I'm Not High (26 page)

“Am I in some kind of trouble?” I answered, raising my hand. Everyone laughed, including Giuliani.

“No, no,” he said, smiling. “I really, really would like to do a Joe Pesci sketch. That’s my favorite sketch. Could we do one?”

I was over the freakin’ moon. It really made me feel validated in front of my peers.

“Sure,” I said, smiling. “We can do that!”

“That’s great, great news,” he said.

Then we went around the room sharing ideas. When it was Cheri’s turn, she said bluntly, “Mayor Giuliani, how would you feel about dressing up as a woman?”

“I could do that,” he said, smiling. I’m pretty sure that was the first any of us knew about the ease with which the mayor would dress in drag, which is now, of course, old hat. And in the end, I have to say that sketch, with the mayor playing Cheri’s mom as they prep Thanksgiving dinner while her kids steal beers and the neighborhood kids trash her lawn, was the funniest one of the night.

When it was my turn, the mayor said, “Oh, Jimmy, I already know what you’ve got in store for me,” and laughed.

And I said, “Actually, I have another sketch in mind, too.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said. “What’s it about?”

“Well, I have this character that basically just goes around telling everyone to shut up,” I explained. “He has no patience, and whenever anyone tries to talk to him he blows a fuse. I figured he’d be good as your new press secretary.”

“Ha!” he said. “I like it. That sounds really funny.”

The meeting came to an end, and Mayor Giuliani looked around the room. “This is tremendously exciting,” he said, breaking into a wide smile. “This is going to be a really fun week.”

I walked back to the office I shared with Tracy Morgan with two starring sketches in the works for the first time ever. I couldn’t believe it.

The next night, the mayor took us all to the back room of this old Italian restaurant for dinner. We sat down at a long table, surrounded by security guards. Somehow, I was seated in front of both Lorne and Mayor Giuliani. Everyone was trying to talk politics with him the whole night, and I felt like it was probably the last thing he wanted to discuss. Interleague play had just resumed in Major League Baseball that year, and I knew that the mayor was a huge Yankees fan. What he did not know was that I was a huge Mets fan. When there was a lull in the conversation, I took the opportunity to change the subject.

“So what do you think of the Yankees and Mets being able to play each other again in the regular season?”

The mayor put down his fork, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and said, “I think it’s phenomenal for baseball and for the city.” And then he launched into a long spiel about his favorite Yankee teams and asked me which team I liked.

“My dad’s a garbage man,” I said. “So that makes me a Mets fan.” I had his full attention just talking baseball for a half hour, and he became so animated, it was like he was a little kid on the street again, growing up in Brooklyn. Then the conversation turned to the mob and about how much he loved mob movies, like
Goodfellas,
and that’s why he wanted to do the Joe Pesci sketch.

“In fact, my biggest Mafia bust when I was district attorney came from a transvestite snitch in the Meatpacking District,” he said. “After mob hits, it was
her
job to chop up the bodies and dispose of them.” He proceeded to tell us the most lurid mob tales just as matter-of-factly as if we were standing around a backyard barbecue. It felt like I’d made a new friend, and at the end of the night, the mayor said, “Jimmy, you ever do any stand-up around the city?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not while the show is on, but next summer I’ll be doing Caroline’s.”

“Let me know the date,” he said, “and I’ll be there.” He really did show up that summer.

Mayor Giuliani also came to Shea Stadium the following year for the Mets home opener. Dee and I had great season tickets for a while, and before the game started, as fans were filing in, we spotted him. So I got up and talked to one of his security guards. “Can I give a quick hello to the mayor?”

The guy recognized me and said, “Oh, yeah, he’d love to see you.”

So I walked right up to him and I said really loudly, “We all know you’re really a Yankee fan! We know you don’t really wanna be here!” He blushed and smiled as I continued to razz him. “You don’t have to play politics! You can go on home! You don’t have to appease us.” By now most of the fans in the lower boxes knew he was there and everyone was listening to the exchange.

“I’m going to get you back, Breuer,” he whispered intently. “You just wait.”

