by Rob Delaney
mes amis morts
Three guys died when I was at the halfway house: Chris, Arturo, and Luke. They all died right after I left in pretty quick succession. Each one hurt like a motherfucker.
I haven’t been to war, so I can’t comment on what that experience is like, but people who go through rehab or a halfway house walk a tough road together and not all of them make it. We knew we faced a powerful adversary that demanded respect. Unlike combat, the adversary was inside of us.
People die all kinds of ways from booze and drugs and they do it all the time. Funny, the other day I read the citations of several Army Rangers who were awarded the Silver Star for their actions in Afghanistan. It was beautiful stuff about beautiful young guys defending their brothers and sisters. Half of the citations were awarded to Rangers who rescued wounded men under heavy fire. My stepfather, Larry, was awarded the Silver Star for his heroics in Vietnam. He defended his men, got shot, and had to kill a lot of North Vietnamese soldiers to keep more of his guys from dying. Many, many died anyway. Larry has always been very respectful and supportive of my decision to get sober and recognized all the “legwork” I put into it. He’s also been kind and sensitive about the depression I dealt with after I was in recovery. In no way am I comparing what I went through to what he went through; it’s just that: a) I just recently read those brave Rangers’ citations, and b) I am about to talk about the friends of mine who died while we were all in pursuit of the same goal. They’re not heroes. And I’m me, so I know I’m not a hero. A memory surfaced today from my senior year of college in which I not infrequently masturbated to the woman who lived across Third Avenue from me in a big apartment building. She walked around nude, so it’s not like I’m some sort of monster. Plus I had binoculars, so when in Rome … While you may not disagree with my decision to masturbate in the shadows while she, well within her rights, walked around her home nude, you can say with confidence that those aren’t the actions of a hero. A hero would figure out which apartment she lived in, go ring her doorbell, and ask permission to masturbate openly while she folded laundry in the nude. That shows respect, discipline, and the hallmark of a real hero: courage. All of which I rarely display, especially when I’m holding a boner in my hand. (It’s my boner, by the way; I’ve never touched another man’s erect penis. But I’m young yet.)
Chris was the first of my friends to die. He was a “rock star” and had been in a band whose videos I’d watched on MTV in the ’80s. He was the prototypical rock dude; tall, incredibly skinny, with long dark hair and puffy bangs. He wore boots, tight jeans, sleeveless shirts, and the jangly bangles that guys in bands like to wear, for some reason. When he checked into the halfway house, he had a big abscess on his arm from where he’d gotten infected shooting up speedballs. Speedballs! Coke and heroin shot into your arm—the shit that killed John Belushi. I am laughing thinking about it; who in the fuck does that unless they are closing out all accounts and are fully one hundred percent at peace with dying at ANY moment?
What’s funny to me is that I never really did drugs. I smoked a lot of pot, but I’m among those who think that doesn’t really count. Not that it can’t make your life shitty and boring and a little shorter due to pizza overindulgence and general malaise, but there are certainly plenty of perfectly well-adjusted people who smoke a doob now and then and suffer, roughly, no negative consequences. I’d take “pills” if they were handed out, and I took acid once and did mushrooms and smoked opium a few times. But that’s it. I never did coke or heroin. And meth showed up after my substance abuse had been sort of “codified,” so that just didn’t seem like something to explore. I believed, as I was told growing up, that crack was indeed whack, so that never called out to me. And I guess it’s a little surprising that I never did coke if you look at the big picture, but I have an explanation for that. In 1986, the Boston Celtics drafted twenty-two-year-old Len Bias, a preternaturally gifted forward from the University of Maryland. I was nine. Right before he was supposed to join the team for training, he did some coke at a party, immediately had a heart attack, and fucking died. It was the first time I’d heard of cocaine and it was introduced to me as something that killed beautiful athletes. His death rocked Boston and all Celtics fans. So COCAINE WILL KILL YOU IF YOU TRY IT EVEN ONCE was permanently imprinted on me.
Once, in college, my friend Michael and I were blind drunk on a bench in Union Square talking about Len Bias’s death, which was still fresh in our memories, and we made a pledge that we would never do cocaine and if either of us were thinking about it, we could call the other for a talk-down off the ledge of certain death. So even when I was an abject alcoholic scumbag, years deep into my booze problem, riding the subway IN THE MORNING with visibly urine-soaked pants, I remained terrified of coke.
Plus, I liked to go “down” with things that I ingested, not “up.” I wanted to ride the wave, not explode, or go pop pop pop, or talk a lot, like coke seemed to make people do. Instead, I drank my beer and wine and bourbon and loved it. Even though my drinking could have landed me in the same cemetery as a crack smoker who got shot in an argument over money, I did and do view hard drug use as exotic and effectively forbidding. It’s a weird little “moral” code. I put “moral” in quotation marks because it has nothing to do with morals but it was a sort of guiding prejudice that guided how I thought back then: “drugs = bad; drinking = fine.” But as we know, booze kills more people than every other drug combined and then multiplied. By what number I don’t know. Let’s go with thirteen, though it’s probably more. Eighty-six? Probably too high. Look, this isn’t a math book, and I’m tired of you yelling numbers at me.
