To Carlin, the church’s solemn rituals seemed laughable. As one historian has noted, since medieval times the Catholic Church has “frowned on laughter. To laugh was to mock heaven, by creating a kind of heaven here on earth.” Of course, trying to suppress his giggling only made Carlin laugh more. The cosmic uncertainty of it all—the “Heavy Mysteries,” as Carlin called them—naturally led the emerging disbeliever to the roots of absurdity. Why are we here? What is the point? Who makes the rules, and what are they for?
Mary began sending her boys away to camp during the summer, to get them out of the city. Carlin spent eight weeks each July and August at Camp Notre Dame, a Catholic boys’ retreat on Spofford Lake in southwestern New Hampshire. Opened by a group of New York area priests in 1900 as Camp Namaschaug, the compound of cabins and cottages was purchased in 1939 by John E. Cullum, a grammar school principal from North Bergen, New Jersey. Known as “Uncle Jack” to a succession of nephews who attended Camp Notre Dame, Cullum was a devout Catholic who expected the boys—200 or so of them each summer—to climb out of their cots at sunrise every morning to attend mass, before breakfast. The camp was run with military precision, with regular bugle calls—“Reveille” at sunup, a mess call at mealtime, and “Taps” at day’s end.
Athletics were strongly emphasized, with the campers playing baseball, basketball, volleyball, and other organized sports. They swam every afternoon and took part in track and swim meets on the weekends. They rowed, canoed, and hiked; at night, they sat around bonfires. Saturday nights were reserved for a talent show, with campers concocting singing groups, playlets, magic acts, and other amateur performances. At the end of each season boys were honored for excellence in various categories, including drama. Dave Wilson, a camper from Hoboken who was four years older than Carlin, was the perennial drama winner as the director of comic skits, which earned him the nickname “Wacky.” Carlin, meanwhile, opted to go it alone, delivering comic monologues and shaggy-dog stories. “I don’t know whether he got them from radio, or what,” recalls Leo Cullum, a nephew of Uncle Jack’s who attended the camp from 1948-1959. “But he was very good. He had your attention. He was known around the camp as a funny guy. You’d hear his name dropped around the camp—‘George Carlin, George Carlin.’”
A sense of humor was imperative at the camp, says Cullum, a longtime New Yorker cartoonist who began his career as a gag writer for the black-humor illustrator Charles Addams. “There were a lot of funny people, a lot of mocking and jibing. It was kind of a survival mechanism—being a good ‘ragger,’ we called it.” After a few summers, Carlin finally unseated Wacky Wilson, winning the drama award, for which he received a medal embossed with the masks of comedy and tragedy. Throughout his life the medal remained one of his two most treasured possessions. (The other was an autograph he got from the saxophonist Charlie Parker, outside the New York nightclub called Birdland, when Carlin was fifteen.) For Carlin, the medal affirmed his strongest instinct—that he belonged on the stage.
Whether or not he belonged in Catholic camp was another question. An aspiring shutterbug, Carlin was caught shoplifting film for his camera at a grocery store in town. “He left under a cloud,” recalls Cullum. “My uncle packed him up on a bus and sent him back to the city.” True to form, however, Carlin did not begrudge the camp director. In later years, after he’d made a name for himself, he sometimes returned to Camp Notre Dame to visit John Cullum.
In New York the boy found himself increasingly attracted to trouble. Though Catholic school and summer camp had been Mary’s idea of instilling structure and discipline in her mischievous son, it was becoming abundantly clear they weren’t the solution—that there might be no solution. “That was her big thing—‘the boy has no male supervision at home,’” Carlin remembered. “As if that’s gonna help.” At ages twelve and thirteen he was hanging around the parks, drinking beer, talking about girls—“debs”—and running with classmates in would-be street gangs. They had jackets with gang names: “the Riffs and the Condors and the Beacons and the Corner Boys and the Lamp-lighters and the Chaplains and the Bishops.”
