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

  He didn’t say he killed the man, but how do you imagine he got the gun away from him?

  I said something like, “Why would you take the gun?” I was a kid, I didn’t understand humiliating an officer.

  “I wanted him to remember what he saw in my eyes, and that if I ever see him in the afterlife, I’ll kill him again.”

  I wondered if my father had found him yet.

  My parents were both cremated, their ashes buried in the courtyard beside First United Methodist, the church where I spent my earliest years frightened out of my wits.

  A few months later, I was getting ready to perform at a convention in Orlando when the producer of the show came up to me and said, “We have a mind reader here. Would you like him to read your mind?”

  Sure, why not?

  The mind reader came over to me and asked me to write down a couple of things. Then he took the paper and tore it up, keeping the bits and pieces balled up in his hand.

  “Who would you like to know about that’s deceased?”

  “My father.”

  He held the paper, and concentrated on it for maybe fifteen seconds.

  “He’s wearing a baseball cap, and he’s sorry.”

  As I had when my sponsee Dean killed himself two decades earlier, I. Freaked. The. Fuck. Out.

  The day after my father passed away, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. More than ten thousand writers were demanding their fair share of DVD and Internet residuals. I got back to New York, only to discover there would be no new episodes of SNL until it was resolved four months later.

  Not knowing how long the hiatus would last, the writers and cast decided to take the show on the road, or at least downtown, to the basement theater of the Upright Comedy Brigade. Since the show would not be televised, and no new material could be written for it, we used previously written sketches that hadn’t made air for one reason or another. The end result was a slightly raunchier show than we could have ever done on network television. Proceeds from ticket sales to the live show went to the production staff, which had been laid off for the duration of the strike. We did our own makeup, gathered our own props, the writers held the cue cards, and Gena Rositano, the stage manager, walked around wearing a headset that wasn’t plugged in. Amy Poehler, who is a founding member of UCB, invited Michael Cera, who had recently starred in the movie Superbad, to host. The writers cleverly cobbled together a monologue for him from what past hosts, including Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton, had performed. At one point, I went onstage with a hat filled with pieces of paper on which I had scribbled celebrity names. I pulled them out at random and did impressions. The show was a huge success with the 150 or so people who came to see it.

  Neither NBC nor Lorne had anything to do with this renegade production, but he was in attendance. And when it was over, Lorne, whose birthday it was, bear-hugged me, which I took as his way of expressing condolences for my father. In deference to such an intimate moment, everyone else looked away like the Queen was taking a leak.

  The season resumed in February, with Tina Fey as host. I was barely in the remaining episodes of the season, which was fine with me. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

  I believe the greatest mistake I ever made was going back to SNL for the final year. Why get in the boxing ring with Mike Tyson when you’re not in the mood? That’s how hard it was.

  About a week before that season was to begin, I went back to the ER. I said to the nurse, “I think somebody poisoned me.”

  “Who poisoned you?”

  “I don’t know, man, but I feel like I’m poisoned.”

  They took my blood pressure, and it was about 180.

  “You’ve got a heart problem.”

  They ran tests on me all night long.

  In the end they said, “There is nothing wrong with your heart. We think you’re afraid.”

  In the closing months of 2008, everything was about Tina Fey’s outstanding impression of Sarah Palin, which was fine by me because it took the focus off my McCain. I didn’t want to play him. I didn’t want to play a soldier after watching my father dying a soldier’s death. McCain had visible war wounds, and part of imitating him would be to imitate his physical limitations, which were the result of torture and I didn’t want to make fun of him.

  But my father, not knowing what this would entail, desperately wanted me to play McCain, whom he thought was a great man. In the months before my father died, he said, “That’s my final wish.”

  What could I do? I played McCain several times that last season, and it was awful. I never could do the impression all the way. It felt like hell.

