IN 1969 MY DAD DROPPED acid for the first time—and the second time—and most probably the twenty-ninth time. As he would say about it years later, “LSD is a values changer.… And I was able to see I was in the wrong place.” He now saw very clearly that he was entertaining the wrong people. He was entertaining the parents of the people he actually wanted to be with.
When he went to do some shows at the Copacabana in New York City, things were what you might call … interesting. Some nights he did his act as usual, and then one night he just lay on the floor under the piano and described what he saw to the audience. Another night he brought the phone book out on stage and read from different sections. He was trying to get fired. They obliged.
Later that year he got hired to open for the Supremes in Las Vegas for twelve thousand dollars a week. The most money he had ever made in his life. It was enough money to reach his American Dream, which is what he’d thought he wanted. It was also enough money to put a deposit on a beautiful house in the San Fernando Valley, which is what my mom definitely wanted.
During the first show Dad did his new bit about the word “shit.” He said, “I don’t say shit. Down the street Buddy Hackett says shit. Redd Foxx says shit. I don’t say shit. I smoke a little of it, but I don’t say it.” Some members of the audience apparently took offense at his act, and the Frontier Hotel told Dad, “You say, ‘Shit,’ we say, ‘Fuck you.’”
Dad got fired. Mom lost her dream house.
And I began to sleep on the floor.
My mom and dad began to argue more and more about money, and all the changes that were happening. They did their best to argue only when I slept or when I wasn’t around. But being an only child, I knew exactly what was going on whether I wanted to or not. I felt the reality—things were tense between them. My dad said that he knew in his gut that their fighting had become a problem for me when I started mysteriously sleeping on the floor in the hallway in the middle of the night. This troubled him deeply. But all he could do was try to spend as much quality time with me as possible to offset any consequences of the war brewing in the house.
Late one night my dad was packing to go out on the road. I was sitting on the floor watching him, fascinated. Because he went on the road so much, my dad was a champion packer. And because he was slightly OCD, he would have stacks of his things all around the dining room—shirts in one pile, socks folded neatly in another, underwear stacked, toiletries laid out precisely. It was a production. Being with him during these ordinary domestic moments meant the world to me. It was a chance to soak up some special “daddyness” before he would be gone for two or three weeks. So there I was soaking him up, when my mom came in and said sharply, “Kelly, it’s time for bed.”
I looked up pleadingly. “Can’t I stay up just a little longer, pretty please?”
Dad quickly chimed in, “C’mon, Bren. Let her stay up a little longer. It won’t kill her. I’m going to be gone for three weeks.”
Mom set her jaw, looked at my dad, and said loudly, “Fine, I’ll just be the only Carlin in this entire household who never, ever, ever gets what she wants!”
I knew what was coming, so I got up and headed toward my bedroom, hoping my obedience would quell any arguing. But as I did so, my mom lost her balance, tried to right herself, but couldn’t, and fell backward into Dad’s half-packed suitcase. I held my breath, waiting for her to lose it. My dad tensed, too, even as he rushed over to see if she was okay. But instead of rage or tears, she began to laugh. It wasn’t a fuck-you laugh, but a loose, silly, oh-my-God-look-what-I-did laugh. And with that, Dad laughed, too. They laughed together. It was a laugh that said, “We’re in love and see all the good in the world and each other.” It was the laugh of “Everything will be okay forever and ever.” Confused but thrilled, I began to laugh, too. I felt a thank-God-everyone-is-still-happy moment deep inside my chest.
Dad helped her up and out of the suitcase, and Mom straightened out her nightgown. As she did this, I saw something that I’d never noticed before—she was wobbly and couldn’t really stand. She couldn’t really speak right, and there was a sleepy look in her eyes. This wasn’t my everyday mom, but someone else who spoke, acted, and felt different. And although I didn’t really know what to call it at the time, it was very clear—she was drunk.
And there it was again, like the day her hair caught on fire: a ripple of threat in my young and sensitive being. However, this time it wasn’t a tremor on my human seismograph, it was more like an earthquake. I was now very worried—What if Dad is gone on the road and Mom is acting like this? Will she know how to take care of me? And even worse, I thought—What if Daddy gets really mad that Mommy is like this and he leaves forever?
My mother, the one I’d known my whole life, had disappeared before my very eyes.
But then Dad looked us both in the eye, put his arms around us, and said, “Come on, come on, group hug.” We all gathered in a circle and hugged. He then said, “Just remember, we are the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all.”
That was the night the Carlins discovered the land of denial.
