Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  Rebuilding myself from the mind up was a slow process, but I kept at it, because something had changed in me and I no longer wanted to be down there in that deluxe pit I’d spent so long building. For once I got with the program once I was out of the institution: I started going to meetings every day, first just sitting in the back, trying to be invisible, but after a while I got comfortable and eventually I participated. Around the same time I started reaching out to the people who had been there for me every step of the way during the time I’d spent hidden away from the world. I made a few social plans to see them and just talking about life again was like achieving something new to me because I hadn’t done anything like that in what felt like a century. I also couldn’t remember the last time I just hung out with people and not been on drugs or drunk or a combination of the two. This was more than a second chance: it was a rebirth.

  Nick DiPaolo was one of the guys who’d called me every week, no matter what, even when I didn’t call him back multiple times. One day in late June 2011, just after I returned home I called him to shoot the shit and he had unbelievable news.

  “Art, I can’t believe you’re calling me right now,” he said. “I just got off the phone with a guy named Chris Crane, who is an executive at DirecTV.”

  “Okay, that’s great, man.”

  “They put radio shows on the air now, like the Dan Patrick show, and they want me to take over for a guy named Tony Bruno and do a test show with a partner. It would be a late-night sports comedy radio show. . . . Would you want to do that with me?”

  “This really just happened?” I asked.

  “I literally just hung up the phone, no shit.”

  It was another sign from God, if you ask me. “Really? That’s incredible. I’m definitely interested, man. And, well, you know I’m available.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that,” he said.

  I’d just found out officially from Gary Dell’Abate, but not too long before, just after Howard’s new Sirius deal was announced in March 2012, he told Rolling Stone that I’d not be returning to the show. It was for all the right reasons too: Howard loved me and wished me the best but he was too worried to have me back. He’d said that the Artie years were over and that fans had to get that idea through their heads. It was clear that he’d support me in whatever I did (and he sure has), but I couldn’t return to the show. I’d been listening one morning that week and even heard Howard say the same thing to a guy who called in. Howard’s instincts were right; the show wouldn’t have been a good environment for me to return to at all. It was coming from a really good place because Howard genuinely wanted me to be okay. I’m not going to lie, I’d held on to a glimmer of hope that I’d return and work with all of my friends there, but looking back now, I’m glad I didn’t get the chance, especially then. Howard was right, I wasn’t ready for that—it was time for everybody, including me, to move on.

  One door closed as another one opened, because there was Nick, a guy I love, with an opportunity for me to do something completely new. It was sports, it was comedy—and it wasn’t happening at six a.m.! It was a dream come true for me. Nick set up a lunch with Chris Crane; James Crittenden, another DirecTV executive; and my agent, Tony Burton, who works for Howard’s agent, Don Buchwald. We all had a great lunch and by the end of it the DirecTV guys agreed to let Nick and me do a test show on July 6, 2011. This was just a month after I’d gotten clean and left Ambrosia, so the timing was crazy, but I felt strong and I knew I had a solid support group around me. I even felt fine enough to do a few unannounced sets at the Comedy Cellar, because through rehab and AA I’d started putting together some stand-up routines based on the hell I’d managed to live through.

  When we did the test show, we didn’t tell anyone I’d be on the air with Nick—no mention of it on the show’s website or anywhere else. I just went live with him when the ON AIR light when on. Word spread fast, much faster than I would have ever guessed, and I’m still incredibly touched by this: within ten minutes I was trending worldwide on Twitter. Reading all of those comments from excited fans really moved me. I hadn’t been forgotten; people cared and there were a lot of people out there who wanted to hear what I had to say. The phone lines lit up like crazy when we started taking calls, all of them from people telling me how happy they were that I was alive and how great it was to hear me doing live radio again. Nick and I had fun, we really did. We were funny, we picked on each other—having a built-in Boston vs. New York rivalry doesn’t hurt—and the show was a success. The executives loved it too, and took an edited sample of it to their board of directors in LA, who then decided to let us have a regular slot from ten p.m. to one a.m. every weeknight.

