Jim Norton - I Hate Your Guts

This book is dedicated to anyone who sits in front of the

television screaming Fuck you! for at least two hours a day.

Bad hair daywhere did this shit come from? What a superficial culture. Put on a hat and go to work, you shallow cunt.

GEORGE CARLIN, twentieth-century American poet

(917) 267-2602

This is a legitimate phone number. I listen to messages left here, and at times respond to them. Its not a scam; check it out on my MySpace page if youre skeptical (Myspace.com/jimnorton). Leave a message, tell me how much you loved the book. Or hated it. Or whatever else you want to tell me.

GEORGE CARLIN

died yesterday and Im goddamn depressed about it. He had a career that spanned fifty years and included fourteen HBO specials, so maybe I shouldnt be depressed about it. But I am. Im sad and distracted and have been crying like a little fruit off and on for the last twenty-four hours.

Late last night I wanted to forget my troubles, so I figured Id sit on the bowl and drop a few logs. For some people its chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, for me its shitting. While perched on the toilet, the thought, This is the first dump Ive ever taken without George Carlin being on the earth actually flashed through my mind, so I glanced around for a pistol to straighten myself out with. A marble-size nugget dropped into the water like a wedding ring. I pulled my pants up without flushing or wiping, and slinked into bed. And tonight is no better. I just feeloff. Empty. I tried having sex, and opted out after three minutes because my cock had the stability of the Somalian parliament. Hard to explain to a woman how youd love to fuck, but you just cant seem to get this cantankerous, seventy-one-year-old dead genius off your mind

First Pryor, now Carlin. Their being gone somehow makes me feel older; more alone. Especially George, who had been actively performing and shooting specials almost right up until the day he died. To so many comics, he was kind of a creative and professional father figure. No mat ter what the current event was, he did a better job addressing it than the rest of us. As much as I loved him, he depressed me by showing the greatness a comic could achieve. He was a constant and prolific barometer and I was never going to quite measure up.

Watching him perform made it feel cheesy and unsatisfying to go onstage and tap dance for approval. He made me feel compelled to be honest, regardless of how the audience felt about my opinions. And he was omnipresent, because whenever you felt lazy or complacent about diving into new materialhovering there, shaming you, was Carlin. And just when you thought you had him figured out morally, hed turn and bite the throat out of whichever ideology he appeared to have his arm around the shoulder of.

Like or dislike him, agree or disagree with him, he was what all comedians dream of being when we start out; he was pure. He wasnt known as an actor, a personality, or a shitty humoristhe was a comic. A belligerent, taunting asshole of a comic. And he was beautiful. Hed go onstage, completely un-needy, never asking the audience for a goddamn thing, other than to remain attentive while he kicked them squarely in the balls. He attacked conservative and liberal institutions with equal harshness and disdain. And his attacks were visceral and precise. I think his greatest gift was his uncanny ability to reach into the guts of something and immediately expose the phony, embarrassing nature of its core. The one advantage to being a virtual nobody is that I never had to endure being deconstructed by him.

Many of the cultural abominations Carlin detested so much were being actively practiced by members of his audience. That never deterred him. In fact, it seemed to fuel him to drive the message home harder: Since youre the people Im talking about, here are the things youll need to stop doing if youd like me to stop attacking you. His almost sociopathic lack of begging, lack of asking the audience for one ounce of agreement, is something Ill never stop being in awe of. And it never felt like Carlin was out to shock or offend an audience; he was simply telling the truth. How they handled it was up to them.

Recently, George came into the studio, and I was able to interview/ hang with him with Op & Ant. He stayed on for about forty minutes and talked about being old and dying. He also talked about how Islam is eventually going to win the religious war because theyre relentless. In typical, brutally honest Carlin fashion, he pointed out that hed probably be dead by then, butand he smiled when he said thismany of us would still be alive to feel the blade. We laughed, but it was also chilling in a way, because he obviously meant it.

The first time I met George was in January 1990 (three months before I ever set foot onstage myself), after taping his HBO special Doin It Again at the State Theater in New Jersey. (If you watch the special, you can catch quick glances of my idiotic face about three rows back, center stage.) I wanted to meet him, so I blatantly lied to his road manager at the foot of the stage and told him I was a comedian. He looked around conspiratorially and sighed, Alright, come on, and brought my friend Gary and me backstage. It was my first time ever being backstage and I handled it with the same calm collectedness Travis Bickle displayed when mingling with Secret Service agents. There was a shitload of people there, and eventually Carlin wandered in and greeted everyone. I nervously introduced myself, so of course he made fun of my last name, mentioned hed just quit drinking coffee, and signed my ticket. I told him I wanted to do stand-up, and he was friendly and encouraging, although I cant remember a fucking word he said. (Proving what a horses ass I am. I had the rare opportunity to get comedy advice from George Carlin, and my brain decided that his quitting coffee was a more important fact to remember.)

The next time we met was almost fourteen years later, on the set of Tough Crowd. In Happy Endings, I described the Act 3 sketch I did with Colin and George. They played priests and I was the altar boy who interrupted the scene to get a Carlin album signed. He called Colin and me cocksucking motherfuckers, which was not only funny, but behaviorally accurate. We also did Acts 1, 2, and 4 together. George and I sat on the couch (as it should have been, the two celebrities), and Nick DiPaolo and Greg Giraldo were across from us. What struck me that day was how we were all on our best behavior in front of Carlin. Typically, we would have been attacking each other, but not on that day. We all did our thing, but there was an unspoken reverence for George. An adoration. Whenever he started to speak, the four other big mouths on the panel slammed shut and waited for him. And it wasnt an issue of his fame. Other famous comics had been on, and at best had been interrupted, at worst had been yelled at.

As much as I loved our third act together, it wasnt my favorite moment of the day. That happened earlier. Before the audience was seated, we got called down to the stage for rehearsal and blocking. (Carlin wanted no special treatment; he came down and went through the annoying camera blocking with the rest of us.) Afterward, when we were upstairs, I was walking by Georges dressing room. As I passed his door, he called out, Hey, Jim. I went into his dressing room, attempting to look casual. (I didnt feel casual. I wanted to kangaroo-hop down the hallway screaming, George Carlin finally knows my name, you faggots!)

As I entered, he held up a bunch of 3x6 note cards, and asked me where I hid my notes on the set. Since I knew where he was sitting, I told him where he could hide his papers on the little table next to the couch without the camera seeing them. I guess what I loved so much about that moment was that a comedian of his magnitude cared enough about being funny on the show to have notes prepared. He didnt take the laughs for granted. More important, I loved that he was the same neurotic schmuck that I was about hiding them on the set. And of course, that when he needed to know where to hide them, he saw me walking by, and thought, Jims a comic, Ill ask him. At least thats how I chose to see it. He very well may have asked the first two-legged creature he saw, which just happened to be me. Am I creating a comedian bonding moment out of a random question that had nothing to do with me as a comic and everything to do with me waltzing by an open door as he thought of it? Probably.