Crash and Burn Read online

  “Yeah, I get it, dude, you don’t need to remind me that you were once both cops,” I said, my attitude still intact.

  “Oh, we know you know that, Art,” Mike said. “I’m doing this because you lied to me about the Subutex. We are not allowing that to be some kind of bridge for you. We’re doing it all; we are getting you off everything. It’s time.”

  “Hey, Mike,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuck you.”

  The next four days were the ninth circle of hell. It rained nonstop, or at least it was raining every time I was conscious enough to focus my eyes beyond the window past my bed. It was raining like hell, gray everywhere, and I wanted to fucking die. No, I wanted to kill Mike and Joe, because they were to blame for this in my mind’s limited focus. Wave after wave of nausea, sweats, and crawling itch washed over me as whatever I cried out for went unanswered. After four days, my body had been so wracked with cramps and spasms that they took me out to get a massage, just to ease my sore muscles. I’ve never felt such relief at any other point in my life.

  They brought me right back and threw me into my room again. I got through the physical addiction just as my vacation from Stern ended—literally. It was hell, but Mike and Joe saw me through. They told me later that at the worst of my pains I promised them money, whores, whatever they wanted if they’d just get me some dope. The amount of dollars I was talking about was insane, but they knew I had it, so I need to thank them again for taking the high road. Or, as it were, the nonhigh road.

  Each time I begged them to get me or let me get drugs I threw a bigger number at them, but they didn’t bite. The best image I can give you of what I felt like is Linda Blair tied to that bed in The Exorcist. If you’re bad enough into opiates the physical addiction becomes so deep that your muscles don’t function right without the drugs in your bloodstream. That’s where I was: in withdrawal I started spasming uncontrollably, my body jerking itself in so many opposite directions that I pulled muscles in my neck, my legs, and my back. I could not get comfortable in any way. I was hot and cold at the same time: I’d sweat in the shower and be freezing to death under a down comforter. I’m not kidding at all when I tell you that I would have punched my best friend in the face as hard as I could to get drugs and make it stop.

  By day three I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and by day four I felt somewhat human. It took a full seven days, because of the extra opiates I’d been sneaking, for the predicted four-day Subutex withdrawal to be over, but once it was I was clean of everything for the first time in four years. That was really something to be proud of for me and it definitely had an effect on my mood. The color returned to my face and the confidence I got from beating my demons inspired me to start exercising a bit. I promised myself, honestly this time, that I’d stick with a nonopiate lifestyle as long as I could—and I did.

  I went back to the Stern Show clean, and I kept that up for quite a while.

  Before I knew it I’d dropped forty pounds in just over a month and a half, because I’d gotten so heavy that it came right off. I started a no-carb diet, I started walking and jogging every day, just moving around for once, and I took long intense steam saunas to help clean out my system and drop more weight. Seeing those results made me incredibly happy. I felt in my heart that I’d turned a corner, and every time someone I knew told me that I “looked more alive,” I felt great. Believe me, that’s far from a compliment because the implication is that the last time they’d seen me I’d looked like the walking dead.

  Around that time I was approached by some reality show producers who wanted to do a show on me, so I let them follow me around for a while. I ultimately turned it down on the advice of my manager, Dave Becky, because it was clear that these guys wanted a train wreck: the show’s working title was Saving Artie, and if that isn’t a recipe for relapse I don’t know what is. It was hard for me to say no because it’s hard for me to say no to anything because deep down I still think that all that I’ve achieved could disappear at any moment. I fought that instinct and said no to this and I’m glad I did, but it just goes to show you that show business is all about timing. If these guys had shown up six months earlier we’d have had a show in the can in three weeks without even trying.

  Before I knew it I’d been clean a month, which was so unfamiliar to me after so many years of abuse that I felt like I’d climbed a mountain without even breaking a sweat. For once I didn’t feel like a loser, a pussy, or worse, a quitter, for being sober. I actually liked it and thought it was cool. I joined a gym in Hoboken and I started going every day to do what I could. I’m not going to kid you into thinking I jumped right into Tae Bo or the Insanity workout, because I was in such bad shape that moving around regularly at all was a lot for me. But it was progress, which was a new and very welcome concept in my life. For once I didn’t start making fun of something positive in my life.

  My gym was right next to a tanning salon and one day as I was walking by I saw, literally, the most stunningly beautiful girl I’d ever seen working at the counter. She was so gorgeous that I stopped in my tracks and did a completely obvious double take. I didn’t care if she saw it, I had to stare at her to make sure she was real, so for a few minutes I stood there silently outside the window, creepier than a pedophile at a school-yard fence during recess. I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t know how I could pull it off. This may come as a surprise, but I didn’t really know my way around a tanning salon, so I had to think of something because this girl was beautiful enough to make a guy like me enter one of those places blind.

  I realized as I went through the door that I had no idea what kind of bullshit things anyone could even ask about tanning, just to start some kind of conversation. She was alone at the counter, so I had that going for me, and just before she noticed me coming, I saw, off to the side, an old-fashioned shaving chair.

