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Last Words

Page 23

by Carlin George


  about Captain Cook—Hawaii having been one of Captain Cook's

  landing places—in a superbly accurate reproduction of the Captain's captain clothes. I didn't play Captain Cook though—I played

  Captain Cook's First Mate. Yes, the Indian Sergeant is back in my

  life. A definite sign that I no longer know who the fuck I am. Or

  even which decade it is: the late seventies? Or the late sixties?

  By the next summer I was appearing as a regular on Tony Orlando

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  SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN

  and Dawn. Not surprisingly, my sixth Little David album, On the

  Road, was directionless and unstructured: featuring the interminable "Death and Dying" routine, the longest piece I ever did. (On the

  album it only ran thirteen minutes but onstage it ran twenty-seven

  minutes.) Talking about dying for twenty-seven minutes should've

  given a seasoned comedian pause, but that hoary old metaphor for

  failure never occurred to me.

  Another signal I missed was in '78, when I had a mild heart attack. It was in the septal branch artery. One morning when I was

  driving Kelly to school, my jaw felt tight. I knew that a tight jaw

  or pain in the jaw can be a symptom of a heart attack as well as

  the traditional pain in the chest. (The left arm, upper back and the

  jaw can all be locations where you feel angina.) Apparently each

  person's angina is slightly different. I had to spend two days in the

  hospital before they were able to find the enzyme in my blood that is

  the marker of an MI, or myocardial infarction. When muscle tissue

  dies an enzyme is released. If they find that enzyme, you had a heart

  attack. If they don't find it, you've had chest pain. So, they found it,

  and I'd had an MI. But it was so minor it didn't force me to change

  anything or reexamine anything. For a while I did eat margarine

  instead of butter.

  One thing happened in that period which would be a major positive force in my life, although I didn't realize it until later. HBO

  came into the picture. I did two HBO one-hour specials in '77 and

  '78. These regular specials would soon take the place of my album

  career—eventually becoming one and the same thing. They didn't

  yet have as many subscribers as they would in the eighties, when

  they exploded, but it did give me access to a mass audience. At the

  time it just seemed like more TV. Not that different from Perry

  Como or Tony Orlando except I got to say "fuck."

  The material I was doing tells the real story. After an explosion of

  self-revelation and self-discovery, and the revelation to others of my

  autobiographical self and past—together with a good strong dose of

  value judgments about the world around me—I'd become a person

  fascinated with his own navel. "Hey—look at my lint! You got lint?

  He's got lint! She's got lint! Everybody got lint!" I was turning to my

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  bodily functions and extremities for inspiration, plundering the last

  few scraps of self-examination from them. It started on Toledo Win-

  dow Box . . .

  Snot is universal. There are some things that work in comedy be-

  cause they're universal, but we don't talk about them. First of all,

  snot is the original rubber cement. Thumb and forefinger. . .

  ever t r y to toss one away? Won't go . . . You ever pick your nose

  and have a guy walk around the corner, "Hi, Bill! How are you?"

  and go to shake your hand? "Sorry, my right arm is paralyzed."

  "Oh, okay. Why don't you put that thing back in your nose and

  come in my office?"

  You CAN put it back in your nose. Lot of people stuck for a

  place to put one don't think of that. You CAN PUT IT BACK!

  They're viable for four hours after picking. Put it back in but

  don't jog it loose. Gotta sit still the first hour . . .

  Imagine if snot was FLUORESCENT! DAY-GLO MUCUS!

  There d be no place to hide it. Where you gonna put a fluo-

  rescent snot? Gotta go down the head shop and wipe it on a

  poster.

  Urinals, pissing and farts were dealt with at some length on To-

  ledo Window Box. On Wally Londo I really went to town. First snot

  made a comeback:

  Have you ever been making out with someone and one of you has

  a snot that's whistling? Oo Oo Oo Oo Oo O0O0O0O0O0O0H

  "I think we blew it out of tune on the climax, honey!"

  I moved on to the involuntary shake that happens when you

  piss—which I called the piss-shiver—and from there I transitioned

  to this important question:

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  SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN

  Isn't it funny how we say take a shit and take a piss? You don't

  take 'em, YOU LEAVE 'EM! "I l e f t a shit, Bill." "Jeez, where'd

  ya leave it this time? Last year the kids didn't find it till Easter!"

  Then it was stomach noises, lots of those, and so to:

  Did you ever belch and taste a hotdog you had two days ago?

  "'Ey, that was almost PUKE! A toss-up between puke and hot-

  dog there!"

  Which brought me to the big finish—vomiting in the New York

  subway:

  You ever notice that your whole sense of values changes when

  you're throwing up? I DON'T CARE ABOUT MY SHOES . . .

  BLEEEEUUUURRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!

