Based on a True Story Read online

  Sarah would say, “Boy, mister, these answering machines are really annoying.” And I would say, “Frankly, lady, I don’t give a damn,” and then give Sarah a big smooch. This gave the sketch a big laugh at the end by spoofing a well-known motion picture, and it also allowed me to give a big smooch to Sarah, whom I was falling deeply in love with.

  At the time, Sarah and Dave Attell ruled the New York stand-up scene. Sarah, with her sly, subversive satire masked by the sweetest of deliveries. And Attell, a joke machine to rival Dangerfield himself. She was elegant and unafraid. He was rumpled, unshaven, and a chain-smoker. They were the Bogey and Bacall of the New York comedy circle. What chance did I have? What woman was going to choose Alfred Einstein over Humphrey Bogart? Still, I vowed I would win Sarah’s love.

  No one at SNL knew more about matters of the heart than David Spade, so I asked his advice. “Just ask her out, buddy,” Spade told me. Just ask her out. So simple and yet so incredibly complex. No wonder David Spade was so good with the ladies.

  I was pulling an all-nighter in the writers’ room, trying to finish the Answering Machine sketch for Wednesday’s read-through, when I spotted Sarah in the hallway. I decided to make my intentions known. “You’re dreadful pretty, Sarah,” I said, “and I’d be honored if you would lay down with me. And not in the restroom either. I will take you out to a restaurant and you can order beefsteak that I will pay for. We will coo and whisper and smile meaningful smiles and we will reduce the whole world and its people to our small table and the two of us. And then, afterward, I will take you to my bed and we will be like swine.”

  She ran away, and I realized that I’d made a big mistake. You see, Sarah was a liberated woman and she didn’t need any man to buy her beefsteak. She made exactly the same salary as I did, minus the thirty percent that they automatically took off on account of she was a woman. And what a woman! In a way Sarah’s lucky she never met the payroll clerk at SNL, or they might have taken off sixty percent.

  The day after my clumsy pass I was served a restraining order that said I was not allowed to be within one hundred yards of my loved one. This made the cameramen on the show furious, because when Sarah and I were in the same sketch, they had to resort to ridiculously wide shots. I fell into a deep depression, heartbroken.

  About a week later I walked into the Comedy Cellar to do a set. I had some new material and wanted to try it out (they had recently come out with a new telephone that had its own built-in answering machine), and the first thing I saw was the two of them, Dave and Sarah, canoodling at a corner table. They may as well have been up in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Well, I saw red and I went over to Colin Quinn. Colin was and is the smartest comedian alive and a great guy to boot. (This was long before he joined the cast of SNL and destroyed my life.)

  “Colin,” I said, “you’re from New York. Where does a guy go to hire a hit man?”

  Colin laughed. “What do you want with a hit man?”

  “Can you keep a secret, Colin? I plan to have Dave Attell murdered and then, once he’s out of the way, convince Sarah to lay down with me.”

  I should have paused to give Colin a chance to answer my question regarding his ability to keep a secret before I spilled my whole plan. As it turned out, Colin Quinn was a huge blabbermouth, who wound up prating like a magpie about the entire murder plot as soon as he got the chance. But I didn’t know that then.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s between fifty and seventy-five dollars in it for you.”

  “Are you completely serious about this, Norm? I mean, there’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

  I knew right away he wasn’t talking about fish. Colin was the king of metaphors. He meant there were plenty of ladies in the sea.

  “No offense, Colin, but the longer it takes for me to listen to your yapping, the longer it will take to have Dave Attell murdered and that very night lay down with Sarah.”

  Colin looked very nervous but finally said, “All right. I know a guy.”

  Colin called me the next day and said it was all set up. I was to meet the hit man at the corner booth of the Stage Deli the next day at noon. I asked Colin if he could change it to the Carnegie Deli, because it is a far superior deli. He said it was too late so I thanked him, but he had to have heard the bitter disappointment in my voice. I mean, if you’re going to meet a hit man at a Midtown deli, why the Stage Deli? Why not the Carnegie Deli?

