Gasping for Airtime (13 page)

On one day that I was feeling particularly down, Mike lifted my spirits with a story about the time he ate a brick of hash. It happened during the European press tour for
This Is Spinal Tap.
On this particular day, Mike related, the cast was flying from Hamburg to London and one of them was holding a brick of hash. Not wanting to waste it or risk being busted at customs, McKean ate the whole thing.

When the cast arrived in London, it was madness. There was a three-hour line for media to get into the press room to interview them. But as he was disembarking from the plane, Mike realized that he could not speak a word of English. “I was speaking gibberish,” he explained to me. Gibberish? “I would say, ‘Abba, bo, bo, gigi, gaga.’ But in my mind, I knew what I was saying, so I sat there for seven hours answering questions in gibberish. They would ask a question, and I would answer, ‘Laka, laka, choo, choo,’ and the entire room would burst into laughter. No one knew I was actually in another dimension.”

The brilliant part was that Mike was so high that he had an actual language in his head, and he was repeating words that meant the same thing to him as the first time he said them an hour ago, causing the reporters to nod and say, “Oh, the laka, laka thing again.” The whole thing was a parody of a guy who was blotto—but he really
was
blotto.

I still can’t eat corn chowder because of McKean. My second season a big bunch of us did a sketch about cops who can’t stop vomiting at a crime scene. It started with Mike and me (dressed as cops) arriving on the scene of a murder. Upon viewing the body, we begin projectile-vomiting all over each other. The crew had rigged tubes that ran up our backs and out the ends of our sleeves. The tubes came out the backs of our coats, across the floor, and into the source of the vomit, which was several giant barrels of corn chowder. The vomit tubes were something of an inexact science. Ideally, whenever we put the tubes up to our mouths, corn chowder would spray out of our sleeves on cue. The problem was that some of the tubes worked and some didn’t.

Cast members would be in the middle of saying their lines and corn chowder would come rocketing out of their sleeves, which were still at their sides. Thinking fast, we would immediately lift our sleeves alongside our mouths—only to have the “vomit” stop. It was priceless live television. Though the tubes worked on cue a couple of times, for most of the sketch we were at their mercy. By the end of the sketch, there were about ten people onstage stopping in mid-sentence to quickly put their sleeves up to their faces, and the motion of moving our arms from our sides to our faces was inadvertently spraying vomit all over the person next to us.

During the sketch, the smell of corn chowder became so strong that I started to gag. I wasn’t alone. I looked at the others, whose eyes were watering and throats were quivering. The audience could plainly see that the tubes were operating erratically and at the wrong time. The sketch became a backdrop to the fact that we were all laughing in the middle of our lines as corn chowder shot all over the stage and all over us.

When it was over, we were all covered in what had become the most disgusting substance on earth. Cue cards and protocol went out the window during that sketch. It was such madness that if I had
actually
vomited, I don’t think anyone would have noticed. That night was an example of how wonderful
Saturday Night Live
could be, and it was absolutely some of the most fun I had on the show. The audience was being treated to a sketch within a sketch, and the cast was all in the corn chowder together.

I
T WAS
the first Thursday of the new season and I was on my way to studio 8-H to rehearse a sketch. Since I had some extra time, I figured I would first stop by my dressing room and feng shui the place. But when I reached my previous year’s dressing room, the door said
CHRIS ELLIOTT
on it.

I was confused at first, then relieved. Maybe I had been moved to one of the larger dressing rooms. Most everyone else had the same dressing rooms as the year before, but some of the dressing rooms were reassigned to accommodate the new cast members. I was obviously one of the people that had to move to a new dressing room—though no one actually ever told me my dressing room would be moved. Just as in my rookie days, I found out by mistake. But because of the way the network had handled my option, I was happy just being back working on the seventeenth floor at 30 Rock—let alone being on camera, even if it was for only a few sentences at a time.

I went looking for Marci Klein to find out where I would be spending my next twenty Saturdays. I found her in the conference room outside of Lorne’s ninth-floor office. When I asked her where my new dressing room was, she told me it wasn’t ready yet. When I asked her when it would be ready, she told me she didn’t know.

Since you’re not supposed to be in wardrobe until Saturday, I didn’t really need a dressing room that night at all. On Thursdays and Fridays, it was more a place to hang out and wait around. You could excuse yourself from rewrites early and go down to your dressing room and read a book for an hour until your sketch came up. I didn’t have a book or a dressing room, so I wandered around the halls.

