A Carlin Home Companion (27 page)

“Hey. I'm not having a good day. I just want to jump out of my life, get away from this pain,” I'd say.

“I know. It all feels so impossible. Like it'll never end. It will. I promise. Time does heal,” she'd reply.

“I'm sorry we didn't talk more before you died. I was too afraid,” I'd say, with tears rolling down my face.

“Me, too. It was too hard. But I'm here now. You can talk to me anytime you need.”

“I'm afraid,” I would admit.

“It's time to move forward, do what you want to do with
your
life. It's time to live,” she would finish.

 

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

True Nature

A
BOUT FOUR MONTHS
after my mom's death, I found myself in the car driving to the UC campus in Santa Barbara to attend a five-day mindfulness meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master. It was insane of me to do this. I'd never meditated longer than four minutes in my life. But I'd heard his voice on a tape—“Breathing in, you are the mountain; breathing out, you are solid. Breathing in, you are a flower; breathing out, you are fresh…” and I knew I just had to go.

For about fifteen years I'd been fascinated with Zen Buddhism, and by “fascinated” I mean confused. I was stumped by the phrase, “Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water,” and wanted to crack the code. I longed to be able to sit still, clear my mind, hush my ego, and learn to become unattached from the roller coaster of life. In my twenties I'd often fantasized about running away to India and giving my life over to a spiritual practice and service to humanity. Of course that might just have been a reaction to my years with Andrew, but it always hung in the back of my mind.

But what I really wanted now from this path was to know how to face death.

Death was the scariest thing I knew, and I wanted to be able to learn to sit with it in a more conscious way. Zen and Buddhist practitioners had been facing death with great wit and aplomb for millennia. I was appalled at how mentally and emotionally checked-out I'd been with my mother during the five weeks between her diagnosis and death. I wanted to do better when it came to my dad's death. And I hoped to do better when it came to my own.

I was terrified of “coming out of the closet” about my spiritual longing to both Bob and my dad. They'd both endured the Catholic Church as children and teens, and were vociferous in their disdain for it, and I feared that disdain would spread onto my choice. And yet, at the same time, they both had a relationship with the sacred in their own ways. But, disdain or not, I was going. I wasn't fucking around anymore. Seeing how fast cancer took my mom, I now understood that on any day I could be hit by a bus, and that I needed to get on with things. There was a rod of strength in me now that said: Do what you need to do for yourself. No one else will do it for you. So off to Santa Barbara I went.

Enlightenment, here I come.

When I got in the car, I realized that I had not driven by myself outside the city since I drove to Lake Elsinore to see Bob during our first week together, five years earlier. I thought, If I make it to Santa Barbara without a panic attack, that'll be my win for the week. Everything else is icing on the cake.

When I triumphantly arrived with nary a hint of panic, I made my way up to the dorms of UCSB to find out that there were about eleven hundred other registered participants. My cult-warning alarms immediately went off. Not only did I hate group anythings, I especially hated the can't-you-tell-by-what-I'm-wearing-that-my-relationship-to-spirituality-is-better-than-yours? type of group things. I took a deep breath and reminded myself,
This is not about them, I am here for me
. When I checked in the news got even grimmer: I had to share a room with a stranger, mindfully walk and eat in silence (whatever the fuck that meant), and do sitting meditation for forty-five minutes at a time, three times a day. I breathed in and I breathed out. I felt like neither a mountain nor a flower.

Every morning at dawn we were invited down to the beach for walking meditation. I'm one of those unhappy morning people. I don't do mornings. But I really wanted to get all I could from this thing, and so I went down to the beach half asleep and joined about four hundred strangers. Damn, I thought, other people slept in? Clearly they didn't want this enlightenment stuff as much as I did. I hadn't been there twelve hours, and I was already getting a spiritual chip on my shoulder. I was well on my way to donning hemp clothing and bowing at every little thing (bowing seemed to be a big thing for these people).

