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  These guys came from deep in our street experience: they were

  cops, dads, bartenders with baseball bats. The first-line authority

  figures we'd grown up with as opposed to Congress, big corporations and more impersonal authorities. Putting bigoted or violent

  language in their mouths was fun and funny and even to a degree

  satirical, exposing them for what they were. In a way they were the

  forerunners of later mainstream Irish bigots like Peter Boyle's Joe

  and Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker. Later still, throughout the

  eighties, my Irish street guy was a powerful element in the evolution

  of what finally became in the early nineties my authentic voice. He

  and his White Harlem relatives are the core of the family of characters that still live inside me.

  For the next two years, Jack and I played first-line nightclubs like the

  Embers in Indianapolis, Freddie's in Minneapolis, the Tidelands

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  in Houston. Bill Brennan, the owner of the Racquet Club in Dayton, flew into Chicago to see us and booked us for the next month.

  The Racquet Club was a hugely important booking. Not professionally—after all, this was fucking Dayton, Ohio. But it was where I

  met my wife, Brenda.

  The nightclub circuit was unpredictable. Some places got what

  we were doing. In the Playboy Clubs, for the most part, we did okay.

  There were other places where we died. At one club outside Detroit, the owner said, "I haven't booked a live act since Bobby Clark

  in 1941. You guys better be good. My softball team's coming in tonight."

  It was a cinder-block bar with a jukebox and tables and a little

  dance floor. The softball team comes in still in uniform and off we

  go. We do the Kennedy bit. Stuff about the European Common

  Market. They don't get it or like it. No laughs, nothing. Sweat is

  pouring off us. About ten minutes in, somebody puts a quarter in

  the jukebox and they start dancing to the music—while we're still

  halfway through the act.

  The owner came over as we were wrapping up: "I'm taking a bath

  with you guys. Don't you work dirty?" We said, "Like Lenny Bruce?"

  He said, "Who the fuck's Lenny Bruce? You better get some tits and

  ass in this act. You got two more shows and the room don't turn

  over." Holy shit. We ran out and bought a fright wig for me and for

  the second show did a bit with Jack as Ed Murrow and me as a waitress in the club. We did stuff we'd never done before—or ever again.

  We were there for a week. We didn't get fired. A nightmare.

  Sometimes it worked the other way around. There was a club

  in Allentown, Pennsylvania, whose owner was a great Lenny Bruce

  fan. And because Lenny liked us, he booked us. In the ad in the paper it said: "Lenny Bruce's favorite comics." Nobody in Allentown,

  Pennsylvania, knew who the fuck Lenny Bruce was either and if

  they had they would have hated him. Every night there were maybe

  five, six people in this cavernous room. Still the guy booked us back.

  And it was the same story every time we played there.

  Deep down I didn't want to work. I was lazy because I knew I was

  going to be a single at some point. Jack and I being together was just

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  a stepping stone. I had no idea what the timing would be but I knew

  it was inevitable. We developed a show of solid stuff and a second

  show (for when those fucking people in the front tables wouldn't

  leave). But once we had that under our belts, we essentially coasted.

  Jack used to say that the reason Burns and Carlin didn't work

  was because we were very much the same person. We did the same

  characters. We were strong willed, Irish, Catholic, veterans. We had

  many things in common that made us great buddies, but didn't explode onstage.

  The truth was more harsh: I didn't want to expend my best ideas

  on the team. I was selfish about my creativity. I refused to put out my

  best effort for, and with, Jack.

  We broke up in March 1962—or I broke us up. It was at the Maryland Hotel in Chicago, where we'd had our first big booking. Jack

  seemed a bit stunned at first, but I think subconsciously he'd known

  for a while it was coming. We got pretty stoned and were clowning around and for some reason that seemed funny at the time Jack

  threw this paperback out the window into the freezing night. As

  he did he suddenly realized all his pay was in the book. He'd put it

  there for safekeeping. We ran to the window and watched the twenties and fifties floating down through the snow and we both knew

  that by the time we got to the street it'd all be long gone. So we split

  my half.

  Jack joined the Compass Players in St. Louis (he auditioned with

  another hopeful named Alan Alda: both of them made it in) and

  then moved to Second City, where he later formed a comedy team

  with Avery Schreiber that did far better than Burns and Carlin. He

  ended up as a hugely successful TV writer and producer. We've

  stayed the best of friends.

  A few years ago Jack said that without Burns and Carlin he

  would've been working at the A&P as a stock boy for the rest of his

  life. Maybe. And quite possibly without Jack I would've ended up

  as some dopey old radio cocksucker spewing bigotry into the night.

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  TALENTED—BRENDA!

