A Carlin Home Companion (16 page)

Mostly though, we spent many, many hours holed up in my bedroom having sex and snorting coke. We had so much coke and it was so pure that we'd cut it with mannitol in mixing bowls. I wasn't sure how or where he'd been getting all this high-quality coke on his mechanic's paycheck until one day, when he took me to eat at a Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. I couldn't figure out why he picked this place, when there were plenty of quality Mexican places closer to home. After we ate dinner we jumped into my 3.0 Beemer and headed back to my parents' house. As we swung onto the southbound 405, Andrew had a sly grin on his face and said, “While we were eating, my client, Joe, put something in our trunk for safekeeping for a few days.”

Confused, I said, “Oh, really?”

“It's a kilo of coke,” he replied nonchalantly.

My body stiffened. “What?” If I could have, I would have leaped out of that car and run as far away from it as I was able to, but we were going 50 mph on the freeway, so that wasn't a real option. Instead, I asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Bury it.”

“Bury it? Where?” Thoughts of driving up into the hills of Topanga came to mind.

“Don't worry. I would never think of burying it on your parents' property. I would never risk that.” Now I was really worried. He continued, “I'll bury it just off their property line. No one will ever know.”

So that's how he got his coke—doing “favors” for his clients with the fancy cars. And that's how a new lifestyle emerged for me—the binge. We'd go on two- or three-day binges, emerging from my bedroom only after my body demanded food. I couldn't go much more than two days without food or sleep, but because Andrew had ADHD, he could eat and sleep after snorting any amount of cocaine. People with ADHD take stimulants to actually feel calmer. But once my body had reached its limit, I needed to refuel. I'd peek out of my bedroom door toward the kitchen, to see if the coast was clear, then I'd dash in to pop a Stouffer's Macaroni & Cheese and Corn Soufflé into the oven, while grabbing a handful of Fig Newtons or Oreos to tide me over until the real food was done heating up.

Scurrying around the house became the norm. I avoided my mother because I didn't want her to see me high, and I seemed to be furious with her all the time now. It had nothing to do with the present and everything to do with the past. All my anger about her alcoholism had finally floated to the surface, and the thought of being in the same room with her disgusted me. I went months speaking only a few sentences to her, and only when I had to. She kept her distance from me, intuiting my need to feel what I did. I avoided my dad because I knew I was out of control. I didn't want him to be mad, or disappointed with me.

He'd gotten mad at me the year before for the first time in my life, and it had to do with drugs. Back in June, before I graduated from high school, my friends and I had bought some coke for the prom. While we were scoring, the dealer asked us if we wanted to freebase some. He cooked some up for us, and had us each take a hit, and then sit quietly. The rush took over my body, and it was the greatest thing I had ever felt. The euphoria expanded me to the edges of the universe. “Magnificent” is too ordinary a word to describe it. A few days later I shared the experience with my dad because it was one of the best moments of my life.

“Don't you EVER FUCKING DO THAT AGAIN,” he quickly said. The full force of his rage landed hard upon me. My eyes stung with tears. He continued at full volume, “I want you to promise me you will never smoke that shit again. It is very, very dangerous.”

Fighting back a big bellow of tears caused by the shock, I mumbled, “Okay. I'm sorry.”

“No, promise me.”

Staring down at the ground afraid to look up at him: “I promise!”

He softened, “Okay. Good. Now give me a hug.”

We hugged.

“I love you,” he added.

“I love you, too,” I said through my tears.

Even though I wasn't smoking coke now, I knew I was snorting way too much. I knew it was wrong, but I kept doing it. And hiding from my dad. I didn't want him to find out. I was now the one making up my own version of that homespun Carlin logic I had been so used to: If I'm home doing drugs, then I'm safe doing drugs. And if they don't see me doing drugs, they don't know I'm doing drugs.

 

CHAPTER
TWELVE

I Know I'm in Here Somewhere

“I would like to bring you up to date on the Comedian's Health Sweepstakes. As it stands now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks two to one. However, Richard still leads me one to nothing on burning yourself up! Well, the way it happened was: First Richard had a heart attack, then I had a heart attack; then Richard burnt himself up; then I said, ‘Fuck that—I'm gonna have another heart attack!'”

