God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem

by Darrell Hammond

  In the middle of it, Arthur the trauma patient blurted out, “Would you rather be raped or be a rapist?” He stood there looking at the ground, his hands shaking violently, his mop of brown hair covering his face. The Mayor talked quietly to him until he stopped shaking.

  Tony kept going up to the Mayor and saying, “When am I gonna hit that shit?”

  “You don’t want to hit this, honey,” she said. “It’s too much for you. This is for the big boys.”

  Not long before the Mayor was due to check out, she sat me down to talk. I knew what was coming.

  “We can’t be friends on the outside,” she said. “I’m a criminal. I like to steal, and I’m a junkie.”

  I asked her why she liked to steal so much.

  “I never had a chance. I was kidnapped. My dad was a drug addict, he OD’d. I was left on my own in Mexico. I never had a chance to go to school and join clubs and date. I didn’t have a childhood, and it wasn’t my fault. I’m owed. I go to Wal-Mart to practice, but Wal-Mart is dick. I like to steal from the big people. I fucking deserve it.”

  What allegedly got her into the Sanctuary was that she had stolen countersurveillance equipment from the NYPD, and the CIA had arrested her. She had no intention of getting better. She’d only come here to avoid prison.

  My doctor told me, “You know she’s a sociopath, don’t you? You can’t catch her in her cons. She feels these things when she says them, but she doesn’t intend to have a meaningful relationship with anybody.”

  “Did the CIA really arrest you?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  A rather sobering answer. If she really had been arrested by the CIA, that seemed like a deal breaker to me. I will hang around just about anybody, but that was too much. And if it didn’t happen, and she’d made that shit up? Hell, I think that would be even worse, wouldn’t it?

  A few days after the Mayor was released, she called me on the cell phone I’d eventually been given permission to have. She had driven her car into a tree, she was high, and she’d stolen someone’s stash, which was apparently in the car with her.

  While we were on the phone, I heard her say, “Officer, what am I being booked for?”

  “Leaving the scene of an accident, felony narcotics, and DUI.”

  I knew she was on parole with the condition that her urine tested clean. She was fucked. “I want you to forget you ever met me. I’m going away for a long time.”

  I have to admit, I was a little bit crushed, but I wasn’t surprised.

  A couple of days letter, a package arrived from her with a pair of Nike sneakers and a note that was signed with a number 7. I guess I must have told her how obsessed I was with Mickey Mantle.

  Dr. K. looked at the note and said, “She’s good. But I’m not going to let you keep the shoes.”

  “Why can’t I keep the shoes?”

  He thought she was capable of planting a chip in the shoes. “She’s going to find out where you live, and one day she’s going to come for you.” I didn’t keep the shoes.

  Dr. K., the Sanctuary’s resident genius, a small Moroccan man with a disarming smile who the world’s power structure sent their fucked-up children to, explained to me that when you have been tortured and beaten by your mother, when you’ve had suicides in your life by people you’d exchanged I-love-you’s with, and you’ve been cursed with a progressive fatal illness you didn’t ask for, your brain starts searching for a way to explain it. Most of the time, your brain says, “It’s because of you. That’s why your mother hit you, cut you, slammed your hands in the door.” You think you’re shit, you think you’re worthless, you think you’re unlovable, you think you can’t do this, you can’t do that. Life is always bad. Your brain has tried to simplify a perfect storm because it’s so confusing. Why would this shit happen to me?

  One day early in my stay he came to my room and said, “Do you believe you are the kind of person who is willing to frighten the people who care about you for the sake of your anger? Are you willing to sacrifice your life for it? Are you willing to take this all the way to the grave?”

  As he stood in my doorway to leave, he said, “I would suggest to you, Mr. Hammond, that you are.”

  What must it be like to wake up in the middle of the night unable to find your husband, knowing that he’s been in the emergency room with cut wrists before? It must be terrifying, especially when there’s a child. I don’t know that you ever fully repair trust. How do I make amends for the way I behaved when I believed that I was entitled to everything because I was mistreated?

  After the doctor left my room, I looked out the window into the bleak snowscape outside, no friends, no family, no money. My credit cards and my phone had been taken away. I was completely cut off from my life. A few years earlier, Drew Barrymore had treated me to a burping exhibition. Sean Connery told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show that I did him better than he did himself. Gwyneth Paltrow held my baby daughter, and Kate Winslet taught her how to pucker up for a kiss.

  How in the same lifetime could I have had Tom Hanks telling me he’d been honored to work with me on my final show? Compliments from Bono and John Mayer. Lengthy discussions with David Duchovny and Sylvester Stallone. Tom Brokaw sharing a story with me in the hall about visiting the beaches of Normandy. Meeting John Kerry and mistakenly introducing him to someone as Trent Lott. Hanging out with a shirtless, cigar-smoking Chris Matthews in his backyard while he talked about his favorite photo of Babe Ruth. E-mails from Maria Bartiromo, Katie Couric’s voice on my answering machine, asking me to imitate Matt Lauer as a favor. Hell, I’d kissed both Paris Hilton and Monica Lewinsky in sketches.

