All this happened in August ’75. I was never happier in my life. I never had a greater feeling of relief than to know—although I didn’t have solid proof yet—that I’d never again have to race out and take the car keys out of her hand, that I would never have to carry her out of any place, that I would never have to endure this terrible tension that went with her drinking.
The three things—my cocaine and pot, her drinking—were hard to separate. Talking about any one of them in isolation implied the others weren’t there. I knew I was to blame too. It had been a mutual dance of death. But more than anything I was simply glad it was over.
A few years later, the Santa Ynez Inn became the Center for Enlightenment. Brenda always said that perhaps in some small way we helped that come about.
Two months after this, in October ’75, I hosted the first Saturday Night Live. One of the original ideas had been that the show would have rotating hosts, Richie Pryor, Lily Tomlin and me, but somewhere along the line that got dropped and Lily and Richie didn’t host till shows 6 and 7. Perhaps I poisoned the well a little: I certainly was full of cocaine. (Though I was far from the only one.) To me this counted as one of those times when “I’m away from home, I can party.”
Bob Woodward, who wrote Wired, said that they had to break my hotel room door down, I was so coked up. Which I don’t remember. It may be true. Maybe I went missing the day before or after the show, crashed after being up all week. One thing I do remember is that I refused to be in any sketches. I was still hesitant about acting and I told Lorne Michaels, the producer, “I’ll just fuck it up. Instead of hanging around throughout the show in sketches, give me a series of monologues of a few minutes each.” Which Lorne agreed to. I think I’m the only host who’s ever done that. I also wore a suit, which Woodward definitely got wrong. He claimed the network insisted that I wear a suit. Actually I wanted to wear a nice three-piece suit, but with a Wallace Beery dirty tee underneath. They wouldn’t let me do that. Too nervous. T-shirt had to be clean.
Everybody was very tentative. And the tension was intense. My role became to balance between the young radicals of the cast and writing staff and the old-guard stagehands and techies, a lot of whom were New York neighborhood guys I could relate to. I brought a little harmony between them by being able to communicate with both sides. At least that’s my interpretation of how the week went.
Nervous or not, they did allow me to do the God material:
Maybe God is only a semi-supreme being. Everything He’s ever made has died … When we put a statue of Jesus on the dashboard, instead of having him watch the traffic, which he should be doing, we got him watching us DRIVE! Watch this, Jesus—LEFT TURN! Are we so middle-class we have to perform for Jesus when we’re driving?
It was fairly mild stuff, but before we were off the air the NBC switchboard had lit up and someone from Cardinal Cooke’s office was on the phone with the official complaint. My second Cardinal Incident.
Somehow, despite the coke, over the course of the week I came to be acquainted with a woman prosecutor, an assistant DA in the New York DA’s Office. I can’t remember if I picked her up or if I got her phone number, but at the end of the taping I brought her to the big cast party. An assistant DA! That freaked out the fearless radicals!
13
SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN
A more casual performance look
(Photograph by Joel Kornbluth)
My own drug use, post-Brenda-sober, fell off. Somewhat. I had longer periods of lucidity and a decreasing pattern of use. The length of a given period of drug use was getting shorter. The frequency of the periods was going down. Everything was in decline. Slow decline. I think. The cocaine anyway. Pot I still saw as benign. Beer I kept for work so I could function. One out of three ain’t bad.
Brenda didn’t say, “you can’t do drugs anymore.” She wasn’t like that. She didn’t try to cure me. Still I felt: “Gee, if she’s going to stay sober, I can’t be coming in wrecked and acting goofy.” And of course when she cleaned up, I lost my drug partner. My drug playmate.
But there’d be times when I’d be gone for the weekend and get some—some of everything—and have my own little private party. Then be straightened out by the time I got home. So I was cleaner and soberer and possibly getting even cleaner and soberer. There are still large gaps in the record keeping. Anal George was still on an extended vacation. In this part of the story I have to keep telling myself that I’m quite sure my amounts of usage were really diminishing. But I’m not sure. Frankly the whole period is murky as shit.
