Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [35]
I took a seat on the edge of the baggage carousel and shivered at the thought of getting on another plane just to get back home. Every asshole in the world was renting cars that day. They had no idea how great they had it. They could walk up to a desk, and if they had a driver’s license saying they were twenty-five, someone would hand them the keys to a car. Assholes, all of them. They came and they left, into their rented cars and away from the planes and the tubes.
My reverie was broken when a woman at one of the counters where I had already begged called me over. She told me discreetly that she loved Saturday Night Live and would rent me a car but cautioned me that I couldn’t tell anyone. It was a deal.
I drove for five hours and passed nothing. I was safe. Nothing else existed. If I let any sensory information in, I would start an avalanche that I couldn’t possibly stop. I did the show and counted each routine after I finished it. I had been keeping a list of how many jokes I could get through before I started to panic. At Millikin University I stopped counting somewhere in the teens and eventually finished the show. I had a car outside that made me feel safer. When I finished the show, I said good night and walked out of the theater and back to my car. I pulled out of the school grounds and very quietly made my way back to Chicago.
That night I slept in a motel near O’Hare that was so disgusting I didn’t crawl under the blankets. I lay on top of the bed with my clothes on and counted my heartbeats. There was a small stove next to the bed that could only have been used to cook crack. I checked the walls for clocks and faces. I thought of the tube. I would have to board a plane in the morning, sit in that tube, and walk through the meat grinder with everyone else. People in the next room were fighting, and I thought that this would be the perfect time and place to die.
But I didn’t die, and I kept not dying. I woke up every single day. I went to work and wondered what fucking plan everyone else was following. They all seemed fine. They wrote, they talked, they got on the elevators, they ate, and they did it all so effortlessly. They seemed to do it one day at a time. Just like everyone else in the world at any other job. Me, I didn’t know how long a day was anymore.
It was six or seven weeks into the show and everyone seemed to have fallen into some sort of a pattern. I had fallen into a pattern of acting as if I were normal. I don’t remember which show it was or who the guests were, but I remember the breaking point. I remember going completely mad.
I was in my dressing room watching the show’s dress rehearsal on the closed circuit television that hung from the ceiling in the corner. It was the second or third week in a row that I wasn’t in any sketches. I lay back in the recliner chair and positioned myself directly under the television so that if it fell out of the ceiling, it would knock me out. I just lay there and watched sketch after sketch that I wasn’t in. What happened next, I later learned, was my fight-or-flight mechanism kicking in.
At the time, I would have called it going crazier than a shithouse rat. I had experienced panic before this particular night, but this one was special—special in a bad way. I jumped from the recliner and ran to the elevators and into the streets and into the night.
I ran all the way back to my apartment—forty-two blocks away.
When I reached my apartment, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a book and not dying. I told him I had to go to the emergency room for a heart attack. He raised an eyebrow at me, since I had told him this several times before. He refused to take me to the hospital, so I decided to run there.
When I hit the street again, I began thinking of how at a hospital they would put me on a stretcher and the claustrophobia from that would kill me slower than