  These things kept whizzing through my mind as I sat there, filled with the first healthy shame of my life, with no way to contact anyone, no wallet, no e-mail, no connection at all. How could I have lived in that world and lived in this one as well?

  In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is imprisoned by a sadistic guard for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. He’s tortured, beaten, put on the rack, whipped. When he comes out, he determines that he is going to take his rage out on the world. He meets a priest one evening who invites him in to stay for the night and get out of the cold. The priest gives him wine, bread, and meat, a nice place to sleep. Jean Valjean repays the priest by getting up in the middle of the night and stealing all the priest’s silver.

  The police catch him and bring him back to the priest. They say, This criminal has your silver. And the priest says, I gave it to him. I gave him this gold, too, which, he says to Jean Valjean, you forgot. They leave, and the priest says to Jean Valjean, Remember this, my brother, the deity has a higher plan. Use this precious silver to become an honest man. By the witness of the martyr, by the passion and the blood, God has raised you out of darkness. I have bought your soul for God.

  Jean Valjean goes off into the wilderness. A little orphan girl comes into his life. The process of loving a helpless little girl, trying to protect her and raise her, changes him. He becomes successful, a good father, and years later he runs into his oppressor, Javert. Jean Valjean has the opportunity to kill Javert, but spares him.

  Javert is the old me. Rather than feel any sense of forgiveness, accept any act of kindness, or for one second think that he might have been wrong, he’d rather be dead. And he kills himself.

  My brilliant psychiatrist Dr. K. had told me that the only way to move on from trauma is forgiveness, giving up the right to hit back harder than you were hit in the first place. To get well, I had to drop the indictment against the people who had hurt me. For my daughter’s health, I had to drop the indictment. For someone who has spent a lifetime conjuring up revenge fantasies, being told that I had to walk away without any kind of payback was like watching an endless loop of NYPD Blue in which the bad guy always gets away with it. These people wronged me, but I was going to have to change my molecules, change my brain, in order to get well. That’s a tall fucking order. It took years and years of
hospitalizations, treatment, therapy, and psychopharmaceuticals, but I think I finally got it.

  When the doctors at the Sanctuary were done with me, they sent me to a dedicated addiction treatment institution in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, for another eight weeks of inpatient treatment. It was the longest winter of my life.

  At this second rehab, they said, “Can’t we show you ways that you have been paid back? Can’t we show you ways that the universe has since been good to you?” They would have us sit down and make out lists of our blessings and all that kind of shit.

  What had a more profound impact on me, though, was all the talk I heard about the place being haunted, that there was a ghost that came out at four-thirty in the morning. The place had previously been a hospice, so a lot of people had died there. “I’ve never seen it,” one security guard said. “I’ve heard it. I’ve heard all kinds of things I can’t explain.”

  After growing up in a house my parents had convinced my sister and me was haunted, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I got up one morning to see this ghost. Of course there was nothing there.

  The next night I woke from one of those dreams that seems so real that it takes a minute or two for you to discern that it wasn’t. I dreamed that I woke up and there was a little girl, not more than three or four years old, standing outside my window in the snow. It was dark, and she was crying and afraid. There was something familiar about her, about her eyes. And then I realized they were my mother’s eyes. It was my mother as a little girl standing in the snow, shivering and helpless, a pure human being before someone did to her what she had done to me. I had this inescapable sensation that someone had hurt her and continued to hurt her for a long time. More importantly, she had once been innocent.

  I realized then that the difference between my mother and me was that I had had Myrtise, who for a few precious years held me and loved me, and my mother had had no one.

  When I woke up, the world seemed in focus for the first time in my life. After years of haziness, I had crystal clarity. I touched the wall to see if the plaster was real, the bedcovers to see if they were really made of cloth. And I felt that shame again. I realized my life was shit, and I had participated in making it so. The horror of being without my daughter had been partly my fault. I was capable of being an asshole, and had been an asshole, a self-destructive, mean-spirited prick. I had become the driver of the bus that had been hijacked in my childhood by my parents and escorted me to hell. I understood that I was wrong.

  And then I felt like something approaching being whole again. I was ready to go home.

  A few days later, after three months of inpatient treatment, I was finally released. Driving away, the grounds a canvas of white from that winter’s record-breaking snow, I looked back one more time to see if the little girl was still standing by the window. She wasn’t.

  I was free.

  THE REAL LAST CHAPTER

  Honest

  New York City

  May 2011

  “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

  —MICHAEL CORLEONE, THE GODFATHER III

  Okay, what I just said about being free? That’s bullshit. Nobody’s ever really free of their baggage. I mean, I’m not in jail and there are no more flashbacks, no more nightmares, no more cold sweats, no more cutting, no more heavy pharmaceuticals. I smile from time to time. I still wear a lot of black, but I’m thinking about going clothing shopping soon.

  And these days when I go on an audition, I really enjoy the process—television series, films, even Broadway. Whether the parts or the shows pan out or not, I’m having fun out there. Why is this happening now?

