Crash and Burn (30 page)

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In September 2010, Greg Giraldo died, and when I heard the news it sent me into a deeper depression because I admired and liked Greg
very much. I heard this at a time when I actually had been making some headway, but I was fragile and that news sent me into a tailspin. Greg Giraldo was a great comedian, plain and simple, and saddest of all, he was on the cusp of becoming recognized for his talent when he lost his fight with drugs and alcohol. Greg’s stand-up was an extension of who he was, which was an acerbic, insanely smart comic who had great observations about life and everything in it. Like every great comic he could also be insanely mean in a funny way. Comics are one of two things: they’re either funny when they whine or they’re funny when they’re mean. Jerry Seinfeld is basically a guy who bitches about shit, but he’s funny when he does it. Greg, and I mean this in the best way, was at his best when he was mean and scathing. And I enjoyed his company immensely, because the conversation was always just perfect.

Greg made a name for himself on Comedy Central’s roasts because Greg, more than anyone else I knew, was amazing at taking someone down to nothing with just one line. And nowhere did I get a better exhibition of this than when he and I both took part in the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner in 2006.

I also knew firsthand that Greg and I shared the same enthusiasm for drugs and had the same brand of dark self-deprecation inside us because we’d partied together. We’d get high, we’d get wasted, and every time we did, at some point in the night we’d start talking about how fucked up we were and how we hated it. We’d talk about how we wanted to get clean because both of us knew we had to. We weren’t talking about it only as a path to improving our careers, and I know we never mentioned it (God forbid!) as the obvious improvement it would be to our health. No, both of us realized very clearly that we were so far gone that getting clean was the only way we’d stay alive. Greg had a wife and children and he spoke of them in the highest regard, never as a burden or a nag the way so many guys with and without problems like ours do. Greg loved his family, he truly did, just as he knew that his habit would eventually cause him to
lose them. I couldn’t relate to how he felt because I don’t have anyone in my life and I’m lucky enough that I never had any accidental kids, but I’ve put more than a few very nice girls who made the grave mistake of getting seriously involved with me through hell, so I could appreciate the guilt he felt for hurting his wife and children with his behavior.

Giraldo and I traveled together to that Shatner roast, and it’s a flight I’ll never forget, first of all because I wasn’t too fucked up to forget, and second of all because for the first time I had to take care of someone on a level that I’d never had to before. Sure, I’d gotten friends home before but this was different—I was holding this guy’s hand, keeping him from the abyss on a minute-to-minute basis. Let me just say very clearly that I’m not judging at all, nor was I then. It was simple: I was the one taking care of someone too fucked up to handle themselves, which was something I could relate to pretty well, having been that guy so many times myself. That day I finally got a taste of what I’d put so many people, from my castmates at MADtv, to my family, to my girlfriends, through.

Greg and I were booked on a first-class flight from JFK to LAX on a Saturday, the day before the taping. I got to the airport nice and early and was enjoying a cocktail in the club lounge of whatever airline it was. I wasn’t sober at the time, in fact I had a pocket full of Vicodin, but I was nowhere near the depths and darkness that lay in store for me. This was the same year I played Carnegie Hall and did
Beer League
, so I was holding things together relatively well, still fooling the people in my life most of the time (or so I thought). I mean, no one considered me an angel, but I’m pretty sure they had no idea just how serious my intake was shaping up to be. Put it this way, by 2006, I never got on an airplane sober. I was in training for my crash and burn.

That day I was sipping a Jack and water about half an hour before boarding time when Giraldo barreled in like a tornado out of west Kansas. The guy’s energy was crazy; he couldn’t stand still, he was
nearly spinning in place, all jacked up and totally manic. He was moving so frantically that everyone else in the lounge walking or talking at a normal pace looked like statues compared to him. His eyes darted around in every direction until he zeroed in on me and he basically ran over to where I was sitting.

“Art!” he said. “Art, I fucked up. I fell off the wagon and my wife is pissed.”

“Greg, it’s okay, calm down,” I said.

“No, Art, you don’t understand. I’m really fucked up and anxious. I’ve been up all night partying. . . . I don’t think I can do this, man. I don’t think I’m gonna make it through this flight. I don’t think I can get on that fucking plane, Art.”

