Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [42]
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