  “Hey, do you do shaves here?” I asked her. “I’m going to my buddy’s wedding next week and I’d like to get cleaned up.” Thank God I didn’t have to ask for a tan.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Can I get back to you? I’m just filling in for someone, and the manager isn’t here right now.”

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t even listening because I was too busy staring at her the way a starving man would look at a filet mignon through a restaurant window. “Yeah, that’s fine. If I give you my number, will you give me a call when you find out?” This was already a step in the right direction.

  “Sure.”

  I then made the lamest joke ever. I asked her what nationality she was.

  “I’m Russian,” she said.

  “You’re rushin’?” I said. “What’s your hurry?”

  And she laughed. Oh boy, I thought, I can’t believe this. I was in great shape with this girl, because if she’d laugh at a joke like that it was a really good sign that the rest of my material was gonna kill.

  I hung around a little while longer making small talk and cracked her up a few more times until I felt confident enough about how we were relating to ask her if she’d like to go to a Yankee game some time. It turned out she was from Cherry Hill, which is in South Jersey down by Philly, but thankfully she wasn’t a Phillies fan. That would have been a deal breaker, but instead it earned her points because it was clear to me that this girl had good taste, since she was from down there but knew enough to be a Yankees fan. I was becoming more smitten by the minute. “Let’s go to a game, but how about we do something before that one night?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that would be great,” she said, smiling.

  I couldn’t believe my luck, this was amazing! She was twenty-five, her name was Adrienne, and that is officially how she entered my life. She met me in the best shape mentally and physically that I’d been in a long time, and after I got to know her I warned her about how I usually was and what I’d just come through. I’d referred to myself as Hurricane Artie for a while by then because there’s no better metaphor: when I was in full-tilt d
ysfunction I was a storm that destroyed everything in its path with an “eye” that made people think everything was okay just before the most destructive wind and rain hit them.

  “Things are calm now,” I told her, “but hanging out with me you’re entering a hurricane, which could be bad, but I swear, I hope things will be only good now. For the first time I really want to try.”

  She took it in stride; she was sweet and young and beautiful and a breath of fresh air in my life. And lucky for me she was willing to take a chance on me. After the first time we met I saw her the very next day when I realized that Norm MacDonald was doing a guest spot on the season finale of Saturday Night Live. What better way to impress a girl than to take her to the SNL finale after-party?

  SNL flew Norm in to do his impression of Burt Reynolds for a celebrity Jeopardy! sketch that included Will Ferrell as host Alex Trebek and Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery—an impression that seemed to get better every time he did it. Will Ferrell was hosting the show that night, and he and I had been friends for years—we’d been in Old School and Elf together. We enjoyed each other’s company and always cracked each other up, so this was going to be a great night, not to mention a great season finale. The same night my good friend Colin Quinn was doing the last performance of his brilliant one-man Broadway show Long Story Short, in which he discussed the economy, the fall of our society, and the history of the world, all in just over an hour. Colin’s show was as genius as his shows always are, and I was so envious of him being able to bring such intelligence, current events, and informed opinions to what was at its core a great piece of stand-up comedy that I had to see his swan song. I also wanted to see him personally and let him know that I was doing all right because he’d always been such a steadfast source of support for me when it came to beating drugs. Backstage at his show I ran into Mandy Stadtmiller from the New York Post and we chatted awhile, which resulted in her running an item in Page Six the next day saying that I was fifty pounds lighter, had a tan, and looked like a human being for the first time in a while. I have to say, that made me feel pretty good! I made sure to show Adrienne that piece of news because I needed all the proof I could get to make her believe I was worth her time.

  After Colin’s show, which was in a Midtown theater, I walked over to SNL at 30 Rock and hung out with Norm in his dressing room. While we were there I met Bobby Moynihan, the heavy kid who joined the show in 2008 and looks eerily like a younger me. I also saw the great comedy writer Jim Downey, who is a friend I hadn’t seen in years, and Norm and his assistant Lori Jo, and I just had a blast. It felt great to be out there on the town, sober and enjoying myself, because I’d had no idea I was even capable of that, but I was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been out among my peers just having fun, totally sober. It had probably never happened. I have to say it was a great help that the whole time Norm was wearing the crazy Burt Reynolds wig and mustache because I was so transfixed by it that I didn’t think about anything else. First off if you haven’t seen it, YouTube Norm playing Burt Reynolds on SNL—his impression is uncanny and hilarious. He’s naturally got that same twinkle in his eye that Burt has, so when he puts on that getup he looks so much like Burt, down to the fake hair, that it gets surreal after a while.

  I called Adrienne from the dressing room, again, trying to impress her. “Hey, I’m up at Saturday Night Live and my friend is on the show tonight—a couple of them actually—and it’s the season finale, so there’s an after-party downstairs in Rockefeller Center. Do you think you’d like to come?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be great!” she said.

  So that was our first official date—the SNL finale after-party, which was in a bar/restaurant on the first floor of Rock Center. It was half-inside, half-outside, and since it was lightly raining, the whole scene was very romantic, with people kind of huddling under the canopies, and all the lights of the buildings twinkling through the mist. I sent a town car to pick her up and bring her there, but I had one small problem: I didn’t have a cell phone, so she couldn’t call me when she arrived.

