Gasping for Airtime (5 page)

The moment arrived. Don Pardo, the NBC announcer, ran down the
Saturday Night Live
cast: “Ellen Cleghorne, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, Tim Meadows, Mike Myers, Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, Julia Sweeney…and featuring Al Franken, Norm Macdonald, Jay Mohr, Sarah Silverman. Musical guest, Nirvana. And your host, Charles Barkley.” He lowered his voice to hit the perfect basso cantinato tone. “Ladies and gentlemen…Charles Barkley.”

The rest of my life began. I constantly repositioned myself to stay out of the way. I must have moved five times in the first three minutes. When “Barkley vs. Barney” ended, the crowd went bananas and gave the sketch a rousing ovation. Charles waited for the applause to die down. “Stick around, Nirvana is here!” he said.

I was in. A real team player. Everyone had seen what I could do, and I was now on my way to becoming the most famous cast member ever. Undeniably, I thought I was going to be the next Eddie Murphy. There was going to be an applause break the following year when my name appeared in the opening montage. I wasn’t being cocky. That’s always been my personality as a performer. If people leave my stand-up show and say it was pretty good, this wrecks me. Why would this be any different? After all, out of everyone in the country who auditioned, they hired three new people—and I was one of them.

T
HE SCHEDULE
for putting together
Saturday Night Live
was made back in the seventies when everyone was on coke. For the two years I was on the show, the schedule was the same as it had always been. Problem was, no one did coke and we were expected to keep the same hours.

The fact that a show pieced together in two days has stayed consistently funny for more than twenty-five years is truly amazing, but I never understood why the format had to be so unnecessarily difficult. On top of the strain of working the most bizarre hours I had ever known, there was a vagueness to the entire process that was crippling. Everyone seemed to always be on their way to somewhere else. Every question I ever asked anybody was answered as they walked away from me, and no suggestions were ever offered. I assumed that they simply hated me. That would have been fine, but I think that having been on the show awhile, they were just afraid to stop moving. Also, why slow down your day helping the new guy when you’re trying to keep from drowning yourself?

When I started working at
SNL
, I was told to be there on Mondays at 1:00
P.M
. A few other guys would be there by then, but as with my first Monday, the majority of people showed up much later. When I was hired, I didn’t know how to turn on a computer. While other writers were typing sketches and modeming them to wherever sketches went to be printed, I wrote mine with pencil and paper on a yellow legal pad with horizontal blue stripes and red vertical stripes and then sat around the office with the finished product wondering where to turn in my pages. My Harvard officemates couldn’t help me because they handed in their sketches with the push of a button. It took me about three days of roaming the hallways asking everyone I saw, “Where do I hand in my sketch?” before I knew what a production assistant looked like. All of them tried to be helpful, but they were inevitably on the fly, so they’d point in a general direction and mumble something with their backs to me.

Early on, it became clear that my body was not reacting well to my new surroundings. My stomach was always knotted. I never knew what time it was. I stopped looking. The clocks on the wall mocked me. Shapes shifted and sounds came and went. I stopped eating out after Norm Macdonald put the fear of a bad avocado in me. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did, it was usually on the couch in my office to the sounds of Dave writing and the smells of Dave chain-smoking. For want of a better expression, I started to feel unsteady. I would wake up each morning with the feeling that something bad was going to happen. All day, I would have to shit with the same intensity of a grade school kid who had just been summoned to the principal’s office. As the months dragged, these feelings increased dramatically.

One Monday morning early in the first season, I woke up feeling bizarre. Physically I felt all right, but in my brain something was definitely wrong. Have you ever seen an enormous storm approaching while the sun is still shining? Try to take that visual of thick black clouds rolling in and put it in your subconscious. Everything around me looked and sounded normal, but I had a strange and sinking feeling that it was only a matter of time—a matter of time until what I didn’t know.

