Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [65]
If rehearsals were running long, Phil Hartman had a standard funny line that he would always deliver at the exact time everyone felt things were dragging. He would look up at the ceiling of the studio and yell, “You got a lot of talent out here, Davy, and they’re baking in the sun!”
Phil Hartman was always nice to me. Though it was obvious that the show took a lot out of most of us, Phil didn’t seem affected by any of it. Sandler, too, was another guy who never seemed to be having any problems. During my first season, I was looking through a car magazine and came across of a photo of a beautiful red Corvette. I tore it out of the magazine and asked Phil to autograph it for me. In black Sharpie, Phil scrawled “Phil Hartman USA!” across the side of the Corvette. I hung it in my office above my desk for the rest of the year, and aside from a pile of notebooks, my backpack, and a few empty coffee cups, it was the only thing in my office.
At the end of the year when I was cleaning out my office, one of my best friends, Matt Frost, was with me. I hadn’t decorated the place much, so I spent most of the day throwing out old newspapers. When I reached for the Phil Hartman autograph to take it down, Matt stopped me. “You’re not going to throw that away, are you?” he said. I was planning on tossing it out along with everything else and just bring home my notebooks. Matt looked at me like I was crazy. “You can’t throw that away! It’s good luck. You have to save it and hang it next year when you come back.”
“Phil Hartman USA!” spent that entire summer in my sock drawer between two magazine pages to keep it in good shape. I brought it back to the show as my good luck charm, and this year I planned to hang it in my dressing room instead of my office. My dressing room was where I needed the most luck, because it was where I had really freaked out.
After dress rehearsal ended that first Thursday, I looked around for Marci Klein again. I was carrying the “Phil Hartman USA!” Corvette ad, which I had now been holding for a few hours. All I wanted to do was find my new dressing room and hang it on the wall for good luck. I found Marci in the conference room again and asked her if my dressing room was ready. She said it was, picked up a set of keys from the middle of the table, and led me away.
As we walked down the hall, I asked her if the reason it hadn’t been ready yet was because they were having it cleaned. She didn’t answer and continued walking very quickly in front of me. We reached a door that I had never noticed, and she found the corresponding key to open it. When she inserted the key to unlock the door, she cautioned, “Don’t get mad. Okay?”
My heart sank. Though I had never seen the door she was about to open, I must have walked past it a hundred times. As Marci opened the door and revealed the inside of my new dressing room, I thought I was the victim of a practical joke. The room was much smaller than my old one. It was literally no more than ten square feet. I stepped inside with a stupid grin on my face. When I turned back around, Marci had left and I was alone in the tiny room.
I examined the door, which said JAY MOHR on it. As I moved the door back and forth, it brushed against the recliner inside the room. There were old paint chips on the floor and the smell of new paint was nauseating. I slowly began to realize that this was no practical joke; this was my new dressing room.
I sat down in the recliner and shut the door with my foot. There was no television. There was no sink or closet. There wasn’t any room for anything except the worn-out recliner and the body sitting on it. I noticed one of the walls had a rectangle sunken into it. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an elevator door. The reason I smelled paint was because the elevator door had just been painted shut. There were paint chips on the floor because the door to my new dressing room had previously been painted shut as well. The room wasn’t ready yet because someone had to chip the paint