Gasping for Airtime (11 page)

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.

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 him. 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.

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.

S
INCE
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.

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.”

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.

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.