A Carlin Home Companion (6 page)

The cops shuffled my parents off to the local lockup, where they quickly got bail. I had somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing until waking for school. I guess it was all that training I got sleeping in clubs as a baby. (I probably would have slept through the Stones at Altamont.)

My mom wasn't the only one creating havoc in the family with her intake of “chemicals.” One afternoon she came into my room and said, “Kelly, Daddy's taken something, and he's not feeling well, and I need you to help me.” We walked into their bedroom and found my dad standing in his boxer shorts, holding a framed picture of his old head shot—the clean-cut face—smiling at us. The frame was shattered, and Dad's hand was bleeding.

“Daddy, are you okay?” I asked. My dad took the picture and threw it against the wall, and then he collapsed in a pile of tears and rage. Mom quickly sat on him. I then jumped on him, too. He rambled on unintelligibly about his mother, himself, the world. He was shouting at things that weren't in the room and making no sense to me. Mom soothed him. “You're going to be okay, George. You're going to be okay.”

I was terrified that he'd lost his mind. I shook with fear. My father was gone. As tears streamed down my face, I bravely followed my mom's lead and tried to soothe him, “It's okay, Daddy. You're going to be just fine.”

We sat on him for a torturous forty-five minutes until he finally cried himself to sleep.

Dad had gotten hold of some bad acid. It seemed that becoming a counterculture god to the youth of America was not as easy as it looked.

*   *   *

At least that's what it felt like Dad had become—a counterculture god. By mid-1972 Dad's second album,
FM & AM
(a mix of old material—the
AM
side—and new material—the
FM
side), had come out and gone gold. With that feat, everything had changed, again.

To the world, just a few years earlier he'd been the clean-cut guy who made a nice living “working clean,” as evidenced by his “Indian Sergeant” routine (done in the voice of an Irish guy from the old neighborhood): “Now, a lot of youse guys have been asking me about promotions.… Well, the results of the tests have come in and youse doin' beautifully. ‘Burning Settlers' Homes,' everybody passed. ‘Imitating a Coyote,' everybody passed. ‘Sneaking Quietly Through the Woods,' everybody passed, except Limping Ox. However, Limping Ox is being fitted with a pair of corrective moccasins.” Now Dad was the long-haired hippie-freak in blue jeans making a great living “working blue,” as seen in his bit titled “Shoot”: “I got fired last year in Vegas for saying shit—in a town where the big game is called craps. That's some kind of a double standard. I'm sure there was some Texan standing out in the casino yelling, ‘Oh, SHIT! I CRAPPED!' And they fly those guys in free. Fired me … shit.”

He now headlined on almost every college campus in America. Not only had he found success, but he'd found it by stepping into his true nature, where he could speak truth to power and question everything. He had finally stepped over the line to the “other side.” And during those heady times in America, that line was firmly drawn and sides were vehemently chosen: the hippies vs. the establishment, the freaks vs. the straights; the heads vs. the blockheads.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1972 Mom and I went on the road with Dad. The road was always a fun adventure. Some of my earliest memories from the road are of waking up in a hotel room, both my parents dead to the world, and spending the next few hours coloring, watching cartoons with the volume all the way down, and staring out the window at the city below. Finally, when I was starving, I'd nudge my parents awake. Dad would run down to a local diner or store (or, as he got more successful, order room service) and buy a bunch of those miniboxes of Rice Krispies and a quart of milk. He'd then carefully take out his pocketknife, cut open those teeny boxes, and magically transform them into an instant bowl. Abracadabra—breakfast was served! And although I never heard it, I am absolutely sure that it was on one of those mornings that Dad heard that famous “Snap, crackle, fuck you.”

Our first stop that summer was Kent State. My dad took me to the memorial for the four college kids who had been shot by the National Guard a few years before. He explained that they'd been protesting the war, standing up for what they believed in, and that the government silenced them by shooting them. This was one of those “Daddy's big teaching moments.” He wanted me to understand the importance of people standing up for what they believed in, especially those who were willing to stand up to their government to make their point. He explained how the government had always silenced those who did not have a voice to begin with—blacks and Native Americans especially—and how young, white American girls and boys were now in that category, too. I felt there was no safe place for anyone.

