Crash and Burn (4 page)

That was the last I saw of Amsterdam, because for the rest of the trip, I barricaded myself in my room, getting high, sleeping, getting high some more, then sleeping it all off. I’m quite the traveler; I get the most out of my free time in a foreign city. I really should write a series of tour books. The guys tried to hang with me and kept calling,
but they probably knew what was going on. We did all fly home together and all was well. I heard all about what they’d done every day and night and they heard all about how exhausted I was from doing stand-up and how happy I was to have caught up on my sleep (yeah, right). Teddy and I kept working together for another year or so, but after that fight he demanded that he not be my assistant—he wanted to be my “tour manager.” I wish he had brought that up while we were still in Amsterdam; I would have turned right around and hired Whoreguide™ because she would have been a much better choice. As it turned out, I gave Teddy what he asked for, I made him “tour manager to Artie Lange,” but fuck him: I still asked him to do assistant stuff, which he still did half-assed. Whatever, Teddy’s a good guy, but by January 2009, he’d had enough of me regardless of his title and asked to be let go. I didn’t want to, but I said yes. It was the end of an era.

Amsterdam was a
nice little buffer between hell and me, one that included amazing pancakes, canals, a neo-Nazi, a lot of pills, and a little sex. I consider it one of my better ventures abroad, which I need to do more of, because I’m a creature of habit, but I’ll tell you something—as soon as I discharged WhoreGuide™, the shit hit the fan. I know how wrong it sounds but it’s true: saying goodbye to that well-informed whore was a turning-point moment for me. I wasn’t in love, and no, we didn’t part like Bogie and Bergman in
Casablanca
. I act dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I mean it when I say that this parting resonated with me in some way I can’t explain. It wasn’t conscious, but I think I knew that the end of this moment of dysfunctional domesticity with its historical tour and drug snorting meant letting go of the last bit of hope for normalcy in my life. I felt that good-bye down to the very depths of my soul because I was saying good-bye to trying or caring about keeping things in check. Looking back on all that came next, my soul knew better than the rest of me just how hard I was set to slide.

The great comedian Dave Attell warned me about a kind of greed that I was feeding way before it happened to me. I understood the
urge he was talking about but of course I thought I’d always be too strong for it.

“Dude, you can get addicted to the money,” Dave told me, late in 2006. “Fuck the drugs and booze, that’s secondary. You can get rid of those. The worst thing you can get addicted to is the money.” He was doing his show
Insomniac
at the time, so he was in the middle of it all, and had started to get sober. He had a really clear view of things.

The money was just like anything else according to Dave. I didn’t agree because I always saw money as something necessary, not something fun like eating the occasional vegetable. I could only see getting addicted to things that are fun. It was necessary to have money to have fun, but money on its own wasn’t something I cared to hoard the way I did, say, oh, I don’t know, heroin, coke, and pills. Those are fun; those were something worth getting addicted to, but money in and of itself? Dave had to be high.

I don’t remember if he was at the time, but I tell you, he was right. It happened to me, and how could it not? If you grow up without money the way I did, struggle doing stand-up, and then, in your thirties, start getting offers of seventy grand to fly to St. Louis or Detroit for the weekend, how could you not get high just knowing you’d become worth that much doing something nobody ever thought you’d succeed at? I didn’t notice it warping my perception because like a foster kid who finally finds a home, I was so fucking happy just to be wanted. I didn’t care about the schedule, the radio show, or what that plus the drugs were doing to me. After every big-ticket gig I did (before I got used to it—at which point I’d want even more) I’d think to myself:
Tonight I made more than my father ever made in a year.
That meant something to me, and soon it meant everything to me. Dave was right, all right: I got as high on that kind of thinking as I liked to get on Vicodin every morning. I remember Dave telling me that when chasing money started to change his thinking he felt like it chipped away at his sanity. He felt himself slipping into this
craziness and stopped before he sold out and took whatever came his way. Losing his self-respect wasn’t worth it to him. He’s right about that too, but I had to learn about that little pearl of wisdom the hard way, through chronic trial and error—mostly error.

