A Carlin Home Companion (29 page)

A few months after my mom's passing, he and I had driven out to Palm Desert for a gig he had. I wanted to share with him the music that had been helping me grieve. I played Van Morrison's
Back on Top.
It had been on constant rotation in my CD player, helping to fill the void in my chest.

About five songs in he said, “Can we play something else? This is depressing me.” I quickly turned it off, and felt ashamed and weak for letting myself wallow in all this grief.

Now, with this new turn of events, I knew I wouldn't risk sharing any of my feelings about what I was going through because of his relationship with Sally. I was terrified that if I did, I'd lose him forever. I didn't want to be that daughter that makes the new woman's life impossible, and ostracizes herself from her father. I wanted to be the enlightened daughter, the one on the high road. Even though really I just wanted my mommy and my triangle back.

But I also knew that turning my triangle into a square would eventually create something solid to stand on. It would give me the opportunity to learn how to be an autonomous adult and leave behind this family system that had kept me small, silent, and ineffectual in the world.

After getting used to the idea that Sally was here to stay, it was decided that I'd meet her after Dad's show at the Comedy Store in August. He was beginning to work on new material for his next HBO special. Dad was very excited for us to meet and finally connect. I was nervous. I talked to many of Mom's friends about Sally, trying to find some equanimity about the whole thing. But being in the middle of grief isn't necessarily the time for equanimity. I knew I had to feel it.

One thing that helped move the grief through me was giving my mom's things to her friends. Months earlier, after my dad gave me all of my mom's jewelry and clothing, I decided I'd share them with my mom's closest girlfriends. These were women whom my mother had nurtured, remothered, and in some cases, saved their lives. They were mourning her as deeply I was. As I distributed bracelets and rings and cashmere sweaters, I felt my mom's love spread out throughout this group of women.

The big “meet Sally” night came. My stomach was doing triple flips. As I walked through the club, many of my mom's friends came up to me, hugged me, and whispered in my ear how they were wearing my mom's ring or sweater or bracelet tonight, in solidarity. I felt my mother and the love that she represented carry me through the impossible.

After the show the dressing room was packed with comics and friends. The dressing room at the Comedy Store is very dark. It has black walls, black furniture, and a mirror table. I looked down at the mirror and wondered how much cocaine had been done on that table in the last twenty years. I looked across the dimly lit room and saw a woman with blond hair and prominent cheekbones. My heart leaped. It was my mother. I'd been seeing her everywhere those days out of the corner of my eye. Any flash of blond hair on a woman walking down a street would make my heart skip.

I took a beat and let my eyes land on this blond woman again. That's when I realized—it's Sally.
It's Sally, and she looks like my mother. There's the ash-blond hair. There are the cheekbones
. Then it hit me: My dad has a “type.” And something relaxed in me. The sting of this whole debacle lessened because I realized that my dad had a type. Why? I don't know. It made him more human? It made the whole thing less about my mom and Sally, and more about what his needs were? Probably.

As I approached her, it was clear she was way more nervous about meeting me than I was about meeting her. She was nice, and funny, and I could see she was not some wicked stepmother type. We laughed about how awkward this was for both of us.

Eventually, after a few months, I saw that she was a woman ten years older than me, interested in writing, performing, and spiritual seeking just like me. She, too, was attempting to find her place in the world. She even had stage fright.

And even though my inner five-year-old was still miserable about Mom and Dad breaking up, my thirty-five-year-old self was genuinely happy for my dad.

 

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

Unspoken Words

“W
E TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING,”
Dad said, describing his new relationship with Sally. “There's no barrier between us. Even when we're having sex, I can tell her what feels good—”

“Dad”—I quickly stopped him—“really. I don't need to hear that.”

Sometime during the first few months after Daddy met Sally, he'd turned into a thirteen-year-old boy with no filter. He was over the moon with his new gal Sal and couldn't talk about anything else. If I hadn't been so thrilled by the fact that he was no longer depressed and looking on the edge of death, I might just have slapped him.