I took my seat on the N/R—the subway line with the yellow-looking caution sign that heads north and then snakes east underneath Manhattan—and opened up the
New York Post
. As the train lurched forward, I suddenly began to feel like I had to escape. Not escape like get off at the next stop; escape like “Holy shit! The train is on fire!” For some reason I took my pulse: 120. Was I having a heart attack? One more stop, I reassured myself.

At 34th Street, a homeless man boarded the train and began asking for change. What happened next occurred in slow motion. As the homeless man came closer to me with his cup out, I could feel my heart beating in my head. I started to gnash and grit my teeth. I wanted to kill him. But my homicidal intentions were soon overtaken by the sudden realization that I was about to vomit everywhere onto everybody. I closed my eyes and began to pray. I prayed that I wouldn’t die on the N/R train by choking on my own vomit while having a heart attack. My heart felt like a volcano ready to erupt.

I was going to die. There was no doubt about it. I didn’t think I was going to die, I knew I was going to die.

I couldn’t hear anything, but I saw the subway doors open at the 49th Street stop. My stop. If I could just get out of my seat, I wouldn’t have to die on the train. I could die somewhere with a little more dignity—on the subway platform or the sidewalk. I stood up and started to walk off the train. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with a fear of having to go to the bathroom. My next thought was to hurry up and run before the doors closed.

So run I did. I ran from the pole on the N/R train at the 49th Street stop all the way to Rockefeller Plaza. The entire way I was engulfed in absolute terror. The world was ending, or at the very least, mine was.

When I arrived at the
SNL
offices, I took my pulse again. With all the sprinting it had skyrocketed to 200. I ducked into an empty office and reminded myself to stay away from the windows. I lay down on the couch and tried deep breathing to slow my heart rate. I did that until I got up and ran to the bathroom and vomited continuously for an hour.

After throwing up everything that wasn’t a permanent part of my insides, I felt better—except for the fact that I had no idea what had just happened to me.

The sketches are read at a roundtable on Wednesday. The ones selected for air are rewritten on Thursday. If the sketch is still alive at that point, it’s rehearsed on Friday or Saturday (and then it moves to a Saturday live rehearsal before a studio audience and finally to the live show). That’s a whole lot of water for a little bit of boat. In short, there is a day and a half of rehearsal for eight to twelve sketches being readied for live television. With this relatively minuscule amount of time allotted for the writing, rewriting, and rehearsal of sketches, it’s a miracle that there’s a show at all.

Whenever I would ask Jim Downey when I was supposed to come in on Tuesday, he would respond, “You’re paid to be here.” Me: “But what time should I come in?” Him: “You’re paid to be here.” That was it. No more. No less. Of course he was technically right, but it’s hard to set your alarm clock to “You’re paid to be here.” Not wanting to be the one to misinterpret “You’re paid to be here,” I began waking up earlier and earlier.

At first I showed up for work at 11:00
A.M
. Problem was, I was the only one there, and I didn’t know what I was doing. What should I write? When I’m done writing it, where do I put the finished product? Where’s the dictionary? The earlier I arrived, the more deserted it would be. I would lie on the couch in my office and fume. “Isn’t everyone else paid to be here!” I would shout to no one.

Each Tuesday I boarded the subway, terrified that I was running late. I just knew that one day I would arrive at noon and everyone else would be waiting for me—along with a pink slip. Before getting
SNL
I looked at a subway ride as theater of the absurd. But now I would constantly monitor my pulse. How could it register 140 when all I was doing was sitting down on the train? I would take it again and it would be higher. The closer it crept toward 200, the more certain I was that death was imminent.

Soon I began taking my pulse everywhere. Regardless of where I was—in restaurants, in record stores, or even in bed at night, I noticed my pulse would regularly race past 200 and I would feel an odd hitch in my chest. A feeling like I was in trouble. Big trouble. I would lie in my bed at night and imagine it looked like a big asterisk inside my chest, spinning and hot, always trying to push its way out of my body. I didn’t wake up with the asterisk every day, but soon enough it reappeared, and I would spend the rest of my waking hours feeling like I had to run out of a burning building.