A lot of that hardheadedness comes from being a stubborn loser and an Italian-American male, but there’s another factor that comes into play: being a comedian. It doesn’t go for every single one of us, but four out of five dentists would agree that comedians are generally a dark fucking bunch. That bullshit cliché about tears of a clown is pretty true, and I’ve spent enough years in my disfigured psyche to know from experience. A lot of us funnymen and -women are like that, but don’t ever feel sorry for us because trust me, we deserve it. Plus if we sense any degree of pity coming from you we’ll treat you as nicely as we’d treat a WASP at Christmas Eve dinner.

Here’s another reason why you should keep your pity to yourself: comedians like to see things go wrong. We really do, because that’s what makes us laugh. W. C. Fields said it best when he was asked what makes a comedian laugh. His answer was one of the funniest and most truthful bits of brilliance ever spoken. “If you dress up a man as an old woman and throw him down a flight of stairs, that will make normal people laugh,” he said. “If you want to make a comedian laugh, you’ll need to throw an old woman down the stairs.” I couldn’t agree more; once you make funny your reason for being, nothing else but that which pushes the envelope to the extreme is funny to you anymore.

This is why I have a hard time with anyone being positive. Positivity is not some spiritually superior state; it’s a delusion that is so dull and obvious that I refuse to get behind it because it’s just too damn easy. Being all about positivity is like being for world peace—I mean, who isn’t for that? It’s not like anyone is out there rooting for world war, so world peace is a joke of a cause. It’s also a myth, because people like to fight and because they do, shit happens. Being
for world peace is like lobbying for oxygen: it’s the kind of thing best left to beauty pageant contestants from such as such places such as South Carolina.

Positivity really pisses me off, so as a comedian I feel it’s my duty to do what I can to shoot it down where I find it, which is precisely what my Twitter feed, “Artie Lange’s Quitter,” is all about. The goal of Quitter is to discourage people from trying to do anything at all because most people aim too high and waste too much time. There’s just no point in anyone making statements like: “If you work hard enough you can do anything,” because it’s just not true. I don’t care who you are, sorry, kid, everyone can’t become president of this country if they try hard enough. Aside from the occasional miracle, only white people from old-money families can be president. Are you one of them? If you’re not, then give that dream up now.

If you ask me, everyone needs to take a moment to truly absorb the brilliance of the epitaph of the late, great writer Charles Bukowski. It’s simple and it says it all. His gravestone says nothing more than his name, the years he lived, and two other words: “Don’t try.” Let this be your mantra, people, because it should be. Seriously, all of you, stop what you’re doing, because you’re just fucking it all up. Stop now, before you do more damage. Please, people, don’t try. Because, really, you shouldn’t. If you’re honest with yourselves for a minute, you’ll know I’m right.

The truly talented people in this world don’t talk about the shit they do, they just do it. The average and completely useless, which accounts for most people, spend so much time talking about their lofty plans and goals that they never get further than that, and call me crazy, but there’s nothing worse than hearing self-righteous, talentless people blabbing on about the positive, wonderful things they think they’re going to do with their lives. They’re pathetic. They need to just sit down and take a Xanax.

I prefer failures and self-hatred. Failing is honest because when shit goes wrong and you really fuck it all up, you can’t lie about it. It’s
like robbing a bank and having the paint bomb in the bag of cash go off in your face. You can’t hide a fuckup like that because your face is blue. I think there’s some kind of truth in mistakes that big because at least they’re honest. I’d rather fail at being anything than succeed at being “positive.” I don’t want to go to a Tony Robbins seminar and be accepted into his inner circle; I want to make fun of Tony Robbins, which, ironically, I’d find much more therapeutic, personally. I have a feeling Tony would almost respect that if he spent enough time with me to understand what I’m made of. Tony Robbins is such an icon of positivity that I experienced perverse joy telling people on the air on
The Nick and Artie Show
how I had become one of his followers and had been granted access to one of his most exclusive get-togethers: “The Running of the Deer.” That special exercise reflects the very heart of Tony’s personal philosophy, I’d tell them, and it’s something he reserves only for select friends and celebrities. As my story would go, Tony had heard about the changes I’d strived to make in my life and decided to invite me to get up early in the morning at five a.m. and accompany him as he ran with the deer. He thought it might help me find the light at the end of my personal tunnel. After some trip I took to LA I told the audience that this dream had come true and that I’d run with Tony, Nicole Richie, Jason Alexander, and Chad Ochocinco, plus Tony’s pack of deer. We’d defecated with them and all rediscovered our primal nature. I’m not sure what this says about me or my fans, but most of those listeners who called in that night had believed my story, so I couldn’t find a reason why I shouldn’t keep it up. I went on about it for four days, after which time I began to feel so positive because of this deception that I just couldn’t take any more. I literally had sunshine coming out of my ass and was so happy that I had to do something about it. So I told them all that I was lying. And then I felt better about things again.

