Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  Now, Chris was well over 300 pounds, and I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of locking horns with him. Fred and Spade would talk out an idea and Fred would end by saying something like “And then Jay can come out and pin Chris.” Chris was turning red and my stomach was churning. Spade got into it, too, and began goading Chris. They both told Chris that if they had to bet, their money was on me to win the wrestling match. With that, it was on.

  Chris squared himself in front of me, in what was more of a football stance than a wrestling stance. I crouched into a proper wrestling stance, figuring I might as well look like I could take him. I kept my arms out in front of me and countercircled Chris. Spade and Fred grew tired of all the dancing and started hollering that we were both chickenshit. Farley hollered, “Shut up, David!” and turned his head. At that moment I sprung forward and made the terrible mistake of shooting in on Chris’s leg. I grabbed hold of his enormous thigh and tucked my head up against his hip for a single-leg take-down. Chris simply collapsed forward, smothering me. I fell to the carpet with all of Chris on top of me.

  From years of wrestling I was preprogrammed to fall facedown and immediately tuck my arms in close to my sides. The move is called turtling, and it prevents your opponent from executing any moves. Chris wasn’t interested in moves. For the next five minutes he just sat on my back bouncing up and down like a little kid. It felt like my spine was beginning to crumble like a bag of potato chips. Chris kept bouncing up and down shouting, “Ha, ha! Ha, ha! Jay! Jay! Jay!”

  I was going to become a cripple in the graphics room. I tried to reason with him. I waited for him to be in the air during one of his bounces so I could inhale enough to speak. When he landed back down on top of me, I calmly whispered, “Chris, seriously, you are going to break my back.” He just kept clapping his hands, bouncing up and down, and shouting my name. I tried again and again. “Chris, if you keep bouncing on me, you are going to break my back. Please stop. You win.” Spade intervened and said, “Get the fuck off of him, Farley.” It was like an older brother chastising a little brother. Chris got up and asked me if he won. “Yes, Chris,” I said. “You won.” And then what was left of me hobbled into the men’s room.

  I splashed some water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror. I was pissed at myself for shooting in on his legs. I was so soundly defeated and humiliated, yet I wanted a rematch. I headed back to my office, and as I passed through the writers’ room, I overheard Chris telling Jim Downey how he kicked my ass. He was sitting on the same gray couch Norm was on when Ian poured water on him for smoking. There were about nine writers at the table and with them were the cohosts, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

  Downey saw me first, and before Chris could see me, he said, “I bet if Jay Mohr walked in here right now he could beat you in a rematch.” Chris cursed him and Downey taunted: “No, Chris, I swear to God, you must have gotten lucky. Jay was, like, a state champion wrestler!” Some of the writers had seen me by now and started chiming in. They would murmur, “Yeah, I would have to put my money on Jay,” or “You got lucky, Chris.” I thought, Fuck it, and walked into the room.

  Downey’s eyes got wide. “Well,” he said, “I’ll be a son of a gun! Here’s Jay now.” Farley gave me a dismissive wave with his hand and the challenge was on. “Let’s go again, bitch! You got lucky!” I yelled.

  Chris reached out and grabbed my arm. I rushed toward him, and because he was in the act of standing up as he grabbed me, I caught him off balance. He was now standing up to the side of the couch and starting to fall down before I made contact. When he grabbed my arm, he had pulled me downward. Now that he was on his way to the ground I was in a perfect position to do something. I wrapped my left arm around his left leg behind the knee, keeping my right arm free so I could wait and see how he landed before I decided how to use it.

  When Chris hit the carpet, he sort of curled up a little and rolled on his side. His chin was a few inches from his chest, so I took my right arm, shot it around his neck, and grabbed my other hand. As soon as I hit the ground, I stuck my right knee in his ribs, forming the perfect cradle. I placed my forehead against his temple and pushed into it as hard as I could. I was trying to crush his skull.

  I kept driving my knee into his ribs and my forehead into his temple. I clasped my hands until they went numb. I knew that if Chris escaped, he would kill me. It didn’t matter what happened next. I won. The move may have happened by accident, but it looked perfect and everyone had seen it. They also saw Chris’s face turn redder more from embarrassment than the knee in the ribs. Neither one of us said anything to signify the end of the rematch, but we both stopped at the same time.

  I scurried to my feet and darted out of the room toward the elevators, leaving my coat and belongings behind. I thought I should get out of there as fast as humanly possible. As I left the writers’ room, I could hear all the guys riding Chris. Just as I pushed the down button, I heard a rumbling in the hallway. People were laughing and cheering.

  I looked up and saw Alec Baldwin, a huge grin on his face, walking with Chris and the rest of the writers. In the back of the approaching mob was Kim Basinger. Chris was walking like a mummy. His eyes were rolled back in his head and his arms were stretched out in front of him. The night elevators were in an alcove to the side of the hallway. I had nowhere to go.

  Chris grabbed me behind the head and we tied up. I reminded myself not to shoot in on his legs. Chris threw his arms around me, pushing me left and right. I kept my center of gravity low and managed to stay on my feet. The more Chris threw me from side to side, the more I could feel how strong he was. I figured that win, lose, or draw, I should probably get it over with.

