Because now the bombshells began—major ones.
I had not only run out of money trying to fund The Illustrated George Carlin, Brown and Kraft had run out of money when the time came to pay my taxes. So they’d rolled over the taxes to the next year, gambling I guess that my earnings would increase enough that I’d be able to pay that year’s taxes, plus the previous year’s taxes, plus the penalties that had accrued for nonpayment. (If I’d bothered to open my monthly statements I might’ve had some inkling of what they were up to.) They’d rolled over taxes for at least two years: the delinquent back taxes plus accumulated penalties were now an astronomical amount and escalating every month. All this is in L.A., where the IRS has a definite “Let’s go get the stars” approach.
Jerry decided to drop Brown and Kraft and go with his accountants in Rochester, Bonadio, Insero. He and his father had used them for years for all their real-estate dealings, their country music promotions and their vending business. They were accustomed to complex tax issues and it moved the case away from the L.A. IRS culture, lessening the likelihood that the media would find out about my problems or that the IRS would slap a lien on my house or my car. Jerry saw that even a tiny news item like that would be toxic to reviving my career.
To start fulfilling the “hot” goal, Jerry decided I needed a new album. I hadn’t recorded an album in five years—after doing one almost every year—and it would be a talking point: “Check this out: George is on his way back.”
But the album deal contained a second bombshell. I had a longstanding agreement with Atlantic Records that there’d be a large advance for my next album: $300,000. Jerry confirmed this with them: a welcome piece of good news. Later the same day, he got a call from the head of Atlantic, Sheldon Vogel: “Listen, we’ve been discussing George internally and going over his sales figures and it’s not going to happen. We’re offering him $100,000.” It wasn’t something you could argue with or take to court. They had the hammer.
To do something different and attention-getting, I needed to get back to a concept album. I made it half live, half in studio. It was called A Place for My Stuff. Overall I felt I didn’t pull the concept off, although there’s some good material on it. It was the first time I used the line: “Why is it that the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” The stand-up stuff was passable. The studio stuff really stunk. I had no experience in the studio and I wasn’t about to let anybody help me. But it was something to talk about, and the “stuff” routine, which was the opening of the live portion, eventually became a signature piece for the next generation of material.
There’s something in comedy called the Rule of Three. Three is the magic number. There are three ethnic types in the standard corny joke. History would’ve been very different with only Two Stooges. Repeating something three times is funny but four, five, eight, ten or sixteen times increasingly less so. I have a supplementary rule to go with the Rule of Three. Call it the Rule of Twenty-Three. After a certain number of repetitions, whatever it is starts being funny again.
The Rule of Twenty-Three is behind A Place for My Stuff. Stuff is a funny word and bears repetition. A lot of it. So although the piece was tightly written and disciplined, it sounded like a kind of incantation—or one of those litanies we used to have to say in church.
All you need is a place for your stuff … there’s my stuff … there’s her stuff … and that’ll be his stuff … gotta take care of your stuff … a house is just stuff with a cover on it … a place to keep your stuff … you can get more stuff to add to your stuff … lock up your stuff … don’t want people stealing your stuff … all kinds of ways to get rid of your stuff … and that’s YOUR stuff … then there’s other people’s stuff … except other people’s stuff isn’t stuff, it’s shit … where’d they get that shit … there’s no room for my stuff …
In a way the album concept was an audio version of The Illustrated George Carlin—cutting away from live performance to recorded vignettes. Perhaps that’s why Brenda and I decided to revive the movie at around the same time. Jerry went along, partly because he didn’t want to come in like a new broom sweeping everything old away: “This stinks, that sucks.” Partly he wanted me to go for the things I wanted (or thought I did).
He found two backers in Toronto: Ron Cohen, who was producing movies up there, and a director named Bob Schultz. But Bob was one of these guys who make a film frame with their thumbs and fingers and he started talking about “the thread” and “I see you on a beach. I see you on a beach at sunset …” I knew then that it was as hopeless as it had always been. The whole thing just collapsed in a heap.
