Gasping for Airtime (10 page)

As Chris spoke to each of us individually, he timed when the camera was off him and on us. When the camera was on me, he said all of his lines cross-eyed. When the camera was back on him, he straightened his eyes and went back to being normal, which, for him, was being the funniest man alive. As he made his way down the line of young punks, he repeatedly crossed and uncrossed his eyes. We were all laughing out loud and nothing could stop us. It was sheer comedic brilliance. Despite the fact that the cameras were over his shoulder and twenty feet away, Chris knew the exact moment that the camera switched shots. I had never laughed like that before in my life—and I had no idea I was about to laugh even harder. Farley filled the stage, leaving no room for panic. The sun was out and the shadows were gone.

Whenever Chris or Martin said a line, they would make a grand gesture of passing the cigarette back and forth, the way the boys in
Lord of the Flies
used the conch. Farley finished his first paragraph of dialogue and handed the cigarette back to Martin. Chris’s line (I know this because it was written on the cue card) was supposed to be: “Sold! Five bitches to the homie in the cornrows.” But what came out of his mouth instead was: “Sold! Five bitches to the cornie in the homie rows!” He then paused, looked directly into camera, and said “Oops!”

I was never so grateful or appreciative of my coworkers as I was at that moment, because thankfully, they were all laughing as hard as me. I would have stood out if I wasn’t laughing. Even Phil Hartman was smirking, and I had never seen him come close to breaking character on the air.

As the sketch was nearing the end, Chris began dancing around and making his way toward the wall that he was going to fall through. He tripped over his own feet and obliterated the breakaway wall, falling onto his back on top of the gymnastics mat. The rest of us started running for the hole in the wall—and it wasn’t lost on me that we were now literally escaping the madness of Farley and the powerlessness he incited in us.

But instead of going through the wall one by one as scripted, we all raced to be the first one out of the sketch and on top of Chris. Five of us threw our bodies through the hole, and as we landed on Chris’s chest, we began screaming and squealing like children. We finally had him where we wanted him. There was now close to a thousand pounds of laughing idiots on top of Chris Farley on the gym mat.

No more than one second passed before Chris realized what we were doing. Chris didn’t panic, get angry, or even laugh. He simply picked us off of his body one by one like we were leaves. When we dove back on top of him, he removed us two by two. He then started throwing us aside like trash bags so he could be back onstage in time to deliver his line. With time to spare, he was on his mark, finishing the sketch, while we lay on the gym mat rubbing our bumps and bruises and gasping for air. We peeked through the hole in the wall just as we had done in dress rehearsal—except this time it was with a sense of awe at what we had just witnessed.

To this day, I don’t know what happened to those pills.

In this “Motivational Speaker” sketch, Michael McKean was playing a wealthy Spanish father of two. He explained to his kids, who were played by Morwenna Banks and me, that he had called the United States to enroll the help of a motivational speaker (that is to say, Farley as Matt Foley). Chris’s part was written entirely in Spanish. America had probably seen Matt Foley ten times—but never speaking Spanish.

Farley entered the stage, shouting at the top of his lungs: “Hola, mis niños! Me llama señor Matt Foley!” Keeping a straight face was impossible. The audience erupted when Chris delivered the money line for the first time in Spanish: “Van cerca del río!”

McKean’s character explained to Señor Foley that both he and his children spoke excellent English, so speaking in Spanish was not necessary. Chris as Matt Foley responded, “Padre, donde por favor and ferme ton grande YAPPER!” That’s when I was supposed to say my line. It was simple. All I had to do was open my mouth and say, “Señor Foley, where did you learn your Spanish? Taco Bell?”

