Share This:
Too Fat to Fish by Artie Lange
Chapter 8: Pig In Shit
It should be clear by now to everyone reading that I started abusing drugs and alcohol with particular gusto as a result of the sudden, tragic, and devastating accident that crippled my father and my family for four and a half years. My mother and sister could have easily gone down the same road or a similar one to cope with the heartache, the stress, and the financial burden of living as a family in the aftermath of that event. Thank God they did not; they stayed strong and they took care of me too, as I found my way through my own suffering along a pretty dark, winding route. For the record, my sister supported my decision to chase my dream as much as if not even more than my mother did.
After leaving the security of Port Newark and doing my first regular paying gig in show business—my stint in dinner theater— I dove into the New York City comedy club scene. I was cheered on by good friends like Jimmy Polumbo and Mike Stafford, as well as my mother’s brothers and sisters, my younger cousin Frankie and my older cousin Jeff, who might have been my biggest comedic influence. Jeff gave me my first George Carlin album, Class Clown, and Woody Allen's The Early Years, an album of Woody's great stand-up from the sixties. Without these people, I would have been really miserable.
Drinking and drugs were, at first, a rebellious, knee-jerk reaction to cover the pain and get through my shitty everyday life. But it changed on me, like it does to anyone with tendencies like mine, so during that period I developed an addiction to cocaine and booze. It was easy to do: I spent as much time as I could, for nearly four years, in and around comedy clubs, which are hardly healthy, clean living environments. I met a lot of fellow dreamers in that world, and they introduced me to coke. I say "introduced me" because although I'd done it plenty of times before, I'd never experienced that drug the way I did then. Doing a bag of coke with your friends whenever some dealer was selling it in a bar was a universe away from doing gram after gram all night and into the next day and into the day after that with no end in sight to the supply. At that intensity, coke was a whole new drug to me, and I was happy to make its acquaintance.
Once I started to get regular stand-up slots around town, it was a no-brainer: There were three-day periods where I'd just stay up the whole time, chasing the dream and the high. I'd do a gig, score some coke at the club, and keep doing it until my next time slot later that night. I might go do another gig at another club and score some more coke there, then I'd go to after-hours places. I'd do more there, party into the morning, hit a few bars in the afternoon, and finish my coke, then go to another comedy club, score some more, and do another gig or two. Tuesday through Thursday, with proper planning, I could stay high nonstop without spending much money at all. That was great, because I didn’t have much to spend. People in the audience at clubs always seemed to have coke and were eager to hang out with comedians. Believe me, if you were a regular comic there were plenty of ways to get coke for free or very inexpensively.
Cocaine makes fast friends, and one of my fastest, best buddie at the time was this party monster who worked at a big Wall Street firm, loved comedy clubs, and had a corporate Amex that he enjoyed throwing down to cover bar tabs all night long. I remember thinking I'd finally seen the face of the devil one night at an afterhours club on the East Side when he used his corporate card to buy us more coke. I thought it was a joke, but this place actually accepted credit cards for cocaine purchases: The guy behind the bar swiped it and handed us an eight ball as if it were a round of drinks. If that's not the embodiment of Satan in this day and age, I don't know what is. I looked at my buddy like he was Lucifer himself and decided right away that I was cool with hanging out with the devil as long as he could get me coke.
That was my struggling period, and as I've said before, I'm lucky it lasted only three and a half years, until the day God opened the heavens and shone a golden light down upon me. I got cast on MADtv as one of eight permanent cast members chosen from 8,000 comics who'd been screened. For any comic trying to make something of themselves, that was like hitting triple 7s-jackpot.
Landing a spot as a regular on a network sketch show in L.A. was specifically one of my dreams. Unlike a lot of comics, I didn’t care about getting on Saturday Night Live. That show had such history and was so established that I didn't see the point. I wanted to be on an original show as an original cast member of a sketch comedy troupe, and I couldn't believe it when that exact scenario happened for me. In May 1995, I went to L.A. to shoot the pilot, which got picked up by Fox and put into the fall rotation, slated to debut on October 14, 1995. I was overjoyed that all of this was happening for me after wanting it for so long because finally I felt justified in my life choices just a bit. So in July I packed up and moved to L.A., ready to begin work on the show. I was twenty-seven years old and everything was great, except for the fact that along with a bunch of old concert T-shirts, I took my crazy drug problem with me to the West Coast.