  When I'd finished scavenging my extremities, I turned to pets—

  the nearest thing to an extremity. Let me tell you about this little

  extension of me . . . my dog . . .

  Example: A dog appears on TV, and you t r y to get your dog to look

  at it. And he won't! He has no clue what that image is. His reflexes are

  triggered by your voice, which is screaming at him, and your hand,

  which is twisting his head o f f . He just thinks you're mad at him and is

  filled with doggie guilt.

  And when I'd done with that, my dog's extremities . . .

  Example: The neighbors are over for c o f f e e , you're chatting away

  and there's Tippy on the floor, bent double like a fur donut, licking his

  own balls! Staggering! If you could do that you'd stay home perma-

  nently! But no one says a word . . .

  It was graced with the term "observational humor." I think I was

  even sometimes credited with inventing it. Later it would reemerge

  as what I call my micro-world material—but by then always balanced with macro-world material. Back in the seventies, it seemed a

  rich vein I could mine for a while.

  The very fact that I didn't see what was happening—and I never

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  have quite been able to untangle why I was behaving like this—is

  itself a sign of profound confusion. Yet I can't believe it was simply

  involuntary, that I was just passively letting it happen to me. I think I

  was also saying to myself, "Okay. I showed them I could be a success

  on my own terms. Now let's see what I can do from the place I've

  ended up."

  In other words, given an opportunity to curve back to the middle, to become straight again, I took it. I got waylaid by that. Instead of taking a new leap into the dark—"I've got another place to

  go, another idea to show you!"—I said, "No, this is okay. Let's be

  safe."

  I've always called these years of my life the Seco
nd Visitation of

  the Straights.

  One other path I did consider, although it eventually led nowhere

  either. On Toledo Window Box there was a piece called "Water Sez."

  A stream of consciousness cut personifying water:

  I'm gonna get some water. This is your H-two-O, my friend. I

  don't mind telling you. From the scientific community . . .

  Lookit that, huh? fust drops and drips. Water sez, "I don't care."

  Water sez, "Drink me, I don't give a shit." Water sez, "Put me on

  your ass, I don't care."

  Water sez, "Leave me alone, I'm in the lake. Get the hell away

  from my water place!" Ice is water, some water is ice. Some water

  hasn't been water for a long time. It's ICE! At the North Pole.

  Long time no water! "Ice. What are you—I'm ice. I WAS wa-

  ter. I'm hopin' to be water again—after the Ice Age, hahahaha-

  haha!"

  You could be two kinds of ice. You could be ice made in the ma-

  chine at the Holiday Inn. OOO-ER! Or you could be a hunk

  of ice that comes across a Mail Pouch sign in Minnesota on

  fanuaryll . . .

  Sometimes I just say shit I've never heard before, man.

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  SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN

  There were a number of other little blips like this, bubbles of conceptual possibility that didn't get on the album. If I had been free

  of my middle-class entanglements, my family, my house, my debt

  structure, my obligations, this might have been the point where I

  veered off into conceptual art. Streams of consciousness harnessed

  into form, let loose again and harnessed back until finally you'd

  have something with form and structure that sprang purely from

  your improvisational side.

  A fantasy, a what-if, a path not taken.

  One thing I can be certain of: the old movie dream wasn't dead. It

  was just deferred. When my comedy exploded, I saw that by putting

  the movies aside, I'd make room for the comedy to become what it

  did. At the same time, the movie thing still had its appeal. Acting

  had a different set of rewards. For one thing, an outsider longing

  to be on the inside is the same as the soloist longing to work in an

  ensemble. I equate them because I get great satisfaction in being a

  part of the proper—for me—community. I'm uncomfortable with

  various social groupings and clusterings. But when I'm in the right

  group, doing the right thing, I get as much satisfaction out of that as

  anyone who does it all the time. Maybe more.

  I had misgivings. There was no way a long-haired, bearded person

  with a hippie immediate past could just suddenly play a salesman or

  a clerk, let alone a leading man. I would be typecast immediately,

  and that's exactly what happened. Those were the kind of offers

  I got.

  I did play a cabdriver in Car Wash. It was one day's work and they

  let me write the scene myself: I played a modified, lightened version of my old Upper West Side character. But I had no illusionssurprising, given how confused I was—that this would lead to a

  flood of offers from the studios, begging me to be in their movies.

  Much better to pour my creative juices into producing, financing, writing and starring in my own movie. And along with the

  juices, all my savings. Yeah. That'll show the fucking mainstream

  and the studio system!

  Among the quasi-gurus—charismatic people around the AA on

  the West Side that Brenda attended—was Artie Warner. Artie got

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  into Brenda's circle and found out she was Mrs. George Carlin and

  Artie saw an opportunity.

