Crash and Burn (33 page)

If I ever
needed proof that God exists, and there have been plenty of those times, I don’t anymore. All my doubts are gone. The fact that I made it out of my mother’s house alive, the fact that she didn’t die from worry while caring for me, the fact that I’m here, still in show business, functioning the best I can and living as normal of a life as I’m capable of isn’t the parting of the Red Sea, but it’s a miracle in my book. Alcoholics Anonymous’s program is based on a fundamental belief in a higher power, and all that talk sounded cheesy and corny to me in the beginning when I didn’t want to hear it, but once I got over myself, once I got my mind clear and less self-involved, it didn’t sound so cheesy anymore. A lot of intellectuals that I truly respect love AA with all of their hearts, and that went a long way with me. Once I took the program seriously and started to get into it and really engage, I began to ask those same friends about it, and all of them more or less told me the same thing: none of them know why AA works, they just know that it does if you give yourself over to it. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone or that it’s the only solution, but if you have issues even remotely like mine and anything about the AA philosophy appeals to you at all, it will improve your life if you let it. AA preaches a higher power and a twelve-step path to sobriety, and that’s the path I followed out of the darkness. And it worked, it really
did. So I’ll never indulge in a crass moment of cynical disbelief about it again because I know there’s a higher power in this world. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean I won’t be crass and cynical about everything here on earth. I’m not sure I’m capable of that kind of control. I’m only human.

Rebuilding myself from the mind up was a slow process, but I kept at it, because something had changed in me and I no longer wanted to be down there in that deluxe pit I’d spent so long building. For once I got with the program once I was out of the institution: I started going to meetings every day, first just sitting in the back, trying to be invisible, but after a while I got comfortable and eventually I participated. Around the same time I started reaching out to the people who had been there for me every step of the way during the time I’d spent hidden away from the world. I made a few social plans to see them and just talking about life again was like achieving something new to me because I hadn’t done anything like that in what felt like a century. I also couldn’t remember the last time I just hung out with people and not been on drugs or drunk or a combination of the two. This was more than a second chance: it was a rebirth.

Nick DiPaolo was one of the guys who’d called me every week, no matter what, even when I didn’t call him back multiple times. One day in late June 2011, just after I returned home I called him to shoot the shit and he had unbelievable news.

“Art, I can’t believe you’re calling me right now,” he said. “I just got off the phone with a guy named Chris Crane, who is an executive at DirecTV.”

“Okay, that’s great, man.”

“They put radio shows on the air now, like the Dan Patrick show, and they want me to take over for a guy named Tony Bruno and do a test show with a partner. It would be a late-night sports comedy radio show. . . . Would you want to do that with me?”

“This really just happened?” I asked.

“I literally just hung up the phone, no shit.”

It was another sign from God, if you ask me. “Really? That’s incredible. I’m definitely interested, man. And, well, you know I’m available.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” he said.

I’d just found out officially from Gary Dell’Abate, but not too long before, just after Howard’s new Sirius deal was announced in March 2012, he told
Rolling Stone
that I’d not be returning to the show. It was for all the right reasons too: Howard loved me and wished me the best but he was too worried to have me back. He’d said that the Artie years were over and that fans had to get that idea through their heads. It was clear that he’d support me in whatever I did (and he sure has), but I couldn’t return to the show. I’d been listening one morning that week and even heard Howard say the same thing to a guy who called in. Howard’s instincts were right; the show wouldn’t have been a good environment for me to return to at all. It was coming from a really good place because Howard genuinely wanted me to be okay. I’m not going to lie, I’d held on to a glimmer of hope that I’d return and work with all of my friends there, but looking back now, I’m glad I didn’t get the chance, especially then. Howard was right, I wasn’t ready for that—it was time for everybody, including me, to move on.

