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

by Rob Delaney

  She didn’t present it as some horrible bombshell, and she had no reason to. She had a boyfriend and was tired of living in a small apartment in Koreatown and wanted to get a house.

  And I didn’t do or say anything other than, “Okay, good luck!” but inside I was terrified.

  Rather than thinking, “C’est la vie, another chapter in the journey that is life” … I was devastated.

  It wasn’t that we had any kind of special relationship—we’d never dated or hooked up or anything like that, nor was our friendship ending, just our cohabitation—but I remember thinking, “How will I possibly find another roommate or place to live? How could anyone do that? It’s impossible.” What should have seemed like a quotidian, normal “hiccup” really, seemed an insurmountable problem. That was really the first clue that something was wrong. Up to that moment in life, absent booze, I’d met with life’s vicissitudes in a pretty average to good manner. But now I was frantic. At the time, I was going to a psychologist every other Tuesday to just talk stuff out. My “big brother” at the halfway house had suggested that talking to a therapist would be a good idea due to the overtly, comically self-destructive nature of some of the things I did when I was drunk, like climbing telephone poles, jumping down onto subway tracks, and driving into buildings. I’d found therapy very useful and I enjoyed going. It just felt good to get in the regular habit of telling somebody the truth about how I felt. Whether you’re in a good mood or a bad mood, I can’t imagine hashing out your issues with a disinterested professional third party would ever be a bad idea.

  In addition to the terrible fear of Ali moving out and what that would mean for me, I started to not be able to sleep at night. I didn’t tell Ali about this because I was at least aware of the fact that my feelings didn’t really have anything to do with her. Perhaps I was just afraid to be by myself. After a couple of weeks, she moved out, and I started to get more depressed. I was temping some days and hating it, tiptoeing around offices, terrified of making a mistake or standing out or even having to talk to anyone. I would fall asleep when I went to bed at night, but I’d wake up pretty soon after and then not be able to go back to sleep. I was just gripped by terror. I began to think about suicide. The nights would be awful, and then when I woke up, I’d have terrible diarrhea, since my churning stomach liquefied anything that went into it, which, after a while, wasn’t much. When I’d brush my teeth in the morning, the act of touching the toothbrush to my tongue would make me vomit. Every single day. Brushing my teeth would fill me with dread. I lost all sexual desire too. My libido had always been probably average or leaning slightly toward high, but it just totally evaporated. I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time, so this just meant I didn’t masturbate anymore. I began to express my concerns to family and a couple of people I’d met at the halfway house. They were all kind to me but I felt like I was talking to them through a thick cement wall.

  Evaluating my life circumstances made me think, “I should probably wrap this up.” I would constantly envision blowing my head apart with a shotgun blast or swimming out into the ocean until I got tired and drowned.

  I wasn’t secretive about feeling low, but I was afraid to fully unfurl the horror of what I was imagining for my family and close friends to see. My therapist said that she’d like me to see a psychiatrist to look at the possibility of going on medication for depression. I resisted for a few weeks, for all the normal reasons someone might; I thought it would be “weak” and that I should “soldier through.” But part of me, a very tiny part, recognized that something was very wrong. I’d quit drinking and drugs. I’d surrounded myself with good healthy people who were doing the same. I was eating healthy. I was exercising. I was going to therapy and genuinely striving to live my life in a kind manner. I wasn’t harboring any secrets that were weighing me down. In essence, I was doing everything one could reasonably expect me to do to “feel good.” But I didn’t feel good at all. I didn’t sleep. I shit only fiery liquid. