Riding high with Artie Lange

I imes like this are really hard," Artie Lange says in a slow, tired, asthmatic rasp. "Now is when heroin really seems like a good idea. How else am I going to come down from this?"

Lange is sitting in the back of a black stretch limousine parked in the load­ing dock attached to Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh. Beads of sweat glisten in his thin corona of graying hair. He shifts all of his 305 pounds on the leather seat, trying to get comfortable. Not one to overdress, he's in loose Carhartts and a stained sweatshirt. He just headlined a stand-up comedy show in front of 2,704 fans, who smothered him with love for close to an hour. Now there's a near riot in the street just on the other side of the loading-dock door, which is about to open. Lange sparks a Marlboro Light and puts the pack into a satchel alongside a prescription vial of Subutex, an opiate-blocking medication that prevents symptoms of heroin withdrawal.

The limo door opens. Lange's assistant, Teddy, hands him a $72,000 check.

"Shit, man, I thought it was going to be a little more money," Lange says. "I mean, I'm not complaining. Seventy-two grand for an hour of work. It's really 20 years of work if you think about it. Anyway, I always have the feeling I'm getting fucked."

Lange starts in about the night. "Being onstage." he says, "in the eye of that storm, is like a drug itself." The more he talks about the show ("the Paris Hilton bit went over okay"), the more it's obvious he's not thinking about the show. He's still thinking about junk. It would be so easy to score. For a few bucks he could take a magic carpet ride back to the hotel.

The loading-dock door opens onto the street, and fans block the way. A 10-year-old boy knocks on the limo window, holding a copy of Artie's stand-up DVD It's the Whis­key Tolkin'. Artie signs it and hands it back. A stunner walks up. She's a blonde with long, strong stems and enough lipstick on to paint a house.

"There's a possibility I'm your soul mate, Artie," she says, "and I hate you for it."

"Well, wait a minute," Artie replies. "Let's talk more about the soul-mate thing."

"Aw, Artie, you're too much of a man for me."

Lange rolls his eyes as if to say, Sweetie, I really doubt that.

It's a typical night in the life of Artie Lange. He spends a lot of time on the road. He's one of the highest-paid comedians in America. When he landed the most coveted seat in the business in 2001-that of right-hand man on The Howard Stern Show-he'd already starred on a network sitcom. ABC's Norm. and on Fox's improbably successful sketch show Mad TV. Since then he has appeared in the hit movies Elf and Old School. He has been a recurring character on Denis Leary's FX series. Rescue Me. In November 200G he sold out Carnegie Hall in three hours, and this winter he sold out a night at the 1,500-seat Town Hall in Manhattan for a show called

Artie Langei Fully Loaded and closed the New York Comedy Festival as the headliner at Lincoln Center. He's building a 7,000-square-foot weekend manse on the Jersey shore, and he's shopping for a yacht. He's a certifiable multimillionaire.

Not bad for a 40-year-old former Newark dockworker who barely finished high school.

But Lange's got problems. Big ones. They are, in descending order of immediacy: (1) Cross obesity, attained through eating everything but most notably cupcakes. Devil Dogs, pasta and Hawaiian Punch. He's put on a good hundred pounds in the past year. (2) Alcoholism, by means of Jack Daniel's and Patron. (3) The aforementioned her­oin. (4) Cocaine, preferably snorted off the bosom of a Vegas hooker. (5) Loneliness. Lange shares a two-bedroom apartment in Hoboken, New jersey with a plasma-screen TV. When talking about Artie Lange. people always bring up the Belushi curse. His career trajectory follows the path by which portly comedians (John Belushi, Sam Kinison, John Candy. Chris Farley) take a tragic dirt nap at the peak of their career. There's even a website, artielangedeathwatch.com. about which Lange has remarked, "They're mak­ing a couple of very good points."

As the limo rolls through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, Lange looks out the window into the dark night. Somewhere out there is the wrong girl and a sleazy hotel room with his name on it. Now is the time in Lange's career when he's supposed to wake up dead, and he knows it.

"'Hugs are better than drugs.' My mother used to say that to me as I left the house, and I believed her. I believed everything she ever said-until the first time I got high. I leaned

bock and went. Wow. this is woy better than when my Uncle Perry hugs me. What else has my mother been lying to me about7 Am I not the most handsomest boy in New jersey1 Hugs are great, but better than drugs1 Come on. Let me put it this way: I never went to Harlem at four in the morning to pay some­one to hug me. Hey. Carlos, here's 20 bucks just put your arms around me'"

Everyone loves Artie Lange. He's one of the guys. Other comics flock to him, and he helps them out when he can-getting them gigs, promoting them. He signs lots of autographs. He's a big tipper. He knows everything about sports, celebrities. TV and movies. He wouldn't know an e-mail account from his bank card, but he reads several newspapers a day, dozens of maga­zines a week and the occasional book. He's renowned for his photographic memory, and he can recite the entire script of CoodFellas. Ask Lange about an obscure Belushi bit and he'll deliver it word for word, beat for beat.