One door closed as another one opened, because there was Nick, a guy I love, with an opportunity for me to do something completely new. It was sports, it was comedy—and it wasn’t happening at six a.m.! It was a dream come true for me. Nick set up a lunch with Chris Crane; James Crittenden, another DirecTV executive; and my agent, Tony Burton, who works for Howard’s agent, Don Buchwald. We all had a great lunch and by the end of it the DirecTV guys agreed to let Nick and me do a test show on July 6, 2011. This was just a month after I’d gotten clean and left Ambrosia, so the timing was crazy, but I felt strong and I knew I had a solid support group around me. I even felt fine enough to do a few unannounced sets at the Comedy Cellar,
because through rehab and AA I’d started putting together some stand-up routines based on the hell I’d managed to live through.

When we did the test show, we didn’t tell anyone I’d be on the air with Nick—no mention of it on the show’s website or anywhere else. I just went live with him when the
ON AIR
light when on. Word spread fast, much faster than I would have ever guessed, and I’m still incredibly touched by this: within ten minutes I was trending worldwide on Twitter. Reading all of those comments from excited fans really moved me. I hadn’t been forgotten; people cared and there were a lot of people out there who wanted to hear what I had to say. The phone lines lit up like crazy when we started taking calls, all of them from people telling me how happy they were that I was alive and how great it was to hear me doing live radio again. Nick and I had fun, we really did. We were funny, we picked on each other—having a built-in Boston vs. New York rivalry doesn’t hurt—and the show was a success. The executives loved it too, and took an edited sample of it to their board of directors in LA, who then decided to let us have a regular slot from ten p.m. to one a.m. every weeknight.

This was incredibly exciting and for me proof that the changes I was making in AA were having an effect at every level of my life. Around the same time I got back in touch with my cowriter on
Too Fat to Fish
and this book, the great Anthony Bozza, and we got to work on what you are now reading. Anthony and I started getting together and going over preliminary notes and just talking, because I wasn’t sure I could actually do this book. I didn’t know if I could put all of these experiences out there but in time, as the two of us spent more time together, slowly, I realized I could. I knew that this book would be the most personal and honest thing I’d ever do, and being that vulnerable scared me, but what drove me on was the thought that if sharing my stories helped even just one person avoid going through what I had and inspired them to make some changes in their life then it was all worth it.

My whole team was still there for me: my manager, Dave Becky;
my stand-up agent, Rich Super; my agent, Tony Burton; my great lawyer, Jared Levine. Everyone stuck with me through those two years of hell. I found that the stand-up world was there too, ready to embrace me when I returned.
Letterman
called almost immediately. Piers Morgan, all these different talk shows wanted to book me. I was a guest of both Jimmys: Kimmel and Fallon, who in my opinion are a new generation’s version of Letterman and Leno. When the radio show went on the air and became a reality, Conan O’Brien called and they had me back on. It wasn’t all good news, though, because I’d destroyed relationships too. Some people fell by the wayside because of my bullshit and I don’t blame them for it. If there’s one thing you can say about heroin without hesitation it’s that it takes away a lot, from money to belongings to friends, but a lot of amazing people stuck with me, including my cowriter, who is sitting here right now. And I’m very happy to be here working with him again.

————

When we got off the air at the end of our trial show I went for a walk, because I wanted to savor how great I was feeling before heading home. I walked uptown, taking in all the lights and buildings. It was about 1:30 a.m. when I stopped in front of Radio City Music Hall, just a few blocks from the studio where we did the show, and my phone rang. I had already been thinking about her, standing where I was, but the last name I expected to see on my Caller ID was
ADRIENNE
, my old girlfriend’s. Drugs had ruined the two of us the way they’d ruined everything else in my life, and I’d realized since I’d gotten sober that it was all my fault things had ended so horribly. The girl had tried; she thought she could handle hurricane Artie, but he was too much for her.

“Adrienne, guess where I’m standing right now,” I said.

“Where?”

“Right in front of Radio City, the exact spot where I picked you up for our first date. Can you believe that?”

