Crash and Burn (13 page)

In 1992, when Helicopter Mike was still an NYPD beat cop, he got a call on a night that he happened to have a rookie along for the ride. There was a kid on the corner of Second Avenue and East Seventeenth Street in Manhattan claiming that a guy whom he’d seen doing stand-up comedy at Comic Strip Live had kidnapped him. Supposedly the comic and the kid had been drinking at a bar after the show when the comic asked the guy to get him cocaine.
When the kid said he didn’t know where to get any, the comic got mad and strong-armed the kid into driving him to get cocaine. The comic was in the kid’s car and refused to get out until he was driven to get drugs. That was the long and short of what dispatch told them.

Mike and his partner took the call, rolled up, and found the kid in his car with me in the front seat. The kid confirmed everything they’d been told. He said I was the comedian he’d just seen in the club (probably right) and that we’d gotten to drinking (of course) and that I was doing coke (whatever) and when I ran out, I insisted that we take his car to get more (who doesn’t like cocaine?). Then I got into the passenger seat and wouldn’t leave. Since I didn’t have any more coke I fell asleep (that’s what happens) and he couldn’t wake me up (right again, and good luck with that).

“I’m afraid of this guy,” the kid told the two cops. “You’ve got to get him out of my car.”

There was no way in the world for me to refute these facts, so when Mike told me the story I didn’t even try. I was a regular at Comic Strip Live from ’92 through ’93, and I was doing all the coke I could get, drinking whiskey like water, and having blackouts the way yuppies take “staycations.” I remember doing a lot of strange things at night, but the few clear memories I have don’t come close to the number of stories I’ve heard about me, almost all of which involve me forcing people to get me drugs or threatening them if they didn’t give me the rest of theirs.

When I heard this story in 2007, it was embarrassing but it wasn’t a surprise. Believe me, I was dying to be offended, wishing I could get in this guy’s face and yell:
This is an outrage, you bastard. How dare you! I was a junior at Dartmouth at that time!
I wish I were more like Travolta, able to point to films I was doing, insisting I was out of town, on set, or off helping the needy for every time I was accused of soliciting a male masseur. Spoiler alert: I’m not Travolta, so I didn’t flinch when the guy told me I’d taken a kid hostage because I’d run out of coke.

“Yeah, man, now that you mention it that could have been me,” I said, “so let’s assume it was, and I hope this is the beginning of a great story. But what happened? I don’t have a record, so you couldn’t have arrested me.”

Mike laughed. “No, man, you weren’t arrested that night. The ending is much better than that.”

Mike confirmed what most of us have probably guessed at one point or another: cops don’t like doing paperwork and who can blame them? So rather than arrest me, which would have involved waking me up and taking me in, he decided that both the kid and I were such idiots that we deserved to spend the night together. The kid, by the way, was also visibly drunk, so cleaning up the mess would have meant a lot of paperwork and waiting for a tow truck to impound this knucklehead’s car. Instead of dealing with any of that, Mike and his partner told the kid they’d take his keys, lock them in the trunk, and then take the trunk key with them. The plan was to leave him there in the car with me for a few hours until their shift was over. By then the two of us would be sober enough to go home.

“That okay with you, kid?” Mike said.

“Well, I . . .”

“It’s either that or we’re arresting you and taking your car, and I just don’t really feel like arresting anybody tonight. And in this situation, you’re both going downtown. If I were you I’d shut up and sleep it off.”

The kid had enough of a functioning brain left to make the right choice, but I think it took all three of them to talk me into the backseat, where the kid joined me. That sucked for him, but if another squad car found him sleeping in the front seat, legally he could still be busted for DUI—take note of that, you drunks. The cops found a shitty blanket in his trunk, gave it to him, and apparently left the two of us back there to spoon.

Mike isn’t a cop anymore and since we’re now friends he’s admitted to me what I’ve always suspected: cops do that kind of shit all
the time just to fuck with people. I mean, wouldn’t you if you were a cop? Pretty much if they don’t want to do paperwork and you’re on the margin of illegality and not hurting anybody, there’s a good chance they’ll clown you before they arrest you if they’re feeling lazy. Making a fool of you kills two birds with one stone, because it teaches you a lesson and makes the cops’ shift funny for them.

