Last Words

by George Carlin

  yours.

  Hamza's presence is so much larger than just a sentence that says:

  "And then I met Jerry."

  The financial pressure was huge. I'd claimed two things in the

  seventies as major business losses. One was The Illustrated George

  Carlin— millions there, a money pit. The other was a piece of land

  up past Malibu, at Zuma Beach. Its official name was Meadow

  Creek Farms, but we called it the Funny Farm. We paid for the

  upkeep and the salary of the couple who ran it, Jill McAtee and her

  partner, Odie. Kelly kept horses at the Funny Farm and Brenda had

  a notion about eventually breeding horses up there.

  Kelly had started riding in high school and it became kind of an

  obsession. She was really good—a hunter-jumper, English-style. In

  her senior year, when she was eighteen, she was third on the entire

  West Coast in junior jumpers. Competing is a form of performance

  and she had incredible performance anxiety: she threw up before

  and after events. But it was the one thing in our chaotic family environment that she could control. It gave her a sense of self and kept

  her anchored during her own problem years.

  The Taxman hadn't allowed either of these as business losses—

  they would have to go to an arbitrator or tax court. (Eventually they

  allowed the movie.) For now we couldn't deduct them from our tax

  bill. Which was gigantic and always growing. Often they'd look

  at a year and say: "You owe another two hundred grand." When

  I couldn't pay it, the big run-up was interest and penalties, endless interest and penalties. Plus the years in question were at least

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  50 percent taxable. Some in the seventies were at the old 70 percent

  rate.

  Say I owed a million. Not counting the running interest and penalties on the million dollars for every day they went unpaid, I had

  to earn two million at 50 percent tax rates to pay the back tax. Then

  I had to pay a million current taxes on the two million. I've earned

  two million dollars and I haven't even bought a hat!

  Jerry shielded me from the worst implications of all of this. I'm

  sure he felt: "As long as we have to do this anyway, I'll relieve George

  of the worst news. Not tell him, boy, it looks fucking bleak and it's

  getting worse." But sometimes he would have to tell me: "They

  found another $525,000, they're looking at 1977 now as well as '78

  and '79." Then we'd have to bite the bullet and get a loan or increase

  the mortgage or get a second mortgage. Sometimes the Taxman

  wanted money faster than I could make it. Jerry was a rock. Twice

  in the '80s, he reached into his own pocket and loaned me over a

  million dollars . . .

  Brenda always said that I was being singled out because of what I

  did and said onstage. That's why it went on so long—almost twenty

  years in the end—without any attempt to settle it on the part of the

  IRS. And it's true that many people in showbiz have tax problems—

  worse than ours—but eventually there'd always be a settlement.

  Seventy cents on the dollar, fifty cents on the dollar, whatever. But

  that never happened for me. She was convinced the Taxman was

  really saying: "Shut the fuck up. Or suffer." I don't know if it was

  true but I loved her for thinking of it. She had a great line about

  the whole affair: Despite everything I said about the government,

  like not trusting anything they told me, I went out every night—and

  worked for them.

  Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his

  local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might ve been the beginning of my giving up on my

  species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More

  than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy

  of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.

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  All through the eighties I had a visceral reaction to those who

  supported him. Especially on planes. I lost count of how many times

  I sat up in first class with all these business suits, feeling a great welling anger in my gut. Livid at the conversations of these cocksuckers,

  with their smug body language, their little leather briefcases, their

  neatly folded Wall Street Journals, their aura of being in charge, running the show. I knew they were totally happy about what had happened and that they were in a position to gloat. It hastened new

  directions for me.

  The osmosis from the prevailing political climate is very real in a

  person like myself. And so, all through those Reagan years, another

  process accelerated. Along with finding my authentic voice, I was

  finding an authentic position to speak from.

  A decade earlier, when I'd done my gold albums, I didn't have any

  synthesized sets of feelings or information about politics. Beyond a

  few one-liners about racism or Vietnam I had no coherent point

  of view. It was more a question of: "Let's just get HIIIGGGHHH!

  Yeah, man, I'm against this and I'm against that, but who the fuck

  knows why?"

  I was very unsophisticated. I certainly couldn't back up what

  political positions I had or argue them any with weight. I didn't

  have a political self. Yes, I'd thrown off the phony media me, rediscovered the authentic rebel child and clown, rejoined my own

  history, dug out my personal truth from misguided ambitions. All

  good. But after a certain point, I'd discovered not much remained

  to be rediscovered. I'd exhausted my personal history—right down

  to snot-as-rubber-cement and my old toenails. I'd never considered

  or explored the creative process in terms of the tension between the

  internal me and the external political environment. But now I could

  and would . . .

