Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  I went to see Smashing Pumpkins with Marci Klein, who was someone you wanted on your side. If you were on her bad side, you were finished. In her role as talent coordinator/coproducer, she functioned as the gatekeeper to Lorne. With long, dirty blond hair and piercing eyes, she was very attractive. She also had a real mean streak, and was a complicated person, perhaps owing to the fact that (I was told by several people) she was kidnapped as a child. Marci and I always got along pretty well, and we even formed a loose bond over our mutual love for Tabasco sauce. She always had a bottle on her desk and drizzled it on everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if she put it in her coffee. Once my roommate ordered a bottle of a hot sauce called Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally, and I brought it into the office for Marci. “I’ve had that,” she said excitedly, “but it’s not as hot as this other one.”

  The concert was held at Roseland, a small, standing-room-only club holding about 3,000 in Midtown Manhattan. Marci and I sat on a small elevated platform on the side of the stage that had about fifty chairs for VIPs. The VIPs had sacrificed one of the precious chairs to pile their coats on, and it was about fifteen feet from Marci and me. The house lights were on and everyone below us was dying from the heat and from being packed in like sardines. The only air in the room came from an air conditioner vent that was ten feet from our heads. Everyone who was elevated was freezing; everyone who wasn’t was frying.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder with the celebrities in the VIP area, I was trying to act as nonchalant as possible. Then Marci turned to me and barked out, “Jay, get me my coat.” I looked at the coat chair and thought of the work it would take to even get near the chair, never mind the task of pawing through a bunch of celebrities’ coats to locate Marci’s. Anyway, I reasoned that if I pulled her coat from the pile now and decided later that I wanted my coat, then I would have to barge through everyone a second time. I looked at her and said, “Why don’t you get it?” I wasn’t snarky or hostile; I had merely reached indifference to my entire situation at the show. As I finished my sentence, she pointed at me and screamed, “I fucking discovered you!”

  Now I really wasn’t going to fetch her coat. All the celebrities were staring at me. If they knew who I was, they wanted to know who she was. If they didn’t know who I was, now they wanted to know. The concert hadn’t started yet and no one on the elevated, air-conditioned platform had anywhere to go. Marci turned to a stranger next to her, pointed at me again, and yelled, “I fucking discovered him!”

  Then, in an act of God, the house lights went off and the concert started.

  Someone at the concert had a joint and passed it my way. I took two drags and was immediately convinced that I had just smoked angel dust and would die at the concert, halfway to the chair with the coats on it. Below me, people were slam-dancing, creating a swirling whirlpool-like mosh pit. The mosh pit resembled how I felt inside. Bodies collided and people surged forward and backward, churning like the inside of my stomach.

  I made my way over to the edge of the elevated VIP section and decided to let the crowd below swallow me up. I stepped off the ledge and landed with a jarring thud on the Roseland Ballroom wood floor. I was never able to penetrate the whirlpool of the crowd, so I remained on the outside, literally fighting with my fists and feet to get on the inside. No dice.

  I soon found myself at the back of the ballroom, a good fifty yards from the swirling maniacs. There was a bar at the rear of the room, and I decided that if I was going to die, I was going down shit-faced drunk. Hoping that I would pass out and be trampled, I drank myself stupid but somehow kept my feet. By the time the show ended, I was slurring my speech and weaving through the crowd, searching for an exit. No matter which way I turned, I was swimming against the tide of people leaving. Like a human pinball, I bounced off person after person. The last of those people was Marci.

  “C’mon!” she said, “there’s an after-party behind the stage.” She led the way backstage, bumping no one, with me immediately behind her, bumping everyone.

  Backstage, Marci introduced me to Billy Corgan, the band’s lead singer. I tried telling him that I had just worked with him the previous night on Saturday Night Live and had loved the concert. Instead, I blithered until I realized I sounded like every drunken idiot who had ever wasted his time after a show.

