all the progress in ehemo and radiation, new drugs, protocols, treatments, why not again?
I decided to keep working.
I'd always been disturbed that my actions in the 1970s concerning my money and other behaviors had put me in the position
where I had to be away from Brenda so much. I have a thoughtful
nature—as a child I did—and I'd always tried do extra things for
her that would be described as thoughtful acts, unprompted, unbidden. First, to make her more comfortable in every way in her physical feelings and her emotional world; and second, to let her know I
was trying to compensate, consciously trying to atone—my mother's
word, very Catholic of course—for these absences.
And '97 was an unusually busy season, with the normal work
schedule plus Aspen in February and the book tour for my first
book, Brain Droppings, which was to begin in May. I'd said to her:
"I'm working on our retirement. We're close to being even. I'm trying to get ahead of the game. Set some things in place that will
make us less likely to be eaten by dogs later in life." I saw that as part
of the atonement.
But the initial diagnosis had been incorrect. The cancer hadn't
metastasized from her previous one. It was new, separate and aggressive. In fact the oncologist told us—afterward, of course, when it
was too late to act upon—that under the microscope it was the most
aggressive cancer he'd ever seen. Brenda deteriorated rapidly, and
on the morning of May 11—Mother's Day—she crashed. She was
already unconscious when Kelly got her to Saint John's. At midday
all her systems shut down and her heart stopped.
I was in New York. I grabbed the first plane I could find. The
doctors restarted Brenda's heart and Kelly had them put her on life
support till I could get back.
I hadn't seen her for a week or more. Jaundice had made her skin
yellow. All her hair was gone from the chemo. She was unconscious
and unresponsive but. . . her eyes were open. I have no idea if she
was aware of anyone, but I saw her eyes were tearing up a little.
I took a tissue and gently wiped away her tears.
My own health troubles seemed to be on hold. I'd had a third,
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pretty serious heart attack in '91 while driving to Vegas and a
follow-up one—less serious—in '94. I believe that the '94 one was
related to the '91 heart attack. They tried to do an angioplasty after
that one and it failed, an artery went into spasm and I had a lot of
angina. I went to San Francisco to my guys there and they said they
didn't want to touch the lesion. It was a little immature, not well
formed. They said: "We don't want to work on this artery, so we're
going to send you back to your cardiologist in L.A. and treat you
with medicine." For three years that was fine, and then I began to
get a tiny bit of angina—my usual kind in the throat—but only at
the highest point of exercise. It would go away when I stopped exercising.
But I don't fool around. I checked into the hospital and they took
a look and did an angioplasty with a stent. A stent is a mesh cylinder,
like a Chinese finger puzzle, made out of very fine wire. They insert
the balloon with the stent, the balloon is expanded, the stent expands and then they deflate the balloon and take it out. The stent remains in the artery to keep it open. This prevents restenosis, which
is the biggest problem with angioplasty—the dilations they make
can reclose, either immediately or within six months. Stents had a
much higher rate of keeping them open. I'm quite sure that the lesion he fixed was the one from '91.
One strange thing about my heart problems is that I've always
gotten in on, if not the leading edge of technology, things that were
still in the experimental stage. When I got my stent, the procedure
hadn't yet been approved by the FDA. It was only in use in six hospitals. I was lucky again—as with the streptokinase—that they were
experimenting with it in that particular hospital. At the time, the
only other person I knew about who'd had a stent was Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa had a stent—I had stent. My mother would have
been so proud.
It always seems to me when I have these heart attacks or angioplasties that it's just mechanical work. It may have an organic
origin—the plaque builds up because of a chemical reaction—but
essentially it's Roto-Rooter time. Let's get in and clean out that
clogged pipe. Everything I've ever had healthwise involved some27.1
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thing that could be moved around. That's lucky. Even the ablation I
had in 2003, which is a procedure to correct arrhythmia, where they
intentionally scar your heart to control the signals from your brain,
is really just a kind of tune-up. Your heart's not firing properly and
needs adjustment. I've always felt optimistic and comfortable about
my heart. Even with an attack, once it's over you don't feel any pain.
With angioplasty, the only result is the incision they made and you
just want to get home.
I sort things out well. I place things in my world where they ought
to be mentally as well as physically. In fact I move my physical world
around in order for my mental world to be a little easier to look at
and work with. People ask me in interviews sometimes: "Didn't the
heart attacks change your life? Didn't they change you?" And I say
no, not really. Obviously I had to start exercising because I'd been
sedentary my whole life. I had to start eating correctly because I'd
been an American slob eater my whole life. Those were the only two
changes. I've never lived with a sword of Damocles. I guess I knew
another can strike at any moment so I don't know how much of it is
this wonderful thing we've discovered, denial. I don't think so: denial has a different flavor. This is just being sensible about yourself
and not being a fucking martyr and a victim.
