That’s the title of George Carlin’s posthumously published sortabiography, finished by Tony Hendra, a funny, funny, smart man who had been Carlin’s friend for many decades, and with whom he’d started work on this project many years ago.
Right after the table of contents, and just before Hendra’s introduction, there is this small statement:
It says “Gee, he was here a moment ago.” And underneath it, in parentheses, the words “(What George wanted on his tombstone – if he’d had one.)”
Just about perfect, don’t you think? A perfectly clear human view of death. One moment you’re alive, and then you’re not. It’s that simple. Everyone tries to complicate it – Heaven, Hell, reincarnation, all those imaginary fairy tales made up by people who seriously lack faith and so find ways to cushion its inevitability with ideas of angels and harps and eternal happiness, as well as the other part – the eternal flames, the suffering, the Purgatory, a weasel idea if ever I heard on one.
And if God is so all-forgiving, why not Heaven for everyone? What’s Hell for? Forgiveness, and all that? They are limited? And who decides what those limitations might be?
On the other hand, I recently watched “Meat Loaf – In Search Of Paradise,” a documentary about his preparation for an heading out on his 2007 tour promoting his “Bat Out Of Hell: The Monster Is Loose” album, which went gold while he was touring Canada.
Meat Loaf is portrayed as an extreme perfectionist, one who has his hand on every note, every chord, every costume, every bit of choreography, every part of the show. It’s exhausting just to watch him, but he’s The Boss, and there is clearly no argument about that fact.
He’s 59 when this documentary was made. He’s 62 now, and just finished a new album. The new album will call for a lot of auto-tune, and if he goes on tour, well, his voice is gone. I don’t know how he’ll do it.
But, he’s driven. As tortured as he is by stage fright, he has to go out and do it, driven by forces that come from someplace is the past of the fat boy who was told by a child’s mother, at the age of 7, that he was “too fat to play with my kid.” A boy whose mother, his chief protector, died young (of breast cancer), a boy whose drunken cop father tried to kill him with a butcher knife shortly thereafter, a boy who went away and decided to bust into show business with only his talent. And he never compromised. He succeeded, then he failed. He lost everything, and worked to get it all back again. He is an amazing story.
But, after each show, he can’t get up off the floor, he needs oxygen to help him, and then he is helped off by his aides, who literally hold him up, he is that spent. He gives it all away in his show.
He is shown walking, with those aides, to the SUV that will take him to his hotel, where, hopefully, he will get some sleep, but odds are that he’ll lie there, thinking compulsively about what went wrong in the previous night’s show.
As he is walking towards the SUV, down the arena’s cavernous hallways, exhausted, looking every bit of his 59 years, and maybe more, Meat Loaf says “I tried. I tried.”
Of the two quotes, between Carlin and Meat Loaf, two of my rapidly-disappearing list of heroes, one is very funny and lighthearted, and the other, I think, is the best thing anyone could ever say about his or her life:
He would have been ninety-five years old today. Hard to imagine, but numbers don’t lie. Fortunately, he doesn’t have that kind of infirmity to contend with, having shuffled off his mortal shell long before it became too burdensome.
When it finally mattered, he showed his greatest gift: he got the hell out of this mess before it turned really ugly. Timing, they say, is all.
I still see things through his eyes, I still wonder what he’d think sometimes, and I usually know. I ended up being his daughter far more than he might ever have expected. At the end, toughness was called for, and one of us had more than the other. There was a part of him that lamented that, knowing how hard it was making life for me, and there was that other, Calabrian/Romany part that celebrated his younger kid, that knew exactly what she was doing, that it was right, that it could be no other way.
He then passed away, knowing that he had accomplished, perhaps inadvertently, what he had never quite articulated, maybe never ever planned (although I doubt that one a bit) – he had raised a child stronger than he was, than he could ever be.
His little girl turned out to be a hell of a man when it came time to throw down dicks on the table.
Little Boy is at it again, looking at another weekend where he’ll be out on his property, disguised as a buck or something, wearing an antler hat and a bright orange vest, designed to fool any deer that wanders by, for sure.
I mean, what’s more attractive to an innocent woodland creature than a grown human with a loaded gun and an orange vest?
But, Little Boy remains hopeful, and he’ll be out there, sending me a beautiful photograph from his phone of what his early Saturday morning looks like where his hoped-for carnage will take place.
It’s not like that’s all he does, though.
He’s also thinking about Christmas decorations, and when he found what he thinks he really should put up on his house, I, of course, encouraged him, because we all know that big whiner bitch, Rudolph, had it coming.
