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

up. I wouldn’t allow my brain to think its own thoughts, or I thought I would lose my mind.
    I did that for a year, but I no longer had faith in God or in the Program. I went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings too, because for a while after Dean’s suicide, I couldn’t eat, and then I couldn’t stop. Eventually I quit going to all meetings, and I started to drink again. Five years of really good, productive sobriety, gone. My life had been better than I ever could have believed: I was making good money doing voices, I had a beautiful wife, I had a gorgeous apartment where I lay out by the pool slathered in suntan lotion, an item you would not find in my medicine cabinet today. I felt Dean’s suicide was directed at me, and it worked. I had to leave Florida.
    It seemed like a good time to give New York another try.
    S even years had passed since I’d flamed out of New York. I had a lot more going against me now, not least of all that I was in my mid-thirties, which is way too old to start a comedy career. And did I mention I was drinking again? It bears repeating.
    My first gig in New York was at a short-lived club in Yonkers, a suburb of New York City.
    The home of Mary J. Blige, Ella Fitzgerald, and DMX—and with W. C. Handy Place right off of Central Avenue—what were they thinking? Can you imagine poor DMX, a black Jehovah’s Witness, living in Yonkers? I can just see him knocking on the door of some Irish or Italian family on Tuckahoe Road, trying to spread the word of God. His only hope was if he picked Steven Tyler’s family home on Pembrook Drive. Like he was commenting on an American Idol contestant’s performance, Tyler would have loved that: “I thought your preachin’ was great, just great, DMX. You sang like a duck and you quacked like a singer, fiddle-de-dee kiss my little finger.”
    Anyway, the gig was at a place called Grandpa’s Shooting Stars. Owned by Al Lewis, the actor best known for playing Grandpa on the sitcom The Munsters , although he did a fine turn in Car 54, Where Are You? before that, it was a classy joint with fishbowls on the tables, and the drinks all had long, long straws. The audience sat there sucking on these giant straws, and after eighteen minutes of a forty-five-minute set, they started to boo. I heard someone in the audience say, “He’s wounded, finish him off.” I slunk off the stage. At least I got carfare to get home.
    And it was still the best gig I got. I was turned down by every club in Manhattan because I did impressions, and they were prejudiced against that. It was seen as a novelty act, and serious comedy clubs don’t like novelty acts, guitar acts, prop acts. People looked down on it.
    W hen I worked at the Skyline Motor Inn when I first lived in New York, I was living uptown in Washington Heights on 163rd Street. When I moved back to New York with my wife, we started out even farther uptown, at the very northern tip of Manhattan in Inwood. But eventually, after we realized living together wasn’t working out that well, I ended up on my own in an apartment at 688 Tenth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets in Hell’s Kitchen. Coincidentally, my building was across the street from the Skyline Motor Inn.
    One afternoon when I didn’t have much else to do, I was browsing through a bookstore, looking for something to read. Like my father, I was always drawn to stories of law and order, anything from Wyatt Earp and the frontier justice of the Old West to the sordid true crime tales of modern organized crime. I was trolling this section of the store when I saw a paperback with a photograph of the street sign on my corner on the cover. What were the chances? I had to get it.
    The author was T. J. English, an Irish-American journalist who wrote for Irish American Magazine during the 1980s, and his book, The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob, chronicled the bloody misadventures of one of the most brutal gangs in the annals of New York