A Carlin Home Companion (7 page)

Dad was now saying stuff out loud often to people's faces, which made me want to disappear. Part of the reason for this was that his very presence provoked reactions. Dad's hair was now halfway down his back, and this would raise the hackles of the “straights.” Sometimes they gave him a look that said, “Cut your hair, hippie!” Sometimes they'd actually say it out loud to his face. Either reaction triggered my dad to spout a few of his famous “Seven Dirty Words,” usually with a few additional choice words tacked on for good measure.

Once when we were on a cross-country flight on a 747 coming home from a trip back east, Dad disappeared into the bathroom for a long time. After about ten minutes a big guy with a big Texan accent banged on the door and told my dad to hurry it up. Dad was taking his time in there, rolling and then smoking a joint, and I'm sure doing a few lines, too. After about twenty minutes the big Texan was starting to get really loud, threatening my dad. When my dad finally came out, the Texan sneered at him and called him a freak. My dad told him to stick a dildo up his ass. The Texan lunged at my dad, and a few stewardesses had to get between them. About ten minutes before we landed, one of the stewardesses came over to tell us that the Texan had complained to the pilot and also mentioned that he smelled marijuana. The cops would be at the gate to meet us. My stomach clenched with terror. I didn't want to see a repeat of Milwaukee, or worse. Then the stewardess said that she and the other girls on board were huge fans, and that if we wanted to, they would sneak us off to safety. After we landed we lingered on board and then sneaked out the back stairwell with the stewardesses, and into their van. It was as if we were secret agents making a getaway! We went straight to the Airport Marina hotel on Lincoln Boulevard with them and hid out. We ordered room service, and I watched cartoons. Finally, after about four hours, one of them called to say that the coast was clear and we could go home.

Although I was young, I knew that Dad's volatile behavior probably wasn't the best strategy for succeeding in life. But my dad couldn't help himself. His general attitude toward authority (which had gotten him kicked out of every institution he had ever been a member of—middle school, high school, the air force), combined with the quality and quantity of cocaine he was now regularly ingesting, resulted in mounds of unfiltered rage.

Doing ridiculous amounts of cocaine must be some kind of prerequisite to becoming a counterculture god. My current theory goes like this: Fame brings lots of people into your life, and with these people comes genuine admiration, and with genuine admiration come gifts, and during the early seventies, most gifts came in the form of drugs. Therefore, if not all, then most of the people who came into our lives at some point handed my dad a little packet of white powder. Although I was meant not to, I usually saw the exchange, but never acknowledged it. I mean, what could I possibly say as I waved at folks leaving our house? Thanks for coming by. Oh no, it's fine. I like it when you bring all those drugs into the house. My life is way more fun when Mom and Dad stay up for days and nights, and end up arguing right outside my door at 3:00
A
.
M
. I mean, what else could I possibly be doing? Sleeping? No, no, really.

The upside of Dad's cocaine use (strangely, there
was
an upside, even for me) was that he'd be up at all hours doing all kinds of stuff, and I could hang out with him. One night I found him in the living room on the floor surrounded by piles of nails, screws, washers, bolts, paper clips, and rubber bands. He was sorting them. He had a little cabinet with about fifteen little drawers in it, and he'd created a system that involved the size, color, and use of each object. He was in his joy. Sorting his stuff was such a joy for him that it ended up becoming the source for one of his most famous routines: “A Place for My Stuff”: “That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff … That's all your house is—a place for your stuff.” My dad believed all was right in the world when, and only when, there was a list, a pile, a folder, or a Ziploc bag to contain the chaos of his life.

Even his ideas needed to be contained. Everywhere in our house, for as long as I can remember, there were pads and pens in every room so that when an idea popped into his head, it had a place to go. He would then collect all those notes, organize them into themes, place them in folders, and then build his bits from there. This is how he did fourteen HBO specials of groundbreaking comedy over a forty-year span—he wrote his shit down. Anyway, that late night when I saw him hovering over the piles of nails, screws, washers, bolts, paper clips, and rubber bands, I happily plopped down, learned his system, and got to the task at hand.

