A Carlin Home Companion (34 page)

The only reason Dad put up with Vegas was because it was a solution for him. It kept him off the road and out of airports for about twelve weeks a year, and it was a great place for him to write during the day in his condo, and develop new material at night. But just like in 1969, when he was fired from the Frontier Hotel, he'd once again crossed a line, according to the powers that be. He was fired again. This time it wasn't for saying “ass” or “shit”—it was for talking about autoerotic asphyxiation. The times, oh how they've changed!

After a few days in rehab, Dad called me.

“Hey there. I was wondering if you could come up. I wanna talk to you about something.”

Oh, fuck. I couldn't imagine what he wanted.

As we sat outside a mansion at the top of a hill in Malibu, Dad leaned toward me and said, “I need some help with this idea of a ‘higher power' that AA talks about.”

I was taken aback. And yet deeply touched. My dad had come to me for spiritual advice.

I shared the bare scratchings of my own understanding on the topic. “Well, as you probably know, having read Alan Watts and others, in Zen practice there's no personal God, there's just the experience of transcendence. It is ‘that which is beyond words … that which holds everything.' And from what I've learned from Jung, he saw that transcendent state as something he called the Higher Self, an archetype within the collective unconscious. So it's a part of who we are, and we all have access to it. But really, it's about acknowledging that there is something bigger than your personal ego. That's what AA is really focused on. The part of you that is bigger than you, bigger than the part of you that needs to get high.”

Dad jumped in, “You know what I really love? I love the way the Native Americans use Mother Earth and Father Sky to hold all of that.”

I smiled at him. “Well, Dad, you just gotta go with what's in your heart. What works for
you
.”

He smiled back at me and said, “You know, Kiddo, I've always seen you as the shaman of the family.”

My heart soared. I was thrilled by this title.

*   *   *

Although Dad saw me as some wise sage, I was still wrestling with my conflict about being a therapist versus a performer. I wanted to continue to help people find their voices and paths in life, but I also wanted the freedom to be an artist and get on a stage and yell, Fuck you, America! if I felt like it.

I was pretty sure the American Psychological Association would not smile upon me doing both. To be a therapist—a good, ethical therapist—my job was to be a blank slate for my clients, so they could project their issues onto me, and thus solve deep-seated patterns. If I, the therapist, overtly allowed my own needs, wishes, and personality to show up in the office, it could easily undermine the therapeutic relationship. If I pursued a public persona through my art, I feared that my “me-ness” would leak into the therapeutic container. I knew that if for now I was to be a therapist and a performer, I'd have to stay under the radar a bit.

By the summer of 2005, I began to write personal essays and perform them at small storytelling venues around LA. Despite my anxieties, it felt great to be writing something other than academic papers, and to be in front of live audiences again. There really is nothing like getting a laugh. As the months went by, I found a confidence I'd never had. I was finding my voice, my perspective, and I was not afraid of it anymore. I saw that the more I wrote, the better I got; the more I performed, the more comfortable I became onstage.

One night at Tasty Words, a salon run by my friend and mentor Wendy Kamenoff, my dad came to watch me perform. Finally! I was so excited to show him what I could do on “his” stage. It was a story about fame and how it seizes the human psyche. More specifically, I told the story of how, when I was backstage at Carnegie Hall when I was eight years old, I took the buzz of my dad's fame into my young being like a drug. I was nervous to perform in front of him, but I knew the piece was solid. And it was. I killed that night. I got laughs in all the right places, and I could feel the depth of silence in the places where people were drinking it all in. Afterward he hugged me and said, “You definitely know what you're doing up there.”

Phew!
Not bad. I wanted more words from him, and maybe some gushing, but he was there, and more important, he didn't tell me to shut the fuck up. I took in his encouragement and let it be enough. I let it be a green light to carry on writing and performing. But a few months later, the father of one of my clients performed on the same show I did, and my client and I saw each other there. It was okay in the moment, but I knew that because most of my clients were in the biz, and the work I wanted to do was also in that biz, my two worlds were now crossing boundaries. This was not good.

