Crash and Burn (18 page)

It should be obvious by now, as if it weren’t already obvious in
Too Fat to Fish
, that I’m an addict, so the kinds of temptations available to a comedian on the road are dangerous for me. It was stressful enough for me to avoid them just living my professional life during this period of sobriety, and it really didn’t help that I’d managed to break every rule they give newly sober people. Looking back, the worst mistake I made by far was piling on the live gigs and other professional responsibilities—in particular the ones I really didn’t need to do. The stress of it all is what got me in the end, and some of it just so wasn’t worth it. It’s pretty easy for me to pinpoint exactly where and when this started. Yeah, without a doubt it was the benefit for Captain Janks. That gig cost me a small fortune, kicked off my decline, and left me with a case of post-traumatic stress disorder that still kicks in when I think about that moment in time.

For those readers who aren’t maniacal die-hard
Stern
fans, first I’d like to welcome you, and second I’d like to say a few words about Captain Janks because I’m pretty sure you have no idea who the hell he is. Janks is a
Stern Show
Wack Packer, meaning he’s one of the oddball flunkies that Howard has collected over the years who call into the show regularly and are on the TV specials and possess some special (as in “special ed”) skill that Howard finds amusing. Janks, whose real name is Thomas Cipriano, is a gas station attendant by day last I heard, but the guy also happens to be a master prank phone caller who has been at it for
Stern
fans for fifteen years. I’ve got to hand it to him, Janks fools everybody, from CNN to the lady down the street, and what he usually does, once it’s obvious that the victim believes him, is randomly drop Howard Stern’s name into the conversation. He’ll keep doing that until the person on the other end of the phone realizes they’ve been pranked, which is usually the best part of the call.

So, the day after the
Jack and Coke
taping, on May 29, 2009, I was scheduled to do a benefit for Janks, who had gotten arrested for multiple counts of taking payment for appearances and not showing up. The guy barely had the money to hire a lawyer, let alone pay for his court fees or post bail, so he was stuck in jail and had been wasting away in there for a week or so already. I spoke to Janks’s lawyer and told him that I was scheduled to do a gig in Poughkeepsie the day after the live DVD taping, and since I was friends with the club owner we could make that the official Janks benefit. It seemed like a good idea—the venue and comics were already locked in. Like I said, it was my buddy’s club, so I was only taking $5,000 from him for the night, but I told Janks’s lawyer that I planned to donate my entire fee to the Free Janks Legal Fund. His lawyer was ecstatic, probably because he now knew he’d get paid.

That morning after
Jack and Coke
, I planned to take a helicopter upstate to the gig because driving there takes about two hours. And here is where we will start the tally of exactly how much this little adventure cost me. Don’t worry, we will recap it at the end in case you lose count—I know I did at the time. Anyway, the helicopter ride cost $3,500 to take me, my buddy Timmy, and Adrienne there. Remember, I wasn’t making anything on this gig, and remember that this was a conscious decision to do so on my part.

The three of us set out from my apartment in Hoboken in my Mercedes 4-door sedan, and since we were late and a helicopter sitting, waiting, hogging up the landing pad costs money, I drove to the private airport in Linden, New Jersey, as fast as I could. I was rushing, so when I got into the airport parking lot I managed to back my car smack into a cement block stanchion. I did it so well that the back of my car was completely destroyed, basically totaled. Mercedes are well built, so everyone was okay, but the trunk and rear end were history.

“Well, we’ve got to get out of here now,” I said, staring at the wreckage. “I have to deal with this later.”

We flew up to Poughkeepsie, no problem, and I did two crazy shows, both of them sold-out. The crowds were really into it, really loud, and really fun. After the show the club owner came over to me, and here we have the second entry in our tally.

“Hey, man,” he said, all shrug-shouldered, “I know I’m supposed to give you five grand, but I only have two on me. Can I send you the other three in a couple of weeks?”

You don’t have to be a lifelong stand-up comic to figure out that when a comedy club promoter says something like that, you’ll never see the other $3,000.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said.