  I started jogging out of Roseland, thinking that the faster I exited, the faster everyone would forget I was there. The place was now completely empty and all the lights were on. The floor was littered with shoes from people who had removed them and thrown them at the band during the show. A few of these morons were on their hands and knees rooting around on the floor with one shoe on looking for its match. They looked like they’d had a great time that night and dying never even crossed their minds.

  That’s when the lyrics from the Smashing Pumpkins song “Cherub Rock” hit me: “Freak out/give in. It doesn’t matter what you believe in/be someone’s fool.” That was the game I had to play this year as a rookie, and next year would be different.

  As the shows ticked by in my first year, bands came and went, sometimes matching my mood with their music, other times with their actions. Sounding more like old KISS than Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots explained that my feelings were based on the weather inside 30 Rock. Spade had once joked that he liked Stone Temple Pilots better the first time around—when they were called Pearl Jam. When lead singer Scott Weiland and the band got on the elevator with me, Weiland looked at me and asked, “Where’s Spade?” I told him that I didn’t know. “If you see him,” he said in a mischievous, we’re-gonna-kick-his-ass way, “tell him that we’re looking for him.” No matter how fed up I was with the show, I felt that we were all in it together. I turned to Weiland and said, “I guess we’ll all choose our sides, won’t we.”

  UB40 and Crash Test Dummies performed. As UB40 played a song I had never heard before, Al Franken was standing next to me eating what I’m sure was a pencil-flavored cookie. “I feel like I’m watching the lounge band at a Dublin Holiday Inn,” he said. He was right. They were awful.

  Crash Test Dummies also stunk up the joint with a cut from their album God Shuffled His Feet (off to the record store to return that album). Maybe I was judging on a curve. It’s tough to precede Aretha. All I knew was the name and the chorus of the song they were playing, which was “mmmmmmmm.” I wasn’t buying it. Aretha was coming in a week and these guys could mmmmmmmm their asses back to Canada.

  Aretha was given time for three songs rather than the traditional two. She was amazing, but what a look. Her breasts were unlike anything I had ever seen; you should be able to put a key in her rump and drive them. And her bra was architecture.

  Sometimes the musical guests were just unintentional comical relief, particularly in their appearances. Billy Joel was a troll of a man; I couldn’t believe how much he looked like Jackie Mason. When I saw him, the only thing that came to mind was that musicians really do get all the chicks. It was obvious why Dwight Yoakam got all the chicks—until he removed his trademark cowboy hat. His jeans were painted on and he wore ostrich skin boots and a pimpy rhinestone shirt. However, when he took off his hat, it was like Superman returning to Clark Kent. Without the hat, he looked like Clint Howard, Ron Howard’s brother.

  When Snoop Doggy Dogg showed up, I brought in a photo from Spin magazine of him dressed in blue jeans, looking hard-core, with sweat dripping from his brow, and I asked him to sign it. He wrote: “To Jay, much respect, Snoop Doggy Dogg.” But he was so high he just kept on writing, covering the entire bottom half of the photo with graffiti. Maybe it was gangsta rap hieroglyphics for “You’re a cool white guy.”

  Pearl Jam made me feel cool—period. When they arrived near the end of my first season, Eddie Vedder walked around with a piece of luggage resembling a bag you’d see a hobo carrying. When he opened it up, it was crammed with legal-looking papers. I had promised my future sister-in-law that I would get her Vedder’s autograph. All week I waited for the right time to approach h
im. We literally bumped into each other the evening of the show. I introduced myself to him and asked him if he could sign something for me. He replied, “No one…will know!” He was doing my Christopher Walken impression at me and I loved it.

  Vedder smiled and asked me if I could come into the dressing room and say hi to the rest of the band, which I had no problem doing. When I walked into Pearl Jam’s dressing room, Eddie Vedder announced in Walken-ese, “Look…who I found.” The band members all launched into snippets of Walken. For the next half hour, I stayed in their dressing room doing Christopher Walken like a trained monkey.

