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.
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.
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