  Death continued to keep an eye on the Carlin household. After the heart attack we decided I needed an angioplasty, which is

  a technique where a tiny balloon is inserted in a narrowed artery

  and inflated to increase blood flow. There were only a few places

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  in the early eighties that had done the procedure enough times to

  have a good track record. The cardiologist at Saint John's sent my

  angiograms around to the short list of hospitals, including Emory

  University in Atlanta, where a surgeon named Andreas Gruentzig

  practiced. He was the Austrian doctor who'd invented angioplasty

  and was considered the best. He agreed to do my arteries, or as they

  say, my "vessel."

  He did my right coronary vessel. The angiogram showed that two

  other vessels—my left anterior descending coronary artery and the

  diagonal off the LAD where they come together—were also narrowing. So the angioplasty is over and I'm in the recovery room with

  this sandbag on the wound to help close it. And I'm feeling chipper

  because the thing was a success. Gruentzig comes in and he's covered with blood. All over, even on those scrub things they wear on

  their feet.

  Which I think is great. And he says, "Ja. You looking pink. Ja—

  much pinker." I said, "Yeah, I feel good. Let me ask you something.

  How come you didn't do those other two
on the left?" He says,

  "We're not here to show off. We have sufficient blood flow from the

  right coronary artery now. If one of them would have closed down

  you would still have had enough collateral flow that you would be

  healthy and you would not lose much tissue." I thought that was

  pretty snotty—especially in his Austrian accent, but Jerry was laughing. Later I asked him why: "You're sitting there and this guy is

  covered in your blood and you're basically begging him to give you

  open-heart surgery!"

  Then it was Brenda's turn. When we did Carlin at Carnegie in

  1982 she'd found a little lump on her breast, but it was just a cyst so

  she let it go. After she finished editing—it took four months because

  we didn't have that safety show—she went in for a checkup, and the

  doctor looked at it and said yeah, it was a cyst, but he didn't want to

  aspirate it because of the implants she'd gotten in the seventies.

  So she went in for minor surgery and when she woke up there

  were three doctors standing over her bed. Under the cyst they'd

  found a tumor that no mammogram had shown. Luckily it hadn't

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  spread to the lymph nodes, but her options were either radiation and

  chemo or a modified mastectomy—taking a wedge of the breast out

  with the tumor. They gave her forty-eight hours to decide.

  This was a rock and a hard place. After she got sober she was diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis (now called hepatitis C). Her

  liver was shot. They put her on prednisone and gave her a few weeks

  to live. She went through hell on these drugs, became psychotic and

  suicidal and diabetic. She pulled through, but when it was all over

  she still had hepatitis. But they did give her TWO YEARS to live.

  Nine years later she still had the hepatitis C so chemo and radiation

  weren't much of an option. They'd probably kill her.

  B u t . . . a mastectomy? She was only forty-four. We called three

  different surgeons and asked them, "What would you tell your wife

  to do?" They all said get it out. So she had a modified mastectomy.

  And it worked.

  Given that her mother died of breast cancer, Brenda obsessed

  about reliving that history: that she wouldn't make it past fifty (which

  was the age her mother died). But she didn't die and there was no recurrence, although given her compromised system her doctors had

  concerns about that. In 1985 she had reconstructive surgery, and

  that was a good move too. (The surgeon was Steven Hoffman, the

  one who did Michael Jackson.) But once you've had cancer you're

  always in the waiting room, and every time she went in for a mammogram she too felt Death was looking over her shoulder.

  We kept Brenda for many more years but we did lose Mary. In

  the early eighties I'd relented about her banishment to New York.

  She came back to California and I set her up in Santa Monica at an

  assisted-living place on Ocean Avenue called the Georgian Hotel. It

  was a quiet place and a quiet neighborhood, overlooking the ocean,

  but she still had some tart comments left in her—she was in her

  mideighties by now—and a steady stream of complaints about how

  I ignored her and never had time for her. Same old Mary. But she

  seemed to have forgotten about the $52.50 I owed her.

  In late '83 she had a massive stroke that left her nonambulatory,

  and we moved her to a more full-service assisted-living place across

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  from Saint John's. She declined pretty quickly and died in June of

  1984 at the age of eighty-seven.

