A Carlin Home Companion (11 page)

My dad? Well, he was sober-ish. He continued to party on the road, but quit doing drugs at home. Mom didn't expect him to follow her to rehab, but she was adamant about what was and was not allowed in the house—weed was fine (it wasn't her drug of choice)—cocaine was not. He was good with that. He certainly knew enough to not come home coked up to the gills in front of someone who had just scraped and clawed her way out of the clutches of death. Plus, he'd have done almost anything to make sure that Mom stayed sober. In fact, he did. Before she came home from rehab she had only one ultimatum: Mary had to leave. Dad, only too happy to oblige, rushed back to the house, packed Mary's bags, and within a few hours escorted her onto a plane back to New York. Queen Mary's reign of terror was over.

Dad, as always, was busy with his career. During the fall of 1975, he was on the road promoting his two newest albums,
Toledo Window Box
and
An Evening with Wally Londo
,
Featuring Bill Slazso.
He also hosted the first episode of some experimental NBC show called
Saturday Night Live.
Knowing that he didn't want to be in any of the comedy sketches that filled the show, he asked if he could do two monologues instead. He did a bit about airports (which is eerily prescient about airport security today), and a bit about religion. Although they cut out the more controversial parts, it was incendiary enough for New York Cardinal Terence Cooke's office to call the station and demand that they pull the plug on him.

And me? What was I doing now that Mom was sober? Well, suddenly, at age twelve, I was no longer the only adult in the household. All the many skills I had mastered over the years—denial, caretaking, and crisis management—were no longer necessary. I had been downsized. No longer did I have to referee drug-inflamed arguments at 3:00
A
.
M
. No longer did I have to hide my mother's car keys. No longer was I responsible for my parents' happiness and safety. It was all finally over.

And I had no idea what the fuck to do with myself.

When my dad hit adolescence, he had been a rebellious, street-smart kid who had his “Danny Kaye plan.” When my mom hit adolescence, she had been a conforming, book-smart kid with her “I'm going to get the fuck out of Dayton someday” plan. When I hit adolescence, I was a perfect combination of them both: I was a conforming and rebellious, book-smart and street-smart kid.

But I had no plan.

I did have a “sort of” plan, though: Westlake School for Girls. After years at my freewheeling Santa Monica Montessori School, and a free-for-all household, I felt an intense need to balance the scales with nightly homework, school uniforms, and final exams. I was twelve years old and in my last year at Montessori. I knew I had to go somewhere, and I knew it wasn't going to be public school.

The thought of public school terrified me. I knew what happened out in the harsh, real world. I'd seen it on TV. One night I caught the TV movie
Born Innocent
with Linda Blair, and after watching her being raped with a broom handle, I assumed that this is what happened in all public institutions. Therefore I decided no public schools in my future. Of course, with hindsight, I'm sure my decision had nothing to do with actual broom-handle raping, but something way more terrifying to me—not being special.

Westlake School for Girls was an elite college prep school nestled in the bosom of the hills of Bel-Air, filled with young women obsessed with Louis Vuitton purses. I was forced to learn new words like “Halston,” “Gucci,” and “Fiorucci.” The first few months, I walked the halls in fear that these young women would discover that I didn't know anything about their precious world. Suddenly the most important thing determining whether or not I was worth knowing was what label I had on my shoes. Even though my dad was famous and made pretty good money, we were not like these people. My father's fame had come from pressing hard up against the status quo to see if it would break. These people
were
the status quo, and I wanted nothing to do with them. I discovered I was a snob about snobs.

Luckily, as with all institutions, there's always a small group of people who are bristling against its values. I found those people quickly. Creatively I immediately bonded with a girl who was very funny and smart—Carrie Hamilton. When I found out who her mother was—Carol Burnett—I nearly died. But to me she didn't need her mother's status to have status. Carrie was fearless and really knew who she was, and I wanted some of that. She and I sat around the lunch tables for hours and plotted our future: our very own variety show—the
Carlin/Hamilton Hour
. We came up with characters, sketch ideas, but mostly we just made each other laugh. And I
so
needed to laugh. I needed to drink up the freedom and joy of not having a care in the world while distracting myself from the discomfort of adolescence. But even Carrie wasn't enough to soothe my screaming hormones, unexpressed rage, and free-floating anxiety. That took something a bit stronger. I found my people for that, too.

