God, if You're Not Up There . . . (8 page)

He was right. I did well that night.

Most of the clientele were guys I thought were knock-around longshoremen; I didn’t know that most of the guys who worked the West Side piers during the postwar boom had been forced to find other ways to make a living in the wake of the introduction of container shipping in the 1950s. No matter, they were good guys. Sometimes I pulled out my Porky Pig impressions to entertain them. They started egging me on, encouraging me to do my impression of Rodney Dangerfield.

“Why are you working behind this bar?” they’d say. “You should be out there making money doing impressions.”

These tough dudes had me believing that I could make people laugh. One night they encouraged me to do a set at Catch a Rising Star, and I decided to give it a shot. I went on at 1:30 in the morning and did ninety seconds—Porky Pig, Peewee Herman, and Sylvester Stallone doing Shakespeare: “Yo, Juliet, you know, in the moonlight, I can hardly see your mustache.” Three of those same guys came and cheered. I liked the feeling.

They invited me to go drinking with them a few times to a place called Teabags on Tenth Avenue. One night when I was there, one of the guys said to me, “Whatever you do, Darrell, don’t hit on a girl here.”

I wasn’t in the habit of doing that anyway, but out of curiosity I asked, “Why?”

“Every person here has a gun,” he said.

Where I’m from in the South, everyone had a gun. What’s the big deal? I didn’t think any more about it. It would be fifteen years before I learned the truth.

W
hen I wasn’t slinging burgers and gin, I got cast in a few plays. And these weren’t just any plays. I was going up against New York competition, which is a pretty good indication that you’re a decent actor. I did a few off-Broadway productions, which were great. But more often, I landed out-of-town summer stock plays upstate or in Rhode Island. Those were great, too, but each time I got one, I’d have to give up my apartment and my job, which was a huge pain in the ass when I came back to town in the fall and had to start all over again.

Also, I was drinking. A lot.

Sometimes the craving was worse than any desire for food or water or sex. When it hit, all of a sudden—bang—any plans for the next few days were off the rails.
That super interesting woman who agreed to have dinner with me tonight? Not gonna happen.
I remember walking up First Avenue one morning with a quart bottle of Tanqueray gin in my hand, and I saw Jackie Onassis walking toward me, and all I was thinking was that I’d have to cancel my date for that night because I had the craving.

Finally, about five years into my attempt at making it in the big city, I realized I was sick of myself and my life. I said, Fuck it. I was done with New York and acting.

At twenty-seven years old, with no money and no prospects, I moved back in with my parents in Melbourne. They must have been so proud.

B
ack in Florida, I found a job at an automated radio station in Vero Beach pushing buttons three times an hour. That gave me access to their production studios, which I used six nights a week for well over a year to practice voices of cartoon characters, sitcom stars, celebrities of every stripe. Given how much people seemed to like them, I thought I would see if I could expand my library.

I didn’t think I had as much talent as other people, so I figured I would have to work harder than everyone else. I’d be sitting there in the middle of the night working on my Porky Pig and saying to myself, “My competition cannot be doing this. They cannot be working this hard.”

There was one other perk to working there: one of the producers told me that pitcher Bob Feller, the first American Legion alum elected to the Hall of Fame with the most wins in Cleveland Indians history, would pitch to members of the media. Even though I was a button-pusher, I qualified, so I made a beeline for Holman Stadium. When it was my turn at bat, I one-hopped one off the wall in left field.

Feller said, “You got a nice swing, son.”

I
didn’t want to fuck things up, and I was afraid my drinking would do just that, so I went to my first rehab. A doctor at Heritage Health Clinic in Sebastian, Florida, decided I was manic-depressive and schizophrenic, which seemed to make my parents rather happy. It reassured them that my drinking was no fault of theirs. (Other doctors would later tell me I was bipolar or had borderline personality disorder, and even multiple personality disorder. It would be nearly twenty years before an ER doctor in New York would finally make the right diagnosis. But I’ll get to that.)

When I got out of the Heritage Health Clinic, I made a decision that I was either going to starve to death, or I was going to do voices for a living.

I heard that a radio station in Orlando, BJ105—Howard’s Meats to BJ105, my life was turning into one long dick joke—was looking for a guy who could do voices. This was the advent of the “morning zoo” concept in radio, which Scott Shannon started in Tampa. They always had guys who could do voices on those programs, so I sent them a tape. By then, I was sharp. It was the most I’d ever improved in anything in my life, and I got the gig. Then I started doing voices for radio stations in Phoenix and Detroit. I had a nice apartment in Winter Park. I had a nice car. I was going to AA meetings and keeping clean. I even sponsored someone in AA, a young lawyer named Dean, and we became friends. Life was pretty good.

I did my first stand-up at a club called Bonkerz, owned by Joe and John Sanfelippo, who later became my managers for a brief period. It was an open mike night, and I had three minutes. I did impressions of Pee-wee Herman, Eddie Murphy, Porky Pig, Popeye, Elmer Fudd, Donald Duck. The sound of strangers laughing triggered something in my already addiction-prone psyche. I was hooked.

T
he other thing I did when I got out of detox was go to a party with some of my old friends and drink. I told everyone that I’d been in the hospital for stomach problems, gastroenteritis or some shit.

Frank Facciobene said, “You didn’t have stomach pains, did you?”

“No.”

“Let me have that,” he said, and took my cup.

The second he walked away, I headed straight back to the bar.

