Last Words
Page 26
The Aspen Comedy Arts Festival in ’97, where I was honored for forty years in comedy, had a little of that. Not totally: I was proud of the HBO compilation of my work to date—40 Years of Comedy, my ’97 HBO special—and it was my first taste of Jon Stewart. He was just a kid at the time and he did a great interview. Maybe a little too respectful, but he soon got over that. Boy, did he go on to do brilliant things.
There were a bunch of us: Dennis Miller, me, Laraine Newman and Janeane Garofalo thrown in for gender equality, and an SNL contingent: Chevy, Lorne, Martin Short, Steve Martin. I have a lot of respect for Steve Martin. I think he’s got a great mind. He’s made some good choices. And I like Martin Short’s talent. But it’s a club.
I had something in my head for each of them: you fantasize these encounters beforehand and prepare. A little personal thing I wanted to say to each one, Chevy, Lorne, Martin and Steve. Just to make human contact, because I’m out of this club. Steve Martin came by. I hadn’t seen him since 1967 on the Smothers Brothers show, where he gave me an eight-by-ten signed: “Not just another pretty face.” I pulled him aside and said, “Steve, you know I haven’t seen you in a long time. And I want you to know how happy I am for your career and the things that you’ve done.”
He was touched, I could see, a little taken aback, but kind of touched. I’d made human contact. I told him about the photo—that I still had it and occasionally have it out to show people.
Now I see Lorne, for whom I have no respect, because he’s a fucking hands-and-knees cocksucker, but I wanted to make contact so I put on a nice face and I said, “Lorne, all these years I’ve wanted to apologize to you for making that first week so difficult because of the cocaine.” He nods and thanks me. Like he’s accepting my apology and that’s that. No clear human contact like I got from Steve.
By now we’re in a big briefing room that looks like the Council on Economic Affairs; everybody has a pad and a glass of water and a pencil. The room is largely empty and is where they’re supposed to brief us before we go to the dais for the press conference.
So it’s Lorne, Martin, Chevy, Steve and me. That’s it. And HBO’s camera. I do a little thing with Lorne that’s funny, we laugh, there’s a couple of good cocaine jokes. But then it becomes Lorne telling the others Famous Cocaine Stories From SNL: “Gary Busey in the countdown to air … he snorts … 5, 4 … he snorts … 3, 2 … he snorts …” Okay, fine. But I never got another glance, never another word.
Martin Short came over. When I’d done SNL the second time, Martin had been nice and I’d never told him I was grateful. So I said, “I always wanted to tell you—I saw you in Toscana a few weeks ago and I didn’t get a chance—how nice that was of you on SNL and how touched I was by your words.” And he said, “Oh, I didn’t know that.” Some empty words. Just—WHOOSSSSSHHH: no contact. And Martin is a person who, when I see his work, I feel has something really human in him. I forget what I said to Chevy.
Then it’s just movie talk, yuppie talk. Nothing stuff and still not a glance or a word. And I’m realizing that this group of people, who were once considered radical and revolutionary, has become just another fucking Hollywood celebrity club. The Lorne Club. That their chitchat is a modern version of the fraudulent showbiz crap I was expected to do forty years ago in Mike Douglas’s gazebo.
We move on to the press conference and first of all there are a lot of Saturday Night Live questions. Chris Albrecht from HBO, who’s moderating, tries to direct a question or two toward me so I’m included, but I dismiss them with short answers. The press is not interested in me at all. Now people start asking these pretentious questions about the effect of television on CHILDREN. Dennis Miller’s next to me, who I think is an arrogant person but I kinda like his mind. Dennis occasionally says something and I occasionally say something. But they’re all talking about CHILDREN.
Steve and Chevy were very funny. They’re very funny people, though Chevy might not want to be doing so many pratfalls now that he’s a little larger than back when he was doing Ford. But they’re quick and bing! they land on each other and the banter was wonderful.
