Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  That might have worked if I hadn’t been abusing it for the previous three years, using it as some kind of safety net instead of its intended purpose as a detox drug. When I knew I couldn’t get heroin or strong enough opiates for twelve to twenty-four hours, I’d start popping Subutex like Certs to get me through until I could score again. That’s not what it is intended for, but that’s how Dr. Artie used it. The thing about Subutex is that it contains enough of an opiate to keep your body from going into the shock of withdrawal, so you get high to a very mild degree, but after you take it, if you ingest real opiates of any kind for the next twelve hours you become violently sick, which is how and why I missed Bob Saget’s Comedy Central roast. My chemistry schedule, especially when I got bad, was to do as many opiates as I could find for four days—Thursday through Sunday usually—before turning to Subutex to skip through the withdrawals and slip back into the workweek at the Stern Show. I also used it when I had a stand-up gig and couldn’t score drugs before I got there. There were weeks when I was doing Subutex, weeks when I was abusing opiates, and weeks when I was doing both, which was a dangerous proposition. So my body had all kinds of dependency going on.

  At Hippocrates I had my own room, and as nutty as that place is, their program works. Their philosophy was beyond anything I’d ever been exposed to, because to me you were either on drugs or you weren’t, you were either functional or you weren’t, but they didn’t see things that way at all: they took your whole body into account. The drugs were just one piece of the puzzle to them, and I was shocked to find out that the drugs were the least intimate thing they cared about. They aim to get your entire body clean, then teach you to eat right and then to live right. I’m not what you’d call an armchair nutritionist, but I feel fine saying that they have a very unusual view of eating right, which is tied more directly than the food chain itself to shitting right. And like I’ve said, they are the kind of people who aim to be involved every step of the way.

  They had group meetings about this, which involved getting everyone in a banquet room to listen to a staff member explain their program in the kind of very positive up-with-people speak that I loathe. I’m serious, that kind of shit makes my skin crawl worse than day three of heroin withdrawal. This introductory seminar made me want to throw up, which I’m not sure they would consider beneficial because it didn’t involve pulling anything out of my ass.

  You see, they were obsessed with shitting, which they got to immediately after the happy talk died down. They told us that when you shit, you should keep your legs up, which unbeknownst to most of humanity is the “proper” way to shit. To assist us in assuming this position and unlearning years of improper shitting, they gave each of us a little step to put under our feet on when we sat on the bowl. It’s amazing that we’ve put a man on the moon but most of us still don’t shit right, because as I now know, only with your legs elevated can any of us—detoxing addicts, health nuts, normal people—properly get their shit on. I was so glad that someone told me how badly I’d been misusing toilet bowls since my first day out of Pampers.

  They worked their way backward with us, telling us that to get our digestive tracts back in shape we would need to consume plenty of green drinks, yogurt, and more vegetables than I’d ever seen or eaten in my entire life. There was no fruit on the menu, however, because fruit is high in sugar, which is forbidden, as is caffeine and anything else that gets you buzzed in any way. To enjoy an apple a day at Hippocrates you’d need a note from someone in charge—I’m completely serious. Our diet consisted of nothing but flavorless organic things like celery, none of them fun, all of them aimed at cleaning you out.

  It didn’t stop there; actually it didn’t even begin there. Every morning of that first week, a Jamaican woman of about sixty years of age woke me up at seven a.m. with a gentle knock at the door followed by a not-so-gentle green colonic to my ass. She was as chipper as Jiminy Cricket, making small talk while she slipped a tube up there and sent this healthy, organic green cleanser that you could probably also use to fertilize your lawn into my poop chute. She’d smile the whole time, chatting away, asking me questions about my life in her thick, upbeat accent. We’d talk about my favorite bands, my hometown, sports, and whatever else, while this algae shake went into my ass, swished around a bit, then flowed out into a bag, carrying Chinese rocks and God knows what else with it. The whole process took about twenty-five minutes, and since it happened every day, she and I got real chummy, because let me tell you, if someone probes your ass every morning for a week you’ll either become best friends with them or end up killing them with your bare hands. Seeing as I was there to “make some changes” I “stayed positive,” though I hope to never, ever have that much traffic going the wrong way up my body’s one-way street again.

  At the end of the first week my sister came to visit me, and she wasn’t happy to learn that I was still taking Subutex. I hadn’t told her I’d brought it and I wasn’t sure if they’d allow it in, but I explained to the admitting physician that I’d been using it for years and that I’d have a seizure without it. I don’t know if that’s true—it probably isn’t—but they bought it. Anyway, Stacey felt like I was still high all the time because of it. She felt like I wasn’t taking any of this seriously and that I was just wasting everyone’s time once again, and we had it out in my room.

  “Artie, I can’t do this anymore,” she said, enraged. “I’m going to have to give up on you. I’ve reached the end of my rope.”

  To me, this whole thing—the “intervention,” her criticism of my life, all of it—came down to money. At least that was the only subject that might give me an edge up on her. Really it was all I had, so I went for it.