One day, my friend Piper and I were soaking up some rays after lunch. Knowing we had twenty minutes before the bell rang, I said, “I am so dying for a ciggy. The seniors are so lucky. They can leave campus anytime they want.”

Piper replied, “I've got keys to my friend Beth's car.”

I thought about it for a minute. “We can't leave campus. If we're caught—”

“We don't have to leave. All you have to do is get in her car, turn the air-conditioning on, and take a few puffs.”

I had already started to sneak a few cigarettes at the barn where I rode horses, but that was easy. No one who cared was around. Smoking at school felt insane. Westlake had piles of arcane rules that mostly entailed limiting the exposure of our legs: Socks—blue or white only; hems—no shorter than six inches above the knees; tights—not allowed. If you were caught “out of uniform” you'd get a mark; enough marks and it would affect your GPA.

I thought that if they had so many rules about what I had to wear on my legs, I couldn't even imagine the medieval punishment they'd concoct for smoking. But there I was, on a cool winter day with the keys in my left hand and a ciggy hidden in my right, walking toward the white Datsun 240Z, about to smoke this cigarette no matter what.

Just a few months before, I'd been the kid hiding my mom's alcohol, writing nasty messages on her cigarettes, and muttering to myself that I would never ever be like “them.” But as I got in the car I felt the terror of getting caught being eclipsed by the thrill of breaking the rules. As I turned on the air-conditioning, I felt the exhilaration that comes with claiming the powerful space where the grown-ups and their rules were no longer present. As I lit the cigarette I felt a shift in my internal world—the old Kelly was no longer welcome, and the new one said, Here I am.

Within a year I was stealing roaches from my dad's stash and smoking weed every day. Piper and I would find ways to sneak down the Nature Trail (an area of overgrown trees and bushes on campus) during a free period to take hits off a joint. Getting buzzed took the edge off the crushing academic pressure and the cliquish and insidious superficiality of Westlake School for Girls.

To make matters worse, my dad was making my life at Westlake even more miserable. He could never manage to get me to school in time for the beginning of first period.

“Oh, look who has decided to join us again!” my British History teacher, Mr. Smith, would remark when I walked in late, six minutes after the bell. His snide comments hurt because I really liked him. And I really wanted him to like me. But even though my father wrote him many notes that my tardiness was not my fault, my grade was lowered. It was the only C I ever received, and I blamed my dad.

This was new for me. I'd never felt angry at my dad before.

By the winter of ninth grade I just wanted out. My parents knew this, and we'd already started looking at new schools. When I told my parents that there was a class trip to Yosemite Valley in February, I was sure I wouldn't have to go. They never made me do things I didn't want to do. Well, Mom might have made me do a
few
things I didn't want to do, but Dad certainly didn't. And I didn't want to go to Yosemite. Being with strangers away from my parents terrified me in general. I still had horrible separation anxiety, and rarely even slept over at a friend's house. I'd end up calling late at night to get my mom to come and take me home. Even though my mom was now sober, my anxiety had not lessened but increased. And I had something new to worry about—my dad's heart.

At the beginning of ninth grade, my mom unexpectedly picked me up midday. “Your dad's in the hospital,” she said, answering the confused look on my face. I began to tear up.

She touched my hand. “He's fine. They just want to do some tests on his heart.” But I could tell she was really worried when she said, “He just needs to rest a few weeks.” No one ever said the words “heart attack,” but that was what it was. They thought it was related to his cocaine abuse. Even though he had curtailed his usage somewhat, he was still abusing it. This event set him on a path of eventually quitting completely. And he did recover. He was lucky it was a minor incident.

Now, a few months later, after I mentioned the Yosemite trip to my parents, my mom said predictably, “It'll be good for you. You might learn something about yourself.” I didn't fight her because I knew that in the end I would not be going. I knew that in the eleventh hour, my dad would come to my rescue like he always did. The night before the trip, when my mom still wouldn't budge, I began to cry. I knew that if I cried, Dad would rush in and save the day. Mom saw my tears as a ploy.