I’m letting it go whenever it’s CHILDREN this and CHILDREN that. Now it’s the Internet and THE CHILDREN and we can’t protect THE CHILDREN and porn and THE CHILDREN. This goes on and on and even Chevy, when he’s not doing structural damage to the building, is being self-important and pretentious about THE CHILDREN.
They finally call on me and I say: “There’s TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO CHILDREN in this country! Leave them ALONE! They’re gonna BE ALL RIGHT! They’re SMARTER THAN YOU ARE!”
There was a big laugh on it. HBO used it as the punch line in their on-air version of the event. Fuck the Lorne Club.
On April 5, 1997, Brenda was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. They said the cancer had metastasized from her breast cancer and attacked her liver, always vulnerable because of the hepatitis C. A liver transplant was not an option because of her previous cancer.
Some part of me probably knew it was the end. The part of me that always looks for the brighter side got the better of it. The doctors fed that a little, sugarcoated it, I think—that she might have three to four months. I wanted to believe them. Maybe even that she was going to live. They’d given her only a few weeks to live when she got sober in ’75, and ten years later worried that she’d have a recurrence of her breast cancer. Yet here she was: she’d survived so often. With all the progress in chemo and radiation, new drugs, protocols, treatments, why not again?
I decided to keep working.
I’d always been disturbed that my actions in the 1970s concerning my money and other behaviors had put me in the position where I had to be away from Brenda so much. I have a thoughtful nature—as a child I did—and I’d always tried do extra things for her that would be described as thoughtful acts, unprompted, unbidden. First, to make her more comfortable in every way in her physical feelings and her emotional world; and second, to let her know I was trying to compensate, consciously trying to atone—my mother’s word, very Catholic of course—for these absences.
And ’97 was an unusually busy season, with the normal work schedule plus Aspen in February and the book tour for my first book, Brain Droppings, which was to begin in May. I’d said to her: “I’m working on our retirement. We’re close to being even. I’m trying to get ahead of the game. Set some things in place that will make us less likely to be eaten by dogs later in life.” I saw that as part of the atonement.
But the initial diagnosis had been incorrect. The cancer hadn’t metastasized from her previous one. It was new, separate and aggressive. In fact the oncologist told us—afterward, of course, when it was too late to act upon—that under the microscope it was the most aggressive cancer he’d ever seen. Brenda deteriorated rapidly, and on the morning of May 11—Mother’s Day—she crashed. She was already unconscious when Kelly got her to Saint John’s. At midday all her systems shut down and her heart stopped.
I was in New York. I grabbed the first plane I could find. The doctors restarted Brenda’s heart and Kelly had them put her on life support till I could get back.
I hadn’t seen her for a week or more. Jaundice had made her skin yellow. All her hair was gone from the chemo. She was unconscious and unresponsive but … her eyes were open. I have no idea if she was aware of anyone, but I saw her eyes were tearing up a little.
I took a tissue and gently wiped away her tears.
My own health troubles seemed to be on hold. I’d had a third, pretty serious heart attack in ’91 while driving to Vegas and a follow-up one—less serious—in ’94. I believe that the ’94 one was related to the ’91 heart attack. They tried to do an angioplasty after that one and it failed, an artery went into spasm and I had a lot of angina. I went to San Francisco to my guys there and they said they didn’t want to touch the lesion. It was a little immature, not well formed. They said: “We don’t want to work on this artery, so we’re going to send you back to your cardiologist in L.A. and treat yo
u with medicine.” For three years that was fine, and then I began to get a tiny bit of angina—my usual kind in the throat—but only at the highest point of exercise. It would go away when I stopped exercising.
But I don’t fool around. I checked into the hospital and they took a look and did an angioplasty with a stent. A stent is a mesh cylinder, like a Chinese finger puzzle, made out of very fine wire. They insert the balloon with the stent, the balloon is expanded, the stent expands and then they deflate the balloon and take it out. The stent remains in the artery to keep it open. This prevents restenosis, which is the biggest problem with angioplasty—the dilations they make can reclose, either immediately or within six months. Stents had a much higher rate of keeping them open. I’m quite sure that the lesion he fixed was the one from ’91.