Other times in the middle of the night, I'd find him immersed in music. Like my parents, I was a bit of a night owl. I'm not sure why. It might have just been my nature, or it might have been nurture—having spent my first few years on the road. But during this time I suspect that it was because some part of me was always subconsciously on alert for any problems that might arise between my parents. When I couldn't sleep, I'd stand by my door to listen to see if my mom was awake. If I didn't hear her I'd sneak into the living room, and if I was lucky, there'd be my dad bopping his head to an unknown beat that only he could hear through his headphones. I'd stand and watch him until finally he'd notice me and say, “Kel, Kel, you gotta hear this.” He'd then place the headphones on my ears. I never knew what to expect. Would it be the groundbreaking sound of the albums
Tubular Bells
or
Switched-on Bach
or the bluegrass soul of Doug Kershaw? Or maybe even Harry Nilsson singing, “You're breakin' my heart/you're tearing it apart/So fuck you”? I'm guessing that not many other ten-year-olds in my neighborhood were being turned on to Harry Nilsson by their parents.

I always listened intently, trying to understand what exactly it was Dad loved about each piece of music he shared with me. I so wanted to be in his head, to understand his world. When Paul Simon's “Kodachrome” came out, my dad played it over and over again on the big stereo in the living room at full volume. He'd say, “Kel, listen to the harmonies,” and then he'd sing with the record, “They give us the greeeeeeeens of summers./Makes you think all the world's/A sunny day, oh yeah.” The joy in his face coupled with the purity of those notes created an explosion of love in my heart. To this day I cannot hear that song without thinking of him and those moments. To this day I love the harmonies because of him. Those moments in the middle of the night were like little life rafts in our life of increasing chaos. A safe haven of daddyness.

Although Dad had always shared his music with me, it was during this time that I discovered my own musical tastes. It started when I picked a few albums from his collection and played them for myself. When Dad noticed this, he gave me my own turntable for my room. Dad was an early adopter of technology, and I benefited his entire life from this by being first in line to get all of his technological hand-me-downs. The first album I took into my room was
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
I played it over and over until I had memorized every word of every song. The song “She's Leaving Home” had a particularly powerful impact on me. Somewhere on the edge of my thinking, I wondered what my parents would do if I'd suddenly disappeared from their life. I didn't want to leave them, just the chaos. It was the first time I ever entertained the thought that I could choose to do something different and separate from them in my life. If I were like the girl in the song who chose to leave, would they understand that my anxiety and loneliness from their drug use and fighting had pushed me out the door? But those thoughts and feelings were way too scary to actually have, so I pushed them somewhere into the basement of my mind. I knew I'd never leave. We were the Three Musketeers.

As music became my sanctuary, I looked outside of my dad's collection for even more music. Every week Dad got
Billboard
magazine, diligently marking where his albums were on the Top 100 Charts, and keeping the pages in a folder. But before he tore the pages out I looked to see what the top songs were, and then got him to take me down to the little record store in the Palisades Village to buy some 45s. Some of my first purchases were “Love Train” by The O'Jays, “Spiders & Snakes” by Jim Stafford, and “Rock On” by David Essex. I know. I know: “Spiders & Snakes,” really? What can I say? No doubt my eclectic taste came straight from my dad.

*   *   *

For the first year in the house on the hill, Mom seemed to be happy, which really meant she had more good days than bad. I think it was because she had a project to sink her teeth into—decorating the house. The house was one of those just-built modern homes, and it was all glass. The view was stunning. We were able to see all the way from Santa Monica Bay to downtown Los Angeles. It was an open-concept design that Mom filled with gorgeous modern touches like glass coffee tables and lights that swooped over the couch like drooping orchids. But there was also a fair share of quirky items, too. In the hall powder room, when you sat on the toilet you looked at the dashboard of an old Edsel, steering wheel and all. And in the area that had the dining room table and baby grand piano (a new addition), there was a full-size British phone booth sitting against the wall. Next to that was an old barber's chair with a life-sized carved wooden mannequin that looked like a Native American, and in the corner was a naked male store mannequin. Mom's humor, playfulness, and adventurous spirit were on display everywhere. She was such a joyful being in her essence, which made her dark moods and drinking that much harder to live through. When she was happy, she was a delight. When she was not, she was a nightmare.