Lange likes to think he's one of the guys, but the truth is, he's not anymore. When he's out in public-whether he's in Hoboken, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh. Vegas or outside How­ard Stern's studio on 49th Street in Man-hattan-mooks yell out his name, cops stop him to shake his hand, chicks with boob jobs blow him kisses.

"Yankees games are getting rough," says Lange. a rabid pinstripes fan. "That's ground zero for Stern fans. They send over drinks that cost $12, and I feel obligated to drink them. Before long, there are 40 drinks in front of me and a line of Irish guys from Queens waiting to put me in a headlock. It's not fun for the people you're with."

Lange's sensibility is north Jersey Italian. 1958 vintage. A (continued on page 152)

ARTIE LANCE

(continued from page 106) sampling of the laws by which he lives: Women are broads, homosexuals are fags, mothers are Ma. "1 grew up in Union, New Jersey, which was like the entry level to the suburbs when you got out of Newark." I.ange says. "Everybody's father was, like, in construction, a plumber, cop, fireman. But it was also a really progressive place. It won Ail-American City in the mid-1970s."

When he tells the story of his youth, he knows he is proof of the adage that humor is misery distilled. Lange lived with his younger sister. Stacey. and his parents, Artie Sr. and Judy. His parents were supportive and loving. They were strictly lower middle class and sometimes struggled, but Lange and his sister didn't want for anything. By blood he's a mix of Italian, Native American and German. By culture he's a purebred ptiestmo. As such, he worshipped his father.

"I never did drugs or thank in high school, because my lather never did," Lange says. He stares at the end of his cigarette when he says this, as if the hot ash has somehow insulted him. We're sitting in his trailer in Brooklyn on the set ol Rescue Me, a couple of days after the Pittsburgh gig. "My old man was addicted to the scam," he says. "That was his vice. He loved action, and he didn't get it from drugs or drinking or gambling. He got it from risking shit. He liked robbing. He liked stealing shit. He was addicted to it, like, any sort of scam that could get you cash money. My mother always used to say, 'What about when the kids want to go to college?' and he would always say. 'I'll get it when the time comes.' Of course, when it was time for me to go to college, he had no money. And then he fell off a roof."

Lunge's father installed rooftop anten­nas for a living. In 1985 he was installing an antenna when he fell and landed on his neck, snapping his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

"It was our family's version of 9/11," Lange says. "There's no other way to put it. He fell off a house that had no homeowner s insurance. He had stolen the ladder he fell oil of from a Bell Atlantic truck. There was nobody to sue. I had just turned 18, and my mother ended up going on welfare for a little while. A very scary time."

It was a wake-up call. Lange's father was bedridden: his mother was despondent. It was about this lime Artie decided to pursue comedy. He began making routine trips into Manhattan at night to seek something better, the kind of Jersey-boy trips into the unknown metropolis mythologized in Bruce Springsteen songs. "I went to New York every night, trying to get into clubs. We got a handicapped van for my father, so 1 would use il to go into New York to audi­tions and shit. 1 would go to comedy clubs even night." I le worked dinner theater for S40 a shift, playing a drunken priest. "For : three months we would do it at difJerent

halls and shit. We kept the lips. As the actors, we also served the food in character."

Lange's father died in 1990. Some people, including l.ange himself, think it was probably suicide by pills. There was never an autopsy, but his father often talked about suicide. By this time Artie )>. was already a heavy boozer and druggie. He had worked a connection and gotten a coveted spot with the longshoreman's union, earning S60.000 a year on the docks, unloading orange juice concen­trate through massive hoses. He stayed there a year and a half, but he was never comfortable. Onstage he had begun to see a little success. He was tunny. People liked him. Bui what did they like about him? From where did his humor stem? Herein lies the Artie Lange conundrum.

As with Lange's friend Chris Farley, with whom he appeared in Dirty Work (Farley's last film before he died alone in his Chicago apartment of a cocaine and morphine overdose), the misery behind Lange's humor was thinly veiled. His insecurities, his character flaws—they were his material. He was the butt of his own jokes. And the harder his audiences laughed, ihe less funny it got.

