Last Words

by George Carlin

  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