Little Boy, though, wants more. As he so memorably (maybe the best line I’ve ever heard regarding the celebration of the Christmas holiday) put it:
“Nothing says ‘happy holidays’ like a big gut pile.”
So true, so true.
Dickens and Frank Capra are both jealous that they didn’t come up with that one, and I kneel in awe at the splendor that is the Mind Of Little Boy, as he dons his orange vest and goes out into that clear, clean, fresh air, where he’ll do his best to convince Bambi’s Mother that he’s one of them, he’s their friend, he’s there to protect them from Godzilla, all the while thinking of venison steaks, and planning to watch his favorite movie when he goes home:
It was maybe twenty years ago. I was dallying in San Francisco, caught up with yet another handsome and stupid man with a silver Porsche and the intelligence of wallpaper.
But he was pretty. And he had excellent table manners. Looked wonderful in a tux, and really was very presentable if you didn’t notice that nothing ever went past the veneer level.
He knew a lot about architecture, which, in San Francisco, made him a genius.
Anyway, one day, lolling in bed, he had a brainstorm. This often happened, but it always ended in confusion because of his failure to foresee consequences. As I said, he was pretty, but stupid.
We would drive up north, past Point Reyes Station, and he would show me this wonderful oyster farm. We’d bring some good chilled white wine, and get some oysters, and picnic in the mustard fields that proliferate around there.
There was one thing about Pretty But Stupid, and that was that he was annoyed that, no matter where we went, I ended up running into someone I knew. It just drove him nuts, but this has always been part of my life. There was just always someone around, someone I knew from somewhere, sometime else, someone who was someone’s brother, sister, cousin, ex-wife, friend.
We stopped in a place – Mike’s Diner – in Point Reyes Station, and while we were waiting for our coffee and pie, I remembered that Kate Gatov had ended up there, in that little town. So I asked the waitress about Kate, and, sure enough, she knew her. Told me about Kate’s activities in the local community theater, and what a great baker she’d become.
That led me to asking about Laura, who had married Wilson, had the baby Jason, and then left them both. Didn’t Laura live here, too?
Yes, the waitress said, Laura taught at the local high school, and had remarried, had had another baby. (A few years later, Kate would be dead and Laura would have left Husband Number Two and Child Number Two.)
Pretty But Stupid just sat there, stirring his coffee, staring at me. No, I’d never been there before. As I said, it drove him nuts.
We drove off to the oyster ranch. Guess what covered the driveways and every path? Crushed oyster shells. Made for interesting walking.
It was a cloudy, overcast day. A fat old man sat in a chair outside the entrance to the store. The smell was briny and refreshing. I wanted oysters, as many as there were in the world. Pretty But Stupid was wandering around, more interested in the places where the oysters were being handled than in anything else. He did all right on his own, as well-trained as he was.
The fat old man, as I approached the store, and him in his small chair, a cane propped straight up between his widely-spread knees, watched me, and then he said, “Don’t you ever dye your hair.”
I was twenty years younger, and the silver in my dark brown hair was coming in in the best, most beautiful streaks. Not gray – silver. Shiny and startling, my hair was beginning to become a topic of other people’s conversations (in Los Angeles ladies’ rooms, I’d grown used to answering “God” when I was asked who my colorist was), and this old man chose it for his opening line.
“Don’t plan to,” I told him. “It sounds like work, and I’m too lazy.”
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Don’t you ever do anything to it.”
That’s when I realized he didn’t have strange grey eyes – he had the worst cataracts I’d ever seen. How could he have seen me?
He must have sensed what I had just figured out, and he said, “I can’t see. I’m pretty blind. But I have some peripheral vision, and I saw you that way. If I look right at you like this,” he turned his face towards me, towards the sound of my voice, my noisy, crushing oyster shell footsteps, “I can’t see you.”
“But,” he continued, turning his gaze away from me, “I can see you here, and you’re beautiful. Just don’t ever do anything to your hair.”
I promised him I wouldn’t, and I broke that promise, yes, of course I did, playing around with lowlights, and dark streaks, and some really beautiful things that were done by talented women, but that didn’t last long, and then I just let it grow as it is. It is silver, and shiny, and it is beautiful.
In the car, Pretty But Stupid asked me what the old man and I had been talking about, that he was the owner, that he’d been in the oyster business from childhood, inheriting it from his father.
“Hair,” I said, and Pretty But Stupid said that we had to stop and get some flowers for the dinner table that night. I agreed.
Something beautiful to go with our wonderful oysters – we’d decided to skip lunch in the mustard fields, the weather not being good enough – and our icy wine. We’d need to get some good bread, too, for sopping up the oyster liquor.
