Crash and Burn Read Free Page B

I’d wake up with more energy than an angry terrorist,ready to rail away at my target until I reduced them to the level of anger, loathing, insecurity, and frustration that I felt every single nonhigh hour of my day. Like I said, anger was a sick thrill for me: it got me going, it blew off steam, and it made me feel alive. And obviously I didn’t care about the consequences it had on the relationships in my life, so it became a bit of a hobby—the kind of hobby your friends have that you wish they didn’t. Usually those friends aren’t too receptive when you try to tell them that collecting paintings by serial killers isn’t going to get them laid.
    I got into a fight with Robin, I got into a fight with Gary, I got into a fight with Fred, I got into a fight with Sal, I got into a fight with Richard, I even got into a fight with Howard! How the fuck did I think that was okay? I got into so many fights on the air that they made a “Best of Artie’s Fights” special after I was gone that they still replay all the time. I know this because every time it airs, if I go outside at all that day—even for just five minutes—someone in a passing car will roll their window down and shout at me about it. This sounds bad, but it isn’t; usually they are informing me of this in a good way. The most famous of these fights was quite the spectacle, even in audio form, and if you’re lucky or cursed enough to have seen the video of this event then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Aside from all that, this incident is significant because it marks a major downturn in my efficiency as a functioning drug addict. I am referring to a fight that stands alone: my battle royale with my old assistant Teddy.
    In April of 2008, I completely lost it on Teddy one day on the air. I insulted him, I threatened him, I made fun of him in every way possible, and I topped it all off by throwing a cup of water at him. I’d been munching painkillers like they were Tic Tacs all night, so I was flying high that morning. I was also pretty exhausted. I’d been keeping up the schedule that drove me into the ground and had played a big LA gig that month after which I planned to relax and wean myselfoff of the drugs, which would have been the sensible thing to do. Instead I went to Amsterdam.
    One of the Stern Show producers, Jason Kaplan, was having a four-day bachelor party there, and great people were going, including Howard TV cameraman Brian Phelan, who is one of my favorite people from the show to hang out with. The flight out was that night, just a few hours after our blowup. On the show that morning, Howard asked about the trip and if we were all packed and ready to go. I remembered that I’d asked Teddy to make a copy of my passport so he’d have all of my information handy for filling out customs forms and in case I lost it, which was a distinct possibility. Teddy was, after all, my assistant, and these are the kind of tasks assistants are told to do if they aren’t on top of it enough to think of these things themselves, which was definitely the case with my flunky manservant. The number of times Teddy didn’t do things he should have done is almost as legendary as the number of times I fell asleep on the air during my last year on the show, but no matter what he did, I believed in Teddy because I liked the kid a lot and wanted him to be all that he could be. So that day, I expected that he’d done what I’d asked him to, regardless of his track record.
    A couple of hours into the show, during a break, a kid who worked at Sirius—not even on our show—came up to me, handed me my passport, and told me he’d found it in the copier machine, where Teddy had apparently left it. This was a major fuckup, even for him, because if someone hadn’t found that and returned it, we would have gone to the airport and I would have been completely fucked. We would have missed the plane, because there is no way in hell I’d let Teddy go and have