Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [27]
Saturdays should have been my favorite night of the week. Unlike Monday nights, when the building was pretty much empty by the time you got to work, Saturday nights were packed. Saturday Night Live was and still is the greatest show in town, and the hallways would be crowded with people who knew they were lucky to be in the way. A lot of celebrities came to the show, too. It wasn’t uncommon to be rushing from your dressing room to the stage and pass Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Charlize Theron or Paul Simon.
And Saturdays were my favorite nights—if I had a sketch on the air. If you weren’t in anything, you spent all of Saturday night in your dressing room watching everyone else have a great time. But if you had a sketch on the air, everything was perfect. Even if your sketch bombed, you were still accounted for. You had contributed to the history of the show. You could stand onstage during Good-nights and wave and shake hands and not feel like a phony.
Too often, however, I was not accounted for.
Even eating takeout with the others became difficult. Food was always delivered to the seventeenth floor, usually very late at night. It was free, so no one really cared what it was. We just devoured it—except for Rob Schneider and writer Ian Maxtone-Graham, who never touched the food the rest of us ate. Ian would roam the hallways with his nuts and yogurt, and Rob would always order up sushi.
Every time Rob received a sushi delivery he would scrabble through his desk and take out a loupe like a jeweler preparing to examine a diamond. He would hold each piece of sushi up to the light and inspect it through the loupe. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was checking for worms. He would put the loupe in his eye as if he were staring at the Hope diamond. It was raw fish. “Here’s one!” he’d shout. He would hand me the loupe and I would go through the same jeweler motions he did and take a peek. Sure enough, I could make out tiny dots in the center of the sushi. This happened once a week. He told me that you always have to check sushi for worms because they were very common in Manhattan. Personally, I would have stopped ordering sushi, but not Rob. He ordered and inspected it every week.
With the Harvard guys, it was never pizza. It was “We’re ordering Portuguese, what do you want?” I didn’t even know what Portuguese food was. I would study the menu and it would be chicken followed by a Portuguese word and rice. The next night, someone would announce they were ordering Serbian food. Again, I’d ask for the menu and their eyes would roll, as if they were saying, “Jesus, Jay, don’t you know anything?” The first time they ordered Indian food, I remember thinking the second that it hit the plate that it smelled identical to the inside of a taxicab. Being a New Yorker, I was reluctant to eat the smell of another man. I put on a stiff upper lip and ate the lamb vindaloo. When I finished, I looked at my plate and saw that it was stained orange. I went to the men’s room and tried to clean it with the grainy, sandy soap. No matter how hard I scrubbed, the plate remained orange. It was then that I concluded anything that stains a plate so drastically is also staining my esophagus and my stomach.
Soon, every time I saw pizza boxes in the writers’ room, I would help myself to four slices, eat one, and stash the others in my office drawer for the inevitable night of Serbian deli takeout. Even with the food, I was out of the loop.
Six
Playing Well
with Others
SURPRISINGLY, THERE weren’t many fistfights while I was on the show. Tempers flared and people screamed at each other, but for the most part, there were no brawls. The one fight I remember was one between Norm Macdonald and Ian Maxtone-Graham.