A Carlin Home Companion (12 page)

Damn. Why can't these people just leave me the fuck alone?

Peggy led us to a spot that overlooked the whole valley. It was the most magnificent view on earth. In one glance I saw Half Dome, El Capitan, three different waterfalls, and the bluest sky I'd ever seen. We sat in a small circle, and she told us about the Ahwahneechee customs and rituals. Then she began to sing: “Wicha tie tie, Heemoo aye, Ahwahneechee, Ahwahneechee, no aye. Water spirits springing singing round my head, makes me feel glad that I'm not dead.”

I couldn't help but think about my brush with the Merced River the day before—“makes me feel glad that I'm not dead.”

She asked us to sing along. We did so—reluctantly. Like most adolescents we were caught somewhere between falling into the moment, and having complete disdain for it. But before I knew it, I was looking out at the splendor of the valley below and singing with the others in a round, “Wicha tie tie, Wicha tie tie, Heemoo aye, Heemoo aye.” But not wanting to spoil the illusion of my misery, I made extra sure I looked like I wasn't enjoying it.

On the last night we all went to a community center to do some square dancing. One would think that this group of angst-ridden rich girls would not have taken too kindly to this. But something had happened. I don't know if it was the fresh air or the magnificent display of nature, or the fact that we had been away from our neurotic West LA lifestyle for five days, but we jumped into it with abandon. We enthusiastically learned the moves, clapped our hands, and giggled our way through the whole evening.

Instead of taking the bus back to the cabins, a few of us decided to walk. The air was very cold and crisp, with nothing around us but empty trees, the moon, and the stars—millions of stars. At first we walked in silence—what group of fourteen-year-old girls can do that? And then quietly I began to sing, “Wicha tie tie, Heemoo aye, Ahwahneechee, Ahwahneechee, no aye.” After a few times the others got the words and joined in. Soon our voices were one with the stars, and the air, and the moon rising over El Capitan. I felt myself stretched wide open. I was bigger than my thoughts. I was more than my body. Everything was perfectly placed. I felt a part of something, connected, not alone anymore.
Wow!
Why hadn't someone told me that all this had always been here for me? I felt a hope, a glimmer of light, a plan of some kind, and thought,
If there was a plan for all of this, then maybe there was a plan for me, too?

 

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Häagen-Dazs and Sinsemilla

“
Q
UAALUDES!”
C
HRIS
N.
SCREAMED
as he threw what looked like a handful of pills into the middle of the classroom floor. As they landed, everyone jumped out of their seats, snatching them off the ground. Art, the math teacher, chuckled. “Okay everyone, let's get back to the problem on the board.” He'd seen right away that they were just candy hearts for Valentine's Day. I sat at the back of the class, grinning and observing. I was checking out a new school, Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences, to see if it was where I wanted to go for high school. I'd had a strong inkling that this was the school for me. After that display, I had no doubt.

I'd been hanging out with kids from Crossroads for a few years now. My new best friend, Vickie, whom I'd met riding horses, went there. Vickie and I, from day two of meeting, had become inseparable. The first day we met, I did not like her. We were both in a riding class when she turned around and sneered. “Don't get too close to my horse. He kicks.”

Bitch
.

But as Vickie and I hung out that summer of 1975 at the little barn at Will Rogers State Park, I realized she was anything but a bitch. She saw the world much as I did, through a goofy but sometimes wickedly funny lens. We laughed a lot. Laughter and horses were the medicine that got me through my mom's initial recovery and my years at Westlake. Now, three years later, Vickie and I were practically living at each other's houses, and that's how I became good friends with her brother, Peter, who was also a Crossroadian.

When I first met Peter, I didn't like him. He picked on Vickie, whined incessantly to his parents for money, and was obsessed with status symbols. I thought the girls at Westlake were snobs, but I had never seen a guy so consumed by his Fila shirts and coiffed hair. But that was soon ignored. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were pooling our money weekly to score weed, and then smoking it in the bushes at Rustic Canyon Park across the street from his parents' house. Although he was my age he was over six feet tall, so he always felt a bit like an older brother naturally looking out for me and protecting me. He had a wicked sense of humor, and I quickly folded myself into his group of friends and found my new home.

