A Carlin Home Companion by Kelly Carlin

Author:Kelly Carlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466862388
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Right Foot Forward, Left Foot Back

BY 1994 MY DAD had been on the road for more than thirty years. He was tired—tired of having to squeeze his home life into a few days a week; tired of the asshole businessmen sitting next to him on airplanes; and tired of bad hotel turkey sandwiches. He wanted to do something that wouldn’t take so much out of him.

What he got was a sitcom—The George Carlin Show on Fox TV. Dad played George O’Grady (his grandmother’s maiden name)—a much-less-enlightened, not-quite-as-worldly, and way-more-cynical version of my dad, who would’ve become a New York cabbie instead of a comedian. Dad was excited to be off the road and to get a chance to stretch himself by writing solely for this curmudgeonly character while immersing himself in an ensemble of comedic actors. He’d always yearned to be part of something, contrary to his very public stance about groups: “People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’ ’cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3:00 A.M. So I dislike and despise groups of people, but I love individuals. Every person you look at, you can see the universe in their eyes, if you’re really looking.”

Mom was also thrilled about the Fox show because she would finally get to spend more time with Dad. She had been a latchkey spouse without a partner to play with for decades, and she was tired of it. In the early 1980s she was so lonely that she considered leaving him. When he realized that she was serious, he started making more of an effort. Suddenly there was a whirlwind of dinner dates, movie dates, and trips to exotic places like a cruise on the Mediterranean and the Nile. But it could never be what she wanted. How could it, with my dad always catching another flight on his way to another gig to catch up with the everlasting back taxes he perpetually owed the IRS?

This TV show just might solve all that.

I, too, was happy that my dad got the show, and not just because I’d get to see any number of movie stars roaming the Warner Bros. lot where the show was taped. It was pretty much the best day of my life when, one afternoon, Warren Beatty rolled down his window to check me out while I stood outside the commissary—that’s bucket-list material. But mostly I was happy for Dad because he deserved the financial reward and success of a Roseanne Barr or a Jerry Seinfeld. I was conscious of how hard all the traveling was on him, especially on his heart. I was always worried about his heart. Three years earlier, in 1991 in Las Vegas, he’d had a third heart attack.

I said to him as he recovered in the hospital, “You know, Dad, you could just move to

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