I was now making huge money: $7,500 an episode plus a big signing bonus, all of which I intended to enjoy. I had my New York City drug dealer hook me up with a contact in L.A., and the second I got there I continued doing coke like it was going out of style. Everything had done nothing but get better for me, so I saw no problem with it. I figured that I could live like that for years! My rationale for the whole thing was that someday I'd quit, and the best time for that was my late thirties. But right now? It was party time.
Of course, I didn't realize at all how crazy and stressful shooting the show would be. I thought it would be sketch comedy as I'd done it in New York, which was creative and inspiring with some pressure involved, but it was mostly pressure we put on ourselves to be great. I had no idea how differently that would play out on a fully budgeted network program. For three straight weeks, six days a week, we'd rehearse sketches, then shoot them live in front of a studio audience on Fridays. Then we'd shoot commercial and movie parodies on location for two weeks—one week for rehearsal, one week for shooting. So there was no break for ages, and that's how it had to be. The format of the show was solid sketch comedy: We didn't have musical guests, so we needed eight solid hours of sketches, each with different characters, voices, and everything else that was involved. There were only eight cast members, so it was a lot of work, but I welcomed the challenge.
I got through the first eight episodes the way I'd been getting through everything in my life—by drinking and doing a lot of coke and working as hard as I could. That was fine in the stand-up world because I was the only one responsible for my act and getting to the gig on time. But on MADtv, there were eight other cast members to consider, plus a huge crew, call times, schedules, union rules—it was too complicated for the kind of one-man show I was running. It was bound to come to a head—and it did.
The last sketch we did before taking a break was called "Babewatch." We were shooting it way out in Malibu for two fifteenhour days, so instead of having everyone drive home, they put us up in this little motel. "Babewatch" was a parody of Baywatch starring me as Babe the Pig, who becomes a lifeguard. If you had to equate me with a character on the real show, then I, as Babe the Pig, would have been David Hasselhoff. As you can see, the whole concept was ridiculous.
The first day of filming this monstrosity was the worst day of my life in show business. My call time was 4 a.m. because I had to endure three hours of prosthetic makeup application that left me looking exactly—and I mean exactly—like a pig. The MADtv makeup artist was as good as it got on TV. She had left SNL to work on MADtv, and she was great. Her name is Jen Aspinall. I love Jen—she had a real sweet way about her. She still works there, and I wish her the best and miss her very much.
Anyway, this mask was by far the most high-budget makeup effect I saw in the entire two years I worked on the show. After three hours in pig makeup, I had a snout, pig ears, a layer of white fuzz on my back and six teats, each of which was going to get its own bikini top. And I was like a grunge pig: I had to wear a dirty flannel shirt, cutoff jean shorts, a wallet chain, and a backward baseball hat.They dressed me to look like a pig on his way to a Pearl Jam concert.They did a great job too, because when Jen was done with me I was disgusting—just a two-legged, talking man-pig. There's no other way to describe it. The skit was horrible in every way, because there was way too much effort going into it. The whole thing was a cheap sight gag that centered around me, the prosthetic pig.
It was strange to be up so early getting transformed into a pig in a place that's as perfect as Malibu. It's that typical, ideal California coastline of nothing but beach and sun and beautiful ocean that comes straight out of a Beach Boys song.The environment freaked me out—it would have been easier to take if I were in a studio. By the time my makeup was done, I was depressed and hungry, so I went over to the catering area, got some breakfast, and took it into my little trailer. I sat down and started to eat, but every time I went to take a bite of my eggs, I'd catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. There I was, this pig, eating. I was hungry too, which made it worse, because I was literally a fake pig who was eating like a pig.
"Ugh, Jesus," I said out loud to myself. "This is not why I signed up for show business."
I finished the rest of my food, getting more and more annoyed with every bite. There was only one thing to do: call my coke dealer. I told him where I was and asked him to come meet me. I couldn't have him show up at the set, so he told me to meet him at Duke's, a seafood restaurant not too far away on the Pacific Coast Highway. It's got a huge self-park parking lot, which in L.A. is fucking rare because everywhere you go there's a valet dipshit waiting to park your car and charge you anywhere from three to twenty bucks to do it. I fucking hate that shit. Anyway, we decided to meet at Duke's.