We began walking down the beach mindfully, which meant I was walking so slowly that I might as well have been walking backward. At first I was driven crazy by the snail-like pace, and my mind raced.
How long is this going to take? At this rate I won't have to worry about facing death because I'll be dead before we ever reach the end of this walk. Am I doing it right?
(If my almost falling over during every step was any example, I was not.)
What is the fucking point of this?
Walking had always been about getting somewhere. This was not about that. I recited the mantra
Thay
(Vietnamese for “teacher,” which is what everyone calls Thich Nhat Hanh) had given us, to calm my agitation and focus my mind: As I put my right foot down, I said, “I am the earth,” and then I put my left foot down: “The earth is me.”

As we headed down the beach with
Thay
leading us, I looked out at the Pacific. The blue-on-blue horizon and the salt air in my face gave me permission to relax a bit. The walking meditation became more natural, my mind shut off for a few minutes, and I was just there.

We took a turn inland to the nature-reserve trail and walked single file on two parallel narrow paths up a hill and around a lake. Four hundred of us mindfully took step after step, with silence filling the space between us. As I emerged onto a plateau, I looked over to my left and saw a red fox about forty feet away. I was completely taken aback. I'd never seen a fox in nature before. It stared intently at a hole in the ground, hunting whatever lived there. It leaped up and pounced in that cute little way foxes do. It was completely unaware that just forty feet away, hundreds of people were walking by. Because we were all mindfully walking, we'd become part of its landscape. I watched it for as long as I could, took a breath, another step, and thought,
I am the earth.… Wow, this shit really works.… The earth is me.… Fuck yeah
.

By the end of the five days, I was still not ready to face death, but at least I'd become a beginner Buddha. I was able to meditate for ten minutes without wanting to run out of the room screaming. I also, much to my chagrin, felt great joy singing along with
Thay
, all the nuns and monks, and the eleven hundred others, “I have arrived. I am home, in the here and in the now,” in their singsongy camp-song style. And I realized that one could learn more about enlightenment by watching a Zen master pour a glass of tea and sip it than from all the books in China.

*   *   *

After the retreat the holiday season came barreling toward me. I have no memory of Thanksgiving. I'm pretty sure we ate food somewhere. I didn't care. I wanted my life with my mother back. Not this one without her.

I knew that I could not face Christmas in Los Angeles. My mother, you see, was Christmas. She'd buy too much of exactly what I wanted, and I'd walk away from Christmas morning feeling abundant, loved, and well taken care of. Christmas without my mother was impossible. My father, also grappling with his grief and depression, agreed that we needed to get the fuck out of Dodge, and so he rented a house on the Big Island of Hawaii—a place of beauty and light to hold us in our darkness, in our winter.

The house was on the side of the island that looked like the moon. It was fitting. It looked like how I felt inside—barren. Bob, Dad, Dennis (my cousin now living with my dad at the house in Brentwood), and I settled in. Bob's sister, Liza, who lived on Oahu, joined us for a few days. Mostly we did touristy things like seeing where the Hawaiians had eaten Captain Cook, riding horses on a cattle ranch, and even visiting the volcano where the fiery and volcanic goddess Pele lives. We brought Pele the gifts she loves most—gin and flowers. As I threw the flowers and sprinkled the gin over the rim of a dormant crater, I asked her to heal me and guide me through this liminal space, this time of transition in which I found myself.

For Christmas, Dad booked a helicopter ride to go see Pele and her volcano, Kilauea, from above. As we flew toward that side of the island, we encountered a circular rainbow. It was the most magical thing. The pilot flew right through the center of it. Once at the live volcano, we flew slowly over a very large hole in the ground where we could see the most primal, elementary aspect of life on this planet—liquid rock. Its energy was like nothing I had ever encountered—a raw, unflinching creation happening right before my eyes. My body and mind felt entered by a force beyond anything I'd ever imagined. I knew I was looking at the ultimate unknown/known otherness of life itself.

As the pilot made another pass, I looked over at my dad, and saw that he was holding a small picture of my mom, angled so that she could see Pele, too. In that moment I knew that human love—raw, aching, cut-you-in-half human love—was part of the same creation that was inside that volcano; that both these forces were equal in their ability to build something up, and to cut us in two. My heart burst open with a love so huge, and a small part of me was healed.