  This was incredibly exciting and for me proof that the changes I was making in AA were having an effect at every level of my life. Around the same time I got back in touch with my cowriter on Too Fat to Fish and this book, the great Anthony Bozza, and we got to work on what you are now reading. Anthony and I started getting together and going over preliminary notes and just talking, because I wasn’t sure I could actually do this book. I didn’t know if I could put all of these experiences out there but in time, as the two of us spent more time together, slowly, I realized I could. I knew that this book would be the most personal and honest thing I’d ever do, and being that vulnerable scared me, but what drove me on was the thought that if sharing my stories helped even just one person avoid going through what I had and inspired them to make some changes in their life then it was all worth it.

  My whole team was still there for me: my manager, Dave Becky; my stand-up agent, Rich Super; my agent, Tony Burton; my great lawyer, Jared Levine. Everyone stuck with me through those two years of hell. I found that the stand-up world was there too, ready to embrace me when I returned. Letterman called almost immediately. Piers Morgan, all these different talk shows wanted to book me. I was a guest of both Jimmys: Kimmel and Fallon, who in my opinion are a new generation’s version of Letterman and Leno. When the radio show went on the air and became a reality, Conan O’Brien called and they had me back on. It wasn’t all good news, though, because I’d destroyed relationships too. Some people fell by the wayside because of my bullshit and I don’t blame them for it. If there’s one thing you can say about heroin without hesitation it’s that it takes away a lot, from money to belongings to friends, but a lot of amazing people stuck with me, including my cowriter, who is sitting here right now. And I’m very happy to be here working with him again.

  ————

  When we got off the air at the end of our trial show I went for a walk, because I wanted to savor how great I was feeling before heading home. I walked uptown, taking in all the lights and buildings. It was about 1:30 a.m. when I stopped in front of Radio City Music Hall, just a few blocks from the studio where we did the show, and my phone rang. I had already been thinking about her, standing where I was, but the last name I expected to see on my Caller ID was ADRIENNE, my old girlfriend’s. Drugs had ruined the two of us the way they’d ruined everything else in my life, and I’d realized since I’d gotten sober that it was all my fault things had ended so horribly. The girl had tried; she thought she could handle hurricane Artie, but he was too much for her.

  “Adrienne, guess where I’m standing right now,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Right in front of Radio City, the exact spot where I picked you up for our first date. Can you believe that?”

  It was the first time I’d talked to her in over a year; she’d contacted me once or twice while I was caught in the doldrums and barely able to muster a hello, so we hadn’t really talked. That night she’d heard about the show and she’d tuned in to the last hour, then decided to call me.

  “I just heard you on the radio,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re doing so well . . . you sounded great! I’m so happy for you. I was up studying and you just popped into my mind. I decided to Google you and saw you were live on the radio, so I tuned in and listened.”

 
“And you called me right now as I’m standing in front of Radio City. See, I told you we’re like When Harry Met Sally.”

  Adrienne was living at home with her parents at the time, taking classes at a college because she wanted to try to get into medical school but needed a bunch of science and premed credits before she could apply. That was how we reconnected, and two days later she came to my house where we had a very honest, long-overdue talk. I got the chance to tell her, from the bottom of my heart, how sorry I was for dragging her into my chaos. It was what she needed to hear, because that rekindled our relationship, a romance that was influential in me getting better from there on out.

  Later that month, Nick and I flew to LA to meet our new bosses, Chris Long and Derek Chang, who are both head honchos at DirecTV, and they gave us the offical green light—generous salaries, a good budget, everything, just like that. The news was picked up by TMZ and all the entertainment blogs. I was just so happy to have my mother see that I was really back on my feet and out in the world. Her son wasn’t going to end up another casualty. It was the best I could do, because I can’t give her back all the hours she spent taking care of me instead of enjoying the golden years of her life. I’ll never forgive myself for that, but I’ll do everything I can to make her proud.