  In '86 I had to get a second angioplasty. An angiogram showed

  that one of the arteries Gruentzig hadn't done was now closing. The

  cardiologist from Saint John's who had taken me to Emory University decided to do the angioplasty himself right there in Santa

  Monica. Now, if you have an angioplasty and anything happens, if

  they split a vein or something, they do immediate bypass surgery, or

  that's it, you die. They always have a team standing by. I wasn't too

  worried—it's not invasive and I'd been through it before.

  But Brenda was tense and she turned out to be right. During

  the procedure the wire went into the wrong artery and there was

  damage to it. So she and Kelly are sitting outside the OR and suddenly there are doctors and carts everywhere in the hall and they're

  figuring I'm going to die and it's déjà vu—Hi and Goodbye time

  again.

  Anyway they work on me and I'm fine, though Brenda was certain

  I'd had another heart attack because of all the activity. They medicate me to keep the arteries open and I get through it. A few months

  later I got angina, which indicated a closing artery, and something

  had to be done. Brenda had got it into her head that I needed to go to

  San Francisco, where there was a doctor named Meyler, who'd been

  Gruentzig's original partner and developed the angioplasty technique with him. We had a big fight about this, because I couldn't

  see what was wrong with going back to Saint John's, and she was

  saying, "Why wouldn't you go to the man who was Gruentzig's partner?" Finally I had her make an appointment for me. We went up to

  San Francisco and Meyler did this wonderful variant of angioplasty

  called the kissing balloon technique, where they did the other two

  vessels at the same time. And that was angioplasty Number Three.

  And by no means the last.

  I began to do something about my political ignorance. I subscribed

  to publications like Anarchy magazine, Mother ]ones, In These Times,

  the Nation. I read a lot of sociology and social history. I sought out

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  the most radical parts of the Village Voice, which I'd always kept a

  subscription to because I liked the New York edge. I knew I'd always

  find someone really far left. Not just Village Voice-left, but someone

  really wailing, like Alexander Cockburn. I discovered Noam Chomsky, Hunter Thompson, Gore Vidal, writers who said things in a

  daring manner, truly dissenting voices.

  I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues.

  On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds toward various classes of people. None of which included skin color or ethnicity

  or religion. Well—religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar

  right-wingers, but that passed, because I saw that in the end they

  were just a different sort of victim.

  I felt discomfort at having received positions on issues, simply because of my preference for the left of center, for people's rights over

  property rights. I was beginning to find that a lot of my positions

  clashed. The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their kneejerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing

  stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were,

  banding together in packs, so that I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their

  mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy

  was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

  That wasn't an entirely new feeling. I'd worked for Jesse Unruh

  in
1970 when he ran against Reagan, during Reagan's second run

  for governor. (My brief little brush with electoral politics.) One of

  the rally talks I gave for Unruh was at an Elks Lodge in Stockton.

  I pointed out to these democratic liberals that, "You're having your

  meeting in a place that has excluded black members for years. Just

  thought you might like to know."

  I hosted Saturday Night Live for the second time in 1984. (I like to

  do it every nine years. For some reason Lome didn't call in '93 or

  2002. I'll give him one more chance in 2011.) This time, unlike the

  first, I was determined to do sketches, because my acting ambitions

  had been relit. I felt confident and different enough about who I

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  was by then. I did three sketches, and I have to say I was really good.

  They were with Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Chris Guest. I did a

  policeman sketch with Billy Crystal as the father. And Martin Short

  played this crazy rock guy.

  At the cast party, Martin came over and he said, "You know

  you were terrific in that policeman thing, because you played the

  middle man." (Which is an old vaudeville term for the man in the

  middle. And apparently it was a position of responsibility.) I had this

  wonderful running line where Billy would ask me a question and I

  would say, "Not to my knowledge. Not that I'm aware of."

  I was really pleased Martin had taken that trouble. So now I'm

  over with Billy. I had done some things in the sketch, small though

  they were, that came so naturally to me I knew I now had the chops

  to be an actor. And would get it done when the time for the film acting came. So I said to Billy: "So long, man. The sketch went nice,

  didn't it?" And since I knew he was going to leave Saturday Night

  Live and go to movies the next year and I was beginning to seriously

  explore them again myself, I added: "Maybe we'll get to do a movie

  together someday."

  And he gave me this look as if I was some kind of a bug. Like, "Oh

  yeah? That certainly doesn't work into my plans."

  So it was satisfying that I got a pretty fat role in a movie before

  he did— Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Shelley Long—

  which turned out to be a hit. And I think I got my star on Hollywood