Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  When Adrienne and I landed in Jersey, I was pretty groggy because I’d taken some sleeping pills for the flight that I’d gotten from some guy on the plane. We pulled in bright and early and both Adrienne and I were both too tired to drive down to my shore house. My apartment was getting painted at the time and everything was covered in tarps, so I did the sensible thing and got us a $1,500-dollar-a-night room at the Mandarin Oriental. That was me—it couldn’t be a fucking Sheraton even though we were both so exhausted all we needed was a bed. What can I say? I love that hotel.

  I pulled in there in the black Mercedes SUV I was driving as my loaner car and left it with the valet. Our plan was to sleep there for the night and drive down to my beach house the next morning to prepare for the Fourth of July party I’d planned to have. As we got settled into our room and into bed, withdrawals started to kick in and I started to feel really sick. Adrienne was about to fall asleep, which meant I might be able to slip out without her wanting to come along.

  “Oh my God!” I said in a dramatic whisper. “I just got a text from my buddy in Jersey; he needs my help. I’ve got to leave right now.”

  Let’s just say she was pretty suspicious; as sleepy as she was, she gave me a sidelong look. “All right,” she said slowly.

  “Stay here, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  I got my black SUV out of the valet and drove into downtown Newark, New Jersey, where I scored heroin and some sleeping pills. The way I always have, as soon as I got the drugs, I did some: I pulled into a parking lot and snorted a couple of lines of heroin off the dashboard. That hit the spot and I started to feel okay. I did one more for the road then got back on the Turnpike heading toward the Holland Tunnel and Manhattan, where I drove straight into bumper-to-bumper traffic. There was no worse place I could possibly be. After a red-eye flight featuring a generous dose of sleeping pills to keep the withdrawals at bay and a few lines of heroin, sitting in traffic while behind the wheel was a recipe for disaster. I nodded out in no time, and when I did my foot slid off the brake, sending the truck forward, right into the back of a huge, brand-new BMW SUV.

  The BMW didn’t take much damage, but the front of the SUV I was in was wrecked—the hood was bent and the radiator cracked. The impact woke me up and I was coherent enough to realize what had happened. It was now about eleven a.m. and we were right in the middle of serious noontime Holland Tunnel traffic. I got out of the car and walked over to the window of the BMW. There was one guy in the front and a few in the back.

  “Are you okay?” asked the guy in the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, man, I’m fine. You guys okay?”

  The guy in the passenger seat was pissed off. “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, I took a red-eye flight in this morning, and I’m really tired. I’m sorry,” I said. “But more important, are you okay?”

  That calmed him down a little bit. “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “Wait a second . . . Artie?”

  “Yeah, man, that’s me.”

  It got a little awkward for a second because those kind of things can go either way, then he said, “I used to work with your publicist. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Oh, no way, really?”

  Now I’m having this conversation in the middle of traffic with a nearly totaled loaner SUV on my hands. A minute later five cops showed up, and in case you forgot I was holding enough drugs to put me away for a while. Luckily every single one of them was a huge Stern fan. So before I knew it I’m signing autographs and telling stories but I can’t help thinking how bad it had to look and what they were going to do about it. There was a totaled SUV driven by a known drug addict who probably still smelled like booze. And God help me if they searched my pockets.

  Somehow none of this happened. I exchanged insurance info with the BMW driver, charmed the cops as best I could, and tried to act casual. The other driver was really cool; he said he wouldn’t sue, he just wanted money to fix the car, and he stayed true to his word. I can only imagine what my insurance company had to pay out, but that’s what insurance is for. And the cops—I guess because they were fans—were so great. They didn’t make me take a sobriety test, and they never even talked about searching my car. They were more concerned about how I would get back to my hotel.

  “Is this thing running okay, Art?” one of them asked.

  “I think I can drive it. Don’t worry about it, man.” This was a ridiculous thing to say because one wheel was completely bashed in and would barely move.

  “Okay, man,” they said. “Go ahead, we love you.”

