BY THE SUMMER of 1974, life in our house on Tellem Drive was like living in a hurricane. There were long periods of buffeting chaos punctuated by respites of calm and normalcy, as if the eye of the storm were passing overhead. Still, I always knew that the calm was temporary, and I’d better prepare for what came next.
Living with this level of uncertainty forced me to create a kind of expertise. Over the years I’d become adept at being able to tell what my parents had been smoking, drinking, and snorting just by looking at them: bloodshot eyes and cottonmouth—pot; pupils pinned and grinding jaw—coke; dark circles under the eyes and slurring speech—booze. When I’d walk in the door coming home after school, or in from playing, I would immediately assess the temperature of the space. Is it quiet? Do I need a knife to cut the tension in the air? Has Dad slept yet? Is Mom coming down, or just getting going? I was like the “addict whisperer.”
It really would have been much easier on me if my mom and dad had just had some kind of color-coded flags to raise on the front lawn so I could be warned before I walked in. A green flag might have signified that they were awake, talking to each other, and sober (well, sober-ish—I’m not sure either of them was ever fully sober during this period). A yellow flag might have meant that they were both asleep, which meant I could relax but should be on the alert for when they woke up (who knew what might have happened before they passed out?). A red flag would have been a warning to enter with great caution. Most likely I’d find my dad rearranging his vinyl album collection again (this time by genre, with alphabetical subheadings), which definitely meant that he was high on coke, had been up for quite a while (maybe days), and that Mom was most likely high, too. This would be a tinderbox ready to go up at any moment. Add to this mix the high probability that Mom was also drunk, and the flag waving outside the house should have been an upside-down picture of the Carlins, signifying, “Enter at your own risk—screaming, yelling, and object-throwing imminent.”
When Dad wasn’t home, leaving Mom and me alone, I had additional criteria to assess the situation: Was Mom awake and cooking dinner? Excellent! Sigh of relief. Was she in her pajamas at 3:00 P.M. and having coffee and a cigarette? Good—but the rest of the day could go either way. Best to be on my toes. Was she in her pajamas at 3:00 P.M. having a scotch and a cigarette? Not so good. When my mom was day-drinking, the house was a minefield. I walked around precariously, avoiding too much in-depth conversation with her, fearing that any contact might create a spark that could ignite a shit storm. “How was school?” she’d ask.
“Fine. I’m going over to Amanda’s. Be back later,” I’d answer, already out the door, escaping unscathed.
If she was in one of her wine-soaked dark moods, everything was an affront, or a sign of disrespect, or an excuse to bring back to full flame last night’s argument or irritation. Little things like leaving my shoes in the living room, or having a messy bedroom, or a certain look on my face might be the trigger. It wasn’t consistent or rational. It would inevitably lead to some resentment or bitterness about my dad. Because he and I were partners against her drinking, we both became the enemy.
And it wasn’t so much what she said; it was how she said it. There was a sharpness in her tone that would cut right through me, making my soul feel like there was no love left inside her. An acidic bitterness laced each word, further deepening the pain of it. I lived in fear of the moments when it would come spewing toward me. When she was in her darkness, which was most of the time in those days, there was no sign of the loving, joyful mother who had loved me unconditionally my first seven years on the planet.
My mission became to find any glimmer of love within her to prove to myself that the love I had seen and felt before was real. I wanted to pull that love back from the abyss. Whenever I saw a sliver of brightness in her eyes, or the hint of softness in her smile—proof that she was in any way approachable—I would do what I could to lure it out even more. I’d make her a drawing or a card to cheer her up. I’d show her my latest dance routine. I’d ask her if she was hungry and bring her some food from the kitchen. I’d even pour her a drink, if that would keep her mood elevated for a few more minutes. But inevitably the chemicals would accumulate in her bloodstream, and she would turn back into the other version of herself, which was unreachable. Dad and I referred to this version of my mom as “Nazi Brenda.” It was like a stone wall would build up around her, and I could no longer feel her heart. My stomach would toss and turn, and I would become rigid with anxiety, holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
* * *
That summer I escaped the turmoil of the house by following Amanda down the hill to audition for a production of Oliver at St. Matthew’s Day Camp. Although I auditioned to be in Fagin’s gang with Amanda, I ended up in the general chorus. I didn’t care. I was going to be on a real stage with real people singing real songs! I’d had a little performing experience from piano and ballet recitals at school, but nothing like this.
