Playboy: Back in the early Sixties, when you were still a disc jockey and just beginning to do comedy in small clubs, Lenny Bruce supposedly selected you as his heir.

Carlin: Apparently, Lenny told that to a lot of people. But he never said it to me and I didn’t hear it until years later. Which is probably fortunate. It’s difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too.

Playboy: Because of what Bruce said about you, are you now overly sensitive about being compared to him?

Carlin: Yes, and those comparisons are unfair to both of us. Look, I was a fan of Lenny’s. He made me laugh, sure, but more often he made me say, “Fuckin’ A; why didn’t I think of that?” He opened up channels in my head. His genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry. I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I’m not in a league with Lenny, certainly not in terms of social commentary. So when people give me this bullshit, “Well, I guess you’re sort of…uh…imitating Lenny Bruce,” I just say, “Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear it.” I want to be known for what I do best.

Playboy: Nevertheless, throughout the early to mid-Seventies, with a five-year run of albums and packed auditoriums for an act that viciously ridiculed every nook and cranny of “the establishment,” you really did seem to be fulfilling Lenny’s prophecy. Then it stopped abruptly about five years ago. No more albums; no more college tours. Why?

Carlin: I’ve just now completed a five-year period that can perhaps best be called a breathing spell. A time of getting my health back and gathering my strength. That time also included incredible cocaine abuse, a heart attack and my wife’s recovery from both alcoholism and cocaine abuse.

Playboy: It’s comforting to hear you talk about that breathing spell in the past tense.

Carlin: My wife, Brenda, and I are both clean and sober now. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. By the time this interview appears, my first album in seven years will be out. I’m also working on a series of Home Box Office specials, a book and a motion picture. It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical. And I hope I’m now beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it’ll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be…well, that’s for others to judge.

Playboy: When and how did you get into drugs?

Carlin: In my neighborhood—West 121st Street in New York, “white Harlem”—there were only two drugs: smack and marijuana. By the time I was 13, some friends and I were using marijuana fairly regularly. The Reefer Madness myth was still very strong then, but I’d been into jazz and those lyrics included so many casual references to pot that it was completely demystified for me. Heroin, forget it. In my neighborhood, I could see what heroin did firsthand and I was definitely afraid of that number.

Playboy: How do you define fairly regular marijuana use?

Carlin: Oh, I was a stonehead for 30 years. I’d wake up in the morning and if I couldn’t decide whether I wanted a joint or not, I’d smoke a joint to figure it out. And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, “Do you get high to go onstage?” I could never understand the question. I mean, I’d been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it.

Playboy: Are you still a stonehead?

Carlin: To my surprise, my marijuana use has been tapering off steadily. As we speak, I haven’t had a joint in two months.

Playboy: You imply that this has been an unplanned withdrawal.

Carlin: Completely. The enjoyment has been diminishing. Now, there’s no question that it’s sort of fun to get high. Let’s say I had a little baggie lying around the office. I’d get up, come over here, fuck around, shuffle a few papers, and all the while I’d be thinking about that pot. I’d say to myself, “Well, whatever I’m going to do today, it’s obviously going to be more fun if I have a hit or two.” But I got to the point where taking those hits made me feel dumber than I’d felt before. I’d say to myself, “Man, you’ve been high for fucking 30 years and you don’t want to be high anymore.” [laughs] I always have these little internal monologs. You’ll get used to them.… I simply decided that dope wasn’t worth the ritual.

Playboy: So you were one of those ritualistic dopers.

Carlin: The ritual was very important to me: cleaning the pot, rolling the pot—I was never a pipe or bong man. That’s California stuff. I was an Eastern roller. My daughter had to teach me to use a water pipe, and I’d still fuck it up every time. To me, smoking pot meant sitting with a newspaper on my legs, rolling the seeds down, pulling the twigs out and finally producing a perfectly cylindrical, absolutely wonderful joint that you either locked at both ends or pinched off, or pinched at one end and left open at the other.

Playboy: What was your technique?

Carlin: We always locked in the East. I got to be a pincher later on.

Playboy: Do you now find yourself lecturing others on the joys of sobriety?

Carlin: No, never. I don’t want anyone who reads this to think it’s a message to him. It’s not. This is merely an accounting of what I have done.

Playboy: Would it be fair to say that you’re not sorry about your 30 years as a pothead but you’re glad they’re over?

Carlin: Exactly. Grass probably helped me as much as it hurt me. Especially as a performer. When you’re high, it’s easy to kid yourself about how clever certain mediocre pieces of material are. But, on the other hand, pot opens windows and doors that you may not be able to get through any other way. Being a very bound-up, Irish Catholic tight-assholed person, I’ve often thought that whatever negative effects pot had on me, it probably saved me from being an alcoholic and a complete fucking brainless idiot by the time I was 25. So I’d say pot has been a break-even proposition for me.

Playboy: Did you ever get into hallucinogens?

Carlin: I did LSD and peyote in the late Sixties, before I got into cocaine. That was concurrent with my change from a straight comic to the album and counterculture period, and those drugs served their purpose. They helped open me up. You know, if a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting. It should tell you when you’ve had enough. Acid and peyote were that way for me. Cocaine was different. It kept saying, “You haven’t had enough.” I became an abuser almost instantly.

Playboy: Specifically, what was your pattern of cocaine abuse?

Carlin: I’d go on runs, four and five days without sleep. Then I’d crash and sleep about 18 hours a day for seven to ten days. Then it would take a few more weeks to get over a vague sort of depression. Then I’d be off on another run.

