by Rob Delaney
I wasn’t in jail for that long, a few hours at most. I would have been there for a few days, but I was too much of a pain in the ass so they just folded me in half and put me in the back of a cruiser and drove me home. They actually drove by the junkyard on the way home so I could get some stuff out of my rental car. The car was utterly destroyed. It was fully caved in on the front and back and half the size it had been the day before. You’d have thought it was a washing machine or a stove if you didn’t know it was a car.
As the cops escorted me into my apartment, I shuffled past my building manager and assured her, “It’s okay, I’m fine!” though I was rather obviously the opposite of fine. I was still in the bloody hospital gown and was wearing the metal-reinforced leg stabilizers so I looked like a partially finished, emaciated Frankenstein. I thanked the cops for the ride and crawled onto my bed.
A few hours later, I woke up to take a piss and was surprised to discover that my urine was neon blue. Though I’d grown used to being totally horrified by myself at this point, this was especially upsetting. I started to cry at the sight. After crying for a bit, I needed to blow my nose. When I did so, bits of broken glass came out with the snot. Bits of windshield were still up there. That made me even more scared and I started to get hot and hyperventilate. I took off the hospital gown and was further shocked to discover stickers all over my body. Upon examination, it turned out they weren’t decorative; they were the little anchors for heart monitor wires that I’d been hooked up to. They were all over my hairy body and they took forever to peel off with my broken arms. More stickers would turn up over the coming days that I’d missed on the first search-and-remove mission. And the blue piss was a byproduct of the methylene blue they’d flushed my system with. They do that to see if you’re hemorrhaging internally. Thankfully, I was not.
Naturally, there was a court date coming up that I needed to get ready for. I got a lawyer and my saintly uncle Steve flew out from Boston to help me for a few days and get everything in order. Steve is one of my mom’s older brothers, and is a wonderful guy. I didn’t even ask him; he just flew out when he heard what had happened. I’d spoken to him on several occasions in the past about my desire to quit drinking, so the news that I’d driven into a building didn’t surprise him. My parents didn’t come and I’m glad of that. I wouldn’t have wanted them to see me in such disrepair. And Steve didn’t ask; he just came. It was really quite a Navy Seal move. Uncle smells trouble; deploys immediately to help without asking permission. Hot shit if you ask me.
The lawyer recommended I go directly to rehab and throw myself at the mercy of the judge, pleading no contest. Rehab sounded like a great idea, so a few days after the accident I moved into the chemical dependency unit of Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena for the standard twenty-eight-day period, hoping my health insurance would cover it. I didn’t have regular employment at the time; just a hodgepodge of babysitting, catering, and working in a furniture store warehouse, so none of them would miss me. I told a few friends I’d be away for a bit and they were uniformly kind and concerned. When my court date rolled around, I’d already been in rehab for a week. While that proactive move may have helped reduce the severity of my sentence, I truly didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth than a Rehab with a capital R.
The grounds of Las Encinas are beautiful and are actually designated as a registered arboretum by the state of California. The hospital itself is home to crazy people whose lives had gotten to the point that they needed a little “time-out” and the opportunity to regroup with the help of medicine and doctors. I fit right the fuck in, and I was once again grateful my outsides matched my insides for the first time in a long time. My brain and heart had developed some kinks that were killing me and I knew they needed straightening.
I met some very nice schizophrenics at Las Encinas, women with postpartum depression, people with split personalities, and then “regular” folks who were mentally healthy but had had too many tragedies befall them at once for them to keep it all together and act like everything was okay. And I remember them fondly. One very nice man, who was just under seven feet tall, liked to wear a very realistic bear mask when he went to the dining hall. He talked normally and was entirely pleasant. He just liked to wear a bear mask.
The hottest girl in the whole hospital (and the one I developed a slight crush on) was in there because she’d killed a guy and was in for observation. But as human beings, whatever social situation we’re in, we just sort of organize people in our minds and play games with ourselves like, “If I had to have sex with someone here, it would be …” Well, this was the most extreme example of that so far in my life; there were a bunch of people in my social circle, which HAPPENED to be a mental hospital, and one chick had to be the hottest, and in this case she was a killer. It’s not my fault that she wore tight sweatpants all the time and did her hair all nice.
