Crash and Burn (11 page)

“This is you getting ready for your
Rolling Stone
photo shoot,” she said, deadpan. She has a great sense of humor as well as immense patience, that girl. The pictures are hilarious: I look like Oscar Madison rolled up in bed after a bender.

She stalled them for about twenty minutes, but after a while there was nothing else for her to do but to admit I was still asleep.

“Artie, the photographer is here,” she said loudly, standing in the doorway to my bedroom, banging on the wall as hard as she could.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Hi, photographer. Give me just a minute.”

I rolled out of bed with the grace of an obese otter with a hangover, still high on opiates and booze, my eyes crusted shut from sleep. I looked like a piece of furniture left out on the lawn after a weeklong orgy at Versailles. I was overweight and gray-skinned, my eyes still pinned from smack and my hair standing up like I’d been electrocuted. I was just forty-one, but I looked seventy-five. My beard was entirely gray and all I could think to put on for this shoot was a green corduroy jacket, a pair of gray sweatpants, and white gym
socks. Somehow I thought a shirt wasn’t necessary.
Mister DeMille
, I thought,
I am ready for my close-up
.

The photographer was an effeminate Asian fellow. “It’s nice to meet you, Artie,” he said, looking at me strangely. “Why don’t you go and get ready.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I am ready. Were you expecting me to be wearing Yves Saint Laurent?”

“Oh,” he replied. “Fine, then.” He looked like he’d smelled fresh dog shit.

And the thickest silence you can imagine fell over the room.

I started chain-smoking as they set up their lights, moved my books around, and tried to make an artful backdrop out of my belongings. I kept going to the bathroom every fifteen minutes to crush and snort more pills. I didn’t care how obvious it was, and it was obvious, because every time I returned all eyes were on me.

As the photographer prepared to shoot, the hair and makeup girl approached me, looking truly terrified. There wasn’t a foundation, eye shadow, brush, or spackling tool on Earth that could have made me look healthy, sober, or normal, but God bless her, the girl fought the good fight. She put powder on me, trimmed my beard and the rest of it as best she could. It didn’t help matters that I wouldn’t stay still, because the more high I got the more abusive I became toward the photographer. I chose to torment him by quoting movie lines he clearly didn’t know.

“How about a Fresca?” I’d say to all of them. That’s a line from
Caddyshack
from the scene where Ted Knight says it to the guy who plays Noonan. No one had any idea what I was talking about. They were probably too young to even know what a Fresca was.

The assistants kept joking around, trying to make light of it, but my comments were pointed and just so off that the mood got awkward and dark real quick. I remember the two guys taking test shots and doing what they could to distract me from what had become my
main objective: pissing the Asian guy off, which I was doing in the time-honored spirit of self-destructive rebellion. In the end I’m pretty sure they used one of those test shots, because the image was the most grotesque, embarrassing, and unfinished one you can imagine. Basically I looked like Vic Tayback, who played Mel on
Alice
, on a crack binge.

Norm MacDonald had this sweet little piece of advice for me—too late, of course—after he saw this murder scene they called a photo. “First of all, you never let anybody with a camera into your home—ever,” he said. “That’s the first thing you should know.”

I wish that the photo was the worst thing about the whole debacle, but it wasn’t: the article was much, much worse. It was what two-bit gossip columnists call a “takedown,” just an insult wrapped in a veil of fake authority and so-called journalism. Who knows, maybe it was due to my behavior at the photo shoot that they chose to send a woman writer who’d gone to Wesleyan or Vassar or one of those other broad colleges, who basically hated me on sight. She was a typically forgettable Upper-West-Side-Central-Park-jogger type who couldn’t be more different from—or more judgmental of—someone like me. I’ve become pretty skilled at knowing when someone doesn’t like me, particularly women, so I knew it wasn’t going to be a “fluff” piece, but I had no idea it would be such a hatchet job.

Everything in my life was going so well professionally, and it’s not like a biased article by some no-name broad in
Rolling Stone
could change any of that, but still, I’d hoped that my moment in such a historic magazine would at least reflect who I was. She just couldn’t get past her own bias enough to do her job. The day the magazine came out I bought one at the newsstand and realized immediately that this was another bittersweet victory in my life—this one more bitter than sweet.

