Crash and Burn

by Lange, Artie

  I figured I’d missed my chance to chat with Bruce, but after the show, Amy Lofgren, who was sitting near me, invited me to the band’s after-party at the Four Seasons. She said the whole band would be there and Bruce would be too, since he had his mother and his in-laws in town for the show. I was missing Adrienne bad, but I had to go. I chose to ignore what was going on between us because I’d probably never get a chance like this again. I left my friends behind and went off on my own. It took me an hour to hail a cab to take me over there because it was chaos outside of the arena, but I did it and I’m glad I did. I was escorted into the bar, where the band was hanging out and Nils greeted me. As I was walking in, Ryan Seacrest was walking out. Fuck him.

  The whole band was there, including Bruce, who was sitting quietly chatting and laughing with his mother. It was such a great hang, just talking about music and life with Nils and Amy. I also talked to “Mighty” Max Weinberg at length, as well as his wife and daughter. For a Springsteen fan like me it was seventh heaven. Nothing else in my life mattered just then. An unexpected bonus was meeting NBC anchor Brian Williams, who is really cool, really funny, and was a great guy to talk to.

  The evening couldn’t have been better for me, just sitting there by the bar drinking water (at that point), chatting with all of these people that meant so much to me and made music that has been my life’s sound track since my teens. I didn’t think for a second I’d get a moment with Bruce, and it didn’t matter to me: I was having the time of my life. I couldn’t believe it when, over Amy Lofgren’s shoulder, I saw Bruce get up from his table and walk toward us. Surely he was just getting a drink? No, I was this lucky—he was coming to talk to me. He tapped Amy on the shoulder, pointed at yours truly, and said, “Excuse me, Amy, I wanna talk to this guy.” He shook my hand, asked how I was doing, and I got that chance to let him know just how much his call, his concern, and his words meant to me.

  “Bruce, I just want you to know that your phone call saved my life. It really did. I’m out of hell now. Thank you, man.”

  He didn’t say a word; he just gave me a hug.

  “That’s great news, Artie. I’m glad you’re here.”

  We talked for a while and had a few laughs and I asked him something I’ve always wondered about, because in my small way I can relate, though he’s on such another level. I asked him how he came down from performing.

  “Yeah, that can be the hard part,” he said, grinning a little. “After all that it’s tough to relax.”

  After a while Bruce said his good-byes, and the last thing he said to me was this: “Much good fortune.” What a cool way to say farewell. Bruce escorted his mother to the elevators, and watching that guy, arguably the greatest American rock star we have, do something so humble and natural warmed my heart. Of all the roads a rock star can take, of all the horrible self-indulgent places they can end up, of all the pitfalls that can take them too early, from Hendrix to Cobain, seeing Bruce Springsteen, age sixty-three, chivalrously walk his mother, who is in her eighties, to her room in the Four Seasons in Paris did my heart good. It made me want to stick around long enough to do the same with my ma one day.

  Riding back to the hotel I was on cloud nine. And I can hear some of you fans of mine snickering as you read this. Yeah, I get it, I’m being corny. I’m a forty-four-year-old sappy sentimental loser. I know comedians are supposed to be cynical and sarcastic above all, and I agree with you. But also, I have this to say: Fuck you. Really, go fuck yourselves. No human with a heart and conscience can be that way all the time. Everyone must allow themselves to be romantic, at least about a few things in life. You get to choose what they are, and for me the music of Bruce Springsteen is one of them. It’s helped save my life and hopefully my soul. I’ll probably not be able to let you guys know if that happened, but if I can I will.

  When I was eleven, I was hanging out at my cousin Jeff’s house because to me at that time in my life, Jeff was the coolest person in the world. I wanted to be exactly like him. I was waiting in his room while he took a shower or something when his mom, my aunt Jo (who is simply one of the greatest human beings of all time), came in to clean up. She was dusting off a photo of a thin guy with long hair, sunglasses, and a guitar. That guy, whoever he was, looked to me like the only guy I’d ever seen who was probably cooler than Jeff.

  “Aunt Jo? Who is that?”

  “Artie, who’s that?” she said incredulously. “That’s the Boss!”

  ————

  By the time I got back to my room, it was close to seven a.m. I found Adrienne, the only other thing I’m romantic about in this life, lying there, awake and upset. Actually she was half-asleep, half-crying, and completely mad at me. I’ve come to realize that it’s possible to be too in love with someone. That state of mind probably means different things to different people, but completely sober, in a foreign country, I discovered exactly what it means to me. I became controlling, I became obsessed, and I found out how destructive those emotions can be. We didn’t make up completely, but we tried our best and things remained tense for the next few days as we went sightseeing with our friends.

  One night Adrienne wasn’t with me. Our group was supposed to go out together, but I didn’t follow that plan. I decided to go to the hotel and take a nap, so she had dinner with my cowriter, Anthony, and the plan was for me to meet them afterward when I woke up. But I didn’t take a nap; in a crazy, angry, resentful state I got some booze and started drinking in the room, hard, the way I used to when I had nothing to lose and didn’t care about shit. I must have downed a bottle of vodka in half an hour and was in a blackout state before I knew it. And then I got nutty enough to accuse her of cheating on me with Anthony, which could not be further from the truth. I was irrational.

