A Carlin Home Companion (30 page)

The second night of taping there was none of that. He came out and killed it.

The after party of one of Dad's HBO shows was usually a mellow affair—the staff, crew, and family having a few drinks and a nice meal at an Italian restaurant around the corner from the Beacon Theater, but the party that night felt more like a real celebration. I think everyone was happy that Dad was back. I think Dad was happy that he was back.

There were a few comics there (Bob and I had a nice conversation with David Cross), and I had some friends there too. I had gotten tickets to the show for my ComedyNet colleagues, Mark Graff and Victorria Johnson. Before becoming part of ComedyNet, I didn't have my own New York friends. I'd never mixed my work with my dad's world, and having them there made me feel like I had finally arrived in the business myself. I felt like a goddamn-real-live grown-up.

As the party was winding down, Rocco Urbisci, the director of Dad's show, insisted that Bob and I join him and his managers at the
Saturday Night Live
party in the Village. Gee, twist my arm! As we all jumped into a cab, Rocco said to his managers, “Kelly's been doing some great work with these short films for ComedyNet. You should check them out. She's quite a talent.”

I was taken aback and deeply touched.

“What are you working on now?” asked Jane, one of the managers.

“Actually, I've started to work on a one-woman show about growing up with all my parents' craziness. I have a bunch of funny, wild stories from my childhood,” I replied.

“You know, HBO has a space in LA that they use to develop one-person shows. We should talk about getting you in there,” the other manager, Frank, said.

I wanted to stop the cab and run around and do the happy dance. Real managers were talking to me about wanting to help me develop my one-person show with HBO. HBO and Carlin. This was not happening. I felt higher than if I'd just snorted an eight ball of coke.

“That sounds great. Let's talk when we get back home,” I replied as nonchalantly as I could. I didn't want to look like a total rube.

By the time we'd made our way in to the party, spent way too much on a few vodka drinks, and been ignored by the majority of the partygoers, I felt like I'd truly arrived—I was kind of, sort of, maybe represented by Rocco's managers.

When I got back to LA, the managers weren't ready to sign me officially since I was still an unknown quantity, but they took me under their wing. I went with them to the taping of the three one-person shows that HBO had just developed in the last year. They were okay. They were funny and lightweight fare, but nothing wowed me. They were basically stand-up comedians doing longer versions of some of their premises. If this was what was being seen as the best of the work there, I knew I could do this.

As I began to develop my show, I got excited. I'd come up with a great premise and title:
Driven to Distraction
. I wanted to examine how I'd been surrounded by things that distracted me from my true, authentic self for most of my life—messages from the culture's media, my parents' addictions and chaos, my privileged-Hollywood teen years, my poor choices within my relationship with Andrew—and how my mother's sudden death had woken me up to what was real—love. I wanted to share the funny stories from my crazy life, talk about the pain and confusion of watching her die, but really the whole show led up to that moment at my mom's memorial, when the space that only death can crack open appeared before me and transformed my world. I knew I could talk about funny things and deep scary things onstage within the same show. I knew I could be clever, silly, serious, and real.

In the fall of 1999, after I'd turned in a rough draft to the managers, they told me, “We think you need to scrap the death stuff. It's just too morbid. Stay with the funny.” I was offended. I didn't
want
to just “stay with the funny.”

“Also, HBO has shut down their one-person show program,” they added. “They're no longer looking to develop shows.”

Fuck it, I thought. I'll do it my way. I'll do it myself. I walked away from the managers.

About a month later Dad informed me that he'd sold the house on Old Oak Road. Another blow. That house was the last thing that connected me to my mother, and I'd always imagined that the house would be mine someday. I'd dreamed about growing old within those adobe walls. But Dad and Sally were now basically cohabitating, and every square inch of that house in Brentwood was my mom. Every color choice, piece of furniture, and Indian rug said Brenda. There was no way Sally was moving in there. I couldn't blame her. If I were her, I wouldn't have either.

