Crash and Burn (31 page)

I went back to my house in Hoboken for a short period of time after that because I thought I would get back into stand-up and I thought I was out of the woods. My mom was going to monitor me and my sister lived very close by. For the first time I actually thought I could begin to rejoin society. And that’s when I heard that Greg had died and I was devastated. I’d just gotten up the balls to do some new material at the Cellar, the place I associated with him more than anyone else I knew, and within a week I heard he died. That sent me into a deep depression once again. So I retreated back to my mother’s house, back to that room above her garage, because once more I became completely incapable of taking care of myself, just like that.

I wish I could have been with Greg that night, I really do. Even in the state I was in, I think I could have found the words that would have kept him alive, or at least gotten him through to the morning. When you’ve got demons you’re trying to beat, those long lonely nights are endless; it’s something only someone who’s been there can understand.

Greg’s death reminded me of another genius who left us too soon, Mitch Hedberg, and when I returned to bed, completely paralyzed again, I thought about him often. I began to think that there are some souls that aren’t meant to endure this life—and that maybe I was one of them.

To me, Mitch Hedberg is the bar for modern comedy by which all others should be judged. People who get him understand what is truly funny and those who don’t are pretty much losers. Mitch was
a genius and a loving, warm human being. He was also a raging drug addict who died of a heroin overdose on March 30, 2005. I’ve never met anybody quite like Mitch, because he was one of a kind. Talking to him was just so fucking relaxing because, I’m telling you, the guy was a sedative in human form. He’d do anything for you, even things as boring as giving you a ride somewhere when you could have gotten one yourself. Mitch was a brilliant guy and a truly beautiful person; he was never patronizing. When he said the kind of things people say all the time and don’t mean like,
Hey, don’t worry, it’ll be all right
, he actually meant them. That’s unusual anywhere, but in comedy, everyone is so sarcastic and dark it’s unheard of.

Basically Mitch was a mellow, long-haired angel from the seventies who cared about making people happy and making people laugh and nothing else. He was the comic of this generation, in my opinion, and I can only imagine what he would have done if he’d been able to stay alive. Another thing that was great about Mitch was his honesty: he knew his strengths as a comic and never wanted to do anything but perfect them. He was a master joke teller; he didn’t want to act, and he didn’t want to host a show or ever be a celebrity. He had this great bit about it where he talked about all the money he had been given to be in pilots that were being developed for him that he’d told the agents and network executives pushing them that he couldn’t do the first time they met because what he does is tell jokes. The same way that Mitch told jokes and stories, he went along for the ride, all the while asking the simple questions that revealed just how dumb these pilot concepts were. The funniest one he mentioned, by the way, was Mitch Hedberg starring as a tennis instructor in a suburban town, which is ridiculous.

Here’s how sweet of a man Mitch Hedberg was. One night way back, in the late ’90s or early 2000s, we were at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, sitting upstairs where the comics gather whether they’re doing sets downstairs or not. I was at a table with Dave Attell, Greg Rogell, Keith Robinson, and a few other guys, and Mitch was
there that night too. He did stand-up that night but I didn’t see him because as anyone who has been to the Cellar knows, it’s a pretty tight room down there.

Anyway, we were all hanging out upstairs and at some point the conversation turned to the Aspen Laff Festival, which was a few weeks away. Most of us, like me, Attell, and Mitch, were going, and so was one of the nonregulars present—some douche bag who used to write for
Frasier
. The guy was “having a go at stand-up” and he couldn’t have been easier to hate: the guy had an assistant with him and some hot chick he was probably paying to be on his arm all night before she fucked him and went home to her studio apartment. I’ll give him this—the chick was really fucking hot. All of us were staring at her and trying to talk to her. Anyway, when we started talking about who was going to Aspen, the guy piped up.

“You guys are all going to Aspen, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Me too,” he said.

Being a wiseass, I said, “How you getting out there?”

“I’m taking a plane,” he said.

“That’s good,” I said. “Good way to get there.”

“You could drive,” Mitch said.

“No, I’m taking a plane,” the guy said.

