Gasping for Airtime (14 page)

My new dressing room was an old elevator shaft. I didn’t think that my little box room was a fitting place for my “Phil Hartman USA!” autograph, so I brought it back upstairs to my office and hung it above my desk, the same as last year.

The night of the live show, there wasn’t anywhere in the room to hang my costumes, so the wardrobe department had folded them and set them down across the recliner. I threw them on the floor and sat down. If anyone asked me why my clothes were wrinkled, I would tell them because my dressing room is a goddamn elevator shaft. I sat in the chair and stretched my arms out to see if I could touch both walls at the same time with my fingertips. I was a few inches short. I took two pencils and held them in my hands and stretched out again. With the pencils in my hands, I could write on both walls at once. So I sat there with my pencils, waiting for the show to begin, and scribbled parallel lines on the walls from my seat.

Since there was no television, I quickly grew bored with my cave drawings. I sat there in silence for a while and enjoyed the quiet. I assumed the tranquility was due to the fact that the room did not have an intercom box in it. Would someone come and get me when it was time for me to be onstage, or would I have to go outside every minute and check? As showtime grew closer and closer, my tension increased. I would always get an adrenaline rush before going onstage, but as Tom Petty once wrote, the waiting is the hardest part. So I sat in my tiny room on the recliner with my feet against the door. If anyone tried to come in unannounced, I would be able to block them from entering. Despite my surroundings, I felt fantastic. I knew that all the anxieties and nervousness I was feeling were appropriate. I was alone in the smallest room in the building with nothing except my thoughts, but at least I didn’t think I was going to die.

I approached the new dressing room as a desensitization exercise. A lot of people I knew would have gone bananas in such a little room. I was feeling just a little claustrophobic. My claustrophobia wasn’t what eventually drove me from the room. I don’t know how long I sat there (no clock or watch), but I started to get nervous that everyone had forgotten about me. No one had knocked or stuck a head in. I could hear people standing in the hallway right outside my door talking.

Occasionally I heard people run past. They were all doing something. Why wasn’t I? I had already been late for a rehearsal once that week, and knew that being late twice would make me look like a complete jackass. So I decided I would go down to the stage and see for myself what was going on. I stood up, sucked my stomach in so the doorknob wouldn’t graze it, and opened the door to find myself standing face-to-face with thirty strangers.

The moment the door opened, they all turned to see who was emerging, and I could see their faces register disappointment instantly when I stuck my head out. No one in the group looked familiar to me. In fact they all looked wide-eyed and out of place. As the line of people moved past my doorway, I spotted an NBC page in a blue blazer bringing up the rear. The people outside my door were in a tour group. They were walking through the hallowed halls of
Saturday Night Live
listening to tidbits of history about the show. I’m sure everyone in the tour group had been hoping from the moment they stepped inside the building to see one of the show’s stars. They got me instead. I felt like an animal in the zoo.

I stood there to see how many of the tourists recognized me. I still had the pencils in my hand, making me fully prepared in case any of them asked me for my autograph. I positioned myself directly underneath the
JAY MOHR
sign on the door and tried to make eye contact with all of them. Thirty pairs of eyes looked back at me, but none had a flicker of recognition. Instead, they were all craning their necks to see which room I had just come out of.

As I closed the door, I angled my body so they couldn’t see inside my dressing room. One by one, they went past. They all looked so expectant and hopeful, and I was trying to deliver by standing directly in front of them under a sign with my name on it. When the last of the tour group had passed, the NBC page in the blue blazer looked at me with a puzzled look on her face. She was trying to place me—or so I thought. Once she put one and one together and figured out who I was, she would probably point me out to the tour group and I would be stuck there all night signing autographs and answering questions about Farley. She pointed behind me, no doubt reading the name on the door and figuring it all out. “Has that door always been there?” she asked.

I told her it had been, and then tried to be as tiny as possible and just get away from all of them. I walked a few feet down the hallway and then turned back around. I ripped the sign with my name off the door. Why advertise that you have the smallest dressing room in the history of
Saturday Night Live
?

Later in the season, I learned that my dressing room crisis wasn’t the worst ever, because at least I had a dressing room. I was bitching and moaning to everyone about it one night when Mike Myers pulled me aside. Mike told me that the size of my dressing room was indeed bullshit, but he had it much worse when he was first hired on the show. He went on to tell me that for the first two years he was on the show, he didn’t have a dressing room
or
an office. Mike Shoemaker had informed him that they simply did not have any room for him, so for two years, Mike Myers sat on the floor across from the elevators with his notebooks spread out around him.

I couldn’t believe it! We’re talking about Mike Myers. He told me his legs cramped from sitting Indian-style for hours at a time. When I asked him if he complained to anyone, he told me that he hadn’t because he was worried that he had never actually been hired. Mike apparently had never been given the welcome aboard from Marci or Mike Shoemaker or Jim Downey. Chris Farley never fake-vomited in his lap. The fact that he was forced to sit on the floor until a meeting was called or rehearsals began made him reluctant to broach the issue. He told me that after a while he figured that if the only place they had for him was on the floor across from the elevators, the next spot for him was probably out on the street.

