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

  I’m in my bedroom closet in Melbourne, drinking myself into a stupor at fifteen; the psych ward at New York–Presbyterian; a Harlem crack den.

  “Ohmygod, I’ve loved you for fifteen years, since I was ten!”

  I know everyone who works the night shift in the emergency room at New York Hospital on a first-name basis. Have you seen my arms?

  These lovely people laughed at me on national television every week—that’s all the fans knew. A generation grew up watching me. Impossible.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Golden Years Redux

  Melbourne, Florida

  2007

  About a month before my father passed away and before he went into hospice, I thought it might give him a thrill at the end of his life to see his son hit some baseballs. I was fifty-two years old and hadn’t swung a bat in thirty years.

  I got in touch with my old high school friend Wayne Tyson—who had taken my spot on the junior college team when I got sick—and asked him if he’d pitch to me. He agreed, and offered up the field at Palm Bay High School, where Wayne was the coach of the Palm Bay Pirates baseball team. Once again, I flew down with Eddie.

  On the day, Wayne went out to the mound and pitched like he’d pitched ten thousand times to me when we were kids. Out on a field, that soft breeze coming off the ocean, the gardenias and jasmine in bloom, the smell of the grass and the dirt, I was the fucking Mick again.

  My father sat on the bench in the dugout. Wearing his baseball cap, leaning on his cane, he watched the proceedings as carefully as he ever had. The night before, we had watched the Pirates in action, and my father commentated the entire game. He could barely get around anymore, but he hadn’t lost his encyclopedic knowledge—or his love—of baseball.

  I took a few practice swings before I stepped up to the plate to get the feel of the bat in my hand. I wiffed the first couple of pitches, and then it all seemed to click, long-dormant muscle memory waking up.

  For a few minutes it was transcendental as the bat made contact with pitch after pitch. I might as well have been wearing my old Howard’s Meats uniform and had long yellow hair. I was in some kind of a dream. I started hitting these shots I had only fantasized about for decades. And then I lifted one down the left field line, a high, high fly ball—it seemed to stay up in the air forever. It fell a few yards short of the wall.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father struggle to his feet. Slowly, he hobbled onto the field, leaning heavily on his cane. He shuffled over to where the ball had landed and paced it off, like he used to do when I was a kid. The fence down the line was 320, a fair bit farther than the 297 at Wells Park.

  After Eddie, Wayne, and I gathered up the bats and balls, and we were walking back to the car, my father paused. Looking me directly in the eye, and, for the first and only time in my life, he held my gaze for a long moment and said, “It woulda gone out.”

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  I Mean It This Time.

  The Sanctuary

  Westchester County, New York

  2010

  I have to admit that dredging all this shit up to write this book pretty much kicked my ass. After the episode in the crack house and my last hospitalization, I thought I’d made peace with everything. It turns out, I hadn’t.

  Thanks to my dear friend D, I’m still alive. She found me when I was in the depths of a relapse with a beer in one hand and a large carving knife in the other. The night before, well into this drunk, I’d made the profound mistake of going to see my daughter, and the look on her face when she saw me in that state shamed me.

  After wrestling the knife away from me, D called the ambulance and rode with me to the emergency room at New York Hospital. I knew I should have gotten an E-ZPass for that place.

  I was in the psych ward overnight. While I was there, a male patient walked back and forth in the hallway, a cell phone to his ear, and he kept saying, “I’m sorry, Mama, I think bad things.”

  The doctors were sufficiently concerned about me to send me to the Sanctuary, which is one part psychiatric hospital and one part rehab. Over the course of my stay, I spent time in both.

  We had quite a little society at the Sanctuary. There are fourteen wards, divided up mostly by ailment. I was on a ward reserved for boldfaced names: a couple of world-class athletes with ruined careers; an international beauty pageant winner; European royalty; and some Middle Eastern goddess of considerable power, although I was never able to determine what it was. A world-renowned actress had checked out just before I arrived.

