Leonard Maltin, the critic whose movie reviews I grew up with and believed were more valid then anyone else’s, had this to say about Corky Romano:

  Dreadful comedy from the “idiot as hero” genre. Hyperkinetic Kattan (funny only in small doses) plays the wayward son of a Mob family who’s forced to infiltrate the FBI to destroy evidence that would convict his father, Pops Romano (Falk). Clumsy in every department.

  Chapter 16

  BROKEN

  There’s a scene toward the end of Million Dollar Baby that’s not easy for me to watch. For those who haven’t seen the film, consider this a spoiler alert. Don’t think I don’t take you into consideration, dear reader, because I do. I care.

  Anyway, Hilary Swank plays a welterweight boxer named Maggie, and in the climax of the film, when she’s just about to win the big “million-dollar” boxing match, her asshole opponent knocks her out with an illegal sucker punch right after the last round. Before her coach, played by Clint Eastwood, has the chance to move a small, stupidly placed corner stool out of the way, Maggie falls right on it. When she lands, her head hits the top of the stool, and the side of her neck lands directly on the edge of it. The impact breaks her neck. After a few weeks in the hospital, because of the specific area she injured, the nervous system in her neck stops functioning, causing her arms and legs to atrophy and eventually making her a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic for the rest of her life, which ends up being only a few months.

  The scene isn’t easy for anyone to watch. But it has a particularly significant meaning for me, dating back to May 12, 2001.

  Lara Flynn Boyle was the guest host that week and at the height of her career. At that time, Tina Fey was one of the head writers, plus she did “Weekend Update” with Jimmy. If Tina cast you in one of her sketches, you were lucky, because no matter how they did during read through, if she wrote it, it would always make it in the show.

  That week, Tina had written a parody of MSNBC Investigates. Almost everyone in the cast was in it—Will, Maya, Chris Parnell, Ana, plus Lara—but the focus of the “investigation” centered around Jimmy, Tracy, Horatio, and me, playing a group of men who would secretly get together in a kitchen to enjoy tea, bake a pie, and dress up as The Golden Girls. In the last scene of the sketch, while sitting at the kitchen table, I choke to death eating a piece of the pie that Horatio baked.

  Now, as I’ve said before, when a sketch you wrote makes it into the lineup, you automatically become the producer or “showrunner” of that sketch, which meant that for the MSNBC Investigates parody, Tina was the showrunner. Thursday afternoon when we blocked the sketch, in order to make my “choking to death” as funny as possible, she suggested that after I say my line and take a bite of the pie, before I fall out of the chair, we needed to see on camera that I was choking. When we blocked the scene a second time, I was told the choking hadn’t worked on camera, which made sense because as I was choking, I fell off the chair to my left. That move may have been safe, but unfortunately it wasn’t reading funny.

  After watching the sketch being camera blocked from the control booth, Tina suggested that instead of falling out of the chair to my left, it might work if I fell backwards instead. Standing on set, I looked at the chair and noticed that it wasn’t a breakaway (a prop chair specifically built to collapse to prevent any injury); instead it was a regular tacky, trailer-park kitchen chair, made completely of chrome steel. I questioned the safety of falling backwards from this chrome chair, but nobody in stunts or in props asked if I needed a thick floor mat, off camera, to fall on. Then again, I didn’t ask for anything at that point, either.

  For the run-through Saturday afternoon, the four of us—complete in Golden Girls attire—were on set, sitting at the kitchen table goofing off in our blouses and wigs, waiting to rehearse. Then I remembered the choking bit, and that I needed to fall backwards instead of out of my chair to the left for the camera to see me and get laughs. The only way to do that was to be seated with my back flush against the chair and to take the chair with me when I fell. In order to save my best for the show, just as Phil Hartman had once advised me, I decided that since there wasn’t an audience for run-through, I’d be safe and not do a proper fall, then at dress rehearsal, I’d give my performance eighty percent, and go for it 100 percent for the live show.