But, yes, we definitely needed flowers. Amazing flowers. Remarkable flowers.
Flowers as beautiful as my silver-streaked dark brown hair that made the fat old blind man happy that day.
She’s growing so quickly. Babies have a way of doing this.
Here is the newborn Ryan, in early September:
And here she is now, not quite three months old!
She’s already a beauty, and, if she’s anything like her twin cousins, old GrannyT**t is gonna be on the run for the next thirty years or so. It’s good that she already knows this, and has prepared adequately.
It seems that you take your life in your hands if you try to get in between a hungry Princess Ava and her Happy Meal, even if it’s only to get her to smile for a quick picture:
Upright, breathing, eyes reflecting light it can’t even see, all brought to us by the magic of technology and the sneaky little camera that Little Boy has installed in his magic place where he hunts during the deer season. He likes to send me pictures of the Big Bambis he plans to kill.
This one was referred to as “a monster 8-point” something or other. Little Boy was very excited, feeling, as he has been, quite indulgent and generous over not killing anything last year because the babies were so small, so young. By the Good Grace of Little Boy, they got another year to live. And get bigger. And get to be more fun to shoot.
It’s the place where he’s happiest, I know, out in the woods on these cool autumn mornings, but his joy is increased when he’s able to bring out a carcass, bless his murderous little heart. I can’t help loving this Little Boy, blood on his hands and all.
Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of videos and listening to a lot of music made by the entertainer I regard as the best in the world. Of course, he’s named Meat Loaf, which sort of detracts from the exalted plane on which I’ve placed him, but I must agree that Meat Loaf is a whole lot more interesting than Michael Lee Aday, or even Marvin Lee Aday (his original name).
(Actually, I shouldn’t find the name “Meat Loaf” that odd since I had once been engaged to a man who was affectionately (I think) known as “Beef.” I’ve always been a sucker for a man with some heft on him. Those skinny little sylph boys never appealed to me)
I think that he, along with that other genius, Jim Steinman, created a whole new genre of music, a kind of operatic, dramatic, dynamic rock, that not only required musical talent, but also dramatic talent. Yes, Bruce Springsteen puts on an amazing show, and so does Bob Dylan, but neither of them can touch what Meat Loaf does. I don’t even know what to call it, but I know that when I watch and listen to him, either in a movie or an interview, on tour, on recorded music, in videos, I am completely swept away by this strangely and powerfully charismatic, talented, witty, courageous, perceptive, sad, frightened, and shy individual.
He touches me. He moves me. I have never seen anything like Meat Loaf ever in my life, and I’ve been buying his music for maybe thirty, thirty-five years, but I listened with slight attention to the great lyrics, the brilliant imagery, the relentless passion and demands, the non-negotiable invitation to the hormonal madness that characterized us as youths, the insanity we should never have even tried to control.
I listened, but I only recently heard the lyrics of the best (Steinman/Warren) lyrics. I finally heard, and I realized I’d made it – the one thing Jim Dickinson believed to be the only way to live a life: that is, I had finally quit growing up and had begun growing down.
(Jim would get this, all of it, but Jim is gone now, too. He never let me down, never disappointed me, never made a sound when I left.
I never stopped loving him, nor he me, and he was he the one, perhaps the only one, who understood that leaving was, for me, the most natural thing in the world. Still, his loyalty to me never wavered, his love never ended, and I kiss his memory every day. Jim was all rock’n'roll – he entertained dreams of setting fire to Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles and cheering while they burned down to ashes, and then stomping on the ashes.)
Meat Loaf is a force of nature, like a walloping storm that busts right through everything and lays waste to whatever it hits, but, when it’s over, you realize that everything is clearer and makes more sense than it did before the storm hit.
Because you realize that you’re not alone.
That he knows a lot about what you did, how it was for you, where you failed, where you tried too hard or not enough, where you just had fucking rotten luck, where you were your best, and where you worked harder than you ever thought you could just to stay alive, how you struggled to forget, and died a bit when you remembered. He’s a great actor, and he sings these songs as if all these things have happened to him; he’s human – of course they happened to him.
I saw this video a few days ago, and was immediately haunted by memories of men who could so easily sing this song to me. Some are alive, some are dead, but I left all of them hating me, I think, and they were right: I was young and self-involved, I had wider vistas, I was too unformed to know how to look back.
But the ones who are gone, ah, those good men.
I remember them all so clearly, and I regret so deeply how I hurt them. I know one forgave me, and he made sure I knew that before he died. The others, I don’t know; I was sure that one gladly would have killed me with his bare hands if he’d ever been able to find me. When I read his obituary, I breathed a sigh of relief, because, yes, I am still that self-involved.
