Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.

by Rob Delaney

  A few weeks later, I heard the mailman drop some letters through the mail slot onto the floor of our front hall. As I sifted through the bills, catalogs, and other boring adult stuff, I came upon a letter from Van Nuys, California, with the name “Danzig” stamped in the upper left corner. I carefully unsealed it to reveal a letter from Eerie Von, Danzig’s bass player. It was written with a Sharpie marker and there were some grammatical errors that suggested I hadn’t needed to be so vigilant about my contraction use, but the letter’s tone was kind and warm and endeared Mr. Von to me for life. He explained that Glenn couldn’t possibly answer all his mail, so Eerie lent a hand sometimes. He thanked me for my enthusiasm and hoped I’d tell other people about the band. Naturally, I did, because I was at the age where I would physically sit people down and force them to listen to the songs I liked, watching their facial expressions closely as they reacted to each note.

  And just in case Eerie Von’s first letter didn’t cement Danzig’s position as the world’s greatest band forever, he wrote me another one, unsolicited! Some months later I got the second letter from Von saying, essentially, “How’s it going, man? Everything groovy? Still rockin’ to Danzig?” Indeed I was. What a gentleman. I’m now on my third or fourth Danzig monster skull T-shirt, and when this one falls apart, I plan to get another.

  At that age, my mother and I spent a lot of time together, and she paid attention to my adolescent passions, even deigning to listen to the odd Danzig ballad that I’d force upon her, conceding that it was “Yeah, nice. Sure.” So, for my thirteenth birthday, she made me a Danzig birthday cake. It was magnificent and included all four members of Danzig’s faces, which were easily identifiable. Glenn himself was large and on the left. Eerie Von, guitarist John Christ, and drummer Chuck Biscuits were smaller and on the right. Although her only tool was a simple chocolate cake decorator in a tube over vanilla frosting, she was able to depict delicate shadows and convey the darkness of Danzig’s majesty. It was a great cake and, when she presented it to me, I became infuriated.

  “Mom! Come on! Danzig shouldn’t be on a cake! They’re like, bad dudes! They would never be on a cake! Maybe they’d be, like, on a tombstone or a gunslinger’s coat, but a cake! No way! Jeez!”

  I want to cry thinking about the pain that was on her face. Here was a woman who worked full-time at an insurance agency, working very hard to support her two kids, also making sure to be extremely present in our lives—mornings, evenings, and weekends. She had worked on her masterpiece in secret, studying each band member’s scowl, to make her self-proclaimed bad-ass little boy an extremely cool cake, and he hated it. And he let her know, like a real piece of shit. Now that I’m a parent, the idea of my children expressing displeasure at my efforts to please them makes me want to lie down on a table saw.

  My mother simply smoothed off the guys’ faces with a spatula and then covered the cake with chocolate sprinkles, or “jimmies” as we called them then, but which I’m now told is a racist term.

  Later that night, for my official birthday celebration, my friends Rich and Matt and I saw the film Tango and Cash, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell as cops who are framed for murder and then break out of prison. Then Rich and Matt slept over, our bellies full of the cake my mom had made and then remade when it failed to meet my satisfaction. To this day when I imagine having a time machine, my FIRST stop is my thirteenth birthday where I would jump up and down with excitement and hug my mom when she reveals that cake. If there was still time left on my time travel visa, only then would I go back and kill Hitler.

  la honte

  I stopped wetting the bed while sober at age twelve. I wet the bed while drunk until I was twenty-five years old. I first got drunk at twelve, though, so that tacked on another thirteen years of waking up wrapped in the piss-soaked sheets of beds across the United States, Canada, and France.

  When I was nine, my pediatrician suggested that my bedwetting persisted because I was a deep sleeper and that the condition would ultimately resolve itself. In the meantime, on the mornings that I had wet the bed, I’d wake up, sense what had happened, and get sad. Then I’d strip my bed down to its crinkly plastic mattress cover and trudge down to the basement, arms full of soiled sheets, praying that I didn’t pass my mom, dad, or sister (who was five years younger than me, yet woke up each morning in a bone-dry bed, ready to attack the day). Then I’d throw the sheets in the washing machine with detergent and a little bleach. A framed pastel drawing I’d done depicting bright red flowers that looked like gaping, bloody grenade wounds hung over the washing machine. Then I’d go back upstairs, spray a little Lysol on the bed, put clean sheets on it, and take a shower. My parents handled the situation as best they could. They loved me.

