Last Words Read online

  My mother wanted me to learn the piano. Like her, like Uncle George the admiral. And I did take lessons and play at recitals and shit, but I hated practicing. I had this dream one night not long ago. I’m trying to learn these piano pieces and I’m very frustrated because I haven’t got time, and I’m trying to learn them. Then right there in the dream I say to myself, “Hey, I don’t even take piano lessons!”

  When I woke up I wrote that down. I stuck it up on the wall of the room where I work. Whenever I get goofy and my OCD kicks in, I look at it and say: “Mary, Mary! Get out of the room!”

  3

  CURIOUS GEORGE

  George Carlin, 1959,

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  One blazing Sunday in July 1941, my mother and I and an older woman named Bessie, who was our housekeeper, went to Mass at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. Usually we went to Our Lady of Lourdes, a gloomy neo-Gothic barn on 143rd Street, but the good Catholic ladies had been attracted to Corpus Christi by its pastor, Father George Ford. It wasn’t physical attraction, although Father Ford was, by contemporary Catholic standards, doing something quite indecent. He was delivering intelligent sermons that credited his congregation with having minds of their own.

  As well as the church he ran an eponymous parochial school of eight grades—an oasis of enlightenment in the wasteland of Ascensions, Nativities, Blessed Sacraments and Our Ladies of Unbearable Maternal Grief, where retrograde clergy routinely hammered on the bodies and minds of the children entrusted to their care.

  After Mass we strolled up the hill toward Amsterdam. There outside 519 West 121st was a sign: “Vacancy—5 Rooms.” Just what we needed! An address my father didn’t know about. And only a few doors from a school I could walk to without crossing the street. Of course I was only four, so I still had two years to shop for a really cool pencil box. Mary always was a visionary.

  Most people would’ve considered this a random piece of good luck, but not Mary Carlin. She pointed out to me many, many times afterward that God’s mother had been directly responsible for find ing our apartment, because we moved in on August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption.

  For Catholics the Feast of the Assumption was a Holy Day of Obligation, which meant you had to attend Mass on that day or be guilty of a mortal sin. I certainly hope we found time to attend Mass, because mortal sins are far worse than venial or “regular” sins. If you die with a mortal sin on your soul you will burn in inconceivable torment in hell for all eternity. Dying with a venial sin on your sheet merely costs you a few aeons of flaming agony in purgatory. There the fires are as hot as hell but you’re consoled by knowing it’s only for a few hundred thousand million years. God hands out these hideous, agonizing punishments because He loves you.

  The Assumption of Our Lady by the way doesn’t mean she assumed she was going to heaven. That would be a sin of pride and August 15th would be the Feast of Our Lady’s Presumption. Our Lady could not commit a sin. She was conceived immaculate, meaning “free of the stain of original sin” (which has nothing to do with whether your sins display any originality). She was the only human ever to give birth without being fertilized by a male sperm—otherwise known as the Virgin Birth—the reason being that the standard male sperm-delivery system comes very close, in the eyes of the Church, to mortal sin. We have to assume—there’s that word again—that Mary’s husband, Joseph, never came close to getting into the Immaculate Pants.

  Why Mary the Immaculate had so keen an interest in the living arrangements of Mary the Carlin was never explained, but right around the time the United States was laying plans to sucker Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, we three Gypsies (my mother’s name for herself, Pat and me) plus Bessie tucked ourselves safely away in our Morningside Heights apartment.

  We soon discovered we’d moved into one of the greatest neighborhood concentrations of educational, cultural and religious institutions in America. The centerpiece was Columbia University with its many colleges, including, just a few yards from my front door, Teachers College, from which it was once said every superintendent of schools in America had been graduated. Across Broadway was Barnard, one of the Ivy League’s Seven Sisters. Down the street from our house was Union Theological Seminary, America’s foremost training ground for Protestant clergy.