And yet, I am sorry. I wish I could explain to them all that I didn’t understand, that I was far too young for them, that even today consequences matter so little to me.
But, to them all, alive and dead, I say that I am sorry. I hope they forgot me. That would have been the kindest cut of all – for them to have forgotten all of it, the same way I did.
The same way, that is, I almost did, until I heard this song:
Then I saw another, and it reminded me of the man whose birthday was just five days ago, a man who fell so madly in love with the young woman with the dark hair and dark eyes.
How we had it so good and how happy we were, and how he made some wrong, bad, hurtful choices that tore us apart, and I was too young to understand, forgiveness was impossible for me, shattered as I was, and he didn’t say he was sorry until years after we had parted. It was too late by then, but it was pretty of him to apologize, to take responsibility for all that he had done, I suppose.
It meant nothing, just like he means nothing now, but I remember him without anger, without passion, without longing, without any feeling at all, this man for whom I once would have died, and it is all so sad.
Of course, things always happen in threes, or so the Chinese believe, and so did Meat Loaf, with the publication of his last part of the “Bat Out Of Hell” trilogy, and, wouldn’t you know that he included a song that, at first, made me laugh, but all of Meat Loaf’s songs make me laugh. At first.
On “Bat Out Of Hell III – The Monster Is Loose,” there it was, done by Meat Loaf with every bit of passion he still has left in him. His performance here, labored as it is, is stunning, because he is doing just what he is singing about – he is willing to die for love.
I listened and watched this, and couldn’t turn away, couldn’t turn down the volume, couldn’t believe how lucky we had been, just for a while. I had no idea that a while would have to last forever.
I had always been so good, I thought, at not looking back.
I was wrong.
I was foolishly wrong.
There is no present without a past, not if you’ve lived any kind of life of value, and I have. I watched and listened and deliberately looked back.
Meat Loaf’s voice isn’t quite what it used to be, but then, he’s about my age, and lots of things about me aren’t quite what they used to be, either. I’m older now than you were the day you died, older by twelve years, and you have been gone for twenty-eight years.
Twenty-eight years.
A lifetime.
Someone else’s, not mine.
You missed so much while I was missing you.
I’m glad I looked back, and I’m glad I let myself remember.
Even with the tears, even knowing the terrible ending and the forever pain, I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.
Still, I’d give anything – everything – to be able to dance with you one more time.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Graydon Carter famously, and opaquely, declared that the events of 9/11 had effectively killed irony. I still don’t know what that meant, but I do know that watching the news coverage of yesterday’s massacre at Fort Hood, a most enlightening notion struck me:
Imagine that this horrid event so affects President Obama that he decides to get us out of Afghanistan AND Iraq.
(Actually, that’s my deepest wish. This whole concept is an extension of my exercise in wishful thinking.)
But, if that really happened, it would mean that the thirteen people who died at the hands of that flipped-out shrink would really have died for something. Their deaths would have meaning. Their deaths would change history, and save countless lives, and help our country.
They would be the only deaths that would make any kind of sense vis-à-vis our involvement in the Middle East, in spite of Chimpy Fucknuts’ bleating about how “they have not died in vain.”
They’ve all died in vain, but if these thirteen murders had that effect on Obama’s decision, wouldn’t that be the absolute height of twisted and irrefutable irony?
The funniest story I can tell you today is about our new Ambassador to a certain Western European country which shall remain nameless here.
She was my best friend during our first year of law school, before my then-husband and I moved, and I transferred schools. She was very wealthy – her mother was from the family that founded a now-giant multi-national corporation in that same Western European nation. – her parents came here when WWII broke out, before she was born.
I always assumed she was Jewish, but she got all upset when I mentioned it, vehemently telling me, No, her family wasn’t Jewish. They were Unitarians, which meant, to me, that they used to be Jews.. She made a point of telling me about taking her first child, a daughter, to be “dedicated” in the Unitarian Church where she’d grown up.
So, big deal. I went with it, because we were good friends. I figured it was some kind of shame that kept her from admitting what her heritage really was, but sometimes it bothered me, when I’d watch her trying to get along at parties or mixers. She was ill at ease, never quite connecting, putting people off. I was married when we met, and she was single, and I don’t ever remember her having a date during the whole time we were living in the same city.
People didn’t like her, and I guess maybe they saw something I didn’t. I remember that she flunked Contracts at the end of our freshman year of law school, and since the grades were posted late, and she had already left for a summer school session run by Notre Dame in Europe, she didn’t know about the failing grade. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her.
