Crash and Burn (26 page)

After I stabbed
myself and my mother found me, saving me once again, I lost consciousness and woke up three days later in the Intensive Care Unit of New Jersey Medical Center. The first people I saw were Robin Quivers and
Stern Show
producer Tim Sabean, who were sitting right next to my bed. They had been there for hours and had visited every day hoping I’d come out of it, hoping they’d get a chance to talk to me and thinking at times, I’m sure, that it might be the last time they’d see me alive.

“We’re here,” they said. “We’re so sorry. We love you. We miss you, Artie. Please get better.”

By the time I came to for good I’d gone through surgery, where a great surgeon had stitched up my wounds. Physically I was fine, aside from being sore and not being able to move much without causing blood to leak from the wounds. I’m lucky that I didn’t hit any major arteries or any organs because I would have bled to death immediately. I’d cut into my skin and muscle pretty badly, though, and I’d lost so much blood all over my living room and bedroom that I needed blood transfusions. I’d find out later that I’d disturbed the balance in my bloodstream so much that I had become anemic. I was on an IV to keep me hydrated and another to keep me sedated and I had bloody bandages on my stomach and a catheter tube in me,
which is just a horrible thing. It wasn’t my first time either: I’ve had catheters in my dick four times in my life, all of them due to being so fucked up on drugs that I needed to be hospitalized.

My mind was foggy and I was confused when I saw Robin and Tim and everyone at my bedside, but I was coherent enough to realize that I wasn’t going to die and that I’d lived through whatever I’d done. My memory of the events weren’t crystal clear, but I knew that I hadn’t meant to die. . . . At the same time I wasn’t sure how happy I was that I hadn’t died. I know it’s confusing, but put it this way: I knew that I hadn’t meant to kill myself and only then did I begin to understand how little I’d thought about what would have happened if I had fallen asleep the way I wanted to when I started stabbing myself (I would have died). I didn’t mean to die and I wasn’t trying to, but at the same time I wouldn’t really have been disappointed if I had died. Like I said, all I wanted was to go to sleep, and if I’d woken up dead—whatever that means—I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

I remember lying there in my hospital bed looking at all the faces in the room thinking,
Who knows? Maybe I
am
dead
. I was on a morphine drip, which probably had something to do with how detached I felt, but then again, I was so used to opiates maybe that’s the only reason I was coherent at all. It was foggy; it was all a bad dream. I was floating there, just staring at everyone, feeling like a zombie. I had no idea what to say, so I said nothing. Maybe I was still alive according to this universe, but maybe this is what it means to be dead, sitting here in a hospital room being visited by people who wish you were still alive. Maybe that is what we experience before we truly leave the earth. I didn’t know and I didn’t know who the fuck
would
know, because there’s not really a buzzer for that kind of question on the hospital bed remote. And so the confusion set in. And it made my head explode. “Maybe I’m in hell, maybe I’m in heaven, maybe I’m in purgatory—I don’t know.” All I did know was
that I was still here somehow, and there wasn’t anyone who could tell me what the fuck to do next.

My mother and sister put on a brave face for Robin and Tim, but they had been crying and they had been sleeping there in my room on a cot together for two and a half days. They never left my side and all I could think about was how much suffering I’d caused them once again. I was insanely embarrassed and didn’t know what to say, so I just lay there in silence mostly. I realized that Tim and Robin weren’t just people I worked with; they were friends, and I felt guilty for troubling them.

I spent a total of four days in the hospital, checked in under the name Brian Carter in an effort to duck the media. Unfortunately there was more interest in me than I expected, so it was just insanity, none of which was helped by the
Post
when they ran the headline “Lange Stabs Himself” with a very flattering picture of me looking completely inhuman and out of it. I didn’t see that piece when it came out, but I did later on when I was in somewhat better shape. And I’d say that little piece of print set me back ten steps in my recovery because it made me feel lower than shit on a shoe. I got so upset when I saw it because they’d dug up an old interview and recycled the quotes, taking things out of context to make it look like the signs had always been there and the
Post
had seen them first.