Fortunately my mom and dad weren’t pushy stage parents. Although Mom had lost the chance at her scholarship to Wesleyan to study piano, she never pushed me to fulfill some life she never got to live. She certainly wanted me to be successful, and often pushed me toward things that were outside my comfort zone (which was admittedly quite narrow). But because we were at odds more often than not, I usually resisted on principle anything she suggested. What I really wanted was for my dad to push me instead. He’d say things like, “You can be anything you want. Just do what you want.” Which was great on the surface, but coming from the guy who was a god to me, I wanted more. I wanted him to encourage me, see my talent and my gifts, and then take me under his wing and help me fly toward the stars. But since he had felt so much pressure from his own mother trying to mold him into what she wanted him to be, he was determined to let me find my own way.
And that summer I did. For six blissful weeks of rehearsal, I sang and danced my way through “Food, Glorious Food,” “Oliver,” “Consider Yourself,” and “Who Will Buy?” It was a life raft for me. I spent six hours a day either in rehearsal or watching others rehearse. One of the guys from our block, Thomas Newman, was our musical director. He would later follow in the footsteps of his father, Lionel Newman, and become an Academy Award–winning film composer. It was pure bliss. After all the rehearsing, around the end of the summer, we did two shows in the auditorium of Santa Monica High School.
For the opening number, I was in the front row of orphans, spooning my way through a bowl of gruel, singing, “Food, glorious food. Hot sausage and mustard!” My mom was in the audience, sober and genuinely thrilled for me. My dad wasn’t in the audience. He was on the road and couldn’t make my big debut. I was heartbroken. I so wanted him to see me up there onstage and be proud of me. The only thing that almost made up for it was when a dozen roses and a telegram arrived from him before the show. I was the only person backstage who got either. I felt like a diva.
* * *
When the summer was over, it was back to school, and back to the hurricane in the house. More and more my parents were jumping down each other’s throats, and I jumped in after them. It often went something like this: Dad would send out the first salvo, usually about Mom’s drinking, which then led Mom to bring up Dad’s cocaine use. Dad would brush that aside, leaving Mom to bring up the popular topic of the women he must be sleeping with on the road (which was probably true), which always led to who Mom might be sleeping with while she stayed home. Inevitably this led to Mom saying that she wasn’t sleeping with anyone or doing anything because there was nothing for her to do, which brought back the tried-and-true topic of how she had nothing to do and nowhere to go, which is probably why she drank so much.
And around and around it would go until I entered the fray. I tried to protect my dad from my mom’s alcohol-fueled irrationality by defending his behavior, and I’d protect my mom from my dad’s cocaine-laden volatility, and at times violence, by trying to calm him down. When that didn’t work, I called their therapist, Al Weinstein. He’d try to scare some reason into both of them. He’d remind them that they were not only damaging themselves with all the drugs and chaos, but that they were damaging me, too. On a good night it would work, and after they hung up the phone with Al, Dad would say, “Come here, you two. Remember, we are the Three Musketeers.” And the three of us would hug.
But some nights nothing would reach them, and I’d have to do what I could to shut them up. One night they raged in the hallway, right outside my door.
“I don’t fucking have it. You can frisk me if you want!” Mom growled at Dad.
“I know you took it. Where else could it have gone?” Dad asked while he held open a book and riffled through its pages looking for his cocaine stash. Lately he’d been stashing it in books in the bookcase, but it wasn’t where he remembered it. I lay in bed and could hear every word through my door.
“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you forgot where you fucking stashed it,” Mom answered as she opened another book, hoping it would fall out.
“If you stayed away from my stash, I wouldn’t have to hide it,” Dad offered.
“Stay out of your stash? You’re the one who’s always taking mine and doing it all.”
“Well, I do pay for it.”
“Don’t fucking start that again.” Mom leaped at Dad. Dad grabbed her wrist. She cried out, “You’re hurting me!”
I ran and opened the door before it got any worse. “Stop it! Just stop it!” I shrieked.
Dad let go of Mom. I said, “Don’t hurt her. I’ll help you find your fucking—”
“Watch your mouth, young lady—” Mom started.
“Really, Brenda?” my dad said to her.
I interjected, “Can we just please look for the stuff?”
I began to look through the bookcase that was filled with more than six hundred books. I methodically took out a book, shook it, and then moved on to the next one. Dad and Mom followed suit. After about five minutes, Dad held up a small Baggie of coke and exclaimed, “Be Here Now! Ram Dass. How could I forget that one?” Finally I could get some sleep, while they got some more “awake.”