  The next day, I sat in the Stage Deli and waited for the hit man to arrive. He was late, so I spent my time thinking about the delicious pastrami on rye they had at the Carnegie Deli and how I would not be eating one today. I saw a police officer enter the joint and I got nervous. When he slipped into the booth across from me, I got really nervous.

  “You Norm?” he asked.

  “I’m not talking to any coppers,” I said.

  “Who’s a copper?” the cop asked.

  “You are.”

  “I’m no copper. Where did you get a ridiculous idea like that?”

  “You’re wearing a police uniform.” I was very good at spotting cops.

  He looked down at himself and saw that I was right and began sweating profusely and stuttering and hitting his forehead twice with the palm of his hand and saying, “STUPID! STUPID!”

  It took him a few minutes to compose himself, but finally he said, “Oh, this. You see, I’ve been walking the beat the last ten years and I just got promoted to undercover cop. But you know what they say. Old habits die hard.”

  He seemed relaxed again.

  “So you’re an undercover cop,” I said. “Why should I talk to you?”

  Well, he started the whole sweating and stuttering and hitting-his-forehead routine all over again. I’d just got up to leave when he blurted out, “I’m a bad cop. A dirty cop.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course I am. That’s what makes me such a good hit man. I have my own gun, and nobody ever suspects a cop.”

  The waitress came up and addressed the hit man with the police costume on. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to keep your voice down. You’re frightening many of the customers.”

  The hit man had been speaking very loudly, in a sort of a panic. I would find out later that he wasn’t a bad cop at all. I mean, he was a bad cop in the sense that he was no good at being a cop, but he was not a corrupt cop.

  He pulled out a large tape recorder and hit the play button and the record button simultaneously and we began hammering out a deal. He would murder Dave Attell and in return I would give him $355. We haggled for well over an hour before finally settling on the $355 figure, which made me very angry after he arrested me and I realized he could have just accepted my first offer and saved us both a lot of time. When I got to the precinct they told me I was allowed one phone call.

  “Hello, Colin, it’s Norm. You’re from New York. Where does a guy go to hire an attorney?”

  18

  THE TRIAL

  Only a month earlier I had been on national television, appearing in bit parts in Ellen Cleghorne sketches. And now here I stood before a judge, wearing some sort of ridiculous orange jumpsuit, found guilty by a jury of my peers, about to be sentenced, and trying to figure how it had come to this. And maybe I was guilty, but of what, really? Attempting to hire a hit man to kill a close friend of mine? Well, if they convicted everybody who was guilty of that, they’d have to build a lot more prisons in this country, brother.

  And what had I done anyway? I had never actually met a hit man. By the prosecution’s own admission, the police officer I met with at the Stage Deli had never killed a single man in exchange for cash. All I’d really done was eat a Reuben with a policeman. I had a very good lawyer and he tried to get the charge reduced to eating a Reuben with a policeman. But the judge didn’t go for it.

  I thought we had a pretty good defense. We made the point that people die every day; it’s not such a big deal. We showed the jury a picture of Sarah Silverman and they all agreed she was a knockout, and one
man even made a loud wolf whistle. We tried to get the jury to believe that I had an evil twin brother and it was he who was guilty and not me, and we even told them not to feel bad charging me with the crime because we understood that it was a natural mistake. But that fell apart when it turned out my evil twin brother had an ironclad alibi. He had been down south on a multistate killing spree at the time.

  Even though I was found guilty, I never blamed my lawyer. I mean, he was no Ben Matlock, but he was good. The problem was, I was just too guilty. But I was a man, I’d made a mistake, and I was willing to face the consequences of my actions.

  I started to think how maybe I should have taken that plea bargain, though. My lawyer was very good friends with the DA. He had come to me one day, giddy, and told me of the deal he had struck. If I pleaded guilty and apologized to Mr. Attell in court, I would receive a sentence of one midafternoon in prison.

