God, if You're Not Up There . . . (12 page)

I didn’t think anything of it when this old guy in the audience fell asleep during my show. I’d seen plenty of people in audiences catching a nap, and these were old folks with more rich food and liquor in their systems than they were probably accustomed to. I once did
Macbeth
in summer stock, the straw-hat circuit in Rhode Island, and people would routinely snooze during the show. The actors weren’t bums, they were talented people. The guy playing Macbeth would be up there doing his most stentorian baritone, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . It is a tale told by an idiot.” And you’d hear snoring from the seats. So when the geezer went face-first into his scampi, I was just grateful that his snores weren’t drowning me out.

It wasn’t until my set was done and the lights came up and the old dude didn’t move that one of the waitresses went over and tapped him on the shoulder to wake him up. When she didn’t get a response, she looked over at me and said, “I guess you killed.”

Uh, that’s not what I had in mind.

T
he ship’s bar might as well have been the crew’s quarters. A lot of those people had given themselves to the sea years ago. They were career ship guys. There were comics and croupiers and staffers, all kinds of folks who got lured into the idea of room and board for five years and good money and health insurance, and never left. I could see why. The ocean is hypnotic. But the isolation of being out there working as a comic and not knowing anyone on the whole ship can cause a person to, shall we say, compensate.

On one cruise, I was introduced to a cocktail called the B52. I don’t even know what’s in a B52—Kahlua, ouzo, cream, Clorox, rifle cleaner—but it’ll set you right. The night I had my first B52, I joined the band for a rousing rending of “Honky Tonk Women,” in which I did a fair-to-middling Mick Jagger.

There were a lot of English people working on the ships, and I was enchanted by them. I loved their manners, the way they spoke, especially the ones whose accents leaned a little toward cockney or North London. That accent was deliriously wonderful. I’d hear them refer to their mums, and think, I’m actually experiencing another culture for the first time
.
I used to want to go up to them and say, “Can
everyone
in your country act? Like
all
of them?” But I never did. Instead I drank B52s.

After my second or third B52, I danced, and I don’t dance. There’s a reason for that. One day when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I was hanging out in my room listening to the radio when some great song came on, Smokey Robinson or James Brown or the Supremes, and I started moving to the groove. My father suddenly loomed large in the doorway and glared at me as if I were responsible for the Black Death. I never danced after that. (A few years ago, I was invited to be a contestant on
Dancing with the Stars
. I called my agent and said, “Tell them I’ll be happy to do the show as long as there’s no dancing.”)

But there I was out on the briny deep doing a fair Mick Jagger and dancing with some very interesting British people. Amazing what circumstance and sixty-seven B52s will do.

A
t that time, I used to get down on my knees and pray before I went out with the English girls to drink.
I know I’m going to get drunk tonight, but please—please—don’t let me break my nose again.
I’d broken it the first time playing baseball in junior college, and then twice more on the cruise ships: once falling downstairs, and another time falling into a doorknob. There’s nothing like being at sea with a broken nose.

One night, after another Rubbermaid garbage can full of B52s, one of the English girls gave me a copy of the book
The Shining.
Another girl gave me a tape of the sound track to
The Omen.
They said, “We like to smoke dope and listen to this. It’s really freaky when you look out at the ocean, and you see all the black water.” They thought it was a joke, but for me, it was a little too close to home.
Whoa.

O
n my last Disney cruise to the Bahamas, the ship pulled into Freeport on a Thursday night, with nowhere to be until an hour before setting sail the next morning. Was it a coincidence that Freeport didn’t exist before I was born in 1955? As far as Freeport is concerned, I wouldn’t mind if the world wanted to go back to 1954. Who builds a major city out of nothing but fifty thousand acres of scrubland and swamp? What is this, Florida? I guess it makes sense, since Florida is only sixty-five miles away. Three-quarters of the Bahamian population lives in Freeport, meaning the laid-back emptiness of the islands you see in the travel brochures has been replaced in the capital by streets both narrow and heaving. But if you run a business there, the name Freeport is apt at least: no one’s paying any taxes on anything till 2054, so it has the feeling of the Wild West, only with bigger ships, seedier bars, and a mighty chill accent.

On this particular Thursday, I found myself at a bar on the main drag. The place was filled with tourists, refugees from other cruise ships, locals. The bartender served these killer drinks made with
four
shots of rum apiece. In the space of a few delicious hours, I’d had four of them. I was having a blast.

I stumbled up a long, narrow flight of stairs to the bathroom to take a leak. A guy I’d been chatting with at the bar stumbled up the stairs with me. I didn’t think much of it until he tried to sell me some coke. I didn’t really feel like it, so I declined. But while I’m at the urinal with my dick in my hand, he’s giving me the hard sell. “Just try a sample. You like it, tell your friends.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about it, but I was pretty wasted, and I really wanted this guy to go away so I could piss in peace. With the hand that wasn’t holding my johnson, I reached into my pocket for the small wad of bills I still had and pressed them into the guy’s hand. The guy stuffed the wad into his pocket and handed me a bunched-up dollar bill. I stashed the dollar in my pocket, zipped up, and headed back to the bar, relieved to have gotten rid of him.

I never made it down the stairs. Two cops were waiting for me outside the bathroom door. They patted me down, found the bunched-up dollar in my pants, saw that it was dusted with white powder, and put me in cuffs.

I was so drunk it seemed funny at the time. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that the situation was no joke. A security guard for the ship watched me being taken away in chains like I was disappearing into a pool of sharks.