  “Why can’t you let me live the way I want to live, Stacey?” I shouted. “Let me do it my way and I’ll buy you a fucking car! Whatever you want, just leave me the fuck alone.”

  That made her want to punch me in the face.

  I kept saying stupid shit like that during my first week at Hippocrates and I believed all of it, but things had started to change. I’d lost some weight, I’d gotten some color back in my face, and I felt better. I saw it, I felt it, and I liked it, but that didn’t mean I was buying the lifestyle they were selling. My sister sensed that, so she stayed on in West Palm Beach for as long as she could, until eventually she had to get back to her job in New York City. I said good-bye and told her I’d see her back at home after my time there was done—and she gave me a look that said she wasn’t betting on it.

  She was right again, of course. I was scheduled to stay at Hippocrates for another two and a half weeks, but it took me precisely twenty-four hours after Stacey’s departure to decide that I was all fixed up. I checked out, I rented a car, I drove to Miami, to South Beach, and checked into a $2,000-a-night suite at the Setai Hotel. Then I started drinking the minibar, one small bottle at a time, no chaser, mixing everything from Sambuca to tequila. I ordered room service, I got smashed at the beach bar, and I started living it up like the world was going to end tomorrow. The party was back on.

  The Stern Show was also back on, so each morning, since I’d be up, I’d start listening to them talking about how I’d gone AWOL from rehab. They’d wonder what I was doing, where I might be, and when I couldn’t take the speculation anymore I checked in by phone. I was completely fucked up, sitting there waiting for room service to bring my breakfast at six a.m., having drunk all through the night. They patched me in to Gary right away, then to Howard, live on the air.

  “Artie, where are you?” Howard asked.

  “I’m at a hotel in South Beach, Howard!” I said, somehow proud of myself. “The rehab I was in was great, and I did so well there I got to leave early. I’m in Miami, and boy, am I going nuts!”

  Just then the food arrived and I made the Asian guy who delivered it tell everyone exactly what I’d ordered. It was funny because he had a very thick accent, which made the word “pancakes” sound hilarious. I really couldn’t get enough of it, so I
asked him to say it about five or six times.

  “Artie, get back here as soon as possible,” Howard said, dead serious. “We’re all worried about you.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  I didn’t do that, of course: I partied for two more days, spending an insane amount of money before I got on a plane home. It was completely retarded: aside from my bar tabs, drinks at the pool, and room service bills, I bought a $7,000 watch that I wore exactly twice. I ended up giving it to a drug dealer when I had no cash and owed him money. He took it for $3,000, which is about as great of a value depreciation as you get driving a sports car off the lot. I also met some girl in the lobby who saw me buying the watch in the gift shop and we got to talking. She kind of recognized me, which means she recognized that I had money, and after we had a bunch of drinks at the bar we went to my room and out on my terrace, in broad daylight, overlooking the beach, she gave me a blow job. I remember drinking a Jack Daniel’s and water, admiring both the view of the coastline and the top of her head blowing me and thinking to myself, Nobody gets it. Why would I ever want to stop partying? This is great! Fucking rock and roll! What a perfect prick I was. I had become that asshole who’d forgotten every single value my Italian-American family had instilled in me.

  It couldn’t last forever, because no high can, so my last night there I had dinner at Nobu with my former assistant Michelle and I remember listening to myself, knowing I was lying, telling her how I’d get clean the minute I got home.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked. She has these insanely expressive, beautiful eyes, which she squinted up at me and sarcastically said, “How?”

  That was all she needed to say. Both of us knew I had no answer, so we simultaneously started giggling. “Yeah,” I said, kind of mock frowning. “I don’t know how I’m gonna do that.”

  I flew home the next day and went back to the show and made light of all of it. I told all my crazy stories and at once I felt like the status quo had returned. I’d gotten through the holidays and 2009 had arrived and everything was fine—right? It was a new year, and a week later I found out that another one of my dreams was about to come true.

  The success of Too Fat to Fish drew the attention of the kind of mainstream media that had ignored me until then, one of which being Rolling Stone magazine. I’d always wanted to be in those pages because what warm-blooded American rock-and-roll fan wouldn’t? I was overjoyed to hear they wanted to do a feature on me and had assigned a reporter to follow me around during the first two weeks of January. They didn’t want a manufactured photo, they wanted me in my element, at home, with no pretense, so they asked to have the shoot take place at my apartment. That sounded perfect.

  This was really important to me, so I hired my former assistant Michelle to come in to town to make sure everything went smoothly. That didn’t keep me from oversleeping the day of the photo shoot because I’d done drugs all night the night before. I had no awareness of the wreckage I was leaving in my wake. I saw my abuse as harmless to anyone else but me just as much as I saw it as necessary to my existence. I’d do drugs, sitting there watching the clock tick away the hours, knowing I should get some rest but continually procrastinating, telling myself I could handle it. When something important was scheduled for the next day I’d tell myself I’d get the rest I needed after I snorted just one more line. There’d be time to sleep after that high. And then it would wear off and I’d convince myself that I’d be good to go after just one more. And then one more. I was always running out of time because time flies when you’re getting high. The thing was, I pretty much always showed up to my engagements, maybe unprepared, but I was always there, so what was the problem?