One strange thing about my heart problems is that I’ve always gotten in on, if not the leading edge of technology, things that were still in the experimental stage. When I got my stent, the procedure hadn’t yet been approved by the FDA. It was only in use in six hospitals. I was lucky again—as with the streptokinase—that they were experimenting with it in that particular hospital. At the time, the only other person I knew about who’d had a stent was Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa had a stent—I had stent. My mother would have been so proud.
It always seems to me when I have these heart attacks or angioplasties that it’s just mechanical work. It may have an organic origin—the plaque builds up because of a chemical reaction—but essentially it’s Roto-Rooter time. Let’s get in and clean out that clogged pipe. Everything I’ve ever had healthwise involved something that could be moved around. That’s lucky. Even the ablation I had in 2003, which is a procedure to correct arrhythmia, where they intentionally scar your heart to control the signals from your brain, is really just a kind of tune-up. Your heart’s not firing properly and needs adjustment. I’ve always felt optimistic and comfortable about my heart. Even with an attack, once it’s over you don’t feel any pain. With angioplasty, the only result is the incision they made and you just want to get home.
I sort things out well. I place things in my world where they ought to be mentally as well as physically. In fact I move my physical world around in order for my mental world to be a little easier to look at and work with. People ask me in interviews sometimes: “Didn’t the heart attacks change your life? Didn’t they change you?” And I say no, not really. Obviously I had to start exercising because I’d been sedentary my whole life. I had to start eating correctly because I’d been an American slob eater my whole life. Those were the only two changes. I’ve never lived with a sword of Damocles. I guess I knew another can strike at any moment so I don’t know how much of it is this wonderful thing we’ve discovered, denial. I don’t think so: denial has a different flavor. This is just being sensible about yourself and not being a fucking martyr and a victim.
One reason that I don’t worry too much about these things is that I’m happy in love.
I met Sally Wade about six months after Brenda’s death. She was a comedy writer based in Hollywood who’d always wanted to meet me, but was a bit shy about it. So her dog Spot made the first move for her. We fell for each other—I’ve always been lonely for people like me and she was a kindred spirit. Still, with Brenda’s death so recent, I wasn’t ready yet. Sally waited for me, and when we got together, I knew she would be the love of my life. And she is.
A big part of my job is exploding clichés. But it seems impossible to talk about what Sally and I have without them. I’ve already used a couple. So here’s a couple more: it was love at first sight, we’re crazy about each other, we have a great love together. And there’s more where those came from. The weird thing is, they’re all true.
At my age, I’m allowed a little inconsistency.
Throughout the nineties and whatever we call this decade—“the zeros” works for the Bush years—I’ve had a constant sense of growth and growing strength. I’ve always had the path ahead of me as my artistic life unfolded, sometimes with side roads and cul-de-sacs, true, but in spite of them a sense of growing internally, intellectually, emotionally, of constantly finding a better way to craft my work. And thanks to Jerry, I’ve always had plenty of shit to do out there, always had 125, 150 dates a year. There’s always an audience waiting for me in Topeka or Eugene or Orlando or Stevens Point, Wisconsin. There’ll always be a roomful of people somewhere, willing to sit quietly in the dark. Not too quietly, obviously, but at least sit in an orderly fashion and appreciate me and listen to my stuff and pay. That has a life-giving aspect. That is what I live for.
People always ask questions like: “How can you go on? Aren’t you anxious to retire? Aren’t you tired of the road?” But I realized something very simple a long time ago. I can’t do what I love to do without these people. I have to go where they live. They’re not going to come to my house. Even if I pay them.
Sure, there’s always bad stuff. The fucking Bide-A-Wee Motel or the rinky-dink airport where a wing’s fallen off the plane, all the bad shit about traveling we all know. And I’ve never liked being backstage. That’s the worst fucking place in the world. It’s like being in a boxing ring and the match hasn’t started yet. That’s where I used to get a lot of my drinking done. But I will say this: once I get onstage—not every night and not every minute of every night, but damned close—once I’m onstage, it’s a transformation. All the bad stuff just drips away when you step onstage.
