Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [50]
Then, in an act of God, the house lights went off and the concert started.
Someone at the concert had a joint and passed it my way. I took two drags and was immediately convinced that I had just smoked angel dust and would die at the concert, halfway to the chair with the coats on it. Below me, people were slam-dancing, creating a swirling whirlpool-like mosh pit. The mosh pit resembled how I felt inside. Bodies collided and people surged forward and backward, churning like the inside of my stomach.
I made my way over to the edge of the elevated VIP section and decided to let the crowd below swallow me up. I stepped off the ledge and landed with a jarring thud on the Roseland Ballroom wood floor. I was never able to penetrate the whirlpool of the crowd, so I remained on the outside, literally fighting with my fists and feet to get on the inside. No dice.
I soon found myself at the back of the ballroom, a good fifty yards from the swirling maniacs. There was a bar at the rear of the room, and I decided that if I was going to die, I was going down shit-faced drunk. Hoping that I would pass out and be trampled, I drank myself stupid but somehow kept my feet. By the time the show ended, I was slurring my speech and weaving through the crowd, searching for an exit. No matter which way I turned, I was swimming against the tide of people leaving. Like a human pinball, I bounced off person after person. The last of those people was Marci.
“C’mon!” she said, “there’s an after-party behind the stage.” She led the way backstage, bumping no one, with me immediately behind her, bumping everyone.
Backstage, Marci introduced me to Billy Corgan, the band’s lead singer. I tried telling him that I had just worked with him the previous night on Saturday Night Live and had loved the concert. Instead, I blithered until I realized I sounded like every drunken idiot who had ever wasted his time after a show.
I started jogging out of Roseland, thinking that the faster I exited, the faster everyone would forget I was there. The place was now completely empty and all the lights were on. The floor was littered with shoes from people who had removed them and thrown them at the band during the show. A few of these morons were on their hands and knees rooting around on the floor with one shoe on looking for its match. They looked like they’d had a great time that night and dying never even crossed their minds.
That’s when the lyrics from the Smashing Pumpkins song “Cherub Rock” hit me: “Freak out/give in. It doesn’t matter what you believe in/be someone’s fool.” That was the game I had to play this year as a rookie, and next year would be different.
As the shows ticked by in my first year, bands came and went, sometimes matching my mood with their music, other times with their actions. Sounding more like old KISS than Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots explained that my feelings were based on the weather inside 30 Rock. Spade had once joked that he liked Stone Temple Pilots better the first time around—when they were called Pearl Jam. When lead singer Scott Weiland and the band got on the elevator with me, Weiland looked at me and asked, “Where’s Spade?” I told him that I didn’t know. “If you see him,” he said in a mischievous, we’re-gonna-kick-his-ass way, “tell him that we’re looking for him.” No matter how fed up I was with the show, I felt that we were all in it together. I turned to Weiland and said, “I guess we’ll all choose our sides, won’t we.”
UB40 and Crash Test Dummies performed. As UB40 played a song I had never heard before, Al Franken was standing next to me eating what I’m sure was a pencil-flavored cookie. “I feel like I’m watching the lounge band