The problem was that Chris had screamed his line so loud into McKean’s ear that he covered him in spittle, causing him to move back a step. I struggled to keep from becoming a member of the audience myself. Although I was in the sketch, I was being treated to an incredible performance. I bit my tongue and tried to think of things that weren’t funny. I thought of dead babies and naked grandmothers, but resistance was futile. Chris was standing on the stage, but he was also taking up all of the space between my ears. Finally I decided that if I was a teenager and Matt Foley was in my living room in Spain, screaming into my father’s ear in terrible Spanish, I would think it was funny and most likely giggle. I said the line and laughed at the same time, making it barely audible.

Then Chris sauntered across the set toward me and put his hand on top of my head and began to tussle my hair. To the audience it looked endearing—but we all knew better. As he shouted, “Muy cómico es el Paul Rodriguez?” he continued to rub his hand back and forth until my black wig was now draped over one of my ears.

For the rest of the sketch I was delusional. I didn’t know whether to fix my wig or just to continue with the wig hanging on the side of my face. The audience watched the entire process unfold, and an entirely different dimension of laughter filled the studio. Chris had all of us by the jugular. I should have been at least a little prepared. In dress rehearsal, Chris had tugged gently on the hair on my wig, making it come loose but not off. I giggled through that exchange as well. In the meeting in Lorne’s office between the dress rehearsal and the live show, Lorne looked at me and said, “Jay, do you think you could do us all a favor and not laugh through the entire sketch?” I said of course, but I knew that was a lie.

The corollary to the Farley wig trick was that if people in the sketch weren’t wearing wigs but Chris was, he would shake his head violently to make his own wig fall off—though not in dress rehearsal. He played it straight in dress rehearsal so he could surprise you on live television.

Late one wintry night, I was going crazy. Dave Attell and I were on a downward spiral, and we had given up. Uncle! We couldn’t put anything on paper. Our writing collaboration was like waiting for a bus with a guy you know but don’t talk to. We very rarely bounced ideas off each other. It was just one guy on one side of the room smoking and doodling and the other guy on the other side checking his messages and leafing through car magazines. The only spark of hope that night was this Otis Redding boxed CD set that Lorne had given all the writers for Christmas. The cover art for the CD was an early head shot of Otis, my man. Dave had poked a hole where Otis’s mouth was and put a cigarette in it. On that dull, unproductive night it was the funniest thing either one of us had ever seen. We were keeled over holding our sides laughing. We needed help, so we called Chris into the office to hang out.

I’m not sure which one of us heard Chris Farley first, but it didn’t matter. The moment he walked through the doorway we began laughing like little kids. You couldn’t help it. He was a wrecking ball of joy.

One of us told Chris we would pay him a hundred bucks to take a dump out of our window. Farley was no dummy; he wanted our money on the table first. We were laughing so hard it took us a while to dig through our pockets and cobble together the hundred. When we did, we pooled the cash on my desk, which was next to the window. Chris stuffed the money into his pocket and opened the wide window with a wave of his arm.

Methodically, he prepared to execute. He unbuckled his pants and climbed onto my desk and then out onto the windowsill. The heels of his boots were on the outside of the window frame and his ass was dangling in the cold December air. Still fiddling with his belt buckle, Chris rested the back of his neck on the bottom of the window and balanced the rest of his enormous self outside the building to ensure that the shit fell out and not in. Seventeen floors above the dullest night in the history of man, Chris’s face turned beet red as he tried desperately to squeeze a shit out the window.

Dave and I were delirious. We laughed until we saw stars, knowing that one false move and Chris would fall to his death. A snot bubble came out of Chris’s nose as he pushed. Soon a tiny marble of crap dropped onto the windowsill. Chris looked up at us proudly, cracking a smile, the snot bubble still clinging to his right nostril. He craned his neck, searching around the office for something to wipe his ass with. There was a porno magazine on Attell’s desk, but it was too far away to be practical. So Chris wiped his ass with his hand. I had never seen anyone do that before.

Then Chris jumped off the window ledge and began chasing Dave and me across the office, his shit-stained paw outstretched.

