Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  I ran all the way back to my apartment—forty-two blocks away.

  When I reached my apartment, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a book and not dying. I told him I had to go to the emergency room for a heart attack. He raised an eyebrow at me, since I had told him this several times before. He refused to take me to the hospital, so I decided to run there.

  When I hit the street again, I began thinking of how at a hospital they would put me on a stretcher and the claustrophobia from that would kill me slower than a heart attack. I decided to take a bath to relax, so I doubled back to my apartment. As the tub filled, I looked in the medicine cabinet for some aspirin. There, on one of the shelves, stood the most beautiful of all pill bottles. It gleamed and glistened and glowed. It was filled with Valium. I had never taken Valium before that night, but I had convinced a doctor to give me a prescription to help me with my flying situation. I swallowed one beautiful blue pill and climbed into a bath that was unfortunately not deep enough to drown in.

  About half an hour later the Valium began to kick in. I didn’t feel better, I felt euphoric. I wasn’t dying. For the first time in a month and a half, I didn’t have a hot spinning asterisk inside of me. My insides were fine with being on the inside. I climbed out of the tub, wrapped myself in a towel, and phoned my parents. I told them I had almost died at work, but I had taken a Valium and now felt better. They told me that is exactly what happens when you take Valium, and asked if I had any idea what time it was.

  I did indeed: It was time to go back to work. I didn’t go back that night out of any sense of duty or responsibility. I went back simply to see what it was like to be inside the walls of the building while not dying. I decided to take a taxi back to Midtown. I sat in the back of the cab and struck up a conversation with the driver. He didn’t speak much English, but it didn’t matter. I was speaking; someone was responding. We passed street signs. I looked out the window at all the bars and restaurants, with patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. For the first time I could remember I was just like them…living.

  When I arrived at 30 Rock, I tipped the driver twenty bucks. I rode the night elevators up to the eighth floor and said hello to everyone I saw. The elevator was regular-sized and the walls were just as wide when I got off as when I got on. Since the first day I had arrived at the show, I had kept my panic and fear to myself. From the time the Valium kicked in, I felt an urge to tell anyone who would listen how great I felt. When I walked into the studio, the show was nearly half over. Since I wasn’t in anything, I roamed around saying hello to anyone. I was smiling.

  I dropped in on Sarah Silverman, whose dressing room was next to mine. She wasn’t in any sketches either that week. We sat and talked for a few seconds before I told her about how I had almost died and ran home and took a Valium and now felt better. Sarah’s eyes lit up and she said, “You had a panic attack. You have got to see my doctor! She’s the best!”

  How the hell did Sarah Silverman know I had a panic attack? What was a panic attack? More important, how did I get in touch with her doctor? Sarah wrote a number down on the back of one of the pages of a sketch that neither of us were in. “You have to call her,” she said, handing me the number. “She saved my life.”

  I walked from Sarah’s dressing room to mine and dialed the number. Since it was past midnight on a Saturday, the answering machine picked up. The outgoing message said that if it was an emergency, I could page the doctor and she would get back to me as soon as possible. Figuring that living your life in a constant fear of dying was an appropriate emergency, I paged her.

  To my surprise, by the time I got home from the wrap party, there was a message on my answering machine from the doctor herself. In the message, she stated matter-of-factly that it sounded like I was suffering from a basic panic disorder and she could see me first thing Monday morning. All I had to do was survive Sunday.

  I woke up Sunday feeling like a zombie from the combination of red wine and Valium from the night before. I stayed in bed all day and counted my breaths until Monday rolled around. At 8:30 A.M., I showered, shaved, and went to visit the woman who would save my life.

  The doctor had an office in a hospital on Second Avenue. To reach the elevators to her office, you had to walk through the emergency room. I found this incredibly comforting. If anything went wrong or if I flipped out, treatment was at hand. I sat in a small waiting room and wondered what was wrong with everyone I saw coming and going. Were they experiencing panic attacks, too? Eventually an attractive young woman walked out of a door and introduced herself.

  “Hello,” she said, shaking my hand. “Come in.”

  I looked around her office and was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a couch. I had always seen people on television and in the movies lie on a couch and spill their guts to a shrink, who would scribble notes down on a legal pad. In this doctor’s office, I had to settle for a chair across from her desk. It didn’t matter. I was there and was going to tell her everything.

  I spoke for about twenty minutes straight. When I was done, she told me I did indeed have a panic disorder, which was most common for men in my age group who are actors and medical interns. Basically, it affects people who come from structure and are thrown into structureless environments. She asked me if panic ran in my family. I had never given it much thought, but on the spot I remembered that both my father and one of my sisters had had episodes during my childhood.

  Before I finished saying the word sister, the doctor had written out a prescription for something called Klonopin. She told me I was lucky to have seen her so soon. Many people, she explained, go for years experiencing panic attacks before seeking help. What struck me during this first meeting with the doctor was that she seemed rather nonplussed about the entire thing. I was going on and on about my claustrophobia—how I couldn’t eat out, couldn’t fly, couldn’t go to ball games or take elevators or subways or even be the passenger in a car. Her attitude was, Yeah, yeah, I get it. Panic. Here’s your prescription. Let’s see how it works on you.