I noticed that there were new photos up from the previous year. Unlike in the past, the photos were memories, not devices for intimidation. I saw photos of Nicole Kidman with Mike Myers, Emilio Estevez with Rob Schneider, and Charlton Heston standing on stage during Good-nights. I remembered Sandler doing an impression behind closed doors of the way Charlton Heston shuffled his feet when he walked. We had to keep in mind Mr. Heston’s age when we submitted sketches that week. He was pretty old. There weren’t going to be any pratfalls on the air that show.

On the Heston show, a “Planet of the Apes” sketch was scheduled to run during the opening monologue. The show had hired fifty extras to play apes, and the wardrobe department had secured the actual uniforms from the
Planet of the Apes
movies. The basic premise of the sketch was that the show, to Charlton Heston’s horror, had been overrun by apes. The makeup department put several cast members and all the extras in perfect ape makeup. The process of being made up to look like an ape took five hours. I told anyone and everyone that there was no way I could be an ape, so I played a slave of the apes. (What if I had a panic attack under all that ape makeup?) Dave Attell had to be an ape. Attell was a chain smoker, but he couldn’t reach his lips with a cigarette through the ape mask. It was easy to know which ape was Dave because he was the only ape with a five-inch cigarette holder sticking out of his mouth. Christopher Walken was right, after all; ape suits are funny.

During rehearsal of the “Planet of the Apes” sketch, Heston slapped Farley down pretty good. Farley, along with Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, and me, was playing a slave, and he was getting bored, so he started mumbling, “I’m a slave, I just beat my dick all day.” Then he whipped it out and actually started masturbating. Though we were all in a cage about forty feet from Heston, the man who will always be Moses to me saw what was happening and yelled in that biblical-sounding voice, “Knock it off!” Farley was so shocked that he quickly scooted it back into his pants. “I’m sorry, Mr. Heston,” Chris said sheepishly.

The night of the ape sketch, I stayed for Good-nights. The musical guest on that show was Paul Westerberg, who had been the lead singer of the Replacements, one of the truly great American bands. They had split up and now Westerberg was going it solo. We were all excited and honored to have him. It seemed as though everyone was a fan—except Mr. Heston. When we all gathered onstage at the end of the show, Charlton Heston announced: “I would like to thank Paul Westerfield!” Paul Westerberg leaned over and whispered a correction into Mr. Heston’s ear. Charlton Heston looked back into the camera and bellowed, “Excuse me. Paul Westerfield!” Like I said, he was pretty old.

I continued scanning the photos on the wall and slowly began to realize there was something missing from all the pictures: me. Photograph after photograph had cast members and hosts and musical guests for last season. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find myself in any of them—because I wasn’t
in
any of them.

Slightly baffled, I rode the elevator back up to the seventeenth floor to see if any new photos were hanging in the hallway. Sure enough, there were, but I wasn’t in any of them. There was no recorded history on the walls of my ever having been on
Saturday Night Live.
I even saw photos of sketches that had been cut and were never on the air hanging on the wall. I looked for me as Christopher Walken with Jeff Goldblum. I looked for me as Andrew McCarthy with Christian Slater. I looked for me as Sean Penn with Rosie O’Donnell. As far as the walls were concerned, none of it had ever happened.

By the time I returned to the studio, rehearsals had reached the midway point. They had started without me (as they should have). When asked where I had been, I replied that I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t going to start the first show of my second season complaining about not being represented on the walls. The only people who ever saw those photos were the host, the cast, and the writers. I decided to let it go and concentrate on putting my face where it meant a lot more to me—on television.

The most amusing dress rehearsal was when the show installed new cameras. During the entire dress rehearsal, there were about fifty Japanese guys in suits watching the cameras operate. It was, Hey, look at our shiny new Toyotas doing laps around the speedway. It was surreal. Just when you are trying to find a groove, the audience is composed of fifty men who don’t speak English and have their backs to the stage.

Rehearsals, however, were always the best time to shoot the bull with the other cast members. During the breaks, everyone would crack jokes and tease one another. If your rehearsal had either Farley or Sandler in it, you were always in for a good time. Sandler would tell these incredible stories. One of my favorite Sandler stories was the one he told us about the time that Mr. Belvedere sat on his own balls.

