And now, a mentor moment

Mentors. Everybody has at least one, whether they know it or not. As you read in last month’s top story, John Conklin, the chef and owner of Sauced, referred to Citizen Café chef and owner Michael MacKay as his mentor. They worked together for years.

Shortly after that conversation, I began thinking about my mentors. There have been people that influenced me, but very few that shaped me. And a mentor need only be in a person’s life a short time to provide shape. And that mentor might not even know they are one.

I ran into one of my mentors last month, a fellow named David Carr. He’s someone I never expected to see again, but I’d been pondering his existence after hearing him interviewed recently on NPR for his book, “The Night of the Gun,” which details his former life as a raging drug addict. I was interested in the book not to read about yet another life ravaged by toxins, but for how he turned his formidable journalism powers on himself, investigating his life as he would any other subject, from the ample documents (including arrest records ranging from traffic violations to drug possession to assault), and interviewing people who knew him as an addict. It’s deep study of memory and truth.

We met on the street while I was checking out how restaurants on West Seventh Street were doing during the RNC. He was in town covering the event for his current job, as media critic for The New York Times. I hadn’t spoken to him in about 13 years, and I’m certain he didn’t remember me. Nevertheless, he was gracious, and listened to my little story, shared a laugh, and we went back to our different lives.

Carr was the editor at the Twin Cities Reader when I started my journalism career in 1994. He moved on from there in 1995 to run another weekly paper in Washington, D.C., then wrote for The Atlantic and other publications before being offered his current gig at the Times, a paper he always worshipped as the high peak of journalism.

When I met him, he was 38, clean, and turning the Reader into a legitimate news force. He had a staff of three full-time writers, and hired interns to help out with the grunt work. But he also believed firmly in the internship as a teaching tool. We were assigned the occasional story, and also encouraged to develop our own. Our writing was picked apart ruthlessly, both stylistically and for the facts.

My first writing was a success—a story about the local sculptor Allen Christian and his House of Balls studio (http://houseofballs.com/). For not being a journalism major, I thought the profession might be easy. My next story was to attend a clown convention—something they didn’t want a staff writer to spend time on. I can’t say I was thrilled with the assignment. I’m not great in large groups—and clowns? I thought an assault charge was in my own future. But I had a better time than I expected, and wrote the story, kept it short and funny. It was pretty good, except for the lead. I struggled with it for a short while—too short—and turned it in thinking it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The next day, Carr came up to me and made a cutting motion up his forearm, as if committing suicide. “Your lead stunk,” he said. “Don’t ever f***ing do it again.”

I’ve kept that in mind. There was another lesson, after a few months after I’d settled in a bit. It was very late in the day, and I wandered into Carr’s office to ask a question, and found him leaned back in his chair as if it were a recliner, one foot on his desk, his face looked as if he wished he were elsewhere. During the past week, a serial rapist had been caught, and Carr was going to write about it. It was obvious the task for him that evening was similar to performing invasive dentistry on oneself—it just wasn’t working, but not for the reason I expected. “I’m trying to say something other than, ‘Rape is bad,’” he said. He didn’t say that to be glib. The crime and the criminal had already earned extensive media coverage from the daily and television outlets. He wanted to chisel out a meaningful contribution.

I’ve kept that in mind, too, along with a few other lessons. Not that I’ve always succeeded in heeding them at the highest level. Those lessons taught have aged like a good wine, as I suppose he knew they would. When we suddenly realize (or accept) we are professionals at our craft, we also realize we can’t be at our best all the time. We might be tired, bored or just not firing on all cylinders. But what we gain with experience and dedication to craft are smarts and skills that allow your worst day to be quite good.

I told Carr the slashing wrist story, and he seemed slightly embarrassed. “I wasn’t a great manager,” he said. On the contrary, I said, I’ve always appreciated bluntness. “Well, some people do respond well to that,” he said, adding that many of the teams he assembled also appreciated and responded well to that, and were intensely loyal. “But, where I could lead the charge up the hill, I often wasn’t the greatest at choosing the right hill.”

We chatted a bit more and he asked what I did now, and I told him. “I think those of us that are still typing for a living are pretty lucky,” he said. True enough.

It was quite a journey he had, not surprising from a professional standpoint: No one doubted his journalism skills. But from the personal standpoint, he erected many obstacles for himself. And, on top of the drugs, he also got cancer, recovered, and—near as I could tell from my brief time near him—never once had a “woe-is-me” moment.

He might be mentoring me again without knowing it. I am now the same age he was when I first met him. His journey—and many others’—show that nothing is inevitable; change and better fortunes are possible. The first step is looking honestly into the mirror.

But back to restaurants and cooking—what inspired this rambling. From my observations covering this industry, if there’s a profession that shares traits with writing, it’s cooking. Everyone needs these skills on a basic level. Both skills can turn into a profession, but require repetition to be successful, and repetition requires a certain mindset to overcome the monotony—that’s where the mentors come in. Because, performed at higher levels, both skills can comfort, inspire and provoke, and therefore reward the practitioner and the consumer.

Mentors are required to point the way, and there seem to be a good number of them in Twin Cities restaurants.