  Senator McCain himself made a few appearances on the show, and one day I ran into him in the hall while he was talking to Jeff Zucker. Much to my surprise, McCain hugged me. Then he turned to Zucker and said, “I just want to say, Darrell Hammond does the best impression of me there is.” I thought, How fucking gracious is this guy? He knew my work, he had to know it wasn’t any good, but he complimented me to the big boss.

  Everybody at SNL knew my McCain was off, but nobody came to me and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? How come you can’t kick the ball between the uprights on this one? What’s going on?” I guess they assumed I would correct it eventually.

  In the final months of my fourteen-year tenure at SNL, I was circling the drain personally. I’d pretty thoroughly relapsed, I was on medication that had put thirty pounds on me, and I was miserable. I got it into my head that all of my work was terrible, even when it wasn’t.

  Then I had the brilliant idea that I should try crack.

  It’s amazing that crack only exists because of an economic glitch in the drug trade. Supposedly there was a huge glut of cocaine in the early 1980s, which made the drug, which used to be expensive and therefore very popular at Studio 54, insanely cheap. So some enterprising dealers decided to convert the powder to a rock form that you can smoke, and sell it in small quantities that regular people can afford. The rock was also purer than the powder, so you got a better high. Wasn’t that thoughtful?

  By the time I decided to do crack, it was no longer all the rage as it had been a generation earlier—local dealers weren’t even bothering to shoot one another anymore—but then I’ve always been a late bloomer.

  After a night of drinking in April 2009, I ended up in someone’s apartment in Harlem. Like anyone who was breathing during the 1980s, I’d heard the term “crack house” a thousand times, but I’d never really given it any thought. Even now, I didn’t know if I was in one. But there were maybe a dozen people, and every one of them was smoking crack. Does that count?

  There were no conversations, no small talk. It wasn’t clear if any of these people knew one another, or cared. Every hour or so, a guy would come to the door with more rock.

  It didn’t take long for me to understand why no one could be bothered with anything but the pipe they were sucking on. Take the greatest orgasm you ever had, multiply that by five, and then prolong it for eight hours, that’s how good it is. Maybe better. I could see why people get hooked on it.

  I did look up between hits to see a beautiful, large-breasted girl who was missing a front tooth take her top off.

  One of the other guys there told me, “She doesn’t have any money for drugs, so she goes to parties, takes her top off, and people let her stay and do drugs.”

  There were a bunch of men in the room, but no one even tried to touch her. That’s what crack does, makes you think only about the drug. Nothing else matters, not even a beautiful half-naked woman.

  At one point the girl stood up in the middle of the room and started screaming, “I don’t have to do this any fucking more! Reason ’cause a that, I have filing skills, and I don’t have to do this!”

  I said, “Why don’t you put your shirt on?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, you don’t seem too happy at this moment.”

  It wasn’t that I was a good guy, I just knew what it was like to belie
ve you had no worth.

  During a lull while we were waiting for another dealer to show up, this enormous guy asked me to go out on the porch with him. I didn’t want to know his name, but he recognized me from TV and decided to watch out for me. He told me his mother was a pastor at a church in Harlem. Then he began this wistful speech about how he wanted to own a $2,000 suit one day. He’d always wanted to go to the opera, but he needed the proper clothes. He vowed that one day he would have a big enough score that he could get the clothes he wanted and go to the opera. “You see,” he said, “I have a thing about flutes.”

  I don’t know how many hours I’d been there before I saw a piece of paper taped to the wall. Someone had scribbled in pencil the first line of the Saint Francis prayer, or what they refer to as the Eleventh Step Prayer, the same prayer I had heard the guard recite at the jail in the Bahamas: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.”

  God put that there for me. I thought I would never get high again in my life. Then someone handed me the crack pipe. I took a hit.

  I probably slobbered on that pipe for another hour, and then I went home. I had the means to do crack for the next fifty years, but there was something about a note with the fucking Eleventh Step Prayer taped to a wall of a crack house that did finally make me leave. I’ve lived my entire fucking life in error. Maybe nothing has worked for the last fifty years because I’ve been living the wrong way.