"Can you get there, man?" he asked.
"Oh yeah," I said.There is no question that I'd get there. Without coke to pass the fifteen hours I had to spend in this pig getup, I would drown myself in the Pacific.
Because I was the lead of the sketch, two assistant directors had to be aware of my whereabouts because it was their responsibility to wrangle all the cast members when it was time to start shooting. I was going to have to find a way to give them the slip. Apparently, they were having problems getting the lighting right for the first shot, so I seized this opportunity and sprinted to my car in the the full pig outfit—teats, ears, everything. As I sped away off the lot, I saw one of the assistant directors waving his arms at me.
"Hey!" he shouted, his voice fading away behind me. “Where are you going...?"
The Pacific Coast Highway is a winding four-lane strip right on the edge of the ocean, and I tore down that thing at about ninety miles an hour, just a pig who wanted his coke. My makeup was so good that the tone matched my skin perfectly, and every time I looked in the rearview it was just uncanny to see myself that way. When I'd catch people's eye at traffic lights, they did a double take: I think at first they thought I was deformed, but after a second look there was no mistaking that pig snout profile. If you were next to me, you would have said, "Look at that! It's a pig, driving."
I got to Duke's parking lot, went to the far end of it like my dealer said, and sat there waiting. I was so antsy to get my drugs, so focused on the moment his car would turn in to the parking lot, that after a while I forgot about the pig makeup, which was far from comfortable. When I finally saw my dealer drive in, it was like Jesus Christ appearing before me. I jumped out of the car and ran over to him. He was a black kid from inner-city L.A. and he was not prepared for what he saw.
"What the fuck is wrong with you, man?" he said, genuinely disgusted. "What the fuck kind of sick shit are you into?"
"Dude, I told you I was on TV," I said.
"What the fuck kind of show you on, man? That shit ain’t right!"
"I'm on MADtv, man. We're doing some stupid skit and I have to be a pig," I said.
"No shit—you on MADtv?” he said. "That shit is funny! You didn't tell me you on MADtv! Who's that blond chick on that show, man?"
"Nicole Sullivan."
"Yeah, Nicole Sullivan. She's hot, man. You work with her? Damn, man, what's she like?"
I then had to have a fifteen-minute conversation about Nicole Sullivan with this guy, in my full pig face, standing outside in the parking lot of Duke’s. After that, he wanted to know all about what it was like to work on a comedy show and how we came up with all the shit we did on the air.The concept of a team of writers was definitely new to him.
While this incredibly painful dialogue went on, I was on the verge of literally attacking the guy to get my fucking coke. I would have just told him I didn’t have the time and thrown my money at him, but I didn't have the cash to cover the eight ball I'd ordered, so I felt like I had to hang out and endure this endless line of questioning. He was a great drug dealer, this guy—he came with a line of credit, so I could put the coke on my tab. I'm sure he didn't give everyone that treatment, but I was on a TV show, so he knew I was good for it. Besides, at the time I was what any drug dealer would call a very good customer. The only thing I feel incredibly guilty about is that back then Nicole Sullivan was single and I totally forgot to tell her that she could have dated this guy.
After I got my eight ball and my dealer took off, I started tearing through my backseat looking for something to do it with. That didn't take long; like a true coke addict, I had a nice selection of cut straws available. I was so focused on my drugs that I forgot, again, about the pig mask as I went to stick the straw in my nose. The thing hit my snout, bent in half, and got nowhere near my actual nostril. I tried it like three times, wanting to get the coke in me so bad that my brain did not compute why the hell the straw wasn't connecting my nose to the drugs. I pinched the end of the straw, got it in there good enough, and sniffed as hard as I could, expecting my snout to work just like my real nostril. Obviously, that failed miserably. I was on the verge of opening it all up on the passenger seat and just stuffing my whole snout in it in a desperate, piglike attempt to get high.