On the cover, you see, was my hero, Bruce Springsteen, and there was my name just above his picture. After I’d read the first five words of the article on me, I literally prayed to God that Bruce flipped by
those pages on me on his way to his article and never, ever read it. Let me tell you why, the photo was terrible, but the tagline was worse, it quoted me calling myself a loser. How can you ever really come back from that?

I remember Norm MacDonald being on the
Stern Show
the week the article came out and defending me when Howard suggested that I appease
Rolling Stone
by not bitching out the writer on the air as enthusiastically as I’d started to do. Norm cut Howard off actually, which is not something anyone does and gets away with.

“Howard, that fucking broad really railroaded Artie,” he said. “He shouldn’t be nice about it at all.”

I’m pretty sure I was still drunk that morning, and I was definitely high on painkillers, so Norm’s comments really got me going, so much so that when I went on
The Wrap-Up Show
with Gary I really let it go. The best way to combat a blatant attack like a shitty article is to avoid giving it any attention, which I didn’t do, of course. I started insulting everything about the reporter and the shitty job she’d done. In the process I called her a “cunt” about eighteen times, give or take a few cunts. Someone told her about it, of course, which is generally what happens when you say anything insulting about someone on a radio show with six million listeners. The broad responded—of course she did—on some blog somewhere, calling me low-class and obnoxious. Now, if she’d done her homework for the article, she would have known this about me already, just like she would have known that I’ve made those two traits work wonders for me professionally. Stating the obvious is no way to get back at someone who advertises what they are to the degree that I do, so her comment stung about as much as a bee would a rhino’s ass. Anyway, that’s the last I heard from her, which depresses me because I thought we’d really connected and that these differences were just growing pains. I was looking forward to summering together on Cape Cod each August.

When you’re a comedian with any visible degree of success
and you meet comedians on their way up or those just struggling to make it to the middle, most of them ask you for advice. I’m sure it’s like this in every industry, but comics are so full of overanalytical self-loathing that I’d bet my bank account that these little pep talks take longer to get through or get out of than they would, say, a CEO of Boeing Aviation chatting with a recent business school graduate. Comics think too much, they feel too much, and most of them really hate themselves, so you can imagine what happens if you open up that can of worms. You’d better want to, is all I can tell you, and if you don’t, you’d better have an escape plan.

Norm MacDonald has perfected the art of this conversation because he’s had years of practice. It started in the mid-nineties when he was on
Saturday Night Live
, and it only got worse in 1999, when he starred in his own network sitcom,
Norm
. I’ve seen comics latch on to him hoping to get pieces of wisdom long before I ever had to deal with anything like that, and I envy what he came up with, because it’s both true and the best way to keep the conversation brief. Here’s Norm’s line when a comic asks him how to break into the “major leagues” of the business: “Well, I don’t have all the answers, so I can’t tell you how to get in, but I sure can tell you how to get out.” A quick review of his television career will confirm that he’s an expert at achieving and then abandoning success, so you should take his word for it. The rip cord out of a mainstream career for any comic according to Norm is a well-placed racist or homophobic joke. He’s not wrong—just ask Michael Richards: that guy got out of the business in literally two minutes.

After that stint in rehab, I kept going to work, no matter how fucked up I was. I’d show up with my ass crack hanging out, in three-day-old clothes, stinking and high to heaven, but I still showed up. There’s this theory out there among
Stern
fans that I missed work a lot of the time, but that’s just not true; I didn’t miss work. I was there all the time and when I wasn’t sleeping live on the radio, I was funny all the time, every time. I was able to seem
normal somehow . . . crazy, sure, but normal and functional. Only in my last few months on the show did I ever miss a day, because by then things were really falling apart. That’s because I knew what I was doing: if my dealers couldn’t get me what I needed I knew how to score on the street in downtown Newark or Jersey City. I could keep myself supplied well enough so that I would seem normal for those four hours a day that I had to be on the show.

