by Lange, Artie
My mother then said something so poignant and from the heart that it cut through my haze of bullshit, straight to my core. “You don’t realize that I’d rather live in a closet and have you be happy and drug-free, spending the holidays with me, than be in a mansion and have you in the condition you’re in and not even here with us? You matter to me, not this goddamned house!”
The fact that I was making about $3 million a year and giving my mom the life she’d never had got me off the hook for missing holidays in my mind, but that day she set me straight. When my dad told me to take care of my mother and sister I thought he meant financially, so I thought I was doing the right thing—and then some. Dad was on his deathbed at the time, so I took this request very seriously, and honestly I believe that is what he meant, but there’s more to life than that. When somebody truly loves you, they want you, and they want you around more than they want any material belongings you can provide. The time spent with a loved one is more valuable than any amount of money in the world. The problem was, I’d forgotten all about that.
I was so far up the ass of my own career and my own chemical needs that I couldn’t see daylight anymore. But, hey, I’ve always thought daylight was overrated—the thing I hate about it most is that it makes it easier for people to see you. Keeping up with this theme, I’d transformed my apartment into something out of a nightmare edition of Hoarders, which suited me fine. If it kept people away, great. This wasn’t entirely my fault, by the way, because hoarding can creep up on you just like an opiate addiction, especially if you’re in the position to get fan mail. I can’t speak for The Beatles or some tweenybopper like Justin Beeker or whatever his name is, but I can tell you that anyone associated with Stern gets an ungodly amount of fan mail. Put it this way, when members of the Wack Pack, like High-Pitched Mike, get bags of mail at the studio, you can imagine how much I’d get as one of the primary cohosts. My fans are important to me, so I’d have our office manager, Tracy, put all of my mail in large white bags that I’d leave in my corner of the studio or in my office until the piles became to large to handle. Then I’d insist on taking them home with me, believing that I’d actually find the time to read and respond to every letter. I’d throw these bags—kitchen-sized garbage bags—into the trunk of the car driving me home and have my driver carry them upstairs and dump them in my home office, where they’d sit, untouched until my Mexican housekeeper Salma reached the end of her rope and threw them out. After a while she stopped asking me if that was okay because I always said no but never noticed when any of them disappeared.
The hoarding didn’t end there: I also stacked up copies of the Post and the New York Times into piles that grew as high as the Chrysler Building. My very patient maid also asked me nicely if she could throw those monstrosities out, and I didn’t fight her there, I always said yes, but by the time she decided to ask, probably because I was so difficult about the fan mail, there were so many unstable piles that she needed a forklift to move them (this came in the form of my doorman). Over time, the stack developed a color scheme, which ran from gray at the top to yellow at the bottom, and I remember the day Salma removed the oldest stack, because I recall catching a glimpse of the first Gulf War headline getting turned over into the garbage bag. She did her best to keep the place neat, but Salma was fighting an uphill battle, because besides my newspaper compulsion, I kept papers everywhere, most of them handwritten notes filled with half-baked jokes and ideas for new stand-up bits. These were inspirational and somewhat important items, but the negative degree of organization I had going on made it pure luck that I ever saw any of them again once I set them down. It was like dropping something into quicksand. To this day I still don’t use a computer, so napkins and bits of legal pads trail behind me and probably always will, but I’ve learned to keep them somewhere they won’t get lost if they’re actually important. I’ve gotten used to using my phone, but I still hate typing anything, so the most you’ll get out of me is 140 characters or less. And I still don’t do e-mail. That’s way too much for me, so don’t even suggest it.