  “No way,” I said. “I want my name cleared and I will never apologize to Dave Attell. He was the guy I was trying to have murdered. And you want ME to apologize to HIM?!!?” Well, now, as I stood to hear the judge’s decision, that plea bargain was starting to look pretty good, and that sentence of one midafternoon was starting to seem pretty short.

  “Mr. Macdonald, you are found guilty and sentenced to serve forty years in a maximum-security prison. Is there anything you would like to say to this court?”

  Oh, I had plenty to say to this court, all right.

  “Your Honor, you have sentenced me to prison, but let me say this. The real prisons in this country are the classrooms and the cubicles. The real prisons are the mausoleums we call houses, and the life sentence we are given is a job where we have to wear a tie that slowly strangles us and a woman who finds us full and leaves us empty. I will go to your prison; it is true. But there is something honest and true and noble about prison. You give up your freedom, yes. But, in exchange, you are given a roof over your head, three squares a day, and all the morphine you want. And I guess that’s good enough for the likes of me.”

  “There’s no morphine in prison, son,” the judge sighed.

  “What??????”

  I had clearly been misinformed.

  19

  DOING TIME

  Prison was a scary place, and the first day was worst of all. The first thing that happened was the guards took away all of the stuff I’d brought from home. They took away my wallet and my keys and my forty pounds of Omaha Steaks and my cake with the file inside. They took away my Dirty Work hat and my Norm Show T-shirt and my SNL jacket and all the rest of my free-world clothes, and they made me wear their striped pajamas. They even took away my name, but that part was actually pretty cool because they gave me a number instead, like I was a robot from outer space. Mine was 6023102.

  Then they walked me to my cell, past dangerous-looking convicts who chanted, “Fresh meat. Fresh meat. Fresh meat.”

  “You may as well stop with your chanting, boys,” I answered. “I don’t have a single Omaha Steak on me. They all got took.” The convicts continued their chant, but there was a puzzled tone to it.

  The guards threw me in a cell where a big sullen man was sitting on the lower of two steel bunks. He looked to be about three hundred pounds, without an ounce of fat on him. He had a square jaw and a dark forelock, which barely concealed a swastika tattoo.

  “Hey, Rocco,” said one of the guards as he tossed me to the cold gray floor, “we got some fresh meat for you.”

  “Don’t you believe him, Rocco,” I said. “They took all my fresh meat in the other room, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re gonna eat it themselves.”

  Rocco looked me over as the guards left.

  “What are you in for?” he asked. I explained the whole situation with Sarah Silverman and Dave Attell and then I asked him the same. “Triple murder,” he said.

  I was shocked; any fool knows you can’t murder a man more than once, and I told Rocco as much. He’d been railroaded on those last two counts, and I let him know I’d be more than happy to become his jailhouse lawyer and dedicate my life to gaining his freedom. After all, becoming a jailhouse lawyer had been a boyhood dream of mine, and here I was with an opportunity to make it come true! I knew logically that Rocco was completely innocent of at least two of the crimes he’d been convicted of. And I believed in my heart that he was most likely innocent of the other one too. After all, if a man is innocent of two murders, odds are he’s innocent of the third. That’s just grade-school arithmetic. I couldn’t wait to get in front of that jury. I planned to go to the prison library first thing in the morning and start reading law books. And I’d had a little head start too. You see, I had seen every single episode of Matlock many times over.

  “I’ll set you free, Rocco. I promise you that.”

  Rocco started to get real excited at this news. He told me his first lawyers had convinced him to plead guilty. We both agreed that’s the last thing anyone should ever do. We were on the same wavelength, and that’s important when it comes to a lawyer and his client.

  The first thing I suggested was that he lose the swastika tattoo. I didn’t care, personally, about a man’s politics, but if there’s one thing I’d learned from watching Matlock, it was this: Juries hate Hitler. Rocco claimed that he had just picked his tattoo out of a prison tattoo book. “Is there anything we can do?” he asked.

  “Sure, I can just modify the tattoo—add some lines to it and easily make it into a tic-tac-toe board.”

  “That sounds good,” said Rocco, but then he began to look troubled.