"/ wenl In rehab for coke, and a black giiy told me. Damn, man, what are you pouring that shit on, cheeseburgers? )bu thejattest cokehead I ei<erseen! You pouring that shit in a caramel macchiato?'"

November 1996: Artie Lange is making $8,000 a week. He's living in L.A., co-starring on a hit sketch-comedy show called Mad VI.' Forget that he has already been hospitalized lor overdosing on pills. Forget thai he has already been lo rehab and forged an unholy union wilh Jack Daniel's and cocaine. Fight grand a week! And he's not yet 30 years old!

Lange's in a good mood. He's earned himself a bender.

He calls a couple of buddies, and they fly to Vegas lo watch the first fight between Mike 'lyson and L'vander I lolyficld. Fven though he has been sending half his paycheck to his mother even week lor safekeeping. Lange's got a pile of walking money, and he puts $15,000 on lyson. (lyson, of course, lost by TK.O in the 1 lth round.)

Lange scores a bag of coke and promptly loses another $3,000 at ihe tables. It's time to go home. Boozy and coked lo ihe gills, he makes such a scene at the airport that his friends have lo subdue him. When he gels on the plane, he locks himself in the bath-nxmi and starts snorting yayo. He's doing a tightrope walk on a line of cocaine. As long as he stays high, he can walk il while keep­ing everyone around him in stitches. Bui he knows the comedown is going lo hurt.

Ihe next live days are a tornado of drug abuse, whiskey swilling, gambling losses and Mad VI' rehearsals. He doesn'l sleep, doesn't bathe, doesn'l change his clothes. He loses another five grand on a Rockets-Lakers game, reaching a loss

otal for tins bender of yJXlHKi.

Wednesday night: Lange's cruising a jar on Sunset and meets a Ions; tall strip­per who says she tan score him coke. 1 "hey 50 outside and meet the dealer, a six-foot-four biker-looking dude. He wants to jhat, and Lange wants to get high.

"Dude, go gel I lie fucking coke. 1 don't want to sit around here." I.ange bat'ks.

The biker pulls out a knife. The strip­per begs the dealer not to stab I.ange. .ind then she gives Artie .1 blow job in his L'ar. It is a very L.A. moment.

Thursday morning: Lange's roommate and cast mate. Orlando |ones. has booted him from their duplex. His friends worn that I.ange is going to pull a Belushi. I'hone calls are made. On the wav to the studio I.ange passes out at a stoplight while driving from the I lollywood 1 lills. Another cast mate. Nicole Sullivan, pulls up behind Lange's idling Ford Taurus, honks and wakes him up. He drives oil'. When he arrives at the set, a crowd of concerned people is waiting. His manager is in the pat king lot, along with his agents from Wil­liam Morris, two executive producers from the show and an executive from Fox.

Lange does what anyone would do in his shoes: He turns and runs as last as his bloated legs will take him. I le sprints out of the studio gates and into the streets of West Hollywood with a crowd of men in suits trailing like a farcical retinue. Through backyards, around swimming pools, over shrubs and across patios. It's 1 \:'M). Peo­ple reading the arts section of the paper in lawn chairs look up to see a filthy porcine comedian sprinting past in a mist of sweat, followed by a panting pack of executives in linen suits and loafers.

Lange runs out of steam in a grocery store on Melrose and Vine. His reps cornel him in the produce section, and the former all-county first baseman from Union High School throws oranges to keep them at bay. The store manager calls the police. They arrive, and Lange takes a big drunken swing at one. The cops drag him out, throw him on the hood of a cruiser and cuff him.

"Well. well, well, what do we have here"'" says one policeman, pulling a hag of white powder out of Lange's pocket.

When I.ange wakes up the next clay, doctors at the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail hospital ward tell him they have never before seen that much cocaine in a human being.

Lange returns to his bedroom upstairs in his mother's house in L'nion. |ail. the bender, the fear of death and poverty— lies terrified. He buckles down, doing what he knows how.

He works the comedy clubs in New York every night, honing his act.