You may have thirty, forty years under your belt. You may feel really good about your shit. You may know exactly what you’re going to do and that they’re predisposed to like you … But the instant I get out there it all starts over again. Right from the beginning. Win them over, and get ’em where I want ’em! That’s living! That’s the thing that feeds me, that’s my nourishment.
I don’t know if there’ll be any more movies. I did two with Kevin Smith, Dogma in ’99 and Jersey Girl in ’04, where he wrote me a great part as Ben Affleck’s dad. I like working with Kevin; there’s a lot of great counterpunching and the Catholic thing is a strong bond. Acting is fun to do, a worthy fraternity and a great tradition to have had a tiny speck of a part of. But stand-up and acting are like running versus strength training. You work aerobically running, that’s what you need to feel good. Sometimes you do strength training—a completely different set of muscles—and you feel good for completely different reasons. I’m a runner who makes occasional visits to the free weights.
I prefer rewards over awards. There’s something I like about having done so many HBO shows. Thirteen so far. It’s throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of comedy. Comedians who come later: this is the new standard! Thirteen one-hour shows on HBO and you’re in the club! And it’s rewarding to be able to say: “All right, now, I have proved to myself and to whoever’s watching what I wanted to prove in this form.”
Which is stand-up comedy in live performance. Long ago I described my job as being “a foole”; that’s still what I do. Once, this kind of comedy was called the people’s art, a vulgar art. Maybe all comedy is. I prefer live stand-up comedy to any other form. Since my changes in the early seventies I’ve only used television as an advertisement for myself. I’ve been blessed—and cursed—by events and circumstances that have made me, I think, one of the principal stand-ups of this era. The stand-up who has stayed longest with the stand-up form as his prime thing and made it what he does. Therefore I’ve had a chance to take some forward steps with it, at least for myself.
A lot of people who use stand-up to get them to movies let their stand-up work wither or forget about it altogether. Or they go out for a few dates to put together a special, then forget it for two years. The only other guys who did stand-up all their lives were from what I call the Jackie-Joey era—the forties and fifties, when they got their act to a certain level and just stayed at that level for the rest of their lives. I think I can say I’m one of the few people who, in the absence of a movie career and/or a television career, have taken
this form to higher levels. That feels good, that feels special. If I were a Jackie-Joey still doing an act exactly as I did it twenty years ago, I’d be ready for a large blunt weapon. Instead I have a feeling of progress and of achievement. I’ve contributed a little to the vulgar art.
18
BWING, DOING, GETTING
George and Kelly Carlin
(Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)
On 123rd Street, when I was young, we had a gang called the Gripers. (That struck terror into the neighborhood. Watch the fuck out or we’ll come gripe at you.) But even though I was in the Gripers, I wasn’t a Griper. Belonging to any group for me was always an ad hoc thing that filled some immediate need—in this case smoking pot—but not what you’d call a deep existential hunger. As soon as I started going steady with my first girlfriend, Mary Cathryn, I left the group. I was still a card-carrying Griper, but it was always: “Georgie’s up in the hall with Mary Cathryn.” The only gang I wanted to be part of was the Loners, membership restricted to one: me.
In the air force, where they enforced group thought, I got around it by hanging with the black airmen, completely cutting me out from being any part of the white guys. I was out of that group—and happy to be. Then I became a disc jockey, downtown, off base: I’m already edging away from air force group thought. I’m apart, different. Alone in front of a mike. Almost back to my gang of one.
It always seemed to me that the reasons groups came together were superficial. The group didn’t feed me, and I had nothing to contribute to it. I had a deeper goal, this giant puzzle to work on, which was only going to happen if they left me alone. “No one but me can figure me out. No one can help me with it.” All the group stuff: rules, uniforms, rituals, bonding, was a distraction. It denied me the chance to solve the giant puzzle: “Who the fuck am I, how did I come together? What are the parts and how do they fit?”