Authors: Artie Lange
As I started to slide back into drugs, I tried to keep alive the only positive thing I’d found by spending as much time as I could that summer with Adrienne. After we’d been together just a month she moved in with me and came to every road gig she could, which gave us the chance to have a lot of fun out on the road. It seemed like my personal life was going well, even as the amount of opiates I was consuming on the sly became larger and larger. Still, Adrienne and I developed real feelings for each other in a very short time, and she wasn’t just there for the good times: she figured out what was going on with me and she did everything she could to help me, hoping of course that I’d get off drugs again. That was a fantasy, so the whole situation became pathetic after a while. Here was this sweet twenty-five-year-old suddenly put in charge of looking after an addict slipping back down the hill. It got to the point where my shrink put her in charge of my sleeping pills because as
much as I’ve done opiates and downers and suffered depression, somehow the side effects have been that I can never sleep. I just lie there riddled with anxiety.
I’d been going to a shrink that Howard had suggested I see for a few months and I’d really enjoyed it, to be honest. He was an older Upper East Side guy and the days I’d see him I’d walk from the
Stern Show
through Central Park up to his office. He helped me a lot because he wasn’t your typical shrink in any way. He wasn’t controlling or judgmental; he wasn’t traditional; he just talked to you and got to know you in an abstract way that I found very helpful. He got me to talk about things that I’d never talked about because he didn’t go right at them, he found a way to approach them that worked for me.
He got me to talk about my father a lot and my obsession with his death. One day he did something that helped me more than I would have thought, even though at the time it was kind of crazy: he spent twenty-five minutes reading me a novella by James Joyce called “The Dead.” The focus of the story is a guy who lost his first wife and how he was devastated without her even though he’d remarried. The guy was able to listen to a song that reminded him of her and go into his mind and basically spend time with her. He had to do this to deal with the loss and basically told his present wife that she had to deal with that and allow him that time. The shrink wanted me to do that with my dad, and I tried it, when I was sober at least. When I’d really miss him I’d lie back and relax and picture him and relive my best memories of him and it was a pleasant experience, it really was.
When I started drinking again I started lying to my shrink—he was just one more on the list—and who knows if he believed me or not. I didn’t tell him about the drugs, of course, but I did tell him how stressed I was and how it was so hard for me to sleep, so he agreed to prescribe me some sleeping pills, but like I said, only under the condition that Adrienne held on to them and handed them out to
me. She agreed to it because she was in love with me and she wanted to help. The two of us were trying to build a relationship; I was just dead set on fucking it up. Since she spent most weekdays with me and most weekends an hour or so away at her parents’ house, she’d have to hide pills around my apartment when she left in case I had an anxiety attack and my prescribed dose wasn’t enough to calm me down. As I got deeper into the opiates, this became a regular thing, because if the withdrawals didn’t have me strung out, pretty often I’d cry wolf, just because I knew there were pills in my house and I wanted to do them. Adrienne was pretty creative: she’d tape them to the backs of pictures, put them inside books, you name it.
It was about this time in my crash that my performance on the
Stern Show
slid into the shit after eight solid years. Whether buzzed or not I never seemed to lose my sense of rhythm; I knew when to talk and when not to and I was always able to bring some laughs into whatever conversation was happening with a well-placed comment. Long before I was on the show I’d been a fan, so when I got the job I promised myself that I’d never lose sight of the fact that timing was everything. As I’ve already mentioned, all of that went way the hell out the fucking window. If you want to talk about a loss of timing, all I need to say is that falling asleep, on the air, with six million people listening, became my most consistent contribution. That is when I wasn’t making nonsensical comments, interrupting Howard, or fighting with just about everyone.
One morning that sticks in my mind was the day we had Ben Stiller and Jimmy Kimmel on the show. At some point in the conversation Kimmel mentioned that he was friends with Tom Cruise and that he didn’t believe the story in
Too Fat to Fish
where I talk about how rude Tom was to me on the set of
Jerry Maguire
. Jimmy was being friendly about it, just saying it didn’t sound like Tom, but I didn’t see it that way at all. I saw it as personal attack.
