Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [56]
That summer I also heard stories about myself and the things I had done at 30 Rock, many of which I had long since blocked out. People would ask me if it was true that I threw my phone out the window. I would have to stop and think before I answered. Yes, I did throw my phone out the window, but how did they know?
It had happened on a Tuesday night and I couldn’t get anyone to help me with a sketch. I felt a surge of panic but couldn’t leave my office because I would have had to run past the rest of the staff in the writers’ room. So I picked up the phone on my desk and threw it through a window, which was unfortunately closed. Glass flew all over the place, and Mike Shoemaker dashed into my office to see what caused the shattering noise.
An hour later the police arrived. The telephone had landed with a good crash seventeen stories below on the street in the middle of Rockefeller Center, and the good citizens of New York had reported it. I stood in front of the phone-shaped hole in the window and told the cops someone must have broken into my office and thrown the phone out the window. I remember telling them, “I wouldn’t do something like that! I talk on the phone all the time.” I peered out through the window down onto the street. “Who the fuck would do something like this?!” I said. “We’re just lucky nobody got hurt down there.”
The cops looked out the window, too, and the three of us stood there with our heads out the window. Eventually they thanked me for the help with their investigation and left. I asked them if there was anything I could do to help them with the case. Both officers shot me a look that could only be interpreted as “Yeah, don’t throw your phone out the window anymore.”
No one asked me about sketches I had performed or the segments I had written. If my contribution to the show came up in conversation, it was always because I was the one who brought it up. But the people out in California asked me about Farley. They wanted to know if it was true that we wrestled in front of Alec Baldwin and the rest of the cast. Yes, we did, but how did they find out?
I didn’t bring these memories to California with me, but the more conversations I had, the more they came back to me. I remembered the great stories that Alec Baldwin told, like how he stopped eating meat. He and Kim had been in Paris and he contracted food poisoning from steak. He said that he was sick for so long that he decided eating meat wasn’t worth it. His story about being with Kim Basinger in Paris led me to ask what it was like to be married to the hottest woman alive. Though he assured me it was great, Alec said, “If I had to do it all over again, I would have fucked every single woman I ever came into contact with.” He detailed who that crop would have been: “To all the girls Stephen and Billy brought home, I would have said, ‘Come over here,’ and I would have had my way with them because I was famous and I could have. Even second cousins. I would have had no morals because once you’re married, it’s done.”
I thought about when Nancy Kerrigan hosted and how she had a mouth like John Elway’s. She had this enormous set of choppers that made her look like a whale when her mouth was open. If you held her in the ocean by her feet, she could probably filter brine shrimp from the water using her teeth. She was nice, but I don’t think she was the sharpest knife in the cutting block because she gleefully signed the Sports Illustrated cover with the picture of her crying and clutching her knee and the headline reading “‘Why? Why? Why?’”
They wanted to know about when Rosie O’Donnell hosted because she was a fellow comic. Rosie came to have some fun, and she wanted to please. Unlike, say, Shannen Doherty, she was someone you wanted at the rewrite table throwing out ideas. I was in a “Malibu Fires” sketch with her in which she played Penny Marshall and I played