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

by Rob Delaney

  VERY gradually, I began to gather that the doctors and nurses were actually trying to help me and that I was, in fact, responsible for my current circumstances. There were two cops accompanying me wherever the hospital staff wheeled me, and we chatted a bit whenever I could croak out a question or answer. It took me a while to work up the courage to ask them if I’d killed anyone. I decided that if the answer were yes, I’d kill myself at the earliest opportunity. When they told me I hadn’t, every molecule in my body and mind surrendered and I was, in a way, almost happy.

  I had been trying to quit drinking for many years with no success, so I was almost immediately glad I’d gotten so fucked up by the accident. Now there was NO way to hide that I was a disastrous, dangerous, ridiculous alcoholic piece of shit. I looked like what I’d felt like for years. Up to then, I had success hiding it from some people, some of the time. Now, though, I was a bloody, broken mess of a person and it was obvious, even from a distance, at night, from across the street, in the rain, that there was a LOT that was wrong with me.

  My history with drunk driving was not as long as one might imagine, given that I’d been drinking since I was twelve. During high school and visits home to Marblehead during college, I would occasionally drive drunk. But since I went to college in New York City, I didn’t have a car, thus the number of people I could potentially kill at any moment was lower than that of a person who was habitually drunk behind a wheel. As long as I thought I was the only person who might wind up dead as a result of my drinking, I was happy to continue on course.

  But when I moved to L.A. and got a car I realized, “Shit, I drink and drive a lot.” I was ashamed of this fact and made a half-assed effort not to do it, but as you see, I was not at all successful.

  A few months before driving into the Department of Water and Power, I decided, for maybe the twenty-fifth time in my life, to quit drinking. Here’s why: I had attended my friend Dan’s wedding in France on September 9, 2001. He married an actual countess and the wedding and reception took place at her family’s chateau in Bordeaux. It was the most opulent celebration I’ve ever attended, on grounds a little larger than a medium-sized college campus. An American Airlines stewardess propositioned me at the reception and I politely said no because I’d wanted to get it on with a Lithuanian friend of the bride who had light green eyes. To use an old Lithuanian saying, she “wasn’t interested,” so I slept alone that night.

  I’d traveled to France from the U.S. with my friend Jon, a mutual friend of the groom. In high school, Jon was painfully cool and older than me and we didn’t really know each other well. After high school we’d bump into each other when he’d visit from his college in Santa Fe and I’d visit from New York. We both liked to read and drink and chase girls, so we hit it off. The day after the wedding, Jon and I took a smoke-filled train to Paris, where I was fortunate enough to know a few people, having spent my junior year of college there. On the afternoon of September eleventh—at which time it was morning in New York City—Jon and I were exploring the catacombs several stories beneath the streets of Montparnasse.

  In the eighteenth century, when the city’s graveyards had begun to overflow, millions of folks’ remains were gathered and brought deep underground to a series of tunnels and methodically stacked. It’s peaceful down there, walking through hallways lined with stacks of femurs accented here and there by a heart or a cross made of skulls. It strikes me that we were surrounded by thousands of peaceful dead during the attacks of September eleventh.

  When Jon and I emerged from the catacombs, we went to a travel agent’s office to buy plane tickets to Krakow. We were planning to stay with a friend I’d met a couple of years earlier. As we sat opposite the travel agent’s desk, he asked us if we’d heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, causing it to collapse. I sincerely thought that he didn’t have a firm grasp on the English language and was trying to tell us something else, something that wasn’t an incomprehensible nightmare. I made him tell me again, in French, and he confirmed that he had in fact meant to say that the World Trade Center was no longer two buildings that stood 110 stories high in lower Manhattan. I thought he was either crazy or was repeating something he’d been told by some other moron. We actually finished buying our tickets, thinking we’d call home and find out that all was well. When we left the office, people were gathered around news kiosks. Something terribly out of the ordinary had indeed happened.