  This might be it: I got a new psychiatrist, Dr. Ramsey, who said, “Do you hear voices?”

  “No.”

  “Do you see things? Do you think people are there, looking around the corner at you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not psychotic. You’re not schizophrenic. And you’re not manic-depressive. You don’t need the medication.”

  So I’m not on those soul killers anymore. I live by the law of mutuality that is found in twelve-step meetings. What we can’t do alone, we can do together, that sort of thing. There’s something about being in a group of people just like me, trying to recover, hoping to improve their spirits, reaching out to one another, relating to one another. I know that after a meeting, I’ll go home feeling good. I once called the office of the head of the New York Psychiatric Institute when I was still drinking. I told him I was in a twelve-step program, and I wanted a referral for a psychiatrist. He said, “Do you know that’s the best cognitive therapy ever invented?”

  What else? I go to the gym now. Every Wednesday is Guys Who Used to Have It Going On Day. We sit around on our towels, taking a steam, thinking, What the fuck happened, man? We’re still relatively well built, you can tell that once we might have looked pretty good, and we did pretty well in life; we’ve achieved a lot of what we wanted to achieve, seen a lot and experienced a lot, and now what do we fucking do? I wish I could go to every high school and give a speech, “Just in case you’re interested, it’s never going to be better than this.”

  Although lately I’ve been feeling that might not be true. I hasten to emphasize, might not be true. I’m willing to consider the possibility that things do get better.

  It had been more than a year since my last guest appearance on SNL, and I’d grown comfortable with the idea that I had finally moved past that chapter of my life and on to new things. I was gearing up to play Truman Capote in Tru, a one-man play by Jay Presson Allen scheduled to run for the month of June at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York. I had been part of an ensemble cast in David Mamet’s comedy Romance the previous summer at Bay Street, but Tru was a whole different ball game: I was the one and only cast member, and it was a serious drama based on Capote’s own words—ninety minutes of them. Plus I had big shoes to fill in playing the man known as the Tiny Terror: Robert Morse had won a Tony Award for Best Actor for his turn in the original Broadway production in 1990 and an Emmy for the television version that ran on PBS a year later.

  For me, the real challenge was learning how to be Truman Capote, who was eight inches shorter than me, and had a voice so bizarre and high-pitched that it had sounded fake in real life. If you listen to a recording of him with your eyes closed, you’d think you were listening to Granny from the old Tweety Bird cartoons having a stroke. Figuring out how to play him without making him sound like a caricature—as I’d done with almost every character I’d played for the past sixteen years—was as daunting as learning how to hit one of C. P. Yarborough’s curveballs. Fortunately, I had had the luxury of eight months to study and learn him—a far more comfortable proposition than the four to six hours I had to learn most of my SNL roles. And coincidentally, or maybe not, my addiction history was going to be an asset for this role: over the course of two acts, a despondent and lonely Capote becomes increasingly wasted on martinis, Valium, pot, and cocaine. It was entirely fitting that I had conducted part of my Capote research during the previous winter’s rehab extravaganza.

  For much of the spring, I spent my days on the second floor of the New 42nd Street Studios building in Times Square, an elaborate new performing arts rehearsal space. With the New York City Ballet in a studio on one side, and the Shakespeare in the Park crew working on their summer production of Measure for Measure on the other, I worked on blocking Tru with my directors, the supremely talented Judith Ivey and Matt McGrath. Working with them was like getting a Yale Drama School education in fast-forward—when Judith told me to stop focusing on Capote’s voice and pay attention to acting instead, I knew I was operating in a different realm than what I’d been accustomed to. But it was going well. Once again, my life had taken a turn into the land of the impossible—I was going to play Capote in a major American theater.

  And then my phone started to vibrate.

  On a Tuesday, three weeks shy of opening night,
I received a text from Steve Higgins asking me if I could do Trump that Saturday on SNL.

  Tina Fey was returning to host, and they wanted to do a sketch about an imagined Republican debate that included Tina as Sarah Palin and me as Donald Trump, who was publicly toying with a presidential run and making a lot of headlines raising questions about President Obama’s birth certificate. As a result, Trump had also been the butt of jokes at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner. CSPAN’s cameras zoomed in on his grim face as he endured a thorough roasting by the president of the United States. His scowl became even more severe when SNL head writer Seth Meyers, who was the entertainment for the evening, started in. Those pictures would be all over the news media in the days that followed.

  In a conversation with Kenny Aymong, the supervising producer, later in the week, I said that I was in the middle of rehearsals for Tru, but he said they would accommodate my schedule.

  A few minutes later, Lorne’s assistant Lindsay Shookus called to give me the details. She agreed to messenger over the initial script.

  Saturday morning, I went to the studio, where Judith and Matt put me through my paces until about 2:30 p.m. Then I grabbed a cab uptown to 30 Rock in time for the afternoon run-through. Before I even got in the door of the building, I ran into Mary Ellen Matthews, the genius SNL photographer who is responsible for the bumper photos, as the shots of the hosts you see after commercial breaks are called.