—Carlin at Carnegie, 1983

In May 1982, I walked out of my parents' kitchen to the driveway and saw a limo pull up. My dad's manager, Jerry Hamza, jumped out and yelled, “George is at St. John's. He's had a heart attack.”

Jerry and my dad had been at Dodger Stadium watching the Dodgers beat the Mets (my dad's favorite team) when my dad got hit with an attack of angina. Dad and Jerry immediately went to the first-aid station, but soon realized that the first-aid room at Dodger Stadium was nothing more than a glorified place to get a Band-Aid. They quickly found the limo and its driver, John Batis, in the parking lot.

“I'm probably not having a heart attack, but just in case, we should probably get to St. John's Hospital as soon as possible,” Dad said as they got in the limo.

Because they left before the end of the game, and because John broke every moving violation known to man, they made it to Santa Monica in twenty minutes. When my mom and I arrived, the doctors were not as optimistic as Dad was—it was way more serious than angina. It was almost a full blockage of the right descending artery. Grimly the doctors said that Dad's pulse was around twenty and that we should go in to see him—this could be good-bye.

I was terrified and crying, but Dad was in good spirits and tried to calm me. “It's okay, Kiddo. Everything's going to be fine.” I wanted to believe him, but nothing he could say would calm my fear. I thought he was going to die.

After a while the doctors came to a consensus and decided to try an experimental anticoagulant that the hospital happened to have gotten just that week—Streptokinase. They had no idea if it would work. Within minutes the clot broke up, Dad's pulse lifted, and his vital signs stabilized.

Dad got lucky, again.

*   *   *

Six months later, my mom went into St. John's for a routine cyst removal from her breast. Because she had fake boobs, it had to be an inpatient procedure. And thank God it was. If it hadn't been, they might have missed the malignant tumor. After she awoke to the news, they gave her forty-eight hours to make a choice: chemotherapy and radiation or a radical mastectomy. I was terrified that she'd follow in her own mother's footsteps. But Mom had no doubt she was going to live. She opted for the mastectomy and refused the chemo and radiation because she knew that her liver couldn't handle them after all the years of damage from drinking she'd done to it. She'd already had health issues because of it.

A year after Mom got sober in 1976, she had started to have a bunch of weird symptoms that no doctor could diagnose. A few called her crazy, others thought she had some kind of rheumatoid arthritis, but most were just stumped. Finally she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and non-A/non-B hepatitis (what these days they call hepatitis C). The fibromyalgia attacked the soft tissue in her joints and made my mom tired, achy, and depressed. The doctors had no idea where it came from. But Mom knew exactly where the hep-C came from—the one and only time she ever shot up drugs with an old neighbor. She was sure it must have been a dirty needle.

After the breast cancer surgery, in which they removed her entire left breast, Mom healed at home, and I became her nurse. Whatever anger I had about our past melted away as soon as I saw her now-mangled chest. It was a horror to look at. I could feel myself leave my body when it came time to change her bandages and bathe her. I wanted to run away. But with Dad on the road, there was no one else.

*   *   *

But did the Carlins let a little thing like their daughter dropping out of college and living with an older married man, or a heart attack, or breast cancer slow them down? No, of course not. We were the Three Musketeers—all for one, one for all.

After taping
Carlin at Carnegie
in New York, a year later we all got busy with taping
Carlin on Campus
in Los Angeles. Mom designed the set and produced the show, and I shot all the still photographs for the album cover. We were now a family production company—Cablestuff Productions. Dad bought a beautiful two-story building in Brentwood for our offices. Mom had a big peach-and-light-green office—very eighties; and Dad had the nicest office, but it was one he rarely worked in—he liked to write and keep his stuff at the home office. Jerry Hamza moved his family out from Rochester, New York, and he had the big corner office where he strategized and shaped Dad's career. Ros, the funniest, gayest man I'd ever met (and my mom's best friend from rehab) came onboard as the bookkeeper. Mom's assistant was Theresa, a new friend we'd recently met when Mom, Andrew, and I had worked on a play with the now-heroic limo driver/actor/director John Batis. I took on the role of setting up the press interviews and travel for Dad's touring while I dabbled in photography on the side. And because it just wouldn't be right if anyone was left off the payroll, Andrew was brought on to build my dad a state-of-the-art recording studio. I felt happy because all the people—especially my dad—and areas of my life were connected.

