A Carlin Home Companion (21 page)

“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,” I said as I showed him the moves. “All dressed in black, black, black.” Our hands missed each other's on the last beat. “No, it's clap once, then both our hands come together…”

As all the other guests were outside drinking and eating on the deck, Bob and I were reliving recess by ourselves in Theresa's kitchen. Her sister, Mary, looked inside at one point, saw us laughing and patty-caking, and said to Theresa, “Well, will you look at those two.”

After we had exhausted the basics of patty-cake, Bob and I talked and talked the night away. After all the guests had left the party, we both stayed to watch
Saturday Night Live
with Theresa. We were both being cautious, but I could feel the chemistry building between us. Just as we were getting comfortable on the couch, Theresa's phone rang.

“Hello,” Theresa said. Then she looked at me, covered the mouthpiece, and whispered, “It's Andrew.”

Terror shot through my body.
Does he know what I'm doing? Is he stalking me? Is he really psychic like he once claimed? What the fuck?

I took the phone and turned my back on the room.

“What do you want?” I asked as coldly as possible.

“I'm at Santa Monica Hospital. I had an incident with my blood sugar,” he replied.

“What do you want?” I repeated in the same tone.

“I need a ride home. They won't release me unless I have one.”

“Call Steve,” I suggested.

“He's not around. He's out of town. They won't let me take a cab,” his voice getting more desperate.

My heart ached with guilt. “I don't know what to say.”

“You're still my wife,” he threw into the quiet space between us.

I didn't reply at first. I didn't believe that he'd had “an incident” with his diabetes. I didn't believe a word of it. But I felt his pain. I felt my guilt. I knew I should just hang up.

“I'll be there in twenty-five minutes,” not believing the words even as I said them.

I got off the phone and told Theresa and Bob that I had to go—family emergency. As I drove toward Santa Monica Hospital, I roiled in rage and decided that this was the very last act of charity I would give to Andrew Sutton for the rest of my life. I was done. I found him outside the emergency room on the sidewalk waiting for me, and silently drove him home. I couldn't speak. There was nothing to say. I wouldn't speak. It was the beginning and end of some kind of standoff. I had succumbed to this wish, but my silence said I would never grant him another. Whatever he'd tried to do had not worked. I was not going into the house with him. I was not coming home.

I drove away, furious with myself for having given in to him one more time, but more determined than ever to protect the stand I had taken for my life.

*   *   *

While I was clumsily taking a stand for
my
life, my dad was boldly taking a stand for his art. Like the great artistic leap he had made in 1969 when he went from clean-cut comic to counterculture comedian, he evolved once again. During that spring of 1992, he taped his eighth, and what was later considered his most groundbreaking, HBO show,
Jammin' in New York.
Years later, when he talked about this show in interviews, he often said, “After thirty years of doing stand-up comedy, I'd finally found my true artistic voice.”

Although he did some classic Carlin material like “Airline Announcements” (my favorite line being, “Tell the ‘captain,' Air Marshal Carlin says, ‘Go fuck yourself!'”), the show overall was a huge change for him. The most controversial and famous piece that emerged from the show was “The Planet Is Fine.” In it he declared:

The planet is fine; the
people
are fucked.… The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages.… And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet—the planet—the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!

These days, some climate-change deniers love to quote his line about the plastic bags and aluminum cans to justify their position. They don't understand what he really meant. That line was an attack against yuppies—a group of people my father hated because they claimed to be altruistic when in fact they were only saving the planet to save themselves from the inconvenience of climate change. It was an indictment of the 1980s Reagan era that had turned a whole generation, the Baby Boomers, away from the common good and toward NIMBY—not in my backyard—thinking.

That aside, the main punch line of the piece hit many, including myself, in a profound way.

He continued:

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little Styrofoam. Maybe. A little Styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

Here was a hero of the counterculture taking a stand, not for the progressive Left's party line about environmentalism, but for the planet itself. He invited us to step away from our entrenched daily political struggles, and join him in a new perspective where we could see the much bigger picture—floating in space looking back at Earth. He had found a place where we could detach from the Sturm und Drang of the second half of the twentieth century and find some peace.

He finished with:

 

See I don't worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we're part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron … whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn't punish, it doesn't reward, it doesn't judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.

 

As I sat alone on the couch in my old room at my parents' house (I had not gone to New York to see it live), watching this unfold before my eyes, I was terrified, stunned, and in awe of his proclamation. I felt the truth in it. I felt the freedom in it. But I wasn't ready for it.

I felt like I had finally joined the world. I didn't want to leave it now. I wanted to step into the fray, pick a side, take a stand, and make some noise for a cause. I wanted to chain myself to a tree, defend a women's clinic, or register voters in South Central Los Angeles. I wanted to use my heart and mind to evolve the world forward. But there was my dad, my hero, now telling me to fuck hope. I was confused and startled. And yet I was also awakened, as if I were a bell that had just been rung.

*   *   *

Three weeks after I left Bob on Theresa's couch, we met again. Bob had told Theresa that he wanted to see me again, and so she invited me to
Inside Edition
's end-of-season wrap party (she was the production manager). I felt like a giddy teenager. Which made perfect sense, seeing how the last time I had been with a man other than Andrew was when I was eighteen.

The party was held at a bar in Brentwood. I walked in and found Bob hanging out with Theresa. He looked as cute as I'd remembered. We tried to talk over the music and din of the party, and then moved to a back area where there was an arcade and some semblance of quiet.

