George Carlin, how I will miss you

George Carlin died Sunday due to heart failure. He was 71 years old.

It’s hard to explain how this death hits me. It’s not like I knew or met the man. I never even saw him perform live (and I curse myself for the two chances I had and passed up).

But Carlin, for me, occupies a spot in my heart and my self.

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George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television

Growing up, as I did, in a home rife with alcohol and drug abuse, my early years were very chaotic. I attended a different grade school in a different city every year until junior high. There were nights spent terrified at the yelling and screaming of my parents just beyond my bedroom door. There were days spent wondering if dad has left for good or is just nursing off a bender somewhere.

But through all of that, I had three escapes: sci-fi novels, music, and comedy albums. I had comedy LPs of my own – Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Bill Cosby – but I was most thrilled with the “naughty” comedy albums of my dad’s that I had secreted away – Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin. While I still have memorized just about every line of Martin’s “A Wild & Crazy Guy” and Williams’s “Reality… What a Concept!”, those to me were more like familiar sing-a-long songs, enjoyable, but fluff.

Pryor and Carlin, though, spoke to something real. But even though I could identify a bit with Pryor’s comedy, especially the drug and alcohol bits, his experience as a black man and my life as a rural white kid kept me at a respectable distance from fully appreciating what he had to say.

Carlin, on the other hand, spoke directly to me. I was always a precocious little kid with a love of words; I read very early and was digesting Robert Heinlein’s adult sci-fi novels (“Stranger in a Strange Land”, “Time Enough for Love”, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, etc.) by age 10. So when George Carlin came on HBO in the early days of cable, his dissection of the English language was a routine tailor-made for my twisted little mind (“Get ON the plane? Fuck you, I’m getting IN the plane!”…. just the kind of a joke for a kid who in restaurants when asked “How would you like your eggs cooked?” answers, “That would be excellent!”)

As I grew up in the 80s, Carlin was there every summer or so with a new routine. Some people got uncomfortable as his routines became more “misanthropic”, but I always found his darkest stuff to be the most humanity-affirming, (like we’ve established, I have a twisted little mind). As he railed against our Puritanical anti-sexualism and the idiocy of organized religion, it was as if someone was writing the comedy soundtrack to my developing worldview.

Carlin was a huge friend of cannabis (and a top Celebstoner) and he discussed his marijuana use in a 1982 Playboy Interview:

PLAYBOY: When and how did you get into drugs?

CARLIN: In my neighborhood – West 121st Street in New York, “white Harlem” – there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I’d been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me. Heroin, forget it. In my neighborhood, I could see what heroin did firsthand and I was definitely afraid of that number.

PLAYBOY: How do you define fairly regular marijuana use?

CARLIN: Oh, I was a stonehead for 30 years. I’d wake up in the morning and if I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I’d smoke a joint to figure it out. And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, “Do you get high to go onstage?” I could never understand the question. I mean, I’d been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.

PLAYBOY: Are you still a stonehead?

CARLIN: To my surprise, my marijuana use has been tapering off steadily. As we speak, I haven’t had a joint in two months.

PLAYBOY: You imply that this has been an unplanned withdrawal.

CARLIN: Completely. The enjoyment has been diminishing. Now, there’s no question that it’s sort of fun to get high. Let’s say I had a little baggie lying around the office. I’d get up, come over here, fuck around, shuffle a few papers, and all the while I’d be thinking about the pot. I’d say to myself, “Well, whatever I’m going to do today, it’s obviously going to be more fun if I have a hit or two.” But I got to the point where taking those hits made me feel dumber than I’d felt before. I’d say to myself, “Man, you’ve been high for fucking 30 years and you don’t want to be high anymore.” [Laughs] I always have these little internal monologs. You’ll get used to them . . . I simply decided that dope wasn’t worth the ritual.

PLAYBOY: So you were one of those ritualistic dopers?

CARLIN: The ritual was very important to me: cleaning the pot, rolling the pot – I was never a pipe or bong man. That’s California stuff. I was an Eastern roller. My daughter had to teach me to use a water pipe, and I’d still fuck it up every time. To me, smoking pot meant sitting with a newspaper on my legs, rolling the seeds down, pulling the twigs out, and finally producing a perfectly cylindrical, absolutely wonderful joint that you either locked at both ends or pinched off, or pinched at one end and left open at the other.

PLAYBOY: What was your technique?

CARLIN: We always locked in the East. I got to be a pincher later on.

PLAYBOY: Do you now find yourself lecturing others on the joys of sobriety?

CARLIN: No, never. I don’t want anyone who reads this to think it’s a message to him. It’s not. This is merely an accounting of what I’ve done.

PLAYBOY: Would it be fair to say that you’re not sorry about your 30 years as a pothead but you’re glad they’re over?

CARLIN: Exactly. Grass probably helped me as much as it hurt me. Especially as a performer. When you’re high, it’s easy to kid yourself about how clever certain mediocre pieces of material are. But, on the other hand, pot opens windows and doors that you may not be able to get through any other way. Being a very bound-up, Irish Catholic tight-assholed person, I’ve often thought that whatever negative effects pot had on me, it probably saved me from being an alcoholic and a complete fucking brainless idiot by the time I was 25. So I’d say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.

I’ve faithfully watched every one of Carlin’s HBO specials, and only in the last special did he disappoint me.  His material was good, but there were four different points at which he slipped up in his dialog or misspoke a phrase — something few might notice, but something that to me was akin to Pavarotti’s voice breaking or Michael Jordan missing an easy layup.  The age and the cocaine abuse had caught up to George, he was losing the fundamentals, the sharpness, and I was afraid that special might be the last time Carlin would ever speak to me.

I’m saddened that I was right.