  When I did the stunt at dress and fell backwards, everybody in the booth said it looked hilarious because when I took the chair with me, my feet and arms were flailing and stretched way out in the air. The only problem was that in order for me to get my arms and feet as high as possible for the cameras to see, instead of pushing myself with my feet, I had to literally throw myself backwards using my entire body—which was fine, and I was happy to have a solution; I just had no idea how I was going to land when I did the stunt full out. Honestly, I did not like this chair. This chair was not my friend. These were probably real trailer-park chairs and looked great for the scene, but they were not safe enough to land on. Right after dress, I asked props if they could “please get me another chair instead of this one, because I do not want to break my neck.”

  A few sketches into the live show, we heard Jenna’s voice on every speaker in the studio: “Thirty seconds to air. Thirty seconds to air! Cast for ‘MSNBC Investigates,’ please set yourselves!”

  As we were running towards set, I could see ahead that the steel chairs facing me on the camera side of the kitchen table were the exact same chairs that they’d used during dress rehearsal. That was fine, because my chair was on the other side, where the camera could barely see it. I walked onto set, walked around to the other side of the table, and looked at my chair. It was the same fucking chair as all the other fucking chairs. WTF?! The props crew was almost always on top of it. They never, ever, ever fucked up. I mean SNL has won an Emmy every year for Best Props, for fuck’s sake. (It is Best Props, right? Best Props on a Show? Okay, maybe it’s the Production Design Award, I don’t know. Whatever it is, they win it.) Anyway, so I stood there like a frustrated little lamb hoping that someone from props might come running over within the next ten seconds before we went to air.

  Suddenly, one of the prop guys veered around the set background towards me and asked, “You okay?”

  “No, I’m not. What happened with the chair?”

  “We couldn’t find four other chairs that matched in time.”

  “Five seconds!”

  “It doesn’t matter if it matches. It’s not safe. That’s why I asked.”

  “Two seconds!”

  “Sorry, Kattan.”

  “Fuck, man.”

  Fuckin’ production design and their fuckin’ yearly Emmy-winning streak. This was one of the few times I wished the show wasn’t so goddamn professional—I had no choice but to change my thought process and decide: As long as it’s funny, I’ll be fine. That’s what’s most important.

  So, the sketch was going great and I said my line—“. . . he looked beautiful in the St. Jorgen’s Day Punch Bowl”—started choking, and then threw myself forward as far as I could to gain enough momentum to then launch myself backwards. Which I did.

  When I hit the ground, I waited a few seconds before getting up. My first concern was hearing whether I was getting laughs or not, and thank fuckin’ God I was, because when you’re given a good joke, especially from Tina, you had better deliver. My second concern was seeing if I’d injured anything. The only thing that really hurt was the back of my head, which was expected, considering I’d slammed it against the floor. When I stood up, I felt an unfamiliar pain in my neck—probably a little whiplash from throwing myself backwards—and a strange, slight numbness in my left arm and fingers and, for some weird reason, the toes on my left foot. But I didn’t think anything of it.

  A few days later, my head felt fine, but I had a sharp pain that started in my left shoulder and traveled down my arm to the tips of my fingers, which once again started to feel numb. But like most pain I’ve experienced, I assumed it would just go away in a day or two. I’d been accustomed to dealing with pain from injuries since my physical escapades growing up on Mount Baldy.

  Not long after that, someone from the talent department came down with a copy of Entertainment Weekly and asked if I had seen the latest issue. What I thought would be a small blurb in a hard-to-find section of the magazine turned out to be one of the top stories, four pages in and two full pages long. I don’t remember exactly what the title of the article was, but I believe it was something like, “Kattan Injured Live on a Saturday Night.” What I do remember was at the bottom of the spread, pictures were laid out shot by shot, similar to the Zapruder photographs of President Kennedy getting shot in the motorcade in 1963. Or, as Kevin Costner put it in Oliver Stone’s JFK: “Back and to the left. Back and to the left.” Someone had taken a series of photos of a television screen showing me during the Golden Girls scene in the “MSNBC” sketch. In the first photo, I was sitting down and hunched forward over the table. In the second photo, I was bent over backwards. In the third photo, the only parts of me you could see were my hands and my feet up in the air as I was falling backwards heading towards the floor.

