Artie Lange

Comic Artie Lange bares soul, talks of lost love & heroin use

BY LEO STANDORA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, December 2nd 2007, 4:00 AM

Hard-living comic Artie Lange cracks them up on the Howard Stern radio show but his private life is a lot less than a laugh riot.

The 40-year-old Jersey boy lives alone in a Hoboken apartment, he's grossly overweight, diabetic, abuses booze and drugs and lots of people are waiting for him to die.

All this could depress and anger some folks, but Lange shrugs it off in an interview in Playboy magazine's January issue. He says it's Yankee third basemen Alex Rodriguez who gets his goat.

"F------ A-Rod. Can A-Rod get one f------ hit in October?" the forever Yankee fan asked. "A double down the line - something?"

Unable to resist a gag, Lange adds that Rodriguez is "a lot like Babe Ruth. Before the playoffs last year he went to a hospital and promised a dying kid he'd ground out to second for him. ... It's true ... I was there. A-Rod pointed to second base."

For the record, A-Rod went 4 for 15 in the last postseason - three singles and a homer.

Lange's work onstage and on radio, television and the movies have made him a multimillionaire but he tells Playboy: "I'm sick of this s---. I'm tired. I just want to retire."

One big regret, he says, was the end of his only long-term relationship, a love affair with a New Jersey school teacher, that was destroyed by his heroin addiction.

"I was in my mid-30s, and I was more stable than ever. I just couldn't make it work."

Lange seems untroubled by artielangedeathwatch.com, a Web site dedicated to predicting Lange's demise. But he admits he was bothered by a Las Vegas TV station's recent report that he died at the Hard Rock hotel.

"We caught it right before CNN was about to put it on the news ticker that runs across the bottom of the screen. Thank God, because then my mother would have seen it," he recalled.

Then, with a smile spreading across his face, he added, "I think it's kind of cool that I would have made the CNN news crawl, though."