I had a pocket full of Vicodin, which, being a painkiller, takes all your pain away, but it also has that opiate quality that gives you a sense of well-being, even when you have no reason at all to feel that way.

“Dude, c’mon, sit down for a minute,” I said. “You’ve got to get on this flight, so you’ve got to try to relax. If you don’t go out there and do this you’ll fuck up your whole career. I’m gonna help you. Here, take a couple of Vicodin. These will calm you down.”

The poor guy’s eyes were so wild. “I’ll try, man,” he said. “But I don’t know.”

The pills numbed him out enough to get him sitting down and I kept him talking so by the time they were doing last call for the flight, Greg was well behaved enough to get on board. Now I only gave him Vicodin, but when he told the story on Pete Dominick’s Sirius radio show not too long afterward, Greg insisted that I gave him Ecstasy. I wish! Both of us would have been much more cheerful if I’d had a pocket full of that! We sat next to each other in first class and basically I held Greg’s hand for the entire six-hour flight because the Vicodin I kept handing him may have kept him from getting out of his seat, but the guy was still a raw nerve, just pure anxiety. When he had to go to the bathroom I went with him and waited outside
because I was worried that he’d get claustrophobic in there and freak out. Thanks to me we made it to LA without incident, but I have to be honest: just short of diapers and a bottle, I took care of the guy as if he were a baby. You know what? He couldn’t have had a better chaperone because I’ve been that baby more times than I care to remember (and even more that I don’t remember). I was paying a karmic debt to all of those who had done the same for me and I was happy to do so, because I knew what someone in his mind state of mind needed.

Like I said, when Greg told this story he claimed that I had given him Ecstasy, and here’s further proof that he was wrong: the two of us sat through
Alex and Emma
, the worst movie of Kate Hudson’s career, with no problem. If we were on Ecstasy we would have loved it, but we didn’t. We hated it, we just didn’t care enough to look away. That’s what painkillers like Vicodin do: they make you lazy and complacent enough to let crap like that wash over you, even when all you’d have to do to avoid it is just look away.

We had a pretty tight schedule to keep when we landed, the first stop being rehearsal at CBS Studios. A car took us there straight from the airport, and since Greg was still pretty touch-and-go, I made sure I stayed close to him during the run-through. We were lucky enough to end up standing next to Farrah Fawcett (who was still a grade-A fox, by the way!), and I remember Greg freaking out about that, like, every five minutes.

“Art, she’s an Angel,” he kept whispering in my ear. “She is one of Charlie’s Angels. Artie, look at her! You remember that poster, right?”

“Yeah, man, of course, keep it down.”

“The one with the mesh bathing suit?”

“Greg, yeah, I remember. I had one. Be cool, man.”

“She’s still fucking hot.”

“Yeah, she is.”

I got him through the proceedings and I’m pretty sure Farrah, rest
in peace, didn’t hear us recalling all of our adolescent fantasies that involved her. When rehearsal ended I got Greg to the hotel, up to his room, and into his bed without a problem. I didn’t see him until the next day at the studio, and by then he seemed fine.

“Artie, thank you so much,” he said. “I can’t thank you enough. I really can’t. You saved my ass. I fucked up, but it would have been so much worse if I didn’t get here and do this.”

“No big deal, man, you’d do the same for me.”

“No, Artie, you don’t know how bad I was yesterday.”

“Greg, stop, it’s okay, don’t think anything of it.”

He was so ashamed about what he’d done that he thanked me over and over like crazy all day, but he would have done the same for me, end of story. And if his behavior had been noticed by the producers during the rehearsal, they forgot all about it the next day when Andy Dick showed up. That guy was so fucked up and unmanageable that it took every spare handler on set to keep him in line.

I remember sitting in the greenroom with Greg and my friend Lisa Lampanelli, and Joe Francis, the Girls Gone Wild guy, was there doing his thing, which involved boozing up a barely legal broad while trying to seem relevant. Anyway, Andy came in there too, and by then he’d decided, against everyone’s wishes, to do a spoof instead of a monologue. Andy is a funny motherfucker, I don’t care what anyone says, and he could have done a roast as well as he can do sketches, stand-up, you name it. He should have gone out there and just done a bunch of killer jokes but instead he chose to put on a sketch where he played Mister Spock in a bad wig and delivered a list of stupid dick jokes. It didn’t work at all; it was just awkward.

