A Carlin Home Companion (3 page)

Alice left, but thankfully didn't leave my mother empty-handed. There were many projects left unfinished—bootees to knit, decorations to make, and furniture to buy—to fill her time. This did little to dispel Mom's anxiety or grief, but it made the days until my birth go by quicker. But she found it difficult to function, and sleeping was almost impossible. Overwhelmed by it all, during the last month of her pregnancy she was prescribed tranquilizers to relax her and help her sleep.

Ah, the sixties.

*   *   *

I don't know if it was the tranquilizers or not, but it took me three tries to come into the world. After two false labors, which each time caused my dad to drop everything (I guess that would be the microphone?) and rush to the waiting room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, I finally arrived ten minutes shy of Father's Day on June 15, 1963.

Years later Dad commented on the event: “Daughter Kelly born. God Smiles.”

I'm not sure which God he was talking about, but hey, at least he was smiling. As were my parents. They were thrilled with me.

Two weeks later, once I became travelworthy, Mom and Dad swaddled me up, and we all climbed into the old Dodge Dart and returned to New York. We landed in our very own apartment at 519 West 121st Street—the very same building where Mary still lived. The very same building my dad had lived in since he was seven.

The best news was that the apartment was all ours—all three hundred square feet of it. The second-best news was that Mary was now four floors away—close enough for babysitting but far enough to not meddle too much. The not-so-best news was that there was no kitchen. Mom had to cook on a hot plate. Luckily both she and Dad were fans of canned soup and scrambled eggs. Me? I stuck with breast milk.

For Dad's artistic development, New York was the place to be. At night he'd go down to Greenwich Village and hang out with the people who were changing the world. He was watching people like Joan Baez, Mort Sahl, and Bob Dylan step away from the mainstream culture and cut a new, fresh path where the truth, pain, and hope of the world could be expressed in new ways. By 1965 he was doing hootenannies at places like The Bitter End, Café Wha?, and the Café au Go Go. These weren't the straight audiences he'd find at the Playboy or Racquet Club. These were the young kids about to explode into the world and change it in the name of peace, love, and understanding. They were his people. On the outside my dad may have looked like the man his mother wanted him to be, with his clean-cut face and sharkskin suits, but inside he was a pot-smoking radical just itching to tell “the man” to go fuck himself.

But even though it was all very exciting, it couldn't pay the bills.

Even with his mainstream club gigs and the occasional TV spot, Dad barely made enough money for us to survive. Mary would help out by shoving a five into my mom's hand and telling her to go get some food. Luckily my mom was resourceful, and could stretch her money by making all my toys and clothes. But she had no budget for the extras in their life. One would need actual money to have a budget.

When Mom could scrape together some extra dough, she'd spend it on the one thing no young woman could live without—eye makeup. This was the midsixties, for Christ's sake! A woman couldn't fathom leaving the house without twenty-five pounds of that shit on her eyelids. And my mom, although not vain, did like to look good. So when one morning she woke up to find that I, her darling twenty-three-month-old daughter, had opened all the makeup that she'd just spent her last seven dollars on, and used it to paint a most magnificent mural (okay, it was a blob of blue and brown on the walls), she lost it.

She didn't yell. She didn't punish me. She just wept and wept.

She was trying so hard to make it all work. She felt she couldn't do anything right.

One early November evening my mother needed to warm my bottle, so she plugged in the hot plate. The entire city of New York went black.

Plug. Socket. Black. More tears.

With my dad on the road, still filled with grief over her mother, left alone with her thoughts and a rambunctious two-year-old, in a city she could not afford to live in, she truly thought for a few minutes that she and her little hot plate had caused the blackout of the entire borough of Manhattan.

Clearly she was not coping well.

In a letter to her best friend back in Dayton, Mom admitted that she was very depressed because “George will be traveling again through the holidays,” leaving her alone in New York with only me and Mary, and very little money. But, she added, “I would never ask George to give up on his dreams. It's all he's got, and I really believe he can make it.” This, two years after Dad had written a note to himself that had expressed his own take on it all: “In 1963, I made a total of $11,060. Between expenses, managers, and agents, this is a losing proposition.”