  George and Brenda, 1961

  (Courtesy of M a r i o n Rife)

  Brenda was bom in Dayton, Ohio, in 1939 at St. Elizabeth's,

  an open-door hospital run by the Franciscan Sisters. Fortyodd years later I wound up there one night, after totaling my

  car. And experienced a nose-related miracle.

  She was the elder of two sisters and Daddy's little girl. Art, his

  name was. He took her everywhere, including his favorite saloons,

  where he'd sit her on the bar while he drank. Art had been a singer

  in Chicago speakeasies during Prohibition and went by the name

  "The Whispering Tenor." His wife, Alice, made him quit. He hung

  out with these gangsters who, according to her, forced drinks on

  him so that he developed a drinking problem. From what I could

  tell when I got to know him Art didn't need much forcing. But Alice

  didn't like gangsters or alcohol so Art had to give up being the Whispering Tenor.

  Alice was the dominant figure in the family and Brenda was

  scared of her. She did stuff like marking Brenda's periods on the

  calendar with an X. She was nice enough but very controlled

  and severe. I think she was Lutheran or Congregational. I don't

  know about Art. At one point Brenda had to play the organ in

  church.

  Art worked as the production manager for Newsweek in the

  McCall printing plant. They were the largest printer in the United

  States and they printed sixty or seventy titles in Dayton. As a kid

  Brenda loved going with her dad to see the huge presses in action

  and smelling the printer's ink in the air. When she was older she

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  even did pasteup for the foreign edition of Newsweek. All of which

  nurtured her high school ambition to be a journalist.

  On graduation, she planned to go to college becaus
e she'd gotten

  a scholarship to Ohio Wesleyan, but her mother said no: women

  didn't go to college unless they wanted to be teachers. She should ve

  said, "Okay, I'll be a teacher," and then switched to journalism when

  she got to Wesleyan. But she'd always been a sweet, obedient, overachieving child and it didn't occur to her. And her mother was adamant. So Brenda never went to college. And she was very, very angry

  about that.

  She'd been going with the guy next door for about three years.

  Like her, he was "a good kid"—they didn't fool around—but after

  the college episode Brenda was in a fuck-you mood and more or

  less forced the guy to sleep with her. That very first time, she got

  pregnant.

  Again her mother was adamant: they had to get married. Again

  Brenda went along. Within a month she was walking down the aisle

  in a white dress her mother made (she was an expert dressmaker).

  Two weeks later, after the honeymoon, she had a miscarriage. She

  hadn't needed to get married at all. When she started to miscarry, she

  fainted in a downtown department store, but her mother wouldn't

  take her to the hospital. She had to miscarry in secret at home.

  The poor slob on the other end of all this didn't like it any better

  than Brenda did, so as soon as she could she filed for divorce. That

  was the breaking point with her parents because she was the first

  person in their family who'd ever gotten a divorce. So from being a

  wonderful, overachieving, goody-two-shoes child, Brenda became

  overnight an alienated divorcee of twenty.

  She went to work for a tool company as an executive secretary,

  which seemed like a good gig, until she found out the job involved

  the executives' tools as well as the ones they sold. She quit after having to organize call girls for visiting salesmen—and being made to

  watch them at work, so she could give head herself.

  Today Dayton is just another struggling city in the Rust Belt.

  Back then, it had a tremendous industrial base: Frigidaire was there,

  National Cash Register, General Tire. When it still had jobs and

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  factories, it was a major stop on the entertainment circuit. Comedy

  and music acts used it as a kind of test market. Showbiz wisdom was

  that if it went over in Dayton, it would go over anywhere.

  One of the bigger venues in Dayton, out in a suburb called Kettering, was this place the Racquet Club. By day it was a swim and

  tennis club; at night it became a supper club with topflight entertainment.

  Brenda heard on the grapevine that the maître d' had had a heart

  attack. She immediately drove out there and said, "I heard your

  maître d' had a heart attack. I want his job." (She always had balls,

  Brenda.) They said, "Where have you worked?" She said, "I haven't,

  but I'm really good with people." They were desperate for somebody

  to front the place so they gave her a temporary tryout.

  She loved it and was really good at it. Her whole life began to

  center around the nightclub. Major acts came through all the time,

  including at one point in 1960 Lenny Bruce. He and Brenda became good friends—a platonic relationship according to Brenda; it

  was one of her friends he fucked—but they hung out, and had a

  great time.

  Brenda used to pick up money every night for the club. Lenny was

  staying at a motel nearby, so she'd pick him up too and drive him

  to work. One evening they were passing a field full of flowers and

  Lenny yells, "Stop the car!" He jumps out and starts running across

  the field, leaping around in the flowers and rolling in them and yelling gibberish. Brenda thought he was insane; she didn't realize he

  was high and just wanted to roll around in some flowers like any

  other junkie. Then he got back in the car, and they went to the club.