  Perhaps the most scarring bedwetting memory is when I tried to sleep over at the summer camp I attended for nine years as a kid. It was a day camp owned by the YMCA called Children’s Island and it was about a mile outside of Marblehead Harbor. Every second Tuesday evening, campers’ parents would visit their kids and have a picnic, then the campers would stay overnight in tents. Naturally the idea terrified me but I yearned to be a normal boy, so one day I decided to give it a shot and resolved to spend a Tuesday night on the island. My parents got some subs and sodas from Super Sub and brought my four-year-old sister along for the twenty-minute boat ride on the New England Star, the ferry that brought us back and forth each day. I loved riding on the bow of that boat on a choppy day and being sprayed by waves in the afternoon sun. It’s entirely possible that that’s the memory that will flash before my eyes when I die, it’s so satisfying.

  I brought my parents and sister around the tiny island that smelled of salt, wild grass, and seagull shit. I showed them my projects at the arts and crafts lodge and rocks on the island’s edges that looked like whales. I think it’s fair to call the situation idyllic. As the sun prepared to set, my family got ready to see me off and my parents reminded me not to drink any liquids and to make sure I “emptied the tank” before going to sleep. I bid them goodbye and waved as the boat pulled away from the island and made its way back to the mainland.

  Then all the campers and counselors put on warmer clothes and meandered to the eastern edge of the island to gather around a giant campfire, sing songs, and watch the counselors do skits, which were shockingly, improbably good.

  My friend Todd and I confided in each other after the fact that when Ranger Pete, the camp’s nature director, sang an original song containing the phrase “The island has a mystic veil around her, pulling me so close I cannot leave,” we cried.

  After the campfire we found our way to our tents, with me making a pit stop at the bathroom in the main lodge, trying to squeeze out every possible drop of urine. Then I got in my tent with eight other boys and fell asleep.

  Around seven the next morning, I woke up in the sleeping bag thoroughly soaked with piss. My greatest fear had come to pass. What do I do? I thought. How do I escape this? I tried to silently gather up my sleeping bag and sneak out of the tent.

  “ROB PEED IN HIS SLEEPING BAG!” a boy named Liam yelled.

  “No I didn’t!” I responded, vibrating with fear.

  “Yeah you did.”

  “No! I didn’t.”

  “Why’s it all wet then?”

  “It isn’t! If … would I do this if I’d peed in my sleeping bag?” I gathered up my sleeping bag and took the wettest area and rubbed it all over my face. Why I thought that would prove anything is beyond me; I was terrified and ashamed and I didn’t know what to do. Was I shaming my own inner puppy for peeing somewhere he shouldn’t have? Psychologically, it was a pretty delicious scene.

  Liam was horrified and I could see that he immediately regretted calling me out because he now knew he was partially responsible for inciting a psychotic break in another kid. You could see he thought This boy might go on a killing spree one day, so distant is reality from his sad, flailing grasp.

  I struggled through the following day’s ar
chery and sailing lessons and rode the New England Star home that afternoon. When my mom picked me up I told her I’d wet the bed. She was very kind to me and we drove to a laundromat to wash my sleeping bag. I guess our washing machine at home wasn’t big enough for the job. I sat in the car while she brought it in to wash.

  Before she got out I said, “What if somebody comes by and asks why we’re washing a sleeping bag?”

  “Just tell them you spilled a Coke on it,” she replied.

  I was certain that all the town folk would come down to the river’s edge of the laundromat and interrogate me as to why we were washing a sleeping bag immediately after a sleepover so I rehearsed the Coke excuse my mom gave me over and over. I clung to her ruse like a nineteen-year-old refugee would hold her baby as she crossed a mountainous border during a snowstorm.

  I imagined Old Man Carruthers approaching:

  “Hi Rob, how are y—”

  “I SPILLED A COKE ON IT!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I SPILLED A COKE ON IT!”

