My George Carlin Story

George Carlin will be in this story. Wait for it.

In the early 1990s, I began my decade in limbo, divorced, between careers, and marginally employed. I did some freelance writing and worked part-time at the gift shop in what was then the Radisson on Canal Street.

The man renting the space was from India. Maybe he didn’t know American employment law…or maybe he did…but he paid us once a month in cash. He did not deduct any taxes. I never received a W-2 or even a W-9. I made $5 an hour and worked a variety of shifts. Some days I opened the shop in the morning, some days I closed it at night. There was no one else there, so you had to lock the shop to run to the bathroom and eat your lunch behind the counter.

Because the shop owner was behind in paying the bill, the newspaper distributor cut us off. Most of the six months I worked there, we didn’t have any newspapers or magazines. Imagine a hotel gift shop with no newspapers or magazines. We had some toiletries, some overpriced jewelry, food snacks, cigarettes, an assortment of Virginia is for Lovers souvenirs and shirts, and a vast assortment of cheap, cheesy, made in Taiwan toys and doodads that had nothing to do with Virginia and were not things you would ever need. Needless to say, we didn’t sell many of them.

The Radisson was where entertainers playing the Carpenter Center stayed. (See, we’re getting to the point of this story now.) They would wait in the lobby for the limo to take them to the theater or back to the airport. Sometimes I would see someone recognizable, like Carrot Top, sitting on top of his trunks and suitcases.

I learned from my father during my first celebrity encounter (actor Richard Jaeckel, Imperial Hotel lobby, Tokyo) that you did not bother famous people. If they caught you looking at them, you just gave them a discreet wave and turned away.

So there I was in the gift shop when George Carlin walked in. I could see out the window the limo that would drive him the three blocks to the Landmark was already pulling up. Carlin was wearing street clothes. His unclean hair was pulled back in a severe pony tail and he reeked…and I mean knock-you-over reeked…of cigarettes, as if he had spent the last eight hours rolling in an ashtray. He bought two bottles of grapefruit juice and paid cash. (We didn’t take credit cards. A hotel gift shop that didn’t take credit cards!) He kept his eyes down during the entire transaction and never looked at me. I never acknowledged he was George Carlin, even though I was old enough to remember when he was the Hippy Dippy Weatherman on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

So I am surprised he made it to 71 when he must have been a major smoker.

After his first wife died, his HBO specials were singularly unfunny to me, as if he had lost part of himself. He didn’t seem that focused in his sarcasm anymore. He was more bitter than funny. Before the first wife died, one of his HBO specials did make me laugh a great deal (and it’s still funny to me). It was the one with the bit about “stuff,” how we accumulate so much stuff in life, and we have to have bigger places to keep our stuff. When we travel, we take just a portable portion of our stuff. Why isn’t this portion all the stuff we ever need? He tells a story about going to Hawaii for a long vacation, and determining how much of his stuff he needed to take. Then while on the big island, he was invited to spend several days on a smaller island and had to subdivide his stuff again into an even more essential bundle of stuff.

The way he told it was hilarious. Then he followed it up with another hilarious story about his cat, which liked to present himself butt first, right in his face, like “check out my ass!” I have eight cats and to this day, as they regularly present themselves to me butt first to check out their ass, I hear George Carlin’s voice in my head. So that is his everlasting gift to me.

The Ecstacy of Poison Ivy

I'm completing week two of my poison ivy attack. I know better. People often told me I had poison ivy growing on the fence, so I steered clear of it. Then my mother-in-law decided she wanted to pull it off the fence and she didn't think it was really poison ivy. We suggested she not bother, but she did anyway. After awhile, I felt bad watching her so boldly pull possible poison ivy off my fence, so I helped her bag it up.

A couple of days later, we both had poison ivy. Mine took a nasty turn, jumping from one forearm to the other, spreading up the hands and armpits, across my neck and a cheek, and over my torso. The sores are fierce. The first doctor took a moderate approach. A six-pack of Prednisone and over the counter Benadryl for sleep. Daily coatings of Benadryl gel and Ivarest. Nothing made the slightest difference. The rash marched relentlessly across my body, giving me a leprous appearance. I went to another doctor and demanded serious medicine. I got a shot and an ointment and some antihistamine samples. It may have stopped spreading now, but I look like a very diseased person.

When the blisters started popping, I acquired an unexpected delight. Now in the shower, the feel of hot water on my scarred skin produces the most pleasurable sensation. It is like a skin orgasm that maintains its vibrant height of ecstatic feeling as long as the water hits it. It is almost unbearably pleasurable. The pleasure is centered at the worst blisters, so I lift my forearms into the pulsating water and become deeply entranced in ecstacy.

Disappointment - Back by Popular Demand

I've written two pieces in the last 15 years that I hear about time and again. One was a rant on Santa Claus, the first big lie you tell your children, and the second was an essay on the value of disappointment. Although I wrote it about my experiences as a local community newspaper editor, I sent it to Style Weekly instead where it was published (I'm thinking circa 1999-2000), and the fact that I was writing for another paper is what eventually moved me to the head of the layoff list when the ax came down in 2001. Not to mention pissing my employers off by writing such a piece in the first place.