  Well before Richard Pryor came out with his great Live in Con-

  cert in '79 I thought it would be great to make a concert movie. Take

  the second HBO show, do it live in the round so it could be shot

  imaginatively, record it on tape. We'd use part of the concert for

  HBO, parts of it we'd transfer to film (which wasn't commonly done

  at the time), and we'd have our concert movie. Of course the themes

  I would be exploring were the mundane micro-world I was into at

  the time: teeth, fingernails, dogs and cats, how your sneakers smell

  when you get up, shit like that.

  B u t . . . in the middle of talking about dogs or cats we cut to a liveaction sketch that relates to the topic we're talking about on stage.

  We cut from George talking about training his dog to a vignette

  about a man training a dog. Some combination of concert footage,

  live-action vignettes. And, hey, why not throw in some animation?

  Good idea. (We actually commissioned the animation and as an

  independent piece it won awards in festivals like Tokyo.)

  Artie Warner will become producer of all this, because he's a

  friend of Brenda's and he calls himself a producer and I want to stay

  outside of the mainstream. To make things more interesting I also

  make Artie my manager but without leaving Monte Kay or even

  informing him of his new shared duties. So now I'm paying two

  men management fees. The movie will be called The Illustrated

  George Carlin. (Because we're illustrating my monologues by showing vignettes of them.)

  So this is my new departure, my novel approach, my step beyond

  stand-up. Something no one had done before (probably for good

  reasons). The movie dream part of me was being satisfied by these

  notions. I think this was why I was able to accept whatever fall from

  grace, whatever fall back into the mainstream, this whole period

  represented. I could accept that, because I saw myself as having

  taken an innovative step that was going to end-run the studio system

  and dazzle everybody with a new idea.

  The plan was to sell the distribution rights, the TV, cable and

  airlines rights and so on. Whatever ancillary there was we'd raise

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  SAY GOODBYE TO GEORGE CARLIN

  enough money from to make the movie. That was the theory. The

  reality was that, having assembled a full preproduction staff with

  an impressive payroll, Artie took that crucial step all film producers must take on the first day of preproduction: he leased a new

  Cadillac.

  For a while we looked like we were coming close. We had distributors. We had an office on Robertson Boulevard. I went around

  to advertising agencies that specialized in movies and interviewed

  them about their campaigns. I sat with casting ladies behind

  beat-up wooden tables and actors would come by to audition for the

  vignettes. We rented a theater to screen Norman . . . is That You?,

  the Redd Foxx movie, because it had been shot on tape and transferred to film. We discussed the 525 lines of data on the screen as opposed to the 600 lines of data in the European format. . . All on my

  dime.

  I had to walk away from The Illustrated George Carlin. I just ran

  out of money, although—because I never opened those monthly

  statements from Brown and Kraft—I had no clue just how much

  money I'd run out of. Years later I looked at the material. It was

  horrible! I'd been writing better ten years earlier for Buddy Greco.

  Some of the vignettes might have been improved by being performed. Most of it was just mortifying and empty. He may not

  exist, but God saved me from making The Il
lustrated George

  Carlin.

  But then a new area of concern appeared on my radar which I was

  even less well equipped to deal with than how many Teamsters we'd

  need for the second unit. And from a totally unexpected quarter:

  Kelly.

  It wasn't about drugs—the usual do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do-ordid hypocrisy Boomer parents grapple with. Kelly began smoking

  pot when she was thirteen, stealing roaches from my office. I figured

  it out after a while and rather than being Big Bad Dad—I did make

  a living being against all forms of authority—I let it go.

  Brenda was aware of Kelly's smoking too. You might think it odd

  considering what we'd been through, but neither of us stopped her.

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  In fact I split ounces with her when I was home. I preferred the approach: "If it's in our house and you're not driving around, at least

  you're semisafe." What I didn't know was from that point on Kelly

  smoked almost continuously. She went to school stoned. She functioned throughout high school stoned. She got straight A's stoned.

  The bud doesn't fall far from the plant.

  At fifteen she started attending Crossroads—an arts and science

  high school. Full of celebrity kids but a real brain factory. If you

  were smart you could really learn there. If you just wanted to take

  dope and float through, I guess you could do that too.

  There were different cliques, a lot of kids who learned everything

  they could and stayed out of trouble. Then there were celebrity kids

  who did nothing but drugs. Kelly had a foot in both camps. Great

  grades, and a celebrity clique who smoked a lot of dope. Kelly's

  group eventually caused problems, but at the time I was completely

  star-struck. I loved it when Kelly would come home and say, "You

  know who I go to school with? Mahatma Gandhi!"

  These kids would hang out at our house and occasionally steal

  things from me. (They told me about this later so it's not a blind

  accusation.) But what could I do? Like the drug situation, I could

  hardly bitch about it, having been a dedicated felon myself at

  their age.

  They were okay kids. Core good. Different sets of problems at

 

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