What I am certain of is that the second half of the seventies was a period of uncertainty. A time of tentativeness, of groping around for what came next—and coming up mostly empty-handed. I wasn’t quite running on fumes—my fifth album, Toledo Window Box, came out in ’74 and eventually went gold, but it took a lot longer to get there than the previous three. Predictably there was quite a bit of drug material (the title referred to a bizarrely named brand of grass I’d once been offered):
Nursery rhymes are the first introduction children have—from zero through five—to bizarre behavior … I’ve thought about nursery rhymes. Quite a gang we had in there. All on various drug experiences. I got to thinking about this one night when the words “Snow White” passed through my mind.
I thought, Snow White, right? I didn’t know whether it was smack or coke. Can’t be smack—too much housework with those seven little devils around. More likely something to pep you up; something to make you wanna wash the garage.
The Seven Dwarfs were each on different trips. Happy was into grass and grass alone. Occasionally some hash—make a holiday for him. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy … TOO MUCH SPEED. Sneezy was a full-blown coke freak. Doc was a connection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for Dopey. Always got his arm out and his leg up. And then the one we always forget—Bashful. Bashful didn’t use drugs: he was paranoid on his own …
Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he
He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl
… I guess we all know about Old King Cole!
Hansel and Gretel discovered the gingerbread house—about forty-five minutes after they discovered the mushrooms: “Yeah … I SEE IT TOO …”
Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating his Christmas pie
Stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum
And said: “HOLY SHIT, AM I HIGH!”
Mary had a little gram … no … Mary had a little lamb Its stash was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
THEY BOTH ENJOYED A BLOW …
Monte Kay of Little David Records—who’d produced all of my gold albums—had become my manager. When I suggested he become my manager as well as my record producer, I asked him, “Is there a conflict of interest in there, Monte?” He looked me straight in the eye for a very long moment and said: “Nah.” I believed him.
Monte saw—correctly—that the peak was past for the Hot-New-Guy-in-Town-with-the-Albums. We had to take a step somewhere else, somewhere new. The somewhere new turned out to be The Tonight Show, which I returned to in 1975. Sound odd considering my immediate past? That, in the absence of new vistas, I went right back to Johnny Carson? Well, I did. With a silk shirt, yet. One of those seventies deals with big, baggy sleeves. I thought, “I have to look decent.” It was a joke. I looked horrible. (I don’t know anything about clothes.) To complete the refurbished image I cut my hair.
I began appearing frequently on Carson; more frequently than I ever had in the sixties. Soon I was asked to host. (Technically “guest-host,” a term I’ve never understood. How the fuck can you be a guest and a host?)
The hosting became frequent, then very frequent. There was one run of twelve shows where I did eight as a host and four as a guest. In the sixties I’d maybe reached double figures in Tonight Show appearances; later, in the eighties I did it regularly but
sparingly. Somehow in this period I must have racked up the majority of my cumulative 130 Tonight Shows. I began thinking of it as a lifeline, something that would replace the albums as they faded.
In 1975, my fifth Little David album came out. Prior to this there’d been: FM & AM—clear concept; Class Clown—strong concept, ditto Occupation: Foole. Toledo Window Box—no concept, but still a catchy, snappy name that related to the counterculture. Now along comes …
An Evening with Wally Londo, Featuring Bill Slaszo.
No concept at all. And I’m putting two other people’s names on my own album. Outnumbering me TWO TO ONE! And yet my head was the biggest it had ever been on an album cover. I was mortified when it came out that you could see all those little dirty pores—the ones you can never get the dirt out of, no matter what you do. Uncertainty. No focus. And with Wally and Bill, forget about the gold.
Soon I’m also back in Vegas—a financial decision, seemed an intelligent one at the time, of a piece with buying a new house in Brentwood, following the path that was most familiar and offered the least resistance, continuing the flow that supported the money machine.