Anyway, someone just mentioned it again, so I am reprinting it here.

Bring Disappointment Back!

When I was the editor of the Mechanicsville Local, on any given week I reduced half the children in town to bitter tears, or so their parents and teachers would have me believe. I was the Grinch who stole childhood.

Maybe I didn’t run the elementary school six-week honor roll, which included all the names of children who managed to make at least a B average for one report card. Not straight A's as you might think. Isn't a B average what you would normally expect? How is this an honor?

Or maybe they’re all weeping and gnashing their teeth in disappointment because instead of a front page story with several photos of their latest school activity, I just ran one photo with a caption.

Or maybe I have profoundly scarred some little girl because we spelled her name Brittany, except it turns out to actually be Britany, or Britnee, or Brittanee, or Briteney, or Britknee, or Brit’ane. I think it’s the parents who can’t spell. I have plaques and certificates of merit, and even engraved Jefferson pewter cups with my name spelled all kinds of screwy ways on them and if I needed therapy every time this happened, I’d be in a straightjacket by now.

One time, thinking I was at least pleasing one child by running a photo of him with the first deer he had shot and killed, I learned I had variously ruined another child’s appetite, this one’s life, that one’s Christmas, and this other one’s pleasure in the movie “Bambi.” It was now necessary, because of me, for the parents to explain what “shot and killed” meant to children they claimed had no idea of the concept despite exposure to television, and who would be emotionally maimed by the realization that some people on this planet shoot and kill animals.

One irate schoolteacher, who thought her classes’ donation of pennies to a charity deserved more than a photo on an inside page, got into a screaming match with me on the phone over whether or not I thought children and charities were “worth it” or not, and if so, then why wasn’t it a bigger story? I told her it was worth the space it got, which caused her to call her husband, who regularly ran a small ad in the paper. He called his ad representative and threatened to pull his little ad unless the story was rerun, this time with the coverage it deserved.

So now I had the ad salesman coming down the hall to tell me I am jeopardizing his commission and his ability to put food on the table for his own little children, who will be crying bitterly and rubbing their empty tummies. Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t always get what we want, and like the Israeli government, I can’t give in to threats. Even if I was thinking of capitulating a little, now they’ve put me in a situation where I can’t give an inch because that would empower a bully.

That night I thought about the value system of a teacher who, when she doesn’t get what she wants, threatens other people until she does. Is that the value system I would want a teacher of my child to have? Is that what they teach children these days? If you don’t get want you feel you deserve, then make someone pay?

Apparently so, and that’s why the kids are taking guns to school and shooting everyone up.

The morning after all this happened, I saw repeated broadcasts of a news report that a parent who had ordered two game cartridges for his son from toysrus.com was only going to get one. The other was sold out, and instead of the cartridge, toysrus.com was sending him a $100 gift certificate, nearly three times the value of the game. A bonanza you say?

Oh no. The parent went on television to say with a grim face that his child “would not understand” only getting one game cartridge instead of two. They even showed a photo of the poor, deprived child. Call Save the Children now. Call Christian’s Children Fund! Because here is a pathetic child who is only getting one game cartridge and a $100 gift certificate. He is not getting everything he wants when he wants it! Oh, alas! Grab the gun and let’s go shoot up Toys R Us.

The irate parent who wanted to see the honor role printed in the paper said the child’s older siblings’ names had been in the paper when they made honor role, under a different editor, and if I did not carry on the tradition to honor her child, her child would be disappointed.

Oh my gosh. A disappointed child.

Life, I hate to break this news to you, is full of disappointment. It is full of pain and heartache and failure. People we love die. Jobs we want go to other people. Our enemies triumph. Our best efforts sometimes go for nothing. The one we love doesn’t love us back. The one we trusted betrays us. No one will ever have the money they think they need. Only one person can win the race, and everyone else is an also-ran. Someone will always be richer, smarter, prettier, more popular. Every stoplight we come to, someone will have a nicer, newer car. Life will continually suck in a myriad of ways.

And that’s what we need to prepare our children to face: disappointment. Instead, we try to build a buffer zone around them where their feelings will never be hurt and failure never darkens the light. If they cannot make A’s in school, we will reward them for C’s. If the neighborhood children have hundred dollar tennis shoes, we will buy them as well. If Pokemon is the price of self-esteem, then Pokemon it will be. They want cell phones and cars when they’re 16? Get them cell phones and cars! Use them both at the same time!

We shoot them out of the womb and right into daycare centers while we go out and earn money, and then to compensate for not being in their lives, we spend that money on them to keep them drugged up on material goods. We are the first pushers in their lives, getting them hooked on instant gratification as we run in circles, ensuring our child is never, ever disappointed by anyone or anything.

But we can’t protect them from everything and everyone, and eventually they hit a brick wall and the one thing we haven’t given them is the ability to handle disappointment, to deal with it, to suck it up and move on to something positive. Instead they just hit the wall startled and unprepared, and mommy can’t fix it this time. The real drug dealer will help them with their pain, and maybe taking a gun to school and eliminating some more pain will help, too.

So your child is disappointed? Good. Let them feel it, let them soak in the whole essence of disappointment, or else you’ll be teaching them to not feel anything.