Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [12]
The duty was not particularly captivating, and Carlin soon began looking for extracurricular activities to occupy his time. He heard about a local Shreveport playhouse that was auditioning for a new production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy and decided he’d try out. Joining the cast at the Shreveport Little Theater, he met another aspiring actor, a local man named Joe Monroe. Monroe was part owner of a Top 40 “daytimer” radio station (which went off the air at sunset, then a common practice), a thousand-watt channel at 1480 on the AM dial known as KJOE. When the fresh-faced New Yorker mentioned his eagerness to break into broadcasting, Monroe took him down to the station. He asked Carlin to have a go at reading news reports from the ticker tape machine. Already working to tone down his New York accent, the linguistically inclined kid from Morningside Heights “read it off like nothing,” recalls Stan Lewis, a well-known music distributor and record-store owner from Shreveport known as Stan the Record Man. Lewis was good friends with Monroe, bringing the latest rhythm and blues releases to his station and playing poker with him once a week. Lewis soon befriended Carlin, who often hung around the Record Man’s shop, listening to the newest records by Stan Kenton and other favorite jazz artists. Hired for weekend duty at KJOE for sixty cents an hour, Carlin read promotional copy and filled in whenever a disc jockey was absent.
Carlin’s military future was considerably dimmer. He was in near-constant trouble, not only with his superiors, but with local law enforcement as well. He has claimed that he was once stopped for riding in a car with two black enlistees. (In a 1974 interview he said that he was “a voluntary nigger. I gravitated toward the urban blacks rather than the rural rednecks.”) They smoked three joints in their cell. He was also tossed in a jail cell for causing a disturbance at the Stork Club, a combination supper club and strip joint out on the Bossier City strip, where the Barksdale airmen were known to blow off more than a little steam. “He called early one morning, I’m talking post-midnight,” says Jeff Stierman, whose father, Vern, a fellow announcer on KJOE, had become a good friend of Carlin’s. The elder Stierman had to bail out his young friend. “George had had a few too many,” says Stierman’s son. “He was being somewhat obnoxious, I think, making a nuisance of himself. The cops were called, and he was hauled off.”
At the Air Force base, seventy men in Carlin’s squadron had an experimental function: They were guinea pigs in an ongoing medical inquiry into the spread of infectious diseases in barracks living. “They would plant cultures in our throats once a week and study the spread,” Carlin once explained. “So we got out of a lot of duty.” Despite the easy duty, he couldn’t help but chafe when confronted by his superiors. “When I ran into hard-nosed sergeants and section chiefs and even COs,” he said, “I would tell them to go take a flying fuck. You get court-martialed for that.”
Carlin’s radio work was sanctioned by his commanding officer, who arranged for an off-base work permit for the young malcontent, figuring