  “On what? Son, are you okay?”

  “It’s JUST COKE! I SPILLED A COKE ON IT!!!”

  “Ok, I gotta hit the road. You take care …” Old Man Carruthers sauntered off, mumbling, “I guess it takes all kinds …”

  Shortly after this episode, my parents took me to the doctor to see what my options were. Option 1 was a pill I’ll call “Dehydromax 5000.” I hope to God this medication went the way of leeches and the lobotomy, because not only did it keep my bed dry, it also kept my mouth, throat, and eyeballs at the same moisture level as the ash at the end of a generic Russian cigarette. Eventually my blinks became audible across the dinner table, and my parents decided I should quit taking it.

  Option 2, which we tried next, was a special alarm that my mom had to order from some pre-Internet catalog of horrors. I can remember the package coming in the mail, opening it up, staring at it more intently than anything I’d ever received from Santa, and thinking, “Is this the thing that will save me? Will the thing in this box help me be like other boys?”

  The alarm consisted of a sensor that attached to a wire, which ran to a tiny box that emitted a terrifying shriek if it detected any moisture. It was so sensitive that even the moisture on one’s finger would set it off. It slid into a pocket that my mom had sewn onto the front of a pair of my underpants; the wire ran up to the alarm, which adhered to a Velcro patch she had sewn onto the shoulder of one of my white T-shirts.

  Perhaps the pee-sensor industry has since graduated to some sort of waterproof Bluetooth alarm that makes the wire superfluous, but in 1987 it was an essential component, which created a problem: The alarm was designed for children, who are usually short. I was not. In fact, I was the tallest kid in my school. Thus, the wire wasn’t long enough to reach from the pocket on the front of my little underpants up to the patch on the shoulder of my shirt. So at night, when I slid into my little white cotton shame-suit, I had to hunch down as though I had terrible scoliosis and lurch over to my bed, already hating myself. Then I’d slither between the sheets and lie there, awaiting the inevitable. But since I did indeed sleep as deeply as my pediatrician had suggested, I always slept right through the alarm and had to be shaken into consciousness at ungodly hours of the morning by one of my bleary-eyed parents as I lay there in a piss-soaked bed with a shrill robot scream boring into my disoriented brain.

  As I experimented with the alarm, a miraculous thing happened: My brain and bladder fused a better—if sometimes still faulty—connection simply because I was getting older, so I began to wet the bed less and less, thus freeing me of those horrible aids.

  A couple of years after my experience with the alarm, I got drunk for the first time when my friend John’s older sister threw a party at their house. I drank three or four cans of Budweiser and, boy oh boy, did I like the way I felt. I remember an older guy punching me very hard in the arm when I said I didn’t think Ride the Lightning was Metallica’s best album. Another guy threw me off John’s back porch into a rose bush. An adult man wearing a T-shirt with a swastika on it stuck a joint in my face and I was too afraid not to smoke it. I later recognized his face on the front page of the Marblehead Reporter. He was in court, in handcuffs, giving the photographer two middle fingers. He’d been arrested for spray-painting the names of concentration camps all over a temple in town.

  I was drunk that night though, so none of that fazed me. I’d found a new ally of sorts, and it made things like physical pain just disappear. And that made the return of the bedwetting worth it, for a while anyway. It’s funny to think that I wet the bed for slightly longer as a drunk than I did in my youth. With my wife’s recent pregnancy, I learned that babies even go pee-pee inside their mommy’s tummy. So I peed while sleeping from shortly after conception till age twenty-five, at which point I had a hairy chest and weighed just under two hundred pounds. Twenty-five; a silver-golden anniversary, if you will. But you shouldn’t, because it’s a mess.

  sion for Florence & the Machine’s percussive anthems has finally exceeded my love for Christ.@robdelaney If you’re a guy in a tank top, do a gymnastics routine or get the fuck away from me. @robdelaney GALS: Ask ANY guy, if you don’t know all the sex tips from the latest Cosmo, we are NOT interested. @robdelaney What’s all the fuss about horse meat? Who gives a shit? I’ll eat a horse. I’ll eat a dog. I’ll eat your fucking family. @robdelaney Sort of rude to kiss your husband right in front of me when I’ve been looking at your boobs from behind a tree for 20 minutes. @robdelaney Haven’t had intercourse in a while so I’m heading down to