My diet in those days consisted of nothing but pizza and chicken parmesan bought exclusively from one place: Uptown Pizza, the place closest to my apartment. I was loyal to them and still am for several reasons. First of all, I don’t need new and challenging cuisine; I like what I like and when I find it done well, I’m happy to eat it every day. Second, these guys took exactly eleven minutes to deliver my order—believe me, I timed them, because that is the kind of thing that I amused myself with in those days. Uptown makes great food, and since I used to mention them on the air every once in a while, Richie, the owner, never let me pay for anything ever again. I loved that, but honestly it got to be ridiculous. I liked their cooking so much I would have ordered just as often—and trust me, I actually wanted to give these people my money! But every time I’d try to pay the delivery guys for the food (let alone a tip) they’d refuse and run away from me like scared bookies fleeing John Gotti, saying that Richie would fire them if they took so much as a dime from me. I started getting a complex; I mean, maybe Richie thought I was connected or something, so I asked one of the delivery guys I saw regularly what Richie had said about me.
“ ‘Artie Lange never pays for anything,’ ” he said. “That’s what Richie tells us. If he hears that any of us take your money, that guy loses his job.”
I know I’m not the only “celebrity” who gets this treatment, but there’s one thing about this story that sets it apart: this guy Richie we’re talking about had died of cancer the year before. He’d been dead for over twelve months, and his staff was honoring his wish as if he’d come back from the dead to fire them if they took my cash! Before he passed, he said I was not to pay for anything—ever. After I heard about this I became even more determined to pay them, so I started dropping twenties and fifties in their pockets if they didn’t agree to take them. I will always be beyond touched and flattered that Richie thought so highly of me that he put that unwavering law into place, but after he’d been gone for a few years, I had to ask them to stop.
I also ordered from them so much that I had all the delivery guys in my pocket and so I began to use them (and pay them) to do whatever errands I needed done. As my world narrowed to a pinpoint, these tasks got more and more complex to the degree that I feel confident saying that if I asked, they’d help me move a dead body, right now, so long as it was within their delivery radius. I didn’t need them to bring me drugs, because I had that covered, but they brought over just about everything else, allowing me to stay in my apartment for days on end.
“Hey, man, it’s Artie,” I’d say when I called Uptown. “Bring me a Sicilian pie and two one-liter bottles of Pepsi.”
“Okay, you got it, Mr. Lange.”
“Also, stop by Rite-Aid and get me some Advil and a carton of Marlboro Lights. Then stop by King’s Grocery and pick me up four value-sized packs of Peanut M&M’s, some Kit Kats, and a box of Tastykakes,” I’d say.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, then go to Starbucks and get me a caramel macchiato, large. I’ll see you here in twenty minutes?”
“Twenty minutes.”
I got so out of control sometimes that they’d need to send two guys to carry it all. That didn’t matter; they did it always, they were never late, and they never fucked up my order. I couldn’t have been happier, knowing that once I was home, I’d never have to leave. I had no girlfriend at the time—if I’d had one that liked to live the way I did then you’d probably not be reading these words, because we’d be dead. The only things that got me out of my cave was work at the Stern Show and my stand-up gigs, which took up a lot of my time, thank God.
By the way, I wasn’t really fooling the people who were closest to me. I was a visible mess that no one could contain or ignore. I’d stopped caring, and somehow I thought that meant no one else cared either. If they did they had no right to as far as I was concerned. That’s why I was truly surprised one night in late
December ’08. During one of my more enjoyable evenings of solitude and drug abuse, sitting on my couch watching SportsCenter, I heard a knock at my door and looked through the peephole to see my sister Stacey red-eyed, nearly in tears. Next to her I saw a dark sleeve, definitely a guy, and to be honest, I was so constantly paranoid by then that I figured that must be a cop. This was either an arrest or intervention and I decided real quick that whichever it was, I wasn’t having either.
“Stacey?” I said. “Um, what are you doing here? And who are you with?”
“I’m with Colin Quinn, Art; he wants to talk to you.”
This wasn’t expected at all. Of the two options, this was an intervention and she wasn’t kidding around.
“C’mon, Artie, open the door,” Colin said. “I just want to talk to you, that’s all.”
I hid my drugs, tried to arrange myself, and let them in, because Colin is one of the smartest, funniest, greatest comics on the planet and I respect him immensely. Even though I wanted to, I wasn’t going to leave him hanging or refuse to see him, because he’s a true friend and a great person. What I hadn’t realized was that he and my sister had become very close because she needed help dealing with me, so she’d turned to Colin, begging him to help get me into rehab. This wasn’t a typical intervention, though they had packed a bag for me, had chosen a place in upstate New York where I could detox, and were ready to drive me there immediately.
