Brit Hume was there with his wife. Brit was very sweet to me, but his wife walked up to me and said, “Cheap shot.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I assume it was because of the bit I’d done as him during the third episode of that season. Fortunately, Lindsay went over and talked to her, and they were all smiles after that.
But I didn’t like that part of it. I really liked these guys—all of them. Hell, I was impressed that they would even talk to me. By the time someone introduced me to Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and a couple of four-star generals, I thought, I’ve come far through the looking glass.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My Welcome Outstayed Me
New York City and Melbourne, Florida
2006–2009
At the beginning of my twelfth season in 2006, I was in Lorne’s corner office, with its spectacular views of New York out the window, for the first glorious pitch meeting of the year. I was at SNL again. Ah, man, I must be the luckiest motherfucker who ever lived.
But that year, as I sat in that office while everyone introduced themselves to that week’s host, Dane Cook, another thought crept into my brain: I should not be here.
I called my manager, Bernie Brillstein, and said, “Isn’t it time? Isn’t eleven seasons enough?”
“No, that’s your place,” Bernie said. “You belong at SNL.”
Kenny Aymong, the supervising producer and one of Lorne’s top people, told me, “This is your home.”
“I know, but it’s time.”
“Not this year,” everyone seemed to be saying.
So I stayed. For Lorne, for Marci, for Bernie, for the show.
It was awe-inspiring to see people like Tina Fey, Steve Martin, John Cleese, asking Lorne about a joke. Jay Leno would call Lorne to ask about a joke. How could I let him down?
Marci is among the more interesting human beings I’ve ever met in my life. She used to walk up to me and say, “Who’s your rabbi?” And I’d say, “Well, you are, boss.” And she’d start laughing, toss her hair, and walk away. I was once chatting with her at a party, and JFK Jr. came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around to him and said, “I am fucking talking, okay?” (I’m not gay, but if I was, damn . . . he was a good-looking man.) But that’s how loyal and how powerful she is at the same time. How could I let her down?
And yet, by then Clinton had been out of office six years, Gore had been off the political scene just as long, Will Ferrell had left the show, so his Alex Trebek no longer hosted Sean Connery on Celebrity Jeopardy!; in those final years I was left mostly with an occasional Dick Cheney and John McCain in a cold open or in a “Weekend Update” segment.
There was one show that stood out, at least to the press, and that was when I did Fred Thompson in October 2007. Thompson, who had been a two-term U.S. senator from Tennessee, was most famous for his role as the district attorney on Law & Order, which he took up when he gave up public office. But it seemed his popularity on the show convinced him that he had a shot at the presidency, the real one, so he tossed his hat into the Republican ring, although not very convincingly. He announced his campaign on The Tonight Show in September in an effort CNN called “lackluster” and the Chicago Tribune called “awkward.” I heard that Thompson’s people were pleased to learn that I was going to be doing him on the show, although I imagine that changed when they learned we were making some fun of his apparent lack of enthusiasm—“How badly do I want to be your president? On a scale of one to ten, I’m about a six.” The New York Times said my portrayal was “potentially devastating” to his campaign. I find that hard to believe, but then Thompson withdrew three months later. I was slated to do him one more time, but I couldn’t get the voice right—by then I had my stalker and I was scared out of my wits.
Which no doubt contributed to the fact that in those final seasons, I was on air so infrequently that people started to ask me if I was still on the show.
I had several years of post-Hazelden sobriety under my belt, but my shrinks still had me on major meds. I did an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent in 2005 on Lamictal, a mood stabilizer used to treat bipolar disorder, and Zyprexa, an antipsychotic. On just one of those, whatever you are as a human being stops. You simply aren’t there. You don’t feel happy, you don’t feel sad, you feel nothing. And I had to do scenes with Vincent D’Onofrio, a world-class actor. How the fuck was I supposed to do that?
I even made my Broadway debut, playing Vice Principal Douglas Panch in the Tony Award–winning musical comedy The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, at Circle in the Square for six weeks during the summer of 2007. Don’t worry, I didn’t sing. Although I wish I could have sung “My Unfortunate Erection”—I think I could have brought a lot of heartfelt emotion to that number. Instead, my character administered the spelling bee of the title and said things like, “That is correct.” But don’t think it wasn’t challenging; I dare you to pronounce acouchi, boanthropy, mohel, corzya, and Ilspile in front of hundreds of strangers without getting tripped up.
I did Christopher Durang’s comedy Beyond Therapy in 2008 at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Working with such outstanding actors as Tony-nominee Kate Burton and Tony-winner Katie Finneran, I knew the only way I could hold my own was to quit taking my meds for the run of the show, so I did, and it worked.
I had a recurring role as a creepy hit man called The Deacon on Glenn Close’s show Damages during my final season on SNL. Seth Meyers, who became head writer when Tina Fey left the show in 2006 was a big fan of the show, and he was very complimentary. I think it gladdened him to see me get great reviews when I wasn’t doing much on SNL. Aside from being a great writer, Seth was another one of those guys who reached out to help me when I was down. I won’t forget it.
