Wanna Bet? by Artie Lange

Author:Artie Lange
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

11

DIRTY WORK

One of my favorite people on earth is Norm Macdonald. Not only is he a smart and funny motherfucker, he’s also a degenerate gambler. He and I share the same primal need for action, but to tell you the truth, since his bankroll is much, much fatter than mine, Norm is even worse than I am. I love him so much, and I think the feeling is mutual, but I know he will agree with me when I say that we are terrible for each other.

Norm and I first met in 1997, when he offered me a costarring role in Dirty Work. It’s a buddy comedy directed by Bob Saget, with Norm playing the lead role and me playing his fat sidekick. I wasn’t the only guy up for the role, but Norm liked the sketch comedy work I’d done on Mad TV and thought we’d be a good fit. He was right about that in more ways than one. This was the first role in a major motion picture that I’d ever landed, and at the time, I’d been fired from Mad TV for drugs and bad behavior, so Norm was really taking a chance on me. He believed in me, so much so that he had to convince the producers and a handful of studio executives that I was worth it.

Making movies is like going to summer camp: everyone on the production is stuck in a bubble far away from home, so even if you don’t like your fellow cast members, you have to find a way to get along. We shot in Toronto, and the first night, Norm, Saget, a few others, and I went out to a bar. We drank and played pool, and I introduced Norm to nine-ball, or cutthroat as some like to call it. Naturally we played for money, and I ended up taking Norm for $2,000. My manager at the time, who’d had to vouch for me a thousand different ways to get me the job, nearly had a heart attack when he heard about it.

“Why the hell would you do that on the first night? Couldn’t you have lost to him?”

Norm, however, was an honorable guy and even did the culturally appropriate thing by paying me in Canadian dollars. He explained that $2,000 Canadian was a lot less than $2,000 US, but that was the price I had to pay since I’d won the bet in Canada. He didn’t give me an accurate idea of the exchange rate, unfortunately. If I’d known that the US dollar was worth more than the Canadian dollar at the time, I wouldn’t have given a stripper my pocketful of Canadian cash, thinking it was worth half. The next day I learned that I’d paid her the equivalent of $3,000 US for a blow job. Needless to say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Norm and me.

Dirty Work was the best summer camp I’ve ever been to. We had so much fun,

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