You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery

by Mamrie Hart

  “Mame!” Maegan shouted, finally getting my attention as I stood there slapping my legs like I was being attacked by mosquitoes. “Are you okay?”

  I could’ve played it off like my tights itched—it was no secret that I never did laundry. But I decided to be honest. “This is going to sound totally crazy”—I could speak! Sweet Jesus, I could speak—“but I feel really weird. Like, I’m very aware of my legs right now, and everything feels . . . just strange. Like I’m a little underwater.”

  “You’re having a panic attack,” Maegan said matter-of-factly, as if she had just ordered lunch. Yes, I’ll have the Caesar salad, extra croutons, and you are having a panic attack. Also, I’ll take a Diet Coke. I stared at her, not knowing how to respond. “You’re totally having a panic attack. We need to get you inside ASAP.”

  I continued to look at her in wonder. I’d always heard about panic attacks but didn’t know what they would feel like. She linked her arm through mine and talked me down as we walked to the closest bar. Somehow my legs were still moving and keeping up.

  I was very aware of my speech pattern but was nervous that no sound would come out. Like, have you ever spent an entire day by yourself? You’re chilling at home, watching a Catfish marathon, judging these idiots who could fall in love without ever video-chatting. (Meanwhile, you haven’t put on pants all day and just ate a block of Gouda like an apple.) Then it happens. Just as you are about to watch Jimbo Jenkins find out his fiancée is actually a French bulldog who’s learned to type, you remember that you have to go to a coworker’s birthday party in an hour. Fuckity fuckity fuck! You have a brief moment when you think, Do I still remember how to talk to people? When I open my mouth, will full-fledged thoughts and sentences form? This is exactly how I felt during the panic attack.

  We got to a bar and Maegan ordered me two white wines. I focused on my breathing, which felt like it wasn’t coming naturally, as Maegan spoke to me calmly and stroked my back. After I chugged drank my pinot grigios, the weirdness started to lift. I felt normal enough to speak.

  “So, that’s what a panic attack feels like, huh?”

  “Yep. You feel like everything is crazy and you might die. Just a really fun time overall,” Maegan said sarcastically.

  The next few weeks were stressful. I walked around nervous that at any time I was going to have a panic attack, but without Maegan there to lead me through it. After all, I didn’t know what had caused the first one. There hadn’t been any obvious trigger that set it off. I wasn’t feeling particularly anxious at the time. Would my panicking about having a panic attack send me into a panic attack?!

  Later I would try to trace it back and would realize that the first time I had really experienced anxiety was, no lie, because of Saved by the Bell.

  Be honest with yourself—you fucking loved Saved by the Bell as a kid. I, for one, watched it probably every single day from 1992 to 1995, and I wasn’t alone. I guarantee most American females ages twenty-eight to thirty-two could sing the SBTB theme song from start to finish.

  Obviously I had a major lady boner for Zack Morris. He was handsome, suave, a delightful troublemaker, and a good boyfriend. Plus, as cool as he was, he wasn’t afraid to be in the glee club or star as the prince in Bayside’s production of Snow White and the Seven Dorks.*

  Sure, SBTB had its flaws. I was painfully aware of the inconsistent use of Zack’s ability to freeze time. I would watch it and just be face-palming at why he wasn’t using that power constantly. But it was wholesome fun. I didn’t want to deal with eating disorders and coke problems like those skanks on 90210; I wanted to have pep rallies in an oddly small burger joint and throw secret surprise parties in my principal’s office because for some reason there wasn’t anywhere else to throw them.

  What I think I’ve adequately proven is that my love for SBTB was endless. Until one fateful day.

  Riding on the success of the sitcom, Saved by the Bell decided to come out with a two-hour made-for-TV movie where the gang goes on a Hawaiian vacation. It was called Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style. (The execs at NBC really took a risk with that edgy name.) In it, Kelly brought her cutest bikinis. Screech, of course, accidentally became some Hawaiian deity, because that’s what always happens on trips. But the gang did forget one thing back at Bayside . . . the laugh track.