I don’t often cry, but I cried on the phone that night to Brenda: “It’s not going to work! It’s a rotten process! It sucks!” I went to a club called Yuk Yuk’s, watched other guys being comedians and smoked a lot of pot in the stairwell. I called Brenda back (she was with her folks in Dayton) and said, “I’m driving down to Dayton.”
I rented a car and drank a lot of beer on the way. A real lot: it’s 360 miles. I was stopped twice but got out of it, because I was a celebrity. Finally I reached Dayton in the dead of night, got lost and crashed my car in the middle of nowhere into a huge fucking hole. Completely demolishing my nose. Which seemed to end any chance I might’ve had of ever being in the movies. No nose, no movies.
But God jumped in again. It’s two in the morning when I crash. I’m bleeding profusely and I’m unconscious. The police who arrived—I found this out later from a good cop who saved my ass—were going to plant cocaine on me. I’d crashed in the black section and they were going to set up a comedian-in-the-black-section-scoring-drugs thing.
In fact, for once, I didn’t have any drugs. Just a lot of empty beer bottles. The good cop told them they couldn’t set me up, stopped them cold. Not only that, he wrote the crash up as strictly an accident. No DWI. Finally I get to a hospital. It’s three in the morning—and on duty in the emergency room is a plastic surgeon! He was able to do the initial things that saved my nose. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Brenda was born. Catholic hospitals have always been good luck for me.
Slowly but surely Jerry was building things back up. He dealt with the Taxman on a weekly basis, keeping that off my back. He was making me more money from appearances than before. He did all the booking and promoting of the shows himself so there was no one to split with, no agency to pay, no promoter’s fee and no promoter ripping us off on fifty or sixty seats. That automatically made things more profitable. He began to find little markets in between big markets, where you had a small theater of about 1,100 seats and could do two shows a night. Places like Club Bene in South Amboy, New Jersey, that didn’t affect the New York market or the Philadelphia market. He began loading me up and getting me out there.
Playboy came back into my life. They wanted to interview me. Playboy still had a huge circulation in the early eighties and their monthly interview was a big deal; a major indicator of media status. Jerry thought it was important, another talking point. Something else to send people: “See? George is on his way back.”
Both of us knew what Playboy was really interested in: my drug problems. Still, Jerry figured it was worth the risk. It turned out in my favor: an opportunity to put the cocaine years behind me (which was true enough: all my coke money was going to the Taxman). It was pretty funny and fairly smart; a lot of personal history that underlined I’d been around for a while and wasn’t about to leave the scene anytime soon. The cutline on the piece summed it up: “A candid conversation with the brilliant—and still rebellious—comedian about his new life after years of inactivity and a crippling cocaine habit.”
Jerry wanted me to do another HBO special. We owed them one, actually: after the second one in 1978, Artie Warner had squeezed a $40,000 advance out of them to meet the movie payroll. HBO was growing fast and the whiz kid behind it, Michael Fuchs, had developed a winning strategy vis-à-vis network TV: that on cable you could
say and do (but mostly say) things you’d never hear on NBC, CBS and ABC. That made me a natural for them.
Jerry wouldn’t shoot it just anywhere: it had to be Carnegie Hall. He liked the alliteration of “Carlin at Carnegie,” and it was in line with his “big” goal: not every comedian could play Carnegie. It would give me status, single me out. The only night he could book was a Sunday in the fall—he hated that because it would mean paying New York stagehands double golden time. But he took it, even though it would mean we could only shoot one show—there would be no “safety” show the following night to edit from and cover fuckups. Brenda’s needs were met too—she would actually produce the show; Jerry, who’d never produced any television, would executive produce.
Then the third and biggest bombshell went off.
I happened to have a hatred for the Dodgers. (This has abated now, because I’ve realized where my real values lie. I’ve retreated from emotional sports involvement.) But at that time I was still rooted in the old patterns. I hated any Los Angeles team. I wished them ill. I still wish them ill from an intellectual standpoint.
