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Mary Carlin’s exasperation with her son’s rebellious behavior only made him more inclined to misbehave, and he began to spend days at a time away from home. “She had it all worked out,” he remembered. “I would attend a nice college, then get a job in advertising,” like the men she knew professionally. Utterly uninterested in that path, Carlin ignored his mother and her psychological warfare—her “black moods, silent treatment, and martyrdom.” “The older I got, the more apparent it became that my mother was losing control over me,” he recalled.

Carlin was expelled midway though his sophomore year at Hayes. In an otherwise undistinguished year and a half, he’d managed to frequent the dean of discipline’s office so often that he was no longer welcome at the school. Thirty years later Carlin was the unlikely guest speaker at a Hayes event, the school’s first annual Alumni Association Hall of Fame Dinner, honoring Jabbo. Before the ceremony, the two men got reacquainted. “I remember you, Carlin,” said Father Jablonski. “You sat near the wall.”

“The sum and substance of my career at Hayes—I sat near the wall,” Carlin said with a nudnik laugh when he took the stage. “The better to conceal my nefarious activities.”

Acknowledging the only discipline that could hold his attention, Carlin applied to two of the city’s performing arts high schools, but was turned down by both. He briefly attended Bishop Dubois, another Catholic high school, located on 152nd Street, before transferring to George Washington, the secular public school in the Fort George neighborhood of Washington Heights, in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Though famous George Washington alumni included Harry Belafonte, Maria Callas, Henry Kissinger, and Alan Greenspan, Carlin was not destined to number among them. In six months of nominal attendance at the school, his routine absences made him a nonentity. By his count, at the height of his truancy he missed sixty-three consecutive school days. He was just trying to hold on until his sixteenth birthday, when he could legally drop out. Which he promptly did.

2

CLASS CLOWN

After the supportive atmosphere of Corpus Christi, George was ill-prepared for the disciplinary tactics of Catholic high school. Rote education held no interest for him. Working up a decent impression of Cagney or Bogie, however—well, that was worth studying. While bouncing from school to school, trying to hang on until he turned sixteen, Carlin met a teacher named Brother Conrad, who told his students he could get them cameras and other electronic equipment with his clergyman’s discount. Brother Conrad was a bit of a hustler, Carlin recalled. The class clown already had a camera, but could he get his hands on a tape recorder? Mary Carlin had promised her younger son a gift for completing his studies at Corpus Christi. Carlin told his mother that’s what he wanted—a tape recorder.

He thought of it as a training tool, infinitely more useful than his Latin textbooks. Carlin’s state-of-the-art, reel-to-reel tape recorder—“big as a Buick,” he joked—was one of the earliest commercially available models, made by the consumer electronics pioneer Webcor, the Webster-Chicago Corporation. He quickly became adept at recording himself doing mock radio broadcasts, commercial parodies, and other comic bits. “I’d do little playlets about the neighborhood,” he recalled. “I’d make fun of the authority figures—the shopkeepers, the parents, the priests, the policemen.” Friends of his older brother began asking Patrick to bring Georgie to their parties, to entertain with his tapes. His career in comedy was already underway.

He was in a headlong rush to get on with the transition to adult-hood and out from under his mother’s suffocating expectations. For one thing he was engaged, however briefly, to a neighborhood girl named Mary Cathryn. Shortly after quitting high school, Carlin decided to enlist in the Air Force. Not quite a decade into its existence, the Air Force was considered the country club of military service by many enlistees. Rather than train to