“Fuck you, Jimmy,” I said. “Tom Cruise is a fucking asshole. He’s a fucking creep.”
“Calm down, Artie,” Howard said.
I didn’t calm down, of course. I kept at it to the detriment of the show and to my already sagging performance. That was the first time I really sucked, but it was far from the last.
In September Howard had to sit me down for a heart-to-heart, which he’d never had to do in my eight years on the show, no matter how crazy I’d ever gotten. He slipped me a note off the air that day and then he and our program director, Tim Sabean, cleared the studio and closed the door during a break.
“Listen, Art,” Howard said. “We don’t know if you’ve got something going on again, but you’ve not been doing your job on the air lately.”
“Howard, I’m clean,” I said. I was totally lying—I was high at the time.
“Art, if you’ve got something going on, we’ll give you time to recover,” Tim said. “Just tell us what’s going on.”
“We always had a rhythm, Art,” Howard said. “You and Robin and I were always seamless, and that was great. But now you’re sort of interrupting us and I’m worried about you. You get crazed over little things. I don’t want to drug test you because that’s none of my business, but I want you to be all right.”
“Howard, I’m clean and I’m working on myself,” I said. “I’ve gotten rid of the drugs, but I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself. I understand that.”
“I don’t want to fire you, Artie,” Howard said. “It seemed like you were doing so good. Just work on that.”
“I will, Howard, I promise.”
“Do me a favor: when we have guests in, why don’t you just not talk for a little while. Let me get things going before you comment at all.”
“Okay, man. I can do that. I’m sorry. I’ll work on it.”
Yeah, right. I just got worse and worse. As the drug use increased, so did my interruptions, because I couldn’t follow my own rule. I
was going in and out of being on and off drugs with such abandon that most mornings by this point I had no idea whether I was coming or going. I so wanted to be doing my job well that I’d jump in too much, and I was either so high or so strung out that I had horrible ADD. I’d get distracted by one detail in a conversation or an interview Howard was conducting that I’d direct the entire flow of the show toward that. And since I was in my own world, that detail was often completely irrelevant to anyone else but me. I was either in or coming out of a daze that no one else was tuned into, so I became like Frosty the Snowman when the kids put the hat on him and he says, “Happy Birthday!” which in context doesn’t make much sense. Later that year I’d find myself in my version of the greenhouse, where I’d melt, just like Frosty did. That’s what it felt like when my mother and sister found me at my very lowest point: I felt like nothing but a puddle.
————
Howard was getting really frustrated with me, because the last thing a perfectionist as busy as he is needed was my brand of unpredictable trouble on the air. Gary was in an even worse position because people in corporate started to ask him how he intended to handle me falling asleep, aggravating Howard, and missing work all the time. I’m glad I didn’t know about that; I would have made a jihad out of harassing those desk jockeys.
Gary had my back. He’d tell them, “Artie’s been with the show a decade; he’s part of the family and we’re all trying to help him through this. You’ve got to let us do it our way.”
As I got worse, the awkwardness I felt from putting people who had done right by me through this drama began to weigh on me heavily. I began to suck everywhere, which pissed me off even more: my stand-up gigs became rambling diatribes, I fell asleep at work every morning, all because I needed to get higher and higher. And
I wouldn’t stop taking on more work that did nothing but make it harder and harder for me to ever get any rest. For a guy who liked doing opiates and downers and then crashing out for hours, you’d think I’d have planned a little better.
Here’s a perfect example: I’d bought a fantastic beach house, so I planned on having a huge Fourth of July party. That house I bought for $2.5 million is now probably worth eighty grand. Anyway, this party was the last thing I needed to do, but because we’d talked about it on the show, I invited everyone, though I really didn’t need that kind of pressure. I had it catered by a local Italian chef, complete with everything. It was very lavish in every sense. It was worthy of the house, put it that way, and I’d invited my whole family, and that’s where I introduced them to Adrienne for the first time. My nieces and nephews were riding up and down in the elevator, you name it, it was a real gathering. I even sprang for a fireworks display, right there off my dock, practically in the backyard. It was really beautiful. And I was coming down, hard, off of opiates and the rest of it, with no relief in sight.
