Free God, if You're Not Up There . . . by Darrell Hammond Page A

members was staring at my crotch. Imagine my surprise when she walked up to me onstage, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male at a mere fifty-seven inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.

    The couple in back were still sucking face, a waitress was cleaning up a spill at table seven, and the blond weaved her way back from the bathroom, not one of them so much as registering my existence.
    I sometimes hit the road with a kid named Billy Gardell, who now stars in the sitcom Mike & Molly . Sometimes the clubs didn’t want to pay us our measly $20, so Billy, who was a formidably sized young man, would confront the managers to make sure we didn’t get stiffed. He was only eighteen then, but he already wrote brilliant stuff. One time I gave him a joke I’d written about Beaver Cleaver, and in return he gave me a far better joke. This was back when the Ayatollah Khomeini had died: “I hope he’s reincarnated as a tree, cut down, turned into paper, and on him is printed a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. ”
    People would go crazy. They didn’t notice the hot gurgling seed joke, but they went for the patriotic thing.
    B ill and Pat Mullaly and I used to study the big names doing their stand-up routines to see how many laughs they got. With a stopwatch in hand, we watched Jerry Seinfeld’s routine at the University of Florida and counted ten laughs a minute, and he’d end with an applause break. Jay Leno and Bill Cosby got that many too. It was incredible.
    I won a stand-up contest for Funniest Comic in Orlando. My prize was being sent to the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, where I would do a spot on Comic Strip Live , a popular stand-up showcase that aired weekly on Fox starting in 1990. The producer came to see me do my set. In the middle of it, I saw the silhouette of him throwing his arms up in disgust as he rose and left the room. He called my manager, who told me later he’d said, “How dare you send me this fucking amateur?”
    O ne night at a club in Orlando where I’d done a whole bunch of impressions, an attractive young woman comic got onstage after me. She pulled out the largest carrot I’ve ever seen and said, “I’d like to see Darrell Hammond imitate this .” The place went crazy. I had to agree, it was pretty fucking funny.
    So I married her. A couple of times.
    A nd then life dropped another bomb in my lap. One day in 1991, Dean, my sponsee, came to talk to me. He was in a bad way after having just been fired from his job. Apparently he’d been caught kissing another man, although why that was a firing offense, I have no idea. I guess it was that this wasn’t the West Village, this was uptight Orlando, and Dean was a married guy with two kids. That night, he told me he was in love with me. I was shocked. When I told him I wasn’t gay, that seemed to be the last straw. Dean used to joke that if he ever wanted to kill himself, he’d use a .357 Magnum. I never found that very funny, and less so when he finally did it. His wife was too distraught to give me the news. I can still hear his seven-year-old daughter’s voice on my answering machine, telling me her daddy had killed himself.
    I. Freaked. The. Fuck. Out.
    In that moment, I thought I could hear flies buzzing in my ears. My senses seemed to cross boundaries with other senses, a smell I could feel, a fear I could hear. The whole room seemed to fill with the blare of a thousand strident trumpets.
    I ran down to an AA meeting in Winter Park, but the meeting didn’t work. I ran into Dean’s sponsees, and I had to tell them what happened.
    He had a closed-casket funeral.
    I read a book called In Tune with the Infinite , which said that the first hour of the day, your mind is a clean sheet of paper, and you can write whatever you want on it. So I read positive-thinking literature like Emmet Fox’s Seven Day Mental Diet for an hour every morning as soon as I woke