by Lange, Artie
“Okay.”
We put our hands on the book and closed our eyes. I squinted a bit to see what he was doing, which was standing there in silence. This went on for a painful amount of time, probably something like three minutes. Then Teddy mumbled a few things to himself before saying, “Jimmy?”
“Yeah?”
He started me right in the eye for a long moment without blinking and said: “I’ll see you in heaven, Jimmy Kimmel.”
Then he took the book and his autograph and walked away.
————
After four days and three nights, with the help of my lawyer, my mom and sister got me transferred to a nicer place in New Canaan, Connecticut, called Silver Hill. Once again my poor mother followed the same ambulance through another freezing January night to this minimum-security psych ward. I had to pass an evaluation to be able to stay there, since the doctors in the ICU had understandably recommended that I be admitted to a maximum-security institution. I passed the interview because they could tell I wasn’t fully nuts, just a strung-out drug addict who was a little bit crazy. I could have told them that, but my vote didn’t count.
Unlike the place I’d just left, Silver Hill turned out to be exactly how it looks in its brochures and online: it’s a gorgeous old mansion that happens to have been a successful mental institution for the past eighty years. I was there for a month and lived on a floor with about twenty-five other patients. And I saw the Super Bowl there that year because I had a TV in my room, so I watched the Packers beat the Steelers. I knew people going to the game, I knew who was going to play the halftime show, and all I kept thinking about was how I’d be there and all the fun I’d be having if I hadn’t fucked up and landed myself in this place. I was so depressed watching the game in a mental hospital that I couldn’t even finish it. I think I had one eye open for the first half, but by the second I was so depressed about the mess I’d made of my life that I said I’d never watch another one. I hadn’t missed a Super Bowl since I was ten years old.
I had the room to myself for a week, which was cool, and then I had a roommate for the remaining four weeks I was there. The doctors at Silver Hill were very, very good and also very, very cynical, but still they didn’t know what to make of me because what I’d done was so severe. Ultimately they were good doctors because they basically told me off the bat, “Okay, you stabbed yourself, so you’re not leaving here until we tell you that you can leave because we’re not going to have you try that again.” They weren’t what I’d call sensitive; they’d pretty much tell patients like me who had a grip on reality that we were nuts. To be honest, I don’t think it took a degree to figure that one out, I just wonder if they used the opposite approach on the patients who were so nuts that they thought they were Napoleon or Cleopatra. I’d love to hear how those sessions went. That place cost me $1,500 a day, by the way.
There was a community phone on the ward, and one of the kids who was a very depressed, very bad heroin addict (which is what they call a dual diagnosis) used to enjoy answering the phone all the time. God only knows why. He also recognized me from the Stern Show right off the bat because he was a big fan of the show—and he wasn’t the only one. Let me tell you, trying to get my mind back and make sense of what I’d done and what I’d have to do to get back to normal was hard enough to comprehend without Stern fans on the mental ward. Just think for a minute of what Stern fans who have actually been committed to a mental ward are like! To say that getting recognized in that situation was awkward is the understatement of the century because the last thing I felt like doing was answering questions about anything in my so-called celebrity life. Just imagine what it was like talking about my role in the movie Elf to someone who thought it was a documentary.
I couldn’t even retreat into being Brian Carter because word spread around the ward pretty quickly, and once my stand-up special Jack and Coke aired on Comedy Central for the first time on January 22, my fate was sealed because the staff allowed it to be aired on the TV in the communal lounge. Show business can be downright creepy, and strange things happen every day, but the fact that I earned $150,000 when that special aired and was in a mental hospital bed listening to it, too depressed to even open my eyes and watch, takes the cake for me. To be honest I’d completely forgotten I’d sold it, and so had my mother. The next time I talked to her, she asked me what the check was for. It all worked out—that check paid for Silver Hill.