  The first official Nick and Artie Show debuted at 10 p.m. on October 3, 2011, and we found ourselves a devoted audience very quickly—again, something I understand, but it still happily surprised the fuck out of me. It makes sense if you think about it, because sports fans like talk radio—the devoted like to listen to people talking about sports when there aren’t any sports to watch—but until we came along, there weren’t any late-night sports radio shows that were actually entertaining. There are almost no late-night sports shows to speak of, and all of the entertaining ones are on in the morning or during the afternoon rush hour drive time. Creating a late-night version of a talk show with sports had never been done. Put it this way, any guy that likes to catch SportsCenter at two a.m. is definitely going to be up for listening to the kind of sports radio on acid that Nick and I serve up every weeknight. The numbers proved it too: we did so well that after just a couple of months DirecTV put plans in motion to begin televising us. They rented a 6,500-square-foot space in TriBeCa and had the guys who do the show Man Caves build us our dream set. The thing has a full kitchen, a pool table that converts to a Ping Pong table, couches everywhere, air hockey, a functional batting cage, a basketball pop-a-shot, and a photo booth. They even let us put whatever we want on the wall and we took that to the limit. Nick had the producers commission an homage of the famous painting of dogs playing poker, this one featuring Michael Vick. For my part I asked for a photo of O. J. Simpson photoshopped next to a shot of Peyton Manning with the caption: “O. J. Simpson and a white Bronco.” And God bless them, they let us have both. Our set is amazing, so great that basically if things get real bad at home, Nick and I can shack up there if we need to. That’s not been necessary so far, but I’m not counting it out.

  Since the start of the show everything in my life has been going great. I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I’ve kept myself in line for the most part. My stand-up career is better than ever and I’ve gotten a new beginning in radio, which is an entertainment medium I really do enjoy. I’d say the only thing I need to do is lose about 100 pounds, and it really sucks that they don’t make a pill for that. Listen, I know it’s been decades since I’ve seen my fighting weight, but I do have an excuse right now. When you leave rehab they tell you to do anything you need to do to not get high. They say “eat whatever you want, have as much sex as you want with whomever you want, smoke as many cigarettes as you want, drink all the coffee you want—do whatever it takes to stay off drugs and booze.” I had smoking down and I’m not a huge coffee guy, so that left food and sex, and since food was a lot more available to me than sex when I first got out, I went with that.

  I ate whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, which turned out to be enough to feed medium-sized countries. I’m not happy about the weight I’ve gained, but if I had to do it to get where I am, then it’s fine with me. I feel good and that’s the only thing that matters. And I’m not saying I know better than AA, but if anyone out there reading this likes food as much as I do and is freshly sober, you might want to try something I wish I’d thought of when they told me to do whatever I wanted. See, if they’d suggested combining the things, I would be in a whole different place. If they’d said, “Eat as much as you like, have sex as much as you like, and if you really like food, have sex with food as much as you like,” that would have changed things for me. I love food, so I would have tried it—I would have fucked a pancake. And fucking it would have kept me from eating it. Because I know my problems, and food fucking isn’t one of them. That’s not the kind of behavior I could live with, so if it happened, even once, I’d make some changes and never do it again. Let’s face it, I’ve gotten pretty desperate, but even I wouldn’t eat a pancake I’d fucked, would you?

  ————

  As I’ve already mentioned, I’m the type of guy who’s watched every single Super Bowl since I was ten years old. The first I saw was 1978, when the Cowboys beat the Broncos. I got started early gambling too, because I even bet on that first game: I took the Broncos over the Cowboys and I should have learned my lesson then because the Cowboys killed them. My buddy Mike Ciccone, also ten years old at the time, took me for fifty cents on that game, which is something he enjoys reminding me of to this day. I can tell you who has won every single Super Bowl since then, and on a good day I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to tell you who the MVPs were too. I have forgotten so much thanks to drugs and just getting older, but sports stats like these are literally a part of my brain and they’ll never be forgotten. The Super Bowl is a big deal to me, which made the fact that I’d watched two in a row in institutions even more depressing. The first one I saw on a psych ward and the other one (well, half of it) from my bed in rehab, trying to ignore my roommate yelling, mad as hell, about the shampoo they’d taken from him when he’d been admitted because it had alcohol in it.