  One thing was clear: She certainly wasn’t as alarmed as I was. She acted as if I had told her I had a sore throat and she was giving me lozenges. She told me she was starting me out on a low dosage of one milligram a day of Klonopin, and that we would meet back in her office in a few days to see how everything worked out. She shook my hand good-bye and I walked out of her office into the elevators and then through the emergency room with my future written on a piece of paper with her signature on it.

  I walked home and stopped at a pharmacy on 14th Street to fill my prescription. The old man behind the counter told me it would take thirty minutes. He asked me if I wanted to come back later. I laughed out loud and told him I would wait for it.

  I sat in the pharmacy for the next half hour at one of those do-it-yourself blood pressure stations. I monitored my blood pressure continuously for thirty minutes. Each time the air inflated around my arm, I was sure it would get stuck and I would have to rip the entire machine out of the ground to escape.

  When my pills were ready, the pharmacist called my name, and I took my pill bottle of Klonopin and opened it before he could put it in a bag. I ingested my first Klonopin pill while standing at the counter, thinking that this is probably how drug addicts behave. I walked home to St. Mark’s Place with a half-milligram tablet of Klonopin in my stomach and a pill bottle with fifty-nine more in my pocket.

  By the time I reached my apartment, I felt sandbagged and groggy. The feeling of heaviness gave way to a primal exhaustion that barely allowed me to take off my clothes. I lay down to take a nap and slept for three hours without moving.

  When I awoke, I lay absolutely still, a practice I had fallen into so I could time how long it took for the storm clouds I would carry around with me for the rest of the day to roll into my chest. I waited for an hour and realized that the storm wasn’t coming. I wasn’t made out of eggshells. I was human. I looked at my hands, my arms, my feet, my skin to see if any of it b
othered me. I took my pulse over and over, and it was always around sixty—the same as any other human being who has just woken up. It was as if someone told me that the ice was thick enough to walk on, so I stepped out of my bed with a renewed confidence that I wasn’t going to fall through and drown in the cold water.

  I felt normal, which for me was nothing short of euphoric.

  It was Monday, and in a few hours I would have to go up to Lorne’s office and pitch ideas to whichever host sat in the leather chair next to Jim Downey. I had no ideas and knew it didn’t matter. Weeks ago I would’ve been up pacing my apartment racking my brain for ideas for the looming pitch meeting. I now knew better. The pitch meeting wouldn’t start until after nightfall. I didn’t care about the pitch meeting; all I cared about was that I had felt normal all night long.

  I cautiously made my way to the shower. I stood there and let the hot water run down my back, noting that soap was soap, towels were towels, doors were doors, and they weren’t making me nervous. As I dried myself I looked in the mirror and noticed that I was ghastly thin. “Good,” I thought, “’cause I’m starving.”

  I got dressed and walked across the street to St. Mark’s Café and ordered a 5:00 P.M. breakfast. I looked around the restaurant and wanted to hug everyone in it. I paid the bill and boarded the N/R subway to go to the office for the pitch meeting. It wasn’t until I got off at 49th Street that I realized I merely felt like I had ridden the subway, nothing more, nothing less. Coming out of the stairwell from the subway, I was almost blinded by the sun, and I wondered how long it had been there.

  It was 6:30 P.M. when I arrived at the seventeenth floor. When I stepped off the elevator, Mike Shoemaker was passing by, mumbling over his shoulder that the pitch meeting was about to start. I put my backpack down on the couch in my office and made my way to Lorne’s office. His door was still closed, so I sat on the hallway floor and waited. I wanted to be one of the first ones there so I could sit on the big couch across from him. If I were going to be fired for having no ideas, I was going to be sitting down when the ax fell.

  I have no memory of who the host or the musical guest was that week. I’d had such a life-altering experience that day that the show suddenly seemed laughably small. Lorne’s door opened and people began shuffling in. I sat on the couch and looked into the faces of everyone else in the room. They all looked beaten. Defeated.

  As the pitches worked their way clockwise around Lorne’s desk, I heard David Spade say the words that would henceforth cut my weekly anxiety in half. When Lorne asked David for a pitch, he said, “I’m gonna work with Fred on his idea.” I was startled by the revelation.

  Bullshit! I thought. He doesn’t have any ideas this week either! Fred and David were buddies, so this was simply a safety net Spade grabbed to save his ass. “I’m gonna help Fred with his idea.” Fred didn’t seem to mind his position as the guy being gravy-trained at all.

  I thought back to all the pitch meetings and all the times I had heard that sentence. How could I have been so deaf? When it was my turn to pitch, I looked around the room for someone with actual ideas who had already pitched them who I was friendly enough with to pull the sentence on. Attell!

  Lorne looked at me and said, “Jay?” All eyes were on me, and because I was sitting on the couch almost everyone else was standing, looking down at me.

  “I have a few things I haven’t fleshed out yet, but I’m working with Attell on his idea,” I said confidently. No one called bullshit on me and Attell just nodded his head. He could have blurted out, “No you’re not!” But he didn’t. He just nodded his head and saved me from being fired. Bless his heart.