In 2005 my mother, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her doctors wanted to do chemo, but she said, “For what?” She was going to go to her death like Ted Bundy to the electric chair.
I flew down to see her shortly before she died in February 2006.
I hadn’t spoken to or seen her in several years, although I’d heard that she and my father never missed an episode of SNL, even when they were angry with me for confronting them about what happened in our house when I was growing up.
I brought Eddie Galanek with me. After years of looking after me when my stalkers were around, Eddie had become a good friend. But it was also true that back in 2001, my father had threatened to shoot me. Just a few weeks before 9/11, I made one of many appearances on the Howard Stern radio show. On this occasion, we got onto the subject of my addiction problems, which led to a conversation about childhood abuse. I didn’t get into the details with Howard, but enough of the interview made its way into the Florida papers, and my father was pissed enough to threaten me. I knew he was now enfeebled, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Fear will not be denied.
At the hospital, I approached my mother’s bed, where she lay like a queen who’s used to running the show. She grabbed my hand and said, “You were always my buddy, right?” She always called me “Buddy” when I was a kid. “You were always my favorite. You know that, don’t you, Buddy?” Her Southern accent was perfect.
She looked at me as if to say, I win, right?
Eddie and I were barely back in New York when we got word that she’d been moved to hospice, so we turned around and headed back to Florida. Two weeks after our first visit, she was gone.
My father took her death with his customary stoicism. We were gathered around her bed, talking quietly. One minute my mother was breathing audibly, and the next she was silent.
My father looked at her and said, “And this is what happens.”
My parents, both of them, were immensely popular people in their community. The church was packed with well-wishers for my mother’s funeral.
After it was over, people came up to me, clasped my hands, and said, “Your mother was such a wonderful person.”
“She helped us out so
much.”
“I remember when your mother brought a casserole when my husband was sick.”
I went into the bathroom and stuck my tongue out at the mirror, the scar winking at me. I pushed up the left sleeve of my shirt and ran the fingers of my right hand over the ladder of scars running up and down my left arm, each rung a different shade of pink or red, depending on how recently the wound had been inflicted. I understood then that people are capable of leading double lives.
I also realized that I’d been holding on to a fantasy that I’d one day be able to reclaim my childhood. Here I was, fifty years old, and I was still hoping for a do-over. At long last, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
My father was already sick with advanced melanoma when my mother died. A soldier to the end, he wanted to fight it. He went through chemo and multiple surgeries, all of them horrendous. They cut out chunks of flesh behind his ear, trying to remove the tumor. Finally they cut his ear off. And every time, he said, “Son, I’m gonna beat this sombitch.”
After years of estrangement, my father and I talked a lot in the months leading up to his death. I flew down to Florida with Eddie from time to time to see him. Even after it was clear my father posed no threat, Eddie kept coming with me to help out, and the three of us would sit together, watching old war movies and John Wayne westerns, or going through my dad’s high school yearbooks. On one occasion, my dad dug out his war medals and explained what each one was for.
Over those last months of my father’s life, Eddie often cooked for my father, and the two men grew quite close. Eddie had seen his share of action when he was on the police force, and he’d spent months down at Ground Zero looking for remains after 9/11, so they shared the experience of having lived through man-made horror. During one medical visit, the doctor talked to both Eddie and me about “our” father; neither one of us corrected him.
My father talked a lot about what he was going to leave me in his will. Amazingly, I found myself getting sentimental about it. Yeah, it would mean something to me to have his television, his suits, his watch. He didn’t have any money, and I certainly didn’t need any, but it was very emotional to hear him talk about the legacy he wanted to give me. Even more moving was how he kept telling me he was sorry he hadn’t been around for me when I was growing up. I didn’t know if he was referring to how much he was on the road for his job, or something more, and I didn’t ask, but it meant a tremendous amount to me to hear him say it.
And I tried to be a son, to do everything I could to provide for him—a private nurse, whatever he needed. It was my last-ditch effort to have some scrap of childhood, a trace of a parent who cared about me.
A few weeks before he died, when he was filled with painkillers and forgetting things, my father told me that he left the glass door to the patio open, and a cottonmouth came into the house. We were always killing cottonmouths in the yard when I was growing up.
My father grew tomatoes and basil on our patio. There was often an enormous black snake out there, coiled up, sunning. My father said, “That’s old Blacky,” although the way he said it, it sounded more like “Black-ay.” The snake ate rats and other snakes. You couldn’t fuck with my father’s tomatoes because of Old Blacky. But that snake never bothered us.
However, more than once my father got me out of bed to come out in the yard to kill a water moccasin. FYI, they don’t kill that easily. They really need to be shot, but he didn’t have any ammo. He’d be out there in his coaching shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops, our husky howling nearby. He’d have the snake pinned with a shovel. “Darrell, help me kill this sombitch.”
He used to take me Sunday fishing, him and his buddies, to a wonderful place to catch bass. To get there, we passed through a part of the stream where it narrowed to about ten feet, maybe six feet. And on each side were stumps, and on each stump, there was always a moccasin. Every Sunday, my father executed them with an enormous .44 Smith and Wesson. I don’t care what kind of creatures they were, it wasn’t fun to see them executed. The sound wasn’t just deafening, it was injurious, as the snakes evaporated into a fine red mist. And then we’d go fish.