  I’d dodged a huge bullet and once I got in the car and got it started I breathed easy. That could have been the end of so much for me. I started driving and immediately realized that this SUV wasn’t going vary far because it was very screwed up. I made it through the Tunnel, past the West Side Highway, but at Tenth Avenue, the thing just stopped—completely dead, not moving at all. Cars whizzed by me as I triple-checked to make sure I had all of my drugs. I called a tow truck and twenty minutes later this amazing Puerto Rican guy showed up and helped me out. He called the rental company for me and took care of everything. Then I spoke to the girl there and they couldn’t have been nicer: they sent another car out to meet me at the Mandarin, and I liked the girl on the phone so much I offered her tickets to my Beacon Theater show later in the year.

  I can only imagine what the valet at the Mandarin Oriental was thinking when I pulled up: I’d arrived in a black SUV, I was returning in the cab of a tow truck with the SVU from before totaled on back, and just as I was about to go inside, my new car showed up, which was a Honda Civic.

  “Hey, Mr. Lange, it’s good to see you again,” was all he said.

  Up in our room Adrienne was taking a bath and she came out and eyeballed me even more suspiciously than before. She could tell something was off.

  “I’m gonna take a shower,” I said, and that’s what I did.

  While I was in there she went through my pockets and found the sleeping pills, but thank God not the heroin. She got really mad and flushed all of the pills down the toilet, which would have made me furious if I didn’t have some heroin. This started high-test tension between us.

  “Forget it, Artie, let’s try to get some sleep,” she said.

  I was pissed at her for taking my pills, so I wasn’t going to just roll over. “No, I want to get out of here right now,” I said. “I want to get down to the shore.”

  “Artie, what are you talking about?!” she said.

  “I want to leave. I want to leave right now.”

  This kicked off a huge argument that ended with her agreeing to leave the hotel. There was no reason for it aside from my stubbornness, which caused me to pay $1,500 for an amazing room that we only stayed in for four hours. Adrienne didn’t know what to think when she saw the car, and I can’t imagine the doorman did either: he’d seen me get out of an SUV, a tow truck, and a Civic within four hours. Adrienne knew I was screwed up and now she knew that I’d screwed up.

  “Are you even going to bother to explain this car and where you went?” she asked me.

  This kicked off a huge screaming match as we drove from Manhattan to Hoboken, and that fight was all my fault. When I was busted I always got angry. We were no closer to resolving shit by the time we got to my apartment (where her car was), and I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “You know what?” I said, “I’m not taking this shit down to the shore. I’m not going to be fighting with you at my party. Go sleep in my apartment!”

  It really wasn’t the nicest thing to do because there may have been a bed there, but the whole place was covered in tarps and still smelled of paint. She was so exhausted that she just pulled the tarp back off the bed, crawled in, and got some rest.

  I drove down to the shore in the Civic that night and wasted a perfect day the next day sleeping in a darkened room in my beautiful $2.5 million shore house (another great move—spending that much on a
shore house in 2007, just before the real estate crash). Adrienne and I made up on the phone at some point and she ended up coming to the Fourth of July party a few days later and we were fine. But the drugs were taking their toll on our relationship and things between us were about to get worse.

  After the Stern Show returned from vacation I didn’t let up with the live gigs like I’d planned to, even though everyone in my life had told me to do otherwise. They all reminded me—Howard included—about the plan I’d agreed to with Don Buchwald. Like I’d done the last time this was brought up, I said I’d get through my current commitments with the book tour and stand-up and then I’d change everything.

