Free Crash and Burn by Artie Lange Page B

drug isn’t meant to be used that way, and if you use it incorrectly you’ll end up very, very ill, as I did.
    I tried to plead the flu, but they wanted me to be a part of this thing so badly that Comedy Central was ready to hire a private jet to fly me to LA, complete with a doctor on board to get me well enough to perform. My cover was blown and for once there was no way I was getting away with it, so I had no choice but to admit that I was drug sick. I told my lawyer, Jared Levine, the truth, and he did his best to handle it. You know it’s bad when you can’t even get yourself onto a private jet with a doctor waiting to fix you up. It’s pretty sad but the truth is, nothing could get me out of bed that day, physically or mentally—and I didn’t care. I’d hit the wall head-on at full speed, like a fly slamming into the radiator grille of an eighteen-wheeler doing seventy-five on I-95. It was the end of the road, and like that fly, my asshole slammed through my brain, turning me into an unrecognizable stain.
    The roast was taped in August, and my missing it was a big red flag for my friend Colin Quinn, who had been talking to me regularly for months about getting help. He saw this slipup as the tipping point—itwas going to be life or death for me from here. This is when he and my sister, Stacey, began talking regularly, trying to come up with a plan to save my life.
    They were right, of course, but I managed to keep them at bay for a while, until my next major public slipup in November, when I appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien . I love Conan dearly and he and his show have always been incredibly gracious and kind to me. This marked something like my twenty-fifth appearance on the show, which is a milestone. Unfortunately I have no recollection of it whatsoever—it’s another trophy in my hall of blackout. I’m not kidding; I’ve watched the footage many times, each time hoping that something I see triggers even the slightest degree of recall. Let me try again right now. . . . Yeah, sorry, I’ve got nothing. I did a major television appearance in a complete blackout. I know there is some stoner out there who thinks this is really cool, who is probably the kind of guy who shouts “play ‘Free Bird’!” at the end of every concert no matter what band is on stage. I’m glad I’m your hero, tough guy, but it’s for all the wrong reasons.
    The Conan people have been more than kind to me over the years when I’ve been less than sober, but this was the last straw for them because being buzzed or on drugs is one thing, but disrespecting Conan and the show is something else and it’s not forgivable. And I couldn’t have been more obvious: every single joke I told was drug related. I was clearly so tired of my own shit or just so bold, feeling so untouchable—or not caring—that I was like a serial killer trying to get caught. When I wasn’t making blatant drug references I kept cutting Conan off midsentence with lines that made no sense at all. Go YouTube it; you’ll see what I mean. I really couldn’t have been more obvious about being fucked up and I couldn’t have been more insulting to Conan.
    I knew I’d blown it, but I still didn’t think I’d been that bad, because I tried to book another appearance a few months later to continue promoting the paperback version of Too Fat to Fish . Honestly,I was shocked when they refused to book me, for the first time in ten years. They’d had me on when I had nothing going on, but now I had a book that had hit the bestseller list twice and they wouldn’t have me. The producers were very honest with me: they told my manager that they knew I was high the last time I was on the show and that they weren’t willing to risk that kind of train wreck again.
    Despite these repeated fuckups, which continued to grow in scale, I wasn’t willing to admit that professionally I was slipping. I saw these events as setbacks and pains in the ass, something as