  I remember being nine years old and watching my favorite fake high schoolers, the ones I would rush home from school to watch every day, and feeling extremely uncomfortable. Why wasn’t there laughter? And woos when someone kissed? And groans when Screech did anything? My heart started to race. Without the cues from the live studio audience, I didn’t know when to laugh. To make matters worse, without the built-in guffaws, Screech seemed mentally handicapped. And judging by the self-made porn tape he released years later, that assessment is apt.

  Everything seemed like a lie in my nine-year-old brain. Was Saved by the Bell not actually funny? This was worse than learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. I had to turn it off, and that’s saying a lot. This was a girl who thought Ernest Scared Stupid was a goddamn masterpiece.

  And that, folks, is the first time I experienced anxiety. Luckily, it didn’t turn into a full-on panic attack. I was young and innocent enough to think, I feel weird. Better do a floor routine on my trampoline and pretend I am Dominique Moceanu during the Atlanta Olympic Games. My trampoline was basically my home base to get my mind off anything.

  Two things you’ll notice from this picture. That building behind us is my elementary school. That’s how close we lived. On days I didn’t have to go to school because of a dentist appointment, etc., I would jump on my trampoline and wave at my classmates. Also, I’m wearing a hat with my name embroidered on it. Clearly I’ve always been very modest.

  Unfortunately for me, there weren’t a lot of jumbo trampolines lying around New York City to create a panic attack diversion. And once I had my first one with Maegan, they crept up about once a month. And without warning. It was worse than getting my period. In fact, I called it getting my exclamation point.

  Occasionally they would happen on the subway. I’d be sitting there, reading Us Weekly and minding my own business, and boom! Suddenly, those familiar feelings would start to creep in and I’d start sweating. It was going to happen and it was inevitable and I had to get the fuck off the train. Trust me, when you are freaking out about your breathing, the inside of a New York City subway train isn’t the ideal place to be. You already feel like you can’t get enough air into your lungs, and then you look down the car to see an old lady coughing, a discarded dozen chicken-wing bones on the floor, and a homeless man taking off his ten pairs of socks across from you. It’s game over.

  I’d also have them at parties where I was meeting new people. This really threw me off because I am an extremely un-shy person. But for whatever reason, during those few years they would creep in.

  Oh shit, here they come, I would think. Ain’t no stopping this emotion train. Just hope that it’s quick.

  Those anxious feelings would start to cover me like molasses. There would still be full sentences coming out of my mouth, but I had a completely different inner monologue happening in my head, kinda like when you are reading a book and realize that you haven’t been processing the words for the past five minutes. There was this disconnect between my brain and mouth.

  I learned the proper etiquette in that situation is to excuse yourself to the bathroom (while grabbing a cup of vodka on the way), splash some water on your face, and sip said vodka until you feel confident enough to Irish-good-bye the shit out of that party. And for the love of God, take a cab home. Never go back underground with those residual feelings of panic. As soon as you get through the turnstile, the underground music from Super Mario Bros. will start playing in your head and you’ll imagine all the rats at the station banding together to form one large Transformers-style super rat.

  But more so than in social situa
tions or on the subway, the worst panic attacks would happen before I had to perform live. Good thing I decided to become a comedian! Until the past year, every show—and I do mean every show—I would be beyond nervous to go onstage. As soon as I was actually onstage and heard the first laugh, all the nerves would settle. But until that moment, the anxiety was through the roof. And nothing made me more anxious than when I hosted my show Celebrity Funeral at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

  I started performing shows at UCB back in 2009. If you haven’t heard of this theater, I’m sure you’ve heard of the many, many successful folks who’ve come out of it. Amy Poehler was one of the founders, for God’s sake. This fact had me occasionally licking random spots in the dirty theater, hoping to ingest some of her leftover DNA. The space itself was a basement theater underneath a grocery store and a McDonald’s. Was it glamorous? Nope. Was getting to perform on that stage for four years magical? Abso-fuckin’-lutely.