One time, I was with my father driving from Tampa to Melbourne on Route 192, and my father saw the tail of a rattlesnake exiting the highway into the bushes. He’d lost two dogs as a kid, one to a rattlesnake, one to a cottonmouth, so whenever he saw a snake, it was Onward Christian Soldiers. He stopped the car, got out, retrieved some empty bottles from the trunk, then carried his arsenal over to the guardrail, where he perched himself while he chucked his weapons at the snake.
Now, eighty-five years old and in a narcotic delirium, he claimed he had shot that snake that slithered into the house. There were no bullet holes in the floor, but we didn’t question him. Can you imagine the amount of medication you’d have to be on when they cut your ear off? You’d probably think you’d gone Rambo on some reptiles yourself.
During the afternoon of Saturday, November 3, 2007—the day that Barack Obama was to appear on SNL—a nurse from the hospice where my father had finally been transferred when he needed full-time care called. “Your father may not have more than a day or two left. You need to get here.”
But my dad was insistent that I do SNL that night because of Obama. It was an honor, he said, to appear with the man who might become our next president. My father had the hospice nurse take him off his morphine drip because he was afraid he would fall asleep and die before I could get there.
On Sunday, Eddie and I flew down to Florida. When we approached what was to be his deathbed, he said, “Boy, you did so good on the show last night.”
He had his war medals in their plastic cases by his side. My sister must have brought them to him, although perhaps he’d taken them with him when he was admitted. Once again, he took us through each one, explaining how he got them. I figured it was his way of saying, “What I really did while I was on earth was fight for my country against Hitler.” It was the best he could do to explain himself. It had meant a lot to him when, a few months earlier, Vice President Cheney had written him a personal note of thanks.
And one last time, he said, “Darrell, I just want you to know how much I love you. I’m sorry for anything that I might have ever done that upset you, that I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”
And then he turned to Eddie. “Eddie, I’ll see you somewhere on down the road, son.”
Then to the nurse, “Now give me my fucking morphine.” I can’t imagine how much pain he’d endured to make this good-bye possible, but it was clear from his face he’d had enough. It wasn’t long before the drugs did their trick.
Eddie, my sister, and I stayed in the room, my father unconscious but hanging on. We didn’t want him to be alone when he made his final journey.
After a time, a nurse came in and said, “Sometimes they won’t let go if there are loved ones in the room.”
It had been maybe three or four hours since we’d arrived. The three of us stepped out of my father’s room and down the hall to a small patio. Eddie said something wickedly funny that had all three of us howling with laughter when the nurse came to get us a few minutes later. She stood silently behind us. We turned to look at her.
She said, “He’s gone.”
It was that fast.
At the funeral, I thought about this man who had lived in a bottle of gin since he was a kid because he’d never gotten over killing a lot of people in service of his country. For fifty years, he struggled with it. Was it right to have killed so many people? At the end of his life, he was able to say, Yes, it was. Someone had to stop what he called verifiable evil. He wasn’t referring to the men who end up in the penitentiary because they caught their wife cheating, got drunk, lost their temper, and clocked a guy with a blunt object. Nazis are different. Maybe Korea wasn’t as cut and dry, but at the time the Communist threat seemed like something that needed to be stopped, and war was the only way to do it.
Eddie was incredibly helpful in making the fun
eral arrangements when the rest of us were in no shape to do so. He even gave the eulogy, which went something like this:
I know most of you have known Max longer than I’ve known him. I met him through Darrell, and we’ve gotten very close. I’m sure all of you have had an experience with Max where maybe he had a little too much to drink and he said something harsh to you. But there was a boy who wanted to play baseball and be a lawyer. He wasn’t given that choice. His life in the military, doing what he had to do, it changed who he was. But the boy always lived inside of him. Every one of you knows how much he loved baseball. Every one of you knows Max, the other guy, the soft guy, the baseball guy. He didn’t have the choice but to become the hard man, but when he came back around, as you all know him now, he was a sweet guy. I know I’m blessed to have met him. He did a lot for this country, and he’s a good man.
I know in my heart that Eddie didn’t give that speech for those old folks in attendance, or even for my father—he gave it for me.
When the two soldiers from the U.S. Army played “Taps,” and they brought my father’s folded flag out, I felt so much pride, and so much sorrow that I hadn’t understood that I had grown up in a soldier’s house. He’d fought evil, and it had fucked him up.
I convulsed with tears and thought I’d never stop. Big, tough Eddie, a man who’d been to hell and back himself, put his arms around me.
As we left the church, I remembered a time when I was about twelve years old, and I came upon my father sitting in our blue vinyl chair, mumbling. In his lap, he held a Luger he had gotten during the war. It wasn’t loaded; he wasn’t going to shoot himself or anyone else. He was just thinking about the German officer he’d gotten it from.
“He looked at me, and he thought he was right,” he said. My father was haunted by that man’s eyes. He paused, and then he said, “I took his gun.”
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 17