We tore out of the office screaming and raced down the hallway as if we were being chased by a monster. In a way we were. We didn’t stand a chance of escaping. We had laughed so hard for so long that we could hardly breathe, let alone run. I was hunched over, choking, gagging, laughing, and running for my life.

In our path was a bookshelf that jutted out from the wall, creating a single-file lane. Dave and I were shoulder to shoulder and neither of us had any plans of slowing down to be smeared with Farley’s shit. Unfortunately, I was running on the bookshelf side of the hall, so if I wanted to be the first one past it, I was going to have to make a move, and soon. I concentrated on not laughing and tried to accelerate past Dave and past the bookshelf. I wasn’t going to make it. I was running so hard that when my right shoulder hit the bookshelf, it spun me around and I landed flat on my back.

I had the wind knocked out of me and it felt like my shoulder was shattered, but there was no time for pain. Chris was hovering over me, waving his dark-stained hand dangerously close to my face. Now
he
was laughing hysterically. I had to think fast. There was no escape. He had me. I lay there helpless between Chris’s legs, under his belly, about to eat shit.

“Farley, you fucking asshole! My arm is broken!” I screamed.

I really sold it. Chris immediately stopped laughing and a concerned look came across his face, like a child who didn’t know how to help an adult. With pure innocence, he stepped back, looked down at his wounded colleague, and asked if I was okay. I rolled over onto my good shoulder, pushed myself up, and began running before my feet hit the carpet. I ran all the way to the elevators and hit the down button; I was going to go outside and throw myself in front of a cab.

As I ducked into the elevator, I looked back down the hallway and saw Chris standing motionless, a confused look on his face. To this day, thinking about that look makes me sad.

H
OW MANY
people get to go to work and meet Kurt Cobain? I did, and for me, it was a true highlight at
Saturday Night Live.

Nirvana was the musical guest for the first show of the year. To put it mildly, everyone was pretty excited. The album
In Utero
had just been released and the band was going to play two songs from it, “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Rape Me.” “Heart-Shaped Box” was an obvious choice because it was Nirvana’s first single to break from the album, but the selection of “Rape Me” had a few of us scratching our heads. I personally wondered how a show with a full-time censor would allow a song with “Rape Me” as the chorus to see the airwaves. “Rape Me” is about Kurt Cobain’s feelings of being double-crossed by the media. Try explaining that to the Smith family watching the show in Utah.

We were in the middle of a writers’ meeting when I heard that Nirvana was going to rehearse. I walked out of the writers’ room and headed to the elevators. I didn’t care if they fired me on the spot; I was watching Nirvana. This proved to be more difficult than it should have been, though I was used to walking through mazes.

In the evening only one of the main elevators was active. If you wanted to go to a different floor at night in the main elevators, you were forced to call security and secure approval from either someone on that floor or the security guard. There were a pair of night elevators toward the rear of the building. When you showed up for the job, they gave you a card for the night elevators. If you lost the card, a guard was required to walk you to and from the elevators every night.

The night elevators were primarily express elevators that shot up to the Rainbow Room. None of the floor buttons worked unless you had a card to activate them. Once you stepped off the elevator, the panel of buttons would die again. If you got on the elevator and weren’t quick enough with your card, you were going to the Rainbow Room, which was not the place you want to be dumped off wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The night elevators were used the most by us and the drunken idiots in the Rainbow Room. There was a mail chute in the wall opposite the night elevators that ran through the entire building; I know this because one night I actually got off on every floor and checked. Somehow the mail chute and the elevators were connected. Whenever a night elevator would pass your floor, a long whoosh would roll out of the mail slot. In the wee hours of the morning, this was quite an eerie sound. When the offices emptied out a little bit and I was tired, miserable, and depressed, the sound of the elevator that came out of the mail slot made the entire building feel haunted.