Being a nine-year-old only child, and one who felt an increasing need to be more mature than my years, I acted as calm, cool, and collected as I could. I tried to show my dad that I understood the lesson of civics and morality that he was trying to teach me. But it was just a calm veneer, because all I could think was,
If the government was shooting these people for standing up for what they believed, would they shoot me or even my dad?
It was a terrifying thought that now echoed in the back of my mind.

The next stop on our summer of '72 tour was Summerfest in Milwaukee. Summerfest was basically an ocean of beer surrounding an island of sausage disguising itself as a music festival. You know, what they call “good clean American fun.” And when you think “good clean American fun,” don't you also immediately think George Carlin?

Dad opened for Arlo Guthrie, and struggled to do his new material while connecting with the enormous audience of over ten thousand people. He began to do his new routine, the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which he'd just recorded on his third album,
Class Clown.
The album wouldn't be released for another few months, so I'm pretty sure the promoter didn't know exactly what he had signed up for when he booked my dad. The routine was both hilarious and an intellectual examination of the usage of language in our culture. However, it consisted of words, according to Dad, “that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” Yeah, those words.

Because Summerfest was an outdoor venue, the main stage act could be heard throughout the fairgrounds—meaning it could be heard by lots of mommies and daddies and little kiddies. So there was my dad onstage, killing. Most of the audience was loving it, while Mom and I stood in the wings, also enjoying the show. That's when the promoter rushed up to my mom and said, “The cops are here. They're complaining about the language, and they're going to arrest George the minute he walks offstage.”

I guess when my dad said that he'd like to “fuck everyone in the audience,” the nice Midwestern policemen took some offense.

Knowing that he was carrying drugs in his pocket—both grass and coke—my mom thought fast, grabbed a glass of water, and walked out onto the stage. Dad, confused, took the water, and Mom whispered, “Exit stage left. The cops are here.”

Dad wrapped it up, exited stage left, and we all quickly hustled into the dressing room and locked the door. I anxiously watched as Mom removed a rather large Baggie of coke from her purse and stashed it in a bass drum, and Dad took out the joint and small vial of coke from his pockets and handed them to the promoter. The promoter was trying to keep things calm, when suddenly,
Bang
!—it sounded as if a gun had gone off. I leaped into my mom's arms and began crying hysterically. As she tried to calm me down, nothing else happened. Someone said, “It was probably just a balloon.” Someone had popped a fucking balloon! Mom, Dad, and the promoter all laughed a nervous laugh, but I was now unhinged. Terror streaked through my body. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I was going to die. And that's when the door opened, my dad walked out, and within a few seconds policemen cuffed him. I screamed, “Daddy!” I was sure that I would never ever see him again. My mom held me back as I cried.

I don't know how long it took, but she finally calmed me down enough so that she could leave to get my dad out of jail.

Luckily my mom knew exactly what to do because of Lenny Bruce's arrest in Chicago in 1961—You get a civil rights lawyer. I went home with the promoter to his house and family, where I spent the rest of the weekend distracting myself by swimming with his kids in something that as a Southern California girl I had never seen before—an aboveground pool. I almost didn't know what to do with it.

After one of the most harrowing weekends of our family life, Mom paid something like $250 to get Dad out of jail, and we were ready for his next gig: Carnegie Hall, New York City.