  After doing a few duo and group sketch show runs, I decided that I wanted to host and produce my own show. And from that came Celebrity Funeral. Every few months I would host a mock funeral for a celeb who was still alive. Other comedians would perform eulogies as surviving family members, costars, and totally made-up acquaintances as I served as master of ceremonies. For example, some eulogies at the Mariah Carey funeral were:

  1. My girl Alison Bennett being wheeled out as a postal worker who’d had her arms and legs chewed off by dogs because she was playing the song “Emotions” and the high note made them go insane.

  2. The ridiculous Hannibal Buress playing P. Diddy. Diddy used his eulogy to set the record about his and Mariah’s hit single “Honey.” Mariah was supposedly super into entomology, and the song was actually written to warn folks about the impending bee crisis.

  3. My friend Eliot Glazer closed out each show by reciting a poem as Maya Angelou. This would always derail into sexy territory. If you’ve ever had doubts about a Jewish gay man pulling off a spot-on impression of a late African American poet laureate, you have not met Eliot.

  It was essentially an old-school roast, and I loved it. But no matter how exhilarated I felt onstage, no matter how proud and satisfied I was after a sold-out show full of laughs, I would be nervous as fuck the next time we performed. I’d go through the same song and dance: I’d talk to folks backstage while having a totally different, freaked-out conversation in my head. I wasn’t able to feel my legs. I’d have to focus on my breathing because it felt like my body wasn’t going to do it itself. But a new, fun addition came along with the stage fear. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was taking nervous shits.

  Don’t judge me. What I was experiencing is known as fight-or-flight. In fight-or-flight, your body thinks it’s in such extreme danger that you are about to die. It rushes a bunch of adrenaline into your bloodstream in case you need to fight or get the hell out of the situation. Your palms are sweaty. Knees weak, arms are heavy. There’s vomit on your sweater already, mom’s spaghetti. Wait a sec! My mom doesn’t make spaghetti. Sorry, guys, sometimes I lose myself in Eminem lyrics. But that is how I’d feel, minus the pasta puke.

  It’s this fight-or-flight adrenaline dump that makes mothers lift cars off their babies and helps people outrun bear attacks. For me, it was a lot more literal. It was an adrenaline dump.

  Every time before I went onstage for those few years—every single time—I would give myself a little pep talk in the mirror (more specifically, my powder compact as I sat on the toilet). It would go something like this:

  “Mamrie. First of all, you look great. Honestly, that lack of exercise and late-night Kettle chips eating is really paying off. Also, you are gonna be amazing in this show! Quit freaking yourself out. As soon as you hear your first laugh, all these crazy feelings will melt away. And hey, worst-case scenario, you shit onstage. Right there in front of everyone, you shit your pants and it splatters on the floor underneath your dress like an unexpected prom birth. If that happens, you’ll move back to North Carolina. No problem. Change your name. Everyone probably thinks Mamrie is a stage name anyway. You can take a couple of years of courses at the community college to become a dental hygienist. Marry a man who is intellectually beneath you but loves you to death and makes decent Crock-Pot meals. Not your ideal life, but you’ll still be mildly unhappy. Now, get out there and make ’em laugh.”

  Okay, so I’m no Tony Robbins, but there was something comforting about giving myself the worst-case scenario options. Every show, I would have to take over the bathroom, and every time I’d get the pep talk. It got to the point where no matter what time I was on, even up to my live shows today, the people around me knew that I was gonna need a solid ten minutes in the bathroom by myself.

  Here’s my advice to anyone who experiences panic attacks. Be vocal about it. I’m not saying stand up in the middle of class and pull a Kanye. (“Mr. Ginsberg? Imma let you finish but I just want you all to know I’m having a panic attack. I can’t feel my legs, and learning about WWI is not a good look for me right now.”) But I am saying be open about it with your friends, your family, even your coworkers. My friends no longer bat an eye when I have a panic attack. Some have even turned it into a drinking game. If I start to feel the wave of anxiety coming toward me, whether we are grabbing a martini or doing an interview, I will just casually say, “Heads-up. I’m experiencing a panic attack so I might get quiet for a while, so just take the lead on talking.”

  It isn’t something to be embarrassed about. In fact, more than likely you already have a friend who experiences the same thing. They might just not have a name for it yet. They could’ve been calling it “kooky floating maniac time.”

