Gasping for Airtime

by Mohr, Jay

  She went on to say that if I wasn’t suffering from depression or having any more panic attacks, that we should continue with the minimal dosage and I might want to start practicing some desensitization exercises. For example, if you were afraid of water, you could gradually work your way toward a pool and eventually put your toes in, then your feet, and so on to overcome your phobia. Considering my phobia was the place where I worked, I didn’t see this as something I would have to work very hard on.

  The doctor also told me that if I did cocaine or smoked pot I should stop, because both drugs induced panic. I had never even seen cocaine before in my life, let alone snorted it; however, I had been smoking pot every day for three years. I thought that marijuana was helping me with my panic attacks by mellowing me out, but I had actually been encouraging panic with each toke. Once I weighed the consequences, the decision to quit smoking pot was quick and easy. I knew then and there that I would rather have pneumonia once a month for the rest of my life than have one more panic attack.

  She also explained to me the irrational nature of panic disorder. People say that when they have a panic attack their heart races and they feel like they are going to pass out, but she explained that you pass out when your heart slows down, not when it speeds up. She stood up from her desk, opened her office door for me, and said good-bye.

  I asked her what time my appointment was next Monday. In a very matter-of-fact tone, she told me that she didn’t need to see me again until the prescription ran out. I was stunned. I thought I’d see her every week and give her progress reports.

  “You have a sickness, and we have found the right medicine for it,” she explained. “You are no different from someone who walked in here with asthma and got an inhaler. You were sick, and now you’re better.” Then she said something I thought was really cool. “I don’t see a need for you to come in here every week and tell me about your childhood.”

  The door was open, but I was reluctant to leave. I felt safe being near her. “What about when I fly? What if I get a panic attack in the air?” I asked.

  The doctor furrowed her brow. “If your issue is structure, which we have decided and agreed it is, why would you panic on an airplane? Compared to the rest of your life, flying is the most structured thing you do. You know weeks in advance when you should wake up for your flight. The airline hands you a ticket with a seat assignment on it. If you read the monitors in the airport, they tell you what time your flight is scheduled to leave, what gate it will be leaving from, and how long it takes to get there.” She was right. “If you’re on a flight and you feel some symptom of panic creeping in just reach into your pocket and take an extra pill of Klonopin,” she continued. “You’re taking only a milligram a day. I have patients who take twenty. If you took an extra half-milligram, you’re still taking a very small dosage.”

  That was it. I was on my own. She didn’t want to peruse my childhood. I had felt for so long that I was absolutely going crazy, and it turned out I was sick. Not dying, just sick. And now I was treated and feeling fantastic. On the elevator down to the emergency room, I reached into my backpack and took out my bottle of Klonopin. I picked out two pills and put them in the small square pocket of my jeans above my right leg. My Klonopin pocket. Just in case.

  Shortly after seeing the doctor, I started liking pretty much everyone. Ellen was still asshole Ellen and Schneider was still hit-or-miss, but my feelings toward everyone else became muted. Whatever mess I was in, I started to realize that I wasn’t the only one. I was no longer terrified by the thought of having a panic attack, so I began speaking more.

  The more I spoke to my coworkers, the more the subject of panic worked its way into the conversations. Melanie Hutsell told me she once had a panic attack that was so severe she had to be taken to the hospital, and as a result, her face froze for a few days. Spade also told me he had gone to the hospital once, and then I noticed that Spade had to have pizza and an Amstel Light at 9:00 P.M. every Saturday night—not 9:01 P.M. or 8:59 P.M., but precisely nine o’clock—or he would pass out. I also noticed that Norm Macdonald had what appeared to be a Klonopin pocket of his own. Everyone had gone through something. I wasn’t alone.

  It was incredible to sit in someone’s office and share horror stories. Although I was no longer having panic attacks, I still had vivid memories of how crippling they were. The thought of “what if?” was always in the back of my mind. The thought I had much more of was “Why can’t I enjoy this?” I didn’t have anyone to blame. I never blamed myself. I never blamed Lorne Michaels. How could I? All he did was give me a chance.

  Jason Patric hosted. So did Patrick Stewart and Helen Hunt. Blind Melon performed and I got high at the wrap party with Shannon Hoon, who has since overdosed and died. Sara Gilbert came through with Counting Crows. All of these shows run together for me because I wasn’t in any of them.

  When I wasn’t on the show, I just kept drinking and drinking. I kept leaving halfway through the show on Saturdays. I kept skipping Good-nights. I wasn’t on the John Goodman show, either. The final episode of my first season Heather Locklear was the guest, and she was game for anything. Fred Wolf wrote a “Home Shopping Network” sketch for her, in which she was selling blenders and saying such lines as “It’s so easy even a Mexican can use it,” “At this price you couldn’t get it cheaper off a drunken Indian,” and “Why not buy two in case a Puerto Rican steals it?” The phone lines were lighting up after every line she spoke.

