Last Words

by George Carlin

  It had much more than an insulated, ethnically pure bar in the

  middle of a neighborhood had. That was its attraction. It had always

  given me a familiar window on a largely unfamiliar world and by

  osmosis a certain tolerance, at odds with the neighborhood aggression I'd grown up with.

  But now it was just another venue and another opening night.

  Brenda was nervous and so was I. I really wanted their approval. If

  they said, "Fuck, Georgie, what a dog!" I didn't know what I'd do.

  The consensus seemed to be she was pretty cool. There were

  about fifteen guys in the Moylan when I took her in and they all

  liked what they saw. They liked that she sat at the bar and drank with

  them and not at a table like other women. She always was a bit of a

  chameleon, able to transplant herself anywhere she had to be. She

  made it seem the most natural thing in the world for a midwestern

  girl from Ohio to be drinking with these tough Irish dudes a couple of blocks from Harlem. There was one tense moment, though.

  Brenda was rather flat-chested and she used to wear little rubber

  falsies. We're playing pool and at least three or four guys are paying

  close attention to the game. Brenda lays in to shoot and one of her

  falsies falls out. Popped right out of her bra and hit the deck. I caught

  that sucker on the first bounce. I checked around. No one had noticed. Even Brenda hadn't noticed. When she finished shooting I

  slipped it to her: "Here, your falsie fell out."

  As for Mary, Brenda liked her right away. She figured it was because they were both Geminis, so they were both hip to each other's

  female tricks. And Mary immediately adopted Brenda as her daughter. Mary had never had a daughter and in a way Brenda no longer

  had a mother.

  We got married on June 3, 1961, in Dayton at her family's house,

  4477 River Ridge Road, before a justice of the peace. My mother

  flew out from New York. Jack Burns was my best man, Murray

  Becker was there. Brenda's best friend, Elaine, was her maid of

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  INTRODUCING THE VERY LOVELY, VERY TALENTED— BRENDA!

  honor. We'd met in August of '60. In those ten months we'd been

  together for a total of five weeks. But Brenda was itching to get out of

  Dayton. She'd say: "I don't belong in that family. I don't belong in

  that town. I think I was probably raised by wolves."

  So it was into my car with not much more than her clothes and

  back on the road with Burns and Carlin. But for us there was something different now. We were starting out on our own journey—one

  that would continue for almost thirty-six years. We had great adventures and a lot of them, both with Jack and later when I began working as a single. Many of them revolved around having to drive long

  distances to be somewhere for a show or opening night and barely

  making it, the obstacles to be overcome just to get there on time.

  The best time was when Jack and I were arrested in Dallas for

  armed robbery. We had been booked at a place called the Gaslight,

  a great little folk and jazz club. Brenda and I drove down from Dayton. Jack was coming from Chicago to meet us there.

  We're staying in this horrible motel, with no air-conditioning,

  and Dallas is hotter than hell. I drop off my shirt and Jack's at a

  laundry to have them laundered for the next night, when we open.

  The next day I go to pick them up. As I walk into the dry cleaner, I

  notice two guys just sitting in the laundry, in civilian clothes, ties,

  not doing their laundry, just sitting like it's a barbershop waiting

  room. Odd, but I think nothing of it and give the woman who runs

  the place my ticket and she nods very obviously to these men—poor

  concealment there—and ducks down behind the counter. I think,

  "What the fuck? Am I the millionth customer or something?"

  Suddenly these two have guns out and are telling me to put my

  hands up. I'm thrown over the counter, handcuffed and they drag

  me outside. There are three or four more guys and they have all

  these shotguns. And they're all over our car—literally ripping things

  out of it. I didn't know what the fuck was going on and they wouldn't

  tell me a thing. They threw me into a squad car and headed for the

  motel.

  I knew Brenda would be in panties and nothing else, because of

  the heat. So I pound on the door and the cops are pounding on the

  door and I'm yelling, "Get dressed, honey!" like some moron in a

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  LAST WORDS

  sitcom. Brenda throws something on and opens the door and there I

  am in handcuffs. The cops swarm into the room, ripping things out

  of the dresser drawers, the closets, luggage, everything. Now I see

  Jack being dragged out of the other room. He's thrown in one car,

  Brenda and me in another. They take us down to headquarters. It's

  crawling with detectives—like they've got the case of the year.

  We'd only been married for about three months so Brenda didn't

  really know Jack. I knew she was thinking: "What the fuck have I

  gotten into?"

  They separate us into three different rooms. One cop interrogates

  Brenda. "What are you doing traveling with two men?" She says:

  "George is my husband and the other guy is his partner. They're a

  comedy team. They're here to play whatever the club was." And the

  cop says, "Oh yeah? How often do they play the AAA Club?" She

  realizes he must be talking about the American Automobile Association. So she says—of course—how could they play the AAA? So

  now this cocksucker starts in with: "Do you sleep with them?" She

  says she sleeps with me. "You don't sleep with the other guy? What

  do you do for the other guy? Jerk him off?"