  “You don’t . . . have a cell phone?” she asked, confused and a little concerned. For a twenty-five-year-old, someone who didn’t have a cell phone was like someone who didn’t have a head. Instantly I was a weirdo.

  “Yeah, I’ll explain it to you later,” I said. The truth was that now that I’d gotten clean and sober, Helicopter Mike, Joe the Cop, and my family insisted that I not have a phone for a while for obvious reasons. I’d hoped to avoid laying all my cards on the table with this girl right away, but it looked like I’d have to. At least not before I impressed her with SNL.

  I needed to give her a number, so I borrowed my fellow comedian Craig Gass’s cell phone to call her, and when I asked him for it, he looked at me with the disdain of a twenty-five-year-old. I told Adrienne I’d wait outside of Radio City until she got there, and that’s what I did. Half an hour later I was standing there in that light rain when the town car pulled up and she got out, looking even more beautiful than I imagined she would. I think about that moment every single time I pass by Radio City, which was every weekday for the most of the first year of my radio show, since our first studio was just a block south of there.

  Adrienne got to meet Will Ferrell and a few other people she thought were funny on that night and we did the rounds and had a great time. She drank, but I didn’t because that was going to tempt me back to the dark side, and she was totally cool with that. We found Craig Gass and I returned his phone, and he took one look at Adrienne and understood why I’d been so intent about borrowing it. I had a weird interaction with actor Paul Rudd, which foreshadowed a much weirder one that would happen a month later on Joe Buck Live. During the SNL broadcast I’d told Craig Gass that I thought Rudd sucked and wasn’t funny, so as he and I and Adrienne walked by Rudd, Gass said loud enough for everyone within ten feet to hear: “Hey, Artie, there’s the guy you said sucked!” That’s Gass for ya, but Paul is such a classy guy that he shook my hand, smiled, said hello, and took it in stride.

  It was a great first date and we had so much fun that afterward we went back to my apartment and stayed up until seven a.m. just talking, barely even kissing, just getting to know each other. It was very sweet and once the sun came up I drove her home. When I got back to my place and got in bed all I could think about was when I would see Adrienne again. I felt like something really cool was starting, and for once I felt like I might be capable of having something that cool and that real in my life. At that moment, everything seemed possible.

  ————

  I’m not sure I ever got used to having the details of my life made public as instantly as they are when you’re a cohost on the Stern Show. It is weird and unnatural and for the brief periods when I was sober I felt just how strange that reality is with every cell in my being. Everyone is on the spot on the show, which is half the appeal to the audience, but during my last days there, when I was really going down the drain, I felt that spotlight on me more than ever and it was hot. When I started dating Adrienne, for the first time since joining the show I realized that the attention I always saw as an advantage could be a problem because for once I had something in my life I wanted to keep private. Maybe I’d learned a lesson after having my entire relationship with Dana broadcast over the air, or maybe I was just sober—who knows. All I can say is that this new relationship was special, so I didn’t want to fuck it up and I didn’t want anyone butting into it. I wanted it to grow on its own, but that was impossible, of course, because there was no way Howard and Robin were going to let it be. That’s just not how it works on Stern, so I got hit with a million questions, and I had to honor the show, so I answered most of them. I ended up giving up more details on the air than I wanted to; put it this way, from the start Howard and Robin heard more about Adrienne and me than my closest friends had. I couldn’t help it: it was Howard and it was Robin and if I didn’t satisfy them they’d make fun of me for four hours every morning until I did. The w
hole thing made me very self-conscious, and it also made me realize that I really wanted something serious with this girl.

  The microscope of the Stern Show has other consequences too: when Howard turns his insightful interview eye on you, he’s got a way of luring anybody in the world into revealing more than they ever thought they would. The problem is that in his presence, even though you know you’re on the radio, most people (even his co-hosts!) forget just how many people are listening. This phenomenon caused problems with every single woman I dated during my time on the Stern Show, whether it was just one night or a few years, and Adrienne was no different.

  I got myself into even more trouble when it came to sharing my opinions of famous people. I’d be talking as if Howard and I were just on the phone shooting the shit and I’d say off-the-cuff things like “I saw that Chelsea Handler’s show and I don’t think she’s that funny, do you?” A simple above-the-belt comment like that became, in the hands of some reporter interviewing Chelsea a few days later, me saying she wasn’t talented and didn’t deserve a talk show. This actually happened. I can’t blame Chelsea, because that version was an insult, so she responded and my simple opinion started a mean-spirited conversation between us via the media—because we never talked to each other directly about any of this. While we’re on the subject, Chelsea’s response to me was actually funnier than most of her shows: “Artie Lange? He’s grotesque. If I could find one who would, I’d pay any woman five hundred dollars to sleep with him. Honestly, any woman willing to sleep with Artie Lange, I’ll pay you five hundred dollars right now to do it.” I’d just like to say, Chelsea, that your assertion is complete bullshit. I have many friends who will testify, under oath, to the cold hard truth that I’ve gotten plenty of women to sleep with me for as little as $250.