Gasping for Airtime (9 page)

“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 bothered 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.

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.

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.

C
HRIS
F
ARLEY
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 cylinder 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.

I’ve never seen a performer showered with love as Farley was in the “Little Women” figure-skating sketch when David Hyde Pierce hosted. The characters (played by Pierce, Farley, Spade, and Janeane Garofalo) were all dressed in costumes from the 1800s. As they took turns on the ice rink, doing figure eights and showing off, Farley criticized them with foppy lines like “I think you should pay more attention to your schoolwork.” At the end, as everyone argued with everyone else, Farley went out to skate and broke the ice. When Farley fell through the trapdoor into the ice-cold water, he screamed, “Shut the hell up, you stupid whores, and get me out of here!” As the little women came to his aid, he pulled them all in the water with him.

At the end of the sketch, everyone climbed out of the water quickly to escape the cold—except Farley. He didn’t pull himself out until the show had gone to commercial and the band began to play. When he emerged from the hole, his coat had fallen off and he was clutching the soggy garment in his hands. He was standing directly under the cantilevered balcony seats and in front of the people seated on the floor in front of the stage where the sketch had been performed. Dripping wet, Farley held his clothes over his head like a cross between an ancient gladiator and David Lee Roth. He was an absolute god and a sopping wet mess, and the crowd went berserk.

What was true for the audience was true for the performers: If you were in a sketch with Farley, you were going to have some serious fun. You never knew what craziness Chris was going to pull out of his bag of tricks. Even though the sketch’s lines and all the parts were written on cue cards, Chris always managed to come up with something fresh and new. He also had the uncanny ability to make everyone else in the sketch tremble while holding in his own laughter. It was as if Chris was on a mission; if he didn’t make you laugh, he had somehow failed.

In fact the entire cast was in the sketch. Phil Hartman played the warden who told Meadows, Spade, Sandler, Schneider, and me that he was going to introduce us to his hardest inmates. First Martin came onstage wearing a cornrow wig and flashing an enormous gold tooth. Martin delivered the speech and then told us he was going to bring out the baddest homeboy he knew, a man named Matt Foley who was in jail for failure to pay child support (Farley).

In dress rehearsal, Chris played it pretty close to the script. He never touched Martin Lawrence’s wig and he stuck to the cue cards. I wondered to myself what adjustments he would make between dress rehearsal and airtime to make us all laugh. At the end of the sketch, Chris was supposed to dance around to make a point and accidentally crash through the wall of the jail. After Chris made the hole in the wall, all of us were to get up from our seats and escape through the hole. Then Chris would reenter and deliver his final line.

But Sandler came up with an idea to give Chris a taste of his own medicine. For all the times Chris made us laugh during a sketch, we would get him back at the end of this one. Instead of all of us running out through the hole in the wall, Sandler decided that we should all fall down on top of Chris so he wouldn’t be able to get back up to reenter and say his final line. Though everyone signed off on the plan, I secretly wondered if we would actually go through with it.

The dress rehearsal of the sketch went off as scripted. There was a large gymnastics mat on the other side of the wall for Chris to fall on. We all sat on the mat after escaping from the jail and peeked back through the hole at Chris delivering his line. We laughed offstage, knowing that what Chris was saying wouldn’t be said again on the live show.

Martin Lawrence provided enough of a distraction so that no one was focusing on what high jinks Farley might toss in. Knowing that the dress rehearsal wasn’t being aired on TV, Martin delivered an X-rated monologue. It lasted four minutes long, and most of it was about going down on a woman who tastes nasty. When he finished, we all waited for Lorne to say something to Martin about making sure he toned down the monologue for the live show. Lorne droned on and on to every conceivable technical employee. People whom I never noticed worked on the show were getting notes about the sound being too high or the lights being a bit low. Camera angles were dissected and re-dissected. At one point, the wardrobe people were asked to make sure the costume changes were timely. After thirty minutes, Lorne told us all to have a great show. As we got up to leave and prepare for the show, Lorne looked across his office at Martin and said, “Martin? Are we okay?” Martin nodded his head and that was that. I couldn’t decide if Lorne was afraid to confront Martin, or if Lorne was being classy by not confronting Martin with the cast in the room.

The live show started and Don Pardo shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen…Martin Lawrence!” We all held our breath. Some of the cast had gathered in the studio to watch Martin and listen to what was going to come out of his mouth. That was the beauty of live television: Whatever was said was said, and there were no second takes.

Amazingly, Martin’s opening monologue was very similar to the one in the dress rehearsal. He talked about women being funky down there and suggested that they might want to insert a Tic Tac in their ass. He never actually swore, but the content of the monologue all but ensured that the show would never be reaired or shown as a repeat. Considering it was a show I was actually a part of, I found that slightly upsetting. But the upside to knowing the show was now a lame duck was that the repercussions wouldn’t be as harsh for us pinning Farley to the ground and ruining a sketch.