  I took the palm of my right hand and pushed in against the outside of his left elbow. As Chris resisted, I slid my hand under his left elbow and jammed it upward. Chris’s left arm swung up in the air and I ducked my head through his armpit and back around behind him. My ass and the rest of my body squirted through the same space at the same time as my head. I was now standing behind him with my hands clasped around his belly, a wrestling move known as a duck-under. The next step of the move was to lift your opponent up and dump him on the mat. Because I couldn’t lift Chris, I planned to trip him.

  I squeezed him tighter to me, hoping that he thought I was going to try and lift him. He took the bait and lowered his weight and surged forward. I put my right calf around Chris’s kneecap and pushed forward and down. As Chris lifted his leg to escape, he crashed to the ground, with me on his back. The walls shook and I thought I had broken both of my hands, which were trapped under his belly. I wiggled my hands loose and noticed that my right one was bleeding from scraping across Chris’s belt buckle. I slapped Chris on the ass as I got up. At that exact moment, the elevator bell rang and the doors slid open.

  There were five or six people in the elevator and they were obviously coming from the Rainbow Room. The men wore tuxedos and the women had on lovely gowns. There was an NBC security guard wearing a black sports jacket standing there behind the tuxedos, the lovely gowns, the perfume, and the money. I stepped onto the elevator and frantically pushed the close door button. But the doors stayed open and Chris got up off of the blue carpet and walked toward me.

  Chris had raspberries stretching across both forearms and a look on his face that scared me shitless. He was going to tear my head off and feed it to the tuxedoed Rainbow Room patrons. I had now beaten him twice. When he won the first match, it was in front of Spade and Fred Wolf, but when I beat him, it was in front of everyone—most important, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

  The elevator doors weren’t going to close in time, and Chris was going to kill me. I pointed at him and tapped the guy next to me. “Holy shit!” I said. “That’s Chris Farley.” The guy said, “That is Chris Farley!” and the elevator erupted.

  All the drunken rich people recognized Chris and started waving to him and saying hello. Not wanting to deal with them, Chris turned and walked back through the mob.
The elevator doors closed and I wondered whether it would ever be safe to go back to work. The security guard and the rich people talked the whole way down about how they couldn’t believe they had seen him.

  None of them asked me why I was bleeding.

  Seven

  Fight or Flight?

  IT WAS a typical Thursday night. As usual, the show needed to be rewritten, mostly to cut time and punch up the jokes on each sketch. But what the show didn’t need was fifteen grown men sitting around a table arguing over what to name a fictitious high school that would be seen in the opening of one of the sketches. So we sat around for hours. Someone would say, “Washington High School,” and three other people would roll their eyes and say, “No!”

  I never grasped who was steering us, but I was sure we were going nowhere fast. I began to sweat. In intervals, almost like contractions, I would feel unreasonable terror. I didn’t care what they named the school, yet I found myself blurting out names like Central and Montclair just to put a stop to it. But on it went—the naming of a high school, an act with no bearing on the content of the sketch whatsoever.

  Leaving the writers’ room during rewrites was verboten. If you so much as got up to make a phone call or stretch your legs, Jim Downey would ask where you thought you were going. One Thursday around 3:00 A.M., Tom Davis walked out of his office through the writers’ room holding a suitcase and his guitar. He was wearing a knee-length parka and a pair of bright red mittens, and he had a scarf wrapped around his neck. Two-thirds of the way on his journey through the room, Downey asked incredulously, “Tom, where do you think you’re going?” Tom Davis stopped, turned toward Downey, and replied, “The bathroom.” Then he walked straight to the elevators. I envied Tom’s courage. About as far as I went was later in the winter when Dave Attell and I sneaked out at night to do stand-up downtown. We would act like we were going to the bathroom and return three hours later to discover that no one had even noticed we were gone.

  I spent each Thursday night planning my escape. I thought constantly about how to organize my flight. Rewrites in the wintertime were murder, because winter is high school basketball season. Jim Downey was a rabid high school basketball fan. His high school alma mater in the suburbs of Chicago was a national powerhouse during the years I worked on the show. Jim would bring in tapes of the high school team’s games and make us all watch them. His enthusiasm was unbridled and contagious. With Downey pointing out the highlights in the game, you wouldn’t even realize that two hours had passed at first. But after a while, you began to notice.

  I grew to resent Jim Downey’s precious high school. I mulled over the idea of bringing in some home movies to show everyone. Sometimes as late as two in the morning, Downey would put a high school basketball game tape in his VCR, which meant you were gonna be there a while. With Harvard-educated guys arguing over the name of a high school, we had an uncanny ability to always be way behind schedule. Downey would raise his voice a little and say, “C’mon, guys, we have eleven sketches to rewrite!” to rally us. We would all focus long enough to finish one sketch—and then Downey would put another tape in the VCR.

  It wasn’t until my second season that I realized that Downey was going through a divorce. He lived by himself and was lonely. His whole M.O. of making us watch those high school basketball tapes and arguing over the name of a meaningless fictitious high school was so that he could have some company during the early morning hours between the time that the writers left and when the other staff came in the next morning.