Then there was Rhonda. Rhonda was about fifty and she was there because she’d jumped off a roof. Well, that’s part of why she was there. One day I saw her on the lawn and said, “Hi Rhonda!”
“Excusez-moi?” she said.
“Hello?”
Then she goes, “I am sorry, I do not speak English. I am from France.”
Now, it so happens that I actually speak French and I thought about just continuing speaking with her new “French” personality, but JUST IN CASE her “French” personality didn’t actually speak French I didn’t want to make her head explode, so I just said, “Okay, have a nice day!” and walked away.
And those were just the people I’d see in the dining hall. I spent the bulk of my days and nights with the people in the chemical dependency unit, which was called Briar. They were my brethren: the drunks, junkies, tweakers, coke addicts, pill poppers, and crackheads. They were truck drivers, executives, housewives, producers, grandmas, and nurses. They were black, white, Jewish, Asian, Italian, and Mexican. The thing that united us is that we loved to get fucked up and were all very good at it. Our days were spent in groups of various sizes, talking, sharing, and learning how to live life without drugs and alcohol. I was sort of a mascot for the place because I was the most visibly fucked-up person there. I was extremely skinny. My right arm was in a big cast and my left arm was in a brace. While at Las Encinas I took a field trip to a “normal” hospital to have a plate and seven screws put into my right arm. Once that healed, my doctor planned to fuse the bone I’d broken in my left wrist. One of my fonder memories remains the day I knew I’d broken my right arm and the doctor came in to tell me I’d broken my left wrist as well and both would require debilitating surgery that would require months of recovery and occupational therapy. I calmly asked him to leave the room so I could cry by myself.
Muscle atrophy and lack of appetite accounted for my rail-thin frame. I limped, too, because my right ankle had been damaged in the accident. And with my arms in casts, it was too hard for me to use pants pockets, so I wore a black canvas workman’s vest that had two big pockets on the front that I could keep stuff in. It looked sad, like maybe I ran a craft workshop for runaways out of my broken-down van in a parking lot by a beach.
Despite my appearance, the saddest people in the place were still the junkies. Watching all of them kick heroin and painkillers was the worst. They basically just shake and kick all day and night for days. I learned to never go into the bathroom after one of them had been in there. After a kicking junkie has taken a shit in a bathroom it looks like a baby elephant has been hosed off after playing in a muddy riverbank all day. There were various group therapy meetings at Las Encinas that were not unlike what they show on TV and in movies. One night somebody thought it would be fun to watch the movie 28 Days, in which Sandra Bullock goes to rehab. I was rather disturbed when one of the film’s major characters—named Delaney—RELAPSES AND DIES.
My mental state at the time was entirely fight-or-flight. I was in shock that I was alive and I knew that everything would be changing thoroughly and often, so I sort of walled off sect
ions of my psyche and compartmentalized, not really letting myself feel or experience anything on too deep of a level. I was on guard and cautious with my feelings. It was a heady blend of gratitude, shame, terror, and curiosity. But I never allowed myself to freak out or open up too much to anyone either. That would all happen down the road.
Two questions people often ask me about having both arms broken at the same time are, “How did you wipe your ass?” and “How did you masturbate?” Well, the first few times I did either were very painful. Since both of my arms had required surgery, the surgeon did them one at a time, allowing the first one to heal before taking away most of the use of the other one. But for details, on the ass wiping I would just wipe slowly and carefully and wince and moan as I did it. For the ball drainage (because that’s basically what it was) I would just wait until I absolutely had to masturbate, like every week and a half, and then barricade myself in the bathroom, sit on the floor with my back against the door, so no one could come in (because I couldn’t move quickly enough to leap up and yell, “I’m not masturbating!” as one occasionally has to do in normal life), then carefully take the brace off whichever arm was furthest from a surgery using my teeth and the fingertips of my other, casted arm, then I would slowly and tenderly masturbate. I’m actually nostalgic for those times, since it’s so different from the way I assault myself now that I’m healthy.
But you’re not the only people who are curious about how I masturbated in rehab with two broken arms. Oh, no! There was one meth addict at the hospital that was really curious about how I masturbated. Kelly was in rehab because her husband had found pictures of her sucking her meth dealer’s dick. So he suggested she go to rehab while he took care of their daughter.
