A Carlin Home Companion (13 page)

My mom, on the other hand, was definitely found. She was the busy AA queen. She had a whole new group of sober friends. When she wasn't out and about at meetings, she was frequenting the Hollywood Park racetrack. She loved to gamble and now she had a racetrack nickname that she proudly put on a vanity plate for her light-blue Mercedes 450 SL—“Ohio Red.” When my dad and I had picked up the car for Mom's birthday the year before, I had asked, “Is this a rich person's car?” Dad had answered, “You could say that.”

Thankfully Mom's gambling was not like her drinking. She actually knew how to gamble in moderation. But gambling was just for fun. Really, my mom was ready to sink her teeth into something meaty and meaningful. With her sobriety now firmly established, and me off doing my own teenager thing, Dad could no longer hold her back. She enrolled in UCLA's Certificate in Drugs and Alcohol Counseling program. She was a natural therapist already. She was always the one to lend an ear to a troubled soul, or even try to rescue them. She'd been that way even when she was using.

My mom didn't bring home stray dogs; she brought home stray people.

One Fourth of July we were at the beach watching the fireworks, and a guy was sleeping on a blanket twenty feet from us. After about an hour Mom realized he hadn't moved. She got a few big guys to get him up and walking, and brought him home with us. She then called the paramedics when she realized he had probably overdosed. A few months later he knocked on our door thanking her for saving his life that day. Now that she was sober and so grateful for her own life, she was ready to save the world. She volunteered at the VA helping vets stay sober with her warmth, humor, and her own sobriety story.

Which makes my parents' letting me and my friends get high at our house sound insane. But I was living in a house where only a few years earlier my father had been convinced that the sun had exploded. I was used to this special homespun Carlin logic. My parents both figured that if I was at home getting high, at least I was
safe
at home getting high. And this worked out well for me, since this era was the trifecta of stoner life: the original cast of
SNL
, a proliferation of Northern Humboldt County sinsemilla, and the introduction to America of Häagen-Dazs.

In my junior year the headmaster of Crossroads, Paul Cummins, brought my father and me in to “have a talk.” I was terrified. I was a good girl, and certainly didn't want to be in trouble, or for my headmaster to be mad at me. I sat with my dad in Paul's office, staring at my feet, when Paul began, “George, it has come to our attention that Kelly and her friends are smoking pot on the weekends, and we have heard that some of this is happening at your house.”

Dad countered, “Well, Brenda's and my rule is that as long as she stays on the property, and they're not getting into cars, we are okay with it. In fact, she and I often share our weed.” He liked Paul, but certainly didn't want to be told how to conduct his life.

“I see,” Paul cautiously replied.

“What is her grade point average?” my dad asked. Paul looked to find my transcripts. He looked up at my dad: “3.85.”

“Well, it doesn't seem to be affecting her academics,” Dad said, looking at Paul directly.

“No, it doesn't appear to be,” Paul replied.

“Anything else?”

“No, I guess not.”

We all got up to leave. I wasn't quite sure what had just happened, but I was relieved that I wasn't suspended, or worse. As we walked out, Paul said, “And thank you again for doing our annual fundraiser. We're really looking forward to it.”

“Of course. My pleasure.”

Being teens with all the privileges of being adults (money and cars) without any of the responsibilities (jobs or paying the bills), my extended tribe and I were fearless in our pursuits of pleasure. Fridays were spent collecting money to buy our drugs (weed, coke, and ludes mostly) so we could spend our weekends speeding up and down Sunset Boulevard in the cars our parents had bought us, going to parties, clubs, or houses where parents weren't home. So much for being safe at home. We charged our expensive meals at Mr. Chow's or the Bistro to our parents' credit cards, and we girls got older men to buy us drinks at places like On the Rox or Dan Tana's. Hollywood was filled with clubs that barely glanced at your fake ID, especially if you were a girl. My introduction to Hollywood was Gazzarri's. It was a club that had hit big in the sixties with bands like The Doors and Buffalo Springfield. It was filled with go-go dance cages and no fresh air. Our friend Cheryl knew the lead singer in a band called Seagull. Every time they played there, we'd go to see them and their opener, the band Venice. Wearing my Dittos jeans (I had them in at least ten colors) and a sassy little stretch top, I'd dance until I couldn't stand anymore. Gazzarri's was a sweatbox. Leaning up against the wall, you could actually feel the condensation. If we weren't dancing there, we'd head to West Hollywood to inhale amyl nitrate and dance all night to Donna Summer at the gay disco the Odyssey, or maybe over to the Starwood Club to see new-wave bands like The Motels or The Knack.