  That was my train of thought in the hours leading up to what in theory was one of the proudest moments and greatest tokens of success in my life. I guess I was truly laying myself bare before one of the most legendary magazines in the world by getting numb and hungover, but it was so far from being premeditated. As usual when I was on a bender of any kind, I slept in my clothes and didn’t shower, using all those minutes to chase the high or hover in between sleep and euphoria.

  I had to fly Michelle in from Miami to be my stand-in assistant, because as I’ve mentioned, I’d burned through four assistants in the New York tri-state area, none of whom could deal with my drug abuse and insanity. No one wanted to work for me, even on a short-term basis, even for one day—it was that bad. She’d tried to rouse me and yelled at me to get cleaned up, but I don’t even remember that happening. She got so frustrated that she took pictures of me sprawled out in bed and eventually showed them to me when I woke up.

  “This is you getting ready for your Rolling Stone photo shoot,” she said, deadpan. She has a great sense of humor as well as immense patience, that girl. The pictures are hilarious: I look like Oscar Madison rolled up in bed after a bender.

  She stalled them for about twenty minutes, but after a while there was nothing else for her to do but to admit I was still asleep.

  “Artie, the photographer is here,” she said loudly, standing in the doorway to my bedroom, banging on the wall as hard as she could.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Hi, photographer. Give me just a minute.”

  I rolled out of bed with the grace of an obese otter with a hangover, still high on opiates and booze, my eyes crusted shut from sleep. I looked like a piece of furniture left out on the lawn after a weeklong orgy at Versailles. I was overweight and gray-skinned, my eyes still pinned from smack and my hair standing up like I’d been electrocuted. I was just forty-one, but I looked seventy-five. My beard was entirely gray and all I could think to put on for this shoot was a green corduroy jacket, a pair of gray sweatpants, and white gym socks. Somehow I thought a shirt wasn’t necessary. Mister DeMille, I thought, I am ready for my close-up.

  The photographer was an effeminate Asian fellow. “It’s nice to meet you, Artie,” he said, looking at me strangely. “Why don’t you go and get ready.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I am ready. Were you expecting me to be wearing Yves Saint Laurent?”

  “Oh,” he replied. “Fine, then.” He looked like he’d smelled fresh dog shit.

  And the thickest silence you can imagine fell over the room.

  I started chain-smoking as they set up their lights, moved my books around, and tried to make an artful backdrop out of my belongings. I kept going to the bathroom every fifteen minutes to crush and snort more pills. I didn’t care how obvious it was, and it was obvious, because every time I returned all eyes were on me.

  As the photographer prepared to shoot, the hair and makeup girl approached me, looking truly terrified. There wasn’t a foundation, eye shadow, brush, or spackling tool on Earth that could have made me look healthy, sober, or normal, but God bless her, the girl fought the good fight. She put powder on me, trimmed my beard and the rest of it as best she could. It didn’t help matters that I wouldn’t stay still, because the more high I got the more abusive I became toward the photographer. I chose to torment him by quoting movie lines he clearly didn’t know.

  “How about a Fresca?” I’d say to all of them. That’s a line from Caddyshack from the scene where Ted Knight says it to the guy who plays Noonan. No one had any idea what I was talking about. They were probably too young to even know what a Fresca was.

  The assistants kept joking around, trying to make light of it, but my comments were pointed and just so off that the mood got awkward and dark real quick. I remember the two guys taking test shots and doing what they could to distract me from what had become my main objective: pissing the Asian guy off, which I was doing in the time-honored spirit of self-destructive rebellion. In the end I’m pretty sure they used one of those test shots, because the image was the most grotesque, embarrassing, and unfinished one you can imagine. Basically I looked like Vic Tayback, who played Mel on Alice, on a crack binge.

  Norm MacDonald had this sweet little piece of advice for me—too late, of course—after
he saw this murder scene they called a photo. “First of all, you never let anybody with a camera into your home—ever,” he said. “That’s the first thing you should know.”

  I wish that the photo was the worst thing about the whole debacle, but it wasn’t: the article was much, much worse. It was what two-bit gossip columnists call a “takedown,” just an insult wrapped in a veil of fake authority and so-called journalism. Who knows, maybe it was due to my behavior at the photo shoot that they chose to send a woman writer who’d gone to Wesleyan or Vassar or one of those other broad colleges, who basically hated me on sight. She was a typically forgettable Upper-West-Side-Central-Park-jogger type who couldn’t be more different from—or more judgmental of—someone like me. I’ve become pretty skilled at knowing when someone doesn’t like me, particularly women, so I knew it wasn’t going to be a “fluff” piece, but I had no idea it would be such a hatchet job.

  Everything in my life was going so well professionally, and it’s not like a biased article by some no-name broad in Rolling Stone could change any of that, but still, I’d hoped that my moment in such a historic magazine would at least reflect who I was. She just couldn’t get past her own bias enough to do her job. The day the magazine came out I bought one at the newsstand and realized immediately that this was another bittersweet victory in my life—this one more bitter than sweet.