  The bassist, Jeff Ament, asked me if I played basketball. When I told him I did, he gave me his phone number at the hotel where the band was staying and said that he was registered under the name Otis Birdsong. He told me to call him the next day so we could together and shoot some hoops. I woke up but I didn’t call.

  It didn’t matter. Pearl Jam recognized me, so the rest of the world could kiss my ass.

  It was the next-to-last show of the year, and Chrissie Hynde was onstage performing with the Pretenders. They were playing their song and it sounded unbelievable. But Chrissie was having a difficult time with the show’s still photographer, Ken. Every time he maneuvered himself into position to snap a few shots for the hallway next to photos of the Rolling Stones and the other bands who had performed over the years, Chrissie would wave her hand and shoo him away.

  During the Pretenders’ second set, the photographer brought out a ladder and stood on the top step, pointing his camera down at the band. In mid-lyric, Hynde pointed at him and screamed, “Fuck off!” Beleaguered, the photographer climbed down the ladder and slunk away.

  The next day, the entire cast and crew filed into studio 8-H for the annual Saturday Night Live photo. About fifty exhausted people stood shoulder to shoulder and smiled like everything was normal. Some kneeled. As the photographer reached the top of his ladder, Adam Sandler yelled, “Hey, Ken, Chrissie Hynde just called and she said, ‘Get down!’”

  In that photo, every smile was genuine. Even mine.

  Ten

  Fake Pitches

  SINCE I had become medicated, I had more time to actually be at work—not literally but spiritually. I began to notice the smallest details of my work environment. The walls were white and they didn’t close in on me anymore. I began to take notes of the things around me to maybe someday write a book about my experience. I realized that the people I worked with were not sinister after all. They were all good people in an impossible situation. I was a functional person in a dysfunctional place. I wasn’t sick, the show was. It was a restaurant in a great location that served food that sometimes was awful and other times glorious.

  I began to notice more and more tricks that the others applied to help them get through it all. The “I’m gonna help so-and-so with his idea” was just the beginning. Day by day, night by night, I studied everyone around me. In subsequent pitch meetings I became braver and more confident. I would scan the room and pick someone I didn’t get along with and then tell Lorne I was working with him on his idea. No one ever called me out. All the others probably just wondered what took me so long to catch on.

  The strangest phenomenon I noticed in pitch meetings was the fake pitch. The fake pitch was an art form. If you had no ideas, you had to think of a sliver of an idea and say it out loud and the room would move on. The fake pitch took as much energy as an actual pitch, but you were relieved of the duty of having to write it up. You could also use the fake pitch if you wanted your sketch to be a surprise at read-through. Whenever someone would execute a fake pitch, everyone in the room knew it except the host. The host probably wondered what happened to that sketch at read-through, since we all giggled throughout the entire pitch, but it was never to be seen again.

  Looking back, I never understood why some guys had to pitch in the first place. If a guy as brilliant as Phil Hartman didn’t have any ideas, did it really matter? Of course not. The writers would put him in their sketches anyway. Sandler nicknamed Hartman “Glue,” and he was. Phil Hartman could do anything, and he did so on a weekly basis. He was money in the bank. He held everything together. As long as Phil Hartman was on the show, every sketch had at least one person in it who would never let you down. Whether he was playing Sinatra or Charlton Heston or a schoolteacher or a Bond villain or Frankenstein, he executed flawlessly. I never met anyone with Hartman’s versatility.

  So when it was Phil’s turn to pitch an idea to the host, he would always be pleasant, smile and shrug his shoulders, and comment on the pitches that had already been heard. It was understood that out of all of us, Phil Hartman was the last guy you had to worry about ideas coming out of. If he never thought of a single idea, he was still invaluable. He could do anything and we all knew it. If we were a baseball team, Phil was certainly our MVP.

  Oddly, Kevin Nealon’s fake pitches were as funny as everyone else’s real ones. I would have given my right arm to have actual ideas like those that he was secretly presenting as fake ones. I can still remember Kevin Nealon telling one host: “You know those runaway truck ramps on the highway? Well, you live in a house at the top of one of those runaway truck ramps, and every night at dinner a semi comes crashing through your living room.”