Playboy: How did those runs start?

Carlin: They began the moment I scored. I’d take a few hits at the guy’s house. Then I’d take a few more hits. Then I’d put it away. But before I left his house, I’d take some more hits. And when I’d get in my car, before backing out of the driveway, I’d open it up again and take a few more hits. Then, while driving home, I’d somehow contrive to stop and go to the bathroom and take a few more hits. Later on, when it got really ridiculous, I used to snort in traffic.

Playboy: While the car was moving?

Carlin: Yeah. And the moment I copped, I immediately wrote off that night’s sleep, because it was a foregone conclusion that I was not going to put half a gram away at midnight. And I never took reds or Quaaludes to balance out the coke. So when it got to be four in the morning and the gram was three quarters gone, I’d start wishing it was nine o’clock and hoping the guy got up early. But, of course, he didn’t sleep either, so there was no sweat. During all those years, I was always looking forward to the next snort or the next guy I could score from.

Playboy: You mentioned the fact that Brenda was also a cocaine abuser. How did that mutual interest affect your relationship?

Carlin: The effect of the coke on our relationship was very sick. Now that it’s over, those were actually funny times. Looking for each other’s coke, hiding it, finding it, doing some, not telling the other. Then fighting over it.

Playboy: You actually stole coke from each other?

Carlin: It was the typical paranoid experience. As soon as I knew my hiding place, I thought the whole world knew it. I’d write clues to my hiding places in code, then forget the code and spend the rest of the day looking for my coke.

Playboy: Along with the paranoia, many cocaine users experience a heightened compulsiveness.

Carlin: Oh, yeah. Sometimes, when I was really loaded, I’d sit on the floor and sort out every nut and bolt in the house. It was just sheer insanity. And often there’d be speed in the cut, so I was a speed freak, too. There are an awful lot of things in the cut of street drugs that eventually make you sick. I reached a point where the skin around the edges of my fingernails used to hurt all the time. And it would peel away easily. Now, that must have been from some poison in the cut.

Playboy: Yet you continued to go on those incredible runs. Why?

Carlin: It was just a compulsion. In fact, I soon realized that the only thing I really enjoyed was the actual snorting.

Playboy: You mean the initial rush?

Carlin: No, the act of it. Putting out the line. Inhaling it. That seemed to be what I was looking for.

Playboy: That ritual again.

Carlin: Exactly. After every hit, I’d look at myself in the mirror and say, “You stupid motherfucker. You asshole.” And then I’d reach for it again, because it was more fun to snort it than to be high. It was an adventure to find a bar I could go into and use the bathroom. To take it out of my sock and chop it up without anybody’s hearing. The secretiveness. The stealth. Those were obviously the aspects of cocaine use I was addicted to.

Playboy: Were you able to function socially during those periods?

Carlin: I couldn’t even get through a conversation without saying to myself, “How can I get away from this motherfucker and go do me some coke?” I was always saying things like, “Excuse me, but I still have those loose bowels. I’ll be right back.” Fortunately, along with the speed, there’s usually a lot of laxative in the cut, so I was able to say that with some conviction.

Playboy: Did the coke affect your performances?

Carlin: Two things happened. The creative side of my career was harmed. When I’d sit down and write under the influence of coke, the ratio of pages kept to pages thrown out declined drastically. But onstage, when rapping about a feeling I already owned, I would sometimes get a burst of eloquence. For an entertainer, part of the thing you do is just style. And the coke did help me get into great runs of pure form. But when I listen to those tapes now, the real cocaine shows; there’s just nothing special about their content.

Playboy: Were any of your albums recorded during a heavy cocaine run?

Carlin: The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I’d realized what a hell I’d made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album. But by the next one,Occupation: Foole, I was right back into the trip again. I’m more frantic, more breathless. You can hear how sick I am. If you want to see a cokehead, just look at the pictures on the Occupation: Foole album. The angles of my body show you an awful lot. I started doing coke to feel open, but by that time, the hole had opened so wide that I’d fallen through. The body language in those photos tells you everything.

Playboy: You’re talking about astonishing quantities of a very expensive drug. Especially with both you and Brenda abusing it so heavily. How much money did you spend on coke during those years?

Carlin: I never knew or cared. Of course, it was a lot. A fortune. But when I hear people tell me exactly how much they spend on coke, I think, Shit, man. They care more about the money than the drug. I was making a lot of money then. One hundred, maybe 110 dates a year at $10,000 a date, plus the albums. The money was sailing in and sailing out and somehow it all just about worked. But in terms of coke, the only money I ever thought about was that dollar bill I had stuck up my nose.

Playboy: How did it end?

Carlin: It ended suddenly for Brenda, more slowly for me. My runs began getting shorter and less pleasurable. I’d feel bad after only one day, or only a few hours, instead of four or five days. And I began to want to stop. One of the proudest moments of my life was at a rock-’n’-roll theater in New Jersey. A guy actually put some coke under my nose and I was able to say, “No, thanks,” and turn my head away. I still had periods after that when I slipped back a little, but when that happened, I knew something inside me had taken hold. I was going to get well.

Playboy: And for Brenda?

Carlin: Because she had a drinking problem along with the coke, she had to hit bottom first. Most alcoholics do. And for her, bottom was an automobile accident that almost landed her in jail.

Playboy: Was anyone hurt?

Carlin: No. She just drove through a hotel lobby. Now, that’s bottoming out.