There was no hiding from the world finding out, but Brian Carter tried his best. That alias, by the way, came courtesy of the hospital, who made it up to sound generic. A few months later when I’d started to piece together the events of those first few days and had become capable of talking about them with Colin Quinn, he wouldn’t let it go because the name cracked him up.

“Who chose Brian Carter?” he said. “He sounds like a member of a boy band, and since he was you, obviously he’s the one with the problems who doesn’t get invited to the reunion tour.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “and I don’t really look like a Brian, but
I think that name was the right choice. Maybe it got me more respect because there had to be some nurse in there who thought I was a former Backstreet Boy who’d really gone downhill. A name like that made me want to get thinner, that’s for sure.”

The thing about Brian Carter is that the guy stuck with me through every institutionalization that followed (and there were a few) because whenever I was admitted, that was the name at the top of my file, so that’s what they used. He was like Vanilla Ice if I were Rob Van Winkle, except I really didn’t hate the guy. Anyway, since I’d attempted suicide, I was required by law to spend time under surveillance in a mental hospital after my stay in Intensive Care. I was Brian Carter there too, and after that, over the course of the next two years, I was in and out of a few rehabs, and each time I was admitted they asked if I wanted to be Brian Carter or Artie Lange. A few times I took them up on the offer not only because I felt like I’d gotten to know this guy Brian pretty well, but also just in case a paparazzi or an ambulance-chasing gossip columnist hack happened to be roaming the halls looking for Artie Lange’s room that night. Brian Carter . . . he sounds like he must be a born-again Christian, but to me he’s always been a second cousin of Lil Wayne.

The first few days I spent awake in Intensive Care while my wounds healed were also a complete daze because I was given morphine, at first by IV then by shots administered every two hours. That was fine by me—in fact I really, really enjoyed it, because I had no desire to feel anything clearly at all. A bunch of great people came to visit me, including my hero Colin Quinn, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, my mother and sister, of course, and Nick DiPaolo. Nick was one of the few comics (I can count them on one hand and have already named two of them) who came to see me. I understand it and I’m not mad, because I’m sure a lot of them wanted to come see me but just couldn’t do it because it would have been too difficult for them. Seeing me would have brought up their own issues in a way they wouldn’t be able to ignore.

As the reality of what I’d done that morning came into focus for me, an overwhelming sense of paranoia came with it and nothing could keep that under wraps. I knew there were reporters outside, but I thought I saw them everywhere. If my door was opened a crack, I’d swear I saw a guy with a pad or a camera walk by and eyeball me. I was convinced that the nurses who came to take care of me knew something I didn’t know, or maybe they were on the take, telling the spies in the hall what I was doing so they could write it up in tomorrow’s paper. I wanted to see the papers but I was too scared; I was smart enough to know I couldn’t handle that shit yet. My mother would tell me that she was impressed with how Howard was defending me, because she was. The King of All Media was telling everyone to leave her son alone, and she was impressed by that. Still, I’d ask my family about what had been written about me and no matter what they said I was always convinced that they’d lied. My shame was that enormous. I was convinced they were too scared to tell me the truth. One time they even brought me a paper with a big headline that said “Stern Defends Lange.” The article was great, but it didn’t calm me down at all because I was convinced it wasn’t real. I figured they’d had it printed up somewhere.

My biggest worry once I’d “come to” was how Howard had taken the news and what his reaction was. I’d stabbed myself a day before the show returned from its holiday break and I couldn’t imagine how hard it had been for him to deal with that and all the publicity. My mother and sister told me over and over how nice Howard had been on the air during that first week after I’d stabbed myself. They’d tell me how he defended me to every fan that called in to say something negative about me. I was so paranoid that I didn’t believe them, but I did get some kind of comfort from the thought that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to what they were saying. I was just so paranoid about public opinion of me, what some crazy caller would say on the air, and the fact that Howard would have to deal with that. The idea of all that happening out there and me not being able to do
anything started to make me feel smothered, and after four days in the ICU I was completely claustrophobic. I just had to get out, back to the world somehow, even though I wasn’t anywhere close to ready. I was only in that place four days, but thank God I had insurance, because the stay still cost me something like eighty-six grand.

