He had a stroke. (It's a really great feeling when your appointment
gets canceled because your therapist died.)
But that doesn't alter or affect his code of life, which was: Be.
Do. Get.
And I don't be enough, Jack.
I do plenty. I get some. But I don't BE.
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NEW YORK BOY
Clean and sober seems like the ending of a journey I've been
on since I was a kid. Not a happy ending, I've never believed
in those, but not an unhappy one either.
On December 27, 2004, during my Christmas break from the
road, I made a decision I'd been putting off for a while. I went over
to Jerry's house and told him I wanted to go into rehab. For a long
time—since giving up pot in the late eighties—I'd been addicted to
an opiate called wine-and-Vicodin. I was up to a bottle and a half
and five or six Vikes a day. May seem like small potatoes compared
to the planeloads of coke and pot and truckloads of beer I'd ingested
in the seventies, but it was my personal bottoming out. I couldn't
control it and I needed help.
Jerry had booked a lot of dates for the first part of 2005 and it
would cost a small fortune to cancel and reschedule them. Not a
consideration. I checked into Promises in Malibu the same day—
another small fortune—and went into a thirty-day detox program.
The details aren't important. What is important is that I developed
a new appreciation of the AA techniques that had helped Brenda
so much—whatever skepticism I'd had about them or the people
who used them. And that they worked. (Although I can do without
that Higher Power stuff.) At the age of sixty-seven I put an end to
five decades of substance abuse, beginning with my first toke in the
hallway of a building on 122nd Street when I was thirteen. That's a
fifty-four-year-old high.
I don't miss it. I feel better than those mornings when I dropped
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a couple of Vikes to feel better. Wine sections and liquor stores hold
no temptations for me. That's all in the past. Which is good. I have
plans.
I have thousands of notes and ideas in hundreds of files on four
Apple computers. And the notes keep coming. Probably there are
other HBOs in my future, and there'll always be stuff for them. But
my mind and focus have been elsewhere for a while. The reason I
for myself.
If I live long enough and still have my wits about me, I believe
there's going be a Broadway period for me. What form it takes will
evolve, but the basic structure is becoming clearer.
Over the years I've had an increasingly accelerated anticipation
of, and speeding toward, the moment when I begin to use my characters. This multiplicity of identities inside me that I've never had
the opportunity or moment or chance to unleash. Or rather, I've
never had the courage to force the moment and opportunity into
being, so that they could be unleashed.
Some of these characters are onstage already, when I use an occasional voice to accentuate something. For instance, when I'm doing
a language piece, the misuses of it or clichés or absurd expressions,
voices come out with the misuses, clichés or expressions. I don't ask
for them, a character just appears and speaks.
When it's ready, I always print material out so it's there in black
and white. Once I've memorized it and start running it, I often find
that suddenly I don't want to do a certain speech or passage. Something about it says: this is not mine. Maybe it's as basic as: if I do it
in my own voice I'm going to sound like a speech giver or teacher;
maybe it's just that everything is going to sound too much the same.
But almost without my being aware of it happening, a blue-collar
voice is growling: "It's the quiet ones you gotta watch." Or a gritty,
world-weary one is explaining why all the Uncle Daves in the universe felt life had dealt them such a shitty hand.
The biggest family of voices are West Siders. The voices of my
childhood. An older, throaty West Sider has always been my de2 9 2
NEW YORK BOY
fault voice, the voice of the Indian Sergeant and his extended family
of NCOs, of numerous low-grade authority figures who show up
in many pieces. A variant of him appeared in the Fox series. But
there are many others—aggressive, noisy, quiet. Some are street
crazies, speedy, high-pitched or deep, slow or menacing, confusing or confused. Some are funny and some aren't, some old, some
young. There are priests, cops, shopkeepers, all of them real, not
impressions of actors onscreen doing priests, cops and shopkeepers.
There are southerners from the air force, westerners from my radio
days.
But what all of them do when they start talking is invent this magic
fucking material. In the past, when they appeared in the stand-up
pieces I was running, I would sometimes do a couple for myself just
to see where they went and I'd actually get scared. First of all, that
they were going to completely overtake and overwhelm and possess
me. And second, that I would be never be able to capture them.
