God, if You're Not Up There . . . (16 page)

A few minutes into my act, I gave the new president a baseball glove and invited him to play catch, which he seemed to enjoy. He even forgave me for all the Gore material I did that night. I reprised some of the lockbox sketch, which went over very well on the Republican dais, so I turned to Mr. Bush and asked, “Can I do some more of him? I worked a year to learn the damn guy, and then you beat him.” I was supposed to read some telegrams, but I had so many pieces of paper on the podium—oh, and that bottle of wine before—that I couldn’t find them. I guess it really was a good performance, though. At the end, the audience gave me a standing ovation. Or maybe they were just getting up to go to the bathroom.

A
month later, the
SNL
team decided to put together a Mother’s Day special. The other cast members invited their mothers to appear on air, but I, obviously, did not. The writers thought it would be fun to have me play my mom instead.

Using photographs my sister supplied, the hair and makeup folks got to work. I’ll never forget sitting at the mirror when the makeup artist began to paint my mother’s face on my own before dress. When the hair person lowered the wig on to my scalp, I could hear my mother saying, “I saw what you did, and I know who you are.”

I started vomiting right there in the chair. I was rushed to the infirmary, where my blood pressure was recorded as dangerously high. It was as though my body had said, “It would be preferable to die than to let this continue.”

The show went on without me.

B
y the time 9/11 happened, I was barely functioning. But the entire city was in a state of grief and bewilderment; we were the same then. So many had died. A great chunk of downtown had been removed from the skyline by those planes—literally, in the space of two hours, removed, gone, disappeared, the people, the buildings, everything—and those who remained were scared out of our wits.

The season premiere of what would be the show’s twenty-seventh—and my seventh—season was less than three weeks away. Nobody in the cast or crew, let alone the rest of New York, knew how to behave. How do you put on a comedy show when there’s so much destruction and fear and sadness in the air?

Lorne invited Mayor Giuliani, who was in the process of becoming “America’s Mayor” for the deft way he handled the crisis, and a bunch of NYPD and NYFD, still in uniform and covered in dust from Ground Zero, to be onstage in front of an enormous American flag, while Paul Simon sang “The Boxer” in tribute to New York City.

At the end of the song, Lorne turned to Mayor Giuliani, thanked him for coming to the show, and asked, “Can we be funny?”

Giuliani said, “Why start now?”

It was a stroke of genius. It allowed New York and the rest of the country to laugh again.

O
n the Friday night before our third show of the 2001–2 season, NBC News announced that anthrax had been found in
NBC Nightly News
anchor Tom Brokaw’s office and in the post office in the basement of 30 Rock. It wasn’t the first incidence of the deadly white powder turning up around the country—a guy had died in Florida already, and the
National Enquirer
’s offices had been shuttered because of it—so people knew exactly how to respond when they heard: they left the building.

Host Drew Barrymore, whose new movie
Riding in Cars with Boys
was about to be released, had already debated whether to fly in from Los Angeles for the show (she was hardly alone in the country in being afraid to get on a plane then). The anthrax was almost more than she could bear, and she vacated the premises too.

But me, I felt strangely calm. I guess I had become somewhat inured to the presence of danger, to the sense that something bad would probably happen. I already understood the notion that the danger you’re guarding against is already inside. No need to lock the door, it’s already in. And that was more true than we realized. By the time we found out about it, the anthrax had already been in the building for a couple of weeks. Apparently, some assistant to an assistant opened the envelope addressed to Brokaw, thought nothing of it, brushed the powder into a wastebasket, and went about her business, but not before she passed the letter to the real assistant to deal with. That assistant had it on her desk long enough for Brokaw to see it and joke, “If he thinks he’s going to threaten my life, at least he could be grammatical.”

Once it was determined that the danger was limited to the parts of the building where the anthrax had been discovered, Drew and everybody else got it together and returned to the studio. In her monologue that Saturday night, Drew thanked the studio audience for being brave enough to come to the building when it was all over the news that there was deadly powder drifting around. She also thanked her then-husband, Tom Green, for supporting her—and the camera cut to him sitting in the front row, wearing an enormous gas mask.

The show went off without a hitch, and, as
SNL
has always done when there’s a big news story, the writers simply incorporated the anthrax scare into the show. I did the cold open as Dick Cheney. Ever since 9/11, the real Cheney had been in hiding, and there was endless speculation about where he was. Neighbors of the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence, complained about noise that suggested they were perhaps constructing a secret bunker there. So he might have been there. It was later said that one of the compounds where he hid is called the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, Site R, near the Pennsylvania/Maryland border, a few miles north of Camp David. Apparently when you drive by, you might see the two enormous metal doors in the side of Raven Rock Mountain, like something out of an Austin Powers movie. On top of the mountain there’s a ton of communication antennae and towers and stuff, making it easy enough to find—they might have thought of that. Inside, the compound even has its own water source—some huge lake or something. They built the whole thing during the Cold War in case the Russians nuked Washington—at least a few top officials could survive while the flesh burned off of the rest of us.

But since we didn’t know any of that at the time, everybody was guessing. In the sketch, Cheney “reveals” that he’s really been hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, personally hunting Osama bin Laden, because “old Uncle Dick is gonna make sure you don’t have to worry about opening your mail come Christmas.”

A
few days later I went to Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to play one college in the afternoon and another at night. That afternoon I got up in front of all these people, and here I was, this guy who made fun of politicians. No one wanted to make fun of the people who stood between us and the next attack, let alone hear someone else do it, and here I was, my whole act based on exactly that. My act was invalid, but it hadn’t occurred to me before I went on. The afternoon set went horribly. Nobody laughed.