  There was a ward dedicated to folks who were in rehab by order of the court, as a condition of a sentence or parole. That’s where the most interesting person in the whole hospital was. The Mayor, as we called her, was a captivating young thief with full lips, a ring in her nose, and she always wore something that displayed her rather splendid midriff (she wouldn’t have gotten away with that on our ward, but on the criminal ward where she was, they didn’t care). Think a young Molly Ringwald. She had just had fifty-two stitches removed from her mouth from injuries sustained fighting at the women’s prison at Rikers Island in New York City, where she’d been incarcerated after she was arrested for felony narcotics and armed robbery. I adored her.

  To be clear, there was nothing sexual about our relationship, we were just drawn to each other and spent every minute we could together. She’d already been there for a month or two when I arrived, and she seemed to know everybody, both patients and staff. She had this astonishing ability to figure out what was going on with people, what it was that mattered to them, in a very short amount of time, and then feed that every time she saw them, and tie it up with a ribbon in the form of a funny line when the conversation ended. She walked up and down the hall, utterly charming everyone. She could have been the head of the PTA. You might find her chatting just as comfortably in Spanish with the custodians as in English with the likes of me. She’d leave little notes for people. One minute she was asking after one patient’s granddaughter, the next she was talking to a security guard about how his family back in Haiti was doing after the earthquake. She knew all the rules, and how to get around them. Will there be a strip search tonight? Ask the Mayor. Are they testing urine today? Ask the Mayor.

  One of the patients was a soldier who’d been shot in the head. He had lingering mental and physical impairments, and he was struggling to make some sense of what had happened to him, if it had been worth it to be shot in the head. He couldn’t stop nodding his head up and down from the neurological damage he’d sustained, and he was depressed.

  Sensing this, one day she approached him and said, “What is your favorite band?”

  He looked up warily from the crack in the floorboard he’d been studying for the last half hour. “Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he said.

  She said, “There wouldn’t be a Lynyrd Skynyrd if someone hadn’t been willing to do what you did.”

  He brightened visibly. For the rest of the time I was there, he was a slightly different person.

  There was a pretty black girl who’d been raped repeatedly. She wasn’t able to hold conversations. When you said hello to her, she answered, “I’m Delonda Jackson,” and then she’d walk away. She spent a lot of her time wandering up and down the hall, stopping to clean her hands at the Purell dispensers, talking to herself. And yet there was a sense of calm about her, like a soldier standing before the firing squad who has accepted his imminent execution. There was also a sense of fierce pride in her too; she would face that firing squad with her head held high.

  One day the Mayor had a friend bring her a boom box and some CDs. Somehow the Mayor persuaded Delonda Jackson to dance with her. Days later, Delonda Jackson was still moving to her groove. It was wonderful to see her experience such joy. Late one evening I wandered down the hall in search of sugar for my coffee, and I came upon Delonda Jackson and the Mayor dancing with that veteran, in his pajamas and bare feet and the company hat he always wore.

  “Honey, I know what
you’re thinking,” she said one day when she found me pacing the hall with a furrowed brow. “You feel like there’s a universal balance sheet, and it ain’t balancing out in your favor because of things that happened to you and the life you’ve had to lead. And you want to be paid back. But you ain’t getting paid back, and you need to stop thinking that you will.”

  It was a huge breakthrough for me.

  If you’re an alcoholic, you’re not like other people. You have a progressive fatal illness. Trauma is also progressive and fatal. So I had two of those, and for most of my life they debilitated me. More than a few times, they nearly killed me.

  The first thing they told me at the Sanctuary was a phrase from AA’s Big Book: To live life on a spiritual basis or die an alcoholic death are not always easy alternatives for an addict to face. That was a thunderclap. Addiction had turned me into someone who would rather be dead than be forgiving. A disease as lethal as Ebola, it kills its host in messy, horrible ways. But the love of my daughter and the time that we spent together was making me into someone who felt real human emotions. I’d blown it, though, and I wasn’t sure she’d ever speak to me again.

