She Likes to Watch

Today, Tribune blogger Pat Pemberton and I pay tribute to a former Central Coast resident.

Born in Stockton, Marcus Fuhrman attended Cuesta College and Cal Poly in the late 1960s and was stationed at Camp San Luis Obispo through the mid-‘70s. He later became a high school English teacher.

Fuhrman died April 29 in a small town outside of Page, Ariz. He was 59.

This afternoon, family and friends are holding a celebration of his life at Shoshone Point, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

Tribune staffer Jay Thompson became friends with Fuhrman in 1981 while the two were working as waiters at the Moqui Lodge, a 135-room resort near the southernmost border of Grand Canyon National Park.

Known jokingly as “The Last Resort,” Moqui was established in the late 1920s

Moqui became a landmark in the mid-1960s due to its glass-fronted A-frame. The resort was demolished in November 2005.

As Jay shared, “Serving the public can be tough. Some nights, it’s a job just to survive. Maybe it’s like going to war where your fellow waiters cover your back.”

Here are a few of Marcus Fuhrman’s thoughts on life at Moqui Lodge, told to Jay in 2006:

On living at Moqui:

We moved there from Death Valley in 1981 to ’85. We had an Airstream trailer we later sold to Billy Two-Beers and bought a doublewide in Tusayan. We borrowed Dave Miller’s Dodge and dragged it to the Moqui on a Sunday so the sheriff wouldn’t be around. We were probably the first doublewide. We were the only ones with kids back then.

On the “sweet mix”:

I’ve been in some pretty cool times and places with people, with different activities, situations and different types of social groups … and Moqui … it was just a sweet mix. It was a little bit on the outside of the company’s strong thumb, so we were a little loosey-goosey out there. It might have been the altitude, I don’t know.

On the people:

It was a little bit Looney Tunes. (Moqui) was a little campground for crazy people who didn’t fit traditional careers. There were some odd people who could survive there and have some sense of a normal life even though no one was normal.

On the dining room:

It was so fun, man. It was the craziest dining room. I liked going to work because you didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. One night a big old lady on a German tour fell down and had a heart attack. Somebody else lost their whole tray of food … like six plates. Some doofus who didn’t know how to set his tray. They pulled from the wrong side and it was unbalanced and the whole thing slipped over. It was so funny.

On the challenges of waiting tables:

I liked waiting tables because it demanded so much of me — quickness and memory and anticipation and planning and speed and accuracy. But customers could very easily make me feel subservient. It didn’t take much — a look, a word, an attitude or a kind of brush-off.

Maybe one out of 20 tables I’d get that sense. But the other 19 it was like a challenge: Go get them, bust them, dominate them with dialogue or interest — draw them out and find out who they are.

The coolest part of living at Moqui:

It was when we closed after New Year’s. They had a big New Year’s party. Everybody worked and then we hung out. The next day we would watch whatever game was on New Year’s Day … And then two months of quiet.

On the magic of Moqui:

I don’t know when I learned it, but I learned a long time ago for me my time does not belong to somebody else. And the time I get on this planet I just want it to be full of people and experiences that are memorable and important and intimate.

So Moqui fit that for us. It let you leave cheap. I mean we paid $50 a month rent then. It was cheap and easy and they left you alone. That was it. It was a very simple life.

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Blog entry composed by Jay Thompson.

To learn more about Moqui Lodge and the 100 resort workers who called it home, click here.

To see a slide show, click here for Mac computers and here for PCs.

News of George Carlin’s death spread this week like a slow red tide.

Carlin, the counter-culture comedian known for his smart, sarcastic take on drugs, dirty words and the decline of human civilization, died of heart failure in Santa Monica on Sunday.

Since Carlin had a history of heart attacks and drug addition, his death at age 71 didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

Still, most people — like me — were taken aback by the loss of one of America’s funniest sages.

When I interviewed the bald, bearded comedian in September 2007, Carlin was on a national tour and preparing for his 14th and final comedy special for HBO. (”It’s Bad For Ya” aired this March.)

On stage, Carlin’s natural pessimism came to audiences tempered with gallows’ humor and a sly, sideways grin. The ship might be sinking, he seemed to say, but at least we were in the same doomed boat.

In person, though, there was little to temper the bitterness behind the comedian’s astute observations.

My first thought was, “Man, this guy is depressed.”

“I didn’t really care about my culture or my country. I really don’t have any emotional stake in either of them anymore,” Carlin told me, back in 2007. “I’ve kind of given myself a divorce from the Homo Sapien species … I’ll still live here and I’ll still take advantage to the things that are afforded me, because anything else would be stupid.”

“But, at the same time,” he added, “I don’t really participate emotionally in the American drama. I don’t really care what the outcome is. I have a suspicion, a very strong one, that this country is breathing its last gasps and maybe a hundred years is left.”

Not exactly inspiring words.

“I try to be skeptical,” he explained. “I try not to just believe everything I’m told, and I try to be realistic about what the world is, not what some people wish it would be.”

Carlin, of course, had reason to be realistic.

Raised Irish-Catholic and poor in a New York neighborhood, he grew up with an absent father and a working mother. He witnessed America grow in the prosperous ’50s and ’60s. He watched hope and freedom flourish, while he worked to establish his career.

Then, as Carlin battled relationship problems and drug addiction, he watched as almost every promise from the Summer of Love was betrayed by decades of greed and political maneuvering.

As he told me, “They say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist. I would have to admit to some version of that being true for me, way down deep beneath the surface.”

Added Carlin,”For those who wonder why I’m angry, I’m not angry. … What (people) hear on stage that they think is anger is disappointment and disillusionment with my fellow humans and my fellow Americans because they’re pursued such a silly path.

“They’ve made all the wrong decisions about how to organize themselves, and I just think it’s stupid. And stupidity sometimes will make you a little bit impatient. So that’s what it is.”

There you have it, folks: Brilliant. Edgy. And not afraid to speak his mind.

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As tributes to Carlin pour in, here are a few that have caught my eye.

Here, you can read two interviews done by The Onion AV Club in 1999 and 2005.

Entertainment Weekly blogger Gary Susman shares his thoughts, along with a few video clips.

Director Kevin Smith, who directed Carlin in “Dogma,” “Jersey Girl” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” speaks here.

And here’s a great picture, courtesy of The Associated Press and The Los Angeles Times: Carlin being led away by police during his 1972 arrest on obscenity charges.

But it really doesn’t get much better than this New York Times op-ed by — who else? — Jerry Seinfeld.