It was the first time I’d talked to her in over a year; she’d contacted me once or twice while I was caught in the doldrums and barely able to muster a hello, so we hadn’t really talked. That night she’d heard about the show and she’d tuned in to the last hour, then decided to call me.

“I just heard you on the radio,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re doing so well . . . you sounded great! I’m so happy for you. I was up studying and you just popped into my mind. I decided to Google you and saw you were live on the radio, so I tuned in and listened.”

“And you called me right now as I’m standing in front of Radio City. See, I told you we’re like
When Harry Met Sally
.”

Adrienne was living at home with her parents at the time, taking classes at a college because she wanted to try to get into medical school but needed a bunch of science and premed credits before she could apply. That was how we reconnected, and two days later she came to my house where we had a very honest, long-overdue talk. I got the chance to tell her, from the bottom of my heart, how sorry I was for dragging her into my chaos. It was what she needed to hear, because that rekindled our relationship, a romance that was influential in me getting better from there on out.

Later that month, Nick and I flew to LA to meet our new bosses, Chris Long and Derek Chang, who are both head honchos at DirecTV, and they gave us the offical green light—generous salaries, a good budget, everything, just like that. The news was picked up by TMZ and all the entertainment blogs. I was just so happy to have my mother see that I was really back on my feet and out in the world. Her son wasn’t going to end up another casualty. It was the best I could do, because I can’t give her back all the hours she spent taking care of me instead of enjoying the golden years of her life. I’ll never forgive myself for that, but I’ll do everything I can to make her proud.

The first official
Nick and Artie Show
debuted at 10 p.m. on October 3, 2011, and we found ourselves a devoted audience very quickly—again, something I understand, but it still happily surprised
the fuck out of me. It makes sense if you think about it, because sports fans like talk radio—the devoted like to listen to people talking about sports when there aren’t any sports to watch—but until we came along, there weren’t any late-night sports radio shows that were actually entertaining. There are almost no late-night sports shows to speak of, and all of the entertaining ones are on in the morning or during the afternoon rush hour drive time. Creating a late-night version of a talk show with sports had never been done. Put it this way, any guy that likes to catch
SportsCenter
at two a.m. is definitely going to be up for listening to the kind of sports radio on acid that Nick and I serve up every weeknight. The numbers proved it too: we did so well that after just a couple of months DirecTV put plans in motion to begin televising us. They rented a 6,500-square-foot space in TriBeCa and had the guys who do the show
Man Caves
build us our dream set. The thing has a full kitchen, a pool table that converts to a Ping Pong table, couches everywhere, air hockey, a functional batting cage, a basketball pop-a-shot, and a photo booth. They even let us put whatever we want on the wall and we took that to the limit. Nick had the producers commission an homage of the famous painting of dogs playing poker, this one featuring Michael Vick. For my part I asked for a photo of O. J. Simpson photoshopped next to a shot of Peyton Manning with the caption: “O. J. Simpson and a white Bronco.” And God bless them, they let us have both. Our set is amazing, so great that basically if things get real bad at home, Nick and I can shack up there if we need to. That’s not been necessary so far, but I’m not counting it out.

Since the start of the show everything in my life has been going great. I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I’ve kept myself in line for the most part. My stand-up career is better than ever and I’ve gotten a new beginning in radio, which is an entertainment medium I really do enjoy. I’d say the only thing I need to do is lose about 100 pounds, and it really sucks that they don’t make a pill for that. Listen, I know it’s been decades since I’ve seen my fighting
weight, but I do have an excuse right now. When you leave rehab they tell you to do anything you need to do to not get high. They say “eat whatever you want, have as much sex as you want with whomever you want, smoke as many cigarettes as you want, drink all the coffee you want—do whatever it takes to stay off drugs and booze.” I had smoking down and I’m not a huge coffee guy, so that left food and sex, and since food was a lot more available to me than sex when I first got out, I went with that.