God, if You're Not Up There . . . (15 page)

“I’d like to make friends with you, so do you want to hit me?”

“No.”

I don’t understand his answer. I think that’s how you get people to be nice to you, you let them hit you first.

T
he year I turn ten, my mother becomes enchanted by the title of a noir thriller called
I Saw What You Did
starring Joan Crawford and directed by William Castle, who would later produce
Rosemary’s Baby
. In the movie, a couple of teenage girls have nothing better to do than make prank calls. Whenever someone answers, they whisper, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.” Then they reach a man who has just murdered his wife; panicked, he decides to find the girls and shut them up.

Sitting on the couch doing homework or watching TV, I glance up to find my mother standing there looking at me, and without her southern accent, she says, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.”

T
hrough my work with my new therapist, I started to understand why I’d grown up surrounded by a sense of evil, firm in the conviction that I was going to be killed. I woke up every morning in fear for my life. I went to school every day in fear for my life. Went to bed at night in fear for my life. I knew I couldn’t say anything about what was happening. Who would believe me? My mother believed in Jesus. I was certain they would tell me, “You’re a bad boy.”

My mom discovered that if you want to control someone, you have to make them beholden to you. Relieve them of their fear, relieve them of their pain. In my case, she had to give me the fear first, give me the pain. She made sure that I believed I was the problem, that I was a bad person, and that’s why these things were happening.

In
The Grapes of Wrath
, John Steinbeck describes a scene that hit home when I first read it. Al Joad is taken aback when he sees his big brother, Tom, for the first time in four years when he’s paroled after killing a man with a shovel. Tom Joad now wears the expression of a prisoner who doesn’t give anything away: “the smooth hard face trained to indicate nothing to a prison guard, neither resistance nor slavishness.” I learned to exist in my house as if I weren’t there at all. I kept my voice a level monotone, my expression flat. I didn’t reveal anger or fear or sadness. If I showed any of those emotions, it suggested that something was wrong in that house, and that made my mother angry.

After a while, I started to think that if I could make myself cry, she’d lose interest in making me cry herself. If she thought I was already hurt, she might leave me alone. I practiced crying sitting out on those train tracks behind our house.

What finally worked were the voices. I could win her approval, or at least avoid a beating, by doing this one thing she liked to do. Bob Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge spared me her rage. When I demonstrated that genetically we were wired to copy sounds, her eyes would go soft and childlike as I said my line. She would listen to me intently like a mechanic listening to an engine.

I learned how to do voices from her—they were my only protection.

A
s my treatment continued, dredging up these memories, the flashbacks kept coming, like quick and violent snapshots of the past. Sometimes I would see images as two-dimensional drawings. My doctors have told me that sometimes POWs, trauma survivors, incest survivors, remember Picassoesque versions of things.

In Barry Levinson’s 1985 film
Young Sherlock Holmes
, the teenage investigator looks into a string of deaths seemingly caused by hallucinations. In one scene where Holmes and Watson are tripping, the king of hearts gets up and walks out of the deck of cards on bendy cartoon legs, which freaked me out because I had had visions of my mother exactly like that.

O
ne night, a friend knocked on my apartment door. I grabbed the lamp beside the bed, ripping the cord out of the wall, and went looking for the sound. Something in my soul was saying,
It’s not going to happen to me again.
I didn’t even know what “it” was, but the sense of looming danger was unmistakable.

I
was in my apartment one night, stabbing myself in the leg, when one of my pals from the Hell’s Kitchen AA meeting, Big Mike Canosa, knocked on my door. He was a big tough guy who ran around with the Westies.

“Gimme the knife, Darrell.”

He told me that staying sober, trying to do the right thing by your family, showing up for work, was far more difficult than drinking half a bottle of tequila and shooting some guy in the back of the head. He said the longshoremen in the neighborhood who were still getting up and going to work every morning and abiding by the law and taking their children to church every Sunday,
they
were the tough guys.

W
hen my daughter was less than a year old, my wife and I took her to Tampa, where I was doing a corporate job—a private performance for employees or clients of whatever company had hired me. I was doing as many corporate events as I could in my off weeks to bank money for my kid’s future. My mother and a group of her women friends came to this one. The ladies passed the baby around the table, each one cooing at her in turn, the baby giggling and gurgling with happiness. When my mother picked her up, my daughter’s face went blank. No laughing, no smiling, nothing. It was like she knew.

E
ventually my wife and I tried to live together in a house upstate in Tuxedo Park, New York, a small village on the National Register of Historic Places. Situated in Orange County in the Ramapo Mountains, it is about forty miles north of Zabar’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The ubiquitous penguin suit that men are required to wear at formal functions is named after the place, as it was here that the first sucker, a guy named Griswold Lorillard, had the audacity to wear a black-tie outfit that didn’t have tails to the Tuxedo Club’s annual ball.

We had a gorgeous Tudor-style home in a secure gated community, two greyhounds my wife had rescued from a track, our beautiful daughter, and for a few years it was lovely. I remember sitting in our leafy yard, reading the Sunday papers, nibbling on these gigantic muffins Elaine Stritch had sent by way of thanking me for getting her tickets to
SNL
, while my daughter played with neighborhood kids down the street.

As with all good things in my alcoholic world, our upstate idyll didn’t last. I started staying in the city during workweeks, driving up on weekends after the show. And eventually my wife missed the twenty-four-hour amenities of the city, so she wanted to bail too.