  I took a cab to where we were all going to meet, which was a burlesque show in the heart of Paris. When I got there I stood outside listening to music, screaming the lyrics at confused French passersby on the street. I wanted to see Adrienne immediately and I started screaming that. I started screaming that I hated my friend Anthony and I wouldn’t talk to him when he came over to me to try and calm me down. Nothing I was saying made sense. I ran around the street, I ran at oncoming traffic, I ducked into an underground parking garage, and I would not listen to reason no matter who was talking. My friend Dan came down and he and Anthony both tried everything they could to get me out of harm’s way, but it was no use. I don’t know what I expected to happen at that point. All I wanted was for Adrienne to talk to me, but I was acting so insane that she was too terrified to come out of the theater.

  She had every right to be scared; I was in a blind rage, standing in the street, harassing people, hoping a car would hit me, and yelling at two of my best friends as they tried to save me. I tore off my shirt at one point, threw it at someone, and began to walk directly at oncoming cars. The street was wide, with traffic going both ways, but there weren’t streetlights, so it’s a miracle that I wasn’t hit. At one point I lay down in the middle of the road, with my arms and legs spread, as cars passed on both sides of me, hoping one would run me over. My friends Dan and Anthony risked their lives, standing on either side of me, directing traffic away from me on a dark, busy Paris street. I found all of this out later, of course, because I don’t remember it. At the time I hated them both and I told them so in every possible way I could think of. I told them to leave me. I told them I wanted to be hit and that I hated them. At one point I even kicked Dan in the chest, nearly sending him into an oncoming car. He bumped the side of it but thankfully he didn’t get hurt. Those two were just trying to keep me from getting killed or arrested, and they did a pretty good job from what I understand, but there was no end to my spiral by that point. It was just a matter of time before the authorities got involved because I had become a spectacle.

  The French police arrived, the gendarmes, which aren’t your average beat cops. They carry submachine guns like a paramilitary unit, so when they show up, things change pretty quickly. B
y that time I’d stopped responding to my friends altogether apart from accusing them of things that made no sense and insisting that someone bring me Adrienne. I was shirtless, lying on my back in the center of a busy street, and it had begun to rain, so this was just a mess. Adrienne was inside the theater still, scared out of her mind, hiding in there with the managers.

  I kept yelling that I didn’t want Dan or Anthony anywhere near me because I hated them, even as they talked to the gendarmes, begging them not to take me to jail. It took two gendarmes plus my two friends lifting me up by my arms and legs to drag me out of the street and harm’s way, into the gutter on the side of the road. As they put me down, I took a wild roundhouse swing at one of the officers. Let me tell you something, as different as Europe and the rest of the world is from America, certain rules remain the same. I’ve now taken a swing at a cop in LA, New York, New Jersey, Miami, and Paris, France, so I’m somewhat of an expert on this: it is NEVER a good idea. Trust me, if you swing at a cop it’s not going to work out well for you. It should be at the top of everyone’s list of worst ideas to ever do, wherever you’re from and wherever you are. Swinging at a cop eliminates every other alternative they have to taking you in. So that’s what happened. There was no longer anything my friends could do, once the gendarmes slapped the cuffs on me. They pulled me up out of the gutter, sat me down on the curb, and kept me subdued until the paddy wagon showed up. It was my first international arrest, which, in a sick way, is somewhat of an achievement that I have no right to be proud of.

  Once I was carted off, Adrienne emerged from the theater and my friends escorted her back to the hotel. Despite all the names I called them and how much I told them I hated them, Dan and Anthony did everything they could to help me out. They went to bat for me with the gendarmes, which is probably why the cops decided that if I was only drunk and not on drugs, that they’d let me sleep it off and release me without charge. The only problem was that apparently I kept insisting that I was on drugs. Every time my friends would say, in their best French, that I’d had a fight with my girlfriend and was just very drunk, I’d yell in English that I fucking hated them and that they were wrong because I was drunk and on all kinds of pills. That wasn’t true at all, I was just very, very drunk.

  The gendarmes got to the bottom of it by making me pee in a cup at the jail and once they learned that I was clean of all narcotics they kept their promise and let me sleep it off. I have to say that the Parisian authorities were fantastic, just very calm, very professional, and for very no-nonsense law enforcement officers, they were very compassionate. Their American counterparts should take note. I had a cell mate who looked like Casey Stengel when he was ninety-two, who was lying with his head on the toilet, talking nonstop all night. He sounded like a maniac speaking in tongues, but in French. The only thing I could understand, because he said it over and over, was “la plume” which is some kind of bias of mine. When someone speaks French at me, to me, or near me, I only hear “la plume,” which I’ve come to discover means “pen.” So whatever this scary old guy was yelling about, to me it was only pens. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I called a guard over and told him that the guy belonged in a psych ward.

  “Monsieur, come here, read this,” the guard said.

  “I can’t read French,” I said. “You have to tell me what it means.”

  “This means that you are in the psych ward.”

