Last Words Read online

  In a good Irish neighborhood we were into bad shit. If there was a rule, Patrick’s religion required him to break it. Anything I did wrong he would encourage. We both resisted our mother because she had these delusions of grandeur: she was determined to make a couple of geniuses out of us. Or fruits. The way Patrick puts it is concise: Mary wanted two Little Lord Fauntleroys. What she got was a pair of hardened dog turds.

  Nothing made him prouder than the fact that I was always getting kicked out of schools (though Corpus Christi had to take me back in eighth grade because they wanted me to write the school play). I was going down the road he’d already blazed. My mother wanted Pat to go to a school called Regis on the East side which was for bright kids, but of course he balked. He wanted to go to Cardinal Hayes High in the Bronx: THE cool school. He was more interested in football and dances than “a goddam book report.”

  Even at Cardinal Hayes he was the same old Patrick. He most admired Brother Philip, the littlest guy in the school and the best hitter. He used to hit Pat right in the nose with a full fist. “Just fucking beautiful,” my brother used to say.

  He’d be sitting at his desk with his algebra book open and Brother Philip would ask: “Carlin, you know how many homeworks I’ve assigned this year?” “No, I don’t, brother.” “Thirty, and you know how many you’ve handed in?” “No, I don’t, brother.” “None—and why is that?” Patrick would say, “Because I ain’t got no book.” Bop! He hits Patrick full in the nose. His nose bleeds easily so to fuck with the good Brother, Pat holds his nose over the algebra book so it can catch the drips. Bam! Bam! Bam! The bantamweight hits him three more in the back of the neck and says, “Go wash up! Don’t make a martyr outta yourself!”

  We didn’t get to do as much together as I would have liked because of the age difference. Still, I knew his buddies and he knew mine. It was a tight neighborhood. Sometimes he’d be going to some party uptown and his friends would say, “Bring Georgie and tell him to bring his tape recorder.” My mother had given me a tape recorder for my eighth-grade graduation and on it I’d record all these imitations of people in the neighborhood. I did one Pat loved of Dottie Murphy kicking her grandson: “Take that, you little bastard! Just because your father’s a bastard don’t mean you can be a bastard too!”

  Once when he was home from the air force—he’d just gone in, so he would’ve been nineteen—I begged to go to the bar with him, though I was much too young. (You had to be eighteen in those days.) He said, “You can’t get fucking served. You shouldn’t be in there.” I offered him a deal: “If I imitate Dottie Murphy talking to Charlie Mallon with Rudy Madden chiming in, will you take me then?”

  Rudy Madden was one of those guys with about fifty tattoos and a dark tan. Big on fishing and a voice like a backhoe. Charlie Mallon was a younger brother of a guy named John Mallon, who was the toughest motherfucker in the neighborhood.

  I whipped these imitations on him—of Charlie talking to Rudy talking to Dottie Murphy; and I cracked Patrick up. He took me down to the bar.

  It was a very hip neighborhood if you wanted it to be—or you could just be a little stay-at-home square and clean house. I wasn’t into that any more than Pat had been. I was too busy trying to score reefer off the Puerto Ricans. It drove my mother up the wall because she saw me following in Pat’s footsteps. She did try to head me off. She got me a job in a swank New York men’s clothing store called Rogers Peet that had been around practically since the Declaration of Independence. A place where rich business pricks felt secure enough while trying on fancy suits to leave their wallets in their pants pockets. Just begging to be stolen. I answered their call and raked in the stuff, but eventually got caught—the cardinal sin according to Patrick, perhaps the only thing he and Mary agreed on.

  It was probably good she didn’t know what Pat was up to. By then he was down on the waterfront with his dudes stealing flare guns and first-aid kits from Liberty ships and selling them on Riverside Drive. That was a federal rap—ten years and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Unlike me, Patrick never got caught. He used to say: “I could be looking at you and steal the boots right off your fucking feet.”

  I had my own crowd and he had his but it was sometimes useful for people to know my older brother was Pat. When we’d go down to Columbia to steal the freshmen’s beanies and the students dared to bother us, Pat and the boys would kick the shit out of them.