  Even though I was now medicated, everything I said seemed to make things worse. My entire life I have talked too much. If there was one thing I could change about myself, it would be my inability to close my mouth. My manager, Barry, would constantly tell me, “If you don’t say anything, you can’t say the wrong thing.” He was right, of course, and I always knew he was right, but I continued to speak without thinking first. It’s what got me into trouble as a kid, and it was now what was getting me into trouble as an adult. Most people have a filter somewhere between their brains and their mouths. Not me.

  My penchant for putting my foot in my mouth began at the wrap party after my first show. I spotted Nirvana’s Dave Grohl in the hallway and headed toward him. I asked him if he wanted to go smoke a joint. He looked at me like I had three heads and said to me, “I’m kind of doing the family thing right now.” As he spoke, I noticed he had his arms around what looked like his mother and his grandmother.

  But I really stepped in a pile of doggie doo-doo when Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger cohosted. I was feeling trapped in another Thursday of rewrites, listening to sketch after sketch grind to a halt in front of twenty or so writers who apparently had nothing else to do with their lives.

  That night, rewrites got off to an early start—meaning that the sun was still up. Someone had written a sketch about the game show Family Feud. In the sketch, the Baldwins were one family, and Kevin Nealon, Julia Sweeney, Sarah Silverman, and I were the other. (Alec’s brothers Stephen and Billy had both agreed to be in the sketch.) That left one open spot at the end of the dais to be occupied by Tim Meadows, who would play the author James Baldwin.

  As the “Family Feud” sketch was executed line by line, I noticed that every time Kim Basinger spoke in the sketch, she had only one syllable at a time. Alec, Billy, James (Tim), and Stephen spoke in complete sentences, but when it was Kim’s turn to speak, she was relegated to saying things like yes and no. The longest line she had in the sketch was “I don’t know,” which she was scripted to say twice. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. Sarah Silverman broke up the infighting by asking, “How come all of Kim’s lines are only one word?”

  Before anyone could answer I blurted out, “Because she’s dumb!”

  I had gotten used to no one reacting to anything I said anymore. But this time they all reacted. A hush fell over the room as everyone stopped talking. I lifted my head and looked around the table. No one would make eye contact with me. Everyone was reacting as if she was in the room when I said it—and she was. During the rewrite, Alec and Kim had made their way into the room, and they were sitting on the same couch I was on when Farley fake-puked in my lap on my first day at work. The couch was directly across from me, and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were staring straight at me.

  Alec Baldwin is a bear of a man, and I wondered how long it would take him to walk over to the table and cave in my skull with his fists. I realized it was time to do some quick thinking. I looked at the rest of the writers and practically cried out: “You guys have made her look dumb! We can do better than this! We have to do better than this. She’s our guest, for Christ’s sake!”

  Alec didn’t cave in my skull with his fists and Ms. Basinger was given several more lines in the sketch. Yikes. Not realizing that my attempts to save the sketch were merely to keep Alec from kicking my ass, Kim and Alec gravitated toward me that week. Considering my solitary state, I may have mistaken the fact that they sporadically spoke to me as some sort of bond I hadn’t experienced with any other hosts or my coworkers. I would be walking back from the restroom and pass Alec in the hallway and he would throw a fake punch at me and say something like “How’s it going?”

  This was the friendliest anyone had been to me in weeks, and it was coming from a guy whose wife I had insulted. Man, I soaked it up.

  Eight

  The Motivational Speaker

  CHRIS FARLEY was the most beautiful person I have ever met. You wanted him around all the time. You craved his presence. You wanted to hear his stories. You wanted him to answer the phone when it rang in your office. The man was just one giant beating heart, and that heart was full of kindness. He was a genuine, loving creature, one battling horrible demons.

  Chris compared his problem to four cylinders: drugs, alcohol, food, and depression. He told me that each time he pushed one cy
linder down, another rose. If he managed to push three down simultaneously, the fourth would skyrocket. The entire time I worked at SNL, I never saw Chris on drugs or intoxicated, or for that matter even drinking an alcoholic beverage. I, however, was an alcoholic. You know who is and who isn’t. You know when someone with a disease has been up all night partying. If you are that type of partier, there’s no moderation. It’s drinking from sunset to sunrise and doing a couple of eightballs along the way.

  His weight soared in the two years I was on the show. That was the cylinder that was skyrocketing—his eating. He would also have three huge cups of black coffee before read-through, like a guy doing shots at a bar. Despite his weight, there were times when he looked absolutely handsome. He’d have his hair slicked back, with the mousse making it kick out on the side, and he’d be wearing sunglasses. He would try to dress up, but at heart he was still Chicago’s Second City, so he would wear the army boots with the suit.

  As far as I’m concerned, Chris was also the funniest man who ever lived. No one can ever touch Farley. In basketball, there’s Michael Jordan and there’s everyone else. Well, there was Farley and then there was everyone else. But Farley was better than Jordan in his prime. A ball can go through the hoop only one way. More than anyone I have ever seen in the history of Saturday Night Live, Chris made each segment he was a part of absolute madness. He fed off the live audience, and they couldn’t get enough of him.