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.
At 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.
On 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?”
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?
On 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.
The 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.
When 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 a
mount 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.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 9