Crash and Burn (29 page)

The truth is, my suicide attempt and a month in a mental hospital hadn’t put a dent in my stubborn pride. I wasn’t ready to give it up and I still thought I knew what was best for me. There’s no reason I should have felt this way—none at all. I mean, really, what was I thinking? That I’d be fine just heading back home and putting the pieces together on my own? I made every excuse to my family. I said that I’d seen the rehab facilities and didn’t like them, that the doctors there weren’t any good. I found every reason I could to refuse to go and I kept repeating myself, saying I wanted to be at home, so that’s where I was going. This went on for four hours because I wouldn’t budge (I’m sure intervention guy billed for overtime). I had no valid argument, I had no leg to stand on, I just kept saying that I didn’t want to go. Because I didn’t! Who would ever want to go to rehab after a month in a mental hospital? No one!

The sad truth is that no matter how much my family and friends begged and cried, as of February 1, 2010, once the mental institution said I was fit to be free, there was nothing they could do about it. That day was the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death, which was one more reason I refused to go to rehab that day. So after trying as best they could, the next day, February 2, my mother and my uncle Tommy picked me up, and since my mother wasn’t going to abandon me, she insisted that I come and live in her house for a
while. She was afraid that if I was left at my own place I’d jump off my terrace, and she had every right to think that. I agreed, thinking it would be for a week at most.

Driving down to Jersey I heard the
Stern Show
for the first time and it felt like it had been a year. I listened to Howard go through his Oscar predictions and as depressed as I was, instinctually I thought of jokes to play off him, and how I’d jump in and complement the conversation if I’d been sitting at my microphone in the studio. At that moment I realized just how much I missed it and how badly I missed all of them. It took exactly two minutes of hearing the show to clear my fog, to break my heart in two, and to remind me of the life I’d had just over a month ago. At the same time it all seemed so far away; it was like looking at a life that existed behind glass, that I could observe but couldn’t touch. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in my chair making jokes with Howard about the Oscars. And when I opened them I saw that my chair was only the front seat of my mother’s car. My heart dropped lower than I’d thought possible and a wave of incredible sadness came over me. I stared out the window and said nothing for the rest of the ride. I didn’t even hear the show anymore, I was caught up in my head. When we got to my mom’s house she made me a big Italian meal to make me feel welcome, to nourish me, and to celebrate the fact that I’d come home. I was happy to have it and it was delicious. After I ate all that I could I got into bed. And I stayed there from that day, February 2, 2010, until April 3, 2011.

————

I came up for air every once in a while because I wanted to give my poor mother a break, but that never lasted long. I was supposed to go to several outpatient facilities, but I refused. I was supposed to see doctors regularly, but I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t open to anything and I was still suicidal. I could barely sit up straight in bed most days because I was paralyzed with depression, guilt,
and embarrassment. I refused all help. I didn’t want to see daylight, I wanted to be invisible, and after a while it became hard for me to feel comfortable when the sun was up. I’d sleep a lot but I never felt rested. I had no appetite and I always felt weak. It was all in my head, but sometimes I couldn’t even lift my arm to drink a glass of water. I lay there, unable to shower or do anything, tossing and turning for fourteen months, just thinking about how I’d fucked up for good, and about how my life was over. I’d gotten everything I’d always wanted and then I’d destroyed it, over and over again.

The drugs had beat me, which was something I had a really hard time with. I kept thinking about the first time I’d gotten drunk as a fourteen-year-old kid and how that moment had led me to this. I thought about how I started getting drunk every single day once my father became a quadriplegic and how I’d always told myself that booze would never beat me. I remembered how, as I got older and started doing drugs and saw friends from high school die from them, I told myself that drugs would never beat me either. All I thought about there in that dark for fourteen months was how wrong I’d been and how long I’d been wrong. Drugs and booze hadn’t just beat me, they’d made a fool of me.

