Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  Eventually my mother noticed that I was high, but she didn’t know how I was getting drugs into the house and she got very frustrated. There was a lot of crying and there was no rational talk. Taking care of me was a huge burden on her, because I was still on drugs and depressed and suicidal, every single day. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d start screaming so loud that I’d wake myself up. I just wanted to wake up dead and I hoped for it every time I managed to fall asleep. The depression, the anxiety, and the drugs became this constant weight crushing me. I’d have nightmares where I was being buried alive, and they were so real that when my mother would wake me from them I’d be more confused than ever. I wouldn’t know who I was or what was happening, I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t calm down. My poor mother would have to lie in bed next to her forty-three-year-old son and cry with him until he couldn’t cry anymore.

  “Let’s die together,” she’d say, crying. “Let’s die. That’s what you want, so let’s die.”

  She was trying to snap me out of it. One time we had a crazy argument about it, when she told me that she wanted to kill herself. That affected me because I didn’t want to be the cause of her death and in that moment I realized that if I didn’t try to change I very well might be. For once I was calming her down, telling her not to talk like that, even though I felt that way every single day.

  My sister became the backbone of our family because I was a mess and it took all my mother’s strength just to keep me afloat. We were fine financially because of my book royalties and the residuals from my DVD sales and film roles, but even though it’s hard for me to admit it, money isn’t everything. No dollar amount could relieve the pressure on my family and without a doubt these were the darkest hours for Stacey. I will never be able to thank her enough for keeping us together all on her own. She did all of it while holding down her job, which is amazing to me.

  The room I lived in for all those months was down the hall from my mom, above the garage. To this day I’ve not been able to go back in there not only because I traveled to the darkest depths of my own soul in that bed, within those four walls, but because I know seeing that room again will remind me too clearly of just how much suffering I brought upon my poor mother. I’d bought her this town house—all cash—to pay her back for raising me, but then I went and ruined that by using it to exorcise my demons. Under my room in the garage was the Range Rover I’d bought her too, but she couldn’t enjoy it any more than she could enjoy her house because she could barely leave, too worried about what I’d do if she left me alone. My mother began to wither way from sadness and exhaustion as I got high and numbed myself into oblivion.

  I was powerless and when I wasn’t high I was shaken to the core by anxiety attacks so intense that I had to be rushed to the hospital a few times. They’d give me a shot or an IV of Valium to calm me down, then send me home. After my third trip, one doctor gave it to my mother straight as I sat there staring into space.

  “You need to put him in a home somewhere. If you don’t he’s going to die,” he said. “Your son can’t help himself. If you don’t take a stand you’re going to continue taking care of him, which will probably kill you too. And if that happens and you’re not here for him, they’ll put him in a home anyway.”

  The doctor was harsh but he was right, and I knew it. I had a solution, which was getting out of my mother’s hair long enough to return to my place in Hoboken and jump off my terrace. I saw myself as a hopeless case and I didn’t want to be a burden anymore. I didn’t see any other way out for me. But there was no way my mother would let me live alone at that point, and there was no fooling her the way I’d fooled the doctors in rehab. So after each of these emergency room visits she’d take me back home, refusing to give up on me.

  Every once in a while I’d go out late at night and walk around trying to think, enjoying the emptiness and silence and the fact that no one would see me. I isolated myself as hard as I could, but a few people wouldn’t let me. Colin Quinn, the city kid, would take two buses to come down to my mom’s place in central Jersey to visit, just to get me outside. Those were the only times I got any kind of fresh air during the daylight hours, and every time after I had, I felt so strange and vulnerable that I’d seclude myself more than ever for the next few days.

  Whenever I saw Colin I tried to hide my darkness and seem so much better than I was, and the effort that took exhausted me. He didn’t give up on me at all—one day he even got me to play basketball. My mom lives in a nice gated complex, so as we were walking by the courts he suggested we go play a game of twenty-one with some college kid who was out there shooting free throws. I’ve gotta say, even though I’d been in bed for eight months, I won the game. Somehow I hadn’t lost my outside shot, and it’s a memory Colin still jokes about. As great as that made me feel, after Colin left, I took a shower and got in bed and wanted to die all over again—worse than ever. It was so bad that when my mother had to leave the house the next day, she called one of my uncles to come over and keep an eye on me. She was able to tell when I was at my darkest, even though she was powerless to stop it. Of all the friends in my life, Colin Quinn was my savior. He kept calling, even when I wouldn’t take his calls. He did what my closest family members did, from my uncles to the cousins I consider my closest friends—he never deserted me.

  Around this time my hero, Bruce Springsteen, called me too. He and I had met at a funeral of a mutual friend who’d died of a heroin overdose five months before. At the funeral I got a moment to talk to Bruce because I was supposed to be clean at the time—though I wasn’t—and I told Bruce in the ten minutes we spoke that I had a lot of the same issues as the deceased and that I was trying my best to work them out. He wished me well and we shared some stories about the kid who had died, who really was the sweetest guy. I miss him a lot.

