A Carlin Home Companion (15 page)

Later on Leif and I played footsie in the Jacuzzi, and Griffin began to pout. At some point Griffin pulled me aside to tell me that he was worried about me, and didn't want me doing anything crazy. The champagne nearly shot through my nose. He warned me that Leif wanted to have sex with me, but that he probably didn't want it to be anything serious. He was afraid that Leif was just going to use me. How sweet—Griffin protecting me from Leif! I thought,
These boys are much nicer than the ones I used to hang out with
.

*   *   *

Eventually Griffin crashed, and Leif and I barely made it to the couch. I will spare you the gory details of what followed next. But I must say there is not much to spare you from. Even though I was only eighteen, and Leif was only the third guy I had ever been with, there was one thing I knew on that night—he clearly was not, as they say, “made for dancin' all, all, all, all night long”! But who would be after partying all night. If I can save just one woman from one disappointment in life I hope that it is this—that sleeping with a really stoned pop star is not in any way as thrilling as
thinking
about sleeping with a really stoned pop star. Do yourself a favor and satisfy yourself while you keep on fantasizing about Bono, Sting, whoever—you'll get a hell of a lot more bang for your buck that way. Trust me.

The next morning, not wanting Griffin to find us on the couch, Leif and I found our way upstairs, and into Ryan and Farrah's bed. Here in the daylight, with most of the drugs having worn off, we met each other in a very different place. And yes, Leif found a way to redeem himself from the night before. Afterward, as we lay there on Ryan and Farrah's bed, I had to laugh to myself and take in the moment. It was a surreal one for sure. I may have grown up as the daughter of George Carlin and had many a brush with fame, but nothing could possibly top having sex with Leif Garrett in Ryan O'Neal and Farrah Fawcett's bed.

Or so I thought.

Ten minutes later Leif and I found our way to their shower. As the water poured over me, I asked Leif to hand me some shampoo. And he did. Farrah Fawcett's shampoo. No, I mean it. It was Farrah Fawcett
brand
shampoo: Farrah fucking Fawcett shampoo.

And there I was, next to Leif Garrett, washing my hair with Farrah Fawcett shampoo under Farrah's faucet.

 

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Prince Charming

“
D
ID HE CALL?”
M
OM ASKED,
sounding worried. Dad had called her in Dayton (she was out there visiting her dad) from Toronto the night before, and he had sounded very upset. A movie project,
The Illustrated George Carlin,
that he'd already put too much time and money into had headed in a direction he hated. It just wasn't what he had envisioned, and he didn't know what to do. He cried to Mom over the phone, and told her that he would drive all night to Dayton and see her early in the morning. It was after noon now, and he wasn't there.

“No. No, he hasn't called,” I replied, holding back tears.

“I'm going to start calling hospitals,” Mom said. “I don't know what else to do.”

She hung up. My stomach churned. It was as if I'd been put in a time machine, and it was 1974 all over again. Back then, my dad would disappear for days, no phone calls or warning, doing coke or LSD or God knows what with some group of bikers or fans or whatnot, and then suddenly he'd appear back at home acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary. But now, in 1981, things were supposed to be different. There'd been no disappearing or late-night arguing or major misbehavior for more than five years.

He finally called. He'd been at a hospital somewhere on the outskirts of Dayton. He explained that after stopping by the Toronto comedy club Yuk Yuk's, to watch a few comics and smoke some weed, he'd headed to Dayton with a bunch of beer in the car. He drank the entire way. By the time he'd gotten to Dayton he was shit-faced and plowed his rental car into a ditch. A fire truck just happened to drive by and found him unconscious with his nose smashed up. The first cops that showed up wanted to plant drugs on him so they could bust him. But then a couple of others, who were big fans, came upon the scene and talked their fellow officers out of that idea. The incident was written up as an accident saving my dad from a DUI. Sometimes it pays off to be a counterculture god. When Dad got to the hospital, a plastic surgeon happened to be on duty in the emergency room and put his face back together almost as good as new.

He got lucky.

*   *   *

In the fall of 1981, at age eighteen, when most of my peers were energetically leaping from their families into the world of college and commerce, I needed a nap. After all the chaos in my life, I wasn't up to anything too trying. I wanted some of that “Peaceful Easy Feeling” the Eagles were always singing about.

