Time to be and not do. I learned that early on from my shrink, Al Weinstein, whom I loved and trusted but who died suddenly on me. He had a stroke. (It’s a really great feeling when your appointment gets canceled because your therapist died.)
But that doesn’t alter or affect his code of life, which was: Be. Do. Get.
And I don’t be enough, Jack.
I do plenty. I get some. But I don’t BE.
19
NEW YORK BOY
George at The Comedy Hall of Fame Awards, 1994
(Courtesy of George schlatter Productions Comedy Hall of Fame)
Clean and sober seems like the ending of a journey I’ve been on since I was a kid. Not a happy ending, I’ve never believed in those, but not an unhappy one either.
On December 27, 2004, during my Christmas break from the road, I made a decision I’d been putting off for a while. I went over to Jerry’s house and told him I wanted to go into rehab. For a long time—since giving up pot in the late eighties—I’d been addicted to an opiate called wine-and-Vicodin. I was up to a bottle and a half and five or six Vikes a day. May seem like small potatoes compared to the planeloads of coke and pot and truckloads of beer I’d ingested in the seventies, but it was my personal bottoming out. I couldn’t control it and I needed help.
Jerry had booked a lot of dates for the first part of 2005 and it would cost a small fortune to cancel and reschedule them. Not a consideration. I checked into Promises in Malibu the same day—another small fortune—and went into a thirty-day detox program. The details aren’t important. What is important is that I developed a new appreciation of the AA techniques that had helped Brenda so much—whatever skepticism I’d had about them or the people who used them. And that they worked. (Although I can do without that Higher Power stuff.) At the age of sixty-seven I put an end to five decades of substance abuse, beginning with my first toke in the hallway of a building on 122nd Street when I was thirteen. That’s a fifty-four-year-old high.
I don’t miss it. I feel better than those mornings when I dropped a couple of Vikes to feel better. Wine sections and liquor stores hold no temptations for me. That’s all in the past. Which is good. I have plans.
I have thousands of notes and ideas in hundreds of files on four Apple computers. And the notes keep coming. Probably there are other HBOs in my future, and there’ll always be stuff for them. But my mind and focus have been elsewhere for a while. The reason I want to spend less time on the road is so I can develop the next form for myself.
If I live long enough and still have my wits about me, I believe there’s going be a Broadway period for me. What form it takes will evolve, but the basic structure is becoming clearer.
Over the years I’ve had an increasingly accelerated anticipation of, and speeding toward, the moment when I begin to use my characters. This multiplicity of identities inside me that I’ve never had the opportunity or moment or chance to unleash. Or rather, I’ve never had the courage to force the moment and opportunity into being, so that they could be unleashed.
Some of these characters are onstage already, when I use an occasional voice to accentuate something. For instance, when I’m doing a language piece, the misuses of it or clichés or absurd expressions, voices come out with the misuses, clichés or expressions. I don’t ask for them, a character just appears and speaks.
When it’s ready, I always print material out so it’s there in black and white. Once I’ve memorized it and start running it, I often find that suddenly I don’t want to do a certain speech or passage. Something about it says: this is not mine. Maybe it’s as basic as: if I do it in my own voice I’m going to sound like a speech giver or teacher; maybe it’s just that everything is going to sound too much the same. But almost without my being aware of it happening, a blue-collar voice is growling: “It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch.” Or a gritty, world-weary one is explaining why all the Uncle Daves in the universe felt life had dealt them such a shitty hand.
The biggest family of voices are West Siders. The voices of my childhood. An older, throaty West Sider has always been my default voice, the voice of the Indian Sergeant and his extended family of NCOs, of numerous low-grade authority figures who show up in many pieces. A variant of him appeared in the Fox series. But there are many others—aggressive, noisy, quiet. Some are street crazies, speedy, high-pitched or deep, slow or menacing, confusing or confused. Some are funny and some aren’t, some old, some young. There are priests, cops, shopkeepers, all of them real, not impressions of actors onscreen doing priests, cops and shopkeepers. There are southerners from the air force, westerners from my radio days.
But what all of them do when they start talking is invent this magic fucking material. In the past, when they appeared in the stand-up pieces I was running, I would sometimes do a couple for myself just to see where they went and I’d actually get scared. First of all, that they were going to completely overtake and overwhelm and possess me. And second, that I would be never be able to capture them. That they were all one-time people, that sentences would pour out and I wouldn’t be able to get them down, and they’d be gone forever. So I didn’t even let them get started.