  When I asked him what was wrong, Rocco said, “I was just wondering if the tic-tac-toe board is associated with another wicked man from history.”

  I smiled. “Do you consider Wink Martindale historically wicked?”

  Rocco let out a roar of laughter. “Everyone loves Wink Martindale!” And for the first time I could see a glimmer of genuine hope.

  The next day I went to the prison library to study, but I was disheartened when I found out that law books are long. Long books make me sleepy. A great lawyer must know his weaknesses and I knew almost all of mine. I decided that, instead of struggling through those books, I would rely on my vast knowledge of Ben Matlock’s work. So Rocco and I began to practice courtroom scenarios in our small cell. I started by asking Rocco straight out if he was guilty of any of the three murders.

  “Oh, I’m guilty all right, that’s for sure. And the funny thing is, I have no remorse. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

  After hearing this, I made a key decision: Rocco would not be taking the stand. Our courtroom preparation had come to an end, and I felt ready to defend him before the judge.

  The next day I changed Rocco’s tattoo from a swastika to a tic-tac-toe board. And while I was at it, I went one step further. Using Rocco’s wide, heavily muscled back as my canvas, I used my needle and green ink to fashion a beautiful image of Wink Martindale in a checkered suit, asking a contestant a maddeningly easy question. But that night, Rocco woke me up with bad news. He told me he couldn’t go through with the appeal. He’d been in the joint so long, he was downright institutionalized. He confessed that he was afraid of freedom. I couldn’t understand where he was coming from. I missed my freedom more than anything. I loved my freedom. And here in the hoosegow, they were pretty stingy when it came to any freedom whatsoever.

  Then Rocco explained the difference between the outside and the inside to me. On the outside, a man rises to power using his ambition and cunning. On the inside, you make your way up the ropes one way and one way only: by the number of fellows you can rape.

  That’s why, within the jail, Rocco’s name was spoken in hushed tones. He was a raper’s raper. He was staying right here in prison, he told me, because inside he had the necessary skills to command respect and prestige, but outside he was a nobody. I was no longer his lawyer, just another prisoner, and if I knew what was good for me I’d better start raping.

  Now, I’d never raped anybody before, and in t
he free world I had worn that fact as a badge of honor, mentioning it proudly and loudly at dinner parties and social events. Folks admired me for it.

  “Say what you will about old Norm,” my friends would often say, “but he won’t rape you!” Every time I heard that, it’d make me feel good inside, like a warm shot of whiskey. But here in the penitentiary, the rules had been turned upside down.

  I wanted to fit in, but the problem was that I didn’t care much for sex with men. I liked men fine when it came to watching football games with them, and eating Cheetos, and playing videogames, but when it came to having sex with them, I’d just had to grin and bear it.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Norm,” Rocco explained. “Rape has nothing to do with sex. It’s all about power, buddy.”

  I gotta admit, when Rocco first told me that, I thought it was about the damnfoolest thing a man could say. But the more I chewed on it, the more sense it started to make. Rape was all about making the other guy feel small; then I’d look big and strong beside him. I’d done similar things in the free world plenty—spraying a handful of quarters onto a busy thoroughfare and laughing as the homeless bums dodged cars and trucks to earn their supper. I had always felt really big inside when I’d done that. And, apparently, that’s what raping a fellow in prison felt like, or so Rocco told me.

  So I made up my mind then and there that as soon as the opportunity availed itself I would take ungentlemanly advantage of some hapless prisoner. I got my opportunity while I was working one night in the machine shop and I looked over and there stood Marvin Adelman. Marvin was doing a five-year bid for securities and exchange fraud. He had large black glasses, thinning gray hair, and whiskers that made him look just like a rodent with large black glasses.

  I shouted at him loud, so all my fellow inmates could hear. “Hey, Adelman, I’m going to rape you the same way you raped the people who invested all their money in your Ponzi schemes. The only difference is, whereas you raped them in a metaphorical sense, I’m setting out to—” I stopped my speech. Marvin had fled. I had made the biggest mistake of the novice raper: I had made my intentions known.