America's Biggest Loser

These days it's just him, his mother and his sister — his father, a TV-antenna installer from Newark, New Jersey, fell off a ladder on the job in 1985, when Lange was in his first year of college. His dad was his best friend and hero, and Lange used to work for him during the summers, holding the ladder as he climbed on roofs "like Superman," says Lange. Artie Lange Sr. was a quadriplegic until he died four and a half years later from "losing the will to live," says Lange, cryptically. This would seem to be the key to Lange's personality: the blow of losing an idealized father who looms ever more heroic in one's mind, the battle to measure up to him lost for eternity. "That's part of it," says Lange. "But that pain is long over. There's got to be something else."

What's wrong with Artie Lange is the kind of million-dollar question that no one has satisfactorily answered, so it's best to ditch it and just look at the particulars. He has been on and off of heroin for three years. In fact, he was on a five-day bender during the photo shoot for this article, before Christmas. Our photographer was in his living room, and Lange was hiding in the bathroom, snorting a dime bag. He gets into drugs like this every couple of months, before trying to go straight again. Then he gobbles the opiate-blocker Subutex to ward off withdrawal, or he downs a whopping 20-odd painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet per day, or he dries out in rehab centers of various disciplinary ideologies.

This time, Lange got shipped off to a detox center in Florida for a 21-day program of cucumber juice, therapy and wheatgrass enemas. "I had to get a doctor's prescription for an apple, because apples have too much sugar," he says. Seven days later, he was ready to split: A weed-smoking, Neil Young-loving chick from Pittsburgh with whom he once had a fling was on vacation in Miami, and he wanted to get into her pants. He ditched the detox center and booked a room at the Setai hotel in Miami's South Beach for $1,800 a night. He took that woman to a $300 dinner at an Italian restaurant, and the next night he treated another lady to a $750 meal at Nobu. He spent $120 on a haircut and $1,800 on two pairs of sunglasses. Then he started to think that it would be good to make back all the money he'd just wasted, so he booked three shows for later in the week at Caroline's comedy club in Manhattan for $35,000. The whole rehab thing was expensive, costing him about $17,000. Checking out early, he reasoned, didn't leave him a penny poorer. Plus, he didn't want to postpone the interview with Rolling Stone any longer. He's always afraid that everyone secretly hates him, that everything he's worked for is going to be suddenly snatched away.

So here he is, on January 7th, back in New York on The Howard Stern Show two weeks earlier than planned, and his mother and sister are furious. Even Stern is upset. Lange sweats into the microphone, his new $900 sunglasses clapped on his face; at least he's not nodding off today, which has been known to happen. The rest of the staff bust his balls: "Artie wouldn't stay in rehab, he had to go-go-go," chimes in a producer, to the tune of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab."

"I've never heard of someone kicking drugs with wheatgrass enemas," declares Stern co-host Robin Quivers. "There are a lot of layers Artie needs to confront."

"Are we retarded to have thought you were falling asleep on the show because you ate too many cupcakes?" yelps Stern producer Gary Dell'Abate.

Lange promises that he's ready to stay straight. He wants Stern to drug-test him ("It's a daddy complex!" exclaims Quivers). Stern parries: "You don't have to lie to me, Artie," he says. "You can tell me when you're on heroin, because I don't care." But Lange keeps pressing the point. Peering through his lightly tinted glasses, with a lot of mischief but also genuine sadness in his watery blue eyes, Stern shakes his head. "It's a saga," he says. "Artie is involved in a saga."