Andy and I were in the back room of Star Strip Cabaret, a splashy all-nude club in West Hollywood, when he got in a fight with a dancer.
Fueled by four vodka gimlets, two beers and multiple hits of pot, he was getting a lap dance when he grabbed the woman’s butt and tried to wrap his arms around her waist.
Annoyed, she gave him a second chance — but Andy couldn’t stop himself. “Oh shut up, you bitch,” he called out in a sing-song voice as a bouncer escorted us out.
This was 1999 and the comedian was flying high, and not just on drugs.
Andy was a household-name sitcom actor thanks to his role on NBC’s “NewsRadio.” Details magazine sent me to Los Angeles to interview him over a weekend, which turned into a week once my editor heard about the actor’s exploits.
Indeed, he held nothing back.
For the photos, Andy, wearing cracked glasses, pretended to be unconscious on a sidewalk — an uncanny preview of this week, when video Tuesday showed him slumped on the ground after suffering an apparent overdose.
The comedian, who was revived by an administered dose of Narcan, said it happened after a stranger offered him crack cocaine, explaining that he didn’t “mind doing a little crack every now and then.”
Over the course of our several days and nights together, I watched him get sick after taking a massive hit off a pot pipe at a party. He vowed to “bitch slap” comedian Chris Kattan, who had parodied him on “Saturday Night Live,” and bragged that he could wrap his penis around his own wrist like a Rolex.
At a Sunset Strip bar, I thought I saw him hug a guy — until the man cried out, “He bit me!” As we were leaving, I heard the crowd buzzing about something else that allegedly happened.
“Wesley Snipes punched me,” Andy claimed. “I went into the bathroom. Wesley Snipes was in there with a whole bunch of his guys. I saw them, and I said, ‘Now I’m in the minority.’ Then he told me to bow down to him. I did, and he punched me in the chest.”
(Snipes’ rep had no comment at the time.)
It wasn’t all sordid, but it was mostly weird. One day, he showed me his backyard garden, where I watched him feed baby frogs
On our last night, we I met at my West Hollywood hotel and I asked him about his actor friend David Strickland, who had taken his own life after partying with Andy in Las Vegas.
“I wish it was you killing yourself with no one there,” he shouted at me.
After an uncomfortable silence, he gave me a high-five and insisted he was joking.
Then, talking about multiple friends of his who had died young, Andy acknowledged that people around town had nicknamed him the “Angel of Death.”
He told me how, as a little kid, he took off his diaper and spread his own feces on the wall.
“That’s pretty much what I‘ve done with my career,” he said.
Despite it all, I thought we parted on good terms. I had promised to take Andy and a girlfriend to the restaurant of his choice, expecting him to choose a Hollywood hot spot. Instead, we ended up at Red Lobster and later shook hands before he headed out to the Viper Room.
Days after the story, headlined “Life as A. Dick,” dropped, he called me —ranting and raging that I was a terrible person for writing a story like that.
He called me fat and ugly and said he didn’t know how I could be a father.
He was in New York City, where I lived, and said he wanted to meet me at Central Park at midnight so he could kick me in the head.
“Andy,” I said, “everything in the story was true. Why did you do all that stuff if you didn’t want me to write about it?”
Andy had an easy answer: “Dude, I thought we were hanging out.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