But they weren’t one-time people—they’re all still here inside me. And they are bursting at the tethers, trying to get out. I’m a thousand different people that I can climb into in an instant and really inhabit. I don’t want them to be inhabited by other people’s words. I found that out long ago. Nor, to the extent that I can think for them, would I ever put them in a script to be acted by others.
The constraints of my left-brain-organized, carefully constructed stand-up material won’t allow them to be themselves. But they have to be allowed to be who and what they are. I have to let my people go.
What I’ve realized is that I’ve been writing a Broadway show all along. I’ve had this dream for a while now and I’d often worry that being on the road would never leave me time to fulfill it. Among the notes I write and file all the time are many I put away because I can’t find a place to use them, but in effect are at a stage well past notes: they’re the beginning of a narrative. Theater is a different form and not every word has to be scripted. My characters will write their own words when the time comes. Their words are not the words of my stand-up—commentary, lists, observation—so much as stories. So what started as notes is becoming a narrative, linear flow.
It’ll be more a case of finding out where they fit in the larger story and how and why. A Broadway show has been growing organically out of the stand-up process. This is going to be the one place where my stand-up meets my acting. That’s good, because it will reassure people: here’s something you’re not expecting, but not so unexpected that I’ll have to prove myself to you all over again.
The organizing principle will be my childhood—in effect the first chapters of this book. So in a way we’re back to the autobiographical burst of the seventies—more familiarity—except that instead of the class clown it will be the rest of the rich, wonderful, gritty world of the solitary boy who whiled away his school hours by disrupting class.
The priests and nuns, the beat cops, the Irish gangs, the Moylan regulars, the Columbia interlopers, the shopkeepers and street hustlers and so many more, a whole vanished neighborhood with its sounds, music, accents and smells, its fights and joys and loves and prejudices, all seen through the eyes of that same boy.
His home life and mother—yes, I can do my mother—a set of characters in herself, a lace-curtain Bernhardt who can soak you in guilt but also tell you a story with six characters, do a voice for each one of them and come up with a punch line. And beyond home and neighborhood: the magic island of Manhattan—wartime Manhattan—just an IRT ride downtown.
I’ll tell that boy’s tale, even though by the time we get this on I could well be an old fuck of seventy or more. But that will be as it should be. I’ll be old man and boy. The boy who will one day be the old man, the old man looking back on the long-ago boy he once was …
It’ll be pretty good, I think.
I’m calling it: New York Boy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New York City in 1937, George Denis Patrick Carlin was one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time. He appeared on The Tonight Show more than 130 times, starred in an unprecedented fourteen HBO specials, hosted the first Saturday Night Live and penned three New York Times best-selling books. Of the twenty-three solo albums recorded by Mr. Carlin, eleven were Grammy-nominated, and he took home the coveted statue five times, including a 2001 Grammy win for Best Spoken Comedy Album for his reading of his best seller Brain Droppings. In 2002, Carlin was awarded the Freedom of Speech Award by the First Amendment Center, in cooperation with the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, and he was named the eleventh recipient of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in June of 2008. George Carlin passed away at age seventy-one on June 22, 2008, in Santa Monica, California.
Tony Hendra was recently described by the Independent of London as “one of the most brilliant comic talents of the post-war period.” He began his comedic career with Graham Chapman of Monty Python, appeared six times on The Ed Sullivan Show, was one of the original editors of National Lampoon, edited the classic parody Not the New York Times, starred in This Is Spinal Tap, and cocreated and coproduced the long-running British satirical series Spitting Image, for which he was nominated for a British Academy Award. He has written or edited dozens of books, most of them satirical, with the exception of two New York Times best sellers: Brotherhood (2001) and Father Joe (2004). He is a senior member of the board of the nationwide storytelling community the Moth.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Tony Hendra
1 The Old Man and the Sunbeam
2 Holy Mary, Mother of George
3 Curious George
4 The Ace of Aces and the Dude of Dudes
5 Air Marshal Carlin Tells You to Go Fuck Yourself
6 Two Guys in Their Underwear
7 Introducing the Very Lovely, Very Talented—Brenda!
8 Those Fabulous Sixties
9 Inside Every Silver Lining There’s a Dark Cloud
10 The Long Epiphany
11 Wurds, Werds, Words
12 High on the Hill
13 Say Goodbye to George Carlin
14 Death and Taxes
15 I Get Pissed, Goddamit!
16 Working Rageaholic
17 Doors Close, Doors Open
18 Being, Doing, Getting
19 New York Boy
Last Words Page 28