Chris, despite his rock-star looks, was quite down to earth and fun to be around. I got a charge out of talking to someone that “cool.” He would have correspondingly “rock”-y chicks visit him at the halfway house. They had dyed blond hair, tight outfits, and big fake boobs. It’s funny how birds of a feather do in fact flock together and, in the case of rock-and-roll people, many of them do really look like birds, with their plumage and their struts. And their silicone tits. (All birds have silicone tits; look it up.)
Chris was a fixture at our nightly visits to get frozen yogurt. Most nights, a gang of us would go and occupy a corner of a little frozen shop in West L.A. You’d have guys just out of jail, actual rock stars, guys who’d been living on the street, and tall, gangly me in my two casts. Every night I’d get chocolate and vanilla swirled in a cup with crumbled Heath bar on top. My urge to eat sweets in the months after quitting drinking was INSANE. A lot of other people I’ve spoken to have said the same thing; they developed a crazy sweet tooth in early sobriety. Maybe the dopamine hit you get from sugar approximated a weak high? Whatever the case, I ate the fuck out of some frozen yogurt with Heath on top.
A girl named Mindy worked behind the counter at Yogurt Town. She was adorable and had blond hair and dark brown eyes. Since I looked like a medical curiosity, I didn’t flirt or anything; I just tried to be Mr. Polite Nice Guy and I was very happy when she rewarded me with a smile. Where are you now, Mindy? Maybe she works in the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington and is pregnant with her second child. Maybe she’s caring for her mother who has multiple sclerosis and is writing a book much, much better than this one. Maybe she still works at Yogurt Town because it works well with her PhD program at UCLA. Maybe she was a hallucination that my brain chose to show me night after night because it knew I could use a bright spot as I navigated the medical and legal labyrinths of my first year off booze.
I don’t remember what Chris would order at Yogurt Town, but we probably went there ten times together. Then I left the halfway house, and a short while later he shot up the speedball that killed him. The last time I’d spoken to him he was excited about some session work he was going to do with David Bowie.
The second friend to die was Arturo. He was a short Mexican bass player from Austin. I liked him right away because he had a Danzig tattoo. Anybody who felt strong
ly enough about the bands of Glenn Danzig to emblazon his weird goat/devil skull on his shoulder was A-OK in my book. The house took in a lot of guys from Austin since it had a relationship with Musi-Cares and the Musicians’ Assistance Program—two groups that helped musicians get sober. Austin has lots of musicians and musicians get high sometimes.
Arturo was just a little cutie pie, really. He reminded me a bit of my childhood friend Todd, a kid who liked to play music, have fun, and just generally be warm and pleasant and fun to be around, but Arturo was also a crack smoker. One day Arturo came to me with a quandary. He told me that he’d met a guy at a mental health facility where he attended group therapy. The guy invited him to his house after therapy one time, and Arturo went. They hung out a bit and the guy showed him some records and gave him a soda or something. Then he asked Arturo if he’d like to jerk off with him. “No touching each other or anything; we’ll just jerk off together. Just a couple of dudes jerking off. No big deal.” Arturo declined and later that day he asked me what I thought. He said, “I don’t know—is it rude that I told him no? He’s a nice guy and everything. Do guys jerk off together and I just don’t know that? I don’t do it with my friends in Austin. Do you jerk off with your guy friends?”
I wanted to cry. What a little snuggle muffin he was! He was really young and despite drug addiction hadn’t been out in the world enough or seen enough good behavior modeled to know that it is a major-league-wacky anomaly for straight dudes to take out their dongs and play with them together even if they don’t touch. I told him that I personally reserved masturbation for “me time” or for the confines of a romantic relationship. Other than that, jerking off was off the table for social situations. I told him that was nonnegotiable and that even if he, Arturo, and I were friends for years to come, he could rest assured that I would never ever ask him to jerk off with and/or near me. I told him that the dude who asked him was a nutjob and as “nice” as he might be in other areas, it was a very, very awful idea to jerk off with someone you’ve just met at a group therapy meeting at a hospital.
In addition to eating a lot of sugary foods in early sobriety, it can also be tempting to jerk off all the time. The desire for human comfort and closeness can be acute. A hug is like Christmas—or at least it was for me. Some people don’t want to be touched at all, I’m sure. Whatever your wants and perceived needs are at that stage, you are nothing if not raw. So a young kid from out of town, giving up his crutch of drugs, would be very vulnerable to a “kind” stranger and would and should be forgiven for wondering, “Should I jerk off with this guy?” You don’t know. He didn’t know. He was lonely and fucked up and learning how to live.
I don’t know what happened when Arturo left the house and went back to Austin, but it wasn’t good, because a few weeks later we got word that he’d shot himself. I don’t know what to say beyond that. I don’t know if he got high and did it or if the prospect of living without getting high was so unappealing that he didn’t want to live at all. And I never will know. But I know that he was a good guy and I enjoyed the couple of months I got to spend with him.