  I’d had no contact with Springsteen since, until my mother came into my room one night and in the same way she used to tell me my friends were at the door asking if I could come out and play stickball when I was twelve, she said, “Bruce Springsteen is on the phone for you.”

  I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Bruce had heard about what had happened, and he’d actually called—twice! The first time my mother didn’t wake me up!

  “Well, just call him back,” she said.

  “Ma, that’s not how it works,” I said. “You don’t call someone like that back. You wait for them to call you. I mean, he didn’t leave a number, did he?”

  “No, but it’s on the Caller ID.”

  “Ma, no, believe me, I can’t do that. There’s an unspoken rule—you wait for the famous person to call you. They do it when they have the time; you don’t call them back.”

  Anyway, the second time Bruce called, we ended up speaking for over an hour and he couldn’t have been cooler.

  “I’m thinking about you, just want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, you know,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys who have gone through what you’re dealing with and you can reach out and get help from a lot of people. There’s a lot of good people out there that can help you.”

  I asked Bruce what he was doing at the time and he said he was home writing new music (which would become the amazing album Wrecking Ball) and then he told me how he’d taken his fifteen-year-old son to a concert the night before, because the kid had wanted to see some new rock band whose name I’m forgetting.

  “And you know, Artie, I got him backstage at his first non-Daddy rock concert and he was so impressed I could do that,” Bruce said.

  As deep into my own hole as I was I still appreciated the surreal gift of that phone call, except for the fact that I was forty-three and living with my mother. To be sitting in that bedroom in central Jersey and have my mom come in and say that Bruce Springsteen was on the phone helped me in such a profound way I can barely express it. I was sixteen when Born in the U.S.A. came out and he was instantly my hero, as he is today. To be there at forty-three getting a call that sincere fr
om him was an insanely amazing moment and I remember thinking how much I hoped I lived long enough to be able to thank him in person for it one day. It was the first time I’d thought about living for something in months. Bruce was so genuinely concerned that I wasn’t sure what I had ever done in life to deserve such earnest attention from one of my heroes. He ended the conversation by giving me his number and telling me that I could call him anytime. The next morning I woke up feeling lighter, thinking about just how unpredictable my life is. Then I thought about how funny it would be if I started calling him every day, saying things like, “Hey, Bruce, Artie here, do you want to play volleyball today?” or “Dude, what are you doing? Let’s get ice cream!”

  ————

  In September 2010, Greg Giraldo died, and when I heard the news it sent me into a deeper depression because I admired and liked Greg very much. I heard this at a time when I actually had been making some headway, but I was fragile and that news sent me into a tailspin. Greg Giraldo was a great comedian, plain and simple, and saddest of all, he was on the cusp of becoming recognized for his talent when he lost his fight with drugs and alcohol. Greg’s stand-up was an extension of who he was, which was an acerbic, insanely smart comic who had great observations about life and everything in it. Like every great comic he could also be insanely mean in a funny way. Comics are one of two things: they’re either funny when they whine or they’re funny when they’re mean. Jerry Seinfeld is basically a guy who bitches about shit, but he’s funny when he does it. Greg, and I mean this in the best way, was at his best when he was mean and scathing. And I enjoyed his company immensely, because the conversation was always just perfect.

  Greg made a name for himself on Comedy Central’s roasts because Greg, more than anyone else I knew, was amazing at taking someone down to nothing with just one line. And nowhere did I get a better exhibition of this than when he and I both took part in the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner in 2006.

  I also knew firsthand that Greg and I shared the same enthusiasm for drugs and had the same brand of dark self-deprecation inside us because we’d partied together. We’d get high, we’d get wasted, and every time we did, at some point in the night we’d start talking about how fucked up we were and how we hated it. We’d talk about how we wanted to get clean because both of us knew we had to. We weren’t talking about it only as a path to improving our careers, and I know we never mentioned it (God forbid!) as the obvious improvement it would be to our health. No, both of us realized very clearly that we were so far gone that getting clean was the only way we’d stay alive. Greg had a wife and children and he spoke of them in the highest regard, never as a burden or a nag the way so many guys with and without problems like ours do. Greg loved his family, he truly did, just as he knew that his habit would eventually cause him to lose them. I couldn’t relate to how he felt because I don’t have anyone in my life and I’m lucky enough that I never had any accidental kids, but I’ve put more than a few very nice girls who made the grave mistake of getting seriously involved with me through hell, so I could appreciate the guilt he felt for hurting his wife and children with his behavior.

  Giraldo and I traveled together to that Shatner roast, and it’s a flight I’ll never forget, first of all because I wasn’t too fucked up to forget, and second of all because for the first time I had to take care of someone on a level that I’d never had to before. Sure, I’d gotten friends home before but this was different—I was holding this guy’s hand, keeping him from the abyss on a minute-to-minute basis. Let me just say very clearly that I’m not judging at all, nor was I then. It was simple: I was the one taking care of someone too fucked up to handle themselves, which was something I could relate to pretty well, having been that guy so many times myself. That day I finally got a taste of what I’d put so many people, from my castmates at MADtv, to my family, to my girlfriends, through.

