God, if You're Not Up There . . . (13 page)

The police and court officers laughed, and the judge waved him off like he was an idiot for asking. “Charges dropped!”

As my father and I were leaving, we saw the dealer smoking a cigarette with the cops on the courthouse steps. My father looked at him with an expression that said,
You know I’m killing you, right
?

O
n the plane back to Florida, my father worked out his revenge plans, figuring out which guys he’d known from the war were still alive, guys who for the right price would function as mercenaries.

“I’m going to rent a house down there, and we’re all going to go in there, and everyone who works in that jail is getting killed. We’re going to make sure that fucking captain is there. He’s getting killed. And that guy that gave you the fucking drugs, he’s getting killed. I just have to work it out.”

He was planning to smuggle in an arsenal a little bit at a time by boat, get an apartment to stash everything in, and then go down to that police station and kill everyone. I wondered briefly if he’d actually do it.

To me, that was just Dad. That’s how he thought.

T
he night I got back to New York, I got a good drunk on at Dangerfield’s. Drinking rum for only the second time in my life (because that first time had gone so well), I got it into my head to head downtown to the Ravenite Social Club—words to chill the hearts of any law-abiding mobster caught bad-mouthing the Gotti family at a Bensonhurst barbeque. Located at 247 Mulberry Street in what is now the last sliver of Little Italy that hasn’t been swallowed by Chinatown, the club was where John Gotti held court, sort of the Gambino crime family’s HQ. That is, until the killjoys at the Federal Bureau of Investigation bugged a third-floor apartment, and bingo—down came the indictments. It didn’t help that underboss Sammy “The Bull” Gravano turned state’s evidence, either.

My favorite story I ever heard about the Ravenite is the bomb someone left outside the club for Gotti in 1989. “A gift for John Gotti,” the thoughtful card accompanying it read. The “bomb” turned out to be a box of salt, basically, wired without a full circuit. That said, you have to hate someone pretty hard to leave a bomb outside their club, especially when it’s the head of the Gambinos and he knows how to dismember you. (I guess some people are still pissed off. There was a comment posted in May 2011 on YouTube under a video about the Ravenite that reads, “I’m gonna cut your balls off and make you eat ’em you fuck,
R.I.P JOHN GOTTI THE KING OF NEW YORK
.”)

But I was fascinated by guys who didn’t take shit—boxers, soldiers, cops, Mafiosi—so I was thinking,
Maybe the Don will let me work for him. And after a while, he’ll whack those guys for me.
That’s how much rum I drank.

If you ask a cop, he’s going to tell you that people who drink too much can think crazy thoughts. I once left a bar in Mexico after a night of drinking that tequila with the worm in it, because I was convinced I had to get up early to try out for the Yankees. The same thing happened to me years later when I got a colonoscopy, and the doctor gave me the same stuff Michael Jackson was taking when he died: propofol. It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I went to my shrink afterward and she said, “Look at you! What’s going on with you? You seem so clear and bright and crisp.”

I was writing jokes in the cab, thinking, I’m going to write the greatest comic novel of all time, or I’m going to learn to pole-vault—today. Either one. I think I’m going to pencil that in. Going down the West Side Highway, the cab passed the Trapeze School in Hudson River Park at Houston Street, and I thought, How come I never did that? Well, there’s still time. I could totally do the Flying Wallenda thing.

I was noticing the architecture. Wow, I’ve got to read that Frank Lloyd Wright someday. Yeah, I’m going to do that. Read Frank Lloyd Wright, learn how to be a trapeze artist, write a monologue for Jay, and pole-vault.

I even forgave the nurse for asking me in her heavy Slavic accent as I was going under with a camera about to be stuck up my ass: “What would Clinton say now?”

Anyway, the last thing I remember about that night in Little Italy was getting out of the cab and seeing four imposing gentleman in suits standing by the door to the Ravenite Club. I woke up on a sand pile in the alley behind the club. I looked myself over to see what kind of shape I was in. My wallet was still in my pocket, the money in the billfold. But then I looked down and saw that my sports jacket was covered with dark red splotches. As I sat up in alarm, the situation became clear—those red splotches weren’t blood, they were marinara sauce. Evidently, I’d eaten well.

W
hen my daughter was born, it wasn’t so much a mystical touched-by-God moment as it was empirical proof of His existence. When I saw my daughter’s face for the first time, that word came to me:
impossible.
But I was starting to understand that my whole life was about impossible shit. In any given week, I faced the impossible.
I’ve got to write an eight-minute set for my appearance on
Conan
. I have to learn four impressions on
SNL
. I’m trying not to drink or drug. I’m having nightmares every night. Some nights I wake up screaming. I change my sheets every day because I sweat so much.

If I’d ever had any doubts about God’s existence before, that changed when I saw my daughter being born. More to the point, it changed when I saw a little head appear in my wife’s pelvis. Women talk during this procedure, about centimeters and contractions and minutes apart.

I wanted to say, “Goddamn, honey, you’re doing math while a head is emerging from your vagina?”

It’s very, very impressive.

And if the baby can’t come out, they cut you, and not on the knee.
In a very strategic area.
If a man were cut in the same area, there would be homicide in the delivery room. Possibly a suicide. Nobody would get out of there alive. I remember trying to figure out the amount of pain I was looking at, and I finally decided it was the equivalent of getting hit in the mouth by the space shuttle.

I said to the nurse, “Why don’t you give her some Demerol?”

The nurse looked at me and said, “Demerol can’t handle that.”

“What are you talking about? In the army, a guy gets shot, they give him Demerol.”