Dad said we had five months to clear things out. Every time I went over to the house during that time, there'd be another pile of boxes to go through. It was like constantly ripping open a just-healed-over scab. Nothing within me could fully move on. As I stepped through the decades of our life as a family, I was ultimately confronted with the question: What will life be like when Dad's gone, and I have no one left to share these memories with?

The Three Musketeers were fading away.

*   *   *

To move forward with my one-woman show, I gathered a new team around me. I asked my friend, the actress and director Amy Wieczorek, to be my director and collaborator. I sat her down and read my rough draft out loud to her. She laughed and wept throughout the reading. This was a good sign. She said she'd be honored to help me bring this into the world. My friend Meredith Flynn came onboard as a producer. We met with the woman who ran the Hudson Theater in Hollywood, and planned a five-week run sometime in late summer of 2000.

I gathered a group of people I trusted with my creative life—my therapist, acting coaches, other writers and actors, and some friends—to come to a series of readings while I developed the script. I wanted to make sure that what I'd written was not self-indulgent but a universal story of a woman in search of herself. The readings went well. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was on the right track in my creative life. Before I committed to the next step of rehearsals, there was just one more thing that I needed to do: send the script to my dad.

I was excited to know what he thought because not only had he always encouraged my writing, but some of the stories I shared in the show had been part of our Carlin folklore for years. I knew he'd get a kick out of me telling the “Sun Exploded” story from my perspective.

After three weeks I hadn't heard anything from him, but wasn't too worried because he was always so busy. When five weeks had passed with no reaction, I got a stomachache. I gathered myself and called him up.

“Hey Dad, how's it going?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Good,” he replied with a bit of tension in his voice.

I took a deep breath and asked, “So I was wondering. Have you gotten a chance to look at my script yet?”

“Yeah, I have.” He continued, “We need to talk—at your therapist's office.”

Fuck.

Dad and I showed up at the appointment at Berenice's office. After a few pleasantries she said, “Well, George, you've called us together. What do you need to say?”

Dad turned to me and said, “Kelly, you know I love you, but—”

But. But. Oh dear.

“But I need you to know that I feel deeply betrayed by this,” he continued.

The room began to spin. I thought I might lose my mind. I began to sob and sob and sob. The kind of sobbing you do at age three, and you can't quite get enough air because your body is in a panic, so you take big gulps of air. I could not stop gulping and sobbing. I had betrayed my daddy—the very thing I'd been desperate to avoid my entire life. Without my dad, I was dead. I believed that. With my mom drinking, and falling, and driving up neighbors' lawns, I had believed that if I were to push my dad away in any way, I would be dead. And now that she was gone, I had gone and pushed him away. Now there'd be no one to keep me safe.

He continued, “But I am an artist, and you are an artist, and I would never ask you to change a single word of it.” Some air came back into the room. “But I can't be there to watch it. It would just be too hard for me. I just can't sit there and be in the audience.”

My breathing slowed a little more. He didn't hate me. He hadn't stopped loving me. My inner three-year-old realized that I hadn't died because Daddy was disappointed with me. The walls had not fallen in, nor had the earth opened up and swallowed me. Somehow my daddy was still here. But I also saw that he was genuinely worried about the audience judging him as much as he judged himself for those dark drug days in the seventies. He still carried an enormous amount of guilt for those times, and he didn't want to be reminded of them.

Then he said, “But I do have to ask, why didn't you tell me directly how upset you were when I left to go on the book tour when Mom was sick?”

A clarity came over me, and the words poured out of me. “I don't know. Maybe I thought I needed to be on your stage for you to finally see and hear me” came tumbling out of my mouth.

Dad looked visibly taken aback, but then he smiled slightly and said, “Touché, Kiddo. Touché.”

All those years of our family's mutual denial sat in the space between us. All the times he had asked, “Hi, how are you?” and I had answered, “Fine” when I hadn't been, finally came to roost. I was more comfortable speaking openly to a roomful of strangers about what had gone on deep inside me during the darkest days of our life together than I was speaking directly to my own dad.