I inserted my night elevator card in the slot and waited. Three long whooshes later, the elevator arrived. I rode alone, which seemed unfair. If a guy was about to go watch Nirvana perform, he should be able to tell someone about it. I stopped on the eighth floor and walked toward studio 8-H. I was about a hundred yards from the studio, and I could feel bass guitar in the floor and on the walls. They were tuning up!

As I approached the studio doors, I thought, What if they don’t let me in? That feeling of uneasiness gave way to feelings of entitlement when I double-checked all my studio and NBC IDs. I walked into the studio, and thirty feet from me stood Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl, and Krist Novoselic. Only twenty other people were in the entire studio. Half of those were working cameras, measuring sound, and doing lighting. The rest of us were about to enjoy a private Nirvana show.

The band looked pretty bored. As the cameras and lighting people in the control room made adjustments, the band picked at their instruments. It was obvious by their demeanor that they had done this before. If they were being told to hurry up and wait, it wasn’t bothering them. Hey, whatever, never mind, right?

Kurt was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt with a pajama top over it. It was the same pajama top I had often seen in magazine photographs. He was tiny, but he filled the entire room. Krist Novoselic, on the other hand, was gigantic. He stood six foot five, and with Kurt next to him, he looked about seven three.

As they fiddled with their instruments, each band member chirped two-word instructions to some invisible person somewhere. They were on three completely different wavelengths. It looked as if they were the technicians brought in to tune the instruments and do a sound check before the real band arrived. But they weren’t. They were the biggest rock stars in the world at the time, and they were thirty feet away from me. The only thing separating me from Kurt was empty floor and his guitar. All ten of us watching could have moved forward, but we didn’t. No one wanted to spook the thoroughbreds by standing too close to the stage. There were a few seconds of calm where everything in the room stopped. No fiddling, no small talk, nothing. Just a sense of calm. Then the storm hit.

The first sounds that came after the stillness were of Kurt Cobain singing “Rape Me.” The song starts with the sound of a guitar and Kurt repeating the lyric a couple of times. On this take, Kurt sang the first “Rape Me” a cappella and then began strumming. It was a strong move that implied: This is the song we are playing, and if you have any problems with its content, shove it up your ass. When Kurt reached the chorus of “Rape Me,” he screamed like he was dying. Until that moment, I had never heard that sound anywhere in nature. I had certainly not heard it come from a human. The sound that those three men created was mind-blowing. The hairs on my neck stood up, and I told myself that I had the greatest job on the planet.

I had never seen a band rehearse before, so I figured they took everything at half speed. Work out the kinks and save the voice. Not Nirvana. They were gone. Watching them rehearse, I saw that they knew how to do this thing only one way. There wasn’t a sliver of restraint. They were merciless. Grohl beat his drums as if they owed him money. Kurt stayed pretty still, which made the sheer volume of his voice that much more impressive. Krist danced around a bit with his bass hung just over his knee, forcing him to hunch over to play it. In a word, they were ferocious.

When the song ended, the three of them just stood there as if someone had pushed stop. They looked at each other a couple of times and launched right into “Heart-Shaped Box.” Again, Dave thrashed. Krist pounded. And Kurt screamed like a beautiful, wounded animal. Ferocious.

After finishing “Heart-Shaped Box,” the band walked offstage. I was standing between them and their dressing room, so they had to walk past me. They did so in order of height: first Krist, to whom I said, “Great job,” which drew a response of “Thanks”; then Dave, who gave me a nod; and finally Kurt, who was walking a little slower than the other guys. When Kurt was alongside me I could hardly contain myself. “That was fantastic, man,” I said.

Kurt stopped walking and looked at me for a moment. After a while I extended my hand and said, “I’m Jay. I work on the show.”

Kurt shook my hand and asked me what I did on the show. I told him I was a featured performer. “Do you do comedy?” he asked.

I explained to him that I did, but my primary job was to write for the cast and then try to work myself into some sketches. Sometimes, I continued, other people wrote parts for me in their sketches. Cobain nodded. “Wow,” he said, “so it’s kind of like being a songwriter.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I replied. He wished me luck and shook my hand again. He hesitated for a beat before he left. He looked like he would have traded places with me if he could have.