Carlin claimed that in 1951 he and his friends began to experiment with marijuana, then a little-understood drug that appealed primarily to musicians and coffeehouse types. For city boys just entering their teens, it was a secret doorway to a forbidden world. For Carlin, the high let him dig deeper into a comic mind that was finding silliness in every facet of daily life. The mellow, goofy high stripped Carlin and his friends of their latent aggression: “In one semester, in shop class, guys went from making zip guns to hash pipes,” he joked.
By then he was flirting with real delinquency. After getting caught stealing money from a locker room during a basketball game in seventh grade, Carlin was sent to a parochial school in Goshen, New York. Playing up his big-city sophistication on the playground, he showed two gullible classmates a bag of “heroin”—actually, colored erasers. The administrators sent him back to Corpus Christi, where he was told he would have to repeat a term before he could graduate. Carlin pleaded with the administration to let him graduate with the students he’d known since first grade. The nuns made him a deal: Write the year-end play, and you may graduate on time. “It was called ‘How Do You Spend Your Leisure Time?’” Carlin told Playboy in 1982. “Once again, I was rewarded for my cleverness, my show-business skills.”
Carlin’s mother enrolled him in Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic boys’ school for middle-class families who couldn’t afford the city’s more expensive private schools. Tuition was five dollars a semester when the school opened on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 1941. Carlin’s brother had preceded him at Cardinal Hayes, graduating in 1948. “Going to Hayes was absolutely the coolest thing you could do coming out of eighth grade,” Carlin recalled years later. He looked up to Patrick: “He could dance good, he could fight good, he could talk his ass off on the corner. And he went to Hayes. . . . My brother even claimed you could make out better if you went to Hayes.”
Hayes had a championship marching band, and Carlin joined it as a trumpeter. He’d had a subscription to Down Beat from the age of twelve; like so many city kids of the time, he was also a big fan of the R&B vocal groups of the pre-rock ’n’ roll era. He chose the trumpet, he said, because there happened to be one in the family apartment: “I think my brother stole it at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” (“I really wanted to play a stringed instrument, but they told me the yo-yo was out,” he joked at a Hayes reunion years later.) He lasted one year in the band, marching but never blowing a note. “My reasoning was, people can see me marching, but no one can hear me not playing.” He did, however, participate enthusiastically in the football chants, especially enjoying the ones that threatened mild profanity: “Block that kick, block that pass/Knock that quarterback on his—rip, rip, rip, rap, rap, rap, Hayes High, Hayes High, clap, clap, clap!”
For Carlin, Hayes was the beginning of the end of his formal education. He dreaded taking the crosstown 149th Street bus to get there in the morning. “I was one of those guys who didn’t try too hard in school,” he explained. Again and again, he heard the same cliché from the priests: “You have a good head, but you’re not using it.”
“And they’d smack you on the head just to get it started for you,” he joked.
Always trying to make his classmates laugh, he found himself increasingly assigned to detention hall with Father Stanislaus Jablonski. “Jabbo,” as the students called him, was a strict disciplinarian, otherwise known as the Mean Dean or the Sinister Minister. Jablonski, a New York City fixture who would be appointed monsignor by Pope John XXIII in 1961, had a calm resolve that was so recognizable to generations of Hayesmen that one alumnus, who went on to work in television, suggested the father’s colorful name for a character on Hill Street Blues.
Mary Carlin’s exasperation with her son’s rebellious behavior only made him more inclined to misbehave, and he began to spend days at a time away from home. “She had it all worked ou
t,” he remembered. “I would attend a nice college, then get a job in advertising,” like the men she knew professionally. Utterly uninterested in that path, Carlin ignored his mother and her psychological warfare—her “black moods, silent treatment, and martyrdom.” “The older I got, the more apparent it became that my mother was losing control over me,” he recalled.
Carlin was expelled midway though his sophomore year at Hayes. In an otherwise undistinguished year and a half, he’d managed to frequent the dean of discipline’s office so often that he was no longer welcome at the school. Thirty years later Carlin was the unlikely guest speaker at a Hayes event, the school’s first annual Alumni Association Hall of Fame Dinner, honoring Jabbo. Before the ceremony, the two men got reacquainted. “I remember you, Carlin,” said Father Jablonski. “You sat near the wall.”