“You're fourteen years old. These tears are no longer going to work. You will be fine. You'll probably have a good time once you get there,” she said.

“I just don't want to go,” I managed to get out between gulps and sobs. “I just don't want to go.” Not having any better reason than that in my corner, I went another three or four rounds with Mom. Finally my dad came in.

“Take a few breaths,” he said. Thankful that he was there, I did. “You know, Kiddo, I think it would be good for you to get away from us. To find out who you are away from here. I think your mom is right, and you should go.”

What? This sentence was more shocking than the one he spoke to me the day he thought the sun had exploded. “I think you should go”? Dad was agreeing with Mom? I wailed, gnashed my teeth, and, I'm pretty sure, threw my body on the ground in some kind of act of insanity, hoping they'd think that I'd come unhinged and needed serious psychiatric help; anything not to get on that bus.

But in the end none of it worked. At 6:00
A
.
M
. the next morning, I clenched my rage-filled tears back as I was forced to get on a bus with my fellow classmates to be taken hundreds of miles away from my home in the middle of the winter into the damn forsaken wilderness called Yosemite Valley.

After crying my eyes out for the entire six-hour bus ride through the foggy, hideous San Joaquin Valley, we arrived in Yosemite Valley to discover the ultimate insult—our cabins had no bathrooms. To pee in the middle of the night, we had to go out in the cold, wintry air and find the public bathrooms. After they warned us that there might be bears in the area, I secretly hoped I would be eaten by one so that my mother would have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life. Why I didn't want my dad to feel this guilt, I do not know.

The first morning we met our guide, Felix. I was quite sure he was a madman. He had a scraggly beard and hair, wild brown eyes, and wore a beret à la Che Guevara. He spoke excitedly about eating bugs for survival, and I feared he'd make this group of stuck-up, privileged daughters of Hollywood do just that as some sort of victory for the proletariat! I was positive he'd torture us in innumerable ways all week long. I wanted to pull him aside to say, Hey, I'm not really like these girls. Look, my dad is George Carlin. Get it? I am not like these girls. I'm part of the counterculture. I even once helped my dad through a really bad acid trip. Don't you understand? I'm special.

But that day I didn't say any of that. Thankfully Felix didn't make us eat any bugs. He did, however, make us hike sixteen miles on that first day.

The second day, Felix took us on a hike alongside the Merced River. After a few miles we stopped to eat, and one of our teachers asked us to write in our journals after lunch. Ugh. I hated journal writing. It always felt like the world was looking over my shoulder as I wrote.

In order to do my dutiful writing, I decided to cross the Merced River via a very large fallen tree. I'd seen several of my classmates do this, and it seemed like fun. Then the trip suddenly became even more painful than it already was—I fell straight into the icy grasp of the Merced. After breaking a thin layer of ice and plunging about three feet down, I somehow shot my body straight up and out of the water. And I do believe that I actually walked on water to get back to shore. I would have pointed out this miracle to the others, but the realization that I was going to have to strip naked in the woods to change into my thin rain pants quashed any urge to draw attention to my sudden Christ-like powers.

Day two: still not happy.

On day three we hiked to an area that had evidence of the native people who used to occupy this land—the Ahwahneechee. It was the first thing in this whole trip that actually sounded interesting to me, until I was told that the evidence of the Ahwahneechee were paintings in caves. I don't like caves. I don't like caves because they take so much effort to interact with—you need artificial light, you need a strap and rope to hold you so that you don't plummet to your death, and essentially you need the belief that climbing down into the belly of the earth is a good idea. My theory is that because of all the effort it takes, God doesn't really want us bothering with them. And even though I had just walked on water, I was not one to argue with God. Therefore I decided this was a good time to redeem my “special” privilege—I told my teachers and Felix that I did not like small spaces. The minute I did this a few more girls, and even a teacher, also chimed in about their discomfort with caves, and so a small group of us were relieved of having to go. I was feeling good now. That is, until another guide, Peggy, said in an overly cheerful voice, “Hey, I've got a great idea! I'll stay with you guys and teach you some Indian songs.”