I hoped to do my drugs without disturbing Jen's work, but that wasn't happening, so I took the straw and started to dig with abandon into this expensive prosthetic stuff like I was tunneling out of prison. Finally, I managed to crack a hole in the bottom of the snout and get the straw up there and into my nose. I inhaled a line of coke as fast and hard as if it were my first drink of water after walking across the Sahara. At that moment, I didn't give a fuck about where I was, what I looked like, or what kind of shit I was gonna get for walking off the set. Those people could all fuck themselves as far as I was concerned. All I cared about was getting some relief.
Sure enough, once I was high, everything got a little better. So of course the obvious decision was to feel a whole lot better by doing a whole lot more coke before I went back to work. But since I was now high, I was also now paranoid that everyone on set would know I'd run out to get coke. I also worried that Jen would see that I'd poked a hole in the snout the size of a straw. I kept trying to look at the damage in the mirror in the sun visor to make sure I didn’t have blow all over my face. I bent the thing every which way, but for the fucking life of me I couldn’t see under the snout: Every time I lifted my head high enough, my big pig cheeks blocked the view. My only option was to go into the restaurant bathroom to do my drugs as comfortably as possible.
As I walked through Duke's parking lot, cars driving by 200 feet away on the highway slowed down to honk at me like I was fucking Santa Claus, but I didn't care. I went inside, walked right by the hostess stand, through the bar and restaurant, directly into the bathroom. Nobody stopped me—I think they were much too freaked out for that. In L.A. there are always actors in costumes doing shit around town, so who knows, maybe they’d already seen a monkey and a donkey come through that day.
In the bathroom mirror I saw that I'd dug a gaping hole in this prosthetic snout that was covered, as I expected, with white powder. I tried to close it up and hide the damage, but it was fucked; there was a loose flap clinging by a thread. I was now a pig with a deviated septum. Fuck it, I thought and went into a stall, sat down on the toilet, and did more lines.
When I got back to my car, I realized that I’d been gone for over an hour and still had a twenty-minute drive back along the Pacific Coast Highway. Faced with those odds, the only thing that made sense was to do a quick blast of coke for the ride. By now my straw was no longer necessary: I’d successfully fucked up the makeup to the degree that I could easily do a key hit, which is just what it sounds like—a small pile of coke on the end of a key. I did one of those and started making my way down the PCH.
Every time I hit a traffic light I stopped and did another key hit because I felt so shitty about both the skit and the fact that I was fucking up so bad by being so late.At one red light, as I maneuvered the key up my snout, I felt eyes on me. I turned to my left and saw this fucking hot Malibu chick with long blond hair and sunglasses—just smoking hot—driving some sort of Lamborghini convertible. She was there with her girlfriend, and the look on their faces was insane: They must have thought they were on an acid trip, sitting there looking at a pig, in broad daylight, doing cocaine.
I just stopped and stared back at them with the key in my hand. Then the driver leaned over so she could get a better look at me and said, kind of disorganized and pointing: "That's a pig...doing cocaine." She might have said that, I don't know. I'm going with the odds here and assuming she didn’t say, "Hey, you're hot! Can I blow you?"
I just wanted to kill myself. I thought of my mother holding me in the hospital as a baby, staring into my face, never knowing that one day her baby boy would be in pig makeup at 10 in the morning doing blow at a traffic light. I heard my mother's voice in my head, horrified, saying, "Look at my son! Look at him! What's happened to my son?" I was miserable.
The light turned green, and I started driving with the hit of coke still balanced on the key in my hand. I started weaving in and out of lanes trying to get this thing in my nose and ended up cutting off this old lady and almost causing an accident. <,/p>
I got back to the set and put on the rest of my costume: a red Baywatch bathing suit featuring twelve boob cups to hold my six sets of teats. I stashed my coke in one of them and made some excuse to Jen the makeup girl about what had happened to the snout. I told her I was drinking Coke from a can when it broke. Finally, six hours after waking up and three hours after my scheduled start time, I joined the cast on set. It was obvious from like 300 yards away that everyone from my fellow actors to the last crew guy wanted to fucking kill me. They were all just livid. My best friend on the show, David Herman, an amazingly talented actor, walked right up to me, looking more pissed than I’d ever seen him.
"Artie, you almost got the two assistant directors fired!" he said. "What the fuck? You have to let those guys know if you're going somewhere."