“The sum and substance of my career at Hayes—I sat near the wall,” Carlin said with a nudnik laugh when he took the stage. “The better to conceal my nefarious activities.”
Acknowledging the only discipline that could hold his attention, Carlin applied to two of the city’s performing arts high schools, but was turned down by both. He briefly attended Bishop Dubois, another Catholic high school, located on 152nd Street, before transferring to George Washington, the secular public school in the Fort George neighborhood of Washington Heights, in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Though famous George Washington alumni included Harry Belafonte, Maria Callas, Henry Kissinger, and Alan Greenspan, Carlin was not destined to number among them. In six months of nominal attendance at the school, his routine absences made him a nonentity. By his count, at the height of his truancy he missed sixty-three consecutive school days. He was just trying to hold on until his sixteenth birthday, when he could legally drop out. Which he promptly did.
2
CLASS CLOWN
After the supportive atmosphere of Corpus Christi, George was ill-prepared for the disciplinary tactics of Catholic high school. Rote education held no interest for him. Working up a decent impression of Cagney or Bogie, however—well, that was worth studying. While bouncing from school to school, trying to hang on until he turned sixteen, Carlin met a teacher named Brother Conrad, who told his students he could get them cameras and other electronic equipment with his clergyman’s discount. Brother Conrad was a bit of a hustler, Carlin recalled. The class clown already had a camera, but could he get his hands on a tape recorder? Mary Carlin had promised her younger son a gift for completing his studies at Corpus Christi. Carlin told his mother that’s what he wanted—a tape recorder.
He thought of it as a training tool, infinitely more useful than his Latin textbooks. Carlin’s state-of-the-art, reel-to-reel tape recorder—“big as a Buick,” he joked—was one of the earliest commercially available models, made by the consumer electronics pioneer Webcor, the Webster-Chicago Corporation. He quickly became adept at recording himself doing mock radio broadcasts, commercial parodies, and other comic bits. “I’d do little playlets about the neighborhood,” he recalled. “I’d make fun of the authority figures—the shopkeepers, the parents, the priests, the policemen.” Friends of his older brother began asking Patrick to bring Georgie to their parties, to entertain with his tapes. His career in comedy was already underway.
He was in a headlong rush to get on with the transition to adult-hood and out from under his mother’s suffocating expectations. For one thing he was engaged, however briefly, to a neighborhood girl named Mary Cathryn. Shortly after quitting high school, Carlin decided to enlist in the Air Force. Not quite a decade into its existence, the Air Force was considered the country club of military service by many enlistees. Rather than train to storm a beachhead or engage in hand-to-hand combat in some godforsaken jungle, Carlin reasoned that he’d rather “fly over the area, drop some bombs, fly home, take a shower, and go out dancing.” Though military life held no attraction for him, with the draft looming he figured he would enlist early, put the service behind him, and then use the G.I. Bill to train for a career in radio. (A regular listener to radio Hall of Famer Martin Block on WNEW’s Make Believe Ballroom, Carlin had been thinking for some time that he might be cut out to pursue a similar career, introducing the hits of the day on the air.) Seventeen-year-old George Carlin—his mother signed his enlistment papers—was assigned to be a radar technician with the 376th Bombardment Wing’s Armament and Electronics Maintenance Squadron, working on B-47 bombers at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, outside Shreveport, Louisiana.