* * *
During the spring of 1970 my dad went into the hospital for a double hernia operation. He went in my daddy—a clean-cut man with groovy sideburns—and came home someone else—a man with a beard. A beard he would not shave for the rest of his life. I wasn’t quite sure if this was really my daddy. This was very startling for me.
Mom was startled, too. Not so much by the beard, but by all the rest. Dad was ready to change everything. He was ready to walk away from the suits, the ties, and the audiences that didn’t really understand him. This also meant walking away from the money that came with all that. To finally be able to fully express his truth, as many of his peers in music were doing, he was willing to risk everything. My mom was not as willing. All that she and Dad had worked for and sacrificed for the last nine years was at risk.
But even with her anxiety, which led to lots and lots of arguing for a few months, in the end she really did understand. She knew this change of direction for my dad was his “true north.” It might not be full of safety and security, but it was full of authenticity. And she understood what it felt like not to live authentically—she’d been doing it since she was a teenage girl. Plus Mom had always loved the “David vs. Goliath” fight, the us-against-them lifestyle. It’s what made her feel alive when she first met my dad.
Yes, she had wanted the house in the Valley with the pool; yes, she loved having a successful husband; but she had also felt brushed aside the last five years because of that success. Something had died inside her. With Dad igniting a new vision for his life and work, something sparked in her, and she looked him square in the eye and said, “Let’s go!”
* * *
Giving up on the white-bread version of the American Dream meant we were now going to live our own version of it. In the late fall of 1970, we moved out of Beverly Hills and into a three-bedroom apartment on Pacific Avenue near the Venice Canals. We were now living among “our” people—the freaks, bikers, and hippies of Venice Beach. It was a tough neighborhood, so the first week we lived there my dad taught me how to walk down the street like a New Yorker. “So, you know,” he explained in a thick New York accent, “no one will fuck with you.” He took this teeny wisp of a seven-year-old out onto the sidewalk in front of our building and showed me how to do this New York–style walking—head up, eyes front, walking like I had a place to go.
A few months after we moved in, I was awakened by a very large bang—like a truck had hit our apartment building. Before I knew it the whole place started to shake. I leaped out of bed and ran as fast as I could to my parents’ room. The whole world kept shaking. I jumped into their bed, and Dad hovered above Mom and me so that if the roof caved in, he’d take the brunt of the damage. I don’t know what was more traumatizing that morning—the 6.6 magnitude earthquake or the fact that as Dad protected us, I could see his balls.
When Dad wasn’t on the road, he was in his office listening to albums, smoking weed (he was also growing a huge pot plant in there), and working on new material: It was something he now did with real fervor since he now had a new audience for it—college kids all across America. But unlike only a few years earlier, I no longer spent endless hours with him. I now hung around with my friends, a couple of girls I had befriended in the neighborhood. We ruled the back alleyway as only girls on pink-and-turquoise Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes could.
After school my best friend, Cheryl, and I could be found playing handball against the open walls of the apartment building’s carport, and in the summer we were on the beach. These were the days when all you had to do was tell your mom where you were going and when you’d be home. Sometimes that would mean eight to ten hours of free-range playing. We roamed the canals—which back then had few houses and were mostly open space—built forts, sucked on honeysuckle, and sailed Popsicle-stick boats in the canals. I committed my first crime—I shoplifted an Abba-Zaba candy bar and a candle from Alan’s Market. My life of crime was short, though. I felt too guilty to ever do it again. We also roamed the beaches all the way from the marina to the lifeguard station up near Venice Boulevard, ruling the swing sets, building sand castles, and gorging on candy. We were never hassled, bothered, nor molested. It must have been my New York walk.
When Mom was home, she was usually partying with her friends. My friend Cheryl’s mom had become my mom’s best friend, and they often went gallivanting out in the neighborhood together. I began to notice that my mom was drunk or high during the day more frequently, and her moods were all over the place—some days she was euphoric and others a bitch. She was now popping a rainbow of pills. I tried to predict what might set her off. Was it my room being messy? Or maybe it was my coming home a few minutes late? I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know how to act around her anymore, and so I began to pull away from her. I talked to her less, confided in her almost never, and generally avoided her. I became afraid of her and relied on my dad to be my only emotional foundation.
When she and Dad fought, which was more often and much louder than it used to be, I began to take my dad’s side. I felt he was the more logical one, and so I would back him up. But this only made the atmosphere in the household worse. More and more often I found solace by disappearing into my bedroom, where I’d sink into a quiet and dark mood, or I’d flee out the door to find someone or something to distract myself.
