Read Online A Carlin Home Companion by Kelly Carlin - Free Book Online Page B

Her behavior got more and more erratic, and Dad and I did our best to manage it. We had secret conversations in which we’d talk about what we might do about it. We usually concluded that there wasn’t a whole lot we could do except try to slow her down. We became like the East German secret police, watching her every move, questioning her every motive. This, of course, pissed her off and made her feel we were ganging up on her. We were, but we weren’t. We were just trying to get our heads and arms around this force that had taken over her life, our lives—addiction.
    Dad, of course, worried about her and my safety when he was on the road, and so he hired a guy, Fred, to help around the house. Fred drove me to where I needed to go and kept an eye on Mom. Although it was Fred’s job to watch her, it did little to relieve my hypervigilance. My mind was already so ingrained with ways to manage, change, or work around Mom’s increasing dysfunction that I couldn’t just turn it off. I didn’t know how to fire myself from the position of chief Brenda wrangler. And it wasn’t just in the house; I had to try and monitor her while we were out, too. Mom had begun to practice a new form of driving. It wasn’t exactly off-road driving; it was more like off-street driving. More than a few times, as we’d make our way up the winding road to our house late at night after dinner at Bill and Elaine’s house in Malibu, she’d drive the car up and onto our neighbor’s lawn. After she’d done this about half a dozen times, I began to fake being asleep at Bill and Elaine’s so that I wouldn’t have to get in the car with her. I hoped that she would stay, too, and sleep it off. That rarely happened. She’d usually just leave me there and find her way home on her own.
    Fearing she’d really hurt herself or someone else, I began to hide her car keys to prevent her from leaving the house in the first place. That worked the first few times, but then she caught on, and would threaten me if I didn’t give them to her. Then I came up with the next strategy: I hid her alcohol from her. One day when she was out, I emptied the shelves of the wet bar, hid the bottles in my closet, and then left the house to go out and play. When she came home and found the shelves empty, she went ape-shit and searched the house. When I came home, she marched me straight to my closet, pointed at the twenty or so bottles of alcohol on the floor, and asked, “Kelly, what the hell is going on here?”
    â€œUm, I don’t know,” I answered.
    â€œAnswer me! What the hell is going on here? Are you some kind of alcoholic?”
    Oh, denial, how you make me laugh!
    *   *   *
    There was laughter. Especially when the TV was on. It seemed that nothing could go wrong with the TV on. I’d crawl into Mom and Dad’s bed, get right between them, and we’d watch all the great comedies of the day: The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Dad loved Ted Knight’s Ted Baxter character), Laugh-In (I loved Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, and did one hell of an imitation of her), and The Bob Newhart Show (we all waited for the Mr. Carlin character to show up). But our hands-down favorite was The Carol Burnett Show . Carol Burnett was my Danny Kaye. I was around ten or eleven years old when I started to think, Hey, maybe I could do that someday, like my dad had done when he formed his “Big Danny Kaye plan.” My thoughts were much more nebulous than his had been, though. I never formed a plan. When I watched Carol (or Lily or Lucy) there was always a rush of energy that made me feel connected to others, and more importantly, connected to something bigger than myself. I wanted to make people feel connected, too. That is what made me want to be just like Carol. That, and making my dad laugh.
    Although Carol Burnett was my hero, ironically, it was doing an imitation of another cast