A couple of months later, I was scheduled to do a celebrity softball game at Yankee Stadium. To me that place was the enemy’s nest. But it was for charity, and I knew it would be fun to run around the bases. Tom Arnold, Bob Saget, Matthew Broderick, and a bunch of other people I liked were in the lineup.

Sadly, we all were informed that the charity game was canceled. It had rained heavily the night before and the owner, George Steinbrenner, didn’t want us tearing up his field before the Yankees took on the Red Sox.

“As our way of saying sorry,” one of the Yankees’ PR guys said, “why don’t you all come up to Mr. Steinbrenner’s personal box?”

“Why not?” I said. As a Mets fan, again, to me this was not a big deal. I can appreciate how special it would be for someone who loves the Yankees, but I’m not that guy. We all filed in, and Steinbrenner had a bartender in a little suit serving drinks. There was a leather sofa shaped like a baseball glove. The windows looked right out onto his box seats. The coolest thing I observed was that Steinbrenner was really not businesslike at all about the team. He was just a huge baseball fan who loved his team and wasn’t shy about diving in and talking about the disagreements he had with Billy Martin when he was manager. He seemed like the ultimate Yankee fan, and this box was his chapel.

“You’re great on
Saturday Night Live,
” he said. “I’ve known Lorne forever. He’s great, too. You’re lucky he likes you.”

“I know,” I said, nodding.

“So what do you think?” He looked around the room proudly at all his Yankee baubles. “Are you a Yankee fan?

As a die-hard Mets fan, all I could honestly say was, “Oh, I
follow
the Yankees.” Technically, that was not a lie. And I followed it up with a first-class non sequitur evasion: “What a great establishment you have here, sir.” Not a lie, either.

“Call us anytime you want to come to a game,” Steinbrenner said. Then he started talking about great Yankee teams. “From the ’78 club, who was your favorite, Jim? Reggie? Thurman? Catfish? Bucky Dent? Whose contribution meant the most?”

“Oh, my,” I said. “They all did great!”

As I stuttered and stammered, Steinbrenner looked over my shoulder and shouted, “Rudy, I knew you’d show up!” I turned around to see Mayor Giuliani and his entourage.

“I’m not going to miss the Yankees-Red Sox game, George,” the mayor said, shaking Steinbrenner’s hand. “This is huge.”

I gave the mayor a huge hello, and almost immediately he started smirking.

“You two know each other? ” Steinbrenner said, observing our greeting.

“Oh yeah,” the mayor said. “I was on
Saturday Night Live
last season. I did ‘The Joe Pesci Show’ with Jimmy. He’s very funny.”

“Wow,” Steinbrenner replied. “That’s great! That’s one less introduction I have to make.”

“My question,” Giuliani asked Steinbrenner, “is what is he doing here?”

“He was going to play in a celebrity softball game, but the field’s too wet,” Steinbrenner said. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt out there.”

“But you know he’s the enemy, don’t you, George?” Mayor Giuliani said, the smirk returning to his face. Steinbrenner looked really perplexed. He didn’t say a word. “It’s true,” the mayor added. “Jimmy Breuer is just about the biggest die-hard New York Mets fan in all five boroughs.”

All the color left Steinbrenner’s face. He looked like he’d eaten some bad scrambled eggs, and that look was soon replaced with disgust.

“I have nothing against the Yankees,” I said insistently.

“Oh, that’s a ringing endorsement,” the mayor said cockily, his grin widening. “But it’s not what you were telling me last time we met. You said you hated the Yankees and that you were a die-hard Mets fan. Matter of fact, weren’t you gloating that the Mets beat the Yankees last summer?”

Steinbrenner looked almost remorseful, like his own personal baseball-fan radar had let him down. He didn’t know what to think. Beads of sweat ran down my back to my ass. Before I could spit out another half truth, the mayor laughed and said, “Oh, I’m just busting Jimmy’s chops. He’s a comedian. He can take it!”

Steinbrenner didn’t laugh. He looked me up and down and I could tell he knew I was full of crap. Mayor Giuliani just kept grinning. He leaned toward me and whispered, “I told you I’d get you back.”