Money now being handled—at Monte’s suggestion—by a hotshot business management firm called Brown and Kraft, who also handled the affairs of my fellow celebrities Marlon Brando and Mary Tyler Moore. Going along with this was a nondecision that would haunt me for years to come, not because Brown and Kraft did anything illegal, but because, even though the whole idea was to take financial worries out of my hands, I had an irrational fear of looking at my accountants’ monthly statement. I would get their statements out of my hands as fast as possible. I wouldn’t even open them: just throw ’em on the pile with the others.
In 1976 it was back to Hawaii to appear on … Perry Como’s Hawaiian Holiday. Produced by … Bob Banner. Perhaps the déjà vu was lost on me because I was still doing cocaine. I don’t remember. I do remember that Monte controlled it out there so I couldn’t get any from him until the end of the day’s work. Which was groundbreaking stuff like paddling an outrigger canoe with Perry and Petula Clark while singing “One Paddle, Two Paddle.” Or doing a piece about Captain Cook—Hawaii having been one of Captain Cook’s landing places—in a superbly accurate reproduction of the Captain’s captain clothes. I didn’t play Captain Cook though—I played Captain Cook’s First Mate. Yes, the Indian Sergeant is back in my life. A definite sign that I no longer know who the fuck I am. Or even which decade it is: the late seventies? Or the late sixties?
By the next summer I was appearing as a regular on Tony Orlando and Dawn. Not surprisingly, my sixth Little David album, On the Road, was directionless and unstructured: featuring the interminable “Death and Dying” routine, the longest piece I ever did. (On the album it only ran thirteen minutes but onstage it ran twenty-seven minutes.) Talking about dying for twenty-seven minutes should’ve given a seasoned comedian pause, but that hoary old metaphor for failure never occurred to me.
Another signal I missed was in ’78, when I had a mild heart attack. It was in the septal branch artery. One morning when I was driving Kelly to school, my jaw felt tight. I knew that a tight jaw or pain in the jaw can be a symptom of a heart attack as well as the traditional pain in the chest. (The left arm, upper back and the jaw can all be locations where you feel angina.) Apparently each person’s angina is slightly different. I had to spend two days in the hospital before they were able to find the enzyme in my blood that is the marker of an MI, or myocardial infarction. When muscle tissue dies an enzyme is released. If they find that enzyme, you had a heart attack. If they don’t find it, you’ve had chest pain. So, they found it, and I’d had an MI. But it was so minor it didn’t force me to change anything or reexamine anything. For a while I did eat margarine instead of butter.
One thing happened in that period which would be a major positive force in my life, although I didn’t realize it until later. HBO came into the picture. I did two HBO one-hour specials in ’77 and ’78. These regular specials would soon take the place of my album career—eventually becoming one and the same thing. They didn’t yet have as many subscribers as they would in the eighties, when they exploded, but it did give me access to a mass audience. At the time it just seemed like more TV. Not that different from Perry Como or Tony Orlando except I got to say “fuck.”
The material I was doing tells the real story. After an explosion of self-revelation and self-discovery, and the revelation to others of my autobiographical self and past—together with a good strong dose of value judgments about the world around me—I’d become a person fascinated with his own navel. “Hey—look at my lint! You got lint? He’s got lint! She’s got lint! Everybody got lint!” I was turning to my bodily functions and extremities for inspiration, plundering the last few scraps of self-examination from them. It started on Toledo Window Box …
Snot is universal. There are some things that work in comedy because they’re universal, but we don’t talk about them. First of all, snot is the original rubber cement. Thumb and forefinger … ever try to toss one away? Won’t go … You ever pick your nose and have a guy walk around the corner, “Hi, Bill! How are you?” and go to shake your hand? “Sorry, my right arm is paralyzed.” “Oh, okay. Why don’t you put that thing back in your nose and come in my office?”
You CAN put it back in your nose. Lot of people stuck for a place to put one don’t think of that. You CAN PUT IT BACK! They’re viable for four hours after picking. Put it back in but don’t jog it loose. Gotta sit still the first hour …
Imagine if snot was FLUORESCENT! DAY-GLO MUCUS! There’d be no place to hide it. Where you gonna put a fluorescent snot? Gotta go down the head shop and wipe it on a poster.