"Oh yeah? Well, fuck you, Dave!"
"What? What did I do?"
"You heard me. Fuck you. I don't give a fucking shit about you or those two fucking guys."
I gave him finger and stormed off. We didn’t speak for two weeks.
I then did the sensible thing: I went back to my trailer and did more coke until it was time to shoot. It was one of those times when cocaine wasn't at all fun, it just got me through the day, because that was the kind of user I'd become. The drugs did have then unwelcome side effect, however, of making the day more and more strange with each passing minute. Every time I bent over to do a line, I'd catch my reflection in the mirror out of the corner of my eye and I'd see me, as a pig, doing coke. I was a pig doing coke, it was as simple as that. It did wonders for my self-esteem and my growing self-loathing at being an addict. The monologue in my head was like a broken record: “I’m a pig! I’m a fucking coke-addict pig! I am a fucking drug-addicted pig!” The pig costume was more than a symbol to me. As high as I was, when I saw myself in the mirror, I had turned into a pig—a pig who over-ate and did coke.
When you did impressions on MADtv, the producers gave you a Walkman that played huge sections of whatever movie was being parodied, with your character’s catchphrases recorded on a loop. You’d wear this thing around during rehearsals and for a week listen to the voice you had to impersonate over and over again. It drove all of us crazy.When David Herman had to do Pauly Shore, he almost quit. David is a really mellow, great guy who played “Michael Bolton” in the very funny movie Office Space. On his third day of rehearsals, walking around listening to the Pauly Shore tape and practicing saying, “What’s uup, buuuuddy? What’s uup?” he suddenly, out of nowhere, just tore the headphones off and smashed the Walkman on the floor.
"Fuck it! I can't take it anymore!" he screamed. "Fuck this! I fucking quit!"
Eventually, he calmed down. He didn’t quit, and when it came time to shoot, David did the most amazing Pauly Shore impression ever. But who could blame him? The Wease is fucking annoying.
Anyway, the Walkman treatment made my coked-up pig reality so much harder to take. The rest of the cast were dressed as hot lifeguards. I walked around this beach in Malibu getting ready for my scene by listening to, and repeating over and over, lines like "Hey! I'm Babe! Hey, I’m Baaabe!" It was horrible. Then, when we shot, the cast and crew looked on while I did things like sit on a lifeguard stand eating a huge piece of chicken . . . like a pig. In another scene, I had to dig through a garbage can while the entire cast shouted, "You're a pig! You're a disgusting pig!" It was the most surreal day of my life.
By the end of it, I was a mess. I’d done so much coke and everything had been so weird that, in my mind, I was convinced that I’d been permanently transformed into a cocaine-snorting, bingeeating pig,which wasn’t so far from the truth. When I got back into the makeup chair, I was so amped up and into my delusion that I didn’t expect the stuff to come off. As Jen removed it, I could tell she was clearly terrified of me; if she hadn't guessed right away why this hole kept cracking in the base of my snout all day long, I’m sure soon enough she’d figured it out. My knee was bouncing at about a million miles an hour, and every twenty minutes I stopped her so I could go to the bathroom.
"Hey, listen, Jen" I'd say. "Sorry to do this to you, I really have to go to the bathroom again. I drank a lot of coffee out there today, you know?" Sure, coffee, that's what everyone drinks when they’re on a hot beach for ten hours.
Anyway, I was overjoyed to discover how much easier it was to do coke once I'd gotten my God-given nose back. Which was good, because I was far from finished. I went back to the motel, this awful little dive on the side of the highway, knowing that everyone on the shoot completely hated my guts. All I wanted to do was go home, but we had one more day, so I kept doing coke and drinking Jack until I fell asleep around 3 a.m., about an hour before my 4 a.m. wake-up call.
When the phone rang, I felt like I’d arrived in hell. The only way to describe it is to picture the famous scene from The Godfather where Jack Woltz wakes up covered in blood with his prizewinning half-a-million-dollar racehorse's head in bed with him. As it dawns on him what's happened, he starts screaming, over and over and louder and louder, this really disturbing strangled yell: "Ahh! Ahhhhh! Ahhhhhhh!"