Despite all that was going on, Dad was itching to do even more. In the early 1980s, sitcoms had become
the
avenue for comedians to take their careers to the next level, so Dad developed
Apt. 2C.
With the help of HBO, we shot a pilot about a writer, played by Dad, who could never get his work done because he was constantly getting distracted by his wacky friends, neighbors, and strangers who always seemed to need something from him. Because HBO loved and respected Dad, they gave him complete creative control, which meant he could do whatever he wanted, including casting me. While he was working on the script, I asked him to write me a part. I was ready and could now jump into my “Carol Burnett dream” and try my hand at sketch comedy. Theresa, my mom's assistant, who had become my best friend, ended up writing me a really great part—a punk-rock Girl Scout who came to George's door to sell him cookies.

After a month of casting the rest of the roles, a process I got to be a part of on every level, we shot the pilot at A&R Studios on La Brea, where Charlie Chaplin had built his studio in the 1920s. You could feel the business of show in every nook and cranny of the place. It was heady stuff. While we rehearsed on set that week, I hung out with the cast—Bobcat Goldthwait (wacky neighbor), Pat McCormick (needy mailman), and Lucy Webb (drunk neighbor). It was amazing. They were all seasoned professionals. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was doing, but I jumped in anyway, not wanting to show my terror and inexperience.

The day of the taping I was really nervous. We taped two separate shows—the dress rehearsal and the show. Pat McCormick told me, “Just use it—the nerves—use it in your performance.” I had no idea what that meant. As I stood at my mark outside the door to “George's apartment,” the stage manager, Dency, began counting down my cue, “Five, four, three, two…,” and then pointed to me. Bile began to travel up my throat as I knocked on the door to begin the scene. I had no idea what would come out of my mouth: my lines or my lunch. I'm pretty sure that was
not
what Pat had meant by “use it.”

Here's the scene as we taped it:

George opens the door to find me, a punk-rock Girl Scout with my hair a multicolored Mohawk, dozens of accessories on my uniform, and an attitude the size of North America.

“Hey, did you order any cookies?” I ask in a thick New York accent.

Confused by my looks, he replies, “Are you a Girl Scout?”

“No, I'm a fucking zucchini. Did you order any cookies or not?” Throwing it right back at him.

“Yeah, I think I had the lemon wafers,” he answers.

Giving him the once-over—“Hey, macho guy!”—I go into my bag, “I don't got no goddamn lemon wafers.” Holding up a box of cookies, “All I got are ginger snaps.”

“Oh, I had those last year, and I didn't like them. They were too hard to chew,” he explains.

Dripping fake pity in my voice: “Too hard to chew? I'll soften them up for ya.”

I drop the box of cookies on the floor and smash them multiple times with my left foot. I give him one last look as I say, “There's your fucking cookies!” I then turn and saunter away, leaving George with a box of smashed cookies in his doorway. He looks directly into the camera and says, “Boy, scouting sure has changed.”

Moments after we shot the scene, Dad walked up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “Congratulations, Kiddo. You just got your first professional laugh.”

It felt so good.

*   *   *

When Andrew turned thirty and got the money from his trust, he immediately became the poster child for the saying “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Within a year of getting more than one hundred thousand dollars in blue-chip stocks and bonds, he liquidated it all, divorced his wife, and bought a speedboat, a tow truck, a Shelby Cobra Kit Car (which he built with my help in my parents' driveway), a blue-gold macaw named Prudence, two yellow-napped Amazon parrots (one for me and one for my mom), numerous shotguns, rifles, and handguns (in my and my mom's names—he was still not allowed to purchase firearms because of his felony conviction), multiple radio-controlled cars and planes, a full-size dune buggy, a cabin in Big Bear, scuba gear, and a pygmy goat named Toby. All that was missing was the partridge in the fucking pear tree.