I understood, though. New love sets off a gooey gushing of love so big that nothing can contain it. I had felt the same way after meeting Bob. Plus, I knew that my mom and dad's relationship had been far from perfect. They had more baggage than the lost and found at Continental Airlines. When Mom died, they'd loved each other for a long time. They just weren't
in
love with each other. Dad and Sally were in love.

*   *   *

After Dad and Sally had been together almost a year, Dad and I rented a house just outside Yosemite Valley in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains for the two-year anniversary of Mom's death. I was ready for some family time. After the last year of adjusting to my new world order, spending three full days alone with my dad felt like a hundred Christmases times a thousand birthdays.

Dad had never been to Yosemite before, and I was excited to share it with him. Every morning we went down to the valley floor, and I showed him the magnificent waterfalls and rock formations. And every night we went outside onto the deck, and Dad showed me the stars. Dad loved astronomy. He'd brought up his star charts and astronomy books and excitedly shared with me the constellations, galaxies, and planets.

“Right there, that's Gemini—Castor and Pollux,” he said, pointing to two stars low in the western sky. “Soon you won't see them at all until winter.” Dad always tried to find Gemini for me, since it was both my and my mom's Zodiac sign.

“And there's Mars. You can always find Mars because it's red. You can't see Jupiter right now,” he said, scanning the sky for other familiar objects. “Sally and I are Jupiterians.”

“What's that?” I asked, craning my neck up searching for Orion, the only constellation I could recognize on my own.

“We just feel like we don't belong here on Earth, so we decided we're from Jupiter.”

I was glad it was dark and he couldn't see me roll my eyes. But then I wondered,
Does Dad think I'm a Jupiterian, too?

When we weren't out exploring nature, we just occupied the space in the house separately but together—he read while I wrote; he wrote while I read. It was the same space we'd occupied decades ago when I was a young child and he'd be working in his office while I played quietly on the floor. And as usual, music was always playing. Instead of the Stones and the Beatles, it was now Van Dyke Parks and Tom Waits.

The last two nights we were there, we took our time and laughed and cried our way through a huge box of family photos. It was a cavalcade of dogs and cats—Beanie, Bogie, Tippy, Lil', Abbey, Murphy, Annie, Vern, Jeremy, and Moe—and Mom's hairstyles—updos, shags, Twiggy boy cuts, big hair, blond, red, and tawny. Dad put aside about a dozen or so photos of Mom and me for his collection. I pulled out about a hundred for mine.

The last morning we were ready to spread Mom's ashes. We decided we'd let her go into the Merced River and inside a redwood grove next to the valley. As we pulled away from the house, Dad turned on the stereo, and Debussy's “Clair de Lune” began to play. Dad stopped the car. We turned to each other and just stared. During the darkest drug days in the 1970s, my mother would often sit at the piano for hours and play “Clair de Lune” to soothe her haunted soul. This was the only song I ever remember her playing. Dad showed me his arm covered in goose bumps, and I showed him mine.

Dad and I were always such suckers for a perfect moment of synchronicity. Since I was a small girl, my dad taught me how to look for signs that the universe was on our side. Whether it was finding coins on the sidewalk or the number three (our family's lucky number) showing up in hotel room numbers or flight times, Dad was always pointing them out and commenting, “Hey, look, 393. Excellent number. A good sign indeed.” “Clair de Lune” spontaneously playing as we drove down to the valley floor was like a gigantic neon finger pointing right down on us and the universe saying, I see you and hear you.

Brenda was in the house.

Dad and I found a perfect spot along the Merced River and headed down to the bank with a large Ziploc bag filled with Mom's ashes. The river rushed by filled with spring runoff, but there was a quiet little pool near us. We climbed out onto a few flat rocks and both knelt down while each grabbing a handful of the ashes. I held my hand under the water and watched as Mom and the Merced slowly mixed. Dad mentioned that it was this time of day when they got married in Ohio. I looked up and noticed behind him the waterfall across the valley floor. I pointed to it and said, “That's Bridal Veil Falls right there.”

