He fell off a roof a week after my eighteenth birthday and became a quadriplegic.
I worked with him. My job was to hold the ladder and that day … I sound like I grew up in the 1940s sometimes, but I used to hustle pool. My buddies and I used to play nine ball and we used to go to the local county college and go into the game room. It was free fucking money. We would pretend we didn’t know each other and we’d get into a nine ball game. If you hit the five in, it was twenty bucks. The nine was thirty. My buddy would set me up to shoot them in and the third guy would pay me. Then I’d split the money with my friends, until a guy found out and we almost got our ass kicked.
That day I was supposed to hold the ladder and I didn’t go to work with him. I told him I was going to look for a job and I went to shoot pool. I shot pool all day. I got home and my mom said, “He fell off a roof.” He put the ladder on top of a picnic table to get to the top of the roof and he went to swing a hammer and it fell. He fell thirty feet on his head and became a quadriplegic. Had no insurance. Nothing. We went broke. He lasted four and a half years before he died. I think he offed himself through the help of crazy friends that he had. There was no autopsy.
Marc
You felt guilty?
Artie
God yeah, that I wasn’t there to hold the ladder. For a long time.
He would ask me to kill him every week. He’s like, “Just fucking shoot me.” He couldn’t move from the neck down. We had to feed him. It’s a living hell. He always said God was punishing him. He was an atheist, my father. My mother, big Catholic. My father would always say to me, “Don’t tell your mother I told you, but there’s nothing fucking up there.” He’d always say to me, “Do all the shit, get the confirmation, but there’s nothing up there.” Then when you’re a quadriplegic for four years, he started to think maybe there is.
If there is a heaven or hell, I hope God gave him his hell here.
JACK ANTONOFF—MUSICIAN, PRODUCER
I had two siblings, now one is dead. My youngest sister, about eleven years ago, died of brain cancer. It’s terrible. It’s just the worst thing ever.
We have this argument a lot in my family. When you get that question—How many siblings do you have?—what do you say? So I usually say, “I have a sister.”
She was thirteen, I was eighteen. My entire life is based off that moment. Music, everything. It was the single most important thing that ever happened to me and probably will happen to me. Something froze there, and I think I’m constantly looking back on it. I’m thirty and I’m dealing with that at thirty. At forty, I’ll be dealing with that at forty. I don’t think that goes away. I wouldn’t want it to go away.
MIKE DESTEFANO—COMEDIAN, DRUG COUNSELOR (1966–2011)
When I was twenty-one, I found out I’m HIV positive. I was diagnosed with HIV. This is twenty-three years ago, and that’s what changed my fucking life. That’s what just changed every priority. When you know that you’ve got four or five years to live, for real, you change shit.
I met my wife at the support group, the AIDS support group that we went to. I used to walk around and look at women that were in this particular building, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and I’d go, “Oh, I hope she has AIDS!” That’s the way it was back then, it was like, “Please, I hope she has AIDS.”
I met this beautiful girl, Fran, and she had been a recovering addict as well, and she was also positive. One thing that the HIV thing gave me was, it gave me that sense of “I don’t give a fuck, I’m not afraid of anything,” and that’s what I was always looking for as a kid. I wanted to be a gangster so I could be unafraid. I was on the fence. I lived on the fence most of my life. I was a kid riding my bicycle and I saw these two guys giving a cabdriver a beating, and when I say a beating, they were slamming his fucking head in the door of the car, they were fucking pulverizing this guy, and I remember looking at them, going, “I want to be like them,” and then I looked down at the guy that was being hit, and I felt bad for him. I was like, “This poor guy.” Then I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out, “Which one am I going to be? Those are the only two fucking paths.” That was like, “This is what I have to choose from.”
We move to Florida because of the health. We were dying. We came down here, I was twenty-two, she was a little older than me, she was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and we literally came to Florida like two old people would do. That’s what my life was at that time. I didn’t know how long I would live. Back then, people got the virus, they died in four to five years. I expected that to happen.
I noticed her getting sick during playing tennis, which is weird. We’re playing tennis back and forth, and she wasn’t moving as quick as she was. I said, “What’s the matter?” She says, “My legs hurt, I have pains in my legs.” We went to the doctor, and it was a thing called neuropathy, which meant that her immune system was really low and fucked-up. It was causing nerve damage in her body. That was the beginning of it. It was the beginning of such a long and fucking painful deterioration. It was a slow, fucked-up time for me back then.
It was about a five-year period of slow deterioration, and then these rapid, fucked-up things, where she had pneumonia like fifteen times, she was in the hospital, and she was given her last rites a few times and survived it and came back. It was just a brutal, brutal time.
I was her caregiver. I never thought of leaving her. I never even considered it. Today, it’s the greatest decision I’ve made. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done, was care for my wife. I’ll never do anything that great again. Fucking HBO specials, whatever you want to give me. Nothing will be better than that, because it was such a deep reckoning within myself that I am not a piece of shit. That I don’t deserve to stick needles in my arm. I am a good person. Look what I’m capable of. I’m capable of deep love and commitment. That was my whole life, was taking care of her.
I was not in the room when she died. I had been by her side every night. Her mother had been in town the night she died, and her mother wanted to stay with her alone, and I left her there, and I went home, and that’s the night that she passed away. It’s not a very big deal to me. I know what I did for her.