Meanwhile I’d promised Janks’s lawyer $5,000, and the guy was so excited by that I could tell they needed it, which added another $3,000 to my tab. I grabbed the $2,000, turned to my entourage, and said that I wanted to get the hell out of there.

“The last thing I want to do is get caught in Poughkeepsie tonight. This little outing is getting way too expensive.”

Mike just stared at me for a second. “Well, Art, I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “Obama is in town, so they’ve closed the airspace around New York City. We can’t leave till morning.”

I thought about Poughkeepsie for a second. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

I booked Mike into a $250-a-night room (which I found pretty excessive for the area), because he had to stay with the copter and fly it back the next day. Then I called a limo to take Adrienne, Timmy, and me back to Jersey. That cost me $350, and since I gave the guy a $150 tip, it came to $500. My tab for this gig was getting way out of hand.

The next day I went to pick up my car at Linden Airport and, as I expected, the thing was basically destroyed, but in the daylight it was truly grotesque. It was half a bumper away from being totaled, and it barely drove straight. By this point I had lost so much on Captain Janks that I wasn’t going to pay someone to tow my Mercedes, so
I drove it to the dealer myself, and the thing was limping the whole way. I wasn’t expecting good news, because it wasn’t really that kind of week, but still, when the guy told me that none of the damage was covered under my service plan and that to get it back on the road it would cost $14,000, I started to wonder where the joke was in all of this, because there had to be one.

The only thing I could think to do was the math on this whole Captain Janks benefit, because I for one was pretty blown away. Here’s my breakdown, and if I’m missing something, tweet me because if this story doesn’t epitomize what I’m talking about when I talk about Quitter, I don’t know what does.

Here we go. As predicted, I never got the other $3,000 promised in my performance fee, which meant that I had to put it up out of my own funds to give Janks’s lawyer the $5,000 I promised him. The helicopter cost $3,500 and then $1,750 more, I think, because Mike had to stay over. Mike’s hotel room, $250; limo home, $500; my Mercedes, $14,000 . . . This little favor for a friend cost me about $23,000. Captain Janks, I hope you’re doing well.

Shit like that didn’t make it easy to stay sober, that’s for sure. And once we got into June, my schedule got even more hectic with all the book signings to promote the paperback and the endless stand-up gigs that I kept agreeing to. I didn’t have a manger at the time, just a booker, which was probably not the wisest thing for me. He’s a great guy, my booker, and he did his job well: offers would come in and he’d call me with the best ones. The problem was, I had no one to bounce anything off of, so, left to my own devices, I said yes to everything and spread myself thin once again. I started getting stressed, I started getting tired, and I started losing the armor I’d had when I was exercising and well rested. It didn’t take too long for me to reach out for a familiar crutch once again.

————

It was sometime in early June, at a gig I don’t remember, when I fell off the wagon. There was no big event or incident that caused it and I can’t even remember the circumstances, just the fact that I had a drink, probably without even thinking about it. I didn’t go on some drunken bender, I kept it under control, but I had another one to get me through the flight home the next day because I’ve always hated flying and it seemed like I could just drink casually. I was wrong, because as soon as I got back to Jersey from that road trip I drove my Mercedes into downtown Newark and scored a bag of painkillers off the first dealer I saw on the street. I went home, crushed them up, and snorted them chased with Jack Daniel’s. Within a few days I was having bags of heroin delivered. I still looked pretty good, so I was able to fool everyone for a while, at least until my schedule got completely insane—and me along with it. My life was about to turn inside out as everything I’d done to get myself together came apart. I was about to step out of the eye of the hurricane and as usual I took everyone close to me along for a ride they’d never asked to be on.

In June, the paperback version of
Too Fat to Fish
was released and once again it hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, debuting at number nineteen and eventually rising to number six. I agreed to a new round of book signings, more gigs, and anything else to help promote the book, because truly, I can’t say enough how proud I am of it. It was back to chaos for Artie:
Stern Show
during the week, everywhere from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Philly to Vegas each weekend, with book signings for hours after every show. The book business has been good to me, by the way—much better than the DVD business. In the book business you see your royalty checks at regular intervals, and I remember one morning in late 2009 when I opened a check for $381,000 in book sales. I was so fucked up at the time that I just handed it to my mother and told her to deposit it.