  As my enormous caretaker put me in a cab that day, he said, “I’m not a crack addict. I’m a crack user.” He reached out his hand to shake mine. His grip was firm, reassuring. Then he said, “Can you lend a brother twenty dollars?”

  When I got to my apartment on the Upper West Side, the first thing I did was take a shower. I hadn’t bathed since the day before, and I’d been doing crack all night. You sweat when you drink and smoke crack. I do, anyway. As it happened, I had an appointment that afternoon with my psychiatrist, so I chain-smoked for a couple of hours and thought about this whole revelation until it was time to see her.

  When I got to her office, I told her what I’d done.

  “Do you think you’ll do crack again?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, and the prayer on the wall had really shaken me. But it felt amazing while I was smoking it.

  She picked up the phone on her desk and said, “You’re going to the hospital tonight.” She started making calls to arrange it.

  I nodded. I wasn’t at all surprised. In fact, I kind of welcomed it.

  In a few hours, I was uptown at New York–Presbyterian Hospital on 168th Street, which has one of the top four psychiatric departments in the country. The doctor I saw there wanted to put me in the psychiatric lockdown unit, where you wear special slippers and they drug you. I realized that I wanted that, too. I wanted residential living with a doctor around all the time. I was prepared to live in a medical setting and be given high doses of tranquilizers every day for the next however many years until I died. That’s how low I was.

  But when they took me to that ward, I got recognized really fast, and several of the patients became agitated.

  One guy approached me, raking his hands through his hair like he had fleas, and said, “You’re Darrell Hammond, right?”

  “Uh, no,” I said cleverly.

  “Bullshit! Don’t fuck with me!” he screamed in my face. He kept raking his left hand across his scalp. “Do an impression for me! I’m in a fucking psych ward! Do Clinton!”

  I backed away. I was seriously not in the mood for this kind of shit.

  The administrator said, “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  They took me back to a regular floor, but the room they gave me was surprisingly luxurious. I remarked on it to the nurse who was getting me settled.

  “Do you know who had this room before you?” she said cheerfully. “President Clinton!” Apparently it had been his room when he had his 2004 quadruple bypass. You can’t make this shit up.

  I spent a couple of weeks getting it together in the Clinton ward, and then they released me. I had missed only one episode of SNL, and I made it to the last show of the season. It would be, after fourteen years, my last as a regular cast member. Finally.

  On May 16, 2009, Will Ferrell, who had left the show in 2002 to pursue his film career, came back to host, which was a fantastic opportunity to bring back some of his best recurring characters from the show. Will had recently starred in his one-man Broadway show You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George Bush, which had gotten enormous positive press coverage. So of course we did the cold open together, me as Dick Cheney, and Will as W. I don’t know if the audience could tell, but I was on so many medications, and so disheartened by what had just happened, that I could hardly remember what Cheney sounded like. We got several applause breaks, but I suspect it was more for the audience’s delight to see Will’s W back in action. I did get to say “Live from New York” one final time.

  The writers brought back Jeopardy! for Will to do Alex Trebek. Tom Hanks did a cameo as a brilliantly clueless version of himself during the sketch—he kept speaking into a pen, thinking it was a microphone—and I reprised my Sean Connery for the sketch, which I hadn’t done in four years, since Will’s previous stint as host. The special surprise was Norm Macdonald resurrecting Burt Reynolds after a decade.