I especially hate the Dodgers, because they deserted me when I was a boy. I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and when they left New York, they left a hole in my heart. Then the Mets came along. I liked the Mets, because they represented what the Dodgers used to be—inept National League working-class stiffs. (At least they were in the beginning.) Back in ’82, I was still totally in the Mets camp.
The Mets come to L.A. and Jerry and I get invited out to Dodger Stadium to watch the game from those moronic field-level boxes, where you really can’t see the game. You only see the outfielders from the chest up, because of the crown of the field. But these fucking ignorant, cocksucking Dodger fans in the boxes think it’s the hottest thing ever. Dodger fucks who know nothing about baseball, who arrive in the third inning and leave in the seventh (they’re famous for that) and in between listen to the game on the radio so they can understand what the fuck’s happening.
So there I am in the belly of the beast sitting in a field box with these privileged cocksuckers, drinking beers at a fierce clip and eating very fatty hotdogs, arguing with the Dodger fans and cursing at the Dodger players on the field. (I would’ve made a great soccer hooligan.)
We’re in the sixth or seventh inning; the Mets are winning but Valenzuela is pitching. Fernando is at his peak and very popular out there. He’s pitching a close, close game and the Dodgers look like they might pull it out. For once the Dodger fucks are watching every pitch, every swing.
Suddenly I get this bad tightness in my chest. It’s not a pain. I don’t collapse. The feeling is more like: “If I only just stretch enough, this will go away.” But it wouldn’t.
I said to Jerry, “Something’s wrong with me. Let’s go to the nurse. We gotta go to the medical office.” So I go to the medical office. Don’t ever do that. A little tip for you readers out there who might be planning to have a heart attack at Dodger Stadium. Do not go to the nurse’s office. Here is the extent of medical treatment for a heart attack at Dodger Stadium: 1. They have you lie down. 2. They ask you how you feel.
I said to Jerry, “I’m not having a heart attack, but let’s get to a hospital and check.” A friend of ours, John Battiste, a limo driver and an acting teacher, had driven us there. We’d said we’d meet up with him at the end of the game at a specific place. Meanwhile he was going to go and park somewhere else and hang out with the other limo drivers. So we had no idea where he might be.
So far all this had taken maybe half an hour. You have a couple of hours before the real damage sets in. I didn’t know that, but then I didn’t know I was having a heart attack either. But here the Carlin luck kicks in. Normally the Dodger fucks would have been repeating their usual pattern of leaving in the seventh inning. The aisles would’ve been clogged with thousands of fat cocksuckers on the hoof, slowing up egress. But for this game everyone was staying. So I guess while the Dodgers might’ve helped give me the heart attack, they also helped me beat it.
Jerry, who’d never been in Dodger Stadium in his life, found John instantly, right where we left him and next to the car. I lay down in the back and John drove like a maniac from downtown L.A. to Saint John’s in Santa Monica. It’s sixteen or seventeen miles, and he must have made it in ten minutes.
I get there and I’m in bad shape. I wasn’t unconscious in the limo, but now I’m in and out. Or maybe they knocked me out or let me pass out. I have little recall of this part. They give you nitroglycerin, and then if you get a headache from the nitro they give you some morphine for the headache. They try to balance everything out and get you stable. All they want to do is stabilize you.
I come around long enough to see that Brenda and Kelly have arrived. Kelly is crying and crying. I say: “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be okay.” Which just makes her cry harder. What I don’t know is that my pulse is down to 20 and Brenda’s been told that I’m “going.” There’s not a lot left the medical team can do. The women in my life have been brought in to say goodbye. I pass out again.
Suddenly, at the last moment, someone came up with the idea to use streptokinase. Streptokinase, a highly effective clot-buster, is now standard cardiac therapy in emergency rooms, but at the time it had only just been developed and very few hospitals had it. It happened that Saint John’s had been experimenting with it. They asked Brenda if they could use it. She said yes, absolutely! And it turned me around.