  We hated the Columbia students. It was our neighborhood—Irish Catholic with a lot of hostility on every corner. Out of every twenty Irish kids there were probably thirteen or fourteen getting their asses kicked regularly back home. They felt the need to pass that along.

  The students came in from Nebraska and Iowa and they’d run around like they owned the place. Patrick and his pals just devoured them. The students had this dumb song: “Who owns New York? Who owns New York? Some people say we do! Who owns New York? Who owns New York, who? COLUMBIA!” So one night the guys kicked some students’ asses for singing it. Pat said it was beautiful to see the Columbia assholes lying in the street while he sang the song back at them, but with his own words: “Who cleans the streets? Who cleans the streets? Some people say we do! Who cleans the streets? Who cleans the streets, who? WE DO!”

  From an early age, he and the guys would “hit up cars.” They’d go up to the 120s where the Columbia dorks parked their cars without bothering to lock them. All you had to do was pop the doors till a handle opened, get in the glove boxes and strip them. Amazing what people leave in glove boxes. In the fullness of time I followed suit.

  Patrick has always shown the way and I’ve followed in his footsteps. I went into the air force, just like him, and between the two of us we amassed five court-martials. He had three. I had two. My mother really loved that.

  Over the years our relationship has shifted. Back in the sixties Patrick was still slogging away with Catholicism, getting his kids baptized and so on. He was a conservative Southern California car dealer in those days. Then he saw how much my Catholic rap on Class Clown and my attitudes toward big business upset our mother. And concluded I must be right.

  I encouraged him to write. Long ago when I heard him shooting the shit with the guys at the car dealership I knew he’d be great at it. And he was. I hooked him up with a terrific shrink, Dr. Charles Ansell, and he found out he wasn’t fucked up. He was well. The world around him was fucked up.

  Patrick likes to say that the relationship has almost inverted: that I’m the main dude now. But it’s subtler than that. Earlier on, Pat and I lived in different parts of the world—which is to say he lived in places like Vermont and Trinidad, while I lived in L.A. But over the last twenty-five years, we’ve spent a lot of time together. He’s influenced me perhaps without even quite knowing it, enticed out of me very final and violent and harsh judgments. I articulate them better than he does and I’m obsessive-compulsive about getting them out where they can be heard. But for a long time now he’s struck a deep chord in me. He writes wonderful dialogue, great earthy stuff. Talk about the sledgehammer—this is a steam-driven pile driver.

  I share his feelings, his ideas and passions, but he kicks them up into a higher gear. Once upon a time, I would never have done stuff like “I Love It When a Lot of People Die” or “People Who Oughtta Be Killed.” I didn’t have a place in my garden for that stuff. His presence is a sort of reinforcement. It’s less an inversion than that the wheel has come full circle. Almost like the old days: if my big brother feels like that, it must be okay. Not that different from when I graduated eighth grade and Mary wanted me to go to Regis just like she’d wanted Pat to. And I said forget it. Just like Pat.

  At the end of eighth grade you get this little eighth-grade book that everybody signs with things like “Happy Graduation George from The Girl Who Sat Next to You,” the stuff of fond memories decades later. Patrick happened to be home on leave from the air force and I asked him to sign my graduation book. This is what he wrote: “Go to Cardinal Hayes and be a cool guy.”
Signed: “The Ace of Aces and the Dude of Dudes, Your brother, Patrick.”

  5

  AIR MARSHAL CARLIN TELLS YOU TO GO FUCK YOURSELF

  George in uniform, circa 1954

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  Weird how the military touches so many aspects of your life. It’s like the Church in that way. You hate it but it forms you. It’s a parent. Mother Church and Father Military.

  “Father” might seem a bit affectionate for someone who’s on record more than once as having no respect for the business of war. But I don’t. I don’t feel about war the way we’re supposed to, the way we’re told to by the United States government. A large part of which is the United States military, whose business is war. So the military is telling us how to feel about war—so they can stay in business. Something is fucked up here.

