Pill popping New York Times columnist brawls at the Cabooze

We're always looking for Local Boy Makes Good candidates 'round here. I found one on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on Sunday.

The story is NYT columnist David Carr's--it's autobiographical and it starts like this:

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.

Cocaine and Tracy Chapman--pity the '80s. There's more, including video of Carr recounting a fight at the Cabooze that ends with a guy thrown over the hood of a 1975 Ford LTD.

There's much more--including a cache of Minneapolis arrest documents--at the site for Carr's book, The Night of the Gun.