Last Words

by George Carlin;Tony Hendra

Death and the Taxman looking over your shoulder makes life different.

  There was a growing aggressiveness, a new confidence and coherence—and urgency. I didn’t have the luxury of sitting around, smoking dope and thinking: “Boy, that was close.” I had to get on with my life.

  Throughout the eighties I had outbursts of anger. It kept building up and festering. Anger at myself for getting myself in this tax mess, for being such a cokehead I didn’t have the sense to avoid the tax mess. Anger at myself for not getting Brenda help sooner and for the damage we did to Kelly.

  But good stuff came from that anger. Gradually I learned to channel it where it really belonged—fueling the new voice that had made those brief appearances at Carnegie. A voice that slowly grew sharper, stronger, populating my whole personality; more authentically me, more authoritative.

  All this can be linked to the confidence that came from being hooked up with Jerry. I was realizing that I hadn’t just gotten a manager for his incredibly generous percentage. I also got an agent, a promoter, a road manager, a business adviser and financial backer; and as I’ve said, a best friend, a kindred spirit whose mind worked along the same diseased lines as mine. Who I could riff and free-associate with during the long road trips and wee hours in dreary motels. Over the years Jerry’s sown the seeds of some of my best pieces.

  Having such confidence in him, I could turn my attention internally to my work. Concentrate on how I expressed myself, how I could entertain them, make them like me, all the elements that make up what I do. When uncertainty and unreliability and financial pressure eat up a large percentage of your energy it’s impossible to pay attention to that. And when it’s relieved, all that energy is now yours.

  Hamza’s presence is so much larger than just a sentence that says: “And then I met Jerry.”

  The financial pressure was huge. I’d claimed two things in the seventies as major business losses. One was The Illustrated George Carlin—millions there, a money pit. The other was a piece of land up past Malibu, at Zuma Beach. Its official name was Meadow Creek Farms, but we called it the Funny Farm. We paid for the upkeep and the salary of the couple who ran it, Jill McAtee and her partner, Odie. Kelly kept horses at the Funny Farm and Brenda had a notion about eventually breeding horses up there.

  Kelly had started riding in high school and it became kind of an obsession. She was really good—a hunter-jumper, english-style. In her senior year, when she was eighteen, she was third on the entire West Coast in junior jumpers. Competing is a form of performance and she had incredible performance anxiety: she threw up before and after events. But it was the one thing in our chaotic family environment that she could control. It gave her a sense of self and kept her anchored during her own problem years.

  The Taxman hadn’t allowed either of these as business losses—they would have to go to an arbitrator or tax court. (Eventually they allowed the movie.) For now we couldn’t deduct them from our tax bill. Which was gigantic and always growing. Often they’d look at a year and say: “You owe another two hundred grand.” When I couldn’t pay it, the big run-up was interest and penalties, endless interest and penalties. Plus the years in question were at least 50 percent taxable. Some in the seventies were at the old 70 percent rate.

  Say I owed a million. Not counting the running interest and penalties on the million dollars for every day they went unpaid, I had to earn two million at 50 percent tax rates to pay the back tax. Then I had to pay a million current taxes on the two million. I’ve earned two million dollars and I haven’t even bought a hat!

  Jerry shielded me from the worst implications of all of this. I’m sure he felt: “As long as we have to do this anyway, I’ll relieve George of the worst news. Not tell him, boy, it looks fucking bleak and it’s getting worse.” But sometimes he would have to tell me: “They found another $525,000, they’re looking at 1977 now as well as ’78 and ’79.” Then we’d have to bite the bullet and get a loan or increase the mortgage or get a second mortgage. Sometimes the Taxman wanted money faster than I could make it. Jerry was a rock. Twice in the ’80s, he reached into his own pocket and loaned me over a million dollars …

  Brenda always said that I was being singled out because of what I did and said onstage. That’s why it went on so long—almost twenty years in the end—without any attempt to settle it on the part of the IRS. And it’s true that many people in showbiz have tax problems—worse than ours—but eventually there’d always be a settlement. Seventy cents on the dollar, fifty cents on the dollar, whatever. But that never happened for me. She was convinced the Taxman was really saying: “Shut the fuck up. Or suffer.” I don’t know if it was true but I loved her for thinking of it. She had a great line about the whole affair: Despite everything I said about the government, like not trusting anything they told me, I went out every night—and worked for them.

  Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might’ve been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.

  All through the eighties I had a visceral reaction to those who supported him. Especially on planes. I lost count of how many times I sat up in first class with all these business suits, feeling a great welling anger in my gut. Livid at the conversations of these cocksuckers, with their smug body language, their little leather briefcases, their neatly folded Wall Street Journals, their aura of being in charge, running the show. I knew they were totally happy about what had happened and that they were in a position to gloat. It hastened new directions for me.

  The osmosis from the prevailing political climate is very real in a person like myself. And so, all through those Reagan years, another process accelerated. Along with finding my authentic voice, I was finding an authentic position to speak from.

