish to behold.

I called my parents and said that if they took the kids, I would go to
detox and Anna would go to treatment. "You told us that there were no
adults in the house, that it was a dangerous place for children to
be," my dad recalled as I talked to him on his deck overlooking Lake
Minnetonka in the summer of 2006.

Did I say goodbye to the girls? I can't remember, and neither can my
dad. And then I left. Having benchmarked a new kind of bottom, I
needed gas and a boost of coke, so I stopped at the station just up
the street from their house. I was out of my mind with grief and loss,
and when I pulled out of the station, I gunned the engine to leave
behind what I had just done. I got pulled over a few blocks away for
driving recklessly and thrown in the back of the squad car. When we
got to the brightly lit station, the cop who pulled me over stared at
the welter of needle marks on my arms. He went out to his car and came
back red-faced, tapping a bindle of coke into the palm of his hand.

"I found this under my backseat," he said. "You put it
there."

"I can't help you with that, officer," I said as politely as I could
manage.

They eventually kicked me loose.

It took me a few more days to get to detox, a nice suburban facility
near my parents' house. Detoxes are really human aquariums, a place
where large, Librium-infused humans bob here and there, watched by the
staff through thick plate glass in case one of them freaks out or
starts flopping around. My job, as it turned out, was to settle my
arms up to my biceps in a large tub of Dreft detergent, a nice
low-tech way of disinfecting my track marks without involving a lot of
hands-on work by the staff. I had become a white-trash
untouchable.

A few days later, my parents had Thanksgiving dinner, and I came
straight from detox. My babies were there. After dinner, my parents
spoke to me quietly, off to the side. They had spoken to my older
brother, John, a guy who worked in leadership for the Catholic Church,
and he had wired up temporary foster care through Catholic Charities.
Erin and Meagan would be placed with a family while I went "to deal
with things." It was decided that I would follow my detox with an
intensive six-month rehab program at Eden House, a last-chance
facility in downtown Minneapolis.

So that was it. Only it wasn't. When I was in New Orleans talking to
Chris about that time, he reminded me that the night before I went in
to Eden House, I had to go back at it one more time.

"You had called me and wanted me to pick you up some rocks, because
you were going in the next day, and you wanted to get high one more
time. And I did. I think it was the only time I'd been to your
parents' house, but we were in your basement or first floor, the
bedroom down there. I had to open up the car door for you because your
hands were all swollen up, your arms were all bruised up from -- "

Um, shooting coke?

"Yeah, I think it was kind of a moment for me," he
said.

By my recollection, when the twins went into temporary foster care, I
handed them to some faceless county bureaucrat. Besieged by unseen
forces within, the father, with the gentle encouragement of his
parents, admits that he is worthless and that strangers must step unto
the breach and pry the children from his hands. Never happened, at
least not that way.

When I called Pat and Zelda, Erin and Meagan's temporary foster
parents, in the summer of 2007, they explained there was no faceless
bureaucrat, that my mother and I had dropped them off just before I
went to Eden House. They loved those babies from the minute they saw
them. Their father? Not so much.

Zelda: "You were very serious, very somber, and it felt kind of
belligerent, like you really weren't interested, like you really
didn't want to talk to us much, but we were a necessary evil. This
was a good place to put the girls. You were that way and -- "

Pat interrupted. "And you were high."

Zelda: "You were a bit disheveled."

David: "Disheveled and high."

Zelda: "Yes."

Pat: "And you fell on the floor."

David: "In what way?"

Pat: "You just kind of lost your balance and fell on the floor, and I
remember thinking that if one of the babies was there, the baby would
have suffered some pretty severe injury."

Pat had his doubts about ever seeing me again.

Pat: "I remember thinking, this will never work . . . you were so far
out of it. I just thought that this was a way of exiting the scene."

Eden House was a long-term therapeutic community, the kind of place
that brimmed with slogans. This was the main one: "The answer to life
is learning to live."

This is the point where the knowing author laughs along with his
readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so
gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity
Kool-Aid. That's some other story. Slogans saved my life. All of them
- -- the dumb ones, the imperatives, the shameless, witless ones.