When it was time for dinner, Mom was sometimes nowhere to be found, and I’d have to go look for her. One of her regular spots was a local bar called Hinanos. I’d lean just inside the doorway and yell, “Brenda Carlin! Are you here, Brenda Carlin?” When she was there, and not too deep into her Cutty Sarks, she’d come home to get dinner ready. But if she wasn’t there, or if I saw that she was already drunk, I’d go home alone and make my new favorite thing—a Swanson’s TV Dinner. Fried chicken or Salisbury steak were my favorites. (Though I must admit I could have done without the corn infiltrating my chocolate brownie, thank you very much.)
On those nights when Dad was in town and Mom had cooked a meal, the three of us would set up our TV trays in front of the big console and watch some shows together. Those were my favorite nights, because it felt like everything was right with our world. Mom and Dad loved the crime shows like Mission: Impossible, Columbo, and Mannix. But we were also fans of the animal shows like The Wonderful World of Disney and Wild Kingdom, because Dad would do the voices of all the animals. He’d pick a different voice for each animal and do funny dialogue, making Mom and me laugh hysterically.
Not only were we in a new neighborhood, but I was now going to a new school—Santa Monica Montessori. With my new school came a school-bus service, which my parents loved. They no longer needed to wake up early, or be sober enough to drive at eight in the morning! I, on the other hand, hated it. Since they didn’t have to wake up to drive, they’d often sleep in, leaving me to wake myself up, eat breakfast, and get ready for the day. Increasingly I’d wake up to the bus honking in the alleyway. A dagger of anxiety would stab me in the stomach when I’d realize I was late again. Sometimes Millie, the bus driver, would wait the ten minutes while I scrambled into my clothes and grabbed a Pop-Tart for breakfast. But most of the time I’d wave her on and then have to wake my parents to take me to school. Mom or Dad would groggily stumble about, throw on some clothes, and drive me up to Santa Monica.
One morning I woke up for school and found both of my parents already awake, dressed, and in the kitchen. This confused me deeply.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
What had happened was that my mom, who was now volunteering at the LA Free Clinic, had gone for a drink after work with a few coworkers, and on the way home she’d gotten pulled over by the cops. When they searched her purse, they found a bunch of loose pills.
She told them, “They’re my medicine. I have a prescription at home. If you take me there, I’ll prove it to you.”
And so they did. It was 2:00 A.M. and my dad by this point was frantic and worried. He’d been up waiting, and in the meantime had rolled a nice joint to smoke. Just as he lit it, there was a knock at the door. “Thank God you’re—” Instead of finding my mom at the door, he found two of LA’s finest standing next to my mom in handcuffs. They quickly took my dad into custody, too, searched the apartment, and found the six-foot-tall pot plant growing in his office.
The cops shuffled my parents off to the local lockup, where they quickly got bail. I had somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing until waking for school. I guess it was all that training I got sleeping in clubs as a baby. (I probably would have slept through the Stones at Altamont.)
My mom wasn’t the only one creating havoc in the family with her intake of “chemicals.” One afternoon she came into my room and said, “Kelly, Daddy’s taken something, and he’s not feeling well, and I need you to help me.” We walked into their bedroom and found my dad standing in his boxer shorts, holding a framed picture of his old head shot—the clean-cut face—smiling at us. The frame was shattered, and Dad’s hand was bleeding.
“Daddy, are you okay?” I asked. My dad took the picture and threw it against the wall, and then he collapsed in a pile of tears and rage. Mom quickly sat on him. I then jumped on him, too. He rambled on unintelligibly about his mother, himself, the world. He was shouting at things that weren’t in the room and making no sense to me. Mom soothed him. “You’re going to be okay, George. You’re going to be okay.”
I was terrified that he’d lost his mind. I shook with fear. My father was gone. As tears streamed down my face, I bravely followed my mom’s lead and tried to soothe him, “It’s okay, Daddy. You’re going to be just fine.”
We sat on him for a torturous forty-five minutes until he finally cried himself to sleep.
Dad had gotten hold of some bad acid. It seemed that becoming a counterculture god to the youth of America was not as easy as it looked.
* * *
At least that’s what it felt like Dad had become—a counterculture god. By mid-1972 Dad’s second album, FM & AM (a mix of old material—the AM side—and new material—the FM side), had come out and gone gold. With that feat, everything had changed, again.
