Free Crash and Burn by Artie Lange

about. I hope they found it to be entertaining, or at least purely disgusting—at the best I hope they found it enlightening. I’ll also settle for educational, in the way that any video preceded by a don’t-try-this-at-home disclaimer can be educational. That book is one of my proudest achievements, no matter what other heights I manage to scale, God willing.
    Anyway, my stand-up schedule was as busy and lucrative as it had ever been and between the Stern Show , invites to Comedy Central roasts, and a few small acting roles, I’d tapped into everything I’d always wanted from show business besides banging Angie Dickinsonand playing Jean Valjean in the Broadway production of Les Misérables . I also received the opportunity to give back to our country, which is something I’d always wanted to do. That year I went to Afghanistan with the USO to entertain our troops—a milestone for me—but I couldn’t let myself enjoy it completely and had to fuck it up by scoring fifteen Valium at the airport in Kyrgyzstan while waiting for our Armed Forces transport flight out of that hellhole. I got so out of my mind that I had to be driven back to the US Army base to sleep it off for thirteen hours because I was deemed unfit to fly. This was the army, by the way, so they had the authority to strap me into a seat as if I were a box of emergency rations, but they chose not to—I was that bad. If I was what might be called “mildly ill behaved” at the airport, once they got me back on the base I really put on a show, because all fifteen of those black-market Valium, about 150 milligrams’ worth because they were the biggest-sized generic pills—really kicked in. When they let me out of the car I proceeded to run around like a crazy man, until the top dog sergeant in charge caught up with me and told me in no uncertain terms that I was either going to bed or getting locked up in a cell by him personally. There’s one thing I can say about me, which is that I rebel all I can to the furthest degree, always to my own detriment, but when true authority knocks and real trouble is at my door, I answer and at least try to fly right.
    Sometimes it literally takes an army, though. I got the message and allowed them to escort me to my bunk, where I realized that I was more exhausted than I’d thought and had no more fight in me, because, despite my tolerance and stature, I’d snacked on enough Middle Eastern Valium to put down a horse. Still, I had enough wiseass in me to pop off and keep everyone within earshot awake for another hour, because I’d convinced myself that my misery was all their fault and so they deserved to be insulted. I’ve come to realize that I should just stay home.
    After my USO tour I was reeling from drug use, living in a fantasy land, because like I’ve said, in Amsterdam I made this almost proud,conscious decision to let go and didn’t give a shit about myself anymore. I didn’t even try to pretend that I was attempting to slow down anymore, which, ironically, was the most honest I’d been with myself in years. I don’t know if this will make sense to anybody else but me, but it was as if I’d gone to confession and I was the priest: I’d admitted my sin, and I forgave me. My self-appointed salvation was to keep heading on down that road without looking back. I was free; I really didn’t care what happened to me anymore.
    People started to slip out of my life, some quickly, some slowly: everyone from Dana to my best childhood friends, to family like my cousin Jeff, whom I’d never in a million years thought I’d ever lose touch with. I remember him telling me at that time that he hardly knew me anymore and that he only learned what I was doing by listening to the Stern Show . Jeff had always been an older brother to me, I’d always shared everything with him, ever since we were kids, and he’d been reduced to knowing as much about me as any given stranger with a Sirius subscription.
    I saw all of