  I had only one line on the Heather Locklear episode, but I didn’t care because finally it was over. I was in a Melrose Place sketch playing the gay guy. I walked into the scene and said, “That’s me. Gotta go!” And off I went.

  The previous August, I was shoved headfirst into a tunnel and began the struggle. The more I struggled, the more everything tightened up around me. The walls, the elevators, my rib cage, my arteries—they all constricted with each passing week. But on the night of May 14, I came out the other end of the tunnel and saw the sun.

  I breathed deep on my way to the final wrap party of the year. A few of my friends had attended the final show, and I decided to bring them along. One by one, they put their arms around me and said things like, “You made it!” Not “Congratulations” or “Great job,” just you made it—like a soldier returning from war. In fact, there was nothing to congratulate me on. I hadn’t really done anything except survive.

  The day after the final show, I boarded a plane for Los Angeles. For the first time in twenty weeks, I had nothing to worry about. I didn’t have to worry about sketches or fake pitches or who liked me. I didn’t have to worry about panic or anxiety. I didn’t have to worry about being too early or coming in too late. My first year on Saturday Night Live was over, and I wasn’t a rookie anymore. All I had to do was rest for a few months and return refreshed.

  I spent that summer with my girlfriend, Nicole, who is now my wife. I spent day after day on the beaches and night after night in the bars. I was renting a nice house in the Hollywood Hills and bought myself a Mustang convertible. I would drive for hours with the radio blasting louder than Joe Dicso could talk, and I slipped into a calm midsummer languor.

  I did more stand-up than I ever had in my life. I would perform at a Laundromat if there was a microphone. Onstage, I found no politics. I would say something and the audience would either laugh or they wouldn’t. I finally had the mike back in my hand. At SNL, I couldn’t get the mike, and when I did, it was pinned to my suit jacket and I was allowed to speak only one line. After my shows, I would sit with the other comics and get bombed. No matter what city I was in or who I was around, the conversation always turned to Saturday Night Live.

  Comics would ask me what it was like and I didn’t know what to say. I would plaster on a fake smile and tell them it was fantastic. That’s what they wanted to hear. I couldn’t possibly tell them everything. And if I started to tell them anything other than that it was fantastic, I found myself rambling on and on until they were sorry th
ey asked.

  That summer I also heard stories about myself and the things I had done at 30 Rock, many of which I had long since blocked out. People would ask me if it was true that I threw my phone out the window. I would have to stop and think before I answered. Yes, I did throw my phone out the window, but how did they know?

  It had happened on a Tuesday night and I couldn’t get anyone to help me with a sketch. I felt a surge of panic but couldn’t leave my office because I would have had to run past the rest of the staff in the writers’ room. So I picked up the phone on my desk and threw it through a window, which was unfortunately closed. Glass flew all over the place, and Mike Shoemaker dashed into my office to see what caused the shattering noise.

  An hour later the police arrived. The telephone had landed with a good crash seventeen stories below on the street in the middle of Rockefeller Center, and the good citizens of New York had reported it. I stood in front of the phone-shaped hole in the window and told the cops someone must have broken into my office and thrown the phone out the window. I remember telling them, “I wouldn’t do something like that! I talk on the phone all the time.” I peered out through the window down onto the street. “Who the fuck would do something like this?!” I said. “We’re just lucky nobody got hurt down there.”

  The cops looked out the window, too, and the three of us stood there with our heads out the window. Eventually they thanked me for the help with their investigation and left. I asked them if there was anything I could do to help them with the case. Both officers shot me a look that could only be interpreted as “Yeah, don’t throw your phone out the window anymore.”

  No one asked me about sketches I had performed or the segments I had written. If my contribution to the show came up in conversation, it was always because I was the one who brought it up. But the people out in California asked me about Farley. They wanted to know if it was true that we wrestled in front of Alec Baldwin and the rest of the cast. Yes, we did, but how did they find out?

  I didn’t bring these memories to California with me, but the more conversations I had, the more they came back to me. I remembered the great stories that Alec Baldwin told, like how he stopped eating meat. He and Kim had been in Paris and he contracted food poisoning from steak. He said that he was sick for so long that he decided eating meat wasn’t worth it. His story about being with Kim Basinger in Paris led me to ask what it was like to be married to the hottest woman alive. Though he assured me it was great, Alec said, “If I had to do it all over again, I would have fucked every single woman I ever came into contact with.” He detailed who that crop would have been: “To all the girls Stephen and Billy brought home, I would have said, ‘Come over here,’ and I would have had my way with them because I was famous and I could have. Even second cousins. I would have had no morals because once you’re married, it’s done.”

  I thought about when Nancy Kerrigan hosted and how she had a mouth like John Elway’s. She had this enormous set of choppers that made her look like a whale when her mouth was open. If you held her in the ocean by her feet, she could probably filter brine shrimp from the water using her teeth. She was nice, but I don’t think she was the sharpest knife in the cutting block because she gleefully signed the Sports Illustrated cover with the picture of her crying and clutching her knee and the headline reading “‘Why? Why? Why?’”

