eight-year-old girl.
I did tend to direct my hostility at the square world and business1 7 7
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men. Disturbing, because it seemed to control me: I couldn't turn
it on and off. I embarrassed myself a lot and probably Brenda just as
much. At times it was a component of the drug taking, but it also
existed independent of drugs. When I became successful as an outsider and could be physically identified as such, the famous outsider,
"the one who's saying all those things," I became very defensive.
Despite my self-discovery and self-fulfillment and excitement
about them, I was frustrated at the way the things I was saying in
my work—my only artistic way of expressing my feelings—were being received. I really believed that the way these suits ran the world
was seriously wrong. Not only were they wrong, they were ignoring
people over property and profit. But I wasn't being fully understood:
the people on the other side of the fence—or the street—saw me as a
simplistic slogan-monger, a left-wing poseur. I resented that. But my
artistic role—comedian—made it impossible to explain how carefully structured it was, how it sprang from profound changes that
had occurred in my head as well as my heart. I felt misunderstood
and self-conscious. In other words, hostile.
One convenience of our new house was that right up there on the
hill lived an actor who became my most reliable source of cocaine—
an actor who later cleaned up and became quite successful. I spent a
lot of time up there; it was so easy to go up and score. The only celebrity I ever ran into was Peter Lawford. We did a lot of lines together.
I had other, less memorable sources, and Brenda would soon
develop her own independent ones. It was during this period—in
'73 and '74—that things really began to unravel. On top of the liquor, Brenda was now doing coke, plus the pills—like Valium—she
took to balance the coke. At least she never got involved with heavy
downers like reds and Tuinal.
I'd always used Ritalin. My Ritalin habit didn't make me crazy. I
used to take half a Ritalin, or at most one and a half. (I had a doctor's
prescription for the stuff.) That was my speed during my so-called
straight years: the groundwork was laid early on for my attraction to
cocaine.
The timetable on this downward path is not exact—it never is, I
guess—except that it began to happen with the success of my first
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three records. In that context, Brenda's pain and problems were understandable. She'd been my partner during my changes, helping
me—again—with the press kit, travel, support, whatever her misgivings, while others were firing me and bitching about my new direction. Once I began to make money again and there were managers
and agents and record execs handling things, these jobs went away.
Again. She had nothing left to do.
The money didn't help because she felt she was losing me. She
didn't have a husband. She had a man who was out there for everybody else, but was hardly ever there for her. Or Kelly. I don't remember this—there's a lot I don't remember—but she said that once an
interviewer asked me how old Kelly was, and I didn't know.
So she'd sit around and drink. And snort cocaine. She went out
to lunch. She went shopping. No life at all. She used to say she felt
not just replaced by my managers, but patronized. As if she were a
houseplant. Stick her over there. Water her from time to time. Keep
her in the shade.
She was already like Jekyll and Hyde on alcohol. Add in the coke,
and the mix became toxic. And while she wouldn't be mean to anyone else, she was incredibly mean to me. There was a lot of hitting. I'd try to move her from one place to another when she was
drunk on top of cocaine, or at least restrain her. But it was hard,
very hard. At least with a person who's fucked up on cocaine you
can get through to some extent. There's a vestige of linear thought.
But alcohol changes everything, rationality, personality. I lived for
years with, "No, you're not going out. Give me the car keys. You're
not going out." She would hit me, and then I would not punch her,
exactly—I never did that—but I probably slapped her. I'm sure I
pushed her a lot. And she kicked me in the balls a lot.
By '74 she was having hallucinations. One time when I was on
the road she saw many, many people on the roof. She kept calling
the security service to drive by and see what they were doing up
there. Or she'd see mobs of people outside in our deserted suburban
street. One night I came home late, unexpectedly, without calling.
Brenda tried to stab me with a sword she had and just missed skewering me. She didn't know who I was.
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I wasn't a lot better. Once I had a long conversation in my room
with five people who weren't there. I came out to find Brenda:
"Brenda, Pat's in there and Doug and Jimmy Mellon and a couple
of the other guys. Could you call the liquor store? We need some
beers." She said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "For the guys.
We're in my room. We're listening to records and shit." And she said,
"There's nobody in the house. Nobody's come here all day." We
go back, look around and the place is empty. And yet, I'd sat there
seeing all these people for hours. Answered their questions. Asked
them things. Got replies, apparently.
In 1973, on a trip we took to Hawaii with Kelly, the craziness hit
new heights. We stayed in a hotel called the Napili Kai in Maui.