  But I confess, Father, to being conflicted about the military. I was four when we got into World War II. Its memory is precious to me, a central fact of my young life. The slogans, the uniforms, the newscasts, the songs: “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “I’ll Never Smile Again.” I can never hear them without being overwhelmed by nostalgia. Weirdly enough, the songs of war make me feel … safe.

  Then there were the blackouts. I loved the blackouts. They gave me a sense of danger: little five-year-old me fighting the war on the home front. The whole idea of blackouts was that if everyone turned their lights out, the Germans wouldn’t be able to find New York City to drop bombs on it. Fair enough. The Germans were probably itching to fly three thousand miles across the Atlantic on one tank of gas and reduce us to rubble. They’re crazy, those Krauts.

  Every week, we’d hear the keening rise and fall of the air-raid siren at 116th and Broadway, signaling air-raid drill and blackout. We’d turn off the lights and gather in the hall—no windows there—where Mary had put a single low-watt amber bulb. I’d wait hopefully for explosions and my mother would tell me how my father was far away in the Pacific, “helping General MacArthur win the war.”

  The super, Andy McIsaac, would prowl around the building’s courtyards, flashlight in hand, wearing an official air-raid warden’s hard hat, courageously checking to make sure everyone had turned their lights out so the Germans would be fooled into thinking New York City was just another harmless stretch of marshland.

  One time I slid up the window to steal a peek and catch the action of The World At War. Andy wheeled at the sound and blinded me with his flashlight. “George, get yer head back inside unless you want to get it blown off!” I hustled back to the dark hallway as quick as my jammie-clad little legs would carry me. The last thing I needed was to get hit by shrapnel and have a plate in my head for life.

  What did you do in the war, Daddy? I did my part. Like bringing the butcher the cans of hardened bacon fat my mother filled from the breakfast skillet. They gave us eleven cents a pound. I’ve often wondered, what did they do with it? Ship it to those lonely boys overseas? What did THEY do with it? Come to think of it, I don’t want to know.

  And if everyone else in our front-line advance post had been wiped out by a direct hit, I was ready to serve. As a plane spotter. Thanks to the board game Spot-a-plane I could identify by silhouette any aircraft of any combatant nation, even Italy. Focke-Wulfs, Messerschmitts, Mitsubishis, Vickerses, de Havillands, Martins, Douglases, Boeings, I knew them all. No one could fool me. I could distinguish them from front, side, above and below. Some Kraut cocksucker in a Messerschmitt pretended to be a Spitfire by flying upside down: I’d have the artillery blast him to kingdom come.

  Columbia had a Naval Officer’s Training School where college graduates attended a ninety-day course before being shipped overseas as ensigns. On Sunday evenings, after supper hour, the midshipmen, assembled in separate ranks of Catholics, Protestants and Jews, marched through the streets to the local churches and synagogues for evening services. Us kids used to march along beside them for several blocks and they sang as they marched. I can still hear their voices bouncing off the buildings:

  Farewell and goodbye

  There’s no need to cry

  sally and Sue don’t be blue

  We’re comin’ right back

  We’re comin’right back to you

  The Protestants had a longer march than the Catholics and Jews—down to Riverside Church—so they got my attention more often. Many years later I found out that one of the midshipmen I’d marched alongside was a young guy fresh out of the University of Nebraska—Midshipman Johnny Carson.

  Then there were bombs. I’ve always had a thing about bombs and they were a big part of my childhood. By the last year of the war, I was eight and already riding downtown on the subway by myself; often to the Chrysler Building on 42nd Street where the army had a permanent display of military hardware: jeeps, artillery pieces, a tank, uniforms, insignia, all sorts of good stuff. But the centerpiece was a huge five-hundred-pound bomb called the Blockbuster. It sat vertically in a rack, in its falling orientation, packed with explosive possibilities.

  I imagined the rising high-pitched whistle as it screamed to earth—perhaps from a B-17 my uncle Tom had worked on—falling down, down, down, onto the heads of those German people I’d seen in the newsreels. But what I remember most vividly is that previous visitors had scratched their names on the bomb’s casing: “Vito—Brooklyn,” “Gloria & Eddie,” “Sonny USN.” Anonymous, powerless people trying to associate themselves with the bomb’s vast impersonal power.