  At the good-byes at the end of the night, I went out onstage for the first time since McCain hosted. Out of character, I barely knew what to do with myself. In the early years when I’d gone on stage for the good-byes, I usually stood to one side or in the back. Now Will had me stand next to him out in front. While he thanked the various guests, Norm stood behind me and draped his arms over my shoulders to give me a big embrace. Then Artie Lange gave my shoulders a squeeze. Finally, Will put his arms around me and said, “This is Darrell Hammond, right here,” as Bill Hader and Norm pointed to me. The cast was lovely and embracing. Anne Hathaway, who’d had a cameo in the final sketch, “Goodnight Saigon,” hugged me. Standing among all those people, I felt each person’s hands as they reached out to touch me on the back while the credits rolled. It was as lovely a moment as I’d ever had on the show. Afterwards, I was talking with my friend Julie when Tom Hanks came up and told me it had been an honor to work with me.

  It was never formally announced to the public that I was leaving, and the media noted at the beginning of the next season that I had mysteriously disappeared from the opening credits.

  For some reason Lorne had me back for six more appearances the following season. Three of those appearances were on the new edition of the show, Weekend Update Thursday, and the other three on the regular Saturday show. They all went reasonably well. In fact, after my appearance as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to sell the California wildfires to raise money for his beleaguered state, Lorne called me and said it was as good as anything I had ever done on the show, and it might well have been.

  Strangely, I had risen from my darkness, a darkness where only the past and future live, and settled down in the present. I had been on my game. When it was over, the crowd cheered.

  And yet, thirty seconds before my penultimate appearance in the Hall, a few weeks later. . .

  In my mind’s eye I see the hibiscus bush and hear it thumping against the kitchen window of the house on Wisteria Drive.

  Thump thump.

  See the pretty people, the important people, the wealthy people, people with pretty skin and flat bellies.

  Love your scarf. Is that from Bergdorf’s?

  No, I don’t buy my own clothes. I use a professional buyer. Alicia. Do you know her? Here’s her card.

  Thump thump.

  Overpaid people, androgynous people, Goth people, underweight people. The Hall is electric. We are going to air.

  Thump thump.

  Is that Anne Hathaway? God, she’s beautiful. No, Anne hasn’t been here for a while. Certainly looks like her, though.

  Thu
mp thump.

  Oh my God, is that A-Rod? Oh my God, it is A-Rod.

  Thump thump.

  I hope this one goes well. Where is Lorne? Have you seen Lorne?

  Thump thump.

  He’s with Tom Hanks, but he’ll be here, you know that. Five seconds, Darrell.

  Thump thump.

  Lorne walks into the Hall. Why can’t I talk? My vocal cords hurt so bad.

  Thump thump.

  Marci Klein walks into the Hall. I’m running out of breath. I’m not my age anymore. I’m no longer in the Hall. I’m back in the house on Wisteria Drive.

  Thump thump.

  Stand right there. You love Mommy, don’t you?

  Yes, I love you, Mommy.

  Then hold your hand here, on the doorsill. Right there. Like that.

  Thump thump.

  A-Rod, my hero, twenty feet in front of me. Kate Hudson on his arm. The room is flashing red. I grab my wrist to steady myself. Did my thumb leave an indentation?

  Thump thump.

  A-Rod with a quizzical expression. He is looking at something he does not understand: malfunction. A-Rod does not understand malfunction because A-Rod was not designed to malfunction. A-Rod was designed to hit eight hundred home runs and do big things.

  Thump thump.

  Gena: Five. Four. Three. Two—

  The Hall is red. Marci is beautiful.

  Thump thump.

  Seth Meyers: Here to comment is Lou Dobbs.

  Thump thump.

  My thumb has left a mark.

  It’s two years since my last show. I don’t get recognized as much as I used to, but sometimes I do. I went into a Sephora store recently for moisturizer. (Shall we pause for a moment while you finish chuckling about that?) Of course everyone in the store was disturbingly attractive.

  Oh, shit. All of you make me feel really bad.

  One of the young women came up to me.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Shit. That word.

  “Are you Darrell Hammond?” Her bright-eyed, eager smile told me she was more likely to offer to help me cross the street than give me her phone number.

  I nodded. As flattering as it is, I find this part of my career a little embarrassing.