by Rob Delaney
To this day that embrace between Michael and me remains the only time I’ve snuggled shirtless with another man while in a lying-down position after consuming fifteen beers. I remember it fondly, and I’d do it again. After Michael came back to a more functional version of life and some color had returned to his skin, we went out again in the launch to retrieve the dinghy. When we got to the trimaran, we still couldn’t flip the dinghy back over, so we wound up towing it slowly back to the dock upside down. Any safety gear or tools that had been in the dinghy floated away or sank into the darkness. We’d both lost our shoes. When we made it back to the dock, we tied up both the boats—the dinghy still upside down—and then drove our bewildered passengers back to their cars on the mainland. We never saw them again.
The next day, our boss was, naturally, irate. He laid into Michael and me, and I was ashamed. We’d done something indefensible and nearly fatal, and we’d done it with boats and equipment he had built and maintained. Michael and I brought the outboard motor to a shop to be drained, fixed, relubricated, and repaired. That was the biggest physical casualty of the night. More than that though, our genuinely beloved boss had proof that we were total assholes and as dependable as ham sandwiches. He was sincerely disappointed and I felt like shit about it. He couldn’t easily fire us, though, because to get the job in the first place we had to get Coast Guard and Merchant Marines–issued licenses to drive the launches. Those licenses required many hours of training, classes, tests, and drug testing. We were not easily replaceable and there were simply too many passengers that would need transport in the coming months. So Bill sucked it up and kept us.
One month later exactly, on August fourth, I was taking a load of people back to the Crescent on one of the launches. I saw a shoe floating in the water. I pulled alongside it and picked it up. It was an ugly white size thirteen Sperry boat sneaker. Amazingly, it was one of the shoes that I’d lost a month prior, when I kicked it off in an effort to not drown. I put the shoe at the base of my seat, stunned, and drove my passengers back to the club.
That night in 1998 was only one of the many incidents where my drinking could have had fatal consequences, but I shrugged it off and kept truckin’. I was scared of what could or would happen—I was never intellectually unaware of the danger I put myself in; I just loved to drink. And the distance from one drink to eight or fifteen was like a waterslide or a well-lit path in a very alluring wood.
So, after I got back to the club and threw my shoe in the trash I made plans to do what I did best after my shift ended, and got loaded.
le courage
One night in the summer of 1999 I jumped off the Manhattan Bridge. It wasn’t a suicide attempt; I had a bungee cord attached to my ankles. But it was still illegal and not part of any tour package or team-building exercise.
I’d just graduated from NYU and was working as a waiter at the Atlantic Grill on the Upper East Side. Right before I graduated, I booked the role of Sir Lancelot in a touring company of Camelot, but the tour didn’t begin rehearsals until fall, so I spent the summer waiting tables. The night in question, I ate probably twenty-five pieces of exotic sushi that patrons had left untouched on their plates. Rich people ate at the restaurant and thought nothing of ordering two hundred dollars’ worth of sushi and eating half of it. What was I supposed to do, not eat it?
At around eleven, I split up my tips with the busboys, then headed out and took the 6 train back to Alphabet City, planning to drink a twelve-pack of Lowenbrau without assistance.
When I got back to my apartment my roommate, Kiyash, was pacing around and smiling.
“Guess what I’m gonna do tonight?” he asked.
“What?”
“I’m gonna bungee-jump off the Manhattan Bridge!”
I’d met Kiyash during my junior year in Paris. I was drawn to him immediately because he was a smart, fun, well-read guy who was always up for an adventure. He was named for an island in the Persian Gulf off of Iran, which is where his father Manouchehr was born. Manouchehr had an archetypal entrance to the United States in 1963 when the boat that took him across the Atlantic encountered fog as it approached land. After a period of very low visibility, the Statue of Liberty herself emerged from the fog, looming over their boat, welcoming them to the United States.
Rather than ask Kiyash any questions (like, WHY ARE YOU JUMPING OFF THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE?) I told him I was coming with him and we headed out the door to meet “some guy who has a bungee cord” near the Brooklyn on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. Kiyash didn’t know the cord owner, but he did know a Polish guy who knew him, so we went to meet his friend Dariusz at a bar.