But one other classmate, a woman who looked a lot like a ferret, whose name I no longer remember, knew what my friend’s number code had been, and when she saw that she’d failed Contracts, took the time to write to her and tell her.
How mean do you have to be to do that? I remember my friend telling me that – I was already living back on the East Coast – and being so angry and upset about it. I was, too, because she was my friend.
I was with her for her first wedding, to a nice guy she decided she wanted, a limp sort of fellow she bought out of his marriage, leaving his four kids behind, with whom she had two kids before buying him off and divorcing him so fast, I was beyond impressed.
She considered aborting her second pregnancy when she found out it was a boy, that’s how “anti-male” she was. She didn’t, though, and gave birth to a sweet little boy. I never understood what her husband did to incur her hideous wrath, such an anger that she translated it to the child she was carrying, but I let it go. We were still friends, even if we lived in different cities.
Then she went nuts on me. Very strange.
I’d flown out to visit her and the kids for a weekend, and I got the distinct impression that she was put out by how much the kids liked me. I was tickled when I saw that she was wearing jeans, because she never wore jeans, always showed up for class in dresses, pantyhose, platform heels (it was the seventies), the whole thing.
Now, as a single mother, she wore jeans, and I said something about it, and she turned and gave me a murderous look. Her kids clearly didn’t know this, thought their mother had been a really cool hippie chick in law school, so I just played along.
She had a housekeeper named Lulu, who loved those children.
(My friend was working all the time, although she never got a job with a firm, just took space and was listed “of counsel,” paying her own rent. She’d had a clerkship with a Federal judge, which was funny, because it was so obvious that her family’s connections got her the job, lousy student that she had been. Years later, she told me that she’d laid the judge, rather proud of herself for doing it. I figured, hell, as long as everyone had fun, that’s good.
As I said, it was the seventies.)
But she sensed that the children were getting too attached to Lulu, so she fired her, and hired an au pair, a college girl who wasn’t capable of developing the same kind of relationship with the little boy and girl, and after that, the hired help came and went quite regularly. No attachments allowed.
The kids learned that their mother was the only constant, the only one on whom they could depend. My friend was nothing if not manipulative, and, yes, she did this to her own kids, resolved, as she was, that they would love her, even if it meant killing certain small and vital parts of her own children.
She ended our friendship in a weird way – maniacally crying on the phone to me, sobbing hysterically, telling me she could change, that we had to be friends forever. I kept saying Sure, sure, we’ll always be friends. I still don’t know what provoked her breakdown.
Then, I never heard from her again. That was that. Life went on.
So, a few years ago, another classmate and I were talking, and her name came up. Turned out she had married one of the wealthiest men in that city, a very, VERY old guy. He’s about 85 now to her 60. A devout Democrat, and a cousin to a very liberal Senator from another Midwestern state.
She had been a member of the Young Republicans before her first marriage, something I argued about with her forever, but she was very active. Once, she got knocked up by a guy she met there, and when she told him she was pregnant, he changed his home phone number, and wouldn’t take her calls at the office. She never saw him again, and I went to the clinic with her to terminate it, and, even then, I told her Republicans were no damn good.
Anyway, so now she is married to the Rich Old Jewish Guy, and – get this! – she’s Super-Jewess! All involved in liberal causes, very observant religiously, and a total, total liberal Democrat.
I had to laugh, but at least she saw the light.
She was on Obama’s finance committee during his campaign. Her husband was one of the money guys who’s been backing Obama from the beginning. Her husband employed someone who is one of Obama’s closest advisers.
So, when I heard that she had been nominated to the Ambassadorship, all I could think, once I stopped laughing, was that she’d finally sucked the right dick.
I checked, and a newspaper story about her swearing-in named the same judge she’d banged when she was his clerk. Ah, it’s always good to keep it in the family, so to speak, isn’t it?
I swear, this whole story has me tickled. People just keep on surprising me. I have this fantasy of showing up at the Ambassador’s Residence in that certain European city, and when they ask who I am, and I tell the guards my name, you next hear a long, piercing scream from inside the Residence.
They’ve recovered now, but their long weekend in the backwoods caused a temporary, but sincere, regression. Princess Ava was seen frolicking quite regally in a creek, which is now sanctified water. Young Master Cole discovered that the animals’ souls would bend to his will, with only his thoughts as the weapon.
(His father, of course, disagrees, and thinks very differently about weapons. Ah, Bambi, run for your life.)
And their beautiful mother watches over all of this, knowing that it will shake down well, that everyone will be safe and happy.
They returned home and have since recovered………………..