  Jon and I were able to squeeze out a call each to our respective families before the transatlantic lines were totally swamped. I spoke to my mom and we were as scared as anyone, but I found some solace in knowing that she wasn’t near any of the day’s nightmare events. I asked her to try to get in touch with a couple of my friends who lived in downtown Manhattan. After that, we couldn’t dependably get through to the U.S. for a few days. We went back to our hosts’ apartment and watched the towers fall on the news. Then we went out and got drunk.

  The next day we flew to Poland. NOBODY wanted to fly, so we had a pretty big plane to ourselves. We stayed with my friend Marta and had a stunned, shitty time.

  After a few days, we returned to Paris. From there, Jon traveled east and ultimately spent six months working his way from Italy to southeast Asia and on to New Zealand. He kept the first “blog” I ever read, which was wonderful.

  After Jon left, I stayed in Paris for a few more days, doing no small amount of drinking. I also—no joke—looked into the logistics of joining the French Foreign Legion. I knew the United States would respond in some way to 9/11 and I had an idea that I might not be in agreement with their approach. I wanted to be up to speed on how to join the legendary Legion, which is famous for accepting any able-bodied person from anywhere in the world, training them, deploying them wherever they see fit, then furnishing them with a French passport if they perform admirably. Of course, I didn’t want to join any army, but if we descended into global war, I at least wanted to avail myself of the option of not being cannon fodder for George W. Bush and his execrable cabinet.

  I learned that to gain entry to the Legion you had to be able to do at least thirty push-ups and ten pull-ups. So I made sure I could do that and more. I already spoke passable French. In retrospect, it sounds somewhat crazy, but it also sounds entirely sane when, eighteen months after 9/11, the U.S. invaded Iraq because a few blood- and oil-thirsty neocon monsters felt like it. Like many others, I was sick when the U.S. entered Iraq. Afghanistan, sure; they thought they’d rustle up the folks who planned the attacks of 9/11. Whether you agreed with it or not, you could follow the thought process. Iraq, however, was and is a black, bloody blot on our nation’s very recent history. May shame haunt the people who beat the drum for that manufactured war from now until they die in a comfortable hospital bed paid for by your taxes.

  In addition to my calisthenics to prepare for possible Legion basic training, I drank. My first flight scheduled to take me back to the U.S. was canceled. American Airlines was unbelievably accommodating and essentially said, “Fly WHENEVER you want! We are so very grateful that anyone would consider flying after what’s happened that you just say the word, Mr. Delaney!” With that leeway, I pushed my departure date back a few days. Then I got so drunk the night before I was scheduled to leave that I slept through my alarm and missed it.

  “Not a problem, Mr. Delaney! You just fly whenever it suits you! Think of your ticket as a coupon entitling you to fly at your whim, without restrictions! Miss a flight and don’t feel like calling to postpone or cancel? Fret not! Show up whenever you like.”

  One night before I left, I went out drinking with my friend Yacine. After hitting a few bars, we were both drunk, and Yacine made the fantastic decision to go home and go to bed. I decided to stay out. I got profoundly drunk and at one point was sitting on a curb just off the Champs-Elysees. Why I was there, I have no idea. The Champs-Elysees is the equivalent of Fifth Avenue; it’s a place to throw money in the garbage can at expensive shops, not a place to enjoy nightlife and
certainly not a place for career alcoholics to get any serious drinking done.

  In any case, while I was sitting alongside the Champs-Elysees, a large black Mercedes pulled up and a guy in a suit asked me if I needed a ride. I said yes and I GOT IN A STRANGE MAN’S MERCEDES AT TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING IN A LARGE METROPOLIS.

  He asked me if I wanted to go to a bar with him. I did! We went to one bar and I had a drink or two. When I went to pay with a credit card, the bartender ran it and said it didn’t work. He asked if I had another. The second one worked, according to him.