“It sure is,” Dad said wistfully.

After we'd released about half the ashes, we made our way up and out of the valley, stopping one last time to look at the stunning vista that allows you to see North Dome, El Capitan, and Yosemite Falls in one grand view. In the Mariposa Grove of redwoods, we walked slowly among the giants. Because it was mid-May, we were pretty much the only people there. In a month tourists would be crawling on every square inch of these trails. The dappling light made the grove look like a church. Dad sat down on a rock, and I took the rest of the ashes and circumambulated counterclockwise around one of the redwoods while slowly releasing the ashes from my hand. After I made it once around the tree, I knew I felt complete. Well, almost complete. There were still ashes left in the bag. But, I knew I'd keep them to scatter in Big Sur or maybe even Dayton at some point in the future.

As we drove away from the redwoods, Dad said, “I'm done. No more rituals or ashes spreading for me. I need this grief to be over now, Kel. I'm done.”

Tears filled my eyes. I felt so alone.

I was not done. I had just begun.

*   *   *

Before my mom's death, I'd begun to feel an anger simmering in me for myself, my mother, and all women who'd stifled their creative voices in the service of safety and love. After leaving Andrew I carried the heavy truth that I'd wasted a whole decade of my life trailing after him and his needs. Now, with my mom's life cut short, I wasn't going to let another year go by without honoring my creative life. I would not be quiet anymore. Because she'd never allowed herself to nurture and fully claim her own creative and expressive self, I was on a mission—I needed her life and her death to have some meaning. I needed to carry the creative torch forward for her and all women.

I'd never been a feminist with a capital
F
. I'd gone to prochoice rallies and written a few things for the feminist paper at UCLA, but I'd never really felt called to the front lines to fight the female fight. I think this was mostly due to my complicated childhood relationship with my mother, which left me untrusting of women in general. This ultimately translated into me not knowing how to trust myself, especially when it came to my creativity. I didn't trust my talent or ideas. I never learned to nurture my own creative process.

Yes, I'd grown up with one of the greatest role models of how to be a creative right under my nose—he was my dad—but it just didn't translate for me. I needed some female role models, so I found Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe. I immersed myself in their paintings and their life stories. I relished their courage to radically follow the call of the image, their imagination, even if that meant not being the women society wanted them to be. Neither of them let their voices be stifled. I breathed in their fierceness and allowed it to give me just enough courage to go forward with my idea for a work I felt destined to create—a one-woman show.

About three months before the trip to Yosemite with my dad, in February 1999, Bob and I had gone to New York to watch him tape his eleventh HBO special,
You Are All Diseased
. Cheery title. Dad was in a mood. When people talk about my dad during this period, they often call it the “angry George Carlin” period. Was this a reflection of the depression and grief he'd just dealt with? Or was it some unleashing of a side of him that he'd repressed while Mom was alive? I did not know. But in this show he took no prisoners. He went after big institutions—big business and religion. But no one was safe from his disdain—angel worshippers, Harley-Davidson riders, and white guys who played the blues were all fair game. Dad and I often joked during this period that Bob and I had been given personal dispensations for some of our trespasses—golf and cowboy-boot wearing.

Even with this dispensation, a little part of me feared that I'd end up on his increasingly long list of “People I Can Do Without.” I was terrified that he harbored some of this disdain for me and my life choices. I had no proof of it, but it lived deep inside me.

Dad always taped two shows over two nights so that they could cut them together if they needed. Whenever I watched my dad shoot his HBO shows, it was as if I were on the stage with him. This night was no different. When he first walked out, I felt an enormous flood of pride when the crowd went ape-shit upon seeing him. He was such a rock star up there. Then, as the first show progressed, I could feel every part of my body tighten in an effort to carry him through it. He was uncharacteristically unfocused, and fumbled some. My heart went out to him as I watched him struggle a bit with some timing and memorization stuff.