Getting people to believe whatever the hell I wanted them to became the backbone of what Howard and the
Stern Show
came to call “Artie’s Wild Year,” 2008. The year my book came out, the year
the money and drugs took over, the year that everything started to go wrong. They even commemorated that special time with a special episode that captured what was going on in front of the curtain at least—which was a fraction of the chaos. I had, despite Dave Attell’s warnings, gotten completely hooked on greed and took every gig, everywhere, no matter how tired I was. I’m not sure if I believed myself every time I looked at my schedule and blocked out the weeks when I planned to detox and calm down, all I know is that every time I set those dates, I broke them as soon as a paying gig came along. The thing is, I had learned to tell people what they wanted to hear years before that.

Now that I’m sober—aside from the odd fuckup (more on that later)—I’ve gotten the most satisfaction from tracing just how far back my dysfunction started. When the greed set in things definitely got worse, but they were already bad. Let me show you what I mean.

Back in ’07 I played the Playboy Mansion for some charity event. I only made $10,000, but I didn’t care, I had played Vegas the weekend before and made $100,000 at the Hard Rock. Plus, fuck it, I was playing the Playboy Mansion! This was a Rat Pack–level achievement in my mind, and I couldn’t wait. They had all kinds of talent there that day: there was some band set up to play after me, and Sarah Silverman was on the bill too. The stage was in the grotto area, where I planned to have sex with some Bunny after my set.

As I took the stage, Teddy, who was my assistant at the time, went and got high with Sarah Silverman over by the world-famous monkey cages, whose inhabitants are known for masturbating openly and throwing their jizz at many a random passerby. Sarah is world-famous for having the most insane weed, which she does—her shit is just ridiculous, or maybe that’s just how I see it. Here’s why: back in the ’90s—in 1993, I believe—she and I played a place called the Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side and that night someone got the both of us high. I don’t even think it was Sarah, but we got so high that I don’t remember much else. I have no idea how I did onstage;
I have no idea how she did. I don’t remember anyone else or anything at all, aside from one thing. All that I remember clearly is that I ended up disrupting the lives of the ten people on the bus I shared with them back to Jersey from Port Authority sometime around three a.m. by standing on my head and yelling at them, letting them know that I had “evil in my mind” and that “I had to get it out.” I guess I thought it would run right out of my skull if I did a headstand. Judging by how my life has gone since then, I was wrong.

Anyway, I went onstage at the Mansion while Sarah and Teddy went and smoked weed by the monkey cages. It’s probably good that they weren’t there to witness me bomb. I can’t lie (anymore): I really sucked. It didn’t help that Jerry Buss, the owner of the Lakers, was there with a huge entourage, plus the servers were a pack of hot chicks, which meant there were many reasons not to listen to me. I had to do twenty minutes to get the ten grand, but two minutes into it I started wondering how the fuck I would fill the next eighteen minutes, because what little self-esteem I had shown up with that day was somewhere below the stage. I started taking healthy swallows of scotch from a tall glass I kept behind me on the drum riser. After going back for what seemed like my fifteenth, I went to set the drink back down and stepped on something slippery. It was something the color and texture of French dressing, and since nothing has been confirmed or denied, I’m going with that. In any case, French dressing, or dressing of any kind had no business being on that stage, because, among other things it could have done, it caused my foot to slide out from under me, and like the world’s fattest cheerleader, I dropped into an awkward split. I caught myself before I hit the ground, but in the process I completely blew out the seam of my pants. They were basically a tent without a door in a matter of seconds.