I was buying eighths or quarters from a chef in a local restaurant
and doing them in the hotel. It was one of those hotels where everyone had their own little cottage or condo, but of course everybody
was also right next door. And here were these Carlin people, fighting and yelling and threatening one another, creating this terrible
fucking aura, all this horrible, out-of-control, pathetic drug use and
abuse of one another.
Kelly often ended up being the arbitrator between us. She was
the one who said what we never did: "Let's save the marriage." At
the Napili Kai, in the depths of this cocaine madness, she attempted
an actual intervention. At ten years old she was going to solve everything.
The trigger of it was that Brenda and I had taken knives to each
other. We hadn't stuck them in each other's flesh yet but we were
wielding them. Probably not intending to use them but making dramatic, dangerous gestures. That's when Kelly sat us down and said,
"This has got to stop." She was crying and sobbing: "I have to tell
you about how I feel about all this . . . It's my turn to talk!"
Then and there she wrote a contract for us, which read: "You/I
will not drink or snort coke or smoke pot for the next X days of our
vacation. We're going to have a family vacation and we're going to
have a good time." She made us sign it.
It lasted all of thirty minutes. For some reason I went in the bathroom and shut the door. Brenda accused me of doing drugs—which
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for once I wasn't—and went back down to the bar. So then I did have
to do some. And that seemed like it for Kelly's
contract.
Except it wasn't. What she'd written and done was like a roundhouse punch to the solar plexus. Even if it didn't have immediate
results, it had a dramatic long-term impact. From then on I tried
harder to do right. It had a more lingering effect on Brenda that she
wasn't immediately conscious of. But before very long she'd hit bottom and was getting sober.
One great hallucination story—which demonstrates where your
head goes on this stuff—happened right after we got back from Hawaii. The air is very clear in Hawaii and the sun stands out as a disc.
Not a perfect disc, because of the brilliance around it, but still there's
the sun, bright and clear. But in Pacific Palisades, where there's a
constant marine layer of clouds, sometimes you're above the clouds
and sometimes in the midst of them. Since the sky is amorphous and
hazy, the sun is only detectable if the cloud cover is thin enough.
I wake up the morning after returning from Hawaii, where I ' v e
grown accustomed to seeing the sun this certain way, and I'm still
full of cocaine. I get up. My mother is sleeping in the room we have
for her. Brenda is asleep. I look up and I see what looks like the sun
through the cloud layer, but far bigger and more diffuse than I'm
used to seeing it. I decide it has exploded.
I shake Brenda awake: "Get Kelly up! The sun has exploded! We
have eight minutes to live!" Not understanding that if I was able to
detect the explosion, the radiant energy would have reached earth
by now. No, I was certain it had exploded and we had eight minutes
for the shock wave to get here, which would then be the end of the
world. I wake up my mother and Kelly and get them all outside and
they're still groggy and agreeing with me: "Okay, this is the end of
the world. The sun has exploded. We should go inside."
Then Brenda said, "Wait, maybe you're not right." I accept that
remote possibility and call a friend of mine in Sacramento, Joe Balladino, a drummer and a good friend, a big Italian pothead. He'd
given up drumming and had been out with me on the road as my
road manager. We wore the same kind of hats and we called ourselves the Blip Brothers.
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I said: "Hey, Joe, would you go outside and take a look at the sun?
Tell me if it has exploded, will ya?" He said: "Sure, man—hold on
a minute." There's a short silence and he came back and said, "No,
looks okay up here." So I said, "Okay, maybe I'm wrong about this.
Maybe it's not the end of the world."
A lot, a lot, a lot of cocaine. We would each have some—separate
stashes—another of those deceptive practices you think will keep
the peace, but which actually leads to more conflict. I would use
all of mine up and I would want some of hers. So she would hide
hers, or if I knew she'd finished hers, I would hide mine. Then we'd
start looking for each other's stash. Then we would forget where
we had hidden our own. We'd kiss and make up: "Look, you have
some and I have some, so we'll pool and we'll both have some. Let's
look together." We'd take every book from the bookcase because
we thought we'd hidden it there. Hundreds of books. We'd look in
every page of every book. Look behind the books. Try to put the
books back. Leave the books stacked up.
Or I'd decide it was time to sort out all the nuts and bolts and
nails in the house. I wasn't a homey, do-it-yourself guy at all, but
I had thousands of nuts and bolts and nails and washers that the
anal me hadn't thrown away over the years. Brenda would find me
hours later with every nut and bolt and screw and washer and nail
carefully laid out on the carpet. I was putting the ones that matched
each other together. Very important work. Must be done now—even
though it's four-thirty in the morning. If I'd thought of it, I would
have scrubbed the lawn, each blade of grass with a toothbrush, separately. Get it nice and clean. Clean and green.