By the fall I knew I would not be happy spending the next twenty years of my life as a therapist in a darkened room, handing my clients Kleenex. Being a licensed therapist was not my path. I obviously deeply admired and respected those who did that work, but I knew it was not for me. I gave my three-month notice to my clients, giving us enough time to end our relationships in a conscious way.

I was nervous about telling my dad that I was moving on, especially knowing how proud he was of my new path. But he understood. Plus it helped that I wasn't leaving it
all
behind. I was going to employ plan C: becoming a life coach. Working with high-functioning, nontherapy clients would give me far more freedom to balance my two paths.

*   *   *

In November 2005, Bob and I flew to New York to see my dad shoot his thirteenth HBO special,
Life Is Worth Losing.
I was excited—my dad rarely let me glimpse his new material before he shot it for HBO. He liked having me experience the material in its full and polished form. It was always a thrill for me to sit in the audience, not knowing what was coming. This year I was especially looking forward to seeing him. We'd both been really busy, and hadn't seen each other in about three months.

After walking up the stairs backstage at the Beacon Theater, I caught my breath and walked into his dressing room. I saw a short, white-haired man with his back to me. When he turned around, it was my dad. I was stunned.
Who took my father and left this elderly man in his place?
My dad's face was puffy, he was two inches shorter, and he looked like he was fighting to breathe. What the fuck?

I'd noticed the last few times I'd talked with him on the phone that he'd been a bit scatterbrained—very unlike my dad. He'd forgotten the name of his assistant once, and one day he didn't show up at a breakfast we'd planned. I thought at the time it must be age, but seeing him now backstage, I knew something was really wrong: People don't age this quickly.

I didn't say anything to him, not wanting to distract him from the task ahead that night. But as I walked to my seat in the audience, I worried if he'd be able to make it through the show. I steeled myself for the worst. Would he be okay? How would the audience respond to how he looked? Might he even collapse?

But when he took the stage he came alive.

It was like a superhuman force of energy moved through him and propelled him into his first bit, “A Modern Man.” His verbal gymnastics, leaps of logic, and rap-star pacing blew every person in that audience away. He gave the tour-de-force performance of his life during those three and a half minutes. And as I watched this, all I could think was: If he could just stay on that stage, he just might live forever.

*   *   *

A month later he
really
couldn't breathe.

Christmas Eve morning, Sally called. “Kelly, we're at Cedar's. George's in the emergency room.” Bob and I raced north on La Cienega Boulevard, and found Sally in the waiting room, shaken up. “They've stabilized him. He's doing better.”

About twenty minutes later the ER doctor came out.

“He's doing much better than when he came in. We gave him some medicine, Lasix, to help remove some of the fluid from his lungs and stabilize the heart failure.”

The
what
?

Heart failure. That's what had been going on with him in New York. Heart failure. It is a condition they could stabilize with medicine for a few years, but eventually only a heart transplant would fix it permanently.

After a while they let me see him. As I sat alone with him in the emergency room, he admitted to me that he'd had symptoms for months and months, and had ignored them so he could do his HBO special. I wanted to kill him. But on the other hand, I got it: It was a great show.

As he lay there dozing, I sat at the foot of his bed with my hands on his feet meditating and sending him as much life force as I could. I was doing my best to uphold my shaman duties. I'd never felt so peaceful in his presence before. There was a sweetness to it.

A week later they released him from the hospital, but now he had a device implanted in his chest—a combination pacemaker, heart pump, and defibrillator. Dad was oddly proud of it. He even bragged, “It's the same device they implanted in the chest of Dick Cheney!”