As time progressed, so did Mom's drinking. Her behavior got more and more erratic, and Dad and I did our best to manage it. We had secret conversations in which we'd talk about what we might do about it. We usually concluded that there wasn't a whole lot we could do except try to slow her down. We became like the East German secret police, watching her every move, questioning her every motive. This, of course, pissed her off and made her feel we were ganging up on her. We were, but we weren't. We were just trying to get our heads and arms around this force that had taken over her life, our lives—addiction.

Dad, of course, worried about her and my safety when he was on the road, and so he hired a guy, Fred, to help around the house. Fred drove me to where I needed to go and kept an eye on Mom. Although it was Fred's job to watch her, it did little to relieve my hypervigilance. My mind was already so ingrained with ways to manage, change, or work around Mom's increasing dysfunction that I couldn't just turn it off. I didn't know how to fire myself from the position of chief Brenda wrangler. And it wasn't just in the house; I had to try and monitor her while we were out, too. Mom had begun to practice a new form of driving. It wasn't exactly off-road driving; it was more like off-street driving. More than a few times, as we'd make our way up the winding road to our house late at night after dinner at Bill and Elaine's house in Malibu, she'd drive the car up and onto our neighbor's lawn. After she'd done this about half a dozen times, I began to fake being asleep at Bill and Elaine's so that I wouldn't have to get in the car with her. I hoped that she would stay, too, and sleep it off. That rarely happened. She'd usually just leave me there and find her way home on her own.

Fearing she'd really hurt herself or someone else, I began to hide her car keys to prevent her from leaving the house in the first place. That worked the first few times, but then she caught on, and would threaten me if I didn't give them to her. Then I came up with the next strategy: I hid her alcohol from her. One day when she was out, I emptied the shelves of the wet bar, hid the bottles in my closet, and then left the house to go out and play. When she came home and found the shelves empty, she went ape-shit and searched the house. When I came home, she marched me straight to my closet, pointed at the twenty or so bottles of alcohol on the floor, and asked, “Kelly, what the hell is going on here?”

“Um, I don't know,” I answered.

“Answer me! What the hell is going on here? Are you some kind of alcoholic?”

Oh, denial, how you make me laugh!

*   *   *

There was laughter. Especially when the TV was on. It seemed that nothing could go wrong with the TV on. I'd crawl into Mom and Dad's bed, get right between them, and we'd watch all the great comedies of the day:
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(Dad loved Ted Knight's Ted Baxter character),
Laugh-In
(I loved Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, and did one hell of an imitation of her), and
The Bob Newhart Show
(we all waited for the Mr. Carlin character to show up). But our hands-down favorite was
The Carol Burnett Show
. Carol Burnett was my Danny Kaye. I was around ten or eleven years old when I started to think, Hey, maybe I could do that someday, like my dad had done when he formed his “Big Danny Kaye plan.” My thoughts were much more nebulous than his had been, though. I never formed a plan. When I watched Carol (or Lily or Lucy) there was always a rush of energy that made me feel connected to others, and more importantly, connected to something bigger than myself. I wanted to make people feel connected, too.
That
is what made me want to be just like Carol. That, and making my dad laugh.

Although Carol Burnett was my hero, ironically, it was doing an imitation of another cast member that is my earliest memory of really making my dad laugh. Vicki Lawrence's Mama character from “The Family” sketch had a line that went something like, “I don't want to play no god damn Parcheesi!” I mastered this line and could make my dad melt into a pool of laughter whenever I recited it. Making my dad laugh was a conduit straight to nirvana. Hell, just seeing my dad laugh was pure bliss. Maybe that's why
The Carol Burnett Show
was so special to me—every time Tim Conway tried to get Harvey Korman to break in a sketch, my dad laughed so hard he cried. No moment is more perfect than watching the man who makes the world laugh laugh himself.