Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  I was loaded onto a stretcher and strapped in like a mental patient, which technically I was. Now let me preface my next statement by saying I have a lot of respect for the guys who drive ambulances, because that job is no picnic, but the ones I’ve met, particularly during that week of my life, weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree—any tree. Here’s an example. This is the conversation I had with one of them as we were getting ready to leave Jersey City Medical Center for the psych ward.

  “There’s a guy with a pad outside,” he said. “He’s downstairs.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “There’s a guy with a pad asking questions downstairs,” he said.

  “A guy with a pad . . . you mean a notepad? Like a pad where you write things down?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “a pad like that. It’s like a little book.”

  “So there’s a guy with a notepad and he’s writing things down and he’s down there asking questions,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a reporter.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he was,” the guy said. “He was, yeah, a reporter.”

  “He was, yeah, a reporter, huh? And you talked to him?”

  “Yeah, he was talking to everyone.”

  “So what did you say?” I couldn’t believe this shit.

  “When I saw him in the lobby I didn’t say anything,” the guy said.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “But then he asked me who I was going to pick up and I said that when I came back down he’d find out. He was guessing you, but I didn’t tell him that. I told him he’d have to wait and find out. So he doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, perfect! That’s great. Thanks for that.”

  I can’t tell you how much anxiety rushed into my veins at that moment. I’d been picturing the press as a pack of wolves waiting to attack me the moment I left my hospital room and this genius made those fears a reality. The guy did realize how pissed I was so he did me a solid and rushed me through the parking lot. It was a scene: me, the ambulance guys, and a pack of reporters running across the parking lot to an ambulance while my poor family jogged behind us. The reporters were relentless, asking when I’d be back on Howard, why I’d stabbed myself, and just about everything else you can imagine.

  “The show?” I managed to say. “Yeah, I’ll be back on tomorrow for the news.”

  The guys loaded me into the ambulance and my mom and sister followed us to the psych ward of the hospital I won’t name. It was nighttime and the idiots in the ambulance ran a red light, causing us to lose my mom, so I yelled at them to pull over. Being a backseat driver was the last thing I felt up to, but that’s how bad these guys were at their job.

  When we arrived, the place wasn’t open and the night guard wasn’t around, which wasn’t a good sign. By the time someone showed up, about an hour and a half later, to let me in, it was three a.m., which didn’t help the place look any better. I tried to tell myself that it only looked like the set of Hostel because it was so late and dimly lit. I found out the next day that the place was grotesque in any light. There were mice running around, and I can’t imagine what the rehab unit must have looked like because the psych ward made LA County Jail look like the Four Seasons. The place was so bad that I wasn’t going to stay there one minute longer than I had to. The problem was that I wasn’t legally allowed to leave for at least one night, then it would probably be another day before my poor mother and sister could arrange to get me into another facility. I wanted out immediately, but as the doctor explained to us, if he committed me I could end up there indefinitely, but if I admitted myself I would be able to leave voluntarily the next day, so that’s what I did.

  I had to go through processing, which involved a complete shakedown. An orderly was assigned to me and he went through my bag, removing everything that could be construed as a weapon and other potentially harmful objects like toothpaste, my toothbrush, and my roll-on deodorant. It was worse than jail, and here’s why: when you end up in jail, it’s likely you didn’t intend to go there, but in the psych ward you’ve willingly surrounded yourself with insane people. Since insane people have invisible triggers no one can predict, most of your stuff has to go, including clothing with logos—but as you’ll see, their judgment on what constitutes a logo was very subjective. A psych ward is the kind of place where wearing a Yankees shirt might get you killed if you end up sitting next to a psychotic Red Sox fan, although the term “psychotic Red Sox fan” is redundant. Everything you wear in the psych ward has to be pretty plain and unexciting so that even something that mentions beer (like the Beer League shirt I never got back) was illegal. Basically I entered the place with nothing more than a couple of plain white undershirts, my gray Jimmy Kimmel Live! shirt (a logo that was apparently acceptable), and one pair of gray sweatpants. I wasn’t done, though, because after my bag was empty and my clothes were taken away, I had a strip search to look forward to. I was in a place with people so crazy that some of them didn’t know what year it was and others thought they were from another planet, but when I got my shirt off, the orderly freaked out over my scars and stitches.

  “What is all that?” he asked.

  “They’re stab wounds,” I said.

  “Who did that to you?”

  I almost came out with a story. I wanted to tell him I was in a gang fight because I was so embarrassed, but I didn’t do that. I was too exhausted to be a wiseass. Besides, I had to learn to tell the truth and I had to get used to it, so for the first time, I said it out loud.

  “No one did that to me,” I said. “I did it to myself.”

  The guy got quiet because he was really taken aback. It was the same as punching out the biggest con on the cell block—from then on I was considered the king of the nuts by the orderlies. I went to my room after the strip search and met my roommate, who was an Asian kid. I didn’t plan on making friends, but he was nice enough and very quiet. Until about 5:30 a.m., that is, when he woke up screaming bloody murder because the Thorazine and Methadone he was unaware of being addicted to had worn off and left him in a living hell.

