Comedian: Take My Life, Please

Doug Ferrari grimaces as he lumbers along the talk-out-loud-to-yourself streets of the Tenderloin District--past the urine-tinged doorways of one-night-stand hotels and slumbering men sprawled across dirty sidewalks.

Ferrari is a 43-year-old comedian with an eye for the outrageous, but just now he doesn’t feel too funny. He has returned to this city’s toughest neighborhood to confront his past, moving again among the drug users and down-and-outs to gauge how these streets have changed him.

“I hate this place,” he says, wiping his brow under the September sun. “I don’t hate the people anymore. But I despise what these streets stand for--a concentration camp for the mentally ill.”

For almost 12 months, after abandoning a career as a nationally touring stand-up comic, Ferrari endured a succession of seedy hotels in the neighborhood near Union Square as he battled the fallout from years of substance abuse and a long-undiagnosed mental disorder.

Rescued by friends last month after a fellow skid-row denizen profiled him in a publication by advocates for the homeless, the 6-foot-5 comedian known as “Dougzilla” has returned to performing in the Bay Area--clean, sober and decidedly straight-faced following what he calls his comic’s tour of hell.

And as he receives treatment for a borderline personality disorder--which manifested itself in violent mood swings and impulsive behavior that ruined his marriage and landed him in jail--Ferrari wants to use the comedy stage to publicize the plight of the mentally ill and other homeless castoffs.

In every city, he says, there are neighborhoods like the Tenderloin that have become forgotten places that serve as way stations for people with untreated mental and emotional conditions. “Everyone knows somebody who’s dropped out, who’s lost the battle with drinking, drugs or depression. Many end up here. If they don’t kill themselves, they just go on surviving. But I learned that mere survival is no way to live.”

Yet Ferrari is no social worker. He’s a 275-pound bundle of nerves who once shared stages with Jerry Seinfeld and Drew Carey, a comic whose trademark is manic hourlong monologues during which no one is safe from his sarcasm.

The way Ferrari deals with his past is to poke fun with a punch line. “All my truth is told in jokes,” he says. “And if I hit my mark, people might stop to think about where the humor comes from.”

During recent performances, he has suggested a way to make the mentally ill less menacing: hand fake cell phones to wandering schizophrenics so it seems their rants are actually directed at someone.

And his jokes target the neighborhood that still scares him, a place “Dante would have to do a rewrite on hell” to describe. Like his bit about how they’re cleaning up the Tenderloin by “enforcing a four-tooth minimum.”

Ferrari doesn’t worry his humor might offend. “People say, ‘That’s not funny, you’re making fun of the disabled.’ And I say, “Look, lady, I am the disabled. I’m Rainman, except I’m not good at numbers.’ ”

The Cupertino high school graduate’s twisted path to the Tenderloin took years to travel. A decade after joining the likes of Robin Williams in winning the prestigious San Francisco Comedy Competition, Ferrari reveled in the often-excessive road life of the touring comic--earning $100,000 a year zigzagging from Los Angeles to Atlantic City.

His muse was marijuana, but Ferrari rarely met a drug he didn’t like. “I don’t want to say I did a lot of cocaine,” he now tells audiences, “but there are statues of me all over Colombia.” In a more reflective moment he admits: “I did not have a sober, straight, legal day from 1974 to 1994. Not one.”

Six years ago, on a day Ferrari now calls the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, a Chicago club owner found him passed out in his hotel room with a bottle of bourbon. “Everybody misses gigs,” he says. “But back then I lived for the stage. So it was a warning sign.”

He quit using drugs and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He also sought to cope with his the symptoms of his yet-to-be diagnosed borderline personality disorder. Doctors say the condition, characterized by fear of abandonment and sudden rages, affects 5 million Americans.

One night, he threw a Christmas tree through the window of the San Francisco house he shared with his now-estranged wife, Beth. “People with BPD can’t handle holidays,” she says. “They’re afraid they’re going to be disappointed.”

Beth often had no choice but to call the police during Doug’s rages. Following the Christmas episode, he spent several weeks under observation in the psychiatric unit of the county jail.

Through it all, Ferrari kept his dark sense of humor, recalls friend Mike Pritchard. “When I visited him in jail, he looked at me and said, ‘You gotta get me out of here. This stint has cut my sex life in half.’ ”

Then Ferrari stopped laughing. “In 1998, I took a sabbatical. I didn’t have writer’s block, I had living block. It’s deadly for a comedian not to feel funny anymore.”

After he and Beth split up later that year, he received the diagnosis of his disorder, which sent him into a tailspin.

The now-unemployed comic went on the government dole, receiving free medication and a $750 monthly Supplemental Security Income check.

But Ferrari says he paid a price for his help. Under SSI rules, he could spend only $375--half his monthly check--on housing. In America’s priciest city--where one-bedroom apartments rent for $2,000 a month--one of the last cheap places to live are neighborhoods like the Tenderloin.

By the summer of 1999, he felt like the man on the moon, living “on the corner of Pimp Slap and Drive-By.” He was a regular at public clinics and rundown hotels as doctors sought the right mix of therapy and medication.

Ferrari says the social service system creates a revolving door for the homeless--forcing many to endure the worst inner-city neighborhoods in order to remain close to the agencies that pay their bills.

“Mentally ill street people have one thing in common,” he says. “They’re held captive by government policies that tell them where to live. If they don’t play by the rules, they don’t get their money, their medication or their therapy.”

Chris Canter, director of the Walden House Foundation, a Bay Area group that administers government aid for the homeless, says Ferrari has hit upon a sad truth.

“The money these people get doesn’t go very far in San Francisco,” he says. “Many landlords won’t rent to the mentally ill, so the only option for them is a place like the Tenderloin. They could probably do better elsewhere, but in San Francisco this is what people like Doug and others get--feces-filled rat holes, places with drugs and violence all around.”

Officials estimate that in the last decade alone, the number of street people in San Francisco has doubled from 7,000 to 14,000, mainly in the downtown area.

Ferrari recalls the night two junkies overdosed at one of his flophouse haunts where “even the roaches stumble around like Foster Brooks because they’ve inhaled too much secondhand crack cocaine fumes.” He was also frequently robbed, and Beth recalls him sobbing during a collect call after someone stole his shoes and even the cross around his neck.

He survived, he says, because he had the inner strength to no longer take drugs, instead operating on a constant coffee buzz. And he had another advantage:

“I was a big white guy with a nervous disorder living in the ghetto--naturally people assumed I was a cop,” he says. “They saw me coming and swallowed their drugs. I cleaned up the streets like Clint Eastwood in one of those spaghetti westerns. I was a one-man crime stopper.”

Ferrari’s salvation came from Trent Hayward, a fellow street denizen, who profiled him this year for a newspaper published by homeless advocates. His story began: “He is a big man. He kills for a living. The more he kills, it seems, the bigger he gets--and he has killed in over 40 states. He is Doug Ferrari, stand-up comic.”

The two became fast friends, and it broke Ferrari’s heart in June when Hayward died on the streets of an apparent overdose.

But Ferrari got out. Following a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, his friend Pritchard went looking for him in the Tenderloin. “When I found Doug, I almost cried,” says the former comic-turned-social worker. “It was unfathomable to see a guy with such a brilliant mind who had spiraled down to the point [where] he was merely existing.”

Ferrari’s second comedy career has started slowly--including a recent show before a group of insurance claims adjusters. Dougzilla--who now lives with friends--has pledged to do half his gigs for social causes and to assist Beth with her online international support group for people with the illness.

But the ambition remains. He dreams of doing “The Tonight Show” and one day earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “I’d go there every day to scrape the gum off,” he says.

For now, though, Doug Ferrari is glad to be alive and telling jokes. Sometimes, he returns to the Tenderloin just to remind himself. “They say living well is the best revenge,” he says. “Just surviving this place is good enough for me.”