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  She loved it and was really good at it. Her whole life began to center around the nightclub. Major acts came through all the time, including at one point in 1960 Lenny Bruce. He and Brenda became good friends—a platonic relationship according to Brenda; it was one of her friends he fucked—but they hung out, and had a great time.

  Brenda used to pick up money every night for the club. Lenny was staying at a motel nearby, so she’d pick him up too and drive him to work. One evening they were passing a field full of flowers and Lenny yells, “Stop the car!” He jumps out and starts running across the field, leaping around in the flowers and rolling in them and yelling gibberish. Brenda thought he was insane; she didn’t realize he was high and just wanted to roll around in some flowers like any other junkie. Then he got back in the car, and they went to the club.

  The next Sunday he took things a step further: he sent her out to the airport to pick up a package. She drove out there, collected the package and drove back with it. He told her much later it was heroin. But what did she know? She was just doing stuff for her new friend. When he left, Lenny signed a picture for her: “You’re going to have my baby. Love, Lenny.”

  Lenny recommended Burns and Carlin to the Racquet Club and we got a booking there for August 1960. It was only our second or third engagement after Chicago. When our publicity photos came in, apparently she and her roommate, Elaine, gave us the once-over. Brenda pointed at me and said, “He’s mine.” Elaine said, “Jack’s mine.” Fresh young meat they called us.

  Our first night she caught my eye. And I caught hers: she told me later I reminded her a lot of Lenny—the same body language. After our first show I went over to her and asked: “What do you do in a town like this?” She said, “You can go out to breakfast. Or you can find someone with a stereo and hi-fi and go home with them.” I said, “Do you have a stereo and hi-fi?” She said, “I do.” So she took me home. For two weeks. We clicked immediately. Our minds clicked, our humor clicked. We both had the same thought: “This is going to be fun!”

  Then the booking ended and it was time to leave. Brenda said she was in love. I didn’t know if I was or not. But I knew it wasn’t just another fling on the road. Which was what everyone at the club told Brenda after I’d gone: “You’re never gonna see him again.”

  Burns and Carlin got busy and Brenda had to go into the hospital to have her appendix out so we were both pretty occupied for a while. I knew I did want to see her again but I couldn’t take the plunge because I knew also that if I did, something decisive would happen. I was nervous about what that would be. So I did nothing. Meanwhile Brenda’s pining away, thinking her friends in the club were right after all and she’ll never see me again. Finally I called and we talked and it was so easy I couldn’t figure out why the fuck I hadn’t done it before. I was going to be in Chicago on New Year’s so I asked her to come up. She couldn’t. I had a couple of things to do around Chicago but after that I said I’d drive to Dayton. I gave her a day to expect me.

  I got delayed for some reason for a couple of days, figuring I’d get there eventually. What I didn’t know was that when I didn’t show on the first day, Brenda cried all night. And when I didn’t show the next day either, she cried all that night too. She was totally heartbroken, thought I was just screwing around with her.

  By now she was working lunches at the club as well as nights. When I finally got to Dayton a few days late, in early January, it happened to be lunchtime.

  I go in the door and she’s seating people, giving them menus, taking orders and so on, when suddenly she turns around and sees me in the doorway. She drops the menus, runs the entire length of the dining room, jumps into my arms, we go to a motel and no one sees us for three days.

  We lay in bed, we drank beer, I turned her on to grass for the first time. I asked her to marry me and she said, “Yes!”

  We had to tell her parents, so we met them for lunch and her mother was sitting there with this pinched and Protestant face. Brenda and I both had the same thought, which was basically: “Aargh!” We couldn’t do it. So when Art had to go to the bathroom I went with him. And there, pissing side by side in our urinals, I said: “I’d like to marry your daughter.” He said: “Oh. Yeah. Okay.”

  Her dad liked me and felt he had a connection with me because of his own showbiz experience. Art also liked his beer, which was something we definitely had in common. So there was an affinity. But not with her mother. When I told her, “I’m going to marry your daughter,” she looked like she’d gone into shock. I don’t know if she disliked me. She was kind of reserved. Probably she was just very skeptical of me—a comedian who worked in nightclubs? Where would that lead? But she saw her daughter was happy with me and for once dropped the adamant thing.

  At least she made Brenda’s wedding dress.

  Then it was off to New York. For two reasons: to introduce her to my neighborhood and to meet my mother. In that order: getting a good review from my old gang was the most important. The place I picked for her debut appearance was a terrific White Harlem bar called the Moylan Tavern.

  The Moylan was on a street that’s long gone called Moylan Place. Right under the El, off Broadway near 125th Street. They built a project over it.

  It was the classic New York saloon. Being on the common border of several neighborhoods, it had great cross-cultural influences. There were blacks and Puerto Ricans of all trades, seminarians from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, Irish construction workers, cops, firefighters, students and professors from the Juilliard School of Music, Columbia and Teachers College, retired pensioners and young Irish bucks trying to earn their wings, every type of New Yorker rubbing up against one another and most of the time in a peaceful manner.

  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 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 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.

  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 off—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.

  8

  THOSE FABULOUS SIXTIES

  George, Kelly and Brenda Carlin

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  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.

  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. I 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 t
hey 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 all-purpose Kennedy impression:

  It’s nice to return to Chicago, home of the adjustable voting machine. 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 textile industry moved south for one reason—there’s a bigger demand 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.