To make things worse, months before, I’d agreed to appear in a film as a favor to my friend Maria Menounos, who is best known as a host on
Extra
and
Access Hollywood
. She writes, produces, and directs movies, and she’d said she’d only need me for a day. That day happened to be July 5, which I forgot all about (of course) until that week. Maria was great; she let me postpone my day of shooting until the sixth.
I slept in on the fifth, but I didn’t want to get up at four a.m. to get to the shoot in Connecticut on time, so I drove the hour and a half to Manhattan and checked into the Mandarin Oriental, once again in a $1,500-a-night room. Adrienne went home and I told Maria to send a car at six a.m. to drive me the two hours to Connecticut. Maria is a sweetheart, but this was the last thing I wanted to do on a holiday weekend. So I locked myself in my hotel room and numbed out by
snorting heroin all night. I didn’t want to oversleep, because I was responsible, so I did the smart thing and stayed up all night. Makes sense, right? I then got up and had a healthy breakfast of Kit Kats from the mini bar, which cost around $800, and got in the town car Maria had sent, completely fucked up, with a bunch of heroin in my pocket to “get me through the day.”
I slept all the way there and when I woke up did my best to pretend that I was okay. I went through hair and makeup and gave Maria a big hug when I saw her. I met the director, who explained the scene and what they wanted from me, which was great because I hadn’t even looked at the script. My job was to play the older brother of a kid who goes on to become a serial killer, probably because of how often my character called him an asshole, which I did in every scene. I really don’t know what the fuck that movie was and I barely remember doing it, but I love Maria and I hope it worked out. I tried to learn my lines, but I was all fucked up, and there was nowhere for me to get some privacy. There were no trailers; the best they had was a spare sedan, so I climbed there and, in the heat, dozed off in the middle of “rehearsing.”
After a fourteen-hour shoot, the car took me back to the Mandarin Oriental, where I crashed for another night because I was too fucked up to do anything else, flushing away another $1,500. That night I had an out-of-body experience where I realized that my life had become a dream or something worse. It had become something I was watching as an audience member, and it no longer seemed real. I was on the biggest radio show in history, living the life I’d always wanted, but I was so detached from it all and I’d forgotten how to care.
I kept on and it got worse as my on-air “fatigue” became a regular feature of the show. It got so ridiculous that one day when Kathy Griffin was our guest, I fell asleep so deeply and snored into the microphone so loudly that Howard couldn’t continue. He could only
be heard between snores. Howard turned it into gold, of course, but after they’d finished laughing at me, they woke me up and suggested that I sleep it off (whatever “it” was for me that day).
“Art, why don’t you just go into the dressing room and sleep,” Howard said. “We don’t need you for the Kathy Griffin interview.”
“Fine,” I said, so during the commercial break they kicked Kathy and her hair and makeup people out of her dressing room so I could get back to snoring.
“You’re kicking me out so Artie can sleep?” she asked our producer, completely dumbfounded. “I have an Emmy.”
I intended to doze through her interview and rejoin the show, but instead I slept there until two p.m., three hours after the show was over and everyone had left. I walked out the door, got myself home, ordered some pizza, snorted whatever I had left in my pocket, and went to bed. That was just another day at the office. The only reason I didn’t lose my job was that Howard is so brilliant at making anything funny—even a fat addict sleeping—that I became a source of humor and a regular joke. My naps were a recurring theme because he turned it into a bit the way only he can, even though it was a huge burden for him to bear each day.
The top that was my life started really spinning out of control this time. I was so physically addicted, and it had happened so quickly and I really didn’t care. It was horrifying to me: I’d hired guys to get me clean and I’d made such a show of it on the air on
Stern
, and even in my own stand-up DVD, that I was ashamed of what had happened. There was no way I was going to cop to the fact that I’d slipped. I was going to keep this front up no matter what.