That was me, but instead of horse blood, my bed was full of my own shit. I kept shouting, "What is this? What is this!?" My body had had so much badness in it—so much coke and booze and bad food—that when I fell asleep all of it just fell out of me. I had lost all control in that one hour. It was so horrible and there was so much of it that it had filled my Jockey underwear, leaked out of every side, and spread all over the bed. And it was everywhere: on my arms, on my chest, up by my neck because I’d rolled around—exactly like a pig would do—and gotten it all over myself.
When I first saw it, though, I thought it was blood and I was convinced that someone had come into my room and done something violent to me. Cocaine paranoia is great, by the way, you should try it. Once I realized that in fact I was the only one who had done anything violent to me, I was even more horrified. I got up, took a good look at the mess, and it was just terrible. It looked like someone had filled a can of house paint with runny shit and dumped it in the vague shape of a human being on this fleabag bed. The room smelled, I smelled, it was awful. That had never happened to me before, and even though I was far from being done with excessive drug use, it’s never happened since. Whenever I tell this story, I kid myself for a minute by telling myself that it’s no big deal because everyone’s got a story just like it. Unfortunately, reason wins out eventually. Unless I go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and make friends, I'm pretty sure I'll never find myself in a room full of people with stories like this.
Anyway, I was running late by this point and, judging by the carnage I was looking at, it was only going to get later. I felt cursed—there was just no way to keep every single person working on this shoot from fucking hating me. I was going to be late to makeup, which once again guaranteed that everything would be delayed. It was a miserable moment standing there in that dark little room in Malibu feeling this insane pressure.
I jumped into the shower and turned the hot water up until it steamed, then I scrubbed and scorched myself until my entire body was all red. I was clean, but I still felt disgusting. But that didn't matter, because by the time I got out, I was really late: There were people knocking at my door with a van waiting outside just for me, and they were definitely pissed off. I got into some clean clothes, I grabbed my coke, of course, and that's when I realized that I had no idea what the fuck to do about the huge mess on the bed.
"Artie! We've got to go, man, the van is waiting."
"Okay, sorry, I'm coming, one minute."
The only choice was to flee the scene of the crime. I grabbed the old crappy polyester bedspread, threw it over the horror show, and left. I had absolutely no cash at all, so I couldn’t even leave the maid a tip. I had coke, though, and if I knew she partook I would have gladly left her some.
I got to the set, went to my trailer, and did some coke to steady my nerves enough to get me through the three-hour makeup process. The whole time I was freaking out, convinced that I still smelled like shit, as Jen once again turned my face into a pig. I got on set, hoping that maybe, somehow, my friends on the show had forgiven me for my behavior the day before. Not quite: My buddy, the great actor Orlando Jones, wouldn’t even talk to me between scenes. It was too fucked up: I was there, dressed as a pig, with every other actor in the group turning their back on me, ignoring the pig between takes.
Somehow I got through that day and was overjoyed to be going home. As I drove back to L.A., feeling bad about the mess I’d left in the hotel, it hit me: Not only did I almost get the assistant directors fired, but my room had been registered in one of the guys' names! I had showered that place in feces and I wasn't even the one picking up the tab! What an asshole I was. I started to think of what I was going to say to explain it and how I would make it up to the guy.
Well, that never happened. No one ever said a word about it. I can only assume that they covered the damage—who knows if anyone ever said anything to anybody. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. As an eyewitness, I can say that finding that mess was like discovering a decaying corpse: It was so upsetting that they probably made a pact never to speak of it again.
After that skit, we had a break before going into another stretch of shooting, which would be the end of the first half of the season. During the time off, I went to San Diego to get my head straight. At the time I was casually dating a chick down there, so I went to see her. Once I cooled down off the blow, I did some damage control and got everyone talking to me again, though it wasn’t easy. But I hadn't learned a thing and I was far from done with drugs in the workplace. You'd think that waking up in your own crap would be a wake-up call. Not for me; I looked at it as an occupational hazard. No, I kept on doing drugs at MADtv straight on until dawn. More awful shit was yet to come. Everyone knows that the darkest hour is the one right before the dawn. For me, this incident was just around midnight.
Spiegel & Grau, A Division of Random House, Inc.