One night she had a girlfriend visit from the “real world.” While sitting around with a group of people, Kelly said, “Hey, Rob, it must be hard to jerk off with your arms broken. My friend Lisa here will suck your dick if you want.” Her friend Lisa nodded meekly and smiled. I declined and shuffled away as fast as I could, which was very slowly.
I was shocked when I later found out that people often fuck at rehab. It makes sense if you think about it, since the people there are all exploding disasters, but I think for me, I’d come as close to death as I saw fit and I really wanted to get better. I figured that putting my dick in the mouth of a crazy stranger was a blow job in the wrong direction. The more I think about it, the more I feel that that was the precise moment that I started to heal.
After exactly twenty-eight days at the hospital it was time to move on to a sober-living halfway house in West L.A. While rehab had been coed, the halfway house was one hundred percent dudes. It was kind of like sleepover camp.
While everyone in rehab was just totally broken, me included, people at the halfway house were a little further down the road to recovery; really taking a stab at actually living life without booze or drugs. The day I moved in, I was assigned a “big brother,” Byron, who showed me around the place and told me the deal. He had brown teeth from smoking cocaine for ten years contrasted with probably the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. He pointed out which bed would be mine and told me that since it was a bottom bunk I could hang a sheet from the top bed and make it into my own little “jack shack.” A true big brother.
My roommates were a cute, chubby Armenian junkie from Glendale named Paul and an aggressive, muscular crackhead named Rick who terrified me. The first thing Rick said when I moved in and lay down on my bunk was, “Hey, wanna see where I got shot?” I said yes because I was afraid to say no, and he immediately pulled his pants down, spread his butt cheeks, and stuck his asshole right in my face. He then asked me if he could fuck my armpit on his birthday, which was coming up, because in prison, that’s what his cellmate let him do. I was so scared I almost blacked out. Even if I was in my top physical shape, he could have killed me with his bare hands, and in my current condition I was absolutely defenseless with my arms in their casts.
Looking back, moments like that may help explain why I’m a comedian now. I could ONLY defend myself with humor. As hellish as all that sounds, Rick and I eventually became friends. He had an adorable wife and daughter who would visit him on weekends. When he wound up getting kicked out of the house for relapsing, I cried.
We got a third roommate after a while, a very wealthy crackhead who took the bunk above mine. He shook for days as he detoxed and my bed would essentially vibrate through the night. After he stabilized a bit he would regale us with stories of his opulent lifestyle paying hookers to watch him masturbate to porn.
We ate breakfast and dinner at the house as a group and had two weekly group meetings at the house. Thursday nights, a psychologist would come in to lead a discussion meeting with us, let’s call her Elaine. She was crazier than most of the people in the house. One emblematic exchange with her went like this: Paul, a resident at the house, said at one meeting, “You know, I just would sit there and cut myself on the chest with a razor because I just, I felt that I deserved it. …”
Myrna yelled, “YES! I am the same way. I used to get so depressed I wouldn’t make my bed. I would sleep on a bed WITH NO SHEETS!”
And then everybody would be totally nonplussed and we’d exchange glances suggesting, “Hey, at least we’re not as crazy as her,” and then we’d pray for the ninety-minute meeting to end. It’s kind that she volunteered her time to help people, but even twelve years later I look back at her and think: BANANAS.
The owner of the house was bonkers too, but in a good way. He was a black-clad biker with a big gray goatee and gruff voice he’d use to call us “bitches.” His mind was utterly fried from drugs, but he just wanted to do what he could to help people get and stay clean. He was like a blue-collar angel; just a good guy in the trenches of life, getting dirty helping people. He provided people with a place to stay and started them on the path to getting better. And it worked for a lot of people. Not everyone, though.
Although I was only required by the judge to do one month in the halfway house, I wound up staying for almost four. I was too physically fucked up to work, so it was good to live with other people whose arms worked. And frankly, it was fun. It was a good group of guys and it felt great to be around them. They were, generally, taking a massive step forward in their lives, whether or not it would necessarily stick, and it felt good to live in a house that was charged with that energy. It created an atmosphere that was ripe for deep discussions and a lot of laughter.