I didn’t know Dariusz, but he endeared himself to me by immediately launching into a story about how he’d learned the hard way earlier that day that wearing a tiny Speedo bathing suit to the beach draws a lot of attention in the U.S. He presented Kiyash and me with a cogent argument as to why Speedo suits are superior and why American men were silly for not wearing them. We told him he’d made a great case but that American women tended to prefer a little mystery where a man’s junk dimensions were concerned, even though solving such a mystery might involve facing down a disappointing penis lurking in the shadow of a fat gut after drinking a bucket of wine coolers at a rented beach house. Dariusz was pretty fit though, so I’m sure his ensemble made some people happy.
After bonding with Dariusz, we headed out to meet the guy who’d show us how to jump off a bridge.
About fifteen people were gathered on a busy corner of Flatbush Avenue waiting for the guy with the rope. For something wholly illegal and intrinsically dangerous, it was a rather well advertised operation. After a few minutes, “Tony” arrived and led us along Flatbush Avenue toward the on-ramp to the bridge. As we traveled, Tony gave us instructions, including the order to “lie down” if the subway passed us on the bridge so the conductors wouldn’t see us. Tony had me carry the bungee cord up the bridge in a big bag. It weighed maybe fifty pounds and I told myself its substantial weight meant it must be really safe. When we’d covered some distance, he handed out walkie-talkies set to the police frequency to a few of the “customers” (he’d asked us to give him twenty dollars apiece). He told us to listen for any discussion among the cops about a “large group of people sneaking out onto the Manhattan Bridge with crazy gear.” He said that it’d be hard to get away if they wanted to arrest us, so what we were really listening for was for any mention of Truck 2 or Truck 6. He said that those names referred to “tactical antiterrorist units that would kill us first and then figure out who we were.” He said if we heard that those groups were being sent to the bridge, we should just drop everything, run, and not stop until we were in New Jersey. I listened very carefully for Trucks 2 and 6 for the next few hours.
We walked out over the East River, hitting the deck whenever a train came by, and made it about one-eighth of a mile from the Brooklyn shore, then set up our station. Our first instructions from Tony were to climb down a level on the bridge and, I swear to God, disable the red lights that hang from the bridge to alert airplanes, “Hello. I am a bridge.” I’m sure that today, after 9/11, New York law enforcement would “Truck 6” your ass off for that stunt, but our adventure took place two years prior to the attacks, so we didn’t imagine anyone would be too upset that we were turning a piece of vital metropolitan infrastructure into an amusement park ride and making it partially invisible to air traffic.
Then Tony, who claimed to be a “theatrical rigger,” took out the bungee cord and secured it to something. To what? To a piece of bridge, I guess. I have no idea. Tony then asked who wanted to go first and a short guy with a buzz cut volunteered.
Before he let the test subject jump, Tony thrust a tape recorder in the guy’s face.
“WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”
“DAVE!”
“WHAT ARE YOU ABOUT TO DO?”
“JUMP OFF THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE!”
“ARE YOU DOING THIS OF YOUR OWN VOLITION?”
“Y
ES!”
“JUMP!”
The guy jumped, screaming. It was loud for a fraction of a second, then immediately much quieter, as though someone had very quickly turned a volume knob down. The reason his screaming got quieter, to us, is that he had just jumped off a bridge. I looked over the edge and he had disappeared into the black. Disabling the bridge’s lights had effectively shrouded us in inky darkness. I very sincerely believed the rope had broken and he had gone into the river. I was certain I’d helped facilitate the death of someone. Someone stupid, like me.
But then Tony yelled, “You all right down there?” and the test subject meowed a weak “Yes.”
Then a cop car pulled up at the water’s edge in Brooklyn.
There was no activity on the scanners, but Tony yell-whispered down to Jumper One, “Just chill out for a second; don’t move.” Kiyash and I looked at each other, incredulous. Don’t move? What if his head filled with blood and exploded? How long can a person hang upside down without passing out or becoming permanently stupid? What if Truck 6 fired a missile up his defenseless asshole?