But when Dad was home, things were great. He always made Mom laugh, and they explored Manhattan's nightlife together. They adopted “Somewhere” from
West Side Story
as “their song,” and knew for sure that there was “a place for us.”

And Dad always doted on me. When I was an infant he would spend hours staring at me in my crib, recording my bubble blowing and cooing. My grandma Mary insisted on buying me a proper baby pram—navy blue, big white tires, fancy filigree on the sides—and my dad walked me around his neighborhood, those very streets he had roamed and ruled as an adolescent, showing me off to anyone and everyone. As I got older Dad took me to the Central Park Zoo, where I could ride the elephants and see the monkeys and lions. We'd roam the city via subway or bus, and on almost every corner he had a story to tell about the history of his days living there—“That's where me and the gang used to drink and smoke weed,” or, “That's where I stood for hours to get Louis Armstrong's autograph as he came out of the back of Birdland.” I wish he'd been able to record all those moments at those places; I'd love to take the George Carlin tour of New York City again. New York with my dad would always be a special place for the two of us.

And thankfully, careerwise, things began to look up. There were more and more moments of real hope that his “Danny Kaye plan” was not just a Danny Kaye pipe dream. He began to get more spots on TV, and better club gigs.

I'm sure it felt like manna from heaven. And in some ways it was, because eventually it led us to the promised land—Beverly Hills.

 

CHAPTER
THREE

The American Dream

I
N A FLASH,
a poof, a swirl of the magic wand, we, the Carlins, were officially living the American Dream.

After a year in a small apartment on Beverly Glen, where my mom had inadvertently invented her new hairstyle, “Boom Bangs,” we moved into a three-bedroom house on Beverwil Drive, just inside the Beverly Hills border. And I mean
just
inside. Three doors to the south, and we would have been what they officially call “adjacent.” Not that this was really important to Mom and Dad, but I'm sure it lifted their spirits. We were in Beverly … Hills. Swimming pools and movie stars!

The house itself was wonderful. It was a Spanish-style three-bedroom with a big modern kitchen, formal dining room, a laundry room, and a courtyard. Just off the courtyard, near the front of the house, my dad made an extra room into a home office—a place for his stuff. And in the backyard was a playhouse—a place for
my
stuff. It was perfect except for a huge cluster of ferns in the courtyard that I was convinced would eat me. To the adults they just looked like ferns. But in my four-year-old mind, they were the tentacles of a monster ready to come alive at any moment and snatch me up.

We were the typical American family. We had lots of pets that were all named by my dad: Squeezix the parakeet, Frick & Frack the hermit crabs, Bogie the Maltese terrier, and a black cat named Beanie, which came with the house. Mom seemed to be feeling better about being in Los Angeles now, and she eased into her new Beverly Hills–housewife lifestyle: She got her hair done weekly at a fancy salon; she relished decorating the house. She found wallpaper for the kitchen that said, “Ha Ha Ha, Ho Ho Ho, Hee Hee Hee,” scattered in wild and wacky black-and-white sixties graphic writing—God, we were hip. And, being a proper 1960s Beverly Hills housewife, she immediately hired a black maid, Anner Rae, to do the housework.

Dad stepped seamlessly into his role as a 1960s clean-cut family provider/husband/father by rarely being home. He was on the road for weeks at a time doing gigs at big fancy clubs like the Copacabana and the Playboy to pay the bills. All this new money allowed him to buy Mom whatever she wanted for the house or herself. And although I wished he could always be home, it made the times he was around extra special for me. He taught me how to climb the tree in the front yard, how to ride my two-wheel bike along the sidewalk, and every day we'd go to Roxbury Park down the street, where he'd push me on the swings and buy me ice-cream sandwiches.

We were just so damn white picket fence.

Well, kind of.

“Now this bowl here is yours—‘Kelly's Spice Cake,'” my dad said to me as I sat on the kitchen counter mixing the ingredients in the bowl he was pointing to. Then he pulled another bowl over, poured in another box of cake mix
and
a Baggie of weed. “And this one is ‘Daddy's Spice Cake,'” he said as he put that bowl in my lap. I happily stirred in the extra “spice.”