  How was this one of the more important stories of the week? I didn’t even know that I really was injured, especially enough for it to be written up for publication. I mean, nobody on the show really even asked me if I was okay after the stunt. And who at the show told the magazine that I was injured when I’d never even complained about any physical discomfort to anyone? None of it made sense. This was the first time I considered that maybe I really had been injured, and that this was a much bigger deal than I’d thought. And that maybe my continuing pain was going to, well, continue. Long before writing this chapter, I hunted around for a copy of that issue of Entertainment Weekly, but I couldn’t find it. Nor could I find it online in the EW archives. Finally, I found a copy for sale on eBay. When it arrived, the article about me was missing. A few months later, I found another seller, and again the issue didn’t include the article. Could it be that NBC and the powers that be were terrified that I was going to sue them or something? The thing is, that’s just not who I am. I always felt that suing someone was more about wanting to take advantage of a situation and being a scuzzy opportunist.

  A few days after the accident, I went out to dinner with a friend on the Lower East Side, and while we were sitting there, I raised my left arm and felt the same piercing pain again, except this time it felt like someone was really stabbing me in the shoulder. An unfamiliar burning sensation flared between my neck and my shoulders. Then the real pain started—in my neck. And the fingers on my left hand, my left leg, and my foot tingled until they became so numb and so heavy that I had trouble lifting them. I am left-handed, and because I couldn’t hold my fork, I kept dropping it. I didn’t say anything about what was happening to avoid embarrassment, and I just got through the evening somehow. But every morning after that, I felt fine the second I woke up, but once I stood up on my feet, the numbness and pain would start up again, and throughout the day the pain became more and more intense. Within a week, the numbness was so intense that it became visibly obvious. My left arm from my shoulder down to my wrist was now beginning to atrophy. My chiropractor was the first to tell me something was not right, and that whatever was creating the pain and causing the atrophy was something she couldn’t fix—and something not to be ignored.

  I became very self-conscious about the atrophy of my left arm, not just because of how I might appear while trying to conceal my pain, but because my left arm looked so much skinnier than my right. I didn’t want to tell anyone, because I was embarrassed and the last thing I wanted was to appear weak. Or, as I saw it, to act like a “victim” as my father habitually had. No one respected that trait of his. My stepfather had raised me never to be “the boy who cried wolf.” I didn’t want to be that boy, although there were times I would be walking down the hallway on the seventeenth floor and all at once my neck would be in excruciating pain. The moment nobody was around, I would run somewhere private like a vacant office so I couldn’t be seen, and by using the office wall I would stretch my shoulder, my neck, even my leg, as instructed by my physical therapist, trying to alleviate some of the pain, even if for just a few seconds.

  By the time I did a Peepers sketch almost a year later with Cameron Diaz, when she hosted in April 2002, my left arm had terrible atrophy and looked almost half the thickness of my right. I still hadn’t told anyone on the show about my injury and had done a pretty good job of hiding it. My balance, coordination, and pretty much everything I did physically with my upper body had become limited, especially so because, as I mentioned, I am left-handed. What I envisioned in my head for the character’s physical comedy was no longer matching the reality of my physical condition. It was like thinking I was driving a Ferrari when in truth it was actually a Dodge Dart. Since Mr. Peepers was 80 percent naked, I was afraid my injury would be obvious. If you watch the sketch today, you can see the difference in my arms, although I tried my best to hide it by keeping my left arm from being on camera. Who knows—maybe the writers were right. Maybe I should have ended Mr. Peepers earlier.