It was winter, it was cold, and they’d taken the keys to the car, so there was no heat. Two hours later, the backseat of that sedan was a meat locker, or so I’m guessing. Mike and his partner arrived to find the kid shivering, awake, terrified, sad, and blanket-less because I’d pulled it off him, wrapped myself in it, and was snoring, happy as a pig in shit. I’d also wrestled the kid’s jacket off of him and had that around me too. I wish some camera had caught that when it happened. The cops could barely contain themselves.

“You’ve got to wake this guy up,” the kid begged them. “I have to go home. I’m freezing to death and he’s a fucking asshole!”

I’m not sure how long it took or what they had to do, but Mike remembers that they finally woke me up around 5:30 a.m. and that I was still a very drunk and very belligerent asshole. I refused to get out of the car because apparently I’d come to believe that the car was mine, and so I had no idea why all of these people were bothering me. I kept telling them—all of them—to get the fuck off of me and get the fuck out of my car because I had to sleep. I’m telling you, sleep has always been very, very important to me. I don’t think the entirety of the situation ever really dawned on me, but eventually Mike and his partner managed to load me into a cab and send it off to Penn Station. Throughout that process, I’ve been told that I kept telling them that “this city sucks,” that Mike and his partner were fags, and that they could “fucking keep Manhattan,” because I had to “get back to Jersey where the cops aren’t fags.” As Mike told me this, all I kept thinking was that this was definitely me, because those are all things I would say, and said often, while wasted.

A couple of years later Mike was watching late-night television,
minding his own business when he saw my mug on MADtv. He’d been telling the story of that night at parties and around the station since the day it happened because it is so outstandingly ridiculous. He’d never forgotten my proper name, Arthur Lange, because how could he? So when the credits rolled, he saw “Artie Lange” and did the math, and he couldn’t wait until the morning to tell his partner, so he called him and woke him up.

“I’m telling you, it’s the guy,” he said. “I can’t believe he ever made anything of himself.”

“You really sure? It’s like hearing the Easter Bunny lays eggs.”

“I’m telling you, it’s him.”

They were right to doubt my future prospects—even my own grandmother did, and we Italians are proud people not prone to admitting these kinds of things. This was my mom’s mom, Grandma Caprio, who prayed to various Catholic saints asking them to guide each of her sons, grandkids, nephews, and everybody else through life. One day I walked in on her praying to Saint Joseph and asked her what she was asking him for.

“All of my sons are carpenters, so I pray to Saint Joseph because he is the patron saint of carpenters,” she said. “I ask him to keep my sons safe in their work and to make sure that they always prosper.” She went back to praying.

“Grandma Caprio, can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Of course, Arthur, what is it?”

“Do you pray to a saint for me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Really? Which one?”

“For you I pray to Saint Jude.”

I thought that was great! I loved the Beatles, and I loved the song “Hey Jude.” I didn’t even think to ask anything more, I felt like Saint Jude had to be rock-and-roll and Grandma Cap knew that. How cool was it to have your patron saint be Saint Jude? That mirage lasted
about a week until I made the mistake of proudly telling my uncle Bruce how great it was that Grandma Cap prayed to Saint Jude for me.

“She prays to Saint Jude for you?” he said and doubled over laughing. “Saint Jude?”

“Yeah, Saint Jude,” I said. “I thought that was really cool. You know, like ‘Hey Jude.’ ”

“Do you know what Saint Jude is the patron saint of, Artie?” My uncle was nearly pissing himself.

“Um . . . no. I mean . . .”

“Saint Jude is the patron saint—” He was really cracking up; he had to pause to catch a breath. “He’s . . . the . . . patron saint . . . of hopeless causes!”

Fuck me. Well if there’s one thing that can be said about her, it’s that Grandma Caprio called them as she saw them.

Back to the story, once Mike and his partner realized that the guy on MADtv was the same Arthur Lange they’d sent back to Jersey all those years ago, they became fans. I’m not sure why; I guess it had something to do with the age-old tradition of rooting for the underdog, without which teams like the Mets would have no fans. Or maybe they just respected me for beating the odds.