I refused to go, of course, no matter how many different ways my sister asked me. Colin did his best to lighten the mood with spot-on imitations from Goodfellas and The Godfather, which got me going. He and I went back and forth trading lines like that for half an hour, which isn’t exactly what you see during your average episode of Intervention.
“Listen, guys,” I said after the imitations had run their course. “I know I have to go to rehab, but I can’t go to rehab now. And right now I refuse to go. Let me try to make it to Christmas this year. I’d like to spend Christmas with my family. Then I’ll do what we all know I have to do.”
“Artie,” my sister said, looking me dead in the eye, “you know you’re not going to make it to Christmas. You haven’t made it in four years. Enough of the bullshit, enough of the lies. You need to go to rehab and you need to go now.”
“Stace, it’s not just that. I want to go to Christmas and I will go, but I also have work and I can’t miss that.”
“We already talked to them, Artie,” she said, not missing a beat. “Gary and Howard are fine with you taking all the time you need.”
“You talked to Howard?” I asked. I was shocked and not happy at all.
“Yes, I did. And he’s fine with it.”
I couldn’t shoo that fact away; that meant this was real and things were bad. As much as outsiders think the entire Stern Show is a group of misfits being cruel to each other and making fun of the world around them, Howard and the staff, down to the last man and woman, truly care about one another. Sure, it’s a comedy show, so it’s crazy and the mood is always irreverent, but we are all sensitive people and all I can say is that Howard cares—really cares—about everyone. He was genuinely concerned about me and had been for a long time and had tried to get through to me many ways, but I wasn’t having any of it. I know that Howard still cares about me and wants to see me defeat my demons. That knowledge is one of the things that keeps me going because I respect him more than I do myself most of the time.
Howard wasn’t kidding when he asked Chris Rock on the air, in the spring of ’09, “Chris, you’re a smart guy; please tell me, how do I help Artie?”
“Howard, I hate to say this, man, but you’re going to have to fire him,” Chris said without missing a beat. “If you fire him, that might wake him up.”
I was sitting right there, by the way. “That’s a great idea,” I said. “Thanks, Chris.”
“Artie, I’m trying to help you out, man,” Chris said. He yelled it actually, because that’s how Chris says anything. “If Howard fires you, it might wake you up! You’d be fired, you’d be out of a job, and it’d be your fault. It would be a consequence of your actions that you could not ignore.”
Chris was right, and I think deep down Howard knew it, but Howard is such a kind guy that he couldn’t do it, because he’s the type that just can’t fire people no matter how much they drive him crazy. The list of Stern Show employees past and present that prove this point is very long. Howard would rather be inconvenienced by putting up with people he hates no matter how bad a job they do than take away that person’s living. That is how he thinks and it’s coming from a place of kindness, so firing is just not in his vocabulary. I’d like to think that even at my worst I was still contributing to the show in some small way, at least enough that no matter how bad it got, Howard was able to keep rooting for me to get it together, hoping that it would all work out in the end. His attitude rallied everyone else behind me and all the staff did everything they could to help me, day in and day out.
Howard really tried; he took the time to set me up with a shrink, and said that if I needed a week, a month, six months or a year to get better, he’d support me and I’d have a job waiting. “Artie, I want you to do what you’ve got to do,” he kept telling me, and he meant it. Howard also set up a meeting with his agent, Don Buchwald, who is a brilliant guy and a class-A problem solver. Don came up with a plan to dig me out after I’d called in sick two Mondays in a row after spending the weekend on the road doing stand-up. Howard said this couldn’t keep happening, so he sent me to Don to have him figure it out, and it was very awkward because this was the first time Howard had had to address this issue. I met with Don and my agent, Tony Burton.