  Prior to my going to treatment this time, you could not on any level, with any device, apparatus, or mechanism, have convinced me that I was playing a part in my own self-destruction. I felt entitled to be angry, I felt entitled to be self-destructive. I became a monstrous figure, someone who was willing to scare others to get them to lay off. If I got drunk, I’d be willing to cut myself.

  So here I was atop this volcano of impotent rage, and getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and feeling like a victim. But feeling like a victim tends to make a person selfish, to play Pin the Anger on the Donkey. A relatively innocent bystander can become the object of your scorn. I demanded that you play by my rules, and I also demanded that you guess what they were. Therefore, just like the Mayor, I never had real relationships with anybody. It was easy for someone who was beginning to care about me to become upset with me. Once they became angry enough, I could say that the world was a hostile place, and then I would drink. It’s like my brain said, The only thing that works is this alcohol shit. C’mon, let’s get it.

  The doctors explained to me that my disease was one of mistaken beliefs. We have to believe things that are enormously untrue to continue with the addiction, chiefly that our behavior doesn’t really have any effect on others. And if it does, so what? I wasn’t willing to acknowledge that I could be an asshole or that anyone was suffering from this but me.

  Until I saw fear in my daughter’s eyes.

  What you find in rehabs, even a really good one like this, is that the counselor with the least ability is the tough-love counselor. That’s how they position themselves. They call it carefrontation, but what they actually do is say mean shit to you. Not perceptive or analytic, just mean. The trick was to get the patients to acknowledge ugly truths about themselves so that they can heal, but do it in a way that doesn’t traumatize them. The tough-love counselor didn’t have that skill. Everyone else on staff was really gifted, but not her.

  One night I called her a bully.

  She said, “You’re rude. You want your daughter to be like you?”

  “If my daughter thought she was being picked on by a bully, I would want her to be like this, yeah.”

  She was also in charge of who got urinalysis and who got cavity-searched. She was always making the Mayor pee in a cup in front of her so she could see the pee exiting her body.

  One night in Group, in front of everyone, the tough-love counselor on our floor carefronted, aka humiliated, Juanita, a voluptuous twenty-five-year-old girl who had been living with a sixty-year-old man who supplied her with crack in exchange for her favors. She was not allowed to leave the house or have friends. Juanita wanted to be a graphic artist, to go to a sober house, to get her five-year-old daughter back. It was a miracle she’d gotten herself into rehab. You have to be gentle with someone who’s been traumatized, and the tough-love counselor got it all wrong.

  Juanita flipped out and walked out of the room. We could hear her at the pay phone calling the sixty-year-old, screaming and crying. Within a few minutes, she had packed her meager possessions in a duffel bag and left. We looked outside and saw her get in the car. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what was going on in there.

  One patient, who’d recently been paroled after a twenty-year stretch in prison, said, “Damn! Motherfucker is gonna get some twenty-five-year-old pussy this eed’nin’!”

  Everybody but the Mayor started laughing. Evidently the sixty-year-old had brought drugs, and she was making her first payment for them right there in the front seat.

  I heard that the Mayor walked up to the counselor and said something like, “You’re a disgrace to people who are trying to change their lives. You can’t be abusive to someone who’s been through what that girl has been through. If you were any good, you’d know that.”

  Later, I said to her, “Wasn’t that a little harsh?”

  “That girl is gone. She could OD on crack any time. This woman has injured a patient, and that patient is fucking gone.”

  All of the addicts there were looking for a reason to bail. One of the doctors compared us to people on a relay team waiting for the baton to be given to us. We welcomed anything that could push us into victimhood so we could hate and drink and use.

  There was one twenty-something kid named Arthur who’d been traumatized so badly he couldn’t speak at first. When he did begin to talk, the Mayor gave him an audience all the time. He was friends with Juanita, and when she got in the car with her captor, he was heartbroken. The Mayor spent a lot of time with him that night, explaining that he would find another friend one day.