Urinals, pissing and farts were dealt with at some length on Toledo Window Box. On Wally Londo I really went to town. First snot made a comeback:
Have you ever been making out with someone and one of you has a snot that’s whistling? Oo Oo Oo Oo Oo OoOoOoOoOoOo!! “I think we blew it out of tune on the climax, honey!”
I moved on to the involuntary shake that happens when you piss—which I called the piss-shiver—and from there I transitioned to this important question:
Isn’t it funny how we say take a shit and take a piss? You don’t take ’em, YOU LEAVE ’EM! “I left a shit, Bill.” “Jeez, where’d ya leave it this time? Last year the kids didn’t find it till Easter!”
Then it was stomach noises, lots of those, and so to:
Did you ever belch and taste a hotdog you had two days ago? “’Ey, that was almost PUKE! A toss-up between puke and hotdog there!”
Which brought me to the big finish—vomiting in the New York subway:
You ever notice that your whole sense of values changes when you’re throwing up? I DON’T CARE ABOUT MY SHOES … BLEEEEUUUURRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!
When I’d finished scavenging my extremities, I turned to pets—the nearest thing to an extremity. Let me tell you about this little extension of me … my dog …
Example: A dog appears on TV, and you try to get your dog to look at it. And he won’t! He has no clue what that image is. His reflexes are triggered by your voice, which is screaming at him, and your hand, which is twisting his head off. He just thinks you’re mad at him and is filled with doggie guilt.
And when I’d done with that, my dog’s extremities …
Example: The neighbors are over for coffee, you’re chatting away and there’s Tippy on the floor, bent double like a fur donut, licking his own balls! Staggering! If you could do that you’d stay home permanently! But no one says a word …
It was graced with the term “observational humor.” I think I was even sometimes credited with inventing it. Later it would reemerge as what I call my micro-world material—but by then always balanced with macro-world material. Back in the seventies, it seemed a rich vein I could mine for a while.
The very fact that I didn’t see what was happening—and I never have quite been able to untangle why I was behaving like this—
is itself a sign of profound confusion. Yet I can’t believe it was simply involuntary, that I was just passively letting it happen to me. I think I was also saying to myself, “Okay. I showed them I could be a success on my own terms. Now let’s see what I can do from the place I’ve ended up.”
In other words, given an opportunity to curve back to the middle, to become straight again, I took it. I got waylaid by that. Instead of taking a new leap into the dark—“I’ve got another place to go, another idea to show you!”—I said, “No, this is okay. Let’s be Safe.”
I’ve always called these years of my life the Second Visitation of the Straights.
One other path I did consider, although it eventually led nowhere either. On Toledo Window Box there was a piece called “Water Sez.” A stream of consciousness cut personifying water:
I’m gonna get some water. This is your H-two-O, my friend. I don’t mind telling you. From the scientific community … Lookit that, huh? Just drops and drips. Water sez, “I don’t care.” Water sez, “Drink me, I don’t give a shit.” Water sez, “Put me on your ass, I don’t care.”
Water sez, “Leave me alone, I’m in the lake. Get the hell away from my water place!” Ice is water, some water is ice. Some water hasn’t been water for a long time. It’s ICE! At the North Pole. Long time no water! “Ice. What are you—I’m ice. I WAS water. I’m hopin’ to be water again—after the Ice Age, hahahahahaha!”
You could be two kinds of ice. You could be ice made in the machine at the Holiday Inn. OOO-ER! Or you could be a hunk of ice that comes across a Mail Pouch sign in Minnesota on January 21 …
Sometimes I just say shit I’ve never heard before, man.
There were a number of other little blips like this, bubbles of conceptual possibility that didn’t get on the album. If I had been free of my middle-class entanglements, my family, my house, my debt structure, my obligations, this might have been the point where I veered off into conceptual art. Streams of consciousness harnessed into form, let loose again and harnessed back until finally you’d have something with form and structure that sprang purely from your improvisational side.
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