Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [10]
Carlin claimed that in 1951 he and his friends began to experiment with marijuana, then a little-understood drug that appealed primarily to musicians and coffeehouse types. For city boys just entering their teens, it was a secret doorway to a forbidden world. For Carlin, the high let him dig deeper into a comic mind that was finding silliness in every facet of daily life. The mellow, goofy high stripped Carlin and his friends of their latent aggression: “In one semester, in shop class, guys went from making zip guns to hash pipes,” he joked.
By then he was flirting with real delinquency. After getting caught stealing money from a locker room during a basketball game in seventh grade, Carlin was sent to a parochial school in Goshen, New York. Playing up his big-city sophistication on the playground, he showed two gullible classmates a bag of “heroin”—actually, colored erasers. The administrators sent him back to Corpus Christi, where he was told he would have to repeat a term before he could graduate. Carlin pleaded with the administration to let him graduate with the students he’d known since first grade. The nuns made him a deal: Write the year-end play, and you may graduate on time. “It was called ‘How Do You Spend Your Leisure Time?’” Carlin told Playboy in 1982. “Once again, I was rewarded for my cleverness, my show-business skills.”
Carlin’s mother enrolled him in Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic boys’ school for middle-class families who couldn’t afford the city’s more expensive private schools. Tuition was five dollars a semester when the school opened on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 1941. Carlin’s brother had preceded him at Cardinal Hayes, graduating in 1948. “Going to Hayes was absolutely the coolest thing you could do coming out of eighth grade,” Carlin recalled years later. He looked up to Patrick: “He could dance good, he could fight good, he could talk his ass off on the corner. And he went to Hayes. . . . My brother even claimed you could make out better if you went to Hayes.”
Hayes had a championship marching band, and Carlin joined it as a trumpeter. He’d had a subscription to Down Beat from the age of twelve; like so many city kids of the time, he was also a big fan of the R&B vocal groups of the pre-rock ’n’ roll era. He chose the trumpet, he said, because there happened to be one in the family apartment: “I think my brother stole it at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” (“I really wanted to play a stringed instrument, but they told me the yo-yo was out,” he joked at a Hayes reunion years later.) He lasted one year in the band, marching but never blowing a note. “My reasoning was, people can see me marching, but no one can hear me not playing.” He did, however, participate enthusiastically in the football chants, especially enjoying the ones that threatened mild profanity: “Block that kick, block that pass/Knock that quarterback on his—rip, rip, rip, rap, rap, rap, Hayes High, Hayes High, clap, clap, clap!”
For Carlin, Hayes was the beginning of the end of his formal education. He dreaded taking the crosstown 149th Street bus to get there in the morning. “I was one of those guys who didn’t try too hard in school,” he explained. Again and again, he heard the same cliché from the priests: “You have a good head, but you’re not using it.”
“And they’d smack you on the head just to get it started for you,” he joked.
Always trying to make his classmates laugh, he found himself increasingly assigned to detention hall with Father Stanislaus Jablonski. “Jabbo,” as the students called him, was a strict disciplinarian, otherwise known as the Mean Dean or the Sinister Minister. Jablonski, a New York City fixture who would be appointed monsignor by Pope John XXIII in 1961, had a calm resolve that was so recognizable to generations of Hayesmen that one alumnus, who went on to work in television, suggested the father’s colorful name for a character on Hill Street Blues.