  Then the Mercedes man took me to another bar. After a few minutes of observing the clientele at this second, much nicer bar, I realized it was attached to a brothel and it was filled with prostitutes. That made me uncomfortable, so I got up to leave. I realized that the door was blocked by a man who was the size of another door, so I sat back down again. A hooker sat next to me and asked me if I wanted to retire with her to a private room. Drunk as I was, I told her no thanks. I paid for my drinks and—get this—my credit card (which worked everywhere else I’d used it) didn’t work, so I gave the bartender another one, which worked. Then I asked Mr. Mercedes if I could leave. He said yes and that he’d give me a ride. I really didn’t want one, but I was very drunk and, at this point, afraid. Also, I had no idea where we were. I gave him an address to drop me off at, and, thank Jesus, he did. That address was of course nowhere near where I was actually staying because I didn’t want him to murder my hosts or be able to find me again for another early morning joyride.

  Several weeks later, back in Los Angeles, I got two credit card bills in the mail that were fascinatingly huge. I’d apparently spent several thousand dollars on the four or five drinks I bought at the two bars Mr. Mercedes took me to. Nice work! I called one credit card company and told them someone must have stolen my information.

  While technically an agreement with a credit card company probably protects you from things like weirdo scam artists consciously overcharging you to steal money from you, I didn’t really want to explain to them, “Well, you see, I had been drunk for several days and then one night I got in a stranger’s car and he took me to a brothel where, you must believe me, I did not procure sexual favors from a prostitute. The charge on my card is not for sex, no sir.” So I just lied and said I had no idea what that big charge was from and they said, “Okay,” and took it off.

  The second credit card company said, “Fuck off. Pay it, you weird drunk liar.” To which I replied, “Can do!”

  So, since I got stuck with a roughly two-thousand-dollar hit as a consequence of getting blind drunk and then accepting a ride from a stranger in a foreign city who drove me to a brothel where I was robbed in a truly twenty-first-century fashion, I decided it was time to take a break from the booze. It was just such an odd confluence of shitty, dangerous, costly things at once that it put into stark clarity, once again, the fact that I was bad at drinking and very, very good at making terrible decisions once drunk.

  Also, when I got back from Paris, my uncle Burt died. He was my dad’s younger brother and he was an alcoholic. He was on a train on his way from Boston to New Jersey to visit my cousin when he had a heart attack and died at age fifty. He was the youngest of four, the other three of whom are still alive today. He and my dad and their other brother and sister grew up poor in Boston and I know that they shared a bed as kids and took care of each other in foster homes and orphanages. Though their parents were alive, their mother left their father after Burt’s birth and there was a period of some years when their father couldn’t afford to keep everyone under one roof and fed and clothed. Is that why Burt drank? I suspect it was just because he was an alcoholic. None of the other three kids had issues with substances, including my dad. While I’m no doctor, my own field research suggests substance abuse derives a little more from nature than nurture. Situations can exacerbate it, but alcoholism affects the rich and the poor, morons and the brilliant. My uncle Burt drank and died young; my dad didn’t and he’s pushing seventy and lives by the ocean on Cape Ann.

  Burt was a carpenter and I can remember enjoying going to the fridge as a little kid and getting a Michelob for him when he worked on our house. Michelobs were fun to open because their cap was covered with paper that you had to tear as you opened the bottle. I liked to draw and paint when I was a boy, and one day my uncle Burt made me a frame out of extra two-by-fours to use for my art. I was so young that when he handed me the square frame I told him, “Thank you, Uncle Burt, but I do my paintings on rectangular paper,” to which he replied, “You can cut paper to make it square and then it’ll fit.”

  “Wow, that’s a great idea!” was my response to that. YOU CAN CUT/TEAR PAPER THEREBY CHANGING ITS SIZE/DIMENSIONS. This was news to me. So it could be argued that my uncle Burt opened up whole new artistic vistas to me at that moment.

  His passing certainly opened my eyes. Burt was the only relative I’d watched deteriorate and die from alcoholism and it drove home for me the realization that if I looked back at my drinking and then extrapolated potential future scenarios, a heart attack on a train was among the more desirable possibilities. And that still sounded like a shit option.