I did keep my ears open to tune in to what got laughs out in the lounge because they may have been lunatics, but they were an audience. It was like free market research for future routines, because I figured if I kept things up, the only places that would book me in the future would be places like this. Comedy Central aired a censored and uncensored version of my special the same night and they showed both on the ward. The good news is that both killed. The lunatics loved it! Lying in my bed, in the dark, listening to the other patients laughing their crazy asses off to my stand-up act was . . . something else. It’s something I both wish and also never wish happens to my closest comedian friends.
When I went to breakfast the next day I was bombarded with questions: “How did you do that?” “How do you make people laugh?” “Can I eat your Jell-O?” “Who taught you to be funny?” “Can you teach me to be funny?” “What is it like to be inside the TV?”
I wanted to jump out the nearest window (and if they weren’t locked I might have) because it was like walking into a focus group run by the Manson Family. I hadn’t wanted to die before, but I sure did then: when I first got up at a comedy club never did I expect to end up explaining how I do stand-up to a bunch of lunatics. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer! Eventually I stopped the madness because someone had to.
“Guys! I don’t know what the fuck you want from me!” I said “It’s not like tying your shoes or something. I can’t just tell you how to do it. It’s something you do if you can do it. Go try writing jokes in your rooms, okay? If they’re funny you can be just like me.”
That got a whole lot of grumbles and most of them started wandering away. I should also mention that I didn’t impress all of my peers at Silver Hill. There were a few older women who I gathered had been long-term residents who apparently really didn’t like it. It’s not like they were going out of their way to welcome me with cookies before, but boy, did they shoot daggers at me every time we crossed paths after that. There’s nothing worse than somebody’s grandma hating the hell out of you, even if she’s nuttier than a peanut farm.
————
The kid I mentioned before, the heroin addict and huge Stern fan who liked to answer the phone, happened to be the one who answered it when Howard called me. It freaked him out so much that he didn’t even tell me about it. I found out as I casually passed by the message board a full day later and saw a note that said “Artie, Howard called, 2:30 p.m.” It was six p.m. the next day at the time. Howard is a busy guy and though he was very concerned about me, anyone who knows him at all could tell you that calling a mental institution was a big deal for him. Conversely, the kid in question was a patient in a mental hospital with relatively few patients and besides his therapy sessions he had very little to do. Plus he had no problem talking to me every time he saw me, so I couldn’t believe that this kid hadn’t hunted me down. He’d spent hours hounding me about Howard, but now that he’d actually spoken to him, suddenly he wasn’t interested? It made no sense, but then again, we are talking about a mental patient.
I went and found the kid right away because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a joke—crazy people like to prank each other, you know. “Dude,” I said, “did you write this note to me?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Okay. Did Howard call?”
“Yeah, he did,” he said with the enthusiasm of a postal worker three months from retirement.
“What did you say to him?”
“I asked him if he was Howard Stern.”
“No, you didn’t! You’re not supposed
to do that! That’s violating my privacy and his, man!”
“How was I supposed to know it was him? You might know more than one Howard.”
This kid was impossible.
“Let me ask you something, why didn’t you come find me and tell me I had a call from some guy named Howard? You know where I am if I’m not out here watching TV. I’m always in my room sleeping.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But you probably needed your sleep.”
“Yeah, thanks. So what did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘He’s not here.’ ”
“My God. And what did Howard say?”
“He said he’d call back.”
I had steam coming out of my ears. “Listen, man, if he calls back, come and get me no matter where I am, okay? Wake me up if I’m sleeping. I only know one fucking Howard.”
A few days later Howard called back and the kid answered and this time he came to find me. I was in the lounge watching The Golden Girls and he came shuffling in, shaking like a leaf.
“Artie . . . um . . . Howard is on the phone again.”