After a few terrifying minutes, the cop left, not having seen us. We threw another rope with a carabiner down to Danglin’ Dave, he hooked it onto his waist, and we manually pulled him back up to the bridge. I calculated that he probably weighed seventy-five percent of what I weighed, so there was probably a three out of four chance I’d survive. He said, “Whoa” a bunch in a manner that suggested he was properly awed but not necessarily retarded after the rush of blood to his head. Good enough for me!
Then it was my turn. Though I counted maybe eleven reasons as to why I shouldn’t jump, several of them potentially fatal or crippling, and all of them criminal, I was determined to have a stranger tie a rope around my ankles and leap off that bridge at three in the morning, as planned.
Tony stuck his tape recorder in my face.
“WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”
“ROB DELANEY.”
(I must point out that Kiyash made fun of me without interruption for several years at how much naked fear was audible in my shaky high-pitched voice as I answered Tony’s questions.)
“WHAT ARE YOU ABOUT TO DO?”
“JUMP OFF THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE!”
“ARE YOU DOING THIS OF YOUR OWN VOLITION?”
“YES!”
“JUMP!”
I jumped.
I looked out over a sleepy, twinkling Manhattan as I plummeted into the night. It was wonderful and visceral, like my mind and body were violently wiped clean and rebooted to take in the majesty of the experience. It felt like a reverse birth as I flew into and through the darkness toward the river. Then the slack in the cord tightened as my rocketing mass stretched it to its limit and I shot skyward (and bridgeward) almost as fast as I’d descended. I made it almost to the bridge, then fell again and began a series of bounces. It was like being in a giant glitter globe as the city’s lights shook around me. I felt entirely buoyed and supported and loved by the dirty river, the ugly bridge, the beautiful city, and the questionable rope. Then Tony threw down the “yank ’em up” rope, and after it swung past me a few times I was able to grab it, hook it to my waist, and get pulled back to the bridge by my fellow jumpers.
Then Kiyash and the others jumped, one by one, and we pulled them back up. We packed up as the sun rose and took the train home to Alphabet City to sleep, arriving in full daylight. It had been entirely magnificent to watch about twenty people in a row have an experience you knew they’d talk about for the rest of their lives, and participate in it as well. It was interesting to see the few people who backed out so totally at peace with their decision too.
Nobody gave them a hard time either; I know I thought, “Of course you don’t want to JUMP OFF A BRIDGE. Why would anyone do that? That would be crazy.” Those of us who had jumped were pretty much aglow. As my reflections began to gather and coalesce in my brain, I was absolutely glad I had done it, but I knew I would never do it again. Nor would I allow a loved one, or really anyone, to do it, since I’d seen how ramshackle an operation it was. It was a singular rush and an extraordinarily terrible idea, all at once.
And while I have difficulty imagining a scenario where I’d do something that reckless again, I’m very happy I can say I jumped off the Manhattan Bridge and you, statistically, cannot.
nu et sanglant
When given a choice where to spend my downtime, I will rarely pick a jail, psychiatric hospital, or halfway house. While that is true now, for a few months when I was twenty-five, I called those places home.
Twelve years ago I was in jail, in a wheelchair. The hospital gown I was in was covered in blood from my bleeding face. My top front right tooth was missing a piece. My right arm and my left wrist were broken. They were broken so badly they both required surgery. My knees were fucked up too. They’d slammed into the dashboard of the car I was driving the night before and split open to the bone. They weren’t broken but they’d been operated on and sewed shut in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai hospital, just before I went to jail. They were in leg stabilizers, which are reinforced fabric, Velcro, and steel leg braces that don’t let you bend your knees. So, since I couldn’t use my arms to grip the wheelchair’s armrests, or bend my knees to steady myself on the ground, I would occasionally slip down and fall out of my wheelchair onto the floor of my cell. As I slid down the chair to the floor, my gown would fly open and my dick, balls, and even my defenseless little asshole were exposed to everyone in jail. If you’ve been to jail or read a book about it or seen any movies about it, you know you’re supposed to keep that shit to yourself. A kindly couple of cops would usually help me back into my wheelchair, then I’d slip right out a little while later. Not because I wanted to show everyone my dick and balls and asshole but because I couldn’t use my arms or legs.