We stayed at the Plaza Hotel. Well, actually, we lived at the Plaza Hotel for almost a whole month. Are you familiar with the character Eloise? Now imagine Eloise in a tie-dyed T-shirt, sneakers, and a denim jacket with a patch that said, “Make Love, Not War.” That was me. I read all the Eloise books, roamed the back stairs and halls, and got to know most of the staff by name. Every day I ordered a hot fudge sundae and charged it to the room, and every night I went to the basement theater, the Plaza 9 Music Hall, and watched the musical
Curley McDimple.
This was
my
Danny Kaye moment. I sat in the dark, watched a young girl, Robbi Morgan, sing and dance her way across the stage as a Shirley Temple–like character, and I decided right there and then that I wanted to be just like her someday. Having watched the real Shirley Temple on TV my whole life, I had certainly fantasized about being her. But it was just TV, and in black-and-white, which made it feel so remote, so I never really saw it as something I could do in my life. But here I was now, sitting in the hush of a theater, watching a real girl only a few years older than me in a play about a Shirley Temple character. It felt very real. I eventually met the cast, and my mom told them that I had memorized all the words to all the songs. I began to hang out with Robbi before and after the shows, and one weekend I even got to go across the bridge to New Jersey to her house, where her mom and dad taught me how to do the time step. At the end of our stay at the Plaza, the producers let me audition for what could have been the West Coast premiere of the show. I had no singing or dancing experience, so I felt like a bit of a fake, and yet there I was up on that stage singing my heart out. Unfortunately there never was a West Coast premiere.

Then the big night finally came: Carnegie Hall. Outside on the posters my dad's name shone for all of Midtown Manhattan to see—“Carnegie Hall Presents George Carlin”—a huge coup for my dad, who grew up a latchkey kid not sixty blocks away. His mother, Mary, his aunt Aggie, their friends, and of course lots of Dad's friends from the neighborhood were all out there in the audience to cheer him on. Mom, Dad, and I were all hunkered down in the dressing room. Dad checked his notes and paced like he always did. Mom was immersed in a deep and intense conversation with a person she had met only ten minutes earlier—fueled no doubt by whatever chemical mixture she was doing that week. And I, after roaming the halls to find the vending machines, sat in the corner reading
Archie
comics and eating Fritos. Suddenly we got the knock: “Two minutes, George.”

Escorted by the promoter, Mom, Dad, and I left the quiet of the room to make our way through the bowels of the building. As we walked past people, they said things to us like, “Go get 'em, George,” and “Knock 'em dead.” I did not know these people, and they did not know me. But they knew my dad. Everybody knew my dad. As we came up from the basement, we started to hear feet stamping and the chant, “George, George, George!” There were over a thousand voices saying my father's name over and over again, and when he stepped out onto the stage, they erupted into a roar. Every hair on my body stood straight up. I felt energy all around me, and a joy ached inside my chest. I felt extremely alive. And although I understood they weren't cheering for me, I still felt connected to it all. It was very intoxicating, and I knew that all I had to do was stay right next to my dad, and this buzz would be free.

*   *   *

When we got home, things got interesting.

 

CHAPTER
FIVE

She's Leaving Home

B
ECAUSE
FM &
AM
,
and
Class Clown
, made us a ton of money, we now lived in a huge modern house on Tellem Drive, atop a hill in the Pacific Palisades. Dad said it was the perfect street for him because “That's what I do. I tell 'em.” But mostly it was not so perfect because the neighborhood was a bastion of the Republican Party. We were surrounded by lots of Governor Ronald Reagan's best friends: next door a National Security Council bigwig, and across the street a Rand Corporation executive. The only way we could have picked a whiter, squarer part of Los Angeles to move to is if we'd lived in a piece of Wonder Bread. This was the autumn of 1972—the Nixon vs. McGovern campaign was in full swing, and I'm pretty sure we were the only house on the block voting for McGovern.

One early evening I stood with my dad on the driveway, looking across the street at a cocktail party the Rand Corporation executive was having. Like most cocktail parties, it consisted of couples dressed up in suits and cute dresses talking animatedly and tinkling fancy cocktails. However, unlike most cocktail parties, this one came with its own sideline commentator. As Dad and I stood there taking in the scene, he turned to me and said in a very loud voice, “Hey, Kel, look at all the assholes over there.” Conversation stopped, glasses no longer tinkled, and heads spun our way; fun times for a ten-year-old.