  They play Mutt and Jeff with us, telling Jack I'd confessed and

  me that Jack had confessed. All this stupid fucking cop crap. But

  they can't get anything out of us because we have no fucking clue

  what's going on. Meanwhile it's the middle of the afternoon and

  we have to open a show that evening. And we haven't even got our

  shirts back from the laundry.

  We gradually pieced together what it was all about. Jack wanted to

  do a routine about the European Common Market. So he'd clipped

  a story about it from a Chicago paper. On the other side, perfectly

  matching it, was another story about a big armed robbery at the Chicago Motor Club. Two men and a woman. The cops figured, here

  were two men and a woman. Jack had come from Chicago. The

  gunman had been keeping his reviews.

  The way they got this vital clue was that the girl in the laundry

  had found the clipping in Jack's shirt pocket and called the police.

  This was gonna be her big day, taking down three interstate armed

  robbers.

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  INTRODUCING THE VERY LOVELY, VERY TALENTED— BRENDA!

  It was clear that the cops had fucked up big-time, but they

  wouldn't let us go. They kept us until around six. And finally they

  released us. Never said, "We're sorry, we made a mistake, what can

  we do for you?" They put our car back together and we went to the

  motel and got to the club just in time to open—in dirty shirts.

  It was bizarre. It was stupid. It was Dallas.

  The lead cop—the one who asked Brenda if she
jerked Jack o f f later turned up as the guy in charge of investigating the Kennedy assassination, Will Fritz. He interrogated Oswald after his arrest. The

  obvious conclusion: Oswald had as much to do with the assassination as the three of us did with the Motor Club robbery in Chicago.

  Being on the road with Brenda wasn't all wonderful. Hard times

  were coming when I was a single. Our car was broken into once and

  we lost everything we had, which at the time, when we were living

  hand to mouth, was devastating. But we never let any of it defeat us.

  We'd say: Okay this is the way it is, we go from here.

  That's what we did for those years—we went from here. We were

  a good team. A very good team.

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  THOSE FABULOUS SIXTIES

  At the Blue Dog in Baltimore I once did a show for no one. The

  owner insisted: "In case someone comes in, I want him to

  know there's a show."

  The Colony Club in Omaha was just about completely silent the

  whole time I was there. The bonus was you could smell the shit

  from the stockyards. Right onstage.

  At Oakton Manor in Wisconsin, they seemed to be wondering

  who and what I was. I could see the questioning in their faces. "Why

  is this man dressed like that? Why is he saying these things? What

  does it have to do with us?"

  The Copa Club in Cleveland decreed that the comic stood behind the bar, slightly above the bottles. All you could see was the

  back of the bartender's head and people at the bar shouting, "Another beer here!" After two nights the owner said: "You're really not

  right for the room." I said, "You're really right about that."

  The Lake Club in Springfield, Illinois, had a long, long bar and

  about an acre of tables. The tables and I were on the same level.

  None of the glory of being two feet higher than the audience. And

  if you ain't higher, you're lower. No—the lowest. Sometimes I can

  still see the hundreds of pairs of hostile, unblinking eyes out there

  in the darkness. . .

  Only a couple months and it was kicking in just how hard this

  shit was. How few places there were where I felt secure. How many

  times I had to repeat to myself after the died-a-death nights: "Remember that terrific set three Fridays ago? Hang your hopes on that.

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  LAST WORDS

  Last night was an aberration. They were noisy, they were drunk, it

  was the second show, they'd already seen some of it. . ." (There was

  always a reason why the bad night wasn't really.) But it could be very

  discouraging. And incredibly exciting when it was promising. The

  ratio of promise to discouragement was paper thin, but just enough

  to keep me going.

  Chicago became a headquarters for a time because of its central

  location to midwestern cities and their hip, exciting nightclubs. Plus

  it wasn't far from Brenda's family in Dayton. Spending time around

  Chicago, I got familiar with the folk fringe and the nascent rock

  underground. These musicians were the people I felt most at home

  with.

  When I was done being discouraged at the Playboy Club I'd go

  over to Wells Sreet on the Near North Side, the center of rock and

  folkie activity, for a dose of promise. Doing free sets at the Rising

  Moon and the Earl of Old Town, I got my first taste of the folk and

  underground milieu and the feelings that came with it. The freedom on the stage, the people with open-ended and -minded philosophies, who were more than ready for experimentation: they lived

  for it. You couldn't really fail in these places as badly as you could in

  a formal setting.

  I had a dual life between 1962 and 1964.1 worked in nightclubs to

  earn money and I spent most of my free time with the folkies, rock

  n' rollers, people from Second City. The outsider, the rebel in me

  was being fed by these associations. As a lifelong pot smoker I fit in

  that way too. I felt comfortable around them. Already by this time

  they were beginning to look a little like the hippies they would become. Beginning to affect the free-and-easy physical style that went

  with their philosophies.