I
don’t remember much about the first jail, but in the morning I was transferred to another holding cell. It was about twenty by thirty feet and windowless, so I couldn’t really tell if it was day or night. It was so hot it was hard to breathe. There were no beds, no chairs, no toilets. I asked the guard on the first day if I could go to the bathroom. When he took me there, I said, “There’s no toilet paper.” He screamed at me, “Do your business!” I thought, Fuck me. Sixteen shots of rum—career move, Darrell. Nice going.

We had to sleep on the stone floor, which hadn’t been cleaned since viruses were invented. I was sweating and filthy, and they’d taken my lithium away from me. I used my Reeboks as a pillow and finally fell into an exhausted sleep. I began to dream of the stream that ran behind our house in Melbourne when I was a kid, swinging out over the sun-dappled water on a rope with my friends, and the laughter and the color and the smell of the leaves and the trees. The utter joy. When I came to, I was still in that putrid cell.

Other prisoners came and went. At one point, one of the other prisoners said or did something to piss off one of the guards, and the guard hit him with a stick. The guy was bloodied and stunned, and he sat there for a long moment before he reached into his mouth and pulled out what looked like a tooth. Then he shit himself.

The captain of the guards came and whispered to me, “You’re not in America anymore. You’re going to do serious time.”

There was a guy in the cell with me who’d driven his car into a store and killed somebody. If I’d been that guy, yeah, all right, you got me. But I’m locked up for partying?

I asked for a Bible. The harshest guard in the world is probably going to give you a Bible no matter how much of a scumbag they think you are. I started reading the Twenty-third Psalm. I figured it was worth a shot.

I’d heard one of the guards say something about my going before a judge on Monday, so I told myself if I could just get to Monday, I’d be okay. I walked back and forth in the dark saying, “One second less. One second less. One second less.” I wanted it to end. In fear for my sanity and my life, I wasn’t thinking about my root chakras, my 401(k), New Year’s resolutions, or combination skin and frizzies. I didn’t think I was going to make it. I’d rather they just shot me than leave me in the dark for one more day with other people’s shit on the floor. They had put guys in solitary in Alcatraz, the toughest motherfuckers in the world, and they had broken in the dark and silence. I was just trying to not cry or yell. That was my prayer.
Hey, God, don’t know if you’re there, hoping that you are. If you are, I would like to not start screaming at my trial. If you aren’t, I’m fucked.

At some point they let me use the phone. In my desperation, I called my father, and as soon as I told him what had happened, he slipped into military mode, making plans to get me out, whatever it took.

The second night I was in jail, three big dudes came into my cell. They introduced themselves as being from some drug enforcement agency.

“DEA?” I asked.

“No, no. Not DEA.” Without fanfare or really any interest in me at all, they said, “If you can give us thirty-five hundred dollars American cash, you can walk out of here tonight.”

“I don’t know anyone who has thirty-five hundred.” I had just made $2,000 working on the ship, but I couldn’t get to it. “My father is coming down here Monday. Can you wait till then?”

“No.” And they left.

On Sunday night, one of the guards, an enormous man named Stanley, came to my cell and in this sleepy voice called my name.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I got popped,” I said. “I had a dollar bill that they said had coke in it. I don’t know what it was.”

“Man, you’re not a criminal. You don’t belong here.”

Stanley took me out of the cell and gave me barbecued chicken and collard greens. Up until that I had only had grits and ham and a cup of water three times a day. The chicken was glorious. And he gave me a
USA Today
sports page.

“You know you’ve got about a fifty-fifty chance of making it out of here, right?” he said.

No, I didn’t know.

“No prior offenses anywhere?”

“No.”

“If you get the right judge, he’ll fine you. Wrong judge? You will stay in that cell you’re in two to three years.”

Then he turned and started talking to his friends. I couldn’t really follow what they were saying, but they seemed to be religious, God-fearing men. I heard one of Stanley’s friends say, “Make me an instrument of Thy peace.”

I finished my meal, and Stanley said it was time to go back into my cell. “Good luck tomorrow.”

I’d been in there three days without my meds, and my mental state was deteriorating fast. Stanley’s act of kindness got me through that final night.

Monday morning I was led across a dusty courtyard to the courthouse in chains while everyone else was going on about their lives. Talking. Laughing. Slapping one another on the back. Making plans. Eating. Smoking. And I wanted to say, “Excuse me, hello? There’s a man in chains here?”

When I arrived at the courthouse, my father was standing there with a briefcase filled with cash.

I looked at him and said, “This is gonna be okay, right?”

“I wish I could tell you that,” he said, “but I don’t know.” It was really not the answer I was hoping for.

While we were talking, a guy came up to us and said in a rich Bahamian accent, “I’ll get your son off for five hundred dollars.”

My father didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll give you two hundred right now. And I’ll give you another three hundred if you get him off. That’s your five. You can get him off?”

The guy said, “Yes, I can.” Very confident.

I thought, It’s that easy to get a person out of this near-death experience?

I had no choice but to trust him.

I must have inherited something from my father, that I walked into that courtroom with my head up.

In the courtroom, my “lawyer” argued that I had such a small amount of whatever it was, it couldn’t even be weighed. “It’s just dust, your worshipfulness,” he said.

The judge seemed to consider the paperwork in front of him with practiced expertise. He looked down at his desk, and then across the room at me. He said, “Will the defendant please rise?”

I stood, and as I did, I felt that familiar sense of calm, God’s presence or whatever it was. I guess it’s what you feel when you nod at the hangman and say, “Okay, I’m ready.” You are at that moment of acceptance.

The judge fined me $1,500 and told me that as soon as I paid and signed a few papers, I’d be free to go.

The guy who sold me the drugs was in the prisoners’ docket with me. The bailiff, who must have been new, said, “What about him, your worshipfulness?”