The third friend who died was Luke. Luke was an emergency room doctor. He was also one of the most handsome guys I’ve ever seen. He was muscular and blond and blue-eyed. He looked like Captain Mister Doctor Nordic America. It’d be tempting to hate a guy like that on sight, but he was nice, too. He helped me interpret my intake paperwork from when I was admitted to the emergency room after my accident. When you get admitted to an emergency room with a bunch of problems and they have to do a bunch of procedures with cops present, a fair amount of paperwork is generated. I had a big packet of stuff along with the police report that I would thumb through occasionally in an effort to piece together exactly what had happened.
It was all fairly self-explanatory, but there was one anatomical phrase that I didn’t understand. It said, “There is no blood present at the meatus.” I’d never seen the word “meatus.” It sounded very terribly disgusting and I gathered it was good that there was no blood “present” at it. This was pre-smartphones and whenever I’d meant to look it up, there wasn’t a dictionary around so I just had to remain curious about it and let the query sink back into my subconscious the way we all used to do.
Anyway, after Luke and I had been shooting the breeze about various emergency room shenanigans he’d seen, I remembered to ask him what a meatus was, and he told me it was the opening of the urethra at the tip of the penis. Or the vagina. What a fucking awful word. It has “meat” in it but then it’s pronounced as a three-syllable word with two for “meat,” so “mee-ay-tus.” Yuck. It’s a strong candidate for my least favorite word. It’s as gross as calling it a “penis meat-hole.” If there are any doctors reading this, please band together and push to just have it called a penis meat-hole. Don’t pull any punches.
Luke was at a halfway house because he’d become addicted to Oxycontin. It’s generally accepted that doctors as a population have a higher percentage of addicts than non-doctors. And when they have ready access to drugs as delightful as Oxycontin and other synthetic opiates, it’s easy to imagine them indulging. Though I’d never taken them before I got sober, I was prescribed Vicodin and was given Dilaudid at the hospital and those drugs felt utterly wonderful coursing through my veins. You don’t just feel like you’re wrapped in a blanket; you feel like you are a beautiful blanket, being blown around the Caribbean, high in the sky. If I didn’t think they’d set me on a path that would end pretty quickly at the morgue, I’d take a few right now. But therein lies the rub; you feel too good when you take them. The way synthetic opiate painkillers work is that they don’t remove the pain; they make you not care that you’re experiencing pain. Your arm or head or whatever’s been injured might still throb, but you note the “pain” and think, “Throb away, lil’ buddy, I am too busy doing lazy somersaults through the ether with Jesus.” So they’re incredibly dangerous.
Luke had a girlfriend who would come by the house and play guitar and sing with a sexy, smoky voice. I liked her and would have thoughts like, “I wish they weren’t together and that my arms worked so that maybe she would go out with me.” Since I liked both of them, though, I just admired her from afar.
Shortly after I left the house and moved in with my friend Ali from college, I got a call from one of the guys and he told me that Luke had OD’d and died. I was crushed. He was a doctor and so fucking handsome and smart and nice. Shouldn’t all that have added up into some sort of cosmic or karmic armor that protected him? What was his fucking SAT score? His death was more of a shock than Chris’s because I figured Luke was just lured by his easy access to prescription meds and that he would get it together after getting burned. How were people like me supposed to stay sober if handsome doctors could just up and relapse and die?
A few days later his brother called me. I’d never met his brother, but he’d gotten phone numbers of some of the guys Luke had told him about and decided to call them. He cried as he spoke to me and I’m crying right now thinking about it. He asked me to stay sober because he didn’t want anybody else to die like his brother did. He loved his brother and he called me, a stranger, to ask me to not get loaded again and die, to honor his brother. I don’t know about the value of blood pacts or oaths, but I know that when I recall that conversation, with me sitting on the edge of my bed, stunned and crying, listening to another man cry, I am prompted to stay the fuck sober and try to help others do the same.
Naturally, in the years since, other people I met in the early days have died, but those three guys all died within weeks of one another, immediately after I’d left the house. It was like the grim reaper swooped through my pals, cutting them down, saying, “Fuck you clowns. You think this is a joke? This is it. Pick up a bottle. Pick up a bottle and see what happens.” I think of Chris, Arturo, and Luke a lot. I really feel them in me, sort of seated in my heart and along for the ride. I feel stronger when I think about them too. I cry, of course, but they’re not just ca
utionary tales to me; they’re not excuses to say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” they’re my friends and I sort of think of it like we’re on the path together. They may have vacated their earthly bodies, but they’re welcome to ride in my hairy, borrowed vessel to reach the goal, whatever it may be. And I don’t know what it is, but I do feel compelled to do what Luke’s brother asked of me, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I imagine miniature versions of them, in my pockets, shooting the breeze as I walk into the Yogurt Town to get us all frozen yogurt.
dépression!
After three and a half months in the halfway house, I moved in with my friend Ali. We’d met at NYU and then reconnected after we’d both moved to L.A. She was a busy editor and had a boyfriend and wasn’t really around much. I was busy returning to normal life and picking up jobs doing catering and temping. After living with her for not quite six months, she decided she wanted to get her own place, so I was charged with finding myself another roommate. The first sign that something was off was my reaction to her telling me she was moving out. I remember being disproportionately upset at the news.