The night before, I’d driven a car into the side of a branch office of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It wasn’t even my car. A few days prior, I’d been in another accident, albeit a minor one. I was at a stoplight and someone slammed into my 1988 Volvo wagon from behind, inflicting enough damage that it required the car spend a few days in the shop. As such, for my second, larger accident, I was driving a brand-new white Nissan Altima, which happened to be equipped with an airbag. Based on the damage that my arms and legs sustained as they hit the front of the car, and based on the broken tooth and bloodied face I received from the airbag, a feature my fourteen-year-old Volvo did not have, it is entirely possible that the gentleman who hit me from behind three days earlier had, in fact, saved my life. I remember when we exchanged information seeing that his name was “Ivan Dearman.” Ivan, you are indeed a dear man, and I am profoundly grateful you were distracted by a phone call or a Bacardi billboard and hit me from behind that morning in February 2002.
A few nights later, I was driving the white Altima that Ivan Dearman’s insurance paid for. I was very, very drunk and, on my way to the Department of Water and Power, I took out four parking meters, two trees, and a light post.
Here’s the order of the events: I was at a keg party at a friend’s house. There were maybe forty people there. I drank beer for a few hours. My only memories of the party are meeting a beautiful woman named Djuna and talking about the Djuna Barnes book Nightwood, and then kissing a different beautiful woman who was a friend of mine that I’d always wanted to kiss.
The keg got drained, so I started drinking wine. After we (I) finished the wine, I moved on to liquor. Although I’d thought about quitting drinking for years, I pretty much as a rule would start with beer and would stick with it until it was gone or I passed out. But if the beer ran out and I was still conscious, I would continue to drink whatever was around. My last memory before blacking out was filling a big red Solo cup up to the top with bourbon, vodka, and ice. If you’re not a drinker, bourbon and vodka on ice is not actually a drink. I’m reminded of the Ozzy Osbourne song “Suicide Solution.” Nobody drinks bourbon mixed with vodka unless they’re pledging a fr
aternity, lamenting the friends they lost in combat, or are what doctors call a “garden variety alcoholic.” I drank that down like it was lemonade on a hot day, then filled the cup again with my proprietary blend. As that second cup touched my lips, my memory stopped working.
Over the coming months, I found out that after draining the second Solo cup, I’d passed out on my friend’s floor. Everyone else either left or went to bed. Then I apparently “woke up” in the middle of a blackout and went for a drive. For the uninitiated, a blackout is when you’re so drunk that your long-term memory is effectively disabled. So you can function in the moment (albeit in a very impaired manner), but you wake up the next day with minutes or hours missing, never to be found again except in the memories of the people unfortunate enough to have witnessed your antics. People kill their friends, family, and strangers in blackouts all the time. They’re a nasty business, and for a little over a decade, I experienced them all the time.
I am not sure of the route I took in my blackout drive but I wound up crashing the car somewhere quite far from both the party and my apartment. I don’t remember any of the drive, the accident, or the extraction from the vehicle and subsequent ambulance ride to Cedars-Sinai hospital. That is probably for the best. I do remember being wheeled into the emergency room though, strapped down to the gurney by all four appendages and my head. When I came to, I was hallucinating and believed Nazi doctors had kidnapped me and were going to experiment on me. If you’ve seen the film Jacob’s Ladder, in which Tim Robbins’s tortured Vietnam vet character is wheeled around a nightmare hospital with horned nurses and doctors with no eyes, then you understand the type of situation I believed I was in. My plan was to act like I was “okay with it” and that being in the Nazi hospital was no big deal, but as soon as I got the “lay of the land” I planned to figure out how to escape (even though I couldn’t move a single part of my body).