  “My ears are bleeding!” he yelled. “My ears!” He wasn’t lying either; blood was running from both of his ears, all over the sheets.

  I got up and grabbed one of the T-shirts I’d been allowed to keep and tried to stop the bleeding while I yelled for help. The nurses and two guards came into the room and strapped the kid down as one of the guards got in my face.

  “Go to sleep; don’t worry about this,” he said.

  Oh, no problem, I thought to myself. I’ll just go over to my little corner of heaven and drift off to dreamland. What, did the guy think I had a cabin with a fireplace waiting for me over there in my bed? Did he think the Asian kid’s screaming sounded like an angel’s harp?

  I finally got to sleep sometime around 6:30 a.m., after spending an hour staring into the abyss. I also stared at the drawings that the former lunatics who had been there had done on the wall, and I kept running my hands over my stitches and scars as one question repeated itself over and over in my head: What the fuck did I do? I knew I only had two hours of sleep ahead of me because my wounds were still so raw that the nurses had to change my bandages that often. Every time one of them came in I watched their eyes when they saw my stomach. These were nurses on a psych ward—they had seen everything, every desperate thing people can do to each other or themselves, but each and every one could barely hide their shock.

  I didn’t care how much I stayed up, sitting there in my bed during my stay there because I love the middle of the night. I’m not Dracula or anything, it’s just that in the middle of the night no one expects anything from you. You can’t possibly do anything in the middle of the night, that’s why it’s the best excuse in the world for doing nothing. Let’s say it’s three a.m. and someone calls you and asks you to do something. They can’t question you if you say, “Sure, of course I’ll do it—but I can’t possibly do it right now because it’
s three o’clock in the morning.” Anyone who insists that you do it anyway is an idiot. At three a.m. you’re off scot-free, but try to pull that shit at two in the afternoon because you’d rather be sleeping and you’ll look ridiculous. In many lines of work that kind of shit will get you fired. But if it’s three a.m., the other person becomes the asshole.

  Anyway, after I made it through that first night, breakfast was served early and when it was I got up and went to eat. I’d started to feel a little sick because I’d been on morphine for four days in the ICU and now I was withdrawing from that, plus all the pills I’d been taking on my own, which isn’t something they cared to address on the psych ward. It was the kind of place where you had to wait on line to get a toothbrush and toothpaste, so making patients completely comfortable wasn’t priority one. In my experience, without a doubt, prison had better amenities. I remember looking around in jail thinking that these people had stories, that they had done things like steal cars because they had to. Not so on the psych ward. I only had one thought: all of these people are crazy. Then I remembered that I was the one who’d drunk bleach and stabbed himself nine times.

  I hoped I’d find something to eat at breakfast that might take my mind off the withdrawal fever that was starting up inside me. I wasn’t up to showering once I caught sight of the little jail shower across the room. This brand of shower has a button that spits out water for about thirty seconds before shutting off to keep you from flooding the place, because in case you forgot, you’re a lunatic if you’re in there in the first place. At breakfast, as I was about to shovel powdered eggs into my mouth, I noticed two mice running back and forth along the baseboard in the corner of the room. I almost threw up, and after that I couldn’t eat a bite. When I brought it up to the guards they laughed at me.

  “We’re in the woods, man,” one of them said. “Animals are everywhere here. And those two weren’t even bad.”

  I was stuck in that zoo for three days, and aside from getting personal with more mice I learned a few things about the residents. First, there seems to be a way that all crazy people wear their pants. They hike them up too high, way above the ankle, and usually they have them on crooked, like half-twisted around so that their zipper is on their hip. At first I thought it was just the guy I happened to notice it on, but soon I realized that this was like a uniform in there, one that said loud and clear, from a distance, Hello there! I’m nuts. As I started to notice this over and I over I thought to myself that maybe the crooked pants were how they got by in society for a while because from a distance you might mistake them for being retarded. That’s until you got close enough to realize that these were no retards. It’s like there’s a regulation height for retards’ pants that’s somewhere just above the belly button, but these guys were at regulation nuts’ height, which is another three inches above that. It’s like they had a convention and all agreed to this. It doesn’t look comfortable at all, by the way, but comfort isn’t much of a priority when you’re crazy.

  I wasn’t completely antisocial. I made a friend named Teddy in that place. It wasn’t my idea, but when a three-hundred-pound black man decided he wanted to talk to me on a psych ward, I figured being friendly was the right way to play it. This guy was so huge and intimidating that the guards would let him roam the halls all night from one to six in the morning because he just wanted to walk, and there were not enough of them to restrain this guy if he lost it. I don’t know what landed Teddy in there in the first place, but all I saw of him was a gentle giant who was a bit scarier than the Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He’d spend those late-night hours walking the halls, reading his Qur’ān and yelling out passages whenever the spirit moved him, which was kind of a lot.

