God, if You're Not Up There . . . (24 page)

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.

M
y 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.

A
t 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 funeral 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.”

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.

M
y 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.

T
he 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.