I
started reading books on cognitive therapy that talked about self-fulfilling prophecies, and I began to see that my vision of the world was distorted. It wasn’t true that only horrible things happened, and that death was always just around the corner. That’s the way I had lived my whole life. Now I realized I felt bad merely because of the way I was thinking.

Tony Robbins said that you should ask yourself what you would have to believe to feel bad about your situation. When I got up each morning, I would write down my disempowering thoughts, the ones that had totally overwhelmed every happiness and success that I’d achieved. Then I’d write down all the positives: I had a fantastic career, a beautiful daughter, a nice home, plenty of money. I began to believe that it was possible for me to have a good day.

Joel Osteen, who is a very gifted speaker who draws his advice from the Bible, said, “Respect your parents.” And I thought, Until they stab you.

A
fter several years of trauma therapy and going back through this forest of dark memories, my doctors thought it was important for me to confront my parents with what I was learning. For days I agonized about calling them. How do you bring this up with the people who raised you, the people who presented themselves, publicly at least, as your biggest supporters, the people who allegedly cared more about you than anyone else on the planet?

When I finally summoned up the nerve to dial the number that had been etched in my memory since I was old enough to count to ten, my mother’s response was simple and heartfelt: “Don’t ever call us again.” Her accent was notably absent.

I would not see them again until my mother was dying and my father wasn’t far behind.

CHAPTER EIGHT

What You Didn’t See

New York City

2000s

M
inutes before
SNL
went on air the night of October 7, 2000, I was in my dressing room putting on the expensive suit I was to wear in the cold open when
FLASH
, the floor turned red. I was playing Vice President Al Gore in the first presidential debate against George W. Bush (Will Ferrell). Suddenly, a year of studying and practicing was down the drain—I couldn’t remember how to do the voice. I couldn’t remember what Gore sounded like or what I’d seen in any of the tapes I’d been studying ever since it became apparent a year earlier that Gore was going to be a front runner in the millennial election. I couldn’t remember what he looked like or why I even
wanted
to do the voice.

I had to do something.

I got out the gauze pads and tape, and popped the top of a razor.

I made a thin cut across my left forearm. It wasn’t horribly messy, and I wrapped my arm fairly carefully, because I knew I had to wear that nice suit for the sketch. (At
SNL
, whatever the person you’re impersonating wears, you wear, no cheap imitations.) The point was to buy me enough focus so that I could go out there and do what I wanted to do with that character. Luckily Jim Downey, who wrote the sketch, had been giving me line readings during the week, so I knew what I had to do by muscle memory if nothing else.

In the sketch, I ramble on and on in Gore’s peculiar southern drone about the “lockbox” he planned to put Medicare and Social Security in. He had talked about this metaphor for protecting the country’s senior citizens during the actual debate earlier in the week, and Downey elaborated on the idea to make it seem more literal—with keys to the lockbox, and an explanation of where the keys would be hidden, including one under the bumper of the Senate majority leader’s car. I had also devised an awkward stiffness in my movements in caricature of Gore’s real posture.

Will ended the debate with the word that Bush felt would describe a Bush presidency:
strategery
. The word became so entrenched in the public psyche during the real Bush’s presidency that people thought he’d really said it.

I said, “Lockbox.” A reporter for
U.S. News & World Report
said I lost the election for Gore. I felt terrible.

Will and I received an International Radio and Television Foundation Award in 2001, which honors outstanding communications professionals for their accomplishments. There was a big banquet at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and the award was presented by Tim Russert. Past winners of that have included Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, and David Letterman. And now us?

Let me be clear: I don’t say this to brag, I say this to point out how seriously some people take clowns. I mean, we made fun of George W. Bush and Al Gore, that’s it. Perhaps the pundits would have felt differently about me if they’d known what this “expert” was doing to prepare for the sketch that supposedly did Gore in.

I
n the middle of all this hilarity, my old acting roots started gnawing at me, and I started thinking about returning, at least part-time, to serious drama. I fortuitously ran into Valerie Harper at NBC, and she told me about an acting coach named Harold Guskin, whom she had worked with. I went to him, and he had me read a monologue from
Death of a Salesman
. Partway through, he interrupted me.

“You have to hear it before you say it, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“That kills it. You’re obligating yourself to a sound, and obligation is the death of art. I’m going to work with you on
what
you’re saying, not how you say it.”

He gave me a line to read.

“I ran up eleven flights of stairs.”

“How many?”

“Eleven.”

“How many?”

“Eleven!”

“How many?”

“ELEVEN!”

“That’s it!” he said.

The following week, I auditioned for an episode of
Law & Order: SVU
, and I got it.

I
have always been careful to write jokes that will make everybody in the room laugh, Republicans and Democrats both. As a result, everyone thought I was on their side. That’s why the newly installed Bush administration invited me to perform at W’s first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2001, even though I had twice appeared at the same event during Clinton’s presidency.

For me, the main difference was that at this dinner, I was even more nervous than I’d been in the past, so I had strategically consumed a bottle of wine beforehand. I suppose that’s why I thought my performance went so smashingly well. As I told Chris Matthews, who graciously came up to me after the event to compliment me (I’d done him during my routine), it’s unnatural to have that many powerful people in one room. At
SNL
, there are only 300 people in the studio audience, but at the Washington Hilton, there are 2,600 of the nation’s most important players in politics and the media.