Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [49]
As Myers and I were sitting in silence, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler walked past our table with his wife. All week, I had thought he looked like Joan Rivers. During the rehearsals, he would constantly primp himself. Tyler carried a mirror in the holster on the side of his painter’s pants. The mirror wasn’t a compact; it was about eight inches in diameter. It looked like a family heirloom, with small jewels lining the round edge. He looked in that mirror more than someone who lived in a house of mirrors. Somehow it was completely forgivable because he’s Steven Tyler and he’s a rock star. It was as if he were thinking, I want to make sure I look exactly right when I’m playing “Sweet Emotion.” Tyler stopped at our table and tipped his hat. “An auspicious debut!” he said to me.
As Tyler walked away from us, I leaned across the table and started the first dialogue of the night between Mike and me. “What does auspicious mean?” I asked.
The Smashing Pumpkins performed a concert the night after their SNL appearance, and that was the official beginning of the end for me—and the height of my awareness that the bands were speaking to me. For weeks I’d been having trouble breathing, sleeping, eating, walking, and talking. At the time, I had no idea that there was anything known as a panic disorder; this was before my first visit to the doctor. I thought I was having multiple nervous breakdowns and mini–heart attacks that would end only after I dropped dead at the most inopportune time.
I went to see Smashing Pumpkins with Marci Klein, who was someone you wanted on your side. If you were on her bad side, you were finished. In her role as talent coordinator/coproducer, she functioned as the gatekeeper to Lorne. With long, dirty blond hair and piercing eyes, she was very attractive. She also had a real mean streak, and was a complicated person, perhaps owing to the fact that (I was told by several people) she was kidnapped as a child. Marci and I always got along pretty well, and we even formed a loose bond over our mutual love for Tabasco sauce. She always had a bottle on her desk and drizzled it on everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if she put it in her coffee. Once my roommate ordered a bottle of a hot sauce called Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally, and I brought it into the office for Marci. “I’ve had that,” she said excitedly, “but it’s not as hot as this other one.”
The concert was held at Roseland, a small, standing-room-only club holding about 3,000 in Midtown Manhattan. Marci and I sat on a small elevated platform on the side of the stage that had about fifty chairs for VIPs. The VIPs had sacrificed one of the precious chairs to pile their coats on, and it was about fifteen feet from Marci and me. The house lights were on and everyone below us was dying from the heat and from being packed in like sardines. The only air in the room came from an air conditioner vent that was ten feet from our heads. Everyone who was elevated was freezing; everyone who wasn’t was frying.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with the celebrities in the VIP area, I was trying to act as nonchalant as possible. Then Marci turned to me and barked out, “Jay, get me my coat.” I looked at the coat chair and thought of the work it would take to even get near the chair, never mind the task of pawing through a bunch of celebrities’ coats to locate Marci’s. Anyway, I reasoned that if I pulled her coat from the pile now and decided later that I wanted my coat, then I would have to barge through everyone a second time. I looked at her and said, “Why don’t you get it?” I wasn’t snarky or hostile; I had merely reached indifference to my entire situation at the show. As I finished my sentence, she pointed at me and screamed, “I fucking discovered you!”
Now I really wasn