They wanted to go on and do open-heart surgery but Brenda said no. I don’t know why. All they do is slice your chest open, crack your ribs, spread them back as if they’re butterflying you, take your heart out, cut arteries from your leg, sew the new arteries back onto your heart, put your heart back and sew you up. What’s the big deal? It’s no worse than Aztec human sacrifice.
She said later she’d heard somewhere that a lot of men have real personality changes after open-heart surgery. That if this affected me to the point where I became afraid or withdrawn and couldn’t work, it would destroy me.
She may have been right, but if I’d made the decision I would probably have said go ahead. I don’t think I’d let surgery change my personality. First of all, I’m extremely optimistic and positive. Secondly, I hate to behave in clichés. I’d never go: “Now I’m compromised. I’m damaged. I’m crippled. I think I’ll change my personality.”
I realized I’d almost died. I didn’t go: “Nothin’ happened here! Gimme a beer.” But I didn’t dwell on it. I never had a Big Philosophical Moment. Although I will say this: I have looked death in the face. And found it wanting.
I’d like to keep you up to date on the Comedian’s Health Sweepstakes. First Richard Pryor had a heart attack. Then I had a heart attack. Then Richard burned himself up. Fuck that shit! I’m going to have another heart attack. Current standings are … Heart Attacks: Carlin two, Pryor one. Burning Yourself Up: Richie one, Carlin zero.
Carlin at Carnegie in 1982 was the pivotal event in my career after the drift and confusion of the late seventies. The material wasn’t stellar: with the exception of the heart attack sweepstakes and “Seven Dirty Words” (included by special request of Mr. Fuchs), it was mostly A Place for My Stuff.
As usual I was unhappy with my performance. So was Brenda. She’d been saying all along that Jerry was crazy to insist on Carnegie, where we could only do one show and no “safety.” She actually reduced me to tears. But I thought she was right: I’d missed a giant opportunity.
Jerry wasn’t so sure. He’d seen a performance that “wasn’t bad.” What he’d also seen, that I couldn’t, was powerful symbolism. I was back at Carnegie Hall, where I’d been ten years earlier at the height of my first breakthrough. I’d shown I could bounce back from a near-fatal Big Ticker Event and joke about it. The lack of focus, the tentativeness, the hey-man looseness of the seventies had all vanished. I took the stage from the moment I came on and held it till I left. Sure, there were some fluffs and shot timing and nervousness, but the first
hints of a new voice were emerging with an edge to it that hadn’t been there before.
HBO’s subscribers agreed with Jerry. When it came out in early ’83 it was a ratings smash. Within weeks we were selling out double shows again and I was giving the wild and crazy guy a run for his money. Carlin at Carnegie was the real beginning of a relationship with HBO that over the next twenty-five years first incubated my artistic development and then set the seal on it. Without that anchor I don’t know how exactly I would have evolved as a performer and an artist. You could say as HBO grew, I grew, but it wasn’t just the size of the audience and the fact that it was self-selecting. The constant need for a new hour of material every couple of years kept me fresh and productive. And HBO’s absolute lack of censorship was liberating. Whatever topic I chose, people I attacked, language I used, views or opinions I expressed, I never heard: “We’d rather you didn’t …” “We’d prefer if you’d …” “Could you change/tone down/leave out …? ” Even in the vicious, repressive atmosphere of the Bush years, they’ve never wavered.
HBO’s Carlin at Carnegie special was the last time I ever recorded a version of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” There was no need. For the first time, all seven were on television.
15
I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
George and Patrick Carlin
(Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)
I’m in Pittsfield tonight. I go from there to Lexington and then to Winston-Salem for the two-a-nights … This weekend I’ll be in Fort Myers and Corpus Christi … Then on to Pensacola, Birmingham, Raleigh … Work at full bore. Pressure, pressure.
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