  PART II la soûlerie

  the shipyard to make a bad decision. @robdelaney Not a fan of the term “MILF.” When I was a #teen, we called them “yummy mummies” & left it at that. #respect #imagination #lotion @robdelaney Children give terrible gifts because they’re poor. @robdelaney My cousin Denise’s baby Alpo was born with no feet and a full adult penis because she drank Four Loko when she was pregnant :( @robdelaney @wolfblitzer can I spraytan my baby? @robdelaney How many spiders are in your vagina RIGHT NOW? The answer may surprise you. @robdelaney Just saw an unbelievably beautiful woman in the park. I wonder how many cows her father would give me to marry her. @robdelaney Why are blood oranges the only “blood” fruit? Why not blood bananas? Who wouldn’t like to slurp down a nice ripe blood banana? @robdelaney I need to get my shit together. It’s in little piles in my kitchen & then there’s some more in my wife’s closet. @robdelaney If I ever build my own house, I’m putting a toilet right in front of the refrigerator. @robdelaney I bet if Amy Winehouse had changed her name to Amy Lemonadehouse, she’d still be alive today. @robdelaney The hour I lose from daylight savings time will now be multiplied by 6 as I try to change the time on the clock in my car. @robdelaney Pretty cool that the letters “B.J.” stand for the two greatest things in the world: beef jerky & Billy Joel. @robdelaney It’s like taking candy from a baby - A GOOD IDEA IF YOU DON’T WANT THE BABY TO LOSE ITS FEET TO DIABETES BEFORE IT TURNS ONE. @robdelaney Just saw a guy on rollerblades. He was surprisingly sweat-free for having presumably “bladed” here from 1991. @robdelaney “Parodies” or homages or whatever the fuck they are of the “Got milk?” ads are worse than AIDS + 9/11 + a 3rd thing you personally hate. @robdelaney If you ask someone out and they say no, try it again in a few minutes wearing sunglasses and smoking a ciga-

  l’excès

  I don’t think my problems with drinking are rooted in anything too fascinating, other than genetics and a bottomless appetite for life. As a kid of Irish Catholic heritage born in Boston, Massachusetts, my extended family had a standard ratio of roughly fifty-fifty for gutter drunks versus relatively normal people where alcohol and drugs were concerned.

  I first got drunk at age twelve. Someone finally put me to bed when I was deemed too fucked up to hang out anymore. I’m aware now that it was an empirically terrible night, but the feeling alcohol gave me was so magical that it outweighed the night’s lousier aspects and I real
ly looked forward to doing it again; I wanted that shit in me. Like a lot of drunks report, introducing alcohol into my body just felt like, “Ooh, there we go. Here I am.” Sort of like it elegantly completed a chemical equation of some kind.

  But I never really had a honeymoon period with alcohol. Even an idiot or a kitten observing my first drunken experience would describe it as awful. Still, I sought booze with a fervor measurably more intense than that with which I sought to get into young women’s underpants, which is to say it made Hercules (or Jason Statham) look like a pussy.

  The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I drank a bottle of tequila at a friend’s house. Someone handed me a joint and I took a hit, and immediately a wave of nausea hit me. I knew I was going to puke so I covered my mouth with my hand. All this did was intensify the pressure, and when the puke freed itself, it did so in the form of a powerful vomit laser that escaped from between my fingers and hit a guy in the face.

  That night, my friend Todd took me home from the party and we sat on my front porch smoking cigarettes. It was probably around nine or ten and my mom was out with a friend. After a bit, I got up and walked across the street to a telephone pole. Unlike most telephone poles, this one had handles hammered into it that allowed one to reach up and climb it with relative ease if you were over six feet tall. I jumped up and grabbed the first handles and began to climb. It didn’t take long to get to the top. I relaxed and surveyed the neighborhood. Everything looked good. We lived on Ruby Avenue in a neighborhood that also included the Avenues Emerald and Sapphire. I had delivered the Boston Globe for several years as a younger kid and as a result, I’d been inside at least fifty of the houses I could see from my perch.