  That was a wake-up call, and another first—a foreign psych ward. So the old guy belonged there, but thank God he was old and lacking in stamina: he fell asleep in an hour or so, after which I managed to doze off for a while too. I woke up around seven a.m. And what scared me more than the guy’s crazy voice the night before was the fact that he was still comfortably asleep, with his head pretty much inside the toilet bowl. Put it this way, I had to move him in order to take a piss. Even then the guy didn’t wake up; he just let me move him over a bit. I know I sprayed urine on him, but I can’t imagine he cared. I just hope that weirdo is doing okay, wherever he is.

  At that point the guard came over and decided I was sober enough to get the hell out of there, so they gave me back my possessions and signed me out. I wasn’t charged with anything and that was that. Once again, the French police are wonderful people. As I mentioned, I threw my shirt at a car or a person sometime the night before, so I had no choice but to wear what anyone would call a sure sign of trouble: the blue plastic hospital-style smock they’d given me the night before. It was the kind that ties in the back, pretty much leaving you hanging out in the wind, especially if you’re my size. Basically I looked like an escaped mental patient (something I also know quite a bit about) which didn’t help me any when it came time to hail a cab.

  The sun was coming up by then and I started walking as bits and pieces of the night before came back to me, none of them good. The jail was just off the Champs-Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe, smack in the center of a beautiful, busy tourist destination in Paris. There was no getting lost in the crowd or going about my business unnoticed on a Wednesday morning at seven a.m., being an obese American in a blue smock who spoke no French. I wandered, trying to get any cab I saw to stop for me. After about an hour I found a cabbie willing to take me, who coincidentally looked exactly like Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent. I mispronounced my hotel’s name, but she was patient and cool, and got me where I needed to go, God bless her.

  I texted Anthony to tell him that I’d just gotten out of jail as I pulled up to the hotel. He and Dan had taken Adrienne to get her things out of our room because she wanted to move to another hotel, and I can’t blame her for that. But I got out earlier than anyone expected and showed up while they were still there waiting for her to finish packing. I got up to the room and found the two of them standing there, but what I didn’t realize was that Adrienne was in the room too, hiding behind the door. I barged in like a maniac and went straight to the bathroom and when I did, she ran out and went to Dan’s room. I literally just missed her because I came out a minute later and told Anthony and Dan to get the fuck out of my room, out of my life, and to go to hell, because I hadn’t sobered up enough to be rational. I told them they were “traitors,” “liars,” I told them they were fired, crazy shit like that. All I cared about was being alone and taking a shower. That’s the first thing you do when you get out of jail, by the way, you take a nice hot shower. It’s the only way to get the stink off.

  I was confused, I was angry, and that anger hadn’t gone away during my evening in jail. I wanted to see Adrienne just as badly as I’d wanted to see her when I was drunk, playing chicken with Peugeots, the night before. But I’d scared her so bad that she’d checked into another hotel, and since I’d been acting like a homicidal maniac, neither she nor my friends thought it was a good idea for me to know where she was on the off chance that I’d show up and storm the walls to get to her room if she wouldn’t see me. I found out later that Anthony and Dan even refused to let Adrienne tell them the name of her new hotel because they didn’t want to know. They’d had enough of our drama, for one thing, but more importantly, they wanted to be sure the two of us would stay apart until I calmed down. They also didn’t want to have to lie to me; it was just better for everyone if they didn’t know. Adrienne knew how to find them if she needed to and when she was ready to talk to me she would—that’s how they left it. This may come as a shock, but in my mental state, drunk or not (and I did continue to drink immediately after my shower), I didn’t believe my two friends at all. I was convinced that they knew where she was and I got more belligerent about it at every opportunity. I was pissed as hell and believed that the entire world, starting with them, was against me. I just had to see Adrienne so badly that I was going to scream her name from the balcony of the room until someone brought her to me.

  There’s one thing I need to say about Adrienne: I love her to death, but I don’t think any woman overpacks more than she does. Listen, all women pack a lot of shit, but this girl is ridiculous. Left
to her own devices she will pack three suitcases for a two-day trip to the beach where she’ll only end up wearing one bikini. I’m all for being prepared, but she takes it to another level. She’s got this one bag she takes everywhere with her (because it could, literally, fit everything the average family of four might take with them on vacation), and that’s what she had in our room in Paris. This might sound crazy but looking back I’m not surprised at all that the couple hours I spent in the drunk tank weren’t enough time for her to get her shit packed back into her bag and out of the room. A midget could live in her bag; it’s like a studio apartment.

  Anyway, when I came in and Adrienne ran out to Dan’s room, there was no way she could have snuck out and taken her bag, so she left it behind. And there was no way I was going to let Dan take it down to his room, because that bag was the only leverage I had to get to see her. I was so angry that as I sat there all alone, I began to stare at her bag and just get more and more pissed off. I called Dan’s room and started asking him, calmly at first, where Adrienne was. When he couldn’t tell me because he said, for probably the tenth time, that he really didn’t know what hotel she’d moved to, I just started yelling. Eventually I told him to fuck off and hung up. I called Anthony, insisting he knew where she was and started yelling at him to tell me, but it was no use because he didn’t know either. I called him a bunch of names and threatened his life, and then hung up on him too.