God, if You're Not Up There . . . (28 page)

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.

W
hen 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

O
kay, 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.

I
t 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.

O
n 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.

“Are you on tonight?” she asked, giving me a warm hug.

“Hey, Darrell!” a voice yelled from behind me. I turned to find Jodi Mancuso, the Emmy Award–winning
SNL
hairstylist.

A moment later, a tap on the shoulder: another Emmy Award-winner, Katreese Barnes, assistant music director and keyboardist with the
SNL
Band.

The warm welcome went a long way toward calming my nerves at being back. I assumed everyone knew what bad shape I’d been in when I’d left in 2009, but it didn’t seem that way at all.

I went inside, past the line of tourists waiting in line for the NBC Studio tour, and headed for the elevator and up to the eighth floor.

Upstairs, Lindsay greeted me and showed me to my guest dressing room, where I picked up a new version of the script before heading over to the hair and makeup department, down the hall near the cast dressing rooms. On the way, I passed the shelf where the head models for the cast and recurring hosts are kept. I was a little sad to see mine was gone.

But when I turned into the hair and makeup room, there it was, and on top of it was a masterpiece of blond swirls that rivaled the real Trump’s signature “do.” Bettie Rogers, the head of the hairstyling department, another Emmy winner, had outdone herself. There was a set of handmade bushy eyebrows, courtesy of Emmy-winner Louie Zakarian, the head of the makeup department, to go with it. After a fairly elaborate process to cover up my own hair, which I’d let grow long for the
Hound Dogs
pilot, Jodi placed the wig on my head, glued the eyebrows on, and I was transformed.

A few minutes later, I was summoned to the main stage by the voice of Gena Rositano, the stage manager, over the PA system. There, I joined Tina as Palin, Kristen Wiig as Michele “Crazy Eyes” Bachmann, Bobby Moynihan as Newt Gingrich, Jason Sudeikis as Mitt Romney. Each of us stood behind a podium as the candidates would for a debate, although mine was fashioned out of gaudy gold columns. “Unofficially” joining our fake debate was Kenan Thompson as Jimmy McMillan, the eccentric former New York gubernatorial candidate known for his dramatic facial hair and Rent Is Too Damn High Party affiliation. Bill Hader was moderator Shepard Smith.