I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is
nothing romantic about being a crackhead and a drunk -- low-bottom
addiction is its own burlesque that needs no snarky annotation. Unless
a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is
lost.

All the assets I had -- an ability to verbalize, intellectualize and
filibuster -- got no play at Eden House. In at least a few other
treatment centers, I was often seen as baby Jesus, a counselor's pet
who knew all the jargon and right buttons to push. At Eden House, I
was seen as a fool, and a pretty soft one at that. It wasn't Abu
Ghraib, but it wasn't the treatment place with the elliptical machine
and a staff nutritionist, either.

The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large.
If an addict knows in his heart he is going to use someday, why not
today? But if a thin reed of hope appears, the possibility that it
will not always be so, things change. You live another day and then
get up and do it again. Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating
on despair.

The implications of a misstep arrived every weekend. My parents would
come by with the twins after having picked them up from the
foster-care family and set them down to crawl around in the visiting
room. I can remember one of the female counselors -- Beth, maybe --
coming in and marveling at Erin and Meagan and asking no one in
particular whom they belonged to. It took me just a second to realize
the answer.

"That would be me."

My counselor at the time was Marion, a large black man who affected
mirrored sunglasses and an air of mystery. Three months into
treatment, I had arranged all of the necessary passes to go to my
sister's wedding. The Friday night before the event, Marion called me
into the office and told me if I went to the wedding, I should not
bother coming back. I was livid, and my family suggested that I should
walk away from this arbitrary place. I remember going down to Marion's
office later to tell him off, but then I stayed and did not go to the
wedding. What had he said to me that changed my mind?

Marion pulled up on a motorcycle at a coffee shop in south Minneapolis
in July of 2006 with the mirrored shades still firmly in place. I told
Marion that I remembered going down to his office to tell him where he
could put his "therapeutic no." What had he said? He remembered what I
did not.

"You were on the verge, and I told you, 'Well, why don't you just get
those two girls high too?' "

When I got out of Eden House after six months, I moved into a sober
house and began taking care of the kids here and there. Anna and I
were no longer together, but she had sobered up as well, so the
children had been returned to her. But while I was going to recovery
meetings and doing my little freelance writing assignments, Anna began
struggling.

One day in the summer of 1989, I showed up at her house and the twins
were wet, hungry and wailing. We went to the nearby 7-Eleven on Penn
and Dowling Avenues in north Minneapolis. I waited until the spot
right in front of the door opened up, and I went and quickly bought
diapers, milk, new bottles and some bananas. While I changed them,
they ate the bananas and drank the milk with an animal intensity. I
decided not to take them back, not knowing what it meant other than
the fact that I would need my own place, more clothes and more money.

If I am a good person now and an able father, I must have been the
easy choice as custodial parent back in the day. In this formulation,
when I started pursuing custody, I was just a beefier version of
Mother Teresa, all selflessness and calm, and Anna was a nasty basket
case. Eighteen years after the case was decided, I went to see
Barbara, the attorney who helped me obtain custody of my daughters.

These many years later, Barbara hesitated when I ran that story and
then told a different one.

"You looked unwell," she said. "You weighed close to 300 pounds. It
was in the winter, and you had on a very heavy coat, but it obviously
didn't fit you; it was raggedy. If I had seen you on the street, I
would have thought you were homeless, because you were very rough.
Your hygiene was bad; your eyes were rheumy."

But even so, I was a man about my business, right?

"I wasn't used to having clients look like you. I didn't do criminal;
I represented banks and mortgage companies, and so to have you come in
and want custody of two little babies, um, I struggled with whether or
not that was even a realistic goal that we should consider. . . . I
couldn't tell if you were following along well enough to understand
the impact of what this would mean to your life."

So other than being addled from an unspeakable habit, a little smelly
and a touch on the amazingly obese scale, I was good to go. Ready to
star in one of those car commercials where the kids crack wise in the
backseat while the dad says something sage and knowing into the
rearview. Except I didn't have a car. And the kids did not legally
belong to me. I had never married their mother or established my
paternity. I had no insurance, and I had not paid taxes in several
years.