During the roast I sat next to Greg and Lisa and George Takei and as much as I wanted to support Greg—who was staying sober—and lead by example, I indulged in the two bars they had set up on the stage for us. How could I not? They were on the stage! There were also hot girls dressed in green everywhere, as an homage to Captain Kirk’s prowess with alien pussy.

I was good and loaded throughout that taping, so much so that I made a point of insulting Kevin Pollak, who is a great stand-up comic and actor. I said something like, “Kevin Pollak is here. And the only reason he’s here is because he does William Shatner and every other hokey imitation you can imagine. Get your fill because you’re not going to see Kevin on this show again unless Comedy Central decides to roast Peter Falk.”

Kevin got genuinely mad at me for that, by the way. Every single person—I mean every single one—made a joke about me being a drug addict who would probably be dead in a year, and that was fine, but Kevin got mad at a Peter Falk joke. Betty White got up and made a joke about outliving me, for Christ’s sake! Anyway, here’s what Pollak came back at me with when he got his time at the podium:

“I’m sorry, Artie, for insulting you with my impressions. It’s something you might not be familiar with. It’s called a career.”

Thank you, Kevin, for letting me know what you do for a living.

The best part of the night was Greg’s turn at the podium—he was first, by the way. He started with a few cursory remarks, then he looked over, directly at me, and apropos of nothing said, “Artie Lange, you fat fucking drug addict,” then he continued with his roast. It was hilarious and I started laughing hard along with everybody else in the house. Greg was always a sweetheart, though, he made sure to shoot me a look just after that that said,
It’s a roast, man, don’t take it personal
. Like I ever would! How could I when it was so funny and on the nose?

The shoot was on a Sunday so I had to take an early flight to make it to
Stern
on time the next day, and it’s a good thing I did because the roast was really fun and things were heating up to be a good night. I think Andy Dick got into trouble for pissing on the girl Joe Francis was hanging out with or at least I read something like that in the tabloids, and I bet I would have done something inappropriate or illegal or both with one of the green girls if I were given half the
chance. I can’t say because I wasn’t there, but I’m pretty sure Greg didn’t stay clean that night.

I saw Greg quite a bit when we were both in New York because Greg was a Comedy Cellar guy. He’d do sets there but more often than not, he’d spend his evenings upstairs in the restaurant with his fellow comics, just shooting the shit. At this time in my life I was at the Cellar at the very least a few times a month, usually more often than that, and I always ended up at a table catching up with him for a few hours. And every time I saw him he thanked me once again for taking care of him. It got to be silly because I know in my heart he would have done the same thing, if not more, for me.

There’s a store downtown called Lazaro run by a guy who designs his own jewelry and clothes. I used to go there with Adrienne a lot, but the place always did and always will remind me of Greg because he was the one who told me about it and he always wore Lazaro’s stuff. It’s very rock-and-roll and very cool and when I see someone wearing it or read about Lazaro I think of Greg. Whenever I walk into the Comedy Cellar I think of Greg. And whenever I see a roast I think of Greg because he’d perfected it; he was the best roaster I’ve ever seen. It makes me very somber when I think about Greg and what he struggled through. He loved his family so much and he didn’t want to be what he was—a true addict. He was brilliant, but just like me, he was a true drug addict. If you want to call it a disease, that’s one he and I both shared.

Greg died on September 29, 2010, after a gig, in his room at the Hyatt in New Brunswick, New Jersey, of an overdose of prescription pills. At the time I was at my mom’s house in a bed I hadn’t left in months, truly at the bottom of my well of depression. I didn’t know how to react to it, except for the fact that I had just, for the first time in over a year, stepped foot in the Comedy Cellar. I was far from returning to functional, but for a moment there I was able to rejoin the world. It was the first time I’d appeared in public in ten months
and I did a short set at the Cellar. I’d been in a vacuum, completely out of touch with everything that existed outside of my head and the room I’d been hiding in. I’d never forgotten my friends, but that night, being in the Cellar, I remembered just how great it was to be around Dave Attell and Greg and all the guys I’d shared so many laughs with. So I started asking about them, hoping they’d come in that night. All of them were on the road, so I didn’t see them, but that was fine.