In June I also appeared on the debut of Joe Buck’s HBO show,
Joe Buck Live
. A lot has been made of that appearance in this book and just about everywhere else, so like Joe did so graciously in his
foreword, I’m going to give my side of the story. Let me just say that Joe is a brilliant broadcaster, as his father, Jack, was before him, and that I was flattered to be asked to appear on his premier episode. The format was a live chat show covering the biggest events in sports that week but focusing on one major topic that a variety of guests would discuss. I was part of a comedian/actor panel that included Paul Rudd and
Saturday Night Live
’s Jason Sudeikis. The big sports stars of the evening were Brett Favre and Chad Ochocinco. The only thing I can say about what happened on that show was that, from the start, I had the wrong idea of what they wanted me to do. I blame myself, because I should have known better, but I have to say that the show’s producers weren’t very clear about their needs, which, trust me, is a surefire way to fuck up any relationship.

I figured that since this was HBO, anything went language-wise. Was that wrong? Last time I checked there’s no censorship on cable, right? This is America, isn’t it? My “material” that night was R-rated at best, and Joe did his best to keep me in line. But I’d completely misread the situation, so I came off obnoxious and took everyone to Awkward Town, and it was nobody’s fault but mine. About four hours before the show I’d crushed up four ten-milligram Vicodin and snorted the entire pile, then chased it with liberal swallows of whiskey, so by the time I got to the studio I was what anyone would call “loopy.” Video of my appearance has circulated widely on YouTube, so I’m sure you can still find it if you’d like to see this for yourself. For the most part HBO’s lawyers have made it disappear, but the
Huffington Post
and a few other news websites have been able to keep it up thanks to a freedom of speech clause that allows them to deem it newsworthy. I believe that same clause allows people the freedom to buy celebrity sex tapes that have “gotten out.” God bless America.

I’ll give you a play-by-play of how my segment on Buck’s show went. The first thing I said on what was, by design, a classy sports show, involved the phrase
“sucking cock dot com.” That’s right, “sucking cock dot com.” The audience, who’d had zero opportunities to laugh thanks to two painfully boring and egotistical guests (that would be Brett Favre and Chad Ochocinco), exploded. Ask any comedian, when an audience erupts at something you say, nothing else matters. It’s like tossing a bucket of blood into the water when a hungry shark is around: once a comedian gets a taste for an audience’s laughter, they’ll hunt it down by whatever means necessary.

Here’s how I got the laugh that triggered my feeding frenzy. Joe mentioned seeing something on his “favorite website,” TMZ, which is a site that I actually really like and that’s always been fair to me. I had nothing against TMZ or Joe, I was just being a wiseass. Besides, I saw an opportunity to say “sucking cock dot com” live on a major cable network, and what comic wouldn’t want to do that?

That was just the start of me getting out of control, and Joe, being the consummate host that he is, did his best to be jovial while attempting to keep me in line, but I was getting out of control fast and dragging the show right into the gutter. I didn’t leave Joe much choice other than to say I was being unprofessional and disrespectful, and to ask me to curb my “adult” language. Basically Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis sat there and watched this happen, because I wasn’t letting anyone else take the focus off me, and the audience’s laughter was all the affirmation I needed. During the break, Paul Rudd leaned in toward me.

“You realize that what you just did was legendary, right?” he said.

I’ve looked at the footage a lot and I have to say that the first half, the one Paul was talking about, is pretty incredible. I agree, it is legendary. Unfortunately I couldn’t stop there and his encouragement inspired me to take things further. And that’s where it all really went wrong because I completely lost the plot. When I watch the second half of that appearance all I think of is Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in
Raging Bull
, all fat, trying to charm people in his nightclub in Miami. He’s completely unaware that he’s insulting everybody,
spilling drinks on ladies, and making a spectacle of himself. He’s an oblivious slob, which pretty much sums me up on that show.