  Greg and I were booked on a first-class flight from JFK to LAX on a Saturday, the day before the taping. I got to the airport nice and early and was enjoying a cocktail in the club lounge of whatever airline it was. I wasn’t sober at the time, in fact I had a pocket full of Vicodin, but I was nowhere near the depths and darkness that lay in store for me. This was the same year I played Carnegie Hall and did Beer League, so I was holding things together relatively well, still fooling the people in my life most of the time (or so I thought). I mean, no one considered me an angel, but I’m pretty sure they had no idea just how serious my intake was shaping up to be. Put it this way, by 2006, I never got on an airplane sober. I was in training for my crash and burn.

  That day I was sipping a Jack and water about half an hour before boarding time when Giraldo barreled in like a tornado out of west Kansas. The guy’s energy was crazy; he couldn’t stand still, he was nearly spinning in place, all jacked up and totally manic. He was moving so frantically that everyone else in the lounge walking or talking at a normal pace looked like statues compared to him. His eyes darted around in every direction until he zeroed in on me and he basically ran over to where I was sitting.

  “Art!” he said. “Art, I fucked up. I fell off the wagon and my wife is pissed.”

  “Greg, it’s okay, calm down,” I said.

  “No, Art, you don’t understand. I’m really fucked up and anxious. I’ve been up all night partying. . . . I don’t think I can do this, man. I don’t think I’m gonna make it through this flight. I don’t think I can get on that fucking plane, Art.”

  I had a pocket full of Vicodin, which, being a painkiller, takes all your pain away, but it also has that opiate quality that gives you a sense of well-being, even when you have no reason at all to feel that way.

  “Dude, c’mon, sit down for a minute,” I said. “You’ve got to get on this flight, so you’ve got to try to relax. If you don’t go out there and do this you’ll fuck up your whole career. I’m gonna help you. Here, take a couple of Vicodin. These will calm you down.”

  The poor guy’s eyes were so wild. “I’ll try, man,” he said. “But I don’t know.”

  The pills numbed him out enough to get him sitting down and I kept him talking so by the time they were doing last call for the flight, Greg was well behaved enough to get on board. Now I only gave him Vicodin, but when he told the story on Pete Dominick’s Sirius radio show not too long afterward, Greg insisted that I gave him Ecstasy. I wish! Both of us would have been much more cheerful if I’d had a pocket full of that! We sat next to each other in first class and basically I held Greg’s hand for the entire six-hour flight because the Vicodin I kept handing him may have kept him from getting out of his seat, but the guy was still a raw nerve, just pure anxiety. When he had to go to the bathroom I went with him and waited outside because I was worried that he’d get claustrophobic in there and freak out. Thanks to me we made it to LA without incident, but I have to be honest: just short of diapers and a bottle, I took care of the guy as if he were a baby. You know what? He couldn’t have had a better chaperone because I’ve been that baby more times than I care to remember (and even more that I don’t remember). I was paying a karmic debt to all of those who had done the same for me and I was happy to do so, because I knew what someone in his mind state of mind needed.

  Like I said, when Greg told this story he claimed that I had given him Ecstasy, and here’s further proof that he was wrong: the two of us sat through Alex and Emma, the worst movie of Kate Hudson’s career, with no problem. If we were on Ecstasy we would have loved it, but we didn’t. We hated it, we just didn’t care enough to look away. That’s what painkillers like Vicodin do: they make you lazy and complacent enough to let crap like that wash over you, even when all you’d have to do to avoid it is just look away.

  We had a pretty tight schedule to keep when we landed, the first stop being rehearsal at CBS Studios. A car took us there straight from the airport, and since Greg was still pretty touch-and-go, I made sure I stayed close to him during the run-through. We were lucky enough to end up standing next to Farrah Faw
cett (who was still a grade-A fox, by the way!), and I remember Greg freaking out about that, like, every five minutes.

  “Art, she’s an Angel,” he kept whispering in my ear. “She is one of Charlie’s Angels. Artie, look at her! You remember that poster, right?”

  “Yeah, man, of course, keep it down.”

  “The one with the mesh bathing suit?”

  “Greg, yeah, I remember. I had one. Be cool, man.”

  “She’s still fucking hot.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  I got him through the proceedings and I’m pretty sure Farrah, rest in peace, didn’t hear us recalling all of our adolescent fantasies that involved her. When rehearsal ended I got Greg to the hotel, up to his room, and into his bed without a problem. I didn’t see him until the next day at the studio, and by then he seemed fine.

  “Artie, thank you so much,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough. I really can’t. You saved my ass. I fucked up, but it would have been so much worse if I didn’t get here and do this.”