The duty was not particularly captivating, and Carlin soon began looking for extracurricular activities to occupy his time. He heard about a local Shreveport playhouse that was auditioning for a new production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy and decided he’d try out. Joining the cast at the Shreveport Little Theater, he met another aspiring actor, a local man named Joe Monroe. Monroe was part owner of a Top 40 “daytimer” radio station (which went off the air at sunset, then a common practice), a thousand-watt channel at 1480 on the AM dial known as KJOE. When the fresh-faced New Yorker mentioned his eagerness to break into broadcasting, Monroe took him down to the station. He asked Carlin to have a go at reading news reports from the ticker tape machine. Already working to tone down his New York accent, the linguistically inclined kid from Morningside Heights “read it off like nothing,” recalls Stan Lewis, a well-known music distributor and record-store owner from Shreveport known as Stan the Record Man. Lewis was good friends with Monroe, bringing the latest rhythm and blues releases to his station and playing poker with him once a week. Lewis soon befriended Carlin, who often hung around the Record Man’s shop, listening to the newest records by Stan Kenton and other favorite jazz artists. Hired for weekend duty at KJOE for sixty cents an hour, Carlin read promotional copy and filled in whenever a disc jockey was absent.
Carlin’s military future was considerably dimmer. He was in near-constant trouble, not only with his superiors, but with local law enforcement as well. He has claimed that he was once stopped for riding in a car with two black enlistees. (In a 1974 interview he said that he was “a voluntary nigger. I gravitated toward the urban blacks rather than the rural rednecks.”) They smoked three joints in their cell. He was also tossed in a jail cell for causing a disturbance at the Stork Club, a combination supper club and strip joint out on the Bossier City strip, where the Barksdale airmen were known to blow off more than a little steam. “He called early one morning, I’m talking post-midnight,” says Jeff Stierman, whose father, Vern, a fellow announcer on KJOE, had become a good friend of Carlin’s. The elder Stierman had to bail out his young friend. “George had had a few too many,” says Stierman’s son. “He was being somewhat obnoxious, I think, making a nuisance of himself. The cops were called, and he was hauled off.”
At the Air Force base, seventy men in Carlin’s squadron had an experimental function: They were guinea pigs in an ongoing medical inquiry into the spread of infectious diseases in barracks living. “They would plant cultures in our throats once a week and study the spread,” Carlin once explained. “So we got out of a lot of duty.” Despite the easy duty, he couldn’t help but chafe when confronted by his superiors. “When I ran into hard-nosed sergeants and section chiefs and even COs,” he said, “I would tell them to go take a flying fuck. You get court-martialed for that.”
Carlin’s radio work was sanctioned by his commanding officer, who arranged for an off-base work permit for the young malcontent, figuring he’d be of some use as a goodwill ambassador to the local community. But Carlin did his best to undermine the assignment. As a DJ he enjoyed some of the perquisites of the job, accepting pizzas and boxes of donuts from distributors trying to get their records played. On the air one weekend he began drinking a fifth of liquor he’d just received as a gift. According to Stan Lewis, who was listening at the time, the drunker Carlin got, the more he joked about life at Barksdale. Some minutes later the last record ended, and the needle stayed in the groove, leaving dead air. Lewis called the studio—no answer. “I thought h
e’d gone to the bathroom,” he says. He called Joe Monroe, who hustled down to the station, where he learned that Barksdale MPs had hauled Carlin out of the studio and down to the guardhouse.
By Carlin’s own count, he was court-martialed three times and slapped with “numerous” Article 15s for minor offenses. On the night the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the World Series in 1955, Carlin was with his Strategic Air Command unit on a training mission in England. He’d been a Dodgers fan from childhood. Though both the Yankees and the New York Giants played in the Bronx, Carlin instinctively rooted for the unlikely team way over in Brooklyn. The perennially successful Yankees were a “boring, arrogant” team whose fans were “dull-spirited, overbearing twits,” as he once wrote in a New York Times article about his love of baseball. The Dodgers, by contrast, were a motley crew affectionately known as “Dem Bums,” a team that had integrated baseball by adding Jackie Robinson to its roster in 1947. To Carlin, the Dodgers were “colorful, reachable, human . . . and definite underdogs.”
On the night the team clinched the Series victory, Carlin celebrated by getting drunk on cooking wine in a small town near the barracks. “When my tech sergeant expressed his displeasure with my actions—not to mention my noise level—I replied in a manner that he didn’t consider in strict accordance with military protocol,” Carlin recalled. “I told him to go fuck himself. To be honest, I don’t think my salute was up to standards, either.”
Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin Page 3