During my gig that night, I resorted to doing random impressions of Porky Pig and Barney Fife, the hapless deputy sheriff played by Don Knotts in the 1960s sitcom
The Andy Griffith Show.
These were bits I had performed more than a decade earlier when I was starting out.

But that night also saw the birth of a new impression: the gloriously unpredictable New York City gadfly, Al Sharpton. A Baptist minister and civil rights activist, Rev. Sharpton is as famous for his track suits and bouffant hairdo, styled after his hero James Brown (whom he did a killer impression of on
SNL
), as he is for his demonstrations whenever any incident even suggests a racial motivation. Sharpton had drawn attention to a number of racially charged incidents, from the murder of three African American men in the Howard Beach section of Queens in the 1980s to the shooting death of Sean Bell in a hail of fifty NYPD bullets on the eve of Bell’s wedding in 2007. He’s staged unsuccessful but always colorful campaigns for public office numerous times, from mayor of New York City to the U.S. Senate and even president of the United States. He never came even close to succeeding, but his speeches and debate appearances were always fun to watch. He was pretty powerful up there sometimes.

I’d been thinking about doing him for a while, and then I saw him on television in the days after 9/11, taking a run at Mayor Giuliani, who was at the time universally praised for how he handled himself in the wake of the terrorist attacks. On one of those Sunday-morning political shows, I saw Senator Dick Gephardt talk about Homeland Security. On another channel, I saw Senator Joe Lieberman talk about the Patriot Act. Then I turned on
Hannity & Colmes
, and I heard Al Sharpton say in his distinctive preacher voice, “I did not call Giuliani a bozo.”

When I did him that night for the college, I pretty much just repeated what Sharpton had said verbatim, and the audience roared.

Eventually I would be able to work some of our national nightmare into my stand-up routine. I remembered how drunken audiences seemed to really go for a little patriotic bloodletting, so I came up with: “If we ever capture Osama bin Laden, instead of turning him over to the United Nations, we should kidnap him and drop him along a dusty road in Daleville, Alabama. Instead of getting justice from the United Nations, he gets it from some farmer with a twisted leer and a misshapen head. ‘You’re a loooooong way from Tora Bora, ain’t ya, boy? Jethro, get the Slip ’n’ Slide! We’re gonna love you!’ ” It was cheap, the crowds used to really go for it, but I’m not at all sorry that the joke is now obsolete, and not just because the dude is dead.

D
uring the first week of December 2001, the city was still reeling. The smell of the fires still burning at Ground Zero permeated lower Manhattan, and remnants of nearly three thousand bodies were still being recovered.

That week, I went to the funeral of an old drinking buddy from Hell’s Kitchen who had died at thirty-three of cirrhosis. For all the devastation I’d caused in my own life with my drinking, it was a blow to see the corpse of such a young man who had literally been killed by booze.

After the ceremony, I joined my friend Caryn Zucker, who was then–NBC head Jeff Zucker’s wife, and
Today Show
host Katie Couric for dinner. I wanted so desperately to function at Katie’s level, because her rarified world was supposed to be mine too, but I felt like she could see right through me. I was sweating profusely throughout the meal. I was fumbling to make myself understood. It was as though there was a line right down the middle of the table, Katie and Caryn sitting on one side, in the light, and me on the other, sitting in darkness.

After dinner, I went back to 30 Rock for a late rehearsal. Rock god Mick Jagger was the musical guest that week, and the writers were trying to work him into a couple of sketches. I had played Karl Lagerfeld opposite Maya Rudolph as designer Donatella Versace at the beginning of the season, and there was another sketch with those two characters slated for this week. But when Jagger came up to me and asked if I’d mind if he did Lagerfeld, I was both flattered and relieved.
Sure, have a go!
Normally, if someone tried to poach a part from me, I’d be pissed, but it was Mick Fucking Jagger.

Besides, I was still in a daze from seeing my friend in his open casket, knowing full well it could have been me.

CHAPTER NINE

You Want Me to Go
Where
?

New York City

2002

I
got along great with everyone at
SNL
, but I didn’t hang out with cast or crew at the infamous postshow after-parties because my partying wasn’t really about partying. It was about getting obliterated, and I didn’t want those people to see it. The flip side was that when I was trying to stay sober, it was hard to be around revelers because I couldn’t join in. The alcoholic’s catch-22.

But I was at work a lot, so when I was using—I’d started adding an obscene amount of cocaine to my binges—I had to be creative about how I did it without other people catching on or letting it interfere with the work. At least too much.

In those days there were beautiful young women who would walk up and down Sixth Avenue, visiting various office buildings to take orders for coke. Addicts themselves, they provided this service for the dealers in exchange for drugs. And the dealers they worked for supplied the purest, strongest stuff you could get. Once you started, you couldn’t stop.

One night on Fifty-eighth Street, I met up with this tiny Russian woman, Irina, who’d been selling to me for a while. There was blood running out of her nose and over her lips from all the powder she’d snuffed up her own nose. She was in a kind of stupor.

“I didn’t get all of your coke,” she said. “But I got most of it. Can I blow you to make up the difference?”

At another time in life, perhaps, when confronted with a hot Russian chick saying, Hey, how ’bout if I blow you?—I couldn’t imagine a context in which that would not be appealing. But then again, I couldn’t have imagined such a girl having blood all over her face.

“Thanks, but you’re bleeding, and I don’t want blood
down there
. I like nice things
down there
. Like strudel.”

She just looked at me dumbly, continuing to bleed.

“Why don’t we get you cleaned up?” I said.

We went to a deli on Seventh Avenue and got some napkins. Then we went to her apartment, and we stopped the bleeding. While we were there, her phone rang—it was her supplier with the rest of the coke.