Back at
SNL,
after our big Italian meal, we motored through the rest of the week with both Pesci and the Shut-up Guy in the lineup. Tracy had a part in the Pesci sketch as D.C. mayor Marion Barry, trying to sell Mayor Giuliani old garbage trucks for cash. In the dress rehearsal, both sketches killed. And after that response, I was pretty sure it would be the first time I had two characters in one episode. That didn’t last.

Shortly before the main show started, one of the writers came up to me and said, “Hey, Jim, sorry to do this to you, man, but you’ve gotta pick one of the two sketches. It’s such a big week here, we gotta be fair to everyone.”

“That sucks,” I said. To me, it was bullshit. Plenty of people were in multiple sketches every single week. With Steve Koren and Fred Wolf gone, I had no real backers on the writing staff who could swing their weight around. I felt like I was being frozen out. If I could hit a home run, let me hit a home run, don’t put me on the bench just so everyone can bat.

“I know,” he said. “Can you just decide quickly between Pesci and the Shut-up Guy?”

So of course I picked the Pesci sketch, because that was the one the mayor wanted to do. I was very happy with it, and most important, so was the mayor. Well, our mayor. The next week Marion Barry from D.C. was in
The New York Times
demanding an apology from the show for our portrayal of him.

Chris Kattan, Heavy Metal Man, and the End of
SNL
Days

Life on
SNL
gradually became miserable for me. Don’t get me wrong; my overall experience on
SNL
is irreplaceable. It’s just that political tiffs and ego blows had accumulated over the years and by the summer of 1998, things had come to a boil. I had enemies on the writing staff who wanted me fired, and I didn’t really care to stick around.

The only way I found out things were that bad for me was that this high-level NBC exec, who was the grand pooh-bah of all of the channel’s late-night programming, called me during the summer of 1998. He was a huge fan of mine and I was a huge fan of his.

“What
happened
last season?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. He made it sound like I’d walked through the studio with a running chain saw and no pants on.

“We just had our end-of-the-year meeting for
SNL
and I learned that some people are trying to get you off the show. Did something happen between you and any of the writers?”

“Something happened, but I thought we worked it out,” I said. I went on to explain a
situation
with a couple of the show’s top writers that transpired earlier in the spring when Matthew Broderick was the host. I explained to the exec that we patched it up but that there might still have been some hard feelings there.

“Maybe you should talk to Lorne,” he said. “Or go have dinner with these guys.”

“I offered,” I said. “But no one’s taken me up on it.”

The
situation
that got me in trouble occurred when the
Godzilla
remake starring Matthew Broderick was coming out, and he was scheduled to host the show. Tracy and I sat down and started talking about
Godzilla
, wondering if it was going to be like the old versions, and we started riffing on old monster movies. Pretty soon we were like two little kids, just going off making all these airplane, air raid, and machine gun noises. We were like, “Why don’t we do
this
for the monologue?”

Our plan was when the show opened, we were going to come out and bombard Matthew with a spastic barrage of questions about the movie, like: “Is it gonna be like the old
Godzilla
?” And he’d say, “How do you mean?” And we’d start doing loud sound effects with our mouths, like the old prop airplanes shooting at Godzilla, and muffled voices from loudspeakers saying stuff like, “People of Tokyo, run for your lives!” Then Tracy would say, “Are the twins from the movie
Mothra
gonna be in there? Remember the twins, they be singing that song? ‘Oooh-wah, do-do-wah!’?”

We wrote it up and it really came to life as a performance piece in the read-through. Matthew loved it. He was cracking up. And the way it was written made it really easy for him. He wouldn’t have to do a lot of work—he could just come on stage, do his shtick, and we’d take the ball and run with it. However, one of the head writers had his own monologue sketch. It was a spoof on all the
Godzilla
advertisements, like, “His tail is four blocks long. His teeth are two stories high. His testicles are like two overstuffed bags of leaves....” And after a few of them, it was like, “I get it!” It was funny . . . for about thirty seconds.