It was a commercial break and the “Motivational Speaker” sketch was scheduled to be next. We were all changing into our hoodlum clothes that the wardrobe people made sure were properly and promptly hung in our dressing rooms. As I changed, I discovered a terrifying error. The pants I was supposed to wear in the skit didn’t have any pockets, which meant that I had nowhere to put my extra tablet of Klonopin.

I had been carrying extra medication with me everywhere I went in case I started to have a panic attack. I had taken to wearing blue jeans because of the extra square Klonopin pocket above my right thigh. When I had to wear slacks or a police uniform in a sketch, I always found a place to hide my extra pill, usually in the back left pocket. I had also worked out a plan. If I started to have a panic attack on live TV, I would wait until the camera was on somebody else, slip my hand into the pocket, and quickly swallow the pill. I never anticipated that the wardrobe department would outfit me with clothes with no pockets. How could they? How hard is it to give a guy pants with pockets in them? I froze in my dressing room and looked at my blue jeans on the floor at my feet. I made an executive decision to wear the jeans in the sketch.

But just as I started to unbutton my wardrobe pants, stage manager Joe Dicso’s booming voice came over the intercom. “Thirty seconds to ‘Motivational Speaker.’ Thirty seconds. We gotta go, we gotta go!” I wasn’t going to make it. There was no way I could change out of the wardrobe pants and into my jeans and then run onto the stage in thirty seconds. I jammed my fingers into the small pocket of my jeans and fished out two Klonopin pills, and then I ran through the hallways of the eighth floor, rebuttoning my wardrobe pants and clutching two pills in what was now a very sweaty hand. I was going to have to hold the pills in my hand during the sketch. As I took my seat in the makeshift jail set, my hands were sweating so profusely that I was worried the pills would dissolve in my palms in the middle of the sketch. Logically, I could have taken the pill as a preventive measure, but there is no logic to panic, so that thought never crossed my mind. Besides, what if I needed them in the middle of the skit?

We came back from commercial and the stage lights went up. As I sat in my seat, I swiftly transferred the pills to my left hand, out of view of the camera. Phil Hartman began speaking and I hung my arm motionless at my side, trying to leave small cracks between my fingers to ventilate my palms so the pills wouldn’t dissolve. I had to be careful not to make the cracks between my fingers so wide that the pills rolled out between my knuckles onto the floor.

Phil finished his bit and introduced us to Martin Lawrence with his cornrows, his gold tooth, and his prison blues. As Martin began speaking, I started to become short of breath and feel the urge to jump from my chair and walk off the set. If I walked off the set on live television, I thought to myself, I’ll never have to return. I could just spend the rest of my life somewhere else wearing pants with pockets in them. It almost seemed like a fair trade-off.

My mind wandered. I remembered the doctor telling me that no one in the history of medicine had ever died of a panic attack. I remembered her telling me about desensitization exercises, and thought that they seemed pretty drastic. I also thought of how incredibly unfair it all was. Why couldn’t I just be like everyone else on the show? That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be able to sit in a chair during a sketch and watch Martin Lawrence explain to us how in prison young punks like us could be sold to other inmates for a pack of cigarettes.

In an attempt to refocus, I stared at Martin’s gold tooth and watched his mouth form words. I wondered how long it would take me to become a lip-reader, and I wondered why I wasn’t already unconscious. I was now clutching the pills firmly so I could feel them in my palm, which made me feel marginally better. I no longer cared what happened to the pills. If they were crushed or dissolved in my hand, I would simply lick the Klonopin dust from my palms in front of America.

Then Farley happened.

I didn’t actually hear Martin introduce Matt Foley (Chris) into the sketch, but he must have, because the door to the cell opened and Chris exploded onto the set. He was wearing prison blues and eyeglasses, just as in dress rehearsal, but as he entered, something about his appearance was drastically different. Prior to his entrance, Chris had taken the time to make gigantic sweat stains stretching from his armpits all the way down to his waist on both sides of his body. Gigantic pit stains! That was it. We all immediately burst out laughing. The audience started laughing because we were laughing, which only made us laugh harder.

As Chris fiddled with his belt and waited for the applause to die down, the stage lights glistened off his pit stains. I wondered at what point he decided he would add the pit stains to the sketch. It didn’t matter; once again, he had us all by the balls. We were helpless. Martin’s character had explained to us the bartering of young punks for cigarettes, and when the applause died down, he made a grand gesture of handing the cigarette he was holding to Chris, signifying that we were now the property of Matt Foley. He had no idea how right he was.