Although Anna has always given me abundant credit for doing a good job
with our twins, she is quick to remind me that I stole them in the
first place. A part of me was convinced she was right. Revisiting the
issue with Barbara, I talked about how we managed to persuade Anna to
take a drug test when she moved back from Texas, where she had been
staying with her mom. We made visitation conditional on a clean
result, and she came up positive for cocaine and pot. I remembered
this as a clever linchpin in our legal strategy, but Barbara reminded
me that Anna had failed that test over and over and that she moved in
with a dope dealer when she got to town. How she missed appointments
to see the kids, missed court dates, switched lawyers and eventually
agreed to a settlement that gave me physical custody of the girls.

History suggests that things turned out as they should have, but
Anna's suggestion that I was not the obvious choice as the twins'
custodial parent found significant traction when I went back and
looked at the record. I had won a tallest-midget contest with Anna,
nothing more. Each of us had a history of relapse, and mine was far
more extensive. The lie that I told myself -- that I was made entirely
new by my decision to lay off drugs -- kept doubt at bay. If I really
examined my fitness in all of its dimensions, I would have been
paralyzed. It was a fairy tale that kept me alive and allowed me to
make it come true. Everything good and true about my life started on
the day the twins became mine.

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of
wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified
by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those
same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown
prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist,
the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts
committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

I'm not saying that raising children, especially by yourself, is a
trip to Turks and Caicos, but single parenting is as old as
reproduction. Families declare themselves in all sorts of versions,
and ours happened to be two adorable toddlers stapled to 250 pounds of
large, white male. Still, people who knew our circumstance marveled at
its idiosyncrasy. And people who knew me before the twins wondered all
the more.

I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to care for
them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some
brutal, smelly event at a McDonald's. Let them wheedle their way into
your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off
every single night of their young lives. Gradually, slowly, the three
of us developed a routine at bedtime, with baths, prayers and stories
- -- stuff I had been brought up on or seen on TV.

As we spent more time together, they began to know me, and I came to
adore them -- madly, deeply, truly. We developed other rituals. When
it came time to actually turn out the light, I would sing a song of my
own making.

To the tune of nothing in particular, but very up-tempo:

"Oh, I've got the nicest girls in town,

I've got the nicest girls in town.

They are so nice, they are so sweet,
I love them twice, they can't be beat."

And then, a real strong Broadway finish, with every note held and
punished (apologies to Ethel Merman).

"Oh. I've. Got. The. Nicest. Girrrrrrrls.

Innnnnnn.

Townnnnnnn."

It was a huge hit in our crummy little upper duplex, but if that all
sounds like some after-school special, with the fat ex-junkie dad
singing to his misbegotten daughters, well, it is what it is.

I always thought that people who spent endless amounts of time
drilling into their personal histories are fundamentally unhappy in
their lives, and I'm not. I'm ecstatic in my own dark, morbid way and
subscribe to a theory of the past that allows the future to unfold: We
all did the best we could.

Even with the trope of reporting, my addiction narrative arrives at
some very common lessons. Too much of a bad thing is bad. If you don't
sleep and eat but drink and drug instead, you will lose jobs, spouses
and dignity. And while the lessons of the recovery story are
important, they are even more prosaic. Once I stopped doing narcotics
and alcohol, I landed good jobs, remarried, had a baby and, of course,
learned to love myself.

Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own
pratfalls in the form of memoir because they need to believe that all
of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether
is was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something.
That impulse suggests that I don't regret the past -- it brought me
here to this nice, happy place -- but I'd also like to squeeze
something more from it. And so I have.

Two years of reporting and a lot of awkward conversations later, I
realized that in reductive psychoanalytic terms, I had achieved a
measure of integration, not just between That Guy and This Guy but
between my past and my present. Carl Jung suggested that until we
embrace both our masculine and feminine sides, we can't be made whole.
For all the testosterone I have deployed in my affairs, I experienced
salvation in expressing common maternal behavior. You are always told
to recover for yourself, but reproduction has an enormously
simplifying effect on life: Are you willing to destroy others,
including little babies, in order to feed the monster within?

Not in my case, but it was a much closer call than I would like to
admit. I now inhabit a life I don't deserve, but we all walk this
earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the
caper doesn't end any time soon.