Read God, if You're Not Up There . . . Online
Authors: Darrell Hammond
God, if You're Not Up There . . .
God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked
Tales of Stand-Up,
Saturday Night Live
, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem
Darrell Hammond
To the boys from Hell’s Kitchen:
Marty Hennessy, Bobby Spillane,
and Big Mike Canosa
And to Myrtise
Contents
The Hall
The Golden Years
There’s Something Wrong Here
From Hell to Hell’s Kitchen
It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
God, If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked
Blood on the Floor
What You Didn’t See
You Want Me To Go
Where
?
I’ll Show You Multiple Personality Disorder, Pal
I Saw What You Did, and I Know Who You Are
A Host of Hosts
Politics for Dummies
My Welcome Outstayed Me
The Golden Years Redux
I Mean It This Time
Honest
Westchester County, New York
November 2010
Y
ou know what’s worse than being in rehab? Being in rehab over the holidays. You know what’s worse than that? Being in a rehab that doesn’t allow smoking. I mean, what the fuck? Addicts smoke. If we can’t drink, we can’t shoot up, and we can’t ride the lightning bolt, at least we can smoke.
I was sent to the Sanctuary, a few miles north of New York City, via ambulance in the fall of 2010 after getting drunk and trying to cut my arm off with a large kitchen knife. It is one of the best psychiatric and rehabilitation facilities in the country. I was put in the “celebrity ward,” which drew its share of boldfaced names—award-winning actors, sports stars, European royalty—but there are also wards for specific mental illnesses—depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders—and a criminal unit filled with dealers, streetwalkers, thieves, and assorted other miscreants who were there by order of the court.
Deprived of my freedom, separated from my family, I was one of the lucky ones being given yet another chance. It sucked.
I’ve been hospitalized or shipped off to rehab so many times that I’ve honestly lost count. But each one had its own particular brand of hell. The program at the Sanctuary proudly boasted of its success in bringing addicts back to health while generously providing all the butter-laden cookies and cream-filled pastries we could cram into our alcohol-starved, sugar-craving mouths. Hell, I put on twelve pounds in the first three weeks trying to get “healthy.”
Meanwhile, the ferret-faced floor wardens were always looking to bust us for any infraction. There was one nurse there, an attractive, muscular woman in her forties who we called Strap-On because she was constantly reaming someone for some petty crime. She and one of the “tough love” counselors busted us for smoking numerous times. Each room had its own bathroom, and when she caught me hanging out the window of mine with a lit cigarette, she announced it loudly to all within earshot, “He’s smoking in the bathroom!” as though she’d discovered Satan carving his initials in a church pew.
So to avoid her wrath, and if it wasn’t too cold or snowing, the smokers would wander out of the building, down a flagstone path that wound across the finely manicured grounds, to The Tree, the worst-kept secret in the place. An ancient cedar encircled by a layer of dead butts like some weird white-and-tan mulch, it was wide enough and tall enough and just far away enough to hide a grown man getting his nicotine on.
By Thanksgiving Day, I’d been in this rehab for three weeks, and I’d run out of cigarettes. My family wasn’t speaking to me, and my friends were all doing their own thing for the holiday, so no pumpkin pie and stuffing for me. Some of the other patients were spending time with their loved ones in the glassed-in sunroom, awkwardly trying to act “normal.” I figured I’d take a stroll by The Tree to see if any of the other smoker derelicts were there, so I tiptoed past and out the door.
Bingo. Annabelle, a stunning mocha-skinned hooker from Philly, was sucking on a Marlboro Red. Annabelle’s lawyer had convinced a judge when she got done for possession that she needed a doctor more than a jail, so she wound up here instead of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, where such lovelies as Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita who shot her lover Joey Buttafuoco’s wife in the face, have done hard time. Annabelle had been at the Sanctuary about a week.
“Hey, Joe.” Everybody knew me as Joe. I hadn’t been on TV in a while—my last appearance on
Saturday Night Live
, a cameo as Arnold Schwarzenegger on “Weekend Update,” was a year earlier—but I wasn’t in the mood to be recognized while I got myself sorted out, so I checked in under a false name. Unlike certain celebrities who like to share their meltdowns with Matt Lauer or TMZ, I prefer to bring the heavens crashing down around me in private.