Crossroads was also an elite college-prep school. But unlike Westlake, it was not nestled in the bosom of Bel-Air. No. Crossroads straddled a dirty alleyway in Santa Monica. The school occupied three buildings among other industrial businesses. One of which was an auto body shop. We could hear the clanging and whizzing of tools all day long. It wasn't so bad. The guys who worked there would at least let us bum smokes from them. Yes, it was 1978, and with a note from our parents, we at Crossroads were allowed to smoke cigarettes on campus. Of course that's not all we smoked. Any free period I had, I would hop into a car with Kirk, or Peter, or Lisa, or Andy, or Chris, or any other stoner, and go and smoke a joint. Being stoned at school was the norm. Amazingly, it did little to impede my academics. I got As in all of my classes, including AP Chemistry and Physics. It turned out that taking a bong hit was the perfect preparation for my trigonometry and geometry homework. But the one class it didn't help with was English. It was already difficult enough for me to express myself, and being high did not facilitate articulation. Except for one day.

That day a friend and I decided to take magic mushrooms in the middle of the school day. I rarely did something this crazy. I did have limits. So I didn't eat a lot, just a few bites. Then we went to English class. When forty-five minutes had gone by and they hadn't come on, I figured that they were bad or stale. I left class to go to the bathroom. As I walked down the hall everything was fine, but when I sat down in the stall, the walls began to move as if they were breathing. As the walls slowly inhaled and exhaled, I knew I was fucked. I couldn't ditch class—I really needed to keep up my GPA (this was eleventh grade, and college applications were looming). So I went back into class, trying to maintain my composure.

I quietly sat down on the floor in the corner (this was a very casual school, where you could sit at a desk, or on a couch, or on the floor) hoping to just ride out the last fifteen minutes of class. We were studying
The Great Gatsby
at the time, and I hadn't read the chapters for that day's discussion. Katherine, our teacher, asked the class, “In this first section, what does the moon symbolize to Gatsby?” I had no idea, and clearly no one else did either—there were just blank stares and quiet from everyone. It was late afternoon, and no one, not even the sober kids, wanted to be there. I knew I certainly couldn't answer because suddenly there was a roiling sea of orange shag carpeting crashing up against Katherine's ankles (I'm pretty sure that the whole purpose of ugly 1970s shag carpeting was just for the amusement of people on psychedelics). As the orange bobbed up and down, I became lost in the idea that the whole surface of the earth was really this liquid—nothing was really solid. I wasn't solid. Katherine wasn't solid, nor was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I snapped out of my reverie when I heard my name. “Kelly? What do you think the moon symbolized to Gatsby?” My eyes slowly made their way up from Katherine's ankles wading in the liquid shag carpet to her now-blue reptilian face. I took a beat and said, “The illumination of his love for Daisy?” Katherine looked at me, studied my face, and I knew she could tell that I was about three feet to the left of my own body. A rush of anxiety came over me.
This is it
, I thought.
I'm finally going to be busted for getting high at school
, when a smile came across her face and she said, “Very good, Kelly,” and turned around and wrote it on the blackboard. Phew.

Even though I'd found my “crowd” at Crossroads, I got along with almost everyone. Because I was in all the AP science classes, I felt at home with nerds who were now doing something called “programming a computer.” One time they programmed the computer to display the shape of a sexy woman. The woman was made up entirely of the text, “Kelly is a Sexual Goddess,” written hundreds of times. I was flattered and mortified.

Because I was creative, I also loved hanging out with the kids in the Drama Department. I still longed to be on a stage, to be Carol Burnett someday, but with all my partying with friends and the training of my seven horses, six days a week, at the barn in Malibu that my parents had just bought as a business investment, I was too busy to pursue acting or comedy. I was moving up the ranks of the equestrian show circuit, raking in ribbons up and down the state of California, thus too busy for the rigors of the Drama Department. I felt that many of those kids knew what they wanted and where they were going. I don't know if that's true, but some did end up directing films (Michael Bay) and writing on big sitcoms (
Friends
) in the eighties and nineties. Some seemed to have had a clear plan for their lives (much like my dad's “Danny Kaye plan”), and they were on their way to fulfilling it. I, too, had finally stumbled upon a plan of sorts: Step one—wake up, step two—place bong in mouth, step three—repeat as often as necessary.