  A decade earlier, when I’d done my gold albums, I didn’t have any synthesized sets of feelings or information about politics. Beyond a few one-liners about racism or Vietnam I had no coherent point of view. It was more a question of: “Let’s just get HIIIGGGHHH! Yeah, man, I’m against this and I’m against that, but who the fuck knows why?”

  I was very unsophisticated. I certainly couldn’t back up what political positions I had or argue them any with weight. I didn’t have a political self. Yes, I’d thrown off the phony media me, rediscovered the authentic rebel child and clown, rejoined my own history, dug out my personal truth from misguided ambitions. All good. But after a certain point, I’d discovered not much remained to be rediscovered. I’d exhausted my personal history—right down to snot-as-rubber-cement and my old toenails. I’d never considered or explored the creative process in terms of the tension between the internal me and the external political environment. But now I could and would …

  Death continued to keep an eye on the Carlin household. After the heart attack we decided I needed an angioplasty, which is a technique where a tiny balloon is inserted in a narrowed artery and inflated to increase blood flow. There were only a few places in the early eighties that had done the procedure enough times to have a good track record. The cardiologist at Saint John’s sent my angiograms around to the short list of hospitals, including Emory University in Atlanta, where a surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig practiced. He was the Austrian doctor who’d invented angioplasty and was considered the best. He agreed to do my arteries, or as they say, my “vessel.”

  He did my right coronary vessel. The angiogram showed that two other vessels—my left anterior descending coronary artery and the diagonal off the LAD where they come together—were also narrowing. So the angioplasty is over and I’m in the recovery room with this sandbag on the wound to help close it. And I’m feeling chipper because the thing was a success. Gruentzig comes in and he’s covered with blood. All over, even on those scrub things they wear on their feet.

  Which I thi
nk is great. And he says, “Ja. You looking pink. Ja—much pinker.” I said, “Yeah, I feel good. Let me ask you something. How come you didn’t do those other two on the left?” He says, “We’re not here to show off. We have sufficient blood flow from the right coronary artery now. If one of them would have closed down you would still have had enough collateral flow that you would be healthy and you would not lose much tissue.” I thought that was pretty snotty—especially in his Austrian accent, but Jerry was laughing. Later I asked him why: “You’re sitting there and this guy is covered in your blood and you’re basically begging him to give you open-heart surgery!”

  Then it was Brenda’s turn. When we did Carlin at Carnegie in 1982 she’d found a little lump on her breast, but it was just a cyst so she let it go. After she finished editing—it took four months because we didn’t have that safety show—she went in for a checkup, and the doctor looked at it and said yeah, it was a cyst, but he didn’t want to aspirate it because of the implants she’d gotten in the seventies.

  So she went in for minor surgery and when she woke up there were three doctors standing over her bed. Under the cyst they’d found a tumor that no mammogram had shown. Luckily it hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes, but her options were either radiation and chemo or a modified mastectomy—taking a wedge of the breast out with the tumor. They gave her forty-eight hours to decide.

  This was a rock and a hard place. After she got sober she was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis (now called hepatitis C). Her liver was shot. They put her on prednisone and gave her a few weeks to live. She went through hell on these drugs, became psychotic and suicidal and diabetic. She pulled through, but when it was all over she still had hepatitis. But they did give her TWO YEARS to live. Nine years later she still had the hepatitis C so chemo and radiation weren’t much of an option. They’d probably kill her.

  But … a mastectomy? She was only forty-four. We called three different surgeons and asked them, “What would you tell your wife to do?” They all said get it out. So she had a modified mastectomy. And it worked.

  Given that her mother died of breast cancer, Brenda obsessed about reliving that history: that she wouldn’t make it past fifty (which was the age her mother died). But she didn’t die and there was no recurrence, although given her compromised system her doctors had concerns about that. In 1985 she had reconstructive surgery, and that was a good move too. (The surgeon was Steven Hoffman, the one who did Michael Jackson.) But once you’ve had cancer you’re always in the waiting room, and every time she went in for a mammogram she too felt Death was looking over her shoulder.

  We kept Brenda for many more years but we did lose Mary. In the early eighties I’d relented about her banishment to New York. She came back to California and I set her up in Santa Monica at an assisted-living place on Ocean Avenue called the Georgian Hotel. It was a quiet place and a quiet neighborhood, overlooking the ocean, but she still had some tart comments left in her—she was in her mideighties by now—and a steady stream of complaints about how I ignored her and never had time for her. Same old Mary. But she seemed to have forgotten about the $52.50 I owed her.

  In late ’83 she had a massive stroke that left her nonambulatory, and we moved her to a more full-service assisted-living place across from Saint John’s. She declined pretty quickly and died in June of 1984 at the age of eighty-seven.

  In ’86 I had to get a second angioplasty. An angiogram showed that one of the arteries Gruentzig hadn’t done was now closing. The cardiologist from Saint John’s who had taken me to Emory University decided to do the angioplasty himself right there in Santa Monica. Now, if you have an angioplasty and anything happens, if they split a vein or something, they do immediate bypass surgery, or that’s it, you die. They always have a team standing by. I wasn’t too worried—it’s not invasive and I’d been through it before.