  Even though the pain and weakness was becoming more and more debilitating, I tricked myself into believing the pain would eventually go away and that my arm would grow to look normal again. After my chiropractor saying, “This is serious. You need to get this checked out” three too many times, I finally went to the person I most feared would judge me for having a problem that might prevent me from performing like any normal functioning human being on the show: Lorne. He wasn’t able to meet with me that week to discuss it, but he did give me a recommendation for one of the top doctors in New York City. The doctor recommended that I have a CAT scan.

  Producer Ken Aymong was (and is) one of the kindest people on the show, and in charge of the show’s budgeting, and so on. After he learned of my injury and the chair not being replaced, he would check in from time to time and was the first person to actually say something to me about the accident, and I note, with honest sympathy.

  “Whatever you end up deciding to do,” Ken said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  For some reason, even though it was never verbally stated to me, I had a strong impression that they wanted me to keep quiet about the situation. And why wouldn’t I think that was the best advice? SNL wasn’t just a job; SNL was family. In most cases, if you were shooting a movie and got injured on set, you would call your union—the Screen Actors Guild, or in this case AFTRA for television. But bringing in the union, I thought, would create a wedge between me and the show—or the network. The way I saw it, that wouldn’t help the show, and it especially wouldn’t help my future in the business. I mean, honestly, would you really sue your family? The last thing I wanted to do was carry a lawsuit around while on the show. That’s just not how I was brought up.

  Then Lorne’s doctor gave me the news: “You basically broke your neck. You’re going to have to have surgery.”

  “I broke my neck?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s very possible.”

  Immediately, I thought of my father, who had once been fired from a sitcom because he told the show he couldn’t perform a particular feat jumping on a trampoline. This was just another reason why I needed to be quiet about this and not create any drama or put any focus on myself by telling people about the doctor’s results. I was known for my physical comedy, and I didn’t want anything to jeopardize my career. So, instead of reaching out to the people I worked with and hung around with, and since Ken already had confirmed that SNL would take care of medical costs, I kept the injury to myself—for a very, very long time.

  “You could become paralyzed if you don’t have surgery soon,” the doctors told me.

  I chose to have a minor procedure performed by a doctor known for his noninvasive technique. I refused the thought of putting anything in my spine. “I’m not putting metal or parts inside my back,” I told the doctors. “I’m not a car.”

  For the surgery, they would fuse tissue at three levels in my neck, harvesting bone tissue from one part of my spine where the nerves were being compressed and placing it at the site of the fusion to stabilize it. It certainly didn’t feel like a “minor” surgery. I spent weeks in the hospital and then started seeing a trainer, physical therapist, and chiropractor on a regular basis. The pain in my neck did go away at first. What I didn’t realize was that the pain had lessened in part because many of the nerves in my neck were dead.

  I spent the early summer of 2002 in isolation, recovering and continuing to remain silent about the surgery. My agent and my manager didn’t know, nor did most of the people in my life. I only saw a handful of people during that time and lied to the rest about how I was doing. The doctors told me to take half a year to recover, but I only spent a couple of months recuperating before going back to work.

  Over time, people noticed that something was different. I tried to keep my scars hidden and my posture straight, but some people wondered if I was ill or taking drugs. My silence remained stronger than my body as the numbness in my fingers and toes came back. The doctors said that the blood was not reaching the ends of my nerves. I just kept forcing myself to get through the next episode, to remain strong, to not stop.

  As a physical comedian, I had always been worried about waking up with a whole different body one day. That fear became my reality. After those forty-five seconds on the SNL stage in May of 2001, my body would never, ever be the same.

  Chapter 17

  THIS LOVE

  Zooey Deschanel appeared in two very brief scenes in the movie Almost Famous, and she was so likable that in less than a minute of screen time, you could tell that someday she would be a star. Jimmy and I became big fans of Zooey D. because of those two scenes. Then, in 2002, Carmen Cuba—one of my dearest friends, now a successful casting director for Stranger Things, as well as films by Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott—thought Zooey and I would be a good match and set us up.