“Hi there,” I said. Gorgeous as she was, I couldn’t take my eyes off her cigarette.
Annabelle caught me looking. “You want a drag?”
I took the butt from her extended hand. The cherry red lipstick on the filter was definitely not my color, but I didn’t care. Those two puffs were about the best I ever had.
“Thank you,” I said. “I owe you.” I noticed her hand was trembling when she took the cigarette back from me. From the cold or withdrawal, I couldn’t tell which.
“No problem, Joe,” she said. Then, smiling, “Now say it like Bill Clinton.”
The Hall
Studio 8H, 30 Rockefeller Center
New York City
1995
T
o say it’s intimidating to walk into 30 Rockefeller Center to audition for
Saturday Night Live
is one of the century’s greatest understatements. The building itself, once known as the RCA Building until GE bought the company and NBC along with it, is one of the city’s great landmarks, built during the Depression in classic Art Deco style. You could get dizzy looking up at the Josep Maria Sert mural
Time
on the ceiling above the main entrance. Thank God it was summer, because if the enormous Christmas tree had been up out front, I’d probably have passed out.
Trying to ignore the hordes of tourists lined up to take the NBC tour, I checked in at the security desk—
Yes, Mr. Hammond, here’s your pass, go on up, they’re expecting you
—and stepped into the same elevator that for two decades had ferried a seemingly endless cavalcade of comedians to stardom.
I got out on the eighth floor and was escorted to makeup, where a lovely young lady dabbed me with powder to douse the shine of nervous sweat on my forehead. At least I had a few months of sobriety under my belt, so I didn’t have withdrawal shakes. Although I could have killed for a slug of gin right about then.
When I’d been sufficiently fluffed and primped, I was led into the theater that I’d fantasized about forever, Studio 8H, or the Hall, as I call it, where legends like George Carlin, Buck Henry, and Andy Kaufman had performed, a few feet from where the Rolling Stones and David Bowie have played, and where Lorne Michaels, who hatched this comedy phenomenon a generation earlier to replace weekend reruns of
The
Tonight Show
, was sitting on a chair in front of me.
I almost said, “You know what? I’m thirty-nine years old. I’m on lithium. Do you know what lithium is for? If I may quote the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health:
Lithium is used to treat and prevent episodes of mania (frenzied, abnormally excited mood) in people with bipolar disorder (manic-depressive disorder; a disease that causes episodes of depression, episodes of mania, and other abnormal moods). Lithium is in a class of medications called antimanic agents. It works by decreasing abnormal activity in the brain.
“So yeah, it’s too late, and I’m too fucking scared, and apparently I have abnormal activity in my brain. Thank you. Good-bye.”
Lorne looked at me and said, “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I lied.
Then he smiled at me.
Fuck it, now I have to go through with it.
I had been asked to do ten minutes, which is an eternity. I proceeded to peel off every impression, like Phil Donahue speaking Spanish, that I could pull together in the short amount of time that I’d been given to prepare. But really, I’d been preparing for the previous twelve years for a moment like this.
When I left, I thought, If my life ends right now, it’s okay. I was in that theater. Lorne Michaels was there. And I performed well, despite my terror. Whether I was any good or not was immaterial. I knew I wasn’t going to get called back.
And yet I was. Lorne wanted to see if I had any more impressions, so I came up with Ted Koppel in German and another ten or so and did it all over again a week later.
I guess I did okay, because then Lorne wanted to see me move on my feet. He took me to the Comic Strip. Fuck,
that
place?
Really
? I’d been dismissed by a lot of New York clubs, but the Comic Strip held a special place in my pantheon of rejection.
When I auditioned there in 1990, I had as great a set as I’d had up to that point. I totally killed. Afterward, Lucien Hold, the manager of the club, who was renowned for having discovered comic greats like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Adam Sandler, sat me down in a booth up front.