  As I started to slide back into drugs, I tried to keep alive the only positive thing I’d found by spending as much time as I could that summer with Adrienne. After we’d been together just a month she moved in with me and came to every road gig she could, which gave us the chance to have a lot of fun out on the road. It seemed like my personal life was going well, even as the amount of opiates I was consuming on the sly became larger and larger. Still, Adrienne and I developed real feelings for each other in a very short time, and she wasn’t just there for the good times: she figured out what was going on with me and she did everything she could to help me, hoping of course that I’d get off drugs again. That was a fantasy, so the whole situation became pathetic after a while. Here was this sweet twenty-five-year-old suddenly put in charge of looking after an addict slipping back down the hill. It got to the point where my shrink put her in charge of my sleeping pills because as much as I’ve done opiates and downers and suffered depression, somehow the side effects have been that I can never sleep. I just lie there riddled with anxiety.

  I’d been going to a shrink that Howard had suggested I see for a few months and I’d really enjoyed it, to be honest. He was an older Upper East Side guy and the days I’d see him I’d walk from the Stern Show through Central Park up to his office. He helped me a lot because he wasn’t your typical shrink in any way. He wasn’t controlling or judgmental; he wasn’t traditional; he just talked to you and got to know you in an abstract way that I found very helpful. He got me to talk about things that I’d never talked about because he didn’t go right at them, he found a way to approach them that worked for me.

  He got me to talk about my father a lot and my obsession with his death. One day he did something that helped me more than I would have thought, even though at the time it was kind of crazy: he spent twenty-five minutes reading me a novella by James Joyce called “The Dead.” The focus of the story is a guy who lost his first wife and how he was devastated without her even though he’d remarried. The guy was able to listen to a song that reminded him of her and go into his mind and basically spend time with her. He had to do this to deal with the loss and basically told his present wife that she had to deal with that and allow him that time. The shrink wanted me to do that with my dad, and I tried it, when I was sober at least. When I’d really miss him I’d lie back and relax and picture him and relive my best memories of him and it was a pleasant experience, it really was.

  When I started drinking again I started lying to my shrink—he was just one more on the list—and who knows if he believed me or not. I didn’t tell him about the drugs, of course, but I did tell him how stressed I was and how it was so hard for me to sleep, so he agreed to prescribe me some sleeping pills, but like I said, only under the condition that Adrienne held on to them and handed them out to me. She agreed to it because she was in love with me and she wanted to help. The two of us were trying to build a relationship; I was just dead set on fucking it up. Since she spent most weekdays with me and most weekends an hour or so away at her parents’ house, she’d have to hide pills around my apartment when she left in case I had an anxiety attack and my prescribed dose wasn’t enough to calm me down. As I got deeper into the opiates, this became a regular thing, because if the withdrawals didn’t have me strung out, pretty often I’d cry wolf, just because I knew there were pills in my house and I wanted to do them. Adrienne was pretty creative: she’d tape them to the backs of pictures, put them inside books, you name it.

  It was about this time in my crash that my performance on the Stern Show slid into the shit after eight solid years. Whether buzzed or not I never seemed to lose my sense of rhythm; I knew when to talk and when not to and I was always able to bring some laughs into whatever conversation was happening with a well-placed comment. Long before I was on the show I’d been a fan, so when I got the job I promised myself that I’d never lose sight of the fact that timing was everything. As I’ve already mentioned, all of that went way the hell out the fucking window. If you want to talk about a loss of timing, all I need to say is that falling asleep, on the air, with six million people listening, became my most consistent contribution. That is when I wasn’t making nonsensical comments, interrupting Howard, or fighting with just about everyone.

  One morning that sticks in my mind was the day we had Ben Stiller and Jimmy Kimmel on the show. At some point in the conversation Kimmel mentioned that he was friends with Tom Cruise and that he didn’t believe the story in Too Fat to Fish where I talk about how rude Tom was to me on the set of Jerry Maguire. Jimmy was being friendly about it, just saying it didn’t sound like Tom, but I didn’t see it that way at all. I saw it as personal attack.

  “Fuck you, Jimmy,” I said. “Tom Cruise is a fucking asshole. He’s a fucking creep.”

  “Calm down, Artie,” Howard said.

  I didn’t calm down, of course. I kept at it to the detriment of the show and to my already sagging performance. That was the first time I really sucked, but it was far from the last.