And they weren’t done with me either, because I wasn’t done with them, which is what I hated about myself most of all. Even while living at my mother’s house spending all my time in bed, I still found a way to call dealers and buy pills and arrange for them to leave them outside of the house. My mom would be thrilled when I’d find the energy to go for a walk in the yard, thinking I was coming around, meanwhile I was picking up Ziploc bags full of painkillers that I’d hide in my underwear until I got back to my room. I’d stay in bed getting high until they were gone, then I’d find a way to make a call and order more. When anxiety and shame had kept me up for four days straight, a doctor would write me a prescription so that I’d get some real sleep. He was a guy who had always been generous with me, and he felt that if I couldn’t sleep I’d never get over my
anxiety. So on occasion he’d write me a prescription for sleeping pills, but they were few and far between. And those were the only times I was happy, taking them all at once, getting high. Nothing seemed worth living for anymore. I wanted to get back to my apartment in Hoboken so I could jump off of the terrace, just take a nosedive into the pavement after making sure there was no one down there for me to land on. That’s how I wanted to end it; that’s how I wanted to make a final statement. I just didn’t want to wake up alive. My apartment is high up enough, but I had one worry, that I’d hit someone else’s balcony on the way down. In the end I decided that going headfirst was the only way. That’s what I thought about when I was high.

Eventually my mother noticed that I was high, but she didn’t know how I was getting drugs into the house and she got very frustrated. There was a lot of crying and there was no rational talk. Taking care of me was a huge burden on her, because I was still on drugs and depressed and suicidal, every single day. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d start screaming so loud that I’d wake myself up. I just wanted to wake up dead and I hoped for it every time I managed to fall asleep. The depression, the anxiety, and the drugs became this constant weight crushing me. I’d have nightmares where I was being buried alive, and they were so real that when my mother would wake me from them I’d be more confused than ever. I wouldn’t know who I was or what was happening, I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t calm down. My poor mother would have to lie in bed next to her forty-three-year-old son and cry with him until he couldn’t cry anymore.

“Let’s die together,” she’d say, crying. “Let’s die. That’s what you want, so let’s die.”

She was trying to snap me out of it. One time we had a crazy argument about it, when she told me that she wanted to kill herself. That affected me because I didn’t want to be the cause of her death
and in that moment I realized that if I didn’t try to change I very well might be. For once I was calming her down, telling her not to talk like that, even though I felt that way every single day.

My sister became the backbone of our family because I was a mess and it took all my mother’s strength just to keep me afloat. We were fine financially because of my book royalties and the residuals from my DVD sales and film roles, but even though it’s hard for me to admit it, money isn’t everything. No dollar amount could relieve the pressure on my family and without a doubt these were the darkest hours for Stacey. I will never be able to thank her enough for keeping us together all on her own. She did all of it while holding down her job, which is amazing to me.

The room I lived in for all those months was down the hall from my mom, above the garage. To this day I’ve not been able to go back in there not only because I traveled to the darkest depths of my own soul in that bed, within those four walls, but because I know seeing that room again will remind me too clearly of just how much suffering I brought upon my poor mother. I’d bought her this town house—all cash—to pay her back for raising me, but then I went and ruined that by using it to exorcise my demons. Under my room in the garage was the Range Rover I’d bought her too, but she couldn’t enjoy it any more than she could enjoy her house because she could barely leave, too worried about what I’d do if she left me alone. My mother began to wither way from sadness and exhaustion as I got high and numbed myself into oblivion.

I was powerless and when I wasn’t high I was shaken to the core by anxiety attacks so intense that I had to be rushed to the hospital a few times. They’d give me a shot or an IV of Valium to calm me down, then send me home. After my third trip, one doctor gave it to my mother straight as I sat there staring into space.

“You need to put him in a home somewhere. If you don’t he’s going to die,” he said. “Your son can’t help himself. If you don’t take
a stand you’re going to continue taking care of him, which will probably kill you too. And if that happens and you’re not here for him, they’ll put him in a home anyway.”

The doctor was harsh but he was right, and I knew it. I had a solution, which was getting out of my mother’s hair long enough to return to my place in Hoboken and jump off my terrace. I saw myself as a hopeless case and I didn’t want to be a burden anymore. I didn’t see any other way out for me. But there was no way my mother would let me live alone at that point, and there was no fooling her the way I’d fooled the doctors in rehab. So after each of these emergency room visits she’d take me back home, refusing to give up on me.

