• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 874 0

the 9/11 attacks, Carlin took the stage at the Beacon Theatre for his third HBO special there. After acknowledging the unavoidable topic—the “turd in the punch bowl”—he vowed to plow ahead with the job he was paid to do, ensuring that his audience had fun. “Otherwise, the terrorists win,” he said, sucking on the words like expired milk. “Don’t you love that stuff? It’s our latest mindless cliché.” Having trimmed nearly ten minutes of material that applied to the old working title, he did a segment of gross-out humor on scabs and “lip crud” and a lengthy bit about rubbernecking at traffic accidents that he’d done as a warm-up on a recent Tonight Show. The centerpiece, however, was a long list of “People Who Oughta Be Killed,” including those who use credit cards for small purchases and “guys named Todd.” He ended by resurrecting an old idea, a carefully reasoned explanation of how to pare the Ten Commandments down to two. Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, he argued, is really just harmless fantasizing; without it, “what’s a guy gonna think about when he’s waxing his carrot?” The dirty old man was not about to temper his audacity according to the terrorism alerts—though he did show solidarity with his hometown by pulling on a New York City T-shirt as the end credits ran, to the carnivalesque tune “The Sidewalks of New York.”

Shortly after Winston Smith finished his work on the Complaints and Grievances album art, he was invited to see Carlin perform at his new venue in Vegas, the MGM Grand, where several patrons mistook the white-bearded collage artist for the headlining comedian as he made his way through the casino. Midway through the show, Carlin grew frustrated with a woman who was talking loudly to her companion, ignoring the performer. “Lady, would you shut the fuck up?” Carlin finally blurted, followed by “other, much ruder things,” according to Smith. “People realized he wasn’t kidding. Suddenly the laughter kind of died down.”

It was by no means Carlin’s only incident at the MGM, where he’d been performing since finishing his decade-long run at Bally’s. For four years he stuck to his contract at the MGM Grand, but it was a mutually disagreeable association. He’d been inciting walkouts for years—one reviewer of a show in Topeka described a scene including “picketers and counter-picketers” outside the theater and “perhaps a dozen folks” who walked out during the performance. At the MGM, Carlin perfected the art of driving faint-hearted ticket holders toward the exits. The constant complaint was that the show was too dark. “Riffs included suicide and beheadings,” wrote one local reviewer. At the end of the run, Carlin took the opportunity to renew his contempt for the city and the mindless escapism it stood for: “People who go to Las Vegas, you’ve got to question their fuckin’ intellect to start with,” he said. “Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fuckin’ moronic.” A woman in the audience reportedly yelled, “Stop degrading us!”

Facetiously, Carlin thanked her, indicating he hadn’t actually heard what she said. “I hope it was positive. If not, well, blow me,” he said.

Just after leaving the MGM in late 2004, Carlin announced that he was voluntarily checking himself into an exclusive rehab facility for an addiction to the pain killer Vicodin, which, compounded with his taste for fine wine, was becoming a problem. He’d never been in rehab before, as he took care to mention, quitting cocaine completely on his own and cutting down his pot smoking to an occasional hit or two (mostly to “punch up the writing,” as he told High Times magazine).

He started with the Vicodin, he said, before Brenda died, when he dipped into the prescription she had been given for fibromyalgia, a mysterious, possibly stress-related condition characterized by extreme fatigue and sensitivity to pain. He felt “almost unworthy” in the program, he later said, with his self-described habit of a bottle or more of wine and four or five Vicodin per day: “Some of the guys in there were