“So am I,” Mitch said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were on the same plane?”

“I don’t think so,” the guy said, with the most stuck-up arrogance you can imagine. “I’m flying privately.”

And without a beat, Mitch said: “Oh . . . that does bring the odds down.”

The guy then turned to the chick and started talking to her, so he didn’t see this, but Mitch turned to the rest of us, shrugged, and quietly said, “Out of my league.” I nearly fell on the floor.

I didn’t know Mitch nearly as well as I knew Greg, but I will always feel guilty about not doing more for him when I could have.
He was on the
Stern Show
two weeks before he died to promote an upcoming show of his at Caroline’s and he looked terrible. His teeth had turned black from neglect—that’s how into shooting up he was. He just didn’t brush his teeth, and let me tell you that when you’re on drugs all the time you don’t eat well either. He’d show up for gigs with blood on his sleeve from shooting up and it had gotten so bad that he’d developed gangrene in his foot from shooting up in his ankle so often. By then he and his wife, who was a serious addict as well and died shortly after Mitch, were living in an RV. They would drive to each of his shows, eat at truck stops, and do drugs until they nodded out in the mobile home or in whatever hotel room they’d booked for the night. After a gig in Atlantic City, the two of them were bedded down in a hotel in south Jersey and when his wife woke up in the morning, Mitch was dead. It was right around April 1, and I remember people thinking that his death was an April Fool’s joke because the guy was only thirty-seven.

That last time I saw him at
Stern
I was really fucked up, because I was getting to the top of my own roller coaster. I’ll never forget how he looked when he came in: nervous, hunched over, tinted glasses on, just foggy, frail, and stumbling a bit. I remember Howard asking him right away about his drug problem and the fact that he claimed he’d cleaned up.

“Yeah, I’ve got that under control,” Mitch said. “I only use drugs for creative purposes.”

Everyone laughed.

“I know what you mean, Mitch,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I use drugs too.”

It was a pretty awkward interview and none of it was really very funny, but there’s another reason why I’ll never forget that day: it was Saint Patrick’s Day, which was my father’s birthday. Seeing Mitch that day did something to me, because for the first time in five years, right after the show, I went to my father’s grave and I cried my eyes out. Something about seeing Mitch that way, knowing I was heading
down the same path if I didn’t make some changes and realizing that, in the blink of an eye, it had been thirty-seven years since my father died, all hit me like a bat to the head. I walked out of the studio knowing what I should have done—I should have grabbed Mitch by the back of his neck and taken him to a hospital. I should have yelled at him,
Fuck this radio show, fuck your gig at Caroline’s, you need to stay alive!
I didn’t do that and he was dead fourteen days later. He and I were the same age.

I know the truth now, from experience. I could have dragged Mitch kicking and screaming out of the studio to a rehab program. I could have tied him down and stayed with him (this would have been weird seeing as we didn’t know each other too well) or found some other way to get him under lock and key, but you know what? It wouldn’t have changed anything. It wouldn’t have made a difference. He probably still wouldn’t be here. Because if someone isn’t ready, there’s nothing in this world anyone can do to help them. I know it all would have been useless, but I can’t help it—the thoughts of what I could have done still haunt me.

————

I was in bed again. All of my limbs worked, but I was just as much of a cripple as my father had been after his accident, and at the time I was the same age he had been when he’d died. These facts swirled around my brain like shit in a toilet, but they never got flushed. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for my mother having to take care of me day in and day out, another handicapped man on her watch after she’d spent years taking care of my father. She didn’t deserve it and she hadn’t signed up for it: my father was one thing, but I’d brought this on her and on our family all by myself. I’d dug such a deep pit that there was no ladder tall enough and no rope long enough to reach me. My mother stayed strong, and she always told me: “This too shall pass. It will be okay; you’ll get out of this.” But I didn’t believe her, not for a minute.

“Not this time, Ma,” I’d say, and I’d usually start crying, because I didn’t want things to be that way but I didn’t see any other path for me. “I’m so sorry. I’ve gotten out of it a couple of times but not this time. I’m too far gone. There’s no hope.”

