Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [33]
There were five or six people in the elevator and they were obviously coming from the Rainbow Room. The men wore tuxedos and the women had on lovely gowns. There was an NBC security guard wearing a black sports jacket standing there behind the tuxedos, the lovely gowns, the perfume, and the money. I stepped onto the elevator and frantically pushed the close door button. But the doors stayed open and Chris got up off of the blue carpet and walked toward me.
Chris had raspberries stretching across both forearms and a look on his face that scared me shitless. He was going to tear my head off and feed it to the tuxedoed Rainbow Room patrons. I had now beaten him twice. When he won the first match, it was in front of Spade and Fred Wolf, but when I beat him, it was in front of everyone—most important, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.
The elevator doors weren’t going to close in time, and Chris was going to kill me. I pointed at him and tapped the guy next to me. “Holy shit!” I said. “That’s Chris Farley.” The guy said, “That is Chris Farley!” and the elevator erupted.
All the drunken rich people recognized Chris and started waving to him and saying hello. Not wanting to deal with them, Chris turned and walked back through the mob. The elevator doors closed and I wondered whether it would ever be safe to go back to work. The security guard and the rich people talked the whole way down about how they couldn’t believe they had seen him.
None of them asked me why I was bleeding.
Seven
Fight or Flight?
IT WAS a typical Thursday night. As usual, the show needed to be rewritten, mostly to cut time and punch up the jokes on each sketch. But what the show didn’t need was fifteen grown men sitting around a table arguing over what to name a fictitious high school that would be seen in the opening of one of the sketches. So we sat around for hours. Someone would say, “Washington High School,” and three other people would roll their eyes and say, “No!”
I never grasped who was steering us, but I was sure we were going nowhere fast. I began to sweat. In intervals, almost like contractions, I would feel unreasonable terror. I didn’t care what they named the school, yet I found myself blurting out names like Central and Montclair just to put a stop to it. But on it went—the naming of a high school, an act with no bearing on the content of the sketch whatsoever.
Leaving the writers’ room during rewrites was verboten. If you so much as got up to make a phone call or stretch your legs, Jim Downey would ask where you thought you were going. One Thursday around 3:00 A.M., Tom Davis walked out of his office through the writers’ room holding a suitcase and his guitar. He was wearing a knee-length parka and a pair of bright red mittens, and he had a scarf wrapped around his neck. Two-thirds of the way on his journey through the room, Downey asked incredulously, “Tom, where do you think you’re going?” Tom Davis stopped, turned toward Downey, and replied, “The bathroom.” Then he walked straight to the elevators. I envied Tom’s courage. About as far as I went was later in the winter when Dave Attell and I sneaked out at night to do stand-up downtown. We would act like we were going to the bathroom and return three hours later to discover that no one had even noticed we were gone.
I spent each Thursday night planning my escape. I thought constantly about how to organize my flight. Rewrites in the wintertime were murder, because winter is high school basketball season. Jim Downey was a rabid high school basketball fan.