Music was a huge part of my life. I believe that Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Pink Floyd kept me alive during those years. I would smoke a bowl, put my headphones on, and fall asleep to “Wish You Were Here.” Pink Floyd reminded me to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Because I had access to a record label through my dad, I went to lots of concerts. Our parents would all pitch in for a limo, and a group of six to eight of us would pile in, ingest mounds of drugs and alcohol, and be whisked off to see bands like Boston, Styx, Fog Hat, Santana, The Police, Rod Stewart, and the Eagles.

We went to see the band Yes once. About six months afterwards I mentioned to a friend that I would really love to see them someday. He told me we already had. I guess the Quaalude I'd taken that night had wiped my memory of the whole evening.

During the day, when we got bored, my guy friends would commandeer my Jeep and we'd terrorize Brentwood and Bel-Air by running over mailboxes and doing doughnuts on people's lawns. I knew it was wrong, and I always felt guilty, but I didn't want to look like a wuss or give the cool boys any excuse not to hang out with me. I always went along for the ride. I must admit there was something thrilling about pissing off people and getting away with it. Maybe I was a rebel after all. It felt like we ruled the world—we were rich, popular, having fun, and going to live forever.

 

CHAPTER
NINE

Sex, Drugs,…

I
N THE ELEVENTH GRADE
I'd hit a bit of a snag. I was sixteen. I had an ulcer. I was sleeping all day. I was falling apart. I needed help but I didn't know how to ask for it. I needed to tell my parents what was going on, but I had no idea how to do that. Plus I didn't really want to face up to it myself. I guess that's what all the drugs and partying were all about. My mom knew something was up, and she was covering for me at school a lot. She was being the kind of mom she and I both thought we wanted—the cool mom. This is how cool she was: One weekend when she went out of town, my friend Vickie and I stole some Quaaludes from her stash of sleeping pills. She came home early and found us all luded out, and all she asked was, “So, you girls having fun?” We were. But what I really needed her to ask was, Kelly, are you sure you're okay? You've seemed a bit lost lately. I needed her to stop being the cool mom and start being the mom.

My snag came in the form of a boy—a boy I'll call Terry. Terry was a wild boy. I first met him just after he'd broken his collarbone by jumping—or should I say throwing his body—over ten chairs lined up in a row in the school auditorium. He was a walking and talking episode of
Jackass
twenty-five years before it was even a glimmer in Johnny Knoxville's eye. I was never sure what Terry might do. He wasn't stupid, he just had this reckless, unbridled spirit that made being around him thrilling. That, and he had the most gorgeous blue eyes. I was a sucker for blue eyes. Still am. And he was funny. Wicked, wicked funny. I was also a sucker for funny. I still am. But mostly he had a magical charisma. He would walk into a room, and the air would crackle. All the girls felt it, and every one of them had a crush on him.

I was doomed. The gravitational pull I felt toward him could not be countered. I could barely think in his presence.

The first few years I knew him, I never let on that I liked him. In December 1978, Vickie and Peter's parents, Jud and Carole, took all four of us teens to Aspen for a ski trip. We drove there in a big camper that Jud borrowed from my dad. You read that right—borrowed from my dad. He'd bought this camper (it was a big beige GMC thing Dad called “the Big Turd”) with the ambitious intention of the Carlins actually going camping someday. Yeah, right.

It mostly sat in our driveway, just like a big turd, going nowhere.