Within twenty minutes, we were making out against the Pac-Man machine. We couldn't keep our hands off each other. Someone told us to get a room, so we made our way out to the parking lot. After making out there for twenty, thirty … well, maybe forty minutes, we decided we probably
did
need a room. Breathless, we each got into our respective cars and headed to his place in Playa del Rey. We made out on his couch for another hour. When his roommate walked out of his bedroom on his way to the bathroom, Bob asked me if I wanted to move to his room. I said yes faster than I probably should have. I sort of made up for it by asking him, “Will you respect me in the morning?”

He breathlessly replied, “Yes, of course.” Don't they always say that?

Bob and I stayed in his room for three days, taking breaks only to walk down the street to Blockbuster to rent foreign films and buy food at Hank's Pizza. I was the happiest woman on earth—food, film, and fucking.

On day four Bob got up and started to pack an overnight bag. As I rolled over, I nervously asked, “Where you going?”

“To my brother's place in Lake Elsinore for the next week. He's going to help me fix my Camaro,” he replied.

“You're leaving?” I tried not to sound too panicked.

“Yeah, we've had these plans for weeks. It's the only time he has free.”

“Where's Lake Elsinore?” Knowing already that it was probably not close by.

“About seventy-five miles east of here, near Riverside.”

How could he leave? Who was this guy who could leave a naked and willing girl in his bed to go fix his car? I had only ever known the attached-at-the-hip kind of relationships. I also had stuff to do at this point, like study for a final I had that Tuesday, and to proctor another one Friday. But, if I was called to, I was ready to drop all my needs, duties, and appointments to disappear into his life.

Not wanting to appear too needy, I got dressed, and we made plans to see each other when he got home. And then I left.

While thoughts of Bob—how he smelled, how he felt, how he made me feel—cluttered my mind, I distractedly studied for and took my final on Tuesday. By Thursday I couldn't take it any longer. I needed to see him. I called him at his brother's house and asked if I could come out and see him. He quickly agreed. He did warn me that it wasn't very exciting out there. I didn't care what was there, as long as
he
was. The last time I had felt this euphoric was eight years earlier when I had seen a very large pile of pharmaceutical cocaine on a mirror on the coffee table in my bedroom. I was happy, happy, happy. I told him I'd leave UCLA on Friday afternoon around two, and he began to give me directions.

He began with “Take the 10 East to the 110 South to the 91 East. Take that for about thirty miles—”

My stomach did a somersault.

“The traffic will be horrible on a Friday,” he continued.

My lips began to feel fuzzy, as did my head.

“Uh-huh,” I said casually, trying to mask the rising panic in my chest. I finished up the conversation pretending to be the kind of person who could easily drive seventy-five miles by herself in a car without thinking that she's dying from a heart attack or having a stroke. I couldn't let on that I was in fact a crazy person who hadn't driven more than seven or eight miles away from my home in more than six years. I wouldn't let myself fuck this up.

After I'd proctored the final on Friday, I headed east on the 10 freeway. I threw Tom Petty's
Damn the Torpedoes
into my cassette player, and distracted myself by singing along. I made it down the 110, “You see you don't have to live like a refugee/(Don't have to live like a refugee),” and then found the 91 East with ease. I was a road warrior!

But as I ventured deeper east, the highway began to fill with traffic and we slowed down to a crawl of ten miles an hour. I found myself surrounded by semitrucks, locked inside a canyon of eighteen-wheelers. The bile began to rise in my throat, and my guts cramped. “Don't do me like that. Don't do me like that/What if I love you baby?/Don't, don't, don't, don't!”

I was convinced that I was about to throw up on my steering wheel and shit in my pants at the same time. Then the adrenaline hit and rushed through me like a freight train. Breathing became more and more impossible. My head got light, and I was sure I was dying—absolutely positive. I saw a hotel at the next exit and got off the freeway, into their parking lot, and quickly into the lobby. As I searched for the bathroom, my limbs felt heavy and my tongue was like a sponge in my mouth. Once safely ensconced inside the stall, I took deep breaths, attempting to collect myself. Thoughts raced in my head—
Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, body. I fucking hate this shit! Why can't you stop doing this? Why am I so fucking crazy?

I knew the one and only thing that could save me—I needed to talk to someone while I drove. It helped me to feel tethered to something sane. I usually called my mom, but I didn't really want to explain to her where I was. I'd told her that I was spending the weekend with Theresa and friends. I wasn't ready to tell either of my parents about Bob.

After grabbing a Snickers bar at the hotel gift shop to stave off the feeling that I was passing out from low blood sugar (another fake symptom brought on by the panic attacks), I got back in the car and weighed my options. I took a deep breath and called Bob.

“Hello,” a male voice answered.

“Hi, this is Kelly. Is Bob there?” I asked.

“Sure, one minute,” the voice replied, and I could hear the sound of the phone being put down. “Bob. Phone. It's Kelly.” I heard a door open and shut, and the phone being picked up from the counter.

“Hey, where are you?” asked Bob.

“Somewhere on the 91. I think Bellflower?” I replied nonchalantly.

“Oh, okay,” he said, sounding a bit confused.

“I'm calling because—well, I have a little problem. You see, I have this thing called panic-attack syndrome. Do you know what that is?”

“No, not really,” he said.

Of course he didn't know what it was. He was a normal person who came from this really normal background, with a family that was really normal and far, far away from the crazy life and things that I had seen and done.