Every once in a while I’d go out late at night and walk around trying to think, enjoying the emptiness and silence and the fact that no one would see me. I isolated myself as hard as I could, but a few people wouldn’t let me. Colin Quinn, the city kid, would take two buses to come down to my mom’s place in central Jersey to visit, just to get me outside. Those were the only times I got any kind of fresh air during the daylight hours, and every time after I had, I felt so strange and vulnerable that I’d seclude myself more than ever for the next few days.

Whenever I saw Colin I tried to hide my darkness and seem so much better than I was, and the effort that took exhausted me. He didn’t give up on me at all—one day he even got me to play basketball. My mom lives in a nice gated complex, so as we were walking by the courts he suggested we go play a game of twenty-one with some college kid who was out there shooting free throws. I’ve gotta say, even though I’d been in bed for eight months, I won the game. Somehow I hadn’t lost my outside shot, and it’s a memory Colin still jokes about. As great as that made me feel, after Colin left, I took a shower and got in bed and wanted to die all over again—worse than ever. It was so bad that when my mother had to leave the house the next day, she called one of my uncles to come over and keep an eye on me. She was able to tell when I was at my darkest, even though
she was powerless to stop it. Of all the friends in my life, Colin Quinn was my savior. He kept calling, even when I wouldn’t take his calls. He did what my closest family members did, from my uncles to the cousins I consider my closest friends—he never deserted me.

Around this time my hero, Bruce Springsteen, called me too. He and I had met at a funeral of a mutual friend who’d died of a heroin overdose five months before. At the funeral I got a moment to talk to Bruce because I was supposed to be clean at the time—though I wasn’t—and I told Bruce in the ten minutes we spoke that I had a lot of the same issues as the deceased and that I was trying my best to work them out. He wished me well and we shared some stories about the kid who had died, who really was the sweetest guy. I miss him a lot.

I’d had no contact with Springsteen since, until my mother came into my room one night and in the same way she used to tell me my friends were at the door asking if I could come out and play stickball when I was twelve, she said, “Bruce Springsteen is on the phone for you.”

I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Bruce had heard about what had happened, and he’d actually called—twice! The first time my mother didn’t wake me up!

“Well, just call him back,” she said.

“Ma, that’s not how it works,” I said. “You don’t call someone like that back. You wait for them to call you. I mean, he didn’t leave a number, did he?”

“No, but it’s on the Caller ID.”

“Ma, no, believe me, I can’t do that. There’s an unspoken rule—you wait for the famous person to call you. They do it when they have the time; you don’t call them back.”

Anyway, the second time Bruce called, we ended up speaking for over an hour and he couldn’t have been cooler.

“I’m thinking about you, just want to make sure you’re taking care of yourself, you know,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys who have
gone through what you’re dealing with and you can reach out and get help from a lot of people. There’s a lot of good people out there that can help you.”

I asked Bruce what he was doing at the time and he said he was home writing new music (which would become the amazing album
Wrecking Ball
) and then he told me how he’d taken his fifteen-year-old son to a concert the night before, because the kid had wanted to see some new rock band whose name I’m forgetting.

“And you know, Artie, I got him backstage at his first non-Daddy rock concert and he was so impressed I could do that,” Bruce said.

As deep into my own hole as I was I still appreciated the surreal gift of that phone call, except for the fact that I was forty-three and living with my mother. To be sitting in that bedroom in central Jersey and have my mom come in and say that Bruce Springsteen was on the phone helped me in such a profound way I can barely express it. I was sixteen when
Born in the U.S.A.
came out and he was instantly my hero, as he is today. To be there at forty-three getting a call that sincere from him was an insanely amazing moment and I remember thinking how much I hoped I lived long enough to be able to thank him in person for it one day. It was the first time I’d thought about living for something in months. Bruce was so genuinely concerned that I wasn’t sure what I had ever done in life to deserve such earnest attention from one of my heroes. He ended the conversation by giving me his number and telling me that I could call him anytime. The next morning I woke up feeling lighter, thinking about just how unpredictable my life is. Then I thought about how funny it would be if I started calling him every day, saying things like, “Hey, Bruce, Artie here, do you want to play volleyball today?” or “Dude, what are you doing? Let’s get ice cream!”