To the world, just a few years earlier he’d been the clean-cut guy who made a nice living “working clean,” as evidenced by his “Indian Sergeant” routine (done in the voice of an Irish guy from the old neighborhood): “Now, a lot of youse guys have been asking me about promotions.… Well, the results of the tests have come in and youse doin’ beautifully. ‘Burning Settlers’ Homes,’ everybody passed. ‘Imitating a Coyote,’ everybody passed. ‘Sneaking Quietly Through the Woods,’ everybody passed, except Limping Ox. However, Limping Ox is being fitted with a pair of corrective moccasins.” Now Dad was the long-haired hippie-freak in blue jeans making a great living “working blue,” as seen in his bit titled “Shoot”: “I got fired last year in Vegas for saying shit—in a town where the big game is called craps. That’s some kind of a double standard. I’m sure there was some Texan standing out in the casino yelling, ‘Oh, SHIT! I CRAPPED!’ And they fly those guys in free. Fired me … shit.”
He now headlined on almost every college campus in America. Not only had he found success, but he’d found it by stepping into his true nature, where he could speak truth to power and question everything. He had finally stepped over the line to the “other side.” And during those heady times in America, that line was firmly drawn and sides were vehemently chosen: the hippies vs. the establishment, the freaks vs. the straights; the heads vs. the blockheads.
* * *
In the summer of 1972 Mom and I went on the road with Dad. The road was always a fun adventure. Some of my earliest memories from the road are of waking up in a hotel room, both my parents dead to the world, and spending the next few hours coloring, watching cartoons with the volume all the way down, and staring out the window at the city below. Finally, when I was starving, I’d nudge my parents awake. Dad would run down to a local diner or store (or, as he got more successful, order room service) and buy a bunch of those miniboxes of Rice Krispies and a quart of milk. He’d then carefully take out his pocketknife, cut open those teeny boxes, and magically transform them into an instant bowl. Abracadabra—breakfast was served! And although I never heard it, I am absolutely sure that it was on one of those mornings that Dad heard that famous “Snap, crackle, fuck you.”
Our first stop that summer was Kent State. My dad took me to the memorial for the four college kids who had been shot by the National Guard a few years before. He explained that they’d been protesting the war, standing up for what they believed in, and that the government silenced them by shooting them. This was one of those “Daddy’s big teaching moments.” He wanted me to understand the importance of people standing up for what they believed in, especially those who were willing to stand up to their government to make their point. He explained how the government had always silenced those who did not have a voice to begin with—blacks and Native Americans especially—and how young, white American girls and boys were now in that category, too. I felt there was no safe place for anyone.
Being a nine-year-old only child, and one who felt an increasing need to be more mature than my years, I acted as calm, cool, and collected as I could. I tried to show my dad that I understood the lesson of civics and morality that he was trying to teach me. But it was just a calm veneer, because all I could think was, If the government was shooting these people for standing up for what they believed, would they shoot me or even my dad? It was a terrifying thought that now echoed in the back of my mind.
The next stop on our summer of ’72 tour was Summerfest in Milwaukee. Summerfest was basically an ocean of beer surrounding an island of sausage disguising itself as a music festival. You know, what they call “good clean American fun.” And when you think “good clean American fun,” don’t you also immediately think George Carlin?
Dad opened for Arlo Guthrie, and struggled to do his new material while connecting with the enormous audience of over ten thousand people. He began to do his new routine, the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which he’d just recorded on his third album, Class Clown. The album wouldn’t be released for another few months, so I’m pretty sure the promoter didn’t know exactly what he had signed up for when he booked my dad. The routine was both hilarious and an intellectual examination of the usage of language in our culture. However, it consisted of words, according to Dad, “that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war. Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” Yeah, those words.
Because Summerfest was an outdoor venue, the main stage act could be heard throughout the fairgrounds—meaning it could be heard by lots of mommies and daddies and little kiddies. So there was my dad onstage, killing. Most of the audience was loving it, while Mom and I stood in the wings, also enjoying the show. That’s when the promoter rushed up to my mom and said, “The cops are here. They’re complaining about the language, and they’re going to arrest George the minute he walks offstage.”
I guess when my dad said that he’d like to “fuck everyone in the audience,” the nice Midwestern policemen took some offense.
Knowing that he was carrying drugs in his pocket—both grass and coke—my mom thought fast, grabbed a glass of water, and walked out onto the stage. Dad, confused, took the water, and Mom whispered, “Exit stage left. The cops are here.”
