“Last Words”
Posted By Annette on December 15, 2009
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:
I tried. I tried.
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