Hallucinations could come not just from the drug alone, but
from starving for days on end. I'd stay up as much as six days and not
eat, or eat only morsels of food. Fasting, in fact. Now, as we know,
mystics often have visions purely from lack of food. I was right up
there with those medieval saints the good sisters introduced me to.
Never did see Jesus though. Many guys from the old neighborhood.
No Jesus.
Even without visions, there was the deadly treadmill of staying awake and taking more drugs to try to put off the time when
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you would finally have to go to sleep and running out and going
through the rigamarole of getting more and taking it and putting
off sleeptime and then realizing that you couldn't go any further. It
would all just come crashing down and you'd go into this deep, deep
sleep.
They'd have to cancel dates. I'd miss whole strings of dates.
Then I'd go to the cocaine-doctor in Westwood, Dr. von Leden.
He'd write me physician notes that excused me from the concerts so
we wouldn't get sued. Usually the excuse was that I had laryngitis,
which I often did, as I'd sing for six days straight at the top of my
voice to the music I was playing. Or I would talk, talk, talk, whether
I had company or not. Then I'd try to do a two-and-a-half-hour concert and I would lose my voice. Part of it was the numbing from
the sheer bulk of cocaine; part the things it was cut with, which
anesthetized vocal cords and mucous membranes, making speech
mechanically impossible.
Dr. von Leden had an Austrian accent and a slight speech impediment. He'd say, "Ja, you see, this cocaine you shouldn't take, because it makes you wap. And when you wap you lose your voice. You
must stop wapping." I'd always agree to stop wapping but a month
later I'd be back again, all wapped out.
Early on in this lunacy, I bought a jet. An Aero Commander 1121
Jet Commander. I flew everywhere in it, usually with my pal the
singer Kenny Rankin. Kenny was an ex-speed freak, who'd gone
through Phoenix House and got clean. That didn't last. Traveling with me and being around all the coke brought him solidly
back. So I'm zipping around the country high on cocaine, in my
own jet. With my own pilot, my own copilot. Sheer fucking madness.
There was one wonderful moment with the plane. We flew into
LaCuardia from Cleveland to do some New York dates. They parked
the jet on a ramp out near Butler Aviation: the executive-jet area. I
didn't have to work anywhere that night, so after we'd checked in,
I went back out to LaCuardia. I brought my Sony jam box (an early
incarnation of the ghetto blaster), my music tapes, two six-packs, an
ounce of pot and several grams of cocaine. I sat in my own jet plane,
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playing the music as loud as it would go, alone on the ramp at LaGuardia, and had myself a one-man party.
LaGuardia had special meaning for me. When we were kids, we'd
steal these crappy bikes in the neighborhood and ride them across
125th Street, over the Triborough Bridge and along the Grand Central Parkway all the way out to LaGuardia. At LaGuardia there were
bike r
acks, where nice kids would leave their nice, expensive bikes.
We'd leave our crappy, stolen bikes in the racks, steal the nice bikes
and ride them home.
There was a nostalgic contrast between the bicycle of my
boyhood—the lowest, slowest mode of transportation—and the supersonic jet—the highest and fastest. Where I used to come to steal
a bicycle, now I was sitting in my own jet, soaking up the music and
cocaine. A wonderful symbol of success and speed and seventies
drug madness.
We leased it out occasionally; once to Jeff Wald and his wife,
Helen Reddy. They were flying around doing a series of dates, and
somewhere the plane suddenly lost fifteen thousand feet of altitude.
They were sure they were going to die. For some reason, they never
leased it again.
Her near-death experience wasn't the only brush I had with
Ms. Reddy. On another occasion she was at a party at Monte Kay's
house, where Brenda got blind, falling-down drunk but wouldn't
come home. Just refused, point-blank. I forced her out of the place
physically, pushing, jostling, shoving, picking her up, trying to
carry her.
Helen was a fierce women's libber, having had a huge hit with
one of the anthems of the women's movement ("I Am Woman").
She took great exception to the combination of physical things 1
had to do to get Brenda out of Montes house to the driveway and
into the car. Having no prior knowledge of the actual situation,
this appeared to Helen as violent physical abuse of a woman by
a man and she reacted accordingly. She was woman, I heard her
roar.
In the end it was yet another of the endless examples of how out
of control we both were, and as '75 proceeded, things really began to
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fall apart. A big part of the problem was my mother. She had come
out for some birthday early in the year and never went home. The
woman who came to dinner.
I knew how corrosive she could be. This time she had become
Brenda's drinking buddy. Though my mother didn't drink most of
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