I canceled my theatrical run. Even with the insights of that session, I was afraid that if I went ahead and had success with my show, I would lose my father forever. That I'd end up permanently on his “People I Can Do Without” list. My inner three-year-old still needed time to trust the new reality.

*   *   *

I performed my show only three times. My dad never attended. It's a shame, because by the end of each performance the audience loved him even more than they had before.

 

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

The Clown and the Guru

A
FTER MY THREE PERFORMANCES
of
Driven to Distraction
, I once again found myself at a crossroads in my professional life. I should have been looking forward to writing and performing another solo show that would fulfill me creatively and might get me some attention from Hollywood. But instead something was gnawing at me, giving me pause.

In the past decade I'd found plenty of reasons to stall the progress of my career: fear of failure, disdain for the corporate interests of the industry, and just feeling ill suited for the overall task. But with the confidence I'd gained doing my show, those reasons no longer applied.

No worries. I had a new one up my sleeve—was the entertainment industry itself even the proper path for me?

One thing I knew I wanted for sure was to be on a stage talking about my circuitous and humbling human journey, like Spalding Gray did, while also using humor to wake up audiences from their American Dream slumber, like my dad did. However, a whole new set of doubts about being an entertainer was bubbling up inside me.

After a few years on the Buddhist path, I felt called to be of greater service to the world more directly. I wanted to make a real dent in the world; help real people find their strength to create real change in their lives. I'd caught a glimpse of what that felt like while doing my shows. The people who saw them were genuinely touched by my work. A few had told me that my work had shifted something for them. This was huge. I saw how I might weave together the two main forces that were always wrestling within me: the Clown and the Guru. I wanted to be irreverently reverent, while being reverently irreverent. I wanted to bring humor to the deep suffering of human life, while bringing depth and soul to entertainment. Or as Joseph Campbell had said, “Participate joyfully in the suffering of the world.”

I wasn't sure that a life in showbiz, which tended to be mostly a shallow, ego-driven pursuit, would help me do any of that. Of course the people I admired most in the business had done it. They had a much wider impact in the world than just puffing up their own egos. But they were superstars. I wasn't on their level, and didn't know if I'd ever be successful enough to make that kind of impact.

That thinking then brought me to the next big doubt: Would I ever be successful? Now that I was thirty-eight, I accepted that it was probably too late for me in this youth-obsessed business. I was afraid that I'd have to do the kind of work that did not feed my soul but paid the bills. And after my mom's death, and especially after writing and performing my own solo show, I just couldn't go backward. I wanted to feed my soul, make a living,
and
change the world.

But underneath all that thinking lay another reason, maybe even the real reason, to walk away from a life in showbiz—my dear old dad.

I was afraid that if I went ahead with another solo show, I'd lose him forever, so I found a way to please us both—Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Pacifica is a small grad school nestled in the bosom of the hills of Santa Barbara, filled with adults in search of the sacred through psychology—more specifically, Jungian psychology. Their motto is
Anima Mundi Collende Gratia
—“Tending the Soul of and in the World.” That all sounds rather fluffy, full of bullshit, and way too “woo-woo.” But it was music to my ears. And soul. Not only was it a place where I could finally discover what makes humans tick, but it would also allow me to study the importance of storytelling as an integral feature of the human experience. Pacifica was a graduate program built on the shoulders of Carl Jung, one of the founders of modern psychology; and my old buddy, the mythologist Joseph Campbell. These two men had introduced terms like “archetype,” “myth,” “the hero,” and “collective unconscious” into our modern-day vernacular. They both believed that the path of the human was a spiritual one to be found through one's individual foibles, fears, and longings. I knew in my heart that the teachings and legacy of these men would help me to interweave my inner clown and guru. And I knew in my bones that I could use what I learned there to create art and entertainment that just might help to heal and transform the world.