So it was out of the frying pan and into the fire, because the next stop on my crazy train was the psych ward. Like I said, by law I had to spend at least seventy-two hours under observation in a state facility because I’d deliberately hurt myself. This was no surprise to me because I’d been through it before back when I was on MADtv in 1995 and overdosed on pills in a misguided suicide attempt. My family and I tried to pick a psych ward in the area, and let me tell you, if you haven’t had the chance to bond with your loved ones, try choosing a psych ward together. It will bring you a lot closer than debating what you’d all like to have on the next pizza you share. It was one of the strangest conversations we’ve ever had, but we all agreed that one not too far away with a good reputation was what we were after. But to take it back to pizza, if you’re in a strange town, how well do you know the local pizzerias anyway?

The administrator at Jersey City Medical Center was honest with us: she said that the psych ward in their facility was pretty intense and that I should go elsewhere, so we found a place in central Jersey, but didn’t fare much better. Put it this way, I won’t name the place because I don’t have very nice things to say about it and I do plan to say them. The day I was transferred all of my relatives came to see me off, and they were crying—my mother, my aunts, my sister. My mother and sister had been sleeping in my hospital room every night, so they were completely exhausted. I put them through so much: one of those four nights I woke up miserable because the morphine had worn off and I needed more and seeing my sixty-eight-year-old mother curled up in a ball in her sweatpants, with my little sister next to her on that cot next to me, tore me up inside. My poor sister had to get up at six a.m. to get to work on time, but there she was. Because
of those two strong women I’m still alive, and there’s a level of guilt inside me that I’ll never get over. It’s hard for me to think about it, even still, even in passing.

The hospital I was transferred to looked great online, so much so that I’d made a joke about picking up a pair of sandals in the gift shop downstairs because apparently I was going to the Caribbean! The pictures in the brochure promised flat-screen TVs in the rooms and there was a shot of a nice gym area. Basically the place looked like a resort. What they should have, in my humble opinion, are pictures of a guy playing Scrabble while his opponent stares blankly into space, or maybe a patient eating another patient’s throw-up. Those images would convey the feeling of what it’s like to spend time there. I would even go for something more bold, like a picture of one patient trying to cram another patient’s head into a blender in the TV lounge beneath the beautifully tranquil landscape paintings you’ll find on the premises. Let’s face it, when you’re going to a psych ward, how great can it ever be? This place took my insurance, and that’s what decided it, but I should have known the day was going to suck the second my catheter came out. That is never a good time, but this one was just awful because the morphine had worn off completely, and boy, how I missed it. The removal of a catheter, which any man who has experienced it can tell you, is one of the worst sensations a guy can have. Going in is smooth but coming out sure as hell isn’t, and if I can give anyone in that situation a piece of advice it’s this: don’t look down. You don’t want to see how long that fucking thing is, because if you do, you’ll want to die if you’re not dead already.

I was loaded onto a stretcher and strapped in like a mental patient, which technically I was. Now let me preface my next statement by saying I have a lot of respect for the guys who drive ambulances, because that job is no picnic, but the ones I’ve met, particularly during that week of my life, weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree—any tree. Here’s an example. This is the conversation I had with one of
them as we were getting ready to leave Jersey City Medical Center for the psych ward.

“There’s a guy with a pad outside,” he said. “He’s downstairs.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“There’s a guy with a pad asking questions downstairs,” he said.

“A guy with a pad . . . you mean a notepad? Like a pad where you write things down?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “a pad like that. It’s like a little book.”

“So there’s a guy with a notepad and he’s writing things down and he’s down there asking questions,” I said.