Last Words

by George Carlin;Tony Hendra

  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 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.

  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 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’ve 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.

  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 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 LaGuardia 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 LaGuardia. 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, playing the music as loud as it would go, alone on the ramp at La-Guardia, 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 racks, 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 I had to do to get Brenda out of Monte’s 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 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 her life, as she got on in years—she was seventy-eight by now—she’d have a sip of this and a sip of that. It took away the aches and pains. But now she was pouring drinks for them both while feeding Brenda’s unhappiness and paranoia and pushing her further into that toxic liquor-cocaine-Valium-liquor cycle.

  Brenda was discreet about the cocaine—she’d do it in the bathroom. But I’m sure Mary knew she was doing it, even if in a way she didn’t know. She was the kind of woman who wouldn’t see something if she didn’t want to, even looking right at it. And she was pumping all her own poison into poor Brenda: “He doesn’t love you. You know he’s no good. He’s never been any good. If you ever leave him, come with me and I’ll take care of you.” In the shape she was in, Brenda had no defenses against malice like this.

  She sank lower and lower. By 1975 she was reduced to sitting around the house drinking wine: Mateus Rosé, which she’d order—or Kelly would order—by phone from the liquor store down the hill, six or seven bottles at a time. Whenever she did actually sleep—she was terrified of dying in her sleep—she would sleep on the couch, then get up in the morning and immediately crawl to the kitchen to get booze. She couldn’t walk because she shook so badly. She weighed less than ninety pounds.

  I was taking cocaine fitfully, though when I did, I still did a good long run. But I would have relatively coherent periods and realize what a fucking mess my family was.

  Inevitably, Brenda hit bottom. One night in August of 1975 we had a fight and she got in my little white BMW 3.0 CS and took my mother down the hill to the Santa Ynez Inn. They had drinks in the bar and left to head back. Brenda remembered waiting for the car at the main entrance, but after that nothing.

  The next thing she knows, she’s sitting in my car, having backed it into and through the lobby of the San Ynez Inn. The fire truck’s there. My car is an accordion. They bring my mother home. The Santa Monica police lock Brenda up.

  I went down to get her and I was able to get her out. I said: “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not having Kelly see this anymore.” I didn’t yet know about “bottoming out” and all those other AA phrases. She said: “Fine. Help me.” Which was what this was all about—begging me to help her as I should have long before.

  I got a lawyer. She was up for DWI and she’d had a DWI before. Chances were she was going to have to go to Sybil Brand Institute, which was this real shitty women’s jail in L.A. County, with a horrible reputation. Peter Pitchess, the L.A. County sheriff, was a cartoon Nazi who’d make sure Mrs. George Carlin did some time. We had to operate on the assumption that she wasn’t going to walk this time.

  I asked a friend at Atlantic Records to find me a lawyer. He went one better. What I wanted was simply to get Brenda off. Instead all records of her arrest and case just disappeared from the court system. They could never call her case up for adjudication, because it no longer existed. I paid for having that done. Believe me, it’s by far the best way to stay out of jail.

  She went to saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, which was just beginning its CDC—Chemical Dependency Cen
ter. She met a great sponsor—Tristram Colket III, a Main Line Philadelphia neurosurgeon, who had fucked up his own life by having a horrendous accident when he drove fucked-up drunk. He devoted his life to helping people get sober and staying sober himself in the process, which is the basic sobriety technique. By helping others you keep your own sobriety alive.

  When she went to the hospital she packed every pill she had. There were thirty-two bottles of medication in her suitcase—and a nightgown. And in 1975, they did not yet have detox. The next morning, they woke her at six o’clock, made her make her bed, get dressed and go sit in lectures. She didn’t know where she was. She couldn’t walk. It took two people to hold her up and they didn’t know if she was going to make it. They were giving her anticonvulsant drugs. She had chronic malnutrition and was anemic. All she’d done for months was drink. Everything in her body was screwed up: she was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis and given only two years to live.

  But she started to turn around, and the first thing she told me was, “I cannot have your mother in the house.” Obviously I was in one of my coherent moods because I went right home, packed Mary up and put her on a plane back to New York. Later I found an entry in her diary for that day—a typical self-pitying Mary line: “George kicks me out today. He drove me to the airport.”

  Brenda started going to three meetings a day for the first year. When she got out of the hospital she started doing a 12-step workday, where she would go down to skid row and rescue people and put them into facilities. She really practiced the AA thing for a long time until she realized the AA people were all sick in a different way. That they were just living out their sickness and not doing anything about their lives.

  But she did, and never looked back. And the CDC couldn’t have been more wrong about that “only two years to live.”