“That’s right,” she said, “but around the maternity ward, we call gunshot wounds pretend pain.” The look on her face said,
So why don’t you sit in the corner, eat your potato chips, and shut the fuck up?

Why don’t women brag about having a child? We men, we fix a doorknob, drinks are on the house. We really think we’re going to turn on the television and hear Ted Koppel say, “Tonight, against all odds, Darrell Hammond, using only a six-piece ratchet set, let himself back into the house that he also locked himself out of.”

When I got home from the hospital, I sat down and wrote on a piece of paper:

Schizophrenic

Manic-depressive

Borderline personality disorder

Major depressive disorder

Multiple personality

I taped the list on the back of the door and sat on the floor with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s just looking at it for a while. These are the things I had been diagnosed with; these are things I was being treated for. How do I overcome all these things so that I can be a father?

My wife and I were so excited for this baby. Although we were divorced at the time, when I found out my wife was pregnant, I knew immediately I wanted to be that baby’s daddy. It was like every electron, every neuron, in my body went YES! Hell, I even married her again before the baby was due.

And when at last I held that child in my hands—and there’s a photo of me, horribly bloated, dissolute, holding this perfect infant girl—my world rocked. How could something so perfect end up like me? If this were possible, then the world could not be as I thought it was. The pristine nature of this creature was not possible. But mess that I was, I was going try to take care of this baby, even though I had no idea how to do that.

I didn’t realize that ninety percent of what you have to do as a parent is either trial and error, or in your genes. It’s in your hands and your cells. It’s thousands or millions of years old. The first time my daughter cried, I panicked. But then something inside me said,
She’s a baby. She wants you to be in charge. Pick the baby up, pat the baby on the back. She wants to be comforted.
How did I come up with that? Well, it’s either in my DNA or it’s common sense. I picked my daughter up, and I comforted her. I didn’t put a knife on her tongue or hit her in the stomach with a hammer.

Wait, I didn’t
what
?

CHAPTER SEVEN

Blood on the Floor

New York City

1998

A
fter my daughter was born, I started experiencing flashbacks, often at work. For most of my years at
SNL
, I had a windowless corner office just off the writers’ room on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rock. When a flashback struck, my mind would instantaneously travel back to the kitchen of the house on Wisteria Drive, while the office floor and walls seemed to turn red, red and wet—like blood.

My home wasn’t any safer. Sometimes I woke up during the night, and I didn’t recognize my bedroom or my clothes in the closet. I looked at my feet and had never seen them before. Other times, I would wake in the dark and I could feel invisible hands pushing down on the mattress, or I’d see the silhouette of someone standing just inside my bedroom door. When I turned the light on, no one was there.

I was haunted by horrible nightmares. The cold sweats I’d been having before only got worse. I was changing my sheets so often I started to keep a fresh set beside the bed. For the sake of my family, my wife and daughter didn’t live with me but in an apartment nearby. I couldn’t subject them to the sound of my screaming in my sleep.

I
kept a pint of Rémy in my desk at work. I never drank right before or during a show, but sometimes, when disjointed childhood memories popped into my head, I sought refuge in the bottle. I drank on a Saturday morning, had breakfast, then slept for a while before going to rehearsal. The drinking calmed my nerves and quieted the disturbing images that sprang into my head.

When the drinking didn’t work, I cut myself. The wound created a fresh crisis to get me out of the one in my head. It gave me something else to focus on. It was more blood, but it wasn’t
that
blood.

I had a careful system for cutting: I prepared by laying out a razor blade, two square gauze pads, and a couple of strips of precut surgical tape (I learned the hard way that the tape gets twisted if you try to cut it with your teeth while trying to stanch an open wound). I used Good News disposable razors because the plastic top was easy to break off so the blade fell out. It was perfect for a quick slice and easy to control—I could cut only a little, or I could cut a lot. Over the years, I accumulated dozens of scars, narrow and neat, or raw and jagged, like angry ladders across my arms, legs, and chest.

Usually I made small cuts, but when I was drunk, the cutting could get dangerously deep and I couldn’t stop the blood flow. I once approached Gena Rositano, the stage manager, when I needed help with a bad cut, but usually when that happened I’d take myself to the NBC infirmary. One time I had cut myself really bad, and I still couldn’t get out of the flashback. I told the nurse, “I feel like I’m little. Everything’s red. Something terrible happened.” I didn’t know who I was talking to or where I was.

She did not seem suitably impressed, although I don’t know what I expected her to do. I started screaming like, well, a madman.

Next thing I know, there are two cops there, hands on their guns, and a paramedic taking my blood pressure before strapping me into a straitjacket. My wife came, but I didn’t recognize her until we were in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

I should have gotten myself an E-ZPass to the ER at New York Hospital, I was there so much. It’s hard to tell one visit from another. I can say that once I calmed down, I was released and went back to work. It might have been a day or two, but that’s all.

The staff there got to know me. I’d walk in and be like, “Jake! What’s going on?”

I remember on one visit, when I wasn’t feeling quite so jolly, a nurse asking me, “How are you?”

How did she think I was? I was tempted to point to the sign over my head—“Emergency Room”—which seemed explanation enough.

Usually a staff member would go through my bag to make sure I didn’t have any drugs or weapons. A psychiatrist would examine me, but I was always able to convince the doctor that everything was okay, even though it clearly wasn’t. No one knew what to do with me. Every doctor I saw essentially shrugged and wrote out another prescription for antidepressants or antipsychotic medication.

D
arrell. Darrell! DARRELL!”

I was standing on Broadway, my infant daughter in my arms, and my wife was shaking me by the shoulders.