"1 couple df\f>irs ago I went to I'egas for the Super Howl, mul m\ girlfriend, Dim/i, rails me and saw. Me and >in mother want to put in a real live liet in legits! Iwenly minutes be]ore the

game, I take the Eastern European hooker off'my cock, tell her to keep clapping her hands so she doesn't steal anything, and I call Dana up. She goes, 'Okay, we want S50 on the ewer.' Of course I have my reputation as a degenerate gambler to think about, and I'm not going to embarrass myselj with a S50 bet. But I call her hick and tell her 1 put it in, and she goes, 'We want to root Jor you, too. What do you have?' Very calmly I said, 7 have S20.0D0 on the under. Good luck to you and your mother.' Oj course, the mvr comes in and I lose about S48.0(lt) for the weekend. Then when I go home, she ask\ for her 50 bucks."

lour days a week Artie l.ange gets a 4:45 a.m. wake-up call at his top-floor, two-bedroom corner apartment in Hoboken. 1 Ialf asleep, he slips into his beat-up work boots and zombie-walks through his messy apartment—past piles of used towels, news­papers, fan mail and takeout menus, past the original Al Hirschleld drawings and the framed crossword puzzle with the "Stern's Artie" clue on the hallway wall (a gift from

his ma), past the statuettes of Jake and Elwood placed on pedestals across from the 42-inch TV. He catches a glimpse across the Hudson ol Manhattan glittering in the morning light through the windows.

Lange ambles down to a waiting limo. and as he lights the first Marlboro ol the day, the car spirits him through the Lin­coln Tunnel to The Howard Stem Show in midtown Manhattan. A limousine! To The Howard Stem Show'. It's every Jersey boy's dream. No more ferry, no more PATH train. He's made it. He's funny!

But it's still five in the morning, and even after seven years of Stern, Lange's not a morning person.

"It's hard to get used to this, man." Lange says, smoke pouring from his nose. "A lot of times I'll have just come in from a stand-up gig in Vegas or something.'

He arrives in the shiny Sirius Satellite Radio offices on cupcake Wednesday. He picks out one of his Favorites and describes it lovingly: "It's peanut butter and chocolate

all swirled together, concealed in [his really moist and pet led chocolate cake. There are sprinkles on top. It's reall\ a lucking work of art." On Wednesdays l.ange stands by the cupcake table in between show seg­ments and chats with people as they pass, as though daring himself to eat another. Every so often he does.

Lange and his lather were both fans of Stern, going all the way back to the early 1980s, l.ange look over |ackie Mauling s seal when Mauling lell over a nionev dis­pute in early '2001. The competition for the job was heavy, but l.ange was a natural fit: His blue-collar |ersev upbringing goes right to the core of the Stern listener. It helps that he loves drugs, hookers, boob jobs, baton cheeseburgers, spoils, booze and Howard Slern himself. But he also provides honesty and a compassion thai are crucial to Stern's success.

In the studio he sits to Stern's left, between Howard and Fred Norris. Stern's longtime sound-effects guy. and across from Robin Quivers, who sits in a glass booth, presumably for protection. I.ange's life unspools on the Slern show. If he goes on a date, il makes it on the air. If >i.\\ boy is running a profile of him. Howard brings it up. ("What kind ol picture is going to go with the story?" Howard asks. Our answer: "How about Artie naked with a frying pan over his privates?") The ongoing joke seems to be how desperate Artie l.ange is to numb the pain of being Artie l.ange.

"I don't like listening to The Howard Stern Show when they talk about Artie doing drugs or drinking or eating a lot," says Norm MacDonald. the former Satur­day Night Live star who introduied l.ange to Stern. "But Artie's in a tough position on the show because people like to hear it. I saw the same thing with Sam Kini-son. He was really fucking funny, and he made a name for himself with his alco­hol and drug material. He obviously got sucked into that. 1 always tell Artie just to be funny. Don't be one of those jokes that make you a something guy—a drug guy or a booze guy or a midget guy. If you're going to be anything, be the rehab guy."

One of ihe comedians who opens for l.ange on the road elaborates on the l.ange conundrum while backstage at the Pittsburgh show: Tucking Dane Cook may be more popular than Artie, and he might make more money. 1 can't explain it. Dane Cook is a douche bag. But here's the thing: At the end of this tour there's a chance Artie's going to die. Dane Cook's probably not going to die."

In 2005 l.ange disappeared for lour days, and Stern and the show's producer, Gary Dell'Abale. tried frantically to Hack him down. They had no idea thai l.ange was bottoming out from a heroin habit he'd been hiding lor six months. When l.ange finally made il hack lo the show, he lold the Howard Stem Show crew he had been on ,i drinking binge. I le look a ration of shit lor weeks afterward. Il made lor great radio. Kvenlually l.ange confessed on the air.

"It just tame out," Lange says. "That's what happens when you have to talk for six hours every day. Shit just comes out."

It came as no surprise that Lange was dabbling in things that were very danger­ous. At one point Captain Janks, a Stern show regular, phoned a Las Vegas tele­vision station and reported that Lange had been found dead at the Hard Rock Motel. Kveryone believed it, and the news quickly went national.

