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was caught shoplifting film for his camera at a grocery store in town. “He left under a cloud,” recalls Cullum. “My uncle packed him up on a bus and sent him back to the city.” True to form, however, Carlin did not begrudge the camp director. In later years, after he’d made a name for himself, he sometimes returned to Camp Notre Dame to visit John Cullum.
    In New York the boy found himself increasingly attracted to trouble. Though Catholic school and summer camp had been Mary’s idea of instilling structure and discipline in her mischievous son, it was becoming abundantly clear they weren’t the solution—that there might be no solution. “That was her big thing—‘the boy has no male supervision at home,’” Carlin remembered. “As if that’s gonna help.” At ages twelve and thirteen he was hanging around the parks, drinking beer, talking about girls—“debs”—and running with classmates in would-be street gangs. They had jackets with gang names: “the Riffs and the Condors and the Beacons and the Corner Boys and the Lamp-lighters and the Chaplains and the Bishops.”
    Carlin claimed that in 1951 he and his friends began to experiment with marijuana, then a little-understood drug that appealed primarily to musicians and coffeehouse types. For city boys just entering their teens, it was a secret doorway to a forbidden world. For Carlin, the high let him dig deeper into a comic mind that was finding silliness in every facet of daily life. The mellow, goofy high stripped Carlin and his friends of their latent aggression: “In one semester, in shop class, guys went from making zip guns to hash pipes,” he joked.
    By then he was flirting with real delinquency. After getting caught stealing money from a locker room during a basketball game in seventh grade, Carlin was sent to a parochial school in Goshen, New York. Playing up his big-city sophistication on the playground, he showed two gullible classmates a bag of “heroin”—actually, colored erasers. The administrators sent him back to Corpus Christi, where he was told he would have to repeat a term before he could graduate. Carlin pleaded with the administration to let him graduate with the students he’d known since first grade. The nuns made him a deal: Write the year-end play, and you may graduate on time. “It was called ‘How Do You Spend Your Leisure Time?’” Carlin told Playboy in 1982. “Once again, I was rewarded for my cleverness, my show-business skills.”
    Carlin’s mother enrolled him in Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic boys’ school for middle-class families who couldn’t afford the city’s more expensive private schools. Tuition was five dollars a semester when the school opened on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 1941. Carlin’s brother had preceded him at Cardinal Hayes, graduating in 1948. “Going to Hayes was absolutely the coolest thing you could do coming out of eighth grade,” Carlin recalled years later. He looked up to Patrick: “He could dance good, he could fight good, he could talk his ass off on the corner. And he went to Hayes. . . . My brother even claimed you could make out better if you went to Hayes.”
    Hayes had a championship marching band, and Carlin joined it as a trumpeter. He’d had a subscription to Down Beat from the age of twelve; like so many city kids of the time, he was also a big fan of the R&B vocal groups of the pre-rock ’n’ roll era. He chose the trumpet, he said, because there happened to be one in the family apartment: “I think my brother stole it at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” (“I really wanted to play a stringed instrument, but they told me the yo-yo was out,” he joked at a Hayes reunion years later.) He lasted one year in the band, marching but never blowing a note. “My reasoning was, people can see me marching, but no one can hear me not playing.” He did, however, participate enthusiastically in the football chants, especially enjoying the ones