*   *   *

During 2006 I became certified as a life coach, built up my practice, and continued performing. Being a life coach allowed me to use my skills as a therapist and my knowledge of Jungian psychology and Zen Buddhism in the service of working with clients who were looking to create a concrete change in their lives. Although many of my new clients had similar issues as my therapy clients (and some were from my old therapy practice), the approach of coaching is to not dwell on the story of your past, but to see it, own it, and move beyond it. I liked that. This philosophy fit where I was now in my own life—I had healed so much of my past and was ready to move beyond it all.

Dad and I met for coffee once every six weeks or so, mostly at the Cow's End in Venice, to catch up. Over coffee I'd share with him about the writing and the readings I'd been doing around town, and how my new coaching practice was evolving. On the outside I looked like a person who was doing all she could to have a good and successful adult life, but I still could never quite let myself feel that way. Between my crazy twenties with Andrew and the creative schizophrenia of my thirties, I didn't want my dad to think that my forties would be plagued by more confusion. Hell, even more than he,
I
didn't want that for myself. So, since I'd walked away from pursuing the legitimate path of getting my marriage-family therapist license, I felt I needed to impress my dad with all my efforts. Most of our coffee time I'd spend yammering on and on about my plans, and how busy I was. One day he stopped me in midsentence, leaned over to me, and said, “You're doing great, Kid,” as he lightly patted my cheek. “Relax.”

But I just couldn't. Nothing felt like enough. I had to keep pushing forward. I wanted to write a book. I wanted something tangible I could hold up and say, I did that. I took my old solo show, and personal essays I'd written, and began to write a spiritual memoir—my own
Eat, Pray, Love.
I told him about the memoir during one of our lunches. His face got all squinted up and he said, “Didn't you get that out of your system with your solo show?”

I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I was unable to reply. He went on, “You know, Kel, real artists—well, they do their autobiographical work at the beginning of their careers. You know, like me when I did
Class Clown.
But then they move on, and talk about other stuff.”

I still didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. I just listened incredulously. My mind spun, trying to find a way to challenge his thinking, but I was so filled with anxiety that nothing came to me.
He must be right. Why don't I have this out of my system? What's wrong with me?
I took the invisible knife out of my chest, smiled, and went home.

Later that night I thought of what I should have said: Gee, Dad, I don't think Richard Pryor ever moved on. But I knew I could never have said it to his face, even if it had come to me in that moment. I put the memoir on a shelf for someday in the future when it could no longer scare the shit out of my dad.

Or me.

 

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

Out on a Limb

“
FUCK YOU
!”
IS WHAT
I
wanted
to shout down to the retreat leader, Patrick Ryan, but I knew it wasn't his fault that I was now forty feet up a redwood tree, hugging it for dear life. No, the fault was definitely all mine.

Still, I was shocked to be up there.

Only minutes earlier while still on the ground I'd deployed my inner four-year-old to cry my way out of having to climb the tree—a tactic that had worked for most of my childhood whenever I wanted to get out of something. But Patrick, intuiting all that, ignored my ploy, smiled at me, and asked, “What's up?”

Talking through my tears, I said, “Well, I'm tired—and I've already done the other two tree climbs today, which is
way
more than I ever thought I could—and I just can't do another—”

With a calm smile on his face that I wanted to smack right off, he then asked, “So, if you don't go all the way up, how far up
are
you willing to go?”

I looked up the tree to the small platform that had a plank sticking out of it. Once I reached that plank, I was supposed to walk off the end of it and jump. Even though I was attached by a rope and harness to a belay team for safety, I couldn't fathom how I would ever do that. It was impossible. I knew I had signed up for this, but fuck it. I wasn't doing it.

The year before, on the first day of my life-coach training, my instructor had told me I should go to “Leadership.” Leadership was a program that trained you to be a front-of-the-room leader for workshops and the like, but was also an intense empowerment program, like Landmark or the Forum. I saw this as the ultimate up-sell moment you get in these kinds of classes: Hey, you're doing great, but if you want a real breakthrough, you should do the advanced course. Yeah, right.