* * *
This endless cycle of arguing and then reconciliation was taking its toll on all of us, and my dad knew it. He didn’t know how much more any of us could take. This is when he decided that something needed to change for the Carlins. No, we were not going to family therapy. No, they weren’t giving up drinking or drugging. No. Instead we were going on a Hawaiian vacation.
For Easter week of 1975, we went to Maui. It was our very first trip there, and I was very excited. We stayed at the Napili Kai, a fancy resort on the west coast of the island. It had a beautiful, calm bay to swim in, a cute little hut to rent snorkeling gear from, and every night a grand hula show opened with a gorgeous young Hawaiian man blowing on a conch shell. It was a very nice resort, but I couldn’t really take it all in because I was stuck in our bungalow, once again refereeing the latest matchup of Carlin vs. Carlin.
It started the second day. We had spent the entire day in a bar in Lahaina so my dad could score some coke and weed. Now, a few days later, Dad had gotten too little sleep, and Mom had gotten too much Mateus rosé, and they were in full-flung insanity. The coke was running low, Mom wanted more, and Dad wouldn’t share. They fought, threatened divorce, and argued about every trespass they’d ever committed against each other in their fourteen years together. Then Mom picked up a kitchen knife, and Dad did, too. I screamed and hurled myself between them.
“Stop! Stop! Please, please just stop this—I can’t take this anymore.” I collapsed in tears on the ground, spent from the endless chaos. “You’re making me crazy. CRAZY. I can’t be crazy anymore. I can’t, I can’t.”
I must have looked crazy, because they dropped the knives, the spell of rage between them broken. Dad rushed to me and hugged me. He turned to my mom in tears. “We can’t keep doing this. Look what we’re doing. We have to do something different.”
Everyone calmed down, and I hatched a plan. I wrote out a UN-style peace treaty that stated, “I, George Carlin/Brenda Carlin, will no longer buy or snort cocaine, drink alcohol, or argue with each other for the rest of the vacation. The undersigned agrees to these conditions so that we can all have a perfect Hawaiian vacation.” I even drew those little lines with their names underneath, and they both signed it. All for one, one for all. The Three Musketeers were back. There was a calm, a glimpse of peace. Our Hawaiian vacation could finally begin.
About twenty minutes later Dad went to the bathroom. When Mom went to open the door, it was locked. Mom banged on it and accused Dad of bogarting the blow. He told her, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but he didn’t open the door. Mom then proceeded straight down to the hotel bar and ordered herself another bottle of Mateus rosé. I spent the rest of the vacation as far away from them as I could. I befriended the girl who ran the snorkeling-gear hut, and pretended to her and all whom I met that at least I was having the perfect Hawaiian vacation.
* * *
Around eleven in the morning the day after we got home from Hawaii, my dad rushed into my room and woke me with the words, “Kelly, I have something important to tell you.” Now, these words scared the shit out of me because I was sure he was going to tell me that he was finally leaving my mom. I knew in my heart that it was the only thing that might finally make my mom get some help for her drinking, and so I was ready for it. I sat up in bed and braced myself for the blow of the news, when he said, “Kelly, the sun has exploded and we have eight, no—seven and a half minutes to live.”
“What?” I asked, trying to take in this new information.
I knew my father had been doing a lot of cocaine, and God knows what other assorted chemicals in Hawaii, so I thought he was probably just freaking out or something. But he was my dad, and no matter how fucked up he was, he was still my dad, and so I got out of bed and went to have a look.
My parents had very thick curtains in their bedroom to block out the midday sun, so we slowly parted them and made our way through the curtains to the backyard. When we got outside, the sun was blinding. You couldn’t even open your eyes. It was too painful even to squint them open. We were like some mole family suddenly thrown into the midday sun. I thought—My God, I can’t see! My God, what if he’s right? My God, are we going to die? I didn’t really think so. At least I hoped not. What I was hoping was that there was a very reasonable explanation. I offered up a few: “Maybe it’s the smog? Or maybe it’s just that LA sun is different from Hawaii sun?”
And then my mother chimed in, “Maybe it’s the fact that you haven’t slept for more than four fucking hours in the last three weeks?” She did have a point.
Contrary to how it may have seemed at the moment, my dad was a very rational man. He decided that he needed to check and see if this phenomenon was happening anywhere else on the planet. As he paced in the bedroom, he explained, “We could call Doc in New York, but New York is three hours later, which might mean that the effects of the sun exploding wouldn’t be so prominent on the East Coast. No, we need someone on this coast! I’m calling Joe.”
