Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr Page B

only have been used to cook crack. I checked the walls for clocks and faces. I thought of the tube. I would have to board a plane in the morning, sit in that tube, and walk through the meat grinder with everyone else. People in the next room were fighting, and I thought that this would be the perfect time and place to die.
    But I didn’t die, and I kept not dying. I woke up every single day. I went to work and wondered what fucking plan everyone else was following. They all seemed fine. They wrote, they talked, they got on the elevators, they ate, and they did it all so effortlessly. They seemed to do it one day at a time. Just like everyone else in the world at any other job. Me, I didn’t know how long a day was anymore.
     
     
     
    It was six or seven weeks into the show and everyone seemed to have fallen into some sort of a pattern. I had fallen into a pattern of acting as if I were normal. I don’t remember which show it was or who the guests were, but I remember the breaking point. I remember going completely mad.
    I was in my dressing room watching the show’s dress rehearsal on the closed circuit television that hung from the ceiling in the corner. It was the second or third week in a row that I wasn’t in any sketches. I lay back in the recliner chair and positioned myself directly under the television so that if it fell out of the ceiling, it would knock me out. I just lay there and watched sketch after sketch that I wasn’t in. What happened next, I later learned, was my fight-or-flight mechanism kicking in.
    At the time, I would have called it going crazier than a shithouse rat. I had experienced panic before this particular night, but this one was special—special in a bad way. I jumped from the recliner and ran to the elevators and into the streets and into the night.
    I ran all the way back to my apartment—forty-two blocks away.
    When I reached my apartment, my roommate was sitting on the couch reading a book and not dying. I told him I had to go to the emergency room for a heart attack. He raised an eyebrow at me, since I had told him this several times before. He refused to take me to the hospital, so I decided to run there.
    When I hit the street again, I began thinking of how at a hospital they would put me on a stretcher and the claustrophobia from that would kill me slower than a heart attack. I decided to take a bath to relax, so I doubled back to my apartment. As the tub filled, I looked in the medicine cabinet for some aspirin. There, on one of the shelves, stood the most beautiful of all pill bottles. It gleamed and glistened and glowed. It was filled with Valium. I had never taken Valium before that night, but I had convinced a doctor to give me a prescription to help me with my flying situation. I swallowed one beautiful blue pill and climbed into a bath that was unfortunately not deep enough to drown in.
    About half an hour later the Valium began to kick in. I didn’t feel better, I felt euphoric. I wasn’t dying. For the first time in a month and a half, I didn’t have a hot spinning asterisk inside of me. My insides were fine with being on the inside. I climbed out of the tub, wrapped myself in a towel, and phoned my parents. I told them I had almost died at work, but I had taken a Valium and now felt better. They told me that is exactly what happens when you take Valium, and asked if I had any idea what time it was.
    I did indeed: It was time to go back to work. I didn’t go back that night out of any sense of duty or responsibility. I went back simply to see what it was like to be inside the walls of the building while not dying. I decided to take a taxi back to Midtown. I sat in the back of the cab and struck up a conversation with the driver. He didn’t speak much English, but it didn’t matter. I was speaking; someone was responding. We passed street signs. I looked out the window at all the bars and restaurants, with patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. For the first time