“When I saw you were playing here tonight, Artie, I could have just locked the bus and gone home, but I stayed because I wanted to meet up with you again,” Mike said.

“Really?” I said. “Why? I mean, I was an asshole. That’s the dumbest story I’ve ever heard. It’s only funny to me now because I don’t remember any of it. It’s like you’re telling me about some idiot I’ll never meet.”

“I have my reasons, Art,” he said. “First of all I think you’re a funny motherfucker, but I also think I can help you stay out of trouble. I’d like to get to know you, if you’re okay with that, and if you get to a point where you’d like to make some changes in your
life I can help you with that. I’ve done this successfully for a few other people in your situation. That’s really why I stayed tonight, to be completely honest.”

So that’s how Mike became a regular in my life, just another character populating my path to the crash, and like most of them, he jetted out before I burned. I’m not mad about that at all, because Mike really did his best to help until he had to do what he had to do. At this point, who’s to say? There’s no stopping someone who doesn’t want to stop, so what can anyone’s best intentions even accomplish? Once I agreed to take him into my world in that capacity, though, Mike did try to keep me away from drugs and keep me away from everyone who might give drugs to me, but he had no idea just how many options I had available in that department.

But that was really phase two of our friendship. Right away he became essential to me because of his connections to private jets, helicopters, and small planes—basically whatever gangsters, drug dealers, or Elvis would use to get around. I hate airports and I hate flying, so flying private was great, plus as I became less and less on top of my game, Mike became more and more irreplaceable because nothing can salvage dysfunctional lateness quicker than a private charter. Within a few weeks of knowing Mike, every gig I’d booked along the Eastern Seaboard from Niagara Falls to Baltimore and points farther south became much more fun. I wasn’t going to be terribly screened by the authorities, so I could even sneak pills and heroin on board with me, which was a great help in avoiding withdrawals and getting to work on time Monday.

We took helicopters to every casino within range and in typical rock-and-roll fashion, one night (in the wilds of Connecticut, which isn’t at all rock-and-roll) we nearly lost our lives. When it all went bleak for a moment, I distinctly remember being aware of the fact that Connecticut is one of the places, if not
the
place, that I’d least like to die. There is nothing at all remarkable, cool, or legendary about
Connecticut. If Jim Morrison were buried there, no one would visit his grave.

I was scheduled to play Foxwoods Resort Casino in scenic Mashantucket, for four thousand people. It was a totally sold-out show for which I made ninety grand plus an extra twenty grand as a bonus for selling it out. I brought my regular road guys at the time: J.D., Timmy, and Mike to fly us up. Since Mike wasn’t officially hired to keep me off drugs yet, I was flying high on heroin and had some more in my pocket. At that time snorting lines of dope was all I really cared about. I’m not saying I’d turn down a handful of pills if someone gave them to me, but I remember really loving heroin like nothing else at that time.

I’d done quite a few lines before we left and was looking forward to putting on the huge headphones and zoning out in the back of the helicopter, maybe catching a few winks of sleep, and then landing and going right to the stage. We planned to arrive between six and seven o’clock, which left me plenty of time to relax before the curtain came up at eight, and I was actually impressed that we’d left early enough to arrive in a timely fashion. Considering how inefficiently I did everything else in my life by then, this was remarkable. It gave me an irrational feeling of well-being, and a delusion that I really did have it all under control, when it came to my career at least. And maybe I did that night, but what we didn’t count on, and what I wasn’t prepared for, was that no one at Foxwoods was as on the ball as we were.

I’ve got nothing but great things to say about Foxwoods; it’s a paradise up there in the middle of nothing at all, and that’s no exaggeration. There’s literally no civilization of any kind for miles around. It’s on an Indian reservation, so when you arrive, however you get there, you go through a limbo of backwoods emptiness until the place appears ahead of you out of nowhere like the Emerald City in
The Wizard of Oz
. Foxwoods has the only bright lights you see in a county
otherwise composed of shit. I find it fascinating because there it is, this gorgeous, top-notch entertainment facility smack in the middle of white trash–ville. The people who live there follow the Yellow Brick Road of Foreclosure to the Great Oz’s Fun House. They gamble away the deeds to their trailers, and no one’s wearing ruby slippers.