So Dad called his old friend Joe Belardino in Sacramento. I sat on the edge of my parents’ bed tensely listening as Dad hurriedly explained to Joe what was going on. “Joe, it’s George.… I need you to do me a favor.… Well, I need you to go outside and check and see if the sun is okay.… Yeah, I think it may have exploded.… Yeah, yeah, I know.… Um, do you think you could go now? I don’t think we have much time.”
With a look of hope on his face, Dad covered the mouthpiece and said, “He’s checking.”
Now, here was the moment of truth for me: Either the news was bad, and the sun had definitely exploded, but my dad was a genius for being able to calculate something that involved the speed of light! Or the news was good, and the sun hadn’t exploded, but my dad had completely lost his mind to drugs, confirming, once again, that the only sane and rational person in this household was an eleven-year-old girl who wanted doughnuts for dinner.
And just like all the other weird shit that made up my daily life, I could not talk about this with anyone, anywhere—especially at school. When I returned to school after the Hawaii trip, the day after the sun had not exploded, my teacher asked, “So, Kelly, how was your Easter vacation?”
Mustering a look of complete neutrality I said, “It was … good. Fine. It was fine.”
* * *
Things were anything but fine, but at least at school I could pretend they were. School was my safe haven. No one there knew anything about my home life, and I didn’t know what kind of trouble my parents would have gotten into if my teachers had known. But I would have never ever told anyone—we were the Three Musketeers—one for all, all for one. Besides, my home life was normal to me. I never thought to talk about it with other people or kids. I didn’t want my parents to think that I couldn’t handle it. From the time I was five years old, my dad and my parents’ friends had called me an “old soul.” “She’s wise beyond her years,” they’d say. I had a reputation to uphold.
I’m not sure if I loved school more because it was my safe haven, or because it made me feel special. Mrs. Dresser, the principal, would often take me out of class to meet prospective students and their parents. She’d introduce me as one of the smartest kids in school. I never saw her pull anyone else out of class, so I concluded that I wasn’t one of the smartest, but the smartest kid in school. This didn’t make me feel superior to my classmates per se. I mean, I never had the thought, Oh, I’m smarter than they are—but it did make me feel different in a good way.
I liked most of the subjects at school, but I loved math. Unlike my home life, where the answers to problems were out of my grasp, math had problems that I could always solve. My math teacher, Ms. Wildman (whom I ate lunch with most days of the week), said that she would have to read up on algebra just to stay ahead of me. I was starved for solutions, and math fed me. For seven hours a day I didn’t think about my mom’s drinking or my dad’s unhappiness, I just reveled in being able to solve for X.
All my teachers were great, and even my bus driver, Kathe, was cool—she’d blare the rock-and-roll station on the radio and stop at Marquez Liquors, the liquor store at the bottom of my hill, so we could buy snacks (Funyuns and Wacky Packages were my two staples) on our way home. But climbing on the school bus at the end of the day was not all fun. As we headed up Lachman Lane toward my house, I’d get really quiet. By the time we took the right onto my street, the pit of my stomach would sink like a rock. As I got off the bus, I’d look at our front door and start to wonder: Are they asleep? Are they fighting? Are they alive?
* * *
At the beginning of 1975, sometime during the cold of the New York winter, my grandma, Mary, had come out for a three-week vacation. Three weeks turned into three months, and three months turned into six. She and Mom had become drinking buddies. Mary, the master manipulator, fed my mom’s bitterness by whispering into her ear all the ways that my father had disappointed her as a mother (never mind that she bragged about him to every person she encountered), and how, therefore, he must be a horrible husband, too. She’d do this as she was pouring my mom another glass of wine. Avoiding my mother and her moods was challenging enough for me. Avoiding my grandmother and her twisted sense of entitlement was another matter. One day Amanda and I decided to boil a few ears of corn to eat. My mother always reminded me to ask my grandma if she needed anything, so I asked her if she wanted to join us for our snack. Per her usual routine, she gave her, “Oh, no. I’ll be fine. I don’t need a thing” answer, so Amanda and I carried on making our own snack. A few hours later, after I’d been playing outside, I came home to find my mother sitting with my grandma and fuming. “I can’t believe how selfish you are!”
Confused, I replied, “What? What are you talking about?”