As Vickie, Peter, Terry, and I sprawled out on the back bed of “the Big Turd” through Nevada and Utah, we listened to the only two eight-track tapes we could find at the truck stop in Barstow—Steve Martin's
Let's Get Small
and
Best of Bread.
Heady shit for a fifteen-year-old girl. Between the combination of Steve Martin's revelatory comedy, Bread's perfect articulation of the longing of every cell in my hormonal body, and the proximity of Terry, I was done for. I fell head first and headlong in love. But I didn't dare share this information with Vickie or Peter, and certainly not with Terry. I didn't even display a word or a gesture or a hint. I didn't know how. I may have been already experimenting with drugs by the age of fifteen, but I was not experimenting with boys. I'd never even kissed a guy. Somehow I had avoided spinning a bottle, playing “doctor,” or whatever other childhood games kids find to explore the opposite sex.

My one and only chance to kiss a boy came and went on the last day at the Montessori school when I was twelve years old. I'd had a huge crush for the whole school year on a boy named Todd. He was blond, blue-eyed, and a surfer. All the girls knew I had a crush on him because I had revealed it during one of our many games of fortune-telling (with one of those origami folded thingies). But I was too terrified to do anything about it. As we were all saying our tearful final good-byes, someone yelled out in front of Todd, “Todd, you should kiss Kelly.” I panicked and ran into the girls' bathroom and hid. He came in looking for me, and I would not come out of the stall. I'm not sure what I thought would happen if I kissed him. So here I was now, three years later, wanting to be Terry's girlfriend more than anything, and pretending I had no interest in him.

By avoiding my chaotic hormones for most of my adolescence, I had become like a white-knuckled binge dieter resisting the ever-powerful allure of the dozen chocolate doughnuts for as long as possible, but then succumbing and eating the whole damn box in one fell swoop. One night, in the late spring of 1979, in the attic of Peter and Vickie's house, I went from never having kissed a boy to fumbling my way through
all
the bases with Terry. It was a drunk and stoned blur of lips, hands, skin, ouch, and finally sleep. As it goes for most of us, it was both anti- and nonclimactic.

But it ignited a storm in me. Every cell in my body had awakened, and it wanted more. I wanted to possess Terry. I wanted to run away with him and let the world fade. Yes, I wanted to fuck his brains out night and day, but really, I just wanted him to love me. I wanted his attention and his being to revolve around me, and only me. I was sure that the moment after we “did it,” we would now be boyfriend and girlfriend—holding hands in public, making out at parties, calling each other pet names like couples do.

None of that happened. He clearly had other ideas. There was no hand-holding. No PDA. No cute pet names. We kept fucking, but that was it.

I had no idea if we were a couple or not. All the people we hung out with had no idea either. Peter and Vickie figured it out because the first few months Terry and I were together, we were having sex in every available room in their house—the attic's twin beds behind the TV room, where I lost my virginity; the basementlike downstairs with a bed ensconced in a niche—the perfect place to fall asleep hoping that Terry would find his way down to me, which he did on many a night. And pretty much any other available flat surface. The secrecy of it all was maddening and heartbreaking, and the most exciting thing ever. Maddening because it was so illogical—Terry and I were already attached at the hip as friends, so why not just show our affection in public? Heartbreaking because I already felt less than most girls, and his refusal to announce his affection for me in public just underlined my unworthiness. Exciting because I was Terry's secret lover—at parties there were glances from him, surreptitious brushings up against each other, and quick make-out sessions in bathrooms. It was electrifying. The not knowing and the suspense kept me off-kilter. I never really knew where I stood with Terry. I was in love. I was insane.

I wasn't the only crazy one. Terry was one of those tricky types. There were moments when he would flash me a glimpse of the real, soft, damaged human that he was underneath. I could clearly see the lonely and wounded parts of him that just needed to be loved, and I would run toward them, hoping to protect and heal him. Hoping that in return, he would do the same for me. But then he'd lash out at me, as if I were evil, diseased. The first time it happened we were hanging out in my bedroom, listening to music, taking bong hits—an average day—when his voice got sharp and low, and I watched his pupils suddenly dilate. He grabbed my wrist and twisted it, and said, “You—you—you drive me fucking crazy.” I can't remember what I said or did to make him do that, and I'm not sure it really mattered. His reaction was such a non sequitur that I didn't know if it had anything to do with me. It's not like we were arguing or that there was even some tension between us. I thought at first he must be kidding, and let it slide, but more and more of these moments started popping up out of nowhere.