I couldn’t live with the guilt of what I’d done without being high and I couldn’t be high anymore and be able to function and work, and if I couldn’t work, I didn’t want to live anymore. That’s how I saw things, and it was all very simple to me, to the point that I wondered why I was the only one who saw it this clearly. My mother and friends talked about other options but in my mind they knew nothing.

Every time my mother would leave the house I’d hear the garage door go up because it was below the bed where I’d chosen to try to sleep my life away. Like I said, she rarely left, and if it was for more than half an hour, she’d leave a chaperone of some kind in the house to watch out for me. Usually her short trips were for me—most often she’d be going to the pharmacy to pick up some pills that a doctor I’d found in Virginia would prescribe me to keep my benzo and opiate withdrawals from kicking in. I told my mother I was trying to wean myself off of them, but I wasn’t, I was getting as high as I could.

If that wasn’t bad enough—having your own mother be your drug runner—Christmas 2010 was a whole new low for me when it came to guilt. There was a blizzard that year and about a foot and a half of snow fell in central Jersey in just two days. That whole week I’d been pretty bad, just so dark and depressed and hopeless that I had my mother worried sick. I kept thinking I was on the verge of a seizure from the benzo withdrawals and I was so bad that my mother called the doctor and got me a prescription. In a white-out blizzard, my poor sixty-nine-year-old ma shoveled enough snow out of the way that she could get her car out to go pick up drugs for me. I remember hearing her down there and when I went to the window and looked outside, I saw all five feet nothing of her crying, in the cold, shoveling. The storm was so bad that the news had advised everyone
to stay inside and she had to drive so slowly that going half a mile down the road to Walgreens and back took her an hour. She kept calling me every five minutes.

“Are you okay?” she’d ask me, crying the whole time.

“Yeah, Ma,” I’d say. “I’m sorry.”

She got back all right, and she gave me my medication and I didn’t have a seizure, I just fell asleep. I must have seemed so ungrateful. The truth is, I was devastated. How could I not be after subjecting my mother to that? She was almost seventy; I’d worked hard to give her a house and car so that she could relax and retire, not take care of me. I should have been taking her on vacation for the holidays, not ruining her life.

Every morning around eleven a.m. my mother would come into my room as if it were 1975 and I were still eight years old and nothing bad had ever happened to our family.

“Come on, Art, get up!” she’d say. “I’ll make you breakfast. Come on, it’s a beautiful day.”

Just about every single morning I’d hardly respond. She’d try again a couple of hours later, all morning, into the afternoon—one o’clock, two o’clock. I’d try my best for her, but most of the time I couldn’t do it. When one o’clock hit I’d feel like it was okay, because now I was into the day. One o’clock meant it was afternoon, which meant everyone was already out living their life, so if I were too depressed to get up, I’d be given a pass. That idea also usually made me even more depressed, so you can see how there was no winning for me. Being in bed on a beautiful May day, hearing my uncles come by to help my mom with one thing or another or hearing her on the phone scheduling stuff the way normal people do all the time—those simple everyday things were torture to me. I began to believe that I’d die forty feet from my mother, in that bed, in that house, if she didn’t die forty feet from me first. One of us was going in the next fifteen years if we continued living that way. We’d leave
my sister to clean up the mess and then die without any family, all alone in this world. And all of it would be because of me.

My mother would sit on the edge of my bed each night and tell me how she prayed for me every day because what I’d done was forgivable, so God wasn’t going to punish me. I just had to be strong and get through this trial.

“There will be people who will always be upset with you, Artie, but that’s life,” she said. “Your friends will always be there, your business will always be there, and that’s because you’re talented. You have so much more to do.”

She said things like this over and over again; it was the constant sound track to my fourteen months in bed, and mostly I believed none of it. There’s an old saying that you hear in AA meetings, that alcoholics love to wallow in their misery. They say that if a normal person falls down a large hole they start screaming for a ladder, but if an addict falls down a large hole they scream for an interior decorator because they plan on staying awhile.