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
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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
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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.
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INTRODUCING THE VERY LOVELY, VERY TALENTED— BRENDA!
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 o f f 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.
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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.
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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 1964.1 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
they 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 allpurpose Kennedy impression:
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It's nice to return to Chicago, home of the adjustable voting ma-
chine. 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 tex-
tile industry moved south for one reason—there's a bigger de-
mand 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.
We didn't plan it. We were in New Orleans for the World Series
and the Yankees won. Celebrations followed and a few hours later
Brenda got pregnant. (She was positive, she said.) We went back to
Chicago, where I was working at the Playboy Club—appropriately
enough—and took the bunny test. Sure enough, the rabbit died.
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Brenda had a great pregnancy and in her seventh month went
home to Dayton to have the baby. Her parents picked her up at
the airport and her mother weighed about eighty pounds. Brenda
freaked. Her dad said nothing and seemed to know nothing. So
Brenda drove straight to the family doctor: "What the hell is happening with my mother?"
He said, "She's dying of cancer." He hadn't told anybody, not her
father or her younger sister, nobody. And Brenda's mother was the
sort of person who never shared anything with anyone. But she only
had weeks to live. The poor woman really wanted to see our b a b y she decorated a complete nursery for her, trimmed a bassinet and
made a special bedspread and baby clothes. A little palace for the
baby. But her dream was not to be. She slipped into a diabetic coma
not long after and in a day was gone.
As Brenda's mother was dying, our child was born. A daughter.
We named her Kelly.
Now we were three. And broke. And homeless. We moved back to
121st Street and I borrowed money from anyone I could, old friends
from the neighborhood, Mort Sahl, my mother, anyone. I had a
running debit balance with Doug, a pal from the old days. I remember sitting with him on a bench in the median of Broadway at 122nd
Street once, relaxing with a six-pack and a couple of joints. I owed
Doug six hundred dollars but I needed a sum in four figures. I made
him an offer: you lend me X dollars to get to whatever the target sum
was, I ' l l give you a percentage of my future earnings in perpetuity.
He said okay—and never held me to it.
My mother, on the other hand, had a fucking list: "That telegram
when I wired you fifty dollars in Chicago? The telegram was $2.50.
So that's $52.50." I would say: "What about those sneakers you got
me in fourth grade? Where does being a parent end and becoming
a loan shark begin?"
March 1963—when Brenda was six months pregnant with K e l l y was a turning point. I'd just played a pot-and-coffee place called the
House of Pegasus in Fort Lauderdale and run into a group of New
Yorkers, some of whom later became the group Spanky and Our
Gang. I'd smoked enough pot with them that I'd reached a resolve,
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a crossroads. The way I put it to Brenda was, "I have to take a stand.
We've got to live or die in New York. I can't keep going out to nowhere places, playing to people who have nothing to do with where
I ought to be heading. I've got to find somewhere I can work things
out." Though it risked cutting us off from what little income we had,
she supported me totally. And I began to have a powerful feeling
of things inside me developing. Just like her, in fact. Perhaps it was
creative couvade syndrome.
At the time, the only way for struggling comics to be seen was
something called a hoot. "Hoot" was short for "hootenanny," originally an impromptu concert of folk music, but which had evolved
into a version of amateur night where all kinds of aspiring entertainers could strut their stuff—not just singers, musicians and comics,