Howard and I had an unbelievable forty-five-minute conversation that changed my life and really saved me in many ways. He told me about how he’d been thinking of me and rooting for me, and that made me feel so guilty. I love Howard so much and he’s such a busy guy that I hated the fact that I’d taken all that energy from him and disturbed his life and career that way. He said he was there for me and would give me whatever I needed to get better, I just had to say the word. It was a lifeline; his words were what I needed to hear, because I was in such a surreal location and my mind was in such a clouded place that his voice brought me back to reality for a while. The combination of medication and not knowing what was going to happen to me had my mind on a constant merry-go-round. Was I going to spend the rest of my life in places like this? Unless I was heavily sedated I thought that was the case. There was no way I could sustain this financially and hope to take care of my mother. I didn’t want her to die poor because of me. All of these things occupied my every waking hour. Howard’s voice cut through all of that; it was a friend and a dose of what I used to have as my life. It was a wake-up call, and also a reminder of what got me into the business in the first place, because it was the same voice I’d heard on the radio all those years ago.
The doctors at Silver Hill prescribed me a list of medications: mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, and antidepressants, plus the steady diet of iron supplements I had to maintain because, as I mentioned, I’d lost so much blood that I was anemic. Those supplements replaced the missing iron, but they also turned my shits New York Jets green, which was disturbing; it was like shitting the remains of a leprechaun every morning. The anemia made me weak, but after three weeks I wasn’t anemic anymore, so I couldn’t use it as an excuse to skip group therapy, which I’d done my best to avoid from day one. When I was too weak and too tired to leave my bed they didn’t push me hard, but after a while those excuses didn’t cut it anymore.
Once I could no longer avoid group, I committed myself to faking it, because that really was the only way out. Step one was leaving my bed each day because if I didn’t do a certain number of hours in group therapy I’d never be allowed to leave. Antisocial behavior, you see, was an indication that I was still suicidal and should not be left unsupervised. I understood that well enough, but what really motivated me after I felt better physically was the fact that I realized I was more or less just sleeping there at a rate of $1,500 a day. I wasn’t even showering and I was barely eating, so it was time to get with the program.
I started getting up, I started showering, and after a while I even shaved. I started attending group meetings and taking it all in. After a while I even started raising my hand and saying things like: “That means you’re on drugs, Counselor. And drugs are bad.” The worst thing about rehab or mental institutions if you’re a marginal nut like I am is that once you figure out how to fake it and learn to tell them what they want to hear, you have the system beat. And once you’re there you’re halfway home, whether you give a shit about changing your ways or not. The really good doctors can tell when you’re faking it, but I find them to be few and far between.
I did a month there and all I can say is that if you’re planning to go nuts and you have both money and good insurance, definitely go nuts at Silver Hill. The place is clean and the setting couldn’t be a better backdrop to lose your marbles and maybe even find them again. By February 1, I was ready to leave, but my friends and family weren’t so sure. Silver Hill has a rehab program that is completely separate in every way and that’s where they wanted me to go, and so another intervention happened, there at Silver Hill, involving Colin Quinn, my cousin Jeff, my uncles Bruce and Tommy, my mother, my sister, and an intervention guy. The intervention guy seemed nice, which is what I thought until I learned that he charged my mother $10,000 to mediate this little meeting that day. I’d love to see a breakdown on his costs: “Interrupting Artie fee: $2,000; Nodding sympathetically: $3,000; Follow-up two-line e-mail six months later asking how you are doing: $5,000.”
The truth is, my suicide attempt and a month in a mental hospital hadn’t put a dent in my stubborn pride. I wasn’t ready to give it up and I still thought I knew what was best for me. There’s no reason I should have felt this way—none at all. I mean, really, what was I thinking? That I’d be fine just heading back home and putting the pieces together on my own? I made every excuse to my family. I said that I’d seen the rehab facilities and didn’t like them, that the doctors there weren’t any good. I found every reason I could to refuse to go and I kept repeating myself, saying I wanted to be at home, so that’s where I was going. This went on for four hours because I wouldn’t budge (I’m sure intervention guy billed for overtime). I had no valid argument, I had no leg to stand on, I just kept saying that I didn’t want to go. Because I didn’t! Who would ever want to go to rehab after a month in a mental hospital? No one!
The sad truth is that no matter how much my family and friends begged and cried, as of February 1, 2010, once the mental institution said I was fit to be free, there was nothing they could do about it. That day was the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death, which was one more reason I refused to go to rehab that day. So after trying as best they could, the next day, February 2, my mother and my uncle Tommy picked me up, and since my mother wasn’t going to abandon me, she insisted that I come and live in her house for a while. She was afraid that if I was left at my own place I’d jump off my terrace, and she had every right to think that. I agreed, thinking it would be for a week at most.