  The next Sunday he took things a step further: he sent her out to

  the airport to pick up a package. She drove out there, collected the

  package and drove back with it. He told her much later it was heroin.

  But what did she know? She was just doing stuff for her new friend.

  When he left, Lenny signed a picture for her: "You're going to have

  my baby. Love, Lenny."

  Lenny recommended Burns and Carlin to the Racquet Club and

  we got a booking there for August 1960. It was only our second or

  third engagement after Chicago. When our publicity photos came

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  in, apparently she and her roommate, Elaine, gave us the once-over.

  Brenda pointed at me and said, "He's mine." Elaine said, "Jack's

  mine." Fresh young meat they called us.

  Our first night she caught my eye. And I caught hers: she told me

  later I reminded her a lot of Lenny—the same body language. After

  our first show I went over to her and asked: "What do you do in a

  town like this?" She said, "You can go out to breakfast. Or you can

  find someone with a stereo and hi-fi and go home with them." I said,

  "Do you have a stereo and hi-fi?" She said, "I do." So she took me

  home. For two weeks. We clicked immediately. Our minds clicked,

  our humor clicked. We both had the same thought: "This is going

  to be fun!"

  Then the booking ended and it was time to leave. Brenda said she

  was in love. I didn't know if I was or not. But I knew it wasn't just

  another fling on the road. Which was what everyone at the club told

  Brenda after I'd gone: "You're never gonna see him again."

  Burns and Carlin got busy and Brenda had to go into the hospital to have her appendix out so we were both pretty occupied for

  a while. I knew I did want to see her again but I couldn't take the

  plunge because I knew also that if I did, something decisive would

  happen. I was nervous about what that would be. So I did nothing.

  Meanwhile Brenda's pining away, thinking her friends in the club

  were right after all and she'll never see me again. Finally I called

  and we talked and it was so easy I couldn't figure out why the fuck I

  hadn't done it before. I was going to be in Chicago on New Year's so

  I asked her to come up. She couldn't. I had a couple of things to do

  around Chicago but after that I said I'd drive to Dayton. I gave her a

  day to expect me.

  I got delayed for some reason for a couple of days, figuring I'd get

  there eventually. What I didn't know was that when I didn't show on

  the first day, Brenda cried all night. And when I didn't show the next

  day either, she cried all that night too. She was totally heartbroken,

  thought I was just screwing around with her.

  By now she was working lunches at the club as well as nights.

  When I finally got to Dayton a few days late, in early January, it happened to be lunchtime.

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  I go in the door and she's seating people, giving them menus, taking orders and so on, when suddenly she turns around and sees me

  in the doorway. She drops the menus, runs the entire length of the

  dining room, jumps into my arms, we go to a motel and no one sees

  us for three days.

  We lay in bed, we drank beer, I turned her on to grass for the first br />
  time. I asked her to marry me and she said, "Yes!"

  We had to tell her parents, so we met them for lunch and her

  mother was sitting there with this pinched and Protestant face.

  Brenda and I both had the same thought, which was basically.

  "Aargh!" We couldn't do it. So when Art had to go to the bathroom I

  went with him. And there, pissing side by side in our urinals, I said:

  " I ' d like to marry your daughter." He said: "Oh. Yeah. Okay."

  Her dad liked me and felt he had a connection with me because

  of his own showbiz experience. Art also liked his beer, which was

  something we definitely had in common. So there was an affinity.

  But not with her mother. When I told her, "I'm going to marry your

  daughter," she looked like she'd gone into shock. I don't know if she

  disliked me. She was kind of reserved. Probably she was just very

  skeptical of me—a comedian who worked in nightclubs? Where

  would that lead? But she saw her daughter was happy with me and

  for once dropped the adamant thing.

  At least she made Brenda's wedding dress.

  Then it was off to New York, For two reasons: to introduce her to

  my neighborhood and to meet my mother. In that order: getting a

  good review from my old gang was the most important. The place

  I picked for her debut appearance was a terrific White Harlem bar

  called the Moylan Tavern.

  The Moylan was on a street that's long gone called Moylan Place.

  Right under the El, off Broadway near 125th Street. They built a

  project over it.

  It was the classic New York saloon. Being on the common border of several neighborhoods, it had great cross-cultural influences.

  There were blacks and Puerto Ricans of all trades, seminarians from

  the Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, Irish construction workers, cops, firefighters, students and

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  professors from the Juilliard School of Music, Columbia and Teachers College, retired pensioners and young Irish bucks trying to earn

  their wings, every type of New Yorker rubbing up against one another and most of the time in a peaceful manner.