  “They fucking think I’m gonna drink fucking SHAMPOO?” he kept saying. “What the fuck is that? They think I’m so desperate for booze that I’ll drink my fucking shampoo? I respect myself, you motherfucking fucks! Who drinks shampoo?”

  Apparently he didn’t, but what I found out in rehab was that some people really do drink their shampoo, and from what I hear, Salon Selectives Level Six packs quite the buzz. Look, I’ve been pretty fucked up, but I’ve never been so fucked up that I’ve ever considered doing a shot of Prell. It just seemed so stupid and Nazi-like for them to take my shampoo, so I protested even when they explained why they needed to.

  “But you can’t take that. I need that, because I don’t have manageable hair. The alcohol is the only thing that manages it.”

  “Well, I’m afraid—” the orderly said, politely taking me seriously.

  “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I said. “I never wash my hair or any other part of my body. I don’t believe in it. All of the products in my bag are just here for show. So when is the cavity search?”

  After two years of what any sane person would call less than favorable Super Bowl viewing circumstances, in 2010, I came back with a bang. My DirecTV show was official and getting off the ground nicely, and if you don’t know this already, DirecTV offers more NFL packages than any other network, which makes them a major player in all things football. I can’t thank Chris Crane, Jim Crittendon, and the big honcho, the one and only Chris Long, enough for taking a shot on me—I wouldn’t be here without those guys. Basically thanks to them, in 2012, I came back as a Super Bowl VIP employed by the best sports and NFL network around, which is how I ended up sitting third row on the fifty-yard line, watching the Patriots lose to the Giants. It couldn’t have been any fucking sweeter. Plus they let me play in the Celebrity Beach Bowl, which is a touch football game the network televises featuring re
tired NFL guys, a few players, commentators, actors who like football, and lucky losers like me. It’s a pretty fun event, and I’m not just saying that because they employ me; I’d watched it the three previous years they’d done it. Unlike the previous events in places like Miami, since Indiana is completely landlocked, my Beach Bowl debut was miles away from any actual beach. The beach had to be imported, so DirecTV put up a huge tent in the middle of downtown Indianapolis and filled it with a few tons of sand carted in by truck.

  I salute them for the effort because it was insane and also proof that the guys in charge up there aren’t the types to take no for an answer. Chris Long is literally the greatest executive I’ve ever worked with and in a sea of networks like Bravo and all of those making programming solely for women, working for him and his team is like working for a team of Goodfellas. When they set their mind to something they find a way to make it happen. For example, sand had no business being in downtown Indianapolis, but there it was. The sheer fact that it was there made the characters—homeless and otherwise—that populate the area stand out even more by the way. It was a car crash, this beautiful, perfect, celebrity-driven event in a Podunk urban center so rough that you had to step over a mother with a crystal meth problem clutching her shivering child to get to the artist entrance to the artificial beach. It was a strange backdrop to a four-hour, multimillion-dollar event, which unfortunately featured Pauly D from Jersey Shore as the DJ.

  Listen, I was fresh out of my personal depression, so every cloud was gray for me, but all that aside, I stand by my impression that Indianapolis is pretty fucking depressed. It’s not where you’d ever send a friend on vacation. On the drive in from the airport, every house I passed looked like the four-hundred-square-foot shack in Gary, Indiana, where the Jacksons grew up. That place looked small on TV, but in person, that same kind of Indiana McHouse was even smaller than I imagined. All I kept thinking to myself was How the fuck did eleven Jackson kids plus two parents live there and have room to learn those routines? The Jacksons had one bathroom and eleven kids and they sang and danced and mostly all of them were involved. If they just stood in line from tallest to shortest they’d probably take up the whole living room. How the hell did they practice those dance steps? I mean, at some point while they were all sitting around trying not to step on each other did someone just say, “Okay, we have to do ABC. Everybody lend a hand, get up off what you’re sitting on, and help put all the furniture in the hall.” Four hundred square feet is some asshole’s scarf closet on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and that’s all the room they had.