Artie Lange, now working at gas station, sends message to Howard Stern. ‘I love him to death.’
Comedian Artie Lange has a message for Howard Stern: “I love him to death and I miss him.”
Lange, 51, who grew up in Union, was recently spotted at a gas station, where he said he was working as part of his drug court rehab program. He promised he’d be back on stage performing stand-up soon.
In a video posted by a Twitter account for the podcast “Radio Misfits” and retweeted by Lange’s account Wednesday, the comedian explained his current circumstances.
“All right, now I’m pumping gas,” he said. “I gotta pump gas for 10 more days and then I’m satisfying the program I think. If this gets back to Howard, tell him I love him. I love him to death and I miss him.”
“I gotta pump gas!” Lange continued. “I’ll be back onstage soon, though. I promise.”
In 2018, Lange was sentenced to four years of probation after pleading guilty to heroin possession. In 2017, State Police stopped Lange on the Garden State Parkway near Bloomfield and found him with 81 decks of heroin. Later, he was found to have violated his probation when he tested positive for cocaine twice in less than two months. The comedian was jailed for almost two weeks in January.
In April, Lange, who has been in and out of rehab over his decades-long struggle with addiction, was seen working a garbage truck route.
The comedian, who had a recurring role on the HBO series “Crashing,” is best known for spending about eight years on “The Howard Stern Show.” Lange was asked to take a break from the show in 2009 after a drug binge. During that time, he was hospitalized following a suicide attemptin which he drank bleach and plunged a kitchen knife into his stomach several times at his Hoboken home.
Lange has said that Stern tried to help him. Ultimately, the radio host cut ties with Lange.
Stern, who has been promoting his new book, “Howard Stern Comes Again,” recently spoke about Lange during an interview with the New York Times Magazine.
“What’s happening with Artie makes me very sad,” Stern told the magazine. “We’ve lost touch, and that’s my doing. I got my fingers crossed for the guy. And it wasn’t a clean break. It was many years of wanting Artie to get help.”
“I know that a lot of fans want me to talk about Artie and feel it’s a cop-out for me not to,” Stern continued. “I’ll take that. I don’t want to do anything that would rock his boat. I get sad talking about Artie. He was a tremendous contributor. But we had to move on.”
www.nj.com