  Two blocks farther west, towering over the neighborhood, was Riverside Church, a twenty-eight-story Gothic cathedral endowed by the Rockefellers, and known locally as Rockefeller Church (a sure sign of what Americans really worship). It soared over our heads at the foot of our street—a three-hundred-foot phallus with seventy-four bells in its head, the largest carillon in the world.

  Just around the corner were the Jewish Theological Seminary and Juilliard School of Music, where I walked in at the age of ten to ask if I could get piano lessons. Close by was International House, not of pancakes but of foreign Columbia students; Interchurch Center, HQ of the National Council of Churches, and a few blocks away Grant’s Tomb, where many a night we smoked pot while that old juicer Ulysses and his wife dozed away inside.

  Our neighborhood quickly became a metaphor for my mother’s cultural dilemma: the clash between her self-image as a lace-curtain businesswoman and the reduced circumstances in which her shanty-Irish husband had abandoned her. Downtown, up on the hill, was the intellectual center which embodied her cultural aspirations. Uptown, down the hill, on the Broadway which Jesus tells us “leads to destruction,” lay a mostly Irish neighborhood beginning around 123rd Street, known back then as White Harlem.

  White Harlem was tougher and more crowded than the streets around Columbia. Its buildings were older and many didn’t have elevators. The whole area had a decidedly working-class flavor and, of course, was a lot more fun. You can guess in which direction Mary wanted her sons to head. And which direction they wanted to head.

  At the beginning she didn’t have to worry about me—I was only four when we moved into 519. The highlights of my life were my trips to midtown with Bessie, listening to the radio and thumb-sucking. I was a world-class thumb-sucker. My specialty at bedtime was to loosen part of the bottom sheet, wrap it around my thumb and cram the whole thing into my mouth for extended, overnight sucking. By morning this would create yet another circular, pleated saliva stain in one corner of the sheet, which must have caused some speculation at the local Chinese laundry: “Aha! Irish form of birth control! No wonder so many of them!”

  The big old Philco radio in the living room fascinated me from the beginning. I couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t care what was on: quiz shows, soap operas, newscasts, interviews, plays, comedies. That all these voices could magically enter my house fired my imagination and nurtured my obsession with words, inflections, accents. On a more basic level it provided company. I harbored a distinct loneliness as a little kid, growing up with no grandparents, no father, a part-time mother and a hired friend—Bessie, who, kind, sweet and mothering though she was, wasn’t blood. My adored older brother—the problem child—was away at boarding school. For an embryonic loner the radio was deeply associated with warm feelings—comfort, security, companionship. More than half a century later it still is.

  Safe, cared for, nurtured—and mere minutes away from the wild, noisy, vast and exciting world of New York City. Bessie and I traveled at least three days a week to midtown where we haunted the racks and counters of cathedrals of consumerism like Macy’s, Gimbels and Klein’s. Noontime we’d go to Mass at the Franciscan church on 32nd Street. Then we’d attend the most sacred ritual of all: lunch at the Automat. Squirming around for long hours on hard wooden benches in a church basement couldn’t hold a candle to the celestial joys of mashed potatoes, peas and creamed spinach. And these hundreds of pilgrimages to the world’s busiest urban center gave me something more—a sense of vast possibility. You could get on a train and in a matter of minutes entirely change who and what you were. A subconscious lesson at the time but one I’d put to good use before long. I
mastered the Broadway–Seventh Avenue IRT at a very early age.

  When I was six Bessie left us to work for a Japanese family, an interesting move in 1944. (“How could she do this to me?” Mary wailed. “Leave me for a Jap family?”) I didn’t care. I was in Corpus Christi by now and my Bessie period was behind me. After-school without Bessie or Mary or even Patrick was an unparalleled education in street life. I started exploring early. I had a mile-square play ground of colleges and churches and their grounds at my disposal: a thousand hallways, classrooms, labs, theaters, lounges, libraries, dorms, gyms, chapels and lobbies just asking to be terrorized by me and my playmates. Security—a more recent American obsession—was minimal and a handful of small kids can scoot, scatter, disappear and reappear with amazing ease. In addition of course we were in our pre-vandal stage and attracted little attention.