  Several weeks later, I was sitting around the table with several of the writers. I had thought the runaway truck ramp pitch was funny, but it hadn’t been submitted for read-through. Acting like the rookie I was, I asked what had happened to the pitch. I was met with blank stares from everyone. Aha.

  Nealon was the anchor of Weekend Update, and sketch writing wasn’t expected of him. The Weekend Update anchor had such enormous responsibilities—gathering the news and spinning it for the segment—that it would’ve been unfair to make him sit in a room and write a sketch. Regardless of how early I arrived at work, Kevin would be in his office poring over every newspaper ever printed searching for news items that he could use for Weekend Update. Nealon’s fake pitches were done pro forma, whereas Norm Macdonald’s were done to throw everyone off his trail.

  Norm would pitch about five fake ideas in great detail, and then at read-through he would have one winner that you never saw coming. When Bob Newhart hosted the show, Norm took about ten minutes to pitch “Literally vs. Figuratively.” “I’ve noticed that people misuse the phrase literally when they actually mean figuratively,” he began. “A guy will come out of a movie theater and someone will ask him, ‘How was the movie?’ and he’ll respond, ‘I literally laughed my head off!’”

  Newhart stared at Norm thinking he was finished. We all chuckled, knowing that Norm had no intention of writing his “Figuratively vs. Literally” sketch. But the giggles didn’t sate Norm. He wanted to win Newhart over. What happened next was incredible.

  Norm kept adding example after example of what he meant, trying to force Bob Newhart to crack a smile. Newhart was an idol to all of us in the room, especially to the comics. Norm fought like hell. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep that night if Bob Newhart didn’t laugh at his fake pitch. He plodded onward: “Sometimes, someone will say I literally cried my eyes out…but their eyes are still in their head, you know. Or someone will get some bad news and say, ‘I literally died!’ But there they are talking to you because they didn’t die at all. They meant figuratively, not literally, you see.”

  Newhart began to smile, and Norm tasted blood. Norm kept going and going until I was convinced that if this started as a fake pitch, it was now personal. Norm was going to write it, if only to prove to Newhart how funny it was. And it was funny. The longer he went on and on, the funnier it became. Soon we were all in hysterics. Norm felt satisfied with himself.

  That week at read-through, Norm had one sketch on the table that made it onto the show. It was Norm as Charles Kuralt. I was literally blown away.

  I returned to the doctor a week after our first meeting. Since seeing her, I felt great. I walked through the emergency room of the hospital to the elevato
rs. All around me were people in wheelchairs and on gurneys. Some of them groaned. They were dying; I wasn’t.

  By this time, I had become a quick study in panic disorder. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines panic as “A sudden overpowering fright…a sudden unreasoning terror accompanied by mass flight. Synonym: Fear.” Most people who believe they’ve had a panic attack are suffering from anxiety. Alternatively, the dictionary definition of the word anxiety is “Painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind, usually over an impending or anticipated ill. Synonym: Care.” The key word in distinguishing panic from anxiety in these definitions is over. Anxiety is over something: Your boss is an asshole, you can’t pay your bills. These are things you have anxiety over. In the definition of panic, the word over is replaced by unreasoning. The synonyms for anxiety and panic are virtual opposites. Panic equals fear; anxiety equals care.

  The doctor asked me how the Klonopin had been working for me. I told her it had worked like I prayed it would, only better. She told me that Klonopin was a drug developed to stop seizures in epileptics, and that it was a smart drug. This meant that if the patient didn’t suffer from seizures, it redirected itself to stop the flood of adrenaline and endorphins that cause panic. If you suffered from neither malady, it would put you to sleep for a while. When she asked me if, in addition to panic, I had been suffering from depression, I responded with an offhanded “I wish.” Sternly she told me, “No you don’t.”