Dad wrapped it up, exited stage left, and we all quickly hustled into the dressing room and locked the door. I anxiously watched as Mom removed a rather large Baggie of coke from her purse and stashed it in a bass drum, and Dad took out the joint and small vial of coke from his pockets and handed them to the promoter. The promoter was trying to keep things calm, when suddenly, Bang!—it sounded as if a gun had gone off. I leaped into my mom’s arms and began crying hysterically. As she tried to calm me down, nothing else happened. Someone said, “It was probably just a balloon.” Someone had popped a fucking balloon! Mom, Dad, and the promoter all laughed a nervous laugh, but I was now unhinged. Terror streaked through my body. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was going to die. And that’s when the door opened, my dad walked out, and within a few seconds policemen cuffed him. I screamed, “Daddy!” I was sure that I would never ever see him again. My mom held me back as I cried.
I don’t know how long it took, but she finally calmed me down enough so that she could leave to get my dad out of jail.
Luckily my mom knew exactly what to do because of Lenny Bruce’s arrest in Chicago in 1961—You get a civil rights lawyer. I went home with the promoter to his house and family, where I spent the rest of the weekend distracting myself by swimming with his kids in something that as a Southern California girl I had never seen before—an aboveground pool. I almost didn’t know what to do with it.
After one of the most harrowing weekends of our family life, Mom paid something like $250 to get Dad out of jail, and we were ready for his next gig: Carnegie Hall, New York City.
We stayed at the Plaza Hotel. Well, actually, we lived at the Plaza Hotel for almost a whole month. Are you familiar with the character Eloise? Now imagine Eloise in a tie-dyed T-shirt, sneakers, and a denim jacket with a patch that said, “Make Love, Not War.” That was me. I read all the Eloise books, roamed the back stairs and halls, and got to know most of the staff by name. Every day I ordered a hot fudge sundae and charged it to the room, and every night I went to the basement theater, the Plaza 9 Music Hall, and watched the musical Curley McDimple. This was my Danny Kaye moment. I sat in the dark, watched a young girl, Robbi Morgan, sing and dance her way across the stage as a Shirley Temple–like character, and I decided right there and then that I wanted to be just like her someday. Having watched the real Shirley Temple on TV my whole life, I had certainly fantasized about being her. But it was just TV, and in black-and-white, which made it feel so remote, so I never really saw it as something I could do in my life. But here I was now, sitting in the hush of a theater, watching a real girl only a few years older than me in a play about a Shirley Temple character. It felt very real. I eventually met the cast, and my mom told them that I had memorized all the words to all the songs. I began to hang out with Robbi before and after the shows, and one weekend I even got to go across the bridge to New Jersey to her house, where her mom and dad taught me how to do the time step. At the end of our stay at the Plaza, the producers let me audition for what could have been the West Coast premiere of the show. I had no singing or dancing experience, so I felt like a bit of a fake, and yet there I was up on that stage singing my heart out. Unfortunately there never was a West Coast premiere.
Then the big night finally came: Carnegie Hall. Outside on the posters my dad’s name shone for all of Midtown Manhattan to see—“Carnegie Hall Presents George Carlin”—a huge coup for my dad, who grew up a latchkey kid not sixty blocks away. His mother, Mary, his aunt Aggie, their friends, and of course lots of Dad’s friends from the neighborhood were all out there in the audience to cheer him on. Mom, Dad, and I were all hunkered down in the dressing room. Dad checked his notes and paced like he always did. Mom was immersed in a deep and intense conversation with a person she had met only ten minutes earlier—fueled no doubt by whatever chemical mixture she was doing that week. And I, after roaming the halls to find the vending machines, sat in the corner reading Archie comics and eating Fritos. Suddenly we got the knock: “Two minutes, George.”
Escorted by the promoter, Mom, Dad, and I left the quiet of the room to make our way through the bowels of the building. As we walked past people, they said things to us like, “Go get ’em, George,” and “Knock ’em dead.” I did not know these people, and they did not know me. But they knew my dad. Everybody knew my dad. As we came up from the basement, we started to hear feet stamping and the chant, “George, George, George!” There were over a thousand voices saying my father’s name over and over again, and when he stepped out onto the stage, they erupted into a roar. Every hair on my body stood straight up. I felt energy all around me, and a joy ached inside my chest. I felt extremely alive. And although I understood they weren’t cheering for me, I still felt connected to it all. It was very intoxicating, and I knew that all I had to do was stay right next to my dad, and this buzz would be free.
* * *
When we got home, things got interesting.