That they were all one-time people, that sentences would pour out
and I wouldn't be able to get them down, and they'd be gone forever.
But they weren't one-time people—they're all still here inside
me. And they are bursting at the tethers, trying to get out. I'm a thousand different people that I can climb into in an instant and really
inhabit. I don't want them to be inhabited by other people's words. I
found that out long ago. Nor, to the extent that I can think for them,
would I ever put them in a script to be acted by others.
The constraints of my left-brain-organized, carefully constructed
stand-up material won't allow them to be themselves. But they have
to be allowed to be who and what they are. I have to let my people go.
What I've realized is that I've been writing a Broadway show all
along. I've had this dream for a while now and I'd often worry that
being on the road would never leave me time to fulfill it. Among the
notes I write and file all the time are many I put away because I can't
find a place to use them, but in effect are at a stage well past notes:
they're the beginning of a narrative. Theater is a different form and
not every word has to be scripted. My characters will write their own
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words when the time comes. Their words are not the words of my
stand-up—commentary, lists, observation—so much as stories. So
what started as notes is becoming a narrative, linear flow.
It'll be more a case of finding out where they fit in the larger
story and how and why. A Broadway show has been growing organically out of the stand-up process. This is going to be the one
place where my stand-up meets my acting. That's good, because
it will reassure people: here's something you're not expecting, but
not so unexpected that I'll have to prove myself to you all over
again.
The organizing principle will be my childhood—in effect the
first chapters of this book. So in a way we're back to the autobiographical burst of the seventies—more familiarity—except that instead of the class clown it will be the rest of the rich, wonderful,
gritty world of the solitary boy who whiled away his school hours by
disrupting class.
The priests and nuns, the beat cops, the Irish gangs, the Moylan
regulars, the Columbia interlopers, the shopkeepers and street hustlers and so many more, a whole vanished neighborhood with its
sounds, music, accents and smells, its fights and joys and loves and
prejudices, all seen through the eyes of that same boy.
His home life and mother—yes, I can do my mother—a set of
characters in herself, a lace-curtain Bernhardt who can soak you
in guilt but also tell you a story with six characters, do a voice for
each one of them and come up with a punch line. And beyond
home and neighborhood: the magic island of Manhattan—wartime
Manhattan—just an IRT ride downtown.
I'll tell that boy's tale, even though by the time we get this on
I could well be an old fuck of seventy or more. But that will be as
it should be. I'll be old man and boy. The boy who will one day
be the old man, the old man looking back on the long-ago boy he
once was . . .
Reunion, in fact. What we seek all our lives: returning to the
One, no longer separated. The capstone of my life.
It'll be pretty good, I think.
I'm calling it: New York Boy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in New York City in 1937, G e o r g e D e n i s P a t r i c k C a r l i n was
one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of
all time. He appeared on The Tonight Show more than 130 times,
starred in an unprecedented fourteen HBO specials, hosted the first
Saturday Night Live and penned three New York Times best-selling
books. Of the twenty-three solo albums recorded by Mr. Carlin,
eleven were Grammy-nominated, and he took home the coveted
statue five times, including a 2001 Grammy win for Best Spoken
Comedy Album for his reading of his best seller Brain Droppings.
In 2002, Carlin was awarded the Freedom of Speech Award by the
First Amendment Center, in cooperation with the U.S. Comedy
Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, and he was named the eleventh
recipient of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American
Humor in June of 2008. George Carlin passed away at age seventyone on June 22, 2008, in Santa Monica, California.
T o n y H e n d r a was recently described by the Independent of London
as "one of the most brilliant comic talents of the post-war period."
He began his comedic career with Graham Chapman of Monty
Python, appeared six times on The Ed Sullivan Show, was one of the
original editors of National Lampoon, edited the classic parody Not
the New York Times, starred in This Is Spinal Tap, and cocreated and
coproduced the long-running British satirical series Spitting Image,
for which he was nominated for a British Academy Award. He has
written or edited dozens of books, most of them satirical, with the
exception of two New York Times best sellers: Brotherhood (2001)
and Father Joe (2004). He is a senior member of the board of the
nationwide storytelling community the Moth.
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