For months, Tuesdays brought two scenarios of doom: I was either pissed off in my office or panic-stricken that I was still on the train. In an attempt to alleviate the situation, I ignored “You’re paid to be here” and began showing up at the same time as everyone else, which believe it or not, was 8:00
P.M
. At this point, I realized that the show wasn’t really being written on Tuesday, it was
beginning
to be written three hours before Wednesday. This left little time for any extensive creative thought, because the sketches had to be ready for read-through on Wednesdays at 5:00
P.M
.

There was something of a hierarchy to everyone’s position in the room. Sitting at the six cafeteria tables pushed together in the center of the room were Lorne, director Dave Wilson, head writer Jim Downey, the cast members, and a few of the tenured writers. The other writers and nonreading participants sat in a circle around the table. Whoever was left over would form a circle around that circle, and so on. Prior to read-through, every sketch had been printed in the same font and format, spell-checked, and distributed to everyone who would be in the meeting.

Typically, there were about forty sketches. Starting at the top of the distributed stack of sketches, each one would be read aloud with the cast and that week’s host reading their assigned parts. Lorne was the narrator. Due to the sheer volume of the material, read-through lasted around three and a half hours, with a short break in the middle.

During my first few weeks on the show, whenever I had an actual idea, I would explain it beat by beat in Lorne’s office in front of the entire cast and writers on Monday, but I soon noticed that the ideas I pitched in Lorne’s office weren’t getting any laughs at read-throughs on Wednesdays. I quickly discovered the simple answer: Everyone had already heard it, so even if the sketch was fall-down funny, when it was read at read-through, people wouldn’t laugh; they would simply nod their heads as the memory of the pitch came back to them. Feeling like I was catching on, for the third show, which was hosted by Jeff Goldblum, I wrote and turned in three sketches on Wednesday that I didn’t pitch on Monday. Unfortunately, things still didn’t go my way.

One of the sketches involved Goldblum playing a father who is a dog. The man has a wife and kids and looks like a dad, but he’s really a dog. He walks like a human and talks like one, but he speaks lines of dialogue a dog would say. He would say things like “I know better. I shouldn’t have eaten that,” and his kids would respond, “That’s okay, we still love you, Daddy.” Whenever he sat on the couch, his wife would whack him with a newspaper. The idea was that the viewers don’t know he’s a dog in the beginning, but about a fourth of the way through, it hits them. Kids: “Why did you bring fleas into the house?” Dad: “I didn’t mean to. I’m wearing my collar.” But about two pages into the read-through, I realized that there weren’t two funny lines in the whole thing and it might have been better had I discovered that at the pitch meeting on Monday so I could have avoided embarrassment at read-through.

When read-through was over, the host, Jim Downey, and two or three of the producers would meet with Lorne in his office and begin assembling that week’s show. This process was behind closed doors and
not
to be interrupted. After a couple of hours, the cast and writers would be allowed into Lorne’s office to see which sketches had been chosen. There was no announcement, you simply looked at the corkboard on Lorne’s wall.

On that corkboard was your future. The board had three columns running down it; within those columns was that week’s show. Pinned to the top of the first column was a colored index card that read “Cold Open.” A few inches under it was a white index card reading “Commercial One.” In the middle of the second column was another index card reading “Weekend Update.” At the end of the last column was an orange card that read “Good-nights,” the ritual of the host, cast, and musical guest standing onstage together bidding the world adieu. The only thing missing from the corkboard were the index cards with the sketches that would be on that week’s show.

When the doors to Lorne’s office opened, you walked in, hoping that there would be a colored index card on the corkboard with the name of your sketch on it. If your sketch wasn’t on the board, it wasn’t on the air. Period. If you felt like bitching, there was no one to bitch at except whoever else was in the room with you. And quite frankly, if your sketch was on the board, what did you care if someone else’s wasn’t?

The times I walked into Lorne’s office and spotted an index card with my sketch on it, I experienced a feeling nothing short of euphoria, knowing that what I wrote was going to be on television with me in it! The hallways got a little wider. The show once again became my life’s work. Everything was fine.