  There was one patient the Mayor couldn’t get to, an eighteen-year-old Angelina Jolie lookalike with cascades of shiny hair. She wandered around in tiny tank tops and low-slung pajama bottoms with no underwear. I saw her walk up to one patient on methadone maintenance and say, “Come party with me.” She took him outside into the dark night to do whatever he wanted in exchange for some of his methadone. At first I thought people were taking advantage of this young thing, until I realized it was the other way around. She would let the women feel her up in order to get stuff from them too. Some people were on Ativan, some people were on Klonopin, some were on Seroquel. Some of the patients cheeked their meds, pretending to take them, then spitting them out when the nurses weren’t looking to use as currency later.

  She walked into Group one day fully stoned and said, “I’ll suck any dick, I’ll eat any ass, I’ll even fuck that fat piece of shit.” She pointed to a minister who did volunteer work for addicts and criminals.

  One night she told me she wanted to give me a Steaming Carl.

  “First of all, you’re eighteen, and my daughter’s almost a teenager,” I said. “And second of all, I’m almost embarrassed to ask this, what is a Steaming Carl?”

  She described an act that would have been at home in a German Scheisse movie.

  “Okay, that would be a no.”

  Why is it that all the seeming goddesses who have hit on me throughout my life are batshit crazy?

  The staff thought it would be nice to bring the patients from all fourteen wards together for a karaoke night. Everyone was herded into an enormous hall. There were about twenty tables, each covered with bowls of “fun size” candy bars and bags of chips—every form of sugar or artery-hardening substance known to man. They brought in a technical team to set up a big video screen with the words to songs written across the bottom. You haven’t really lived until you’ve had karaoke night in a psychiatric hospital.

  As people mingled with one another, they would introduce themselves by saying their name and which ward they were from: schizophrenic, borderline, manic-depressive, depressive disorder, eating disorder. There were some really good singers, including one bulimic woman who was all bones but for her beach-ball belly; she was pregnant.

  Then there was Ton
y, a Johnny Depp lookalike with an enormous phallus (wait, there’s a point to this) and brain damage from years of meth abuse. He was the sweetest guy, always doing little favors for people. “You need milk in that coffee, man? I could get you some milk. I could get that.” He’d also expose himself to the other patients in exchange for their meds, which everyone seemed to find hilarious.

  Tony occasionally saw people who weren’t there. He’d walk across the room to say hello, then have to pretend that he’d gone over there for some other reason. He’d grab his dick, then stroll back to his chair like John Travolta at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. Tony tried to sing “Respect.” When he got to the part, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he became flustered. He walked away from the microphone to say hello to an imaginary visitor, grabbed his dick, then came back to the mic after that part had finished and resumed singing.

  But honestly, it was a wonderful night until someone put Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” on. All at once, it dawned on the patients that he had died not long before of a horrible overdose. Near-death experiences were what connected us all. People at the different tables, with their different maladies, began to get upset in textbook ways, each according to his own affliction. We had all been triggered, and it quickly turned into a melee of screaming and crying and twitching.

  The nurses came rushing in like a mom saying, “Everybody out of the pool!” to herd the patients back to their wards. They spewed the little catchphrases they were always saying to the patients.

  “Easy does it.”

  “Fake it till you make it.”

  “It’s not about getting out of the rain, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”

  I never did find out which one of the lunatics chose that song.

  One night toward the end of my stay at the Sanctuary, the eighteen-year-old in the pajamas and a thirty-year-old stripper she palled around with decided we should play Would You Rather . . . . They wrote out suggestions on scraps of paper, and we were all given a few to read aloud. Each one was more foul than the last: assholes, cocks, balls, vaginas, camel toes, blow jobs, golden showers, fisting, diarrhea, cum, dildos, bestiality, erectile dysfunction, gangbangs, bologna, incest, cock-chugging, it was all on the table. (I have to confess I introduced “cock-chugging,” which I’d gotten from Eddie. It was an immediate hit in the criminal ward.)