Free A Carlin Home Companion by Kelly Carlin

member that is my earliest memory of really making my dad laugh. Vicki Lawrence’s Mama character from “The Family” sketch had a line that went something like, “I don’t want to play no god damn Parcheesi!” I mastered this line and could make my dad melt into a pool of laughter whenever I recited it. Making my dad laugh was a conduit straight to nirvana. Hell, just seeing my dad laugh was pure bliss. Maybe that’s why The Carol Burnett Show was so special to me—every time Tim Conway tried to get Harvey Korman to break in a sketch, my dad laughed so hard he cried. No moment is more perfect than watching the man who makes the world laugh laugh himself.
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    When we moved to the Palisades, I quickly made friends with my next-door neighbor, Amanda, and her friend Tom. Amanda was the daughter of the guy who worked for the National Security Council. She was a few years older than me, had short blond hair, a perky, flirty personality, and was wicked smart. Although her father worked for the Nixon administration, and her family looked like a “normal” family on the outside, it was just as strange as mine. When I met her, one of her brothers had just returned home from some dustup in Washington, DC. Her father had pulled some strings to get him out of a scrape with the law, or maybe it was the mafia; either way, he was now hiding out on the West Coast. The first thing he did to repay his father was to spell out “Fuck Nixon” on his chest with masking tape and fall asleep in the sun. Once his sunburn set in, he took Amanda and me down the hill for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in the village. Before he got out of the car, he took his shirt off. He and my dad got along very well.
    Yet another brother was also a nice guy, but he had no heels. I was told that a few years before, he’d had a brain operation in which they’d put him in ice, and during the procedure he’d ground down his heels to nothing. I was fine with the big scar on his head; it was his lack of heels that always gave me the willies. To round off the family, Amanda’s mom had some kind of degenerative neck problem, which limited her mobility, and so she got to stay in bed all day wearing a neck brace and watching TV. I thought she was the luckiest person in the world.
    Amanda’s dad, thankfully, was rarely home. He scared me. Not only did he work for the government, but one day we sneaked into his office and found some books that contained horrific photos of dead soldiers who had been torn apart by shrapnel. I may have been able to say the “Seven Dirty Words” in my house, but my dad had always sheltered me from violent films and images. The pictures in those books shattered my innocence. But her dad wasn’t all bad—when he came home from his “business trips” abroad, he would bring us beautiful gifts. Most of them came from a faraway place called Iran. Looking back on it now, I realize that he must have been hanging out with the shah and propping up the regime. When the tension in my house got to be too much for me, I’d go over to Amanda’s. They may have been a strange family, but at least there wasn’t a whole lot of yelling and screaming in their house. One person’s weirdness is another person’s refuge, I guess.
    Tom, my other best friend, lived down the hill, and was really cute. He had sun-bleached hair down to his shoulders, freckles, glasses, and a great smile. I had a crush on him, but didn’t know how to have a crush on him because I was a tomboy. Or maybe I was a tomboy because I didn’t know how to have a crush on him? Either way, any glimmer I felt of wanting him to kiss me I shoved far away, deep inside my psyche. Focusing on tricking out our skateboards, collecting Wacky Packages (funny stickers that made fun of consumer brands, they came with bubble gum), or playing with our Corgi Toys (high-end British