One reason that I don't worry too much about these things is that
I'm happy in love.
I met Sally Wade about six months after Brendas death. She was
a comedy writer based in Hollywood who'd always wanted to meet
me, but was a bit shy about it. So her dog Spot made the first move
for her. We fell for each other—I've always been lonely for people
like me and she was a kindred spirit. Still, with Brenda's death so
recent, I wasn't ready yet. Sally waited for me, and when we got together, I knew she would be the love of my life. And she is.
A big part of my job is exploding clichés. But it seems impossible
to talk about what Sally and I have without them. I've already used a
couple. So here's a couple more: it was love at first sight, we're crazy
about each other, we have a great love together. And there's more
where those came from. The weird thing is, they're all true.
At my age, I'm allowed a little inconsistency.
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Throughout the nineties and whatever we call this decade—"the
zeros" works for the Bush years—I've had a constant sense of growth
and growing strength. I've always had the path ahead of me as my
artistic life unfolded, sometimes with side roads and cul
-de-sacs,
true, but in spite of them a sense of growing internally, intellectually, emotionally, of constantly finding a better way to craft my
work. And thanks to Jerry, I ' v e always had plenty of shit to do out
there, always had 125, 150 dates a year. There's always an audience waiting for me in Topeka or Eugene or Orlando or Stevens
Point, Wisconsin. There'll always be a roomful of people somewhere, willing to sit quietly in the dark. Not too quietly, obviously,
but at least sit in an orderly fashion and appreciate me and listen
to my stuff and pay. That has a life-giving aspect. That is what I
live for.
People always ask questions like: "How can you go on? Aren't
you anxious to retire? Aren't you tired of the road?" But I realized
something very simple a long time ago. I can't do what I love to do
without these people. I have to go where they live. They're not going
to come to my house. Even if I pay them.
Sure, there's always bad stuff. The fucking Bide-A-Wee Motel or
the rinky-dink airport where a wing's fallen off the plane, all the bad
shit about traveling we all know. And I've never liked being backstage. That's the worst fucking place in the world. It's like being in a
boxing ring and the match hasn't started yet. That's where I used to
get a lot of my drinking done. But I will say this: once I get onstage—
not every night and not every minute of every night, but damned
close—once I ' m onstage, it's a transformation. All the bad stuff just
drips away when you step onstage.
You may have thirty, forty years under your belt. You may feel
really good about your shit. You may know exactly what you're going
to do and that they're predisposed to like you . . . But the instant I
get out there it all starts over again. Right from the beginning. Win
them over, and get em where I want 'em! That's living! That's the
thing that feeds me, that's my nourishment.
I don't know if there'll be any more movies. I did two with Kevin
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Smith, Dogma in '99 and Jersey Girl in '04, where he wrote me a
great part as Ben Affleck's dad. I like working with Kevin; there's
a lot of great counterpunching and the Catholic thing is a strong
bond. Acting is fun to do, a worthy fraternity and a great tradition
to have had a tiny speck of a part of. But stand-up and acting are
like running versus strength training. You work aerobically running, that's what you need to feel good. Sometimes you do strength
training—a completely different set of muscles—and you feel good
for completely different reasons. I'm a runner who makes occasional
visits to the free weights.
I prefer rewards over awards. There's something I like about having done so many HBO shows. Thirteen so far. It's throwing down
the gauntlet to the rest of comedy. Comedians who come later: this
is the new standard! Thirteen one-hour shows on HBO and you're
in the club! And it's rewarding to be able to say: "All right, now, I
have proved to myself and to whoever's watching what I wanted to
prove in this form."
Which is stand-up comedy in live performance. Long ago I described my job as being "a foole"; that's still what I do. Once, this
kind of comedy was called the people's art, a vulgar art. Maybe all
comedy is. I prefer live stand-up comedy to any other form. Since
my changes in the early seventies I've only used television as an advertisement for myself. I've been blessed—and cursed—by events
and circumstances that have made me, I think, one of the principal
stand-ups of this era. The stand-up who has stayed longest with the
stand-up form as his prime thing and made it what he does. Therefore I've had a chance to take some forward steps with it, at least for
myself.