  For example, there was one night when I was still bartending at a seafood place on Park Avenue, before I booked my first commercial and hightailed it the fuck out of there. This was when I still reeked of steamed crab legs and would fill a coffee cup full of Baileys and vodka as soon as I got to work and pretend it was a latte. For five years, I bartended at this restaurant.

  Word to the wise: Never work at a restaurant where you can’t eat the food. The other waitstaff would drool over tasting the daily specials, picking each other off like they were basketball centers to get an extra bit of the shrimp cocktail or lobster mac and cheese. I stood behind that bar selling people on how sweet the Kumamoto oysters were and how well they paired with champagne. Meanwhile, I would dry-heave at the thought of eating those barnacle-looking loogies.

  I remember one shift when a new waitress on the floor looked like she was having a major struggle. I watched her almost drop plates of empty lobster carcasses all over a table she was clearing and then walk into the bathroom on the verge of tears. When she came back out, I decided to get the scoop, expecting to hear she had lied in her interview and this was the first time she’d waited tables, or that a table just screamed at her for a two-dollar surcharge for mixed greens as a side.

  “Mary, is everything okay? You look upset.”

  “I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.”

  “Is it because they’ve started making us wear these ties with crabs on them and ninety percent of the male customers make an STD joke about it?”

  She went silent for a second. Maybe I had cracked the case, and not just the case of Modelo I was pounding behind the bar to deal with the incessant onslaught of crab jokes.

  “I don’t know. Everything feels weird and off. Seriously, there’s no way I can balance three martinis. I’m gonna drop the tray,” she said, clenching and unclenching her hands like they were cold.

  Bingo! Panic attack. I could finally pay it forward for that first panic attack that Maegan so calmly walked me through years before.

  “Okay, have you ever had a panic attack before?” I asked as she shook her head no, tears welling up in her eyes. “Well, I think you’re having one now. Here’s what you need to do. I’m gonna pour you a glass of tequila. You’re gonna go into the private r
oom, sit, sip, breathe, and it will all feel okay in twenty minutes. I’ll drop off these martinis and finish up your last table, okay?”

  She nodded, clearly taken aback by how quickly I’d whipped up a plan. Poor thing had probably been hiding her first panic attack for the past half hour. I couldn’t even wait tables hungover, let alone with mounds of adrenaline coursing through my body. And there she had been shakily tying lobster bibs on customers and balancing trays of twenty coffees all at once.

  When I finished up her table and the restaurant was officially closed for the night, I went and checked on her. She was relaxed and a little tipsy. But she wasn’t alone. Three other servers were around her, telling her how they got panic attacks and sharing their stories.

  Here’s the deal, dudes: No matter how bad you are panicking, it’s going to eventually subside. It’s scary as hell! But it will pass. Take this analogy, for example:

  In the summer of 2014, I got to shoot a travel series called Hey USA! with my partner in crime, Grace Helbig. It was seriously a dream job. How many people get to travel around the US all summer, having their days filled with adventures that they don’t have to plan? I’m not going to lie and say that waking up at five a.m. to whale-watch, meet Iditarod dogs, and learn to trout-fish all before four p.m. and all while having to be “on” in front of the camera isn’t exhausting! But it’s a very rewarding type of exhaustion.

  This is from the first episode. NBD—just having a snowball fight on an Alaskan glacier. Sometimes I pinch myself at how cool my job is. Also, because I’m super pinchable.

  Now that I have made sure I don’t look like an inconsiderate asshole, here we go. Grace and I were on day three of our stop in Portland, Oregon. Unlike other shooting days, when we packed four or five activities into one day, this entire day was going to be spent white-water rafting. I was pumped.* I love doing stuff on the river, especially floating on a tube with an inflatable cooler of cheap beer beside me. However, I learned real quick that this wasn’t going to be rafting with a coozie. These were straight-up rapids. Thirty seconds on the river and we were going down a class IV (out of six) rapids. I almost fell out, and our cameraman cracked his helmet against a boulder. But that wasn’t the craziest part.