 

CHAPTER
TWENTY

When a Triangle Becomes a Square

I
'D REACHED A NEW STAGE
of my life: I was the perfect jumble of a human being stuck between who I'd been and what I might become. I was in that gooey stage somewhere between caterpillar and butterfly. I had days when strength and clarity filled every inch of me—ready to claim my creative voice and so certain of my place in the world. Then, out of nowhere, a hidden cache of grief and anxiety would surface, and I'd collapse into a heap, a broken-hearted five-year-old aching for her mommy and clinging to her daddy. I had no idea that such contradictions could live inside one mind and body.

I was death and rebirth's bitch.

*   *   *

A few months before our Christmas trip to Hawaii, Bob and I escorted my dad to the Primetime Emmy Awards show. He was nominated for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Special for HBO's
George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy
. In the limo on the way to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, my inner five-year-old surfaced, and I began to imagine us walking down the red carpet together, the media asking my dad, And who is this beautiful young woman with you?

This is my beautiful, talented daughter Kelly, he'd reply, and then I'd answer their questions in some witty and charming way, winning over the host of
Entertainment Tonight
.

When we all got out of the limo, some red-carpet wrangler quickly separated us, like curds from the whey, and we were told to stand about fifteen feet behind my dad. Awkwardly we loitered behind him, quickly becoming the unfamiliar faces you often see in the background behind the stars on those fancy red carpets. I felt stupid for my earlier fantasy.

In the auditorium, Bob went to sit with Jerry and his wife, and I got to sit with Dad close to the stage. During commercial breaks everyone stood up and talked to each other. Lots of people came up to my dad to say hello and tell him how sorry they were about my mom. When Garry Shandling came up to us, I nearly died. I was a huge fan of everything he'd ever done. He was very nice and funny, but in the end I felt invisible. My dad had earned his rightful place in the business, but I had not yet earned mine. I clearly saw how my inner five-year-old still needed to borrow my dad's shininess to fit in. I, the thirty-four-year-old, felt like the outsider that I was.

Ultimately Dad was an outsider, too, at least at the Emmys. Although he was nominated five times for a Primetime Emmy over the years, he never won. Admittedly Dad never thought much about award shows, but at least on that day, his old friend from Greenwich Village beat him out: Bette Midler.

*   *   *

As I made my way through that mucky goo between death and rebirth, I started to get a hint at what form my creative wings wanted to spread into once I emerged from the chrysalis. In the early 1990s, before I'd left Andrew, I'd seen Karen Finley, the performance artist, and Spalding Gray the storyteller do their seminal works at UCLA. They sparked a revolution inside me. Although their styles and approaches were quite different from each other, their ability to be raw, funny, and vulnerable on a stage stirred me creatively. I saw the power of a one-person show.

In the fall of 1997, a few months after Mom's death, I began writing a list of stories and events from my life in chronological order, searching for the narrative. I wasn't sure what it'd be about, but I felt in my bones that it could be as powerful as what I'd seen watching those other shows. In my bones I also felt something else—terror. The thought of going onstage and allowing myself to be raw, vulnerable, maybe even funny, struck me as an act of insanity. But I knew I must.

I wasn't quite sure how to start, but I knew I needed to start small, get my feet wet. I loved a local Los Angeles commentator, Sandra Tsing Loh, who was funny and talked about her own personal challenges in her weekly four-minute commentary, called
The Loh Life,
on KCRW. I'd also become enamored with Beth Littleford's work on
The Daily Show
. Playing a character or a slightly exaggerated version of myself while commenting on the world or my life straight to camera felt safer than jumping onstage. Maybe I could produce these segments myself, but where to show them? What my heart really ached to do was a little live show at Luna Park called “UnCabaret.” It was a storytelling show where comedians like Janeane Garofalo, Sandra Bernhard, and Taylor Negron got up and shared funny, poignant personal stories instead of doing regular stand-up routines. But that was too scary even to think about. You see, it was in a room with a bunch of stand-ups, and—well—that was a bit complicated for me.