“Your grandmother told me that you and Amanda made some corn and didn’t even ask her if she wanted anything.”
I was stunned, perplexed, and stunningly perplexed. What the fuck was she talking about? I defended myself immediately. “Yes we did! I asked her if she wanted anything, and she said she was okay.”
My grandmother sat there with this disappointed look on her face, like she was saying, You poor child. You should be ashamed of yourself. My mom said, “Apologize.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong! She’s lying.”
“Don’t call your grandmother a liar.”
Had these people lost their mind? Clearly, yes. I tearfully apologized, feeling more rage than I’d ever felt in my life.
Not long after that, for Mother’s Day, Dad and I took my mom and Mary to Will Rogers State Park for a picnic. The house was now clearly divided: Brenda and Mary vs. George and Kelly. After about an hour it became clear to my dad that the two of them were going to be drinking their way through the picnic, so he said to me, “Let’s take a walk.” Because things had gotten so weird at home, my dad had been trying to find ways to make my life more normal. One day, he came home with a baseball bat, ball, and glove so he and I could have some quality time together playing. It was so cute. He was trying to learn how to be some idea of a “good dad.” I might have been a tomboy, but I had no wish to play baseball. But the fact that he made the effort to buy them and carve out time for us together still warms my heart. So I was more than happy to take my dad up on the offer to walk around Will Rogers, and find something fun to do. As we walked up the hill away from the polo grounds, I saw the horse barns and practice rings. A woman, the trainer, was teaching a riding class of about five or six girls. As we got closer, I felt a blossom of excitement in my chest. It reminded me of Vermont. We watched the lesson for a while, and then Dad said, “You want to do that? Take a lesson?” It was like he read my mind. But unsure about almost everything in the world that day, I only shrugged my shoulders and said, “I think so.”
He went on, “I think it would be great for you. You loved those horses in Vermont. What do you think? Should we give it a try?” I smiled and nodded my head yes. Before I knew it, Dad got the attention of the trainer, Jill, and asked her about lessons. We set an appointment for me to be there the next Saturday for a beginner’s lesson.
The entire summer, I spent practically every waking moment at that barn learning how to post the trot properly, clean hooves, braid manes, and forget about the hurricane at home.
* * *
By the end of the summer of 1975, the damage to the Carlins was palpable. My mother barely ate, or bathed, or bothered to get out of bed. I was now calling down the hill to Marquez Liquors to order cases of wine for her. With Dad on the road a lot, there was no one to come between my mother screaming from her bed for me to bring her another glass of wine, and my dutifully bringing it to her. I knew it was killing her, but what choice did I have?
Things had been escalating for months. One night she hallucinated that the entire LAPD SWAT team had surrounded our house. She’d heard a noise, looked out the peephole in the front door, and saw blue-and-red lights everywhere. She thought that cops in cars and helicopters were everywhere. Luckily I was not there that night. Another night, when I came home from a friend’s house, the therapist Al Weinstein was there. My mother had returned from a visit to a psychic on the Santa Monica Pier, and had come home and begun writhing and speaking in tongues. Al said she’d probably been hypnotized, but who really knows?
On yet another night, after I had hidden the keys to the car, my mom found them after I went to sleep, and drove my dad’s brand-new BMW 3.0 down to her favorite watering hole, the San Ysidro Inn. When she got into the car to come home, instead of driving straight out of the driveway, she reversed the car straight through their lobby. The cops were called, and she got her second DUI. Strangely, the police officer who had arrested her did not show up for the court date, and the charges were dropped. Thank you, expensive Beverly Hills lawyer man.
By mid-August, Mom was down to eighty-seven pounds. She crawled to make it to the bathroom, and took in nothing more than water and wine. Her hands shook so badly that she could barely drink a drop. She had already been hospitalized once in the last year for malnutrition, but now the doctor gave her three weeks to live. Dad and I begged and begged her to go to rehab.
After a week she finally agreed to go, but she truly believed she would die there. She felt there was no hope. This was before Betty Ford. This was when rehab was the mental ward. Literally. At St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, their Chemical Dependency Center was in its infancy, and its patients were housed in the psych ward.
On August 17, 1975, my mom left our house thinking she was about to die. The doctors and counselors at St. John’s thought she just might do that, too. They didn’t know what to do with someone who had a triple addiction to cocaine, alcohol, and Valium. They put her on antiseizure drugs hoping that the detox wouldn’t kill her. I knew none of this. I was just relieved to know that finally something might change.