Free Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr Page B

them when they signed their autographs, and I would be with them when they shot their first basket. I would also be with them on Saturday night with the world watching.
    Every once in a while, that week’s host would come along and play basketball with us. George Clooney was a great player. David Duchovny could hit a jump shot from anywhere on the floor. I basked in these evenings well into the next day, when someone would inevitably ask me, “What did you do last night?” Basketball wasn’t really my thing, but it felt great just to be running up and down the court.
    When Jason Patric hosted, he arrived in the early afternoon. He had heard that we played basketball and wanted to know if he could play, and if so, where the gym was located. I didn’t know which gym we would be playing at yet, so I gave him my phone number and told him to call me at my apartment, where I was going to change clothes after the pitch meeting. When I walked in, the message light on my answering machine was blinking. I hit play and listened to a message from Jason Patric telling me he wasn’t going to be able to make it because he was exhausted from flying to New York and needed some sleep. I saved the message and played it like I had never heard it before when my roommate got home.
    Saturdays should have been my favorite night of the week. Unlike Monday nights, when the building was pretty much empty by the time you got to work, Saturday nights were packed. Saturday Night Live was and still is the greatest show in town, and the hallways would be crowded with people who knew they were lucky to be in the way. A lot of celebrities came to the show, too. It wasn’t uncommon to be rushing from your dressing room to the stage and pass Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Charlize Theron or Paul Simon.
    And Saturdays were my favorite nights—if I had a sketch on the air. If you weren’t in anything, you spent all of Saturday night in your dressing room watching everyone else have a great time. But if you had a sketch on the air, everything was perfect. Even if your sketch bombed, you were still accounted for. You had contributed to the history of the show. You could stand onstage during Good-nights and wave and shake hands and not feel like a phony.
    Too often, however, I was not accounted for.
     

     
    Even eating takeout with the others became difficult. Food was always delivered to the seventeenth floor, usually very late at night. It was free, so no one really cared what it was. We just devoured it—except for Rob Schneider and writer Ian Maxtone-Graham, who never touched the food the rest of us ate. Ian would roam the hallways with his nuts and yogurt, and Rob would always order up sushi.
    Every time Rob received a sushi delivery he would scrabble through his desk and take out a loupe like a jeweler preparing to examine a diamond. He would hold each piece of sushi up to the light and inspect it through the loupe. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was checking for worms. He would put the loupe in his eye as if he were staring at the Hope diamond. It was raw fish. “Here’s one!” he’d shout. He would hand me the loupe and I would go through the same jeweler motions he did and take a peek. Sure enough, I could make out tiny dots in the center of the sushi. This happened once a week. He told me that you always have to check sushi for worms because they were very common in Manhattan. Personally, I would have stopped ordering sushi, but not Rob. He ordered and inspected it every week.
    With the Harvard guys, it was never pizza. It was “We’re ordering Portuguese, what do you want?” I didn’t even know what Portuguese food was. I would study the menu and it would be chicken followed by a Portuguese word and rice. The next night, someone would announce they were ordering Serbian food. Again, I’d ask for the menu and their eyes would roll, as if they were saying, “Jesus, Jay, don’t you know anything?”