  When we got tired of being little pests, there were games: Chinese and American handball, boxball, ring-a-levio (called ring-a-leary-o in my neighborhood), blacksmith, Johnny-ride-a-pony, kick the can, roller hockey and a strange game called three steps to Germany. Plus all the city-street variations of baseball: stickball, punchball, stoopball, curb ball and baseball-off-the-wall.

  We had three parks nearby: Morningside Park, Central Park and Riverside Park, which stretched five miles along the sewage-laden Hudson, where we bathed in summer with no apparent ill effects. All the parks were dotted with playgrounds, many recently installed by Mayor La Guardia and called Tot Lots. Basketball courts, baseball diamonds, wading pools, thousands of trees to climb, countless hills for sliding, sledding, rolling down and running up and miles and miles of paths for riding bikes. Not designated bike paths, not shared paths. Paths where pedestrians had to get the fuck out of the way.

  Actually I rarely rode my bike in the park—it was more stimulating when ridden in the streets, weaving adroitly through fast-moving vehicles. “Go play in traffic” wouldn’t have been a put-down for us—just another glaringly obvious suggestion from an adult. Heavy traffic as an obstacle to play offers a level of stimulation simply not found on the farm or in nice suburbs where kids enjoy the innocent idyll of American childhood. Heavy traffic focuses the mind. Going out for a long pass on a busy crosstown street develops impressive coordination skills unknown in Iowa.

  Heavy traffic as a form of transportation is even better. Grabbing a hitch on a fast-moving truck when you’re on roller skates or a bike is idiotic, spectacularly dangerous and every bit as thrilling as it sounds. Techniques vary. With a bike you only have one hand to control the bike and must stay beside, not behind, the truck or risk massive head trauma. On roller skates the fun is all in tiny metal skate-wheels going thirty miles an hour over Upper Manhattan’s cratered streets. I’m ashamed to admit that we did not wear safety helmets, kneepads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, gloves or protective eyewear. We could at any time have put our eyes out or broken our necks; curiously none of us ever did. And those lightning-fast, hip-swiveling maneuvers we learned dodging two-ton automobiles trying to cut inside and make the light blossomed later on the dance floor.

  By the time I was seven I was slipping into the subway to head downtown to Central Park, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Chinatown, the waterfront—great tracts of unexplored territory, an urban El Dorado, just sitting there waiting for an adventurous child. Afternoons of collecting autographs, sneaking into movies, browsing in department stores, walking up the stairs to the observation decks of the RCA and Empire State Buildings, stealing stuff from novelty stores, climbing trees in Central Park, riding elevators on Wall Street or simply walking around taking in the big show—the greatest entertainment on earth. It gave me the feeling I belonged, I was entirely at home in the vast city I was growing up in.

  Sometimes after a few hours of goofing I’d show up at my mother’s office around five-thirty and talk her into taking me to the Automat for a cocktail of creamed spinach. Often, during the meal, she’d give me a quarter and ask me to bring it over to some person she’d spotted sitting alone, nursing a cup of coffee with no place to go. Being down on your luck, she called it. She really did have a generous heart. She just made it so goddam difficult to love her.

  New York City was a great education, but first grade with Sister Richardine in Room 202 also meant other awesome new experiences: sex, music and the roar of the crowd.

  First grade generated first kisses. Two of them. The first first kiss was one afternoon when Sister Richardine announced the imminence of the annual church bazaar. This so aroused a little girl named Julie—clearly a future shopaholic—that she threw her arms around me and planted a big wet kiss on my cheek. An uproar en sued in the class. Small as I already was, I shrank even further—a tiny, beet-red creature in short pants.