  Teddy and I met because one of the few shirts they let me keep was a Jimmy Kimmel Live! T-shirt, which I wore on my second day there. By then withdrawals had gotten so bad that when the Asian kid started snoring that night, I couldn’t stay in the room anymore, so I went for a walk in the hallway, where I ran into Teddy, who had been eyeballing me earlier that day while I was watching TV in the lounge.

  “You’re famous,” he said.

  “No, I’m not, man, not really,” I said.

  “You’re famous. You were in the film Dirty Work,” he said.

  I was surprised at that point. I mean, he was right: I was. I guess he kind of knew who I was, so I went with it. He was also twice my size. I’d have said I was in Beaches if that’s what he’d wanted to hear.

  “Yeah, I was in Dirty Work. Did you like the movie?”

  “Yes, it was very good. You’re very famous.” Then he took a long look at my shirt. “You’re Jimmy Kimmel!” he said.

  “No, man, I’m not Jimmy Kimmel, my name is—”

  “You’re Jimmy Kimmel!” He started to get really excited, which was alarming because there wasn’t anyone else around. “Jimmy Kimmel is here! I saw your show tonight. You’re Jimmy Kimmel!”

  “Really, man, my name is Artie, I’m—”

  “No, Jimmy! You’re Jimmy Kimmel!”

  After five tries, I gave up. I mean, fuck it, why not? “You know what, man?” I said. “You’re right, that’s me. I am Jimmy Kimmel.”

  “I knew it! I knew you were Jimmy Kimmel! Hey! Everybody! This is Jimmy Kimmel!”

  He’d gotten so loud that the crazies started wandering out of their rooms to see what the fuss was about, and he greeted them like a publicist telling all of them I was Jimmy Kimmel and that I was on TV earlier and now I was here.

  “This is Jimmy! He’s famous!”

  I was Jimmy for the rest of my stay, and I consider myself lucky because there are so many worse people to be. Teddy and I became best friends from that moment on, whether I liked it or not, and starting the next morning when he wasn’t reading the Qur’ān, he told everybody in earshot that Jimmy Kimmel was his friend as he pointed me out. It got really interesting when he and I watched Jimmy Kimmel Live! together the next night. I’m not sure what his theory on someone being in two places at the same time was, but I wasn’t going to bring it up. I was happy to have him turn to me and say, “I love your show, Jimmy,” after it was over. Thanks, Teddy, we try to do a good show for our fans every night.

  After two days I wanted a shower, and that’s when I found out that my shower didn’t work. I guess the Asian kid hadn’t tried it, and who could blame him; the kid was either zombied out on Methadone and Thorazine or strapped down and screaming for more Methadone and Thorazine. Smelling fresh wasn’t really on his mind. I let the guards know that my shower was busted and they decided to take me to the other wing on the floor, which was the children’s wing, by the way. It’s not something I’d ever had the misfortune to think about, but they have wings on psych wards for kids who are so mental (or so their parents claim) that they are brought to institutional hellholes like the one I was in and left there. On my way to a functional shower I passed a few rooms, where the most sullen, angry children I’ve ever seen sat on the floor drawing. I can’t imagine what kind of parent would leave their child someplace like that.

  I also passed the communal lounge on my ward, where Teddy and a few of our “peers” were doing whatever it was they did. When Teddy saw me walking with the guards, who were carrying a towel, soap, and shampoo for me, he couldn’t contain himself.

  “Oh yeah!” he shouted. “I see how you roll, Jimmy! Look at Jimmy, everybody! He’s showering in a special shower!”

  This got the crazies all up in arms. They started making noises and turning to look. Some of them even started shouting at me, because none of them seemed happy about this.

  “Teddy, man, no. My shower is just broken,” I said.

  “No way, Jimmy! You see how Jimmy roll? He ain’t gonna shower with all you motherfuckers—that’s Jimmy Kimmel, man! Jimmy can’t shower like all you regular people. He know! He gonna use a special shower!”

  I got my shower in, but for the rest of my stay, which wasn’t much longer (thank God!), literally eve
ryone else there hated me. Not one of them, by the way, ever questioned whether or not I was actually Jimmy Kimmel.

  The guards started to let Teddy hang around me whenever he wanted, which got weird because he’d come and grab me and drag me around the floor to show people that I was Jimmy Kimmel and his friend. It sucked; the guards would basically say, “Teddy, don’t do that to Artie,” as if he were a harmless child instead of a three-hundred-pound schizophrenic. They didn’t bat an eye when Teddy came and grabbed me out of my room on my last day there.

  He pulled out a piece of paper and asked for my autograph. Who was I to say no? I took his pen and wrote: “All my best, Jimmy Kimmel.”

  But that wasn’t it. “Pray with me, Jimmy,” he said, pulling out his Qur’ān.