  But Brenda was tense and she turned out to be right. During the procedure the wire went into the wrong artery and there was damage to it. So she and Kelly are sitting outside the OR and suddenly there are doctors and carts everywhere in the hall and they’re figuring I’m going to die and it’s déjà vu—Hi and Goodbye time again.

  Anyway they work on me and I’m fine, though Brenda was certain I’d had another heart attack because of all the activity. They medicate me to keep the arteries open and I get through it. A few months later I got angina, which indicated a closing artery, and something had to be done. Brenda had got it into her head that I needed to go to San Francisco, where there was a doctor named Meyler, who’d been Gruentzig’s original partner and developed the angioplasty technique with him. We had a big fight about this, because I couldn’t see what was wrong with going back to Saint John’s, and she was saying, “Why wouldn’t you go to the man who was Gruentzig’s partner?” Finally I had her make an appointment for me. We went up to San Francisco and Meyler did this wonderful variant of angioplasty called the kissing balloon technique, where they did the other two vessels at the same time. And that was angioplasty Number Three. And by no means the last.

  I began to do something about my political ignorance. I subscribed to publications like Anarchy magazine, Mother Jones, In These Times, the Nation. I read a lot of sociology and social history. I sought out the most radical parts of the Village Voice, which I’d always kept a subscription to because I liked the New York edge. I knew I’d always find someone really far left. Not just Village Voice–left, but someone really wailing, like Alexander Cockburn. I discovered Noam Chomsky, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal, writers who said things in a daring manner, truly dissenting voices.

  I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues. On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds toward various classes of people. None of which included skin color or ethnicity or religion. Well—religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar right-wingers, but that passed, because I saw that in the end they were just a different sort of victim.

  I felt discomfort at having received positions on issues, simply because of my preference for the left of center, for people’s rights over property rights. I was beginning to find that a lot of my positions clashed. The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I’d see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so that I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn’t even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

  That wasn’t an entirely new feeling. I’d worked for Jesse Unruh in 1970 when he ran against Reagan, during Reagan’s second run for governor. (My brief little brush with electoral politics.) One of the rally talks I gave for Unruh was at an Elks Lodge in Stockton. I pointed out to these democratic liberals that, “You’re having your meeting in a place that has excluded black members for years. Just thought you might like to know.”

  I hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time in 1984. (I like to do it every nine years. For some reason Lorne didn’t call in ’93 or 2002. I’ll give him one more chance in 2011.) This time, unlike the first, I was determined to do sketches, because my acting ambitions had been relit. I felt confident and different enough about who I was by then. I did three sketches, and I have to say I was really good. They were with Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Chris Guest. I did a policeman sketch with Billy Crystal as the father. And Martin Short played this crazy rock guy.

  At the cast party, Martin came over and he said, “You know you were terrific in that policeman thing, because you played the middle man.” (Which is an old vaudeville term for the man in the middle. And apparently it was a position of responsibility.) I had this wonderful running line where Billy would ask me a question and I would say, “Not to my knowledge. Not that I’m aware of.”

  I was really pleased Martin had taken that trouble. So no
w I’m over with Billy. I had done some things in the sketch, small though they were, that came so naturally to me I knew I now had the chops to be an actor. And would get it done when the time for the film acting came. So I said to Billy: “So long, man. The sketch went nice, didn’t it?” And since I knew he was going to leave Saturday Night Live and go to movies the next year and I was beginning to seriously explore them again myself, I added: “Maybe we’ll get to do a movie together someday.”

  And he gave me this look as if I was some kind of a bug. Like, “Oh yeah? That certainly doesn’t work into my plans.”

  So it was satisfying that I got a pretty fat role in a movie before he did—Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Shelley Long—which turned out to be a hit. And I think I got my star on Hollywood Boulevard before he did. Of course, he starred in When Harry Met Sally … a couple of years later and took off. Still, for that one moment, fuck him.

  I had a ball making Outrageous Fortune; it was the kind of belonging I’d always longed for. Part of a group I wanted to be part of. It’s a cliché that’s been used to death, but there is a family feeling when you work with people on an artistic project for four, six, eight weeks; my work wasn’t even that long and I still felt it. Like being at camp with good friends and there’s this little ashtray you’re all making together …

  I played—of course—a burned-out hippie who’s an alcoholic and lives on an Indian reservation and hustles tourists. The part’s not huge but the impact is great because in a way he’s the hero—he saves the whole situation they get into. I played a fairly broad character and I had just a terrific experience, doing my homework, coming in prepared, working with the other actors, going for those little shadings. It was everything I’d hoped it would be, and it led to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure a couple of years later, and then a good role in The Prince of Tides and more recently Dogma and Jersey Girl with Kevin Smith. I’ve always had that same feeling of belonging, working with friends, and enjoying the counterpunching with them. A dream that in a nice little way actually came true. Even if I never did become Jack Lemmon the Second.