A
fter a year of doing open mike nights at Bonkerz, I started driving to clubs all around the state. Every big city had a comedy club with an open mike night, and if you got there early enough, you could get three minutes onstage. I managed to get four or five sets a week by doing Orlando, Cocoa Beach, Tampa, Miami, and Las Palmas. It was a lot of driving, a lot of time alone in the car, but I made the most of those hours in the car, listening to tapes of people whose voices I was doing.

While I was still at the radio station in Vero Beach, I got this idea from AA that if I made small, easily attainable improvements in the impressions I was learning, over time they would add up to major improvements. I thought of distinctions in the things that I learned, a tweak of how a vowel was pronounced, adding a nasal twang, moving a sound from the back of my throat to the front. I might make a single improvement a week, but that’s fifty-two improvements at the end of a year. I never stopped thinking about it, and I never stopped trying. Tony Robbins talked about it as well. I never stopped listening to tapes. Between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-nine, until the day I walked into my audition at 30 Rock, I drove all over the country, playing tapes, experimenting with my voice, with my tongue, with my teeth, with my diaphragm, with my breathing.

I
also worked hard at writing decent jokes, but a lot of my stuff was cheap. Gay jokes. Fucking jokes. Time-of-the-month jokes. Dick jokes. Audiences would howl with laughter when I did the underhanded salesman Mr. Haney from
Green Acres
, a 1960s sitcom starring Eddie Albert as a New York attorney who abandons city life to become a farmer and moves to the country with his glamorous wife, Lisa, played by Eva Gabor
.
Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney on the show, had a very distinctive, high-pitched nasal way of speaking, so he was instantly recognizable when I had him saying the phrase “Hershey Highway,” which, in case you’re not up on your Urban Dictionary definitions, is slang for the, um, back passage. I was ashamed that I was putting that stuff out there, but it’s all I had. Later I considered that kind of shit blackmail material. I would be walking down the hall at
SNL
, and I’d be afraid someone would come up and say, “I saw you one time in Daleville, Alabama, do a joke about Pat Buttram on
Green Acres
saying, ‘Mr. Douglas, if I may introduce you to the Hershey Highway.’ Was that you?”

I imagined responding in a haughty British accent, “I beg your pardon! You are mistaken, desperately mistaken. Good day, sir!”

I started getting booked in clubs around the Southeast. Sometimes the clubs were really sports bars where the game was on the giant TV, the bar was serving gigantic Long Island Iced Teas for 75 cents, and people were fucked up out of their minds, making out, screaming, and I’d be up on the tiny stage going, “So, any birthdays?”

People weren’t even looking at me, but I’d have to stand there and pretend that they were. You have to finish your routine. When I needed to, I resorted to horrible shit just to make it through the night. I would do the filthiest, most vile material just to see if I could get a response from the audience. On one occasion, the NBA playoffs were on, and I remember thinking, There’s a reason they don’t have the playoffs on during
The Phantom of the Opera
. That’s why waitresses don’t come around for last call and give patrons their checks during the big eleven o’clock number.

So I’d do this joke: “How many people here read
Penthouse
magazine?”

No response.

“How about those letters to Forum? They’re unbelievable, right?”

I’d start out using a cross between Bugs Bunny and a Joe Pesce kind of voice:

Dear Penthouse,

I never thought it would happen to me, but I was skydiving the other day from 1,500 feet when lo and behold I noticed that my skydiving partner was not a man but a woman. Imagine my surprise when she sidled over to me in midair, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male, a mere nine inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.

A woman with blond hair teased within an inch of its life caromed off the tables in back on her way to the bathroom.

I’d switch to a southern drawl:

Dear Penthouse,

I never thought it would happen to me, but I’m a schoolteacher at a local elementary school here. And the other day a student came up and asked if she could use my #2 lead pencil. I said yes. Imagine my surprise when she dropped to her knees, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male at a mere seventeen inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.

A table full of frat boys stood up and howled at the television when their team’s star forward sank a three-pointer from half-court.

I brought it home with my best evangelical voice:

Dear Penthouse,

I’m a preacher in the Baptist Church here in Melbourne, Florida. I never thought it would happen to me, but the other day I was giving a sermon, and a parishioner came up to me behind the lectern, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male, a mere twenty-four inches in length, she nevertheless lapped up my hot gurgling seed.

Someone put a John Cougar Mellencamp song on the jukebox. And then I’d say to the crowd, “I’m sorry, that was over the line. I didn’t mean to offend any churchgoers out there.”

Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we are gathered here at Giggles Sports Bar along Route 70 in Daleville, Alabama. It’s been quite an evening so far. A lot of drink specials going on. I was onstage a little while ago, and lo and behold I noticed that one of the audience members was staring at my crotch. Imagine my surprise when she walked up to me onstage, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male at a mere fifty-seven inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.

The couple in back were still sucking face, a waitress was cleaning up a spill at table seven, and the blond weaved her way back from the bathroom, not one of them so much as registering my existence.

I
sometimes hit the road with a kid named Billy Gardell, who now stars in the sitcom
Mike & Molly
. Sometimes the clubs didn’t want to pay us our measly $20, so Billy, who was a formidably sized young man, would confront the managers to make sure we didn’t get stiffed. He was only eighteen then, but he already wrote brilliant stuff. One time I gave him a joke I’d written about Beaver Cleaver, and in return he gave me a far better joke. This was back when the Ayatollah Khomeini had died: “I hope he’s reincarnated as a tree, cut down, turned into paper, and on him is printed a copy of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses.
”

People would go crazy. They didn’t notice the hot gurgling seed joke, but they went for the patriotic thing.