"We caught it right before CNN was about to put it on the news ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen," Lange remembers. "Thank God, because then my mother would have seen it." Then he smiles. "I think it's kind of cl that 1 would have made the CNN news crawl, though."

"(Crystal meth \ a good drug if you need to walk In St. Louis one weekend."

The limo is winding through the Pitts­burgh night. We cross one of the city's bridges to the South Side. The Heinz Hall show is done, and Lange just wants to lake a shower, eal some pasta and walch Jake (iyllcnhaal in Zodiac on hotel pay-per-view, bin he's promised the owner of a small comedy club he'll do a late-night set. "I gotta learn how to say no," Lange says. "And you know, people have got to learn to slop asking for shit like this."

And then, apropos of nothing, he starts to talk about love. The only long-term rela­tionship he's had in his life was with Dana Sironi, a schoolteacher from New Jersey.

"When me and Dana were together, everything was going so good," Lange says. "I was in my mid-30s, and I was more stable than ever. 1 just couldn't make it work."

The limo stops at a red light, and peo­ple see Lange through the tinted window. They've been following him all the way from Heinz Hall.

"Hey, Artie! You're the best, man!"

In reality, everything wasn't going so good with Dana. Artie was drinking heavily, hooked on heroin, doing the Stern show every morning and touring stand-up clubs on weekends. Dana bore the brunt of his bad behavior.

"I'd call her in a blackout from. like. St. Louis, propose to her on the phone, and the next day 1 wouldn't remember it," Lange says, wheezing. "That happened, like, three limes.'

When Lange confessed his heroin addiction on the air, Dana was listening. It surprised everyone close to him—his mother, his sister, his co-workers—but perhaps no one more than Dana.

"She louiul out about it listening to ihe show. ,uid our relationship was never the same." Lange says. "I had to live under a checklist after thai. I fell like I had a boss. Who the fuck needs that? I'm not going to put up with that from any broad. I don't give a shit. She wouldn't fucking budge. And I'm like, 'All right, I'm not going to lucking say I'm sorry.'"

Another car passes, and a girl flashes her tits from the backseat window.

"We love you, Artie!"

"That's depressing to me.' Lange says, ignoring the passing tits, "that I couldn't make that work with Dana."

"/¦'licking A-Rml. Can A-Rod gel one fucking hit in October? A double down the line—something! He wears the number 13 because he wants to be like Babe Ruth. It's close to number three. People don't realize this: He's a lot like Babe Ruth. Before the playoffs last year A-Rod went to a hos­pital and promised a dying kid that he'd ground out to second for him. A nd it's true, people. I was there. A-Rod pointed to second base."

Lange turned 40 in October. He's outlived many of his idols. He's got a lucrative deal with Fox to develop a television show. He has film deals in the hopper. Things are looking up, but at the same time. Lange's more miserable than ever. At a low point on Stem last May he surprised everyone by announcing angrily that he was going to quit the show. He eventually backed down from the threat—"I wasjust tired of getting up early, man. Sometimes it's a grind "—but he still considers quitting an option.

On this night he's pacing the greenroom, psyching himself up for an appearance on Late Might With Conan O'Brien. He just got back from a two-week vacation, and he looks pulfy. pale and not all that rested. He's listening to Live at Leeds on his iPod. He shaved in the morning for the first time in two weeks, and all his chins are shining. It's his 15th appearance on Conan.

"I'm getting sick of this shit, man," he says, not referring to O'Brien in par­ticular—Lange is nothing if not grateful to people who've helped him coming up. He's had enough of the work. And maybe thinking about the drugs, too. And the booze. And what's coming next. "I'm tired," he says. "I just want to retire."

Jessica Biel is headlining the show, and a team of assistants and beauticians is buzzing around her in the adjacent room. Lange munches a chocolate chip cookie. A segment producer asks if he wants to meet her.

"What the fuck could I possibly have to say to Jessica Biel?" he says. "We don't even look like we're in the same species."

Lange chews on an unlit cigar and paces the room. He looks agitated.

"There's something insanely depress­ing about my role in all this." he says. "I'm like this fat court jester waddling out there under the lights. It's fucking depressing."

When Lange's segment arrives, an assis­tant grabs him and he hits the stage. He doesn't waddle as much as sprint. O'Brien greets him, and the crowd gives him a helping of applause. The one-liners pour from Lange in a stream, and just like that, everyone's laughing. He's a hit. He's made it. He's Funny. Everyone loses Artie Lange.