As much as I enjoyed the small, semiprivate concerts, after a while I began to feel that the lyrics of the musical guests were describing my situation on the show. They sang what I was feeling, and their lyrics also seemed to be offering me an explanation for my problems. It was almost like being in high school and having music touch your life in that indelible way it does when you are a teenager.

Looking back, it began with my first week on the show with Nirvana singing “Rape Me.” Then Cypress Hill played “Insane in the Brain” the following week when my Christopher Walken “Psychic Friends Network” was unceremoniously dumped out of deference to Shannen Doherty’s concern for Sean Young’s feelings. The third week, Aerosmith was on the show doing “Sweet Emotion,” which was the first time I appeared on camera.

Five minutes before the Aerosmith show began, Jeff Goldblum, who was hosting, gathered the cast in the greenroom. The guy was like someone from another planet. I expected the tall, nerdy guy from
The Big Chill,
but his body was ripped like an NFL wide receiver and his demeanor was smooth as silk. As everyone scurried to get ready for the show, Goldblum began smoking a fake joint. He took a long toke and then passed it to me. I passed it to Farley. As the fake joint made its way around the room two, three, then four times, nobody said a word. Before Goldblum lit the fake joint, the place was buzzing. People were struggling to pull on their bald caps. My heart was thumping with anticipation. But now the room was completely mellow.

During the show, as I stood offstage in Walken makeup watching Aerosmith perform “Sweet Emotion,” I thought of my parents. They weren’t able to make the show on which “Psychic Friends Network” was originally scheduled to air, but they were in the house on that Saturday when it did and Aerosmith rocked the place. I wondered what it must feel like to watch your son perform on
Saturday Night Live
. All the failed classes, all the detentions, all the groundings flew out the window. I would make them proud. My life was perfect. Sweet emotions were flowing.

At the show’s after-party, I was sitting at a table with Mike Myers, who had helped me with my performance at rehearsal. The valuable trick he taught me was that if you are going to read the cue cards, which are directly above the camera lens, then you should read them the entire time so it appears as if you are looking directly into the lens. The mistake people make is going back and forth between reading the cue cards and looking into the lens, because viewers can see your eyes moving up and down.

As Myers and I were sitting in silence, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler walked past our table with his wife. All week, I had thought he looked like Joan Rivers. During the rehearsals, he would constantly primp himself. Tyler carried a mirror in the holster on the side of his painter’s pants. The mirror wasn’t a compact; it was about eight inches in diameter. It looked like a family heirloom, with small jewels lining the round edge. He looked in that mirror more than someone who lived in a house of mirrors. Somehow it was completely forgivable because he’s Steven Tyler and he’s a rock star. It was as if he were thinking, I want to make sure I look exactly right when I’m playing “Sweet Emotion.” Tyler stopped at our table and tipped his hat. “An auspicious debut!” he said to me.

As Tyler walked away from us, I leaned across the table and started the first dialogue of the night between Mike and me. “What does
auspicious
mean?” I asked.

I went to see Smashing Pumpkins with Marci Klein, who was someone you wanted on your side. If you were on her bad side, you were finished. In her role as talent coordinator/coproducer, she functioned as the gatekeeper to Lorne. With long, dirty blond hair and piercing eyes, she was very attractive. She also had a real mean streak, and was a complicated person, perhaps owing to the fact that (I was told by several people) she was kidnapped as a child. Marci and I always got along pretty well, and we even formed a loose bond over our mutual love for Tabasco sauce. She always had a bottle on her desk and drizzled it on everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if she put it in her coffee. Once my roommate ordered a bottle of a hot sauce called Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally, and I brought it into the office for Marci. “I’ve had that,” she said excitedly, “but it’s not as hot as this other one.”