God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond

Author:Darrell Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

So he came over, and we did coke together. And then my nose started bleeding. For a moment, I stepped out of myself, like a tourist in my own life, and saw this pathetic scene: these three people in this squalid apartment ingesting lines of white poison in the name of a good time. I thought, I don’t like this anymore.

My coke use got so bad that when I called Irina for more a couple of months later, she said, “I’m not selling you any more. You are out of control. You’re famous, and I can’t have that. I can’t have some terrible thing happening and I was the last person you saw that day. I don’t need it.”

It’s not a good sign when your dealer cuts you off.

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