In high school I knew my job as a teenager was to graduate from high school—simple enough. But now, according to Life Plan 101, I was transitioning into adulthood, and my new job was either to “get a job” or go to college so that in four years I could “get a job.” I had only vague ideas about what that “job” would look like—something fun and easy in showbiz? Overwhelmed and clueless about my long-term future, I put off figuring it out. I went to college—UCLA.

My freshman orientation left me disoriented. It was like kindergarten all over again—I craved a lap to cling to and felt like I'd missed the day the “manuals” of life were handed out. As I roamed between seminars, information sessions, and booths from various departments, I looked at my peers and wondered:
How do they have all this ambition, vision, and knowledge about their future?
There were the premed and preengineering students who had known what they wanted to be since they were five. Then there were the kids who for years had been making films, or painting, or dancing, and couldn't wait to immerse themselves even deeper into their artistic passions. And of course there was a good majority of students who just wanted to live three thousand miles away from their parents so they could drink and fuck their way through college.

I couldn't relate to any of them.

*   *   *

The familiarity of the beginning of the school year, with the ritual buying of new clothes, textbooks, and school supplies did help things, but I was still anxious. Most of my friends had dispersed to Ivy League schools that I had applied to but didn't get into (thanks to my fucked-up SAT scores), and with my parents away on a European vacation, I had to face those first few awkward and overwhelming weeks of school alone. Still, I was willing to give it the old college try.

The first few days I was proud of myself for sorting out my schedule and making my way through the maze of almost thirty thousand students on more than four hundred acres of campus with the help of the trusty map I'd glued to the back of my notebook. It wasn't too bad after all. I focused on what I'd be learning, and that kept me excited. But on day four that all changed. When I walked into History 1A: Introduction to Western Civilization, I froze. More than three hundred students scrambled to take their seats. Crossroads barely had three hundred students in total. All these students were smiling and talking to one another. I couldn't breathe. I felt very small, my heart began to race, and I thought I was going to die. I backed out of the class, sat outside for a few minutes to recover, and went home. When I got there I went straight to bed and didn't emerge for a week. When my parents came home from Europe, I told them what had happened. I was sure I'd had a nervous breakdown. They weren't so sure. Whatever “it” was, I knew it wasn't the academics. It was the Okay-it's-time-to-go-out-in-the-world-and-focus-and-figure-out-who-the-fuck-I-am part of it all. I just couldn't cope. My parents didn't seem to have much of an opinion about it.

Well, my mom did.

“You can't just sleep all day,” she not-so-helpfully pointed out.

Dad, as always, came to my defense. “No one said she would. Clearly she's been through a lot lately. Let's give her some space. She just needs to find her center again.”

I was relieved. Yes, that was it. I just needed to find my center again. “Again”? Hmm—I don't really remember having had one in the first place. In the end neither of them demanded that I return to school, and so I didn't. I quit and did nothing, hoping my center would find me.

*   *   *

What did find me was Andrew Sutton, a twenty-nine-year-old car mechanic who worked at the Chevron station at the corner of Barrington and Wilshire. Technically, Terry, my ex, found him (yes, unbelievably, Terry and I were still hanging out) when he filled up the BMW 3.0 my dad had just given me. Andrew waltzed out to the car, handed Terry his card, and said, “If you ever need a repair, let me know. They're my specialty.” Now, in October 1981, I was picking up the car from Andrew after he'd spent a week working on it. As I climbed into the car, he asked, “You wanna party sometime?”

I was a sucker for blue eyes and blond hair. Andrew had neither. But he did have big brown puppy-dog eyes, a confident swagger, and the purest cocaine I'd ever put up my nose. For our first “date,” we sat on his bed in his house and did rail after rail of coke. And as often happens when there is a pile of coke and hours of time to fill, much is said, insights are epic, and a cocoon of safety and purpose is created. We poured our hearts out to each other.