Adam had a small guest part on the show
Mr. Belvedere
early in his career. On his first day, everyone was sitting at a huge table waiting to start the read-through of that week’s show. The old guy who played Mr. Belvedere hadn’t shown up yet, so everyone was drinking coffee and talking until he arrived. Finally Mr. Belvedere walked in, looking very gay in a sweatsuit and with a matching monogrammed attaché case. When the old guy took his seat, he sang out “Goooood morning, everybody!” like a British Ted Baxter. As he took a load off, he apparently sat on one of his testicles. With his nut scrunched under his leg, he screamed,
“Ooooooohhhhhhh!”
and had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Farley didn’t need any stories. Just being around him made you laugh. Even if he wasn’t saying anything, I would just stare at him. I was convinced that I was looking at the greatest entertainer in the world. But when he did speak, he always seemed to come up with something funny.

Take Farley’s background talk. Sometimes the beginning of a sketch called for some white noise background talk. If the sketch took place in an unruly courthouse or at a ball game, everyone would have to mutter fake dialogue until the camera settled on the first person with actual lines. Some of the extras were real actors with real training, and they would have scripted sentences that they had learned to say during this time. I always just looked at whoever was next to me and said, “So anyway, I was talking to Mathew and he…” I don’t know why or when I picked that particular sentence, but it was my trademark blather. Farley would always belt out at the top of his lungs: “Murmur! Murmur! Spade’s gay! Murmur!” I would always piss my pants when he did that and end up forgetting what sketch I was in and what lines I had.

If rehearsals were running long, Phil Hartman had a standard funny line that he would always deliver at the exact time everyone felt things were dragging. He would look up at the ceiling of the studio and yell, “You got a lot of talent out here, Davy, and they’re baking in the sun!”

Phil Hartman was always nice to me. Though it was obvious that the show took a lot out of most of us, Phil didn’t seem affected by any of it. Sandler, too, was another guy who never seemed to be having any problems. During my first season, I was looking through a car magazine and came across of a photo of a beautiful red Corvette. I tore it out of the magazine and asked Phil to autograph it for me. In black Sharpie, Phil scrawled “Phil Hartman USA!” across the side of the Corvette. I hung it in my office above my desk for the rest of the year, and aside from a pile of notebooks, my backpack, and a few empty coffee cups, it was the only thing in my office.

At the end of the year when I was cleaning out my office, one of my best friends, Matt Frost, was with me. I hadn’t decorated the place much, so I spent most of the day throwing out old newspapers. When I reached for the Phil Hartman autograph to take it down, Matt stopped me. “You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” he said. I was planning on tossing it out along with everything else and just bring home my notebooks. Matt looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t throw that away! It’s good luck. You have to save it and hang it next year when you come back.”

“Phil Hartman USA!” spent that entire summer in my sock drawer between two magazine pages to keep it in good shape. I brought it back to the show as my good luck charm, and this year I planned to hang it in my dressing room instead of my office. My dressing room was where I needed the most luck, because it was where I had really freaked out.

As we walked down the hall, I asked her if the reason it hadn’t been ready yet was because they were having it cleaned. She didn’t answer and continued walking very quickly in front of me. We reached a door that I had never noticed, and she found the corresponding key to open it. When she inserted the key to unlock the door, she cautioned, “Don’t get mad. Okay?”

My heart sank. Though I had never seen the door she was about to open, I must have walked past it a hundred times. As Marci opened the door and revealed the inside of my new dressing room, I thought I was the victim of a practical joke. The room was much smaller than my old one. It was literally no more than ten square feet. I stepped inside with a stupid grin on my face. When I turned back around, Marci had left and I was alone in the tiny room.

I examined the door, which said
JAY MOHR
on it. As I moved the door back and forth, it brushed against the recliner inside the room. There were old paint chips on the floor and the smell of new paint was nauseating. I slowly began to realize that this was no practical joke; this was my new dressing room.

I sat down in the recliner and shut the door with my foot. There was no television. There was no sink or closet. There wasn’t any room for anything except the worn-out recliner and the body sitting on it. I noticed one of the walls had a rectangle sunken into it. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an elevator door. The reason I smelled paint was because the elevator door had just been painted shut. There were paint chips on the floor because the door to my new dressing room had previously been painted shut as well. The room wasn’t ready yet because someone had to chip the paint off the door so it would open. And that’s why I had never seen the door before: It had been painted shut in the same color as the wall of the hallway.