  In September Howard had to sit me down for a heart-to-heart, which he’d never had to do in my eight years on the show, no matter how crazy I’d ever gotten. He slipped me a note off the air that day and then he and our program director, Tim Sabean, cleared the studio and closed the door during a break.

  “Listen, Art,” Howard said. “We don’t know if you’ve got something going on again, but you’ve not been doing your job on the air lately.”

  “Howard, I’m clean,” I said. I was totally lying—I was high at the time.

  “Art, if you’ve got something going on, we’ll give you time to recover,” Tim said. “Just tell us what’s going on.”

  “We always had a rhythm, Art,” Howard said. “You and Robin and I were always seamless, and that was great. But now you’re sort of interrupting us and I’m worried about you. You get crazed over little things. I don’t want to drug test you because that’s none of my business, but I want you to be all right.”

  “Howard, I’m clean and I’m working on myself,” I said. “I’ve gotten rid of the drugs, but I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself. I understand that.”

  “I don’t want to fire you, Artie,” Howard said. “It seemed like you were doing so good. Just work on that.”

  “I will, Howard, I promise.”

  “Do me a favor: when we have guests in, why don’t you just not talk for a little while. Let me get things going before you comment at all.”

  “Okay, man. I can do that. I’m sorry. I’ll work on it.”

  Yeah, right. I just got worse and worse. As the drug use increased, so did my interruptions, because I couldn’t follow my own rule. I was going in and out of being on and off drugs with such abandon that most mornings by this point I had no idea whether I was coming or going. I so wanted to be doing my job well that I’d jump in too much, and I was either so high or so strung out that I had horrible ADD. I’d get distracted by one detail in a conversation or an interview Howard was conducting that I’d direct the entire flow of the show toward that. And since I was in my own world, that detail was often completely irrelevant to anyone else but me. I was either in or coming out of a daze that no one else was tuned into, so I became like Frosty the Snowman when the kids put the hat on him and he says, “Happy Birthday!” which in context doesn’t make much sense. Later that year I
’d find myself in my version of the greenhouse, where I’d melt, just like Frosty did. That’s what it felt like when my mother and sister found me at my very lowest point: I felt like nothing but a puddle.

  ————

  Howard was getting really frustrated with me, because the last thing a perfectionist as busy as he is needed was my brand of unpredictable trouble on the air. Gary was in an even worse position because people in corporate started to ask him how he intended to handle me falling asleep, aggravating Howard, and missing work all the time. I’m glad I didn’t know about that; I would have made a jihad out of harassing those desk jockeys.

  Gary had my back. He’d tell them, “Artie’s been with the show a decade; he’s part of the family and we’re all trying to help him through this. You’ve got to let us do it our way.”

  As I got worse, the awkwardness I felt from putting people who had done right by me through this drama began to weigh on me heavily. I began to suck everywhere, which pissed me off even more: my stand-up gigs became rambling diatribes, I fell asleep at work every morning, all because I needed to get higher and higher. And I wouldn’t stop taking on more work that did nothing but make it harder and harder for me to ever get any rest. For a guy who liked doing opiates and downers and then crashing out for hours, you’d think I’d have planned a little better.

  Here’s a perfect example: I’d bought a fantastic beach house, so I planned on having a huge Fourth of July party. That house I bought for $2.5 million is now probably worth eighty grand. Anyway, this party was the last thing I needed to do, but because we’d talked about it on the show, I invited everyone, though I really didn’t need that kind of pressure. I had it catered by a local Italian chef, complete with everything. It was very lavish in every sense. It was worthy of the house, put it that way, and I’d invited my whole family, and that’s where I introduced them to Adrienne for the first time. My nieces and nephews were riding up and down in the elevator, you name it, it was a real gathering. I even sprang for a fireworks display, right there off my dock, practically in the backyard. It was really beautiful. And I was coming down, hard, off of opiates and the rest of it, with no relief in sight.