  But deep down under those ill-fitting shorts, something was stirring. My second first kiss came not long after, alone in the clay room with Ilda Muller-Thym. I bided my time, then made my move—and gave her a big wet kiss. My only memory was that it was good, she didn’t hit me and we didn’t get caught. To this day I can’t see a child’s poorly made clay bunny without a vague churning in my loins.

  Room 202 possessed an odd homemade musical instrument consisting of rows of glass bottles filled with varying amounts of water, suspended in a wooden rack. The player struck the bottles with soft wooden mallets, producing a musical note. After much effort I learned “Frère Jacques” and one day played it for the class. My first ever public appearance! A real charge! Having thirty people (okay, six-year-olds, but they had pulses) sit without fidgeting and watch something you were doing—which they couldn’t do—was intensely satisfying. Having them applaud at the end, even though many had difficulty bringing their hands together with any accuracy, produced an odd sense of power. It was an intoxicant. As would be the case with many intoxicants, I immediately wanted more.

  Actually my attraction to the spotlight had begun earlier when my mother taught me to do two things: an impression of Mae West—whom I’d never seen—and a dopey little dance popular in the thirties called the Big Apple. Whenever we had company or I visited my mother’s office, she asked me to do my little act. I never needed to be coaxed. I even added another impression I’d worked up on my own—Johnny, the Philip Morris midget. Philip Morris cigarettes featured a midget dressed as a bellboy who walked around upscale hotel lobbies yelling, “Call for Philip May-ray-us.” Since I was in effect a midget my impression was flawless.

  Second grade brought my next big career move. Our teacher Sister Nathaniel had organized the class into a band. A big band, though not quite in the Duke Ellington sense: the thirty-odd children had a single form of instrumentation—sticks and clappers. The band was in effect a large percussion section with one actual instrument, a really crappy xylophone. Still, it was the only thing that could play a melody, and I leaped at it. After incredible effort I mastered “March of the Little Lead Soldiers” and became the featured soloist.

  The highlight of our band’s schedule was an invitation to perform at the Horace Mann School in Teachers College, across 121st Street. The occasion was a tribute to Joe Louis and the First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. At seven years of age I was about to do my first liberal benefit.

  Two ensemble stick-and-clapper numbers brought the audience to the REM portion of the sleep cycle—and my big solo. I stepped out in front of the band for “March of the Little Lead Soldiers,” and without false modesty I have to say I nailed it to the wall. A great rendition—tasteful, restrained and yet spirited. I may have made xylophone history with my daring, cross-hand four-mallet ending. I glanced across the stage to where the guests of honor were seated. Thank God they were awake—and applauding! I did notice that one of the First Lady’s stockings was drooping rather badly. At that stage of her life it was probably just part of a larger pattern.

  Corpus Christi School, revolutionary for its time, had no report cards or grades. There was none of that cutthroat competitive spirit which so improves our American
way of life. We were encouraged to study and excel simply for the joy of discovery. If we were inculcated with anything it was the simple idea that the future would take care of itself if you did right by yourself today.

  I grasped the work easily and had a lot of time for daydreaming. If there’d been a course in “What’s Outside the School Window” I would have been head of the class. But idle classroom time can lead to more than just looking for brassieres on the rooftop laundry line next door. It is the breeding ground of the class clown.

  Class clowns are dedicated to attracting attention to themselves. Traditional Freudians might attribute my chronic need for attention to the fact that I had no father and half a mother. Naaah. The truth was much simpler. Then as now, I was a consummate show-off.

  Disgusting tricks are the key components in the class clown’s repertoire. These are useful not only in subverting the whole process of elementary education, but in making girls sick. That’s really all you wanted to do when you were nine or ten—if you could get Margaret Mary to throw up on her desk in the morning, you knew it was going to be a good day. And though I doubt I deprived my schoolmates of much of their education, I certainly curtailed my own. My entire public-school education ended at ninth grade and I barely made it through that. On the other hand, the credentials I earned disrupting class and making girls throw up stood me in good stead a quarter century later on my 1972 album Class Clown.