  So I decided to quit drinking. Smoking pot, however, I would continue, and I’d dial up my intake so that I could still be intoxicated in some fashion every day. By the time I got the brothel statement, I was such a dedicated drinker that the idea of quitting all mind-altering substances didn’t seem possible. I did not like being sober, particularly around other people. So I smoked pot every day, played a lot of Pac-Man, and was very miserable. I can remember being unhappy all the time and thinking, “At least I’m not drinking.”

  Then my twenty-fifth birthday arrived and I decided to have a birthday party. I invited everyone I knew. I had it at a restaurant in Los Feliz called Tangier that had a big back room in which a respectable crowd could dance. About twenty or thirty people came and it was a lot of fun. I remember watching Eli Roth, who would one day write and direct Cabin Fever and the brutal Hostel films, dancing like a sweaty madman and laughing. As the small hours of the early morning approached and the bar began to close, I noticed a tiny, fair-skinned woman with a short black bob haircut and severe bangs at a corner table. When I looked at her, she didn’t look away. I approached and saw that she was entirely fetching, so I introduced myself. She was Austrian and in L.A. working as an architect. We had an easy chat and at the end of it, she let me have her phone number. I acted like I wasn’t excited, but I certainly was. I called her the next day and asked her if she’d let me take her out and she said yes. I immediately got nervous as I considered the prospect of trying to interact with an attractive woman one-on-one without the aid of alcohol. So even though I hadn’t had a drink in several weeks, when I took her to dinner a couple of nights later, we shared a bottle of wine, then went to a bar and had more drinks.

  I didn’t get drunk, but when we went back to my apartment and had sex, I thought, “There’s no way I could have done that without alcohol.” I took it as a sign that it was okay for me to start drinking again. And drink again I did. The next two weeks were very frightening because I drank a little more each day and could really feel my appetite for booze surging in strength. Though I’d had no shortage of problems with alcohol in the past, I had never been able to feel the unquenchable desire to get and stay blind drunk so strongly and consistently. It made my body feel hot and I had thoughts whose intensity bordered on hallucination where my ribs were the bars of a jail cell and my urge to drink and just bludgeon my consciousness took the form of a demon inside of me, not begging to get out, but rather growing in strength until it burst out of the cage as a matter of course. It was terrifying. I saw the Austrian woman again two more times and managed to not scare her. She was lovely and kind and would have probably made someone in better shape a good girlfriend. But I wasn’t able to entertain that possibility since my top priority was getting drunk. Fifteen days after my birthday party I went to the keg p
arty earlier that would land me in Cedars-Sinai’s ER following the aforementioned violent detour where my rented Nissan Altima so passionately kissed a branch office of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

  In the emergency room they checked me out reasonably well. They pinched and squeezed me and said, “Does this hurt?” all over my body. I said no every time, because I was still so fucked up that nothing did hurt. Subsequent hospital visits would reveal that both my left wrist and right arm were broken; my right ulna was effectively smashed. But I felt fine at the time, so they left it at that. My forehead was scraped off from the airbag, which caused me to bleed all over my hospital gown and, as I mentioned, both my knees were cut open from hitting the dashboard. There was a resident helping the head ER doctor fix me up, and he sewed up my right knee while the head doctor was out of the room.

  When the doctor came back he said to the resident, “Wow, you really fucked that one up. It’s all zigzaggy. That’s going to be a horrible scar. Try to do a better job on the other one.” That’s my first clear memory as I gradually came back to consciousness. And the resident did do a better job; one of my knees has a jagged, abstract-art scar and one of them has a nice straight line. I would later receive the clothes they cut me out of in a trash bag. They were soaked with blood.

  After the stitches and medical tests, the cops took me to jail. By this point the booze had started to wear off and my arms were beginning to let me know they were broken by sending strong, clear waves of pain through my body. Any use of my right arm produced an audible crunching and clicking. It also had what looked like an extra elbow bulging out of the middle of my forearm. They wheeled me into the police station to book me. You’re supposed to be standing when they fingerprint you, but I could not, so an officer lifted my arms above my head and onto the table. I screamed in pain.