I filled the void of my teenage unease with everything and anything I could get my hands on, which was really good timing on my part since, at that same time, my dad was filling a very large bucket of guilt with yeses. When my dad was leaving for
The Tonight Show
one afternoon, I shouted out, “Dad, for my sixteenth birthday can I have a Jeep with a four-inch lift kit and those cool KC lights?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “But don't forget—be safe.”

While talking to him on the phone when he was on the road somewhere in the Midwest I asked, “Dad, can I have another horse? This one is for Junior Jumpers, and it can jump six feet!”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and then added, “But, don't forget—have fun.”

On my way out to school one winter morning in the eleventh grade, I casually said, “Dad, can I have a hundred bucks to go buy some weed?”

“Yes, of course,” he answered. “But don't forget—when you get home leave me a few joints in my office.”

I had the coolest dad ever. It was the only way he knew how to be a dad. He didn't know any other way. How could he? He'd never had a father of his own; and he was, at his core, a rebellious teenager himself. Plus he carried an enormous guilt for those dark years on Tellem Drive. He wanted to erase the pain by giving me anything and everything. He just wasn't wired to be the hard-nosed dad.

*   *   *

While my high school escapades were going full speed, my dad's career was losing traction. After his minor heart attack in 1978, he began to feel a bit lost. When he spoke about this time in his life he said, “Given the chance to bend back around toward the middle, I took it.” After his meteoric rise with
Class Clown
and culture-shifting “Seven Dirty Words,” he was back doing TV shows like the
Tony Orlando and Dawn Show
to pay the bills. With a barn full of horses, a driveway full of German cars, and an expensive new house, there was a lot of pressure to maintain the lifestyle.

About six months after my mom got out of rehab, we moved a few miles east of our old place into a ranch-style home on Old Oak Road in an area called Brentwood. It was a bit out of Dad's price range, but Mom cried, and so we moved in. She told me that she'd never done anything like that before, but that's how good this place was: It was worth crying for. And Dad knew how important it was for us to move on from the house on the hill where all our dark days had occurred. I remember after the movers had moved all the furniture out of the house on Tellem Drive, my dad took me up there to say good-bye. He thought it was important to make a conscious ritual out of it. I walked through every room giving each a teary farewell, knowing I'd never have to endure that kind of pain and terror again. We said good-bye to it all.

But by 1979, with the success of
Saturday Night Live
,
Monty Python
, and Steve Martin, my dad was no longer the shiny new thing on the comedy scene. He'd become an institution, part of the establishment, something even other comedians could make fun of.
SCTV
did a parody of him, with Rick Moranis imitating him going on and on about beets: “Beets. Beets. Beets. Beats me.” Dad was no longer cutting edge. He'd spent so much time contemplating his navel, he'd fallen in and gotten stuck there. In 1979 Steve Martin was selling out arenas; my dad was barely filling seven-hundred-seaters.

The only exciting thing that came about during this time for Dad's career was a small, upstart cable channel called HBO. They weren't in very many homes, but they were looking to make a mark in the industry, and one way they did that was by inviting my dad to do unfiltered, uncensored comedy specials. He did his first one at USC in 1977. The way I know that it wasn't considered a big deal is the fact that I don't remember it ever being discussed.

It wasn't until the next year, 1978, when he was asked to do another one, that I became aware of this HBO, and that was only because my mom insisted on making me part of the production team. Mom produced, I was the Xerox/coffee girl, and Dad did his thing. Mom took me under her wing and taught me how to be in the workplace. It did a lot to heal things between us. It was like the good old days when we were on the road, supporting Dad's dream and living in the glow of his success. The Three Musketeers were back! We went to Phoenix and shot it in the round at the Celebrity Theater. It was all very exciting. But we had no idea if HBO would even be around the next year. And Dad didn't do another HBO special, or another album for that matter, for another three years. He was definitely lost.