  At one point during the debate over the name of the high school, I had to make a quick decision: leave or kill. I couldn’t leave the building because all of my belongings were in my office on the opposite end of the writers’ room. There was no way to collect my things and discreetly exit. So I began doing some deep breathing at the table to catch my breath. I looked around to see who was in the room. I wanted to see who was there. I needed to know who was there. I needed to see how many people were going to watch me have a heart attack.

  During my first year on Saturday Night Live, I worked pretty regularly doing stand-up on the college circuit. Just getting the show made me an easier sell, but even those trips were fraught with peril.

  On one trip, I was sitting in Newark Airport waiting to catch a flight when I felt a surge of fear flow through my body. I looked around the terminal and saw everyone living their lives. None of them had any idea mine was about to end. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to die around these people. I tried to make eye contact so I could judge by their reaction if I looked as if I were dying. No one flinched. They all acted normal. The flight number was announced and people began boarding the plane. I looked at the tunnel that led to the plane and all the people lined up and huddled together in it as if they were in a meat grinder. It seemed preposterous to follow them. I thought of what it would be like to feel this way while climbing through 30,000 feet. Boarding the plane was the equivalent of a death sentence. I picked up my bags and walked outside to catch a cab back to my apartment.

  To say the least, this made my agent’s job difficult. I freaked out at the last second and ditched a few gigs in a row. The shows I managed to make it to, I was so scared of panicking while I was there that I couldn’t speak to anybody.

  I was late a lot, too. I had a show at Millikin University in Illinois. I flew from Newark Airport into Chicago’s O’Hare for a connecting flight to somewhere else. The plane was not a puddle jumper or a prop, it was just smaller than the one before it. I stared at the shiny side of the plane and pictured the tube inside that waited to suffocate me. I wasn’t getting on. I walked to the rental car counters and asked them how far it was to Millikin. They all told me it was a five-hour drive. No problem, I thought. If I rent a car and leave now, I’ll be only an hour late to the show.

  However, I had another problem. I wasn’t old enough to rent a car. Hertz, Avis, Budget, Dollar—I begged them one by one to rent me a car. I told them that I was on Saturday Night Live and I was on my way to my own concert. The law is the law, they all told me. You have to be twenty-five to rent a car. I was going to have to hitchhike, steal a car, or miss another show.

  I took a seat on the edge of the baggage carousel and shivered at the thought of getting on another plane just to get back home. Every asshole in the world was renting cars that day. They had no idea how great they had it. They could walk up to a desk, and if they had a driver’s license saying they were twenty-five, someone would hand them the keys to a car. Assholes, all of them. They came and they left, into their rented cars and away from the planes and the tubes.

  My reverie was broken when a woman at one of the counters where I had already begged called me over. She told me discreetly that she loved Saturday Night Live and would rent me a car but cautioned me that I couldn’t tell anyone. It was a deal.

  I drove for five hours and passed nothing. I was safe. Nothing else existed. If I let any sensory information in, I would start an avalanche that I couldn’t possibly stop. I did the show and counted each routine after I finished it. I had been keeping a list of how many jokes I could get through before I started to panic. At Millikin University I stopped counting somewhere in the teens and eventually finished the show. I had a car outside that made me feel safer. When I finished the show, I said good night and walked out of the theater and back to my car. I pulled out of the school grounds and very quietly made my way back to Chicago.

  That night I slept in a motel near O’Hare that was so disgusting I didn’t crawl under the blankets. I lay on top of the bed with my clothes on and counted my heartbeats. There was a small stove next to the bed that could only have been used to cook crack. I checked the walls for clocks and faces. I thought of the tube. I would have to board a plane in the morning, sit in that tube, and walk through the meat grinder with everyone else. People in the next room were fighting, and I thought that this would be the perfect time and place to die.

  But I didn’t die, and I kept not dying. I woke up ev
ery single day. I went to work and wondered what fucking plan everyone else was following. They all seemed fine. They wrote, they talked, they got on the elevators, they ate, and they did it all so effortlessly. They seemed to do it one day at a time. Just like everyone else in the world at any other job. Me, I didn’t know how long a day was anymore.

  It was six or seven weeks into the show and everyone seemed to have fallen into some sort of a pattern. I had fallen into a pattern of acting as if I were normal. I don’t remember which show it was or who the guests were, but I remember the breaking point. I remember going completely mad.

  I was in my dressing room watching the show’s dress rehearsal on the closed circuit television that hung from the ceiling in the corner. It was the second or third week in a row that I wasn’t in any sketches. I lay back in the recliner chair and positioned myself directly under the television so that if it fell out of the ceiling, it would knock me out. I just lay there and watched sketch after sketch that I wasn’t in. What happened next, I later learned, was my fight-or-flight mechanism kicking in.

  At the time, I would have called it going crazier than a shithouse rat. I had experienced panic before this particular night, but this one was special—special in a bad way. I jumped from the recliner and ran to the elevators and into the streets and into the night.