Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
     
     
     
    Saturday Night Live is written on Tuesday night. For the most part, every sketch that you’ve ever seen on the air was written just four days earlier. There’s some sketch writing done on Monday after the pitch meeting, but the bulk of the show is Tuesdays, baby. Tuesday is actually the only scheduled day for writing—the only day and all fucking night.
    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