Having gone mad my first season on the show feeling like an outcast, I was curious how Mike handled his own situation. He said that after a few weeks passed, he started bringing a tennis ball to work with him. Whenever the elevator doors opened on the seventeenth floor, Mike would throw the ball into the elevator as hard as he could so it would ricochet off the back wall of the elevator and bounce back. This version of catch was the way he worked out his frustrations. I asked him what he did when there were actually people in the elevator. Mike gave me a funny grin. “Oh, that was when it was the best!” he said.

I felt good about my conversation with Mike Myers because I was communicating with others about the show—something I was unable to do my first year. I appreciated the fact that Mike had taken the time to commiserate with me. It was somehow comforting to know that one of the show’s biggest stars had gone through even more bullshit than I had.

I knocked on the door that read
CHRIS ELLIOTT
and there was no answer. I opened the door and Chris wasn’t inside. Tim Meadows was coming out of his dressing room, so I asked him if he had seen Chris. Tim told me that he was in hair and makeup. I thanked Tim for the information, though I was really thanking him for the communication. My first year, the same question would have been met by a mumble as the person walked away from me. Tim actually looked me in the eye and gave me a straight answer.

I walked back through the halls reinspecting the walls for photos, hoping that I had missed one. I hadn’t. When I got to the hair and makeup department, Chris Elliott was sitting in a makeup chair. Because he refused to shave his beard, he looked a little like a landlocked sea captain. Across from him was a dummy’s head with a hairpiece on it. I leaned against the makeup counter and asked him how he liked the dressing room. He joked that it was the definition of luxurious, and I bit my tongue. I looked around the room for the owner of the hairpiece, but everyone in the chairs had full heads of hair.

“Chris, whose toupee is that?” I asked.

Very calmly he responded, “That’s mine.”

I was embarrassed and also immediately baffled. I had watched Chris Elliott on television for years and one thing was clear: He was slowly
losing
his hair. Whenever he appeared on
Letterman,
Chris always had a few wisps of stray hair waving off of his head. Those wisps, I discovered that night in the makeup room, were fake. The guy was brilliant! He had a hairpiece that made it look like he was losing his hair so no one would realize that he actually
was
losing his hair.

Though Chris has since dropped the lid, there was one cast member (who shall remain nameless because he’s still using the hairpiece in secret) who was found out when he had a toupee mishap. It occurred at a Monday night basketball game during my second year. This particular cast member had been on the show a long time and rarely fraternized with the rest of us, but he had decided to play. He arrived with a baseball hat on his head. About five minutes into the first pickup game, he went up for a rebound and his baseball hat fell off. We were all crowded around jumping for the same rebound, so when his hat came off with his hair still in it, we gasped in horror. The guy was completely bald!

Some of the cast and writers knew this already, but even if we had all known, it still would have been mortifying. We all backed away and watched as the hat fell top side down with the hair still in the hat looking up at us. The cast member calmly bent down, picked up his hat, put it back on his head, and walked out of the gym without saying a word. After that night in the gym, whenever I saw him, I would look at his shoulders when I spoke to him so I wouldn’t be tempted to stare at his hairline. And from that point on, whenever I saw him on television, I would stare at the screen and remember his entire head of hair in the baseball hat on the gym floor.

The greenroom was the place where the overflow of guests would be put during the show. Whenever there was a sketch that took place in the hallway, there was always a pope, three Vegas showgirls, a guy in a mule suit, two guys in a horse suit, and various and sundry paid extras. All of these characters in the hallways were directed to wait in the ninth-floor greenroom across from my elevator shaft dressing room, and because I had removed the sign, sometimes they would overflow into my private space. If a celebrity brought a dozen friends, they would watch the live show from the greenroom while the celebrity would undoubtedly be on the studio floor standing next to Marci Klein.

Unlike the people in the tour group, I didn’t want anyone—not even the guy in the pontiff costume—coming out of the greenroom to recognize me. It would be humiliating. I would open a door with no nameplate on it and head inside. Everyone would turn to see who I was just in time to see me throw my clothes on the floor and push the door shut with my feet. They would all think I was on probation because I was relegated to such a small dressing room.

Finally, as nonchalantly as possible, I left Chris Elliott and his toupee behind and went back to my dressing room to change into my wardrobe. I was hoping that if anyone did recognize me, they would think that my dressing room was just a place close to the stage where I stashed some extra clothes. I picked my wrinkled wardrobe up off the floor and turned and walked out like I was on my way to someplace much larger and cooler. Now that I had my clothes and had left my dressing room, I was faced with the dilemma of where I would actually change.

I settled for a stall in the men’s bathroom. There, I stripped out of my street clothes and put my sketch clothes on. Thankfully, the pants had plenty of pockets. I felt like a moron carrying my street clothes through the halls, so I went back up to my office on the seventeenth floor and left them there, a practice I followed for most of the year.