Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [21]
I found the veteran producer Mike Shoemaker and asked what had happened. Shoe told me that Shannen Doherty was uncomfortable making fun of Sean Young. “Are they friends?” I asked. He told me he didn’t think so, and walked away. With only an hour to go before air, there wasn’t time for a debate. I couldn’t believe it. All Shannen Doherty had to do was say two lines, which she didn’t want to do because she was afraid of offending Sean Young. Maybe she was afraid that Sean Young would show up at her house wearing a catsuit.
Not only was my sketch not on the air, I was no longer on the air. I had already asked to be taken out of a courtroom sketch where I played a bailiff with no lines. I would rather not be on camera at all than be on camera doing nothing except standing there like the spear-carrier in the school play. I had called hundreds of people and told them to watch my sketch. Now it was vaporized. I couldn’t possibly call them all back at eleven at night and say, “Oops.” I certainly wasn’t going to beg to be reinstated as a mute bailiff and then call my friends and tell them to tape the show and use their slow-motion VCR replay to see me on it.
To put it mildly, I sulked that entire evening. Every time I made eye contact with Shannen Doherty, I looked at her like I was going to kill her. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t exist. I sat in my dressing room and watched the show from an armchair.
I decided to make a statement and not go onstage for Good-nights. Not exactly Gandhi’s hunger strike, but I somehow had to protest. On my first show, I hadn’t been sure whether or not to go onstage for Good-nights. I had written the opening monologue sketch for Charles Barkley, but I wasn’t ever on camera. I was standing off to the side while the cast filed onstage during the final commercial. Mike Shoemaker nudged me and said, “Go on!” If he hadn’t, I’d probably still be standing there.
The only person who even noticed when I skipped the Good-nights was Shoemaker. When Shoe passed me in the hallway after the show and asked me why I wasn’t at Good-nights, I told him I was boycotting. “You should really be there,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.” I basically told him that the fact that I wasn’t on the show didn’t look too good either. I figured I didn’t have enough time to tell him about how humiliating it would have been to stand onstage with everyone in the studio audience—not to mention the friends I had called—staring at me, wondering who I was and what the hell I was doing up there with everyone else who had performed on the show.
That night I went to the wrap party with one mission: to get loaded. I hoped that getting incredibly drunk would alleviate the flow of panic that was constantly and erratically rushing into my body. I would self-medicate! It had to work. If I could just get myself to pass out, I would no longer have to deal with wanting to kill someone until I woke up. The more I drank, the more numb I became.
Amazingly, with next to no motor skills at my disposal, the volcanic churning inside my stomach persisted. Barely able to keep my eyes open, I was acutely aware of the fact that my plan was not working. I was alarmed at my own self-awareness. As I reached new lows of numbness, my self-consciousness was at its peak. My insides felt like I had put a blanket over a kicking horse. This anxiety could be cured only by drinking more. So drink I did. I drank until the sun came up—ironic, considering that the whole point of self-medicating was to pass out.
I don’t remember going to sleep that night, but I do remember waking up. It was six o’clock at night the following day when I got out of bed. More significant, it was dark outside. I met some friends for “lunch” that Sunday evening at a restaurant called Coffee Shop. The entire time I sat in the restaurant, I fought the urge to run. From or to what, I didn’t know.