  I could do material in these places I didn't always trust to a

  nightclub: about integration, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux

  Klan.

  I did have certain routines with a political-social component that

  I'd been doing since Burns and Carlin broke up. There was my allpurpose Kennedy impression:

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  THOSE FABULOUS SIXTIES

  It's nice to return to Chicago, home of the adjustable voting ma-

  chine. Our trip here was fine, though we did have trouble getting

  the yacht down the Saint Lawrence Seaway . . .

  The boilerplate John Birch Society piece:

  We won the mixed bowling league—that's the colored against

  the whites . . . We were going to have a guest from the KKK—

  the Grand Imperial Almighty Omnipotent Invincible Stomper,

  but his wife wouldn't let him out tonight. . .

  Obligatory pieces about the South:

  There's a textile mill in South Carolina where the lunchroom

  has been integrated but the restrooms are still segregated. That's

  like, "Hell, I'll break bread with 'em but not wind" . . . The tex-

  tile industry moved south for one reason—there's a bigger de-

  mand for sheets . . .

  Obviously this wasn't the kind of stuff that went over real big in,

  say, the fabulous Copa Club in Cleveland, or the lovely Lake Club

  in Springfield, Illinois.

  I was being pulled in two directions: I wanted the widest audience I could get, as any artist does. At the same time, I was drawn to

  the "narrower" subject matter, wanting to be someone who spoke to

  and for these folkies and hippies-to-be.

  But it was a tough time, very tough. Brenda and I had no home,

  no address. If we were out of work we stayed in Dayton at Brenda's

  folks', or with my mother in Manhattan. Once in a while in the

  backseat of the car. Then, in the fall of 1962, Brenda got pregnant.

  We didn't plan it. We were in New Orleans for the World Series

  and the Yankees won. Celebrations followed and a few hours later

  Brenda got pregnant. (She was positive, she said.) We went back to

  Chicago, where I was working at the Playboy Club—appropriately

  enough—and took the bunny test. Sure enough, the rabbit died.

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  Brenda had a great pregnancy and in her seventh month went

  home to Dayton to have the baby. Her parents picked her up at

  the airport and her mother weighed about eighty pounds. Brenda

  freaked. Her dad said nothing and seemed to know nothing. So

  Brenda drove straight to the family doctor: "What the hell is happening with my mother?"

  He said, "She's dying of cancer." He hadn't told anybody, not her

  father or her younger sister, nobody. And Brenda's mother was the

  sort of person who never shared anything with anyone. But she only

  had weeks to live. The poor woman really wanted to see our b a b y she decorated a complete nursery for her, trimmed a bassinet and

  made a special bedspread and baby clothes. A little palace for the

  baby. But her dream was not to be. She slipped into a diabetic coma

  not long after and in a day was gone. />
  As Brenda's mother was dying, our child was born. A daughter.

  We named her Kelly.

  Now we were three. And broke. And homeless. We moved back to

  121st Street and I borrowed money from anyone I could, old friends

  from the neighborhood, Mort Sahl, my mother, anyone. I had a

  running debit balance with Doug, a pal from the old days. I remember sitting with him on a bench in the median of Broadway at 122nd

  Street once, relaxing with a six-pack and a couple of joints. I owed

  Doug six hundred dollars but I needed a sum in four figures. I made

  him an offer: you lend me X dollars to get to whatever the target sum

  was, I ' l l give you a percentage of my future earnings in perpetuity.

  He said okay—and never held me to it.

  My mother, on the other hand, had a fucking list: "That telegram

  when I wired you fifty dollars in Chicago? The telegram was $2.50.

  So that's $52.50." I would say: "What about those sneakers you got

  me in fourth grade? Where does being a parent end and becoming

  a loan shark begin?"

  March 1963—when Brenda was six months pregnant with K e l l y was a turning point. I'd just played a pot-and-coffee place called the

  House of Pegasus in Fort Lauderdale and run into a group of New

  Yorkers, some of whom later became the group Spanky and Our

  Gang. I'd smoked enough pot with them that I'd reached a resolve,

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  a crossroads. The way I put it to Brenda was, "I have to take a stand.

  We've got to live or die in New York. I can't keep going out to nowhere places, playing to people who have nothing to do with where

  I ought to be heading. I've got to find somewhere I can work things

  out." Though it risked cutting us off from what little income we had,

  she supported me totally. And I began to have a powerful feeling

  of things inside me developing. Just like her, in fact. Perhaps it was

  creative couvade syndrome.

  At the time, the only way for struggling comics to be seen was

  something called a hoot. "Hoot" was short for "hootenanny," originally an impromptu concert of folk music, but which had evolved

  into a version of amateur night where all kinds of aspiring entertainers could strut their stuff—not just singers, musicians and comics,