  They wanted to know about when Rosie O’Donnell hosted because she was a fellow comic. Rosie came to have some fun, and she wanted to please. Unlike, say, Shannen Doherty, she was someone you wanted at the rewrite table throwing out ideas. I was in a “Malibu Fires” sketch with her in which she played Penny Marshall and I played Sean Penn. I rented old Sean Penn movies to master his walk. I couldn’t do a great Sean Penn impression, but I had the walk down cold. Still, my line got a laugh: “Be nice to strangers because you never know when you are going to be a stranger, too.”

  When I retold these stories, people looked at me with big grins on their faces. They were smiling because it all sounded like so much fun. It all should have been fun, but it wasn’t. With the telling of each story, I realized how many wonderful things I had experienced. But that didn’t make them any more enjoyable. At least not yet. All they did was make me dread going back.

  I went to New York twice that summer, both times to visit my parents. I still couldn’t rent a car, so I borrowed a friend’s. My friend was in the FBI, and he told me that if I was ever pulled over, I should say he was my brother. I asked him, “What if they ask why we don’t have the same last name?” And he repeated, “Just tell them you’re my brother.” I was pulled over twice in two days speeding down Route 80. Both times the cop handed me back my driver’s license and told me to tell my “brother” hello.

  Sometimes I would sleep at my parents’ house, but mostly I made the commute from my apartment in New York to the suburbs of New Jersey. I made sure I never got stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel during rush hour. If there was the slightest congestion on my way to the tunnel, I would turn uptown and drive the half hour out of my way to the George Washington Bridge. At my parents’, I cut the grass and trimmed the hedges. I signed autographs for the neighbors. I played Wiffle ball in the driveway. Everything was fine. People had driveways and mailboxes and screen doors. There were property lines and curbs, and dinner was at six o’clock. I talked a lot with my parents about not wanting to go back, but they never voiced an opinion; they just listened.

  I went to a Yankee game with a close friend of mine who had season tickets. When we sat down at the stadium, he introduced me to most of the people in his section. During the game one of the people sitting behind us asked him if I was on television. He told them, “Yes. He’s a bit player on Saturday Night Live.” The words stung. I know he wasn’t belittling me, but his statement hurt—probably because he was right. I knew right then and there that I had to go back. I had to make a difference. I never wanted to be called a bit player again. At home that night I read a quotation in the New York Post sports section from Penn State football coach Joe Paterno that hit home: “The will to win is important. But the will to prepare to win is vital.”

  I started preparing to win. I kept a notebook with sketch ideas and carried it everywhere I went. I even had pages full of fake pitches. Whether I was on a plane, at the beach, or at home, I scribbled in the notebook. The slightest kernels of ideas were written down. I had to go back.

  There would be things working in my favor. I wasn’t going to be the new guy anymore. I knew where the pencils were. I knew that Al Franken put them in his mouth. I had learned how to set my alarm to “you’re paid to be here.” I knew rewrites took all night for no reason. I knew not to give away any jokes until Wednesday. I knew that if you wanted to talk to Jim Downey, you were going to wait a long time. None of the new people knew anything about me. With ten new people, I could start a clean slate. They would all be asking me for help, and I would befriend them and get them to write with me.

  But first the show needed to officially pick up the option on my contract.

  When you’re hired on Saturday Night Live, the contract is for five years with a network option at the end of each year. This meant they could bail out whenever they pleased. The salaries were pretty much favored nations, with all the first-year people making $5,500 per week. The second year, the salary increased to $6,000 and then continued to escalate each year, to $12,500 per week in the fifth year. In a stroke of good fortune, I had been hired as writer my first year, so I was earning an additional $1,500 writer’s fee on top of my performance check. Contractually, the show had until July 1 to make a decision on renewing my option. Since my post–Yankee game revelation occurred in June, my notebooks and I had to wait for three weeks before I would know if they even wanted me back. They had to want me back! Didn’t they?

  On June 13, the show contacted my agent, Ruthanne Secunda, and asked for an extension on the option. They wanted until July 6 to make their decision to bring me back, and they required it in writing. When Ru
thanne asked me what I wanted to do, I told her I wanted to tell them to make up their minds on or before July 1, just like it said in their contract. She warned me that we might not want to force their hand. If they were asking for an extension, then they obviously hadn’t made up their minds yet, so why be combative? I agreed to the extension and felt even more inspired.

  I would show them. If they would just let me return, I would hand in sketches every week and walk out onstage for Good-nights. I desperately wanted to go back. If everything was terrible again, at least I would know what to expect. I would deal with it. I was medicated.

  On the afternoon of July 6, Saturday Night Live exercised my option. It was afternoon in Los Angeles and nighttime in New York. I woke up that morning knowing that I would receive an answer, but I hadn’t anticipated the show taking until after dinner to give it to me. It was an already long day that seemed longer. By the time the news came, I was terrified. I knew that I didn’t want to be on Saturday Night Live for only one year—certainly not for the year I had just gone through.