I loved spending time with my daddy. Especially in his office, where I'd spend hours and hours coloring and drawing pictures, while he wrote material, listened to music, and rolled joints. Rolling joints was a daily routine. I watched him clean the weed, roll the weed, and smoke the weed. By the time I was ten, I could also clean the weed and roll the weed. But it took until I reached the ripe old age of fourteen before I would smoke the weed.

Dad's office was filled with wild posters (an upside-down American flag, the Zig-Zag rolling papers, a few Bill Graham rock-and-roll posters), and crazy tchotchkes (a hand grenade, an ashtray in the shape of a hand giving the finger, an old toy car of an NYPD paddy wagon). The freshest rock and roll spun on the turntable—Dylan, The Stones, or The Beatles. I loved lying on the floor and looking at the pictures on the front covers of those records: the funny cake on a turntable of The Rolling Stones'
Let It Bleed
; the pen-and-ink drawing of
Revolver;
and then the strange one that was just white—
The White Album.
The very first song that ever registered on my young mind was from
The White Album
—“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” Before that song, music was just sound in the background, but the day I heard the words, “All the children sing!” I was hooked. A children's song! I played the song over and over, skipping around the house singing at the top of my lungs, “Hey, Bungalow Bill/What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?”

When Dad was on the road it was hard on me, but on the phone before he'd sign off, he'd routinely ask, “Are you my Stinkpot or Baby Doll?” To make up for the long trips, he'd come home with lots of presents. He'd bring salt water taffy from Atlantic City, or a snow globe from Chicago, or a little stuffed animal from parts in between. When I got a little older he'd send me postcards from the road. My favorite thing was when he would buy a bunch of them and write only one word on each postcard so that I would have to put the sentence together myself. He was a big kid himself, which drove my mom nuts most of the time because she felt like she had to be both the mom and the dad in the house.

Because Dad was a picky eater like me, he made me peanut butter sandwiches whenever I didn't want to eat what my mom had cooked, much to her displeasure (“George, how will she ever learn to like new foods if she doesn't try them?” “Well, I never try new foods, and I'm just fine.”). And sometimes, when Mom was out, he'd even make me pancakes for dinner.

My dad relished sharing things with me, this little person who knew nothing of the planet yet. He'd explain how things worked—cats purring or music coming out of the radio. And he knew the names of stars—he loved astronomy. He also taught me new words. No, not those words. I'd learn those words easily enough in a few years. But when I didn't know what a word meant, he'd write it and the definition down on a piece of paper for me. But the most special moments with my dad were what I would call “Daddy's big teaching moments.” They came when the world was revealing itself in a new way and Dad knew that it was important for me to witness it and understand.

A perfect teaching moment showed up in 1969.

“Look, Kelly. This is really happening right now.” Dad had woken me up in the middle of the night and plopped me down in front of the TV to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. He, Mom, and I watched as the module sat on the chalky surface of the moon. He kept repeating, “This is really happening right now.” Maybe he couldn't believe it himself.

Dad pointed at the TV. “This isn't like
Gilligan's Island.
This isn't a TV show. There are really men on the moon right now. This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened.”

As he himself took in the enormity of it all, he wanted me to be a part of this species-size historical moment, too. He wanted me to understand that I was part of something bigger than myself. That we all were part of something wondrous.

And yes, he was probably high at the time.

*   *   *

With Dad on the road so much, and sometimes gone for special days like my birthday, my mom always found ways to make up for it. She was very clever and loved celebrating birthdays and holidays. For my fourth birthday she made it truly magical.

Like all kids growing up in the TV age, I loved watching TV. When I was almost three years old, my dad was on the variety show
The Jimmy Dean Show
. Mom was excited because I was finally old enough to watch Dad on TV with her. When the show began, she positioned me in front of the TV. The announcer proclaimed, “And here's George Carlin,” the audience clapped, the intro music crescendoed, and Dad began to speak. I had no idea what was going on. Mom pointed to my dad on the TV and said, “Look, Kelly, it's Daddy. Daddy is on the TV.” He started talking, but I wasn't clear on what was happening. Daddy? TV? All I knew was that my dad's voice was coming out of a box and that there was a really small man stuck inside it. I began to cry and scream, “I want Daddy!” I ran out of the room, hysterical.