It wasn’t rare for someone to drift off during a conversation and say, “Holy shit. I can’t believe I’m alive.” Toward the end of my stay there, a frail little junkie moved in, and on his first day there, I asked him if he wanted to see where I got shot. He said yes, and I showed him. The circle was complete.
When I left the halfway house, I had one arm that totally worked and only a tiny cast on the other. I looked pretty much like a regular person and I felt reasonably ready to live on my own. I knew where to get help if I needed it, and for one shining moment I wasn’t as afraid as I’d always been to appear vulnerable if I thought it might save my life. It was almost five months since the accident. A couple of guys from the house helped me move into my new apartment, which I planned to share with a friend from college.
Over the years I’ve done volunteer work in various rehabs and hospitals in the area. I’ve seen some guys from the house who’ve relapsed and wound up back where we started, or often in even worse shape. Rare is the second or third hospitalization for booze or drugs that’s less disgusting than the first. While I hate seeing guys in that situation, it sure as shit drives home the severity of the issue. And only a small percentage of the people I’ve met in rehabs and hospitals since will remain sober. And though I can’t identify them by sight or smell and wouldn’t dare bet on who will succeed or fail in their sobriety, I like to be in the same room as them. I like to soak up their energy. It’s a two-way street too, since I can tell them what worked for me in my efforts to keep the plug in the j
ug and trudge toward some measure of happiness and peace. But if I’m being honest (and fuck if that isn’t Ingredient Number One in staying sober), I want to be around broken people who have just made the seismically powerful decision to get fixed. I want to feel their energy move throughout the hospital’s ugly beige multipurpose room and let it wash over me. It gets me high.
rette. #cool @robdelaney. Child actors cry so realistically because their parents have given them a bottomless well of sadness to draw from. And… ACTION! @robdelaney On the 1st episode of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Casper the Friendly Boy was eaten by a clown behind his grandparents’ barn. @robdelaney He’d come off way less pretentious if he went by Daniel “Dave” Lewis. @robdelaney My wife does a HILARIOUS John Goodman impression. Doesn’t hurt that she looks exactly like him. @robdelaney I bet if Jeff Bridges picked up your kid from school today & said “I’m your dad now,” your kid wouldn’t even question it.
PART III la réhabilitation
@robdelaney Can’t live without your coffee? Tweet about it! @robdelaney GUY FIERI: “Just saying, I’m open all week if anybody requests me.” MAKE-A-WISH FOUNDATION OPERATOR: “Stop fucking calling.” @robdelaney. My freshman year of college I farted in a tiny crowded dorm room & a girl’s younger sister who was visiting & wasn’t even drunk threw up. @robdelaney A website that automatically plays music or needs to “load” is as outdated & terrible as slavery. @robdelaney I get anxious when there aren’t at least 24 pieces of advertising within my field of vision. @robdelaney It’s perfectly fine to offer raisins to a guest (if nuclear winter is upon us & you’re living in an underground bunker) @robdelaney You know it’s true love when your wife farts in bed & you go in the other room & text your boyfriend “I love you.” @robdelaney @lancearmstrong I cheated on a vocab test in 9th grade, so I feel you brother. Ours is a lonely path. #strength @robdelaney Starbucks bathrooms are EXCLUSIVELY for terrible diarrhea, right? @robdelaney My children annoy me so I’m leaving everything in my will to a nap I took in 2007. @robdelaney I’ve never been to Japan, but I’ve seen a bunch of emojis so I think I get the idea. @robdelaney Watching real love on shows like The Bachelor makes me realize my own marriage is a fake bucket of shit. @robdelaney “I might be a sex virgin but I’m not a virgin at AWESOME MAGIC TRICKS!” *trips on cape, knocks over table with punchbowl & cookies* @robdelaney There should be a terrible show about a woman, her mom, and her daughter, all 3 named Jennifer, called “Jenerations” on Lifetime or the CW. @robdelaney Despite tensions between US & Russia, Putin offers to adopt Kim & Kanye’s baby so that it may have a chance at “a normal life.” @robdelaney GARY: “You wanna?” BARRY: “Ugh. Jesus OK.” (Siamese twins deciding to masturbate) @robdelaney My son claims he “loves me,” but the contents with