  Why not? Everyone should try to scratch their name on the bomb of life.

  A few hundred yards from my house in Columbia’s Pupin Physics Labs, another bomb—the Big One—began its charmed life. That same year our own homegrown bomb was tested on a few hundred thousand Japanese and came through with flying colors. We all went down to Times Square to celebrate V-J Day: the end of one war and the beginning of the next—the Cold War, which would last ten times as long and cost a hundred times as much. But which we’d win also. Damn, we’re good at war.

  In due course the time came for me to do my part in winning the Cold War: the draft. One problem with the draft in a large population like New York City was that they had so many volunteers, you often didn’t get a draft notice until you were twenty-one or twenty-two. That was more disruptive than getting one at eighteen, so guys often joined up earlier. A lot of them didn’t want to be in the army so the chic way to get out of military service was to go into the air force.

  The air force seemed a pretty good deal. You could be part of a group whose job it was to go out and drop bombs on brown and yellow people, then come home, take a shower and catch a movie. Plus my brother was in it and they had cool blue uniforms—not that pukey khaki shit—and a lot of off-base privileges. The way it came down to me the air force sounded a lot like a country club.

  But mainly I joined the air force with a clear goal: using the GI Bill to train myself as a disc jockey at disc jockey school. Funny how a teenager thinks: I had it all mapped out. I’ll become a disc jockey someplace and I’ll be so good in that town I’ll get famous enough to appear in a nightclub. I’ll become a comedian there and get funny enough to be a comedian on Broadway and after that I’ll be in movies! Piece of cake.

  In August 1954, in I went. My mother had to sign me in, because I was only seventeen. My fiancée, Mary Cathryn, and I went down to 39 Whitehall Street at five in the morning for reporting and swearing in. They put us on a bus for a three-hundred-mile ride to Sampson Air Force Base near Rochester, New York. Weird again: what’s running through my head is “Off we go into the wild blue yonder!” I’m on a fucking bus going into a dark hole called the Holland Tunnel.

  Right from the get-go in the air force, I gravitated to the black guys. On that bus, I struck up a conversation about black music with a guy from Staten Island named Bishop. He clued me in about the cha-cha-chá versus the mambo, which I thought was the in dance. He told me: “Nah, the mambo’s out. Watch for the cha-cha-chá. That’s coming nex
t.” The first lesson I learned in the military.

  Basic training was grueling but I was prepared. You’ve always got to weed out the amateur slackers and leave the field to professional, dedicated slackers like me. I volunteered for an experimental flight of seventy men used as medical subjects to track the spread of germs. We didn’t live on the open base but in our own section, in real rooms. Every so often the medics came around and swabbed our throats with long Q-tips. The first time, they said, “We’re trying to see if there’s any colds in the outfit.”

  Later we found out from Flight Sergeant Vanelli what they were really doing. They took cultures from the throats of all the men, marking what room they were in and where they slept in that room so they could track the spread of colds and viruses. So along with the swabs that went in to take stuff out, there were swabs with germs from other guys they put in. Not on the same Q-tip, but still. Disgusting!

  We got out of a lot of duty. We didn’t even have to get up in the morning for reveille. Reveille is when every flight in the squadron has to fall in, dressed, with their teeth brushed, in parade formation, and they have roll call. We guinea pigs had standing permission to fall out if we wanted or even just fuck off. Early morning, still dark out, September/October, upstate New York? We did a lot of fucking off.

  We would go on bivouac, where you go out for three days in tents and camp. It rained one night and they immediately sent us back to the barracks, because they didn’t want to compromise their important virus-research unit.

  I didn’t consider flying for a moment. I had no high school diploma, so I wasn’t going to be an officer or a pilot. I quickly discovered that officers were assholes anyway: the bosses and managers of the operation. I definitely didn’t identify with them. I might have wanted the things they could buy with their salary but I certainly didn’t want to get them that way. I was strictly GI.