A lot of people who use stand-up to get them to movies let their
stand-up work wither or forget about it altogether. Or they go out
for a few dates to put together a special, then forget it for two years.
The only other guys who did stand-up all their lives were from what
I call the Jackie-Joey era—the forties and fifties, when they got their
act to a certain level and just stayed at that level for the rest of their
lives. I think I can say I'm one of the few people who, in the absence
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of a movie career and/or a television career, have taken this form to
higher levels. That feels good, that feels special. If I were a JackieJoey still doing an act exactly as I did it twenty years ago, I'd be ready
for a large blunt weapon. Instead I have a feeling of progress and of
achievement. I've contributed a little to the vulgar art.
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On 123rd Street, when I was young, we had a gang called the
Gripers. (That struck terror into the neighborhood. Watch
the fuck out or we'll come gripe at you.) But even though I
was in the Gripers, I wasn't a Griper. Belonging to any group for me
was always an ad hoc thing that filled some immediate need—in
this case smoking pot—but not what you'd call a deep existential
hunger. As soon as I started going steady with my first girlfriend,
Mary Cathryn, I left the group. I was still a card-carrying Griper,
but it was always: "Georgie's up in the hall with Mary Cathryn."
The only gang I wanted to be part of was the Loners, membership
restricted to one: me.
In the air force, where they enforced group thought, I got around
it by hanging with the black airmen, completely cutting me out
from being any part of the white guys. I was out of that group—and
happy to be. Then I became a disc jockey, downtown, off base: I'm
already edging away from air force group thought. I'm apart, different. Alone in front of a mike. Almost back to my gang of one.
It always seemed to me that the reasons groups came together
were superficial. The group didn't feed me, and I had nothing to
contribute to it. I had a deeper goal, this giant puzzle to work on,
which was only going to happen if they left me alone. "No one but
me can figure me out. No one can help me with it." All the group
stuff: rules, uniforms, rituals, bonding, was a distraction. It denied
me the chance to solve the giant puzzle: "Who the fuck am I, how
did I come together? What are the parts and how do they fit?"
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The aloneness of the stage makes groups irrelevant. Few things
dramatize the face-off between loner and group more starkly than
the artist before the audience. And there's an irony here. If this
loner can't get the audience to act as a group—laugh together—he's
fucked.
When things go well onstage I don't just think: "They like me.
They accept me. They think I'm clever." All those things happen,
but I'm also looking inside to see what else is going on. And when I
do, there is a sense in those moments, I am more than alone—I am
the only thing in the universe. I am the only thing that's happening
in it. No way to escape the progression of moments as they come
up onstage—the next line and the next line, the next laugh and the
next laugh. Which include my h
ands and the tilt of my jaw, how
wide I open my eyes, whether I put more energy into it or slow it
a little with my voice. There is nothing happening in the universe
outside of that reality and that experience. When besides that I'm
being rewarded with all this approval, attention, approbation, for
something that is solely mine and only I can do . . . There can't be
anything better than that. To be intensely alone, intensely myself, in
control of everything, the center of a self-created universe.
The creation of material is the ultimate freedom because that's
creating the world I want. I'm saying to people: the world you
imagine isn't really true: THIS is what's happening: "Booogadee!
Booogadee! Booogadee!" Even if I ' m just babbling I'm saying:
THAT is what's true. What is. Here and now. Whatever you think to
be true, you with the suit and the hat, on the subway or the freeway,
is bullshit. THIS is true: "Booogadee! Booogadee! Booogadee!" I
am momentarily changing the world to THIS. I am reinventing the
world because I can. So long as you're down there and I'm up here,
freedom is: WHAT I SAY GOES!
That's the freedom I always have. I ' m alone, nobody wrote it but
me, there are no amplifiers, no counting off, no staying in the same
key. There are words I have to know but I made them all up. My job
is making up things that AREN'T and telling people that they ARE.
That's what I do. What greater freedom can there be? To say, "The
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world is upside down. It s not what you think at all. It's my world! I
invented it! FUCK YOU!"
I loved it when I was a kid and other kids would say, "Georgie,
you're fucking crazy." "You ever see Carlin? He's fucking crazy!"
I still love it. When people say, "You're weird, you've got a strange
mind," it means way more to me than if they say, "You're a very
funny man." Of course, when they say, "You're a very funny man
and you have a strange way of looking at things," I swell up: it's just
the greatest thing I can hear.
So part of me wants to let them see my weird side. And part of me
wants them to see the serious craft it takes to dig this stuff out and
turn it into art. And there's some need for me to connect with them.
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