“Here’s what I think, Artie,” Don said. “You should work stand-up according to a schedule that I’ll write up for you. You’re doing too much right now and you need to get it together. We don’t want you to make less, we just want you to work less, so you’ll do fewer gigs, but for bigger money. You’ll only do venues of four to six thousand seats and you won’t do as many, so what will happen is that your shows will become events, not some regular thing any schmuck can see every month. We’ll get you traveling less, which takes a lot out of you. If you let me book things for you, we’ll have you on the road once a month at most, only playing for big money.”
That made total sense to me. It was amazing advice actually, but I didn’t follow it. Like everything else I intended to—I just didn’t do it no matter how hard I said yes, even when I meant it.
“I like that plan, Don,” I said. “That sounds perfect, man. Let me just get through this year and finish out all my preexisting commitments and then I’ll start doing that.” Yeah, right.
Anyway, that day in December, Colin and Stacey weren’t letting me off easy. Stacey had taken the lead, so I figured I’d shot this whole rehab idea down once she folded her arms and gave up arguing with me. I was in the clear; Santa had come early to Artie’s house. I hadn’t counted on Colin picking up where she left off.
“Art, if you don’t like the sound of that place upstate, don’t worry about it; it’s not the only solution, you know,” he said. “Believe me, I know plenty of places, and they come in every flavor.”
He told me about a rehab in South Florida called Hippocrates, which isn’t your average detox and rehab—it’s much more holistic. They teach “lifestyle change,” which involves teaching people to adjust their diet for one thing, and if you want to go the whole hog, they’ll teach you the benefits of juicing and eating vegan once you get the drugs out of the way. If you let them have their way you go in a junk food–eating junkie and you come out a yoga-loving swami. They look at diet and lifestyle as something that must change alongside addiction if someone is really going to be free of it. This sounded like a cult to me. I tried to put on a poker face.
“What if you go there?” Colin asked. “It’s not even like a rehab, Art; it’s more like a South Florida resort where you’ll get through withdrawals and then learn about healthy living. You ca
n go between Christmas and New Year’s and stay a month. It’s pricey, but you’ve got the cash. You’ll lose weight and you’ll come back with a tan. It will be a vacation.”
Maybe it was a cult, but that part sounded great, because I was fucking exhausted. I really was, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had taken a vacation. The drugs weren’t fun anymore; they were an anchor dragging in the sand, just as much of a nag as my loved ones were when they were trying to help me. I was too tired to help myself or do much of anything else but try to stay on the hamster wheel I’d built for myself. This Hippocrates place sounded like Club Med compared to keeping up with my bullshit, and I don’t know if Colin and Stacey had just worn me down or if for the first time I felt like I’d actually been presented with an option I could live with. Whatever it was I agreed to go, which was a small victory for Stacey and Colin. It had taken them two hours of talk to get through to me, but they did it. We called the place and made me a reservation: I’d arrive the day after Christmas, because I swore up and down I’d be there. The place cost something like ten grand for two weeks, and I booked myself in there for a month. We then called Gary to inform the Stern camp that I wouldn’t be back until January 17, and they wished me the best.
It goes without saying that my sister was right—I didn’t make Christmas; I was neck-deep in withdrawals, sweating and itchy and not giving half a shit about the holiday season. I called my family but they’d all heard it too many times by then. So I did what any self-disrespecting drug addict would do to honor the season of giving and the legacy of Jesus Christ: I drove to downtown Newark and bought Oxycontin off the first street dealer I saw, then sped back to my apartment and spent the day high and alone. I was reading Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield and was so into it that I made notes in the margin of every page that dealt with Keith Richards’s desperation during the deepest depths of his drug abuse. I also watched Dog Day Afternoon a lot. Over that Christmas I think I watched it three or four times. And as I had for years, when I’d get high on anything and lay around my apartment alone, I’d listen to the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach over and over again. That was the scene. It so seasonally cheery, I can’t believe I didn’t have anyone over for a holiday meal. Anyway, the next morning I made my flight to Florida and brought a healthy supply of Subutex, the opiate blocker drug that I used to avoid withdrawals. I figured I’d need it at Hippocrates and that it would help me reach the first stepping-stone on my path to healthy living.