I shared with him the feelings I could never tell my parents—how I loved them but that I was really angry that their drug abuse had left me feeling broken inside. I revealed thoughts I could never tell my friends—the deep longing I had to understand life in a bigger way—Why are we here? What does it all mean? I confessed my dreams of wanting to be an actor or a director or a still photographer, but that I didn't have any confidence even to try. I had never shared my inner life with a man in this way.

As the afternoon wore on, Andrew told me he'd felt like an outcast in his own family (he was the stepkid) and misunderstood in the world his whole life—at age nine he could build a TV but couldn't sit down for five minutes to read a book. I felt his pain and loneliness. He explained to me that he was currently married, but that he was divorcing her because she'd cheated on him. My heart ached. I could relate to not being loved by the one you wanted. He said that he'd put a voice-activated tape recorder in her car to catch her cheating. My stomach turned, but I ignored it. He had been wronged, I told myself. He then told me that he and his wife, Stacey, had a son, Elliot, who was a bit of a handful but a real cute kid. He was three. He was born a blue baby, and six weeks later Stacey had taken a bunch of pills, trying to kill herself.

Wow, I thought, poor Elliot, abandoned so young! I was touched by how much both Andrew and Elliot had been through. But at the same time I was suddenly very wary of being in the house of a married man who had a kid, and felt myself quickly erect an emotional wall between Andrew and me. Sensing this, he quickly assured me that the marriage really was over. It was all just a formality. In a few months he was turning thirty and would be getting a trust from his grandmother that he was going to use to divorce his wife. That made sense to me. He had a good plan.

He explained that the reason he was a car mechanic, even though he grew up in Brentwood in a Hollywood family (his dad was a famous character actor, Bert Freed), was that he was on probation for another year for a federal weapons charge for designing and manufacturing silencers for AR-15s (the same guns they used in Vietnam). He immediately reassured me that it was really no big deal because, “I'd only sold them to Beverly Hills doctors and lawyers so they could play with their ‘toys' in their own backyards. I like guns. I like to tinker.” I took this information in as if he'd told me he'd been volunteering at a soup kitchen, “Wow, that's amazing.”

Within two months he was living with me in my bedroom at my parents' house.

*   *   *

The first thing Andrew did when he moved in was chainsaw a hole in the wall of my bedroom.

“You should be able to lie in your bed and see outside,” he said while lying on my bed with an ashtray on his chest, acting like he owned the place. My room had an alcove in it where the bed was, so he made a hole in the wall so he could see outside.

While alarmed by his brashness, my dad also saw Andrew's potential. Before I knew it Andrew was fixing all sorts of things for my dad around the house. Need a new fence around the trash cans? Andrew will do it. Need to set up the new satellite TV system? Andrew will do it. Need someone to teach your daughter how to have an orgasm? Andrew will do it. Okay, so Dad hadn't requested that last one, but I must say, it was a real plus. I had been under the impression that the thing that had been happening when I'd had sex with Terry, Mark, and even Leif was an orgasm. I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong!

Even though I knew that Andrew was the most inappropriate boyfriend to have at this time (or any time) in my life that thought got hijacked by the excellent quality of orgasms and cocaine he was providing me. I went with the flow, as did my parents. Neither of them discussed or questioned Andrew's increasing presence in my life. He folded oh-so-neatly into the Carlin familial enmeshment I was so used to.

I attached to him like a barnacle, avoiding the tiny voice within me that occasionally whispered, Save yourself. I allowed his adventurous momentum to lift me up and carry me toward whatever was important to him. I spent hours hanging out with him as he worked at the gas station. So many hours that he eventually bought me my own Chevron uniform shirt to wear. When I was bored, I'd jump up and pump gas and clean windshields. I got a strange kick out of being the rich Brentwood girl pumping gas. It felt almost punk rock to me.

When Andrew wasn't at work, we drove his clients' BMWs, Jensen Interceptors, and Jaguars around the city. He'd trained at Bob Bondurant school of racing and taught me how to drive like a racecar driver. He took me shopping for sexy clothes, took hundreds of photos of me, and told me what a fox I was. He introduced me to people he'd known in show business (he'd worked for a few years on film productions), hoping I'd catch a casting director's eye. I knew he was showing me off like a trophy, but I didn't care. He made me feel like the center of the universe for the first time in my life. I felt beautiful, talented, and loved.