When I got on the road I had to sleep all the time because that’s where my ruse was up. From Teddy to my road manager Tim, and J.D., who did video for me on the road, they began to see what I couldn’t hide. I never wanted to travel with drugs, so the road became a test; I’d get as much shit as possible into me before I got on that plane, trying to plan it all so that I’d not go into withdrawals until I was back home, safe, in range of where I could get enough drugs to get me on track to show up for my job at
Stern
. When I left town for a weekend of stand-up I’d time it out so I’d get to my room and pass out and still be high when I woke up to go onstage a few hours later. If I could get on a plane home just as my withdrawals were starting, I knew I’d be fine because I knew I had something stashed in my apartment and if I didn’t I knew exactly whom to call or where to drive to make those cramps stop. Coming home was literally going to heaven for me for all those months I was doing all those lucrative stand-up gigs every single weekend. If we landed and I was hurting, I knew as soon as I was in my car I could make it. I had it planned out that far. I mean, any flight delay was like death to me, so you can imagine just how often this fragile ecosystem I lived in got completely imbalanced.

This was far from exact science, let me tell you. We are talking about a guy who was trying to do all the drugs he’d need in a weekend by the time the five-o’clock bell rang on Friday. The road became going from the plane to the car to the hotel room where I’d blacken out my hotel room. I mean, blacken. Literally I’d duct tape the curtains down. Around that time, a friend of mine had told me that a
buddy of his who was a heroin addict would get so light sensitive that even the little green light on the smoke detector was too much light for him. What this guy would do is chew a piece of gum and stick it over that little green light. I’m not sure I’d ever even noticed those lights before I’d heard the story, but all I know is that I couldn’t sleep an hour in any hotel room bed if I could see that light from where I was lying. I’m not even a gum guy, but I started to buy gum at the airport just so I’d be able to stick a piece over the little green light. I obsessed over it, and there were terrible times when I found myself with no gum to chew, and before then I’d found gum to be a completely useless item. But once it became my method of blacking out the light in a hotel room, gum became very important to me. There were, however, times when the hotel I was staying in would need to send a maintenance guy with a ladder to place my piece of gum over the smoke detector light. I’m not a diva; I was happy to do it myself, but sometimes the ceilings were too high for me to reach. It got to the point that I couldn’t sleep properly without gum on that light. Chewing gum, strictly to place over the smoke detector light, became part of my ritual, and ask any drug addict—the ritual is what it’s all about.

I was starting to lose it. And thank God that at this point stand-up was all instinct for me, because I’d stay in my hotel room until the last possible minute and take the stage without mentally preparing in any way. If I had to go on at eight p.m., I’d be in the room, in bed, until 7:55 p.m. The promoter, my road manager, everyone, would be ringing incessantly; they’d knock on my door nonstop, but it didn’t matter. There were many times when they all thought I was dead, and to be honest, I don’t blame them. All I’d ever say was that I was real tired, which I suppose I was. I was never lying; then again, was I ever really telling the truth?

It was this crazy: I’d get up when I absolutely had to, and if I couldn’t deal with my hair situation I’d put a hat on. Usually I’d
be wearing the same clothes, so I didn’t have to worry about getting dressed, and I’d go straight to the stage, literally from bed, and I’d do an hour of comedy. I guess that is some kind of miracle. And if I was anywhere within range of my home in New Jersey, I’d drive there myself or demand that I be brought right home afterward because home is where the heart is, and in my case, it was also where all of my drugs were.

I was scared to travel with drugs, which is why my life on the road got so nuts. I’d read all those stories about Keith Richards and the Stones smuggling shit and getting busted, so there was no way I was going to do that as one dude on my own. So I did what I could: I top-loaded my consumption so that I’d be high enough to get through the weekend until I could get home and get more. I didn’t have much of a choice, really. It wasn’t logical at all and it was a risk every single time, but I did think it was fun in a very sick way, and I know why—because I love gambling. Gambling is my biggest vice and this was a huge bet I was placing every week, wasn’t it? Taking all the opiates I’d need to get through the weekend and home again before the withdrawals kicked in and stabilized me enough to make it to work in some kind of decent shape the next morning? That’s one exciting fucking wager! It sure beat betting on college basketball.