Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [6]
Those who weren’t driving their own cars to the retreat were supposed to meet outside the building at noon and ride together on a chartered bus big enough to haul an Alabama church group. At noon, I was still on the N/R subway train. The entire subway ride I knew I was going to miss the bus, miss the trip, and be fired for not having enough class to be on time for my first SNL field trip. Since Sarah Silverman and I were neighbors, we took the subway up together so at least we were both doomed.
At 12:10 P.M., I boarded the bus, panic-stricken about being late. It was empty. Sarah and I were the only ones there. No one else showed up for another hour. For a while we wondered if we were even on the right bus. But one by one people started to wander onto the bus. All of them were writers who I had barely met or not met at all. I didn’t even know what half of the writers looked like, so it felt a lot like being on a city bus. People you didn’t know were getting on and sitting down. No one really spoke, and I wondered if they thought they were on the wrong bus, too. Finally I saw someone I knew: Norm Macdonald.
Slowly and deliberately, Norm lumbered onto the bus. He looked like a cross between death warmed over and a drug addict who had just woken up. Norm stood at the front of the bus for a while and looked out over all of us. He cleared his throat and announced that he had been sick with food poisoning the night before. He provided the name of the restaurant and positively identified the culprit as an avocado. Then he treated us to a blow-by-blow of the havoc that faulty avocado wrecked on his system.
The first sign of trouble, he explained, came when he was crossing the street after leaving the restaurant and started shitting in his pants. He leaned up against a lamppost and puked and shit in the street until he mustered enough strength to hail a cab. He explained that no cabs would pick him up because they thought he was a crackhead puking and shitting in the street.
After Norm had drained his system, a cab stopped and he told the driver to take him to a hospital. When the cabdriver asked him which hospital, he said he didn’t know. Unfortunately, Norm had just moved to New York and didn’t know the names of any hospitals, so he told the cabbie to take him to the best possible hospital. Apparently, the cabdriver decided to put his kids through college on Norm’s dime and drove him all the way up to Harlem. Norm spent the entire ride telling the cabbie that he wasn’t a strung-out druggie, he had just eaten a rotten avocado.
When Norm walked into the emergency room, he was ghostly white and shaking, causing the doctors to immediately put him on a gurney. As they wheeled him down the hall, the doctor kept asking Norm what he was on. Norm said that he kept explaining to everybody that he had food poisoning from an avocado. They pumped his stomach, hydrated him with an IV, and then sent him home.
You could certainly say that Norm was a trouper. He had been up all night vomiting in a hospital in Harlem, and he was still on the bus at one o’clock. I was late, but I didn’t almost die from eating an avocado. I merely overslept.
Mohonk is a huge, stately manor in the Hudson Valley that reminded me of a cruise ship inside a mansion. As I checked in at the registration desk, I looked around and noticed that the average age there was the day before death. It was like a place where Wilford Brimley and Bea Arthur would go to rent a paddleboat—but then here we came and now Chris Farley was running down the hall with his pants around his ankles and Adam Sandler was whacking