Driving down to Jersey I heard the Stern Show for the first time and it felt like it had been a year. I listened to Howard go through his Oscar predictions and as depressed as I was, instinctually I thought of jokes to play off him, and how I’d jump in and complement the conversation if I’d been sitting at my microphone in the studio. At that moment I realized just how much I missed it and how badly I missed all of them. It took exactly two minutes of hearing the show to clear my fog, to break my heart in two, and to remind me of the life I’d had just over a month ago. At the same time it all seemed so far away; it was like looking at a life that existed behind glass, that I could observe but couldn’t touch. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in my chair making jokes with Howard about the Oscars. And when I opened them I saw that my chair was only the front seat of my mother’s car. My heart dropped lower than I’d thought possible and a wave of incredible sadness came over me. I stared out the window and said nothing for the rest of the ride. I didn’t even hear the show anymore, I was caught up in my head. When we got to my mom’s house she made me a big Italian meal to make me feel welcome, to nourish me, and to celebrate the fact that I’d come home. I was happy to have it and it was delicious. After I ate all that I could I got into bed. And I stayed there from that day, February 2, 2010, until April 3, 2011.
————
I came up for air every once in a while
because I wanted to give my poor mother a break, but that never lasted long. I was supposed to go to several outpatient facilities, but I refused. I was supposed to see doctors regularly, but I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t open to anything and I was still suicidal. I could barely sit up straight in bed most days because I was paralyzed with depression, guilt, and embarrassment. I refused all help. I didn’t want to see daylight, I wanted to be invisible, and after a while it became hard for me to feel comfortable when the sun was up. I’d sleep a lot but I never felt rested. I had no appetite and I always felt weak. It was all in my head, but sometimes I couldn’t even lift my arm to drink a glass of water. I lay there, unable to shower or do anything, tossing and turning for fourteen months, just thinking about how I’d fucked up for good, and about how my life was over. I’d gotten everything I’d always wanted and then I’d destroyed it, over and over again.
The drugs had beat me, which was something I had a really hard time with. I kept thinking about the first time I’d gotten drunk as a fourteen-year-old kid and how that moment had led me to this. I thought about how I started getting drunk every single day once my father became a quadriplegic and how I’d always told myself that booze would never beat me. I remembered how, as I got older and started doing drugs and saw friends from high school die from them, I told myself that drugs would never beat me either. All I thought about there in that dark for fourteen months was how wrong I’d been and how long I’d been wrong. Drugs and booze hadn’t just beat me, they’d made a fool of me.
And they weren’t done with me either, because I wasn’t done with them, which is what I hated about myself most of all. Even while living at my mother’s house spending all my time in bed, I still found a way to call dealers and buy pills and arrange for them to leave them outside of the house. My mom would be thrilled when I’d find the energy to go for a walk in the yard, thinking I was coming around, meanwhile I was picking up Ziploc bags full of painkillers that I’d hide in my underwear until I got back to my room. I’d stay in bed getting high until they were gone, then I’d find a way to make a call and order more. When anxiety and shame had kept me up for four days straight, a doctor would write me a prescription so that I’d get some real sleep. He was a guy who had always been generous with me, and he felt that if I couldn’t sleep I’d never get over my anxiety. So on occasion he’d write me a prescription for sleeping pills, but they were few and far between. And those were the only times I was happy, taking them all at once, getting high. Nothing seemed worth living for anymore. I wanted to get back to my apartment in Hoboken so I could jump off of the terrace, just take a nosedive into the pavement after making sure there was no one down there for me to land on. That’s how I wanted to end it; that’s how I wanted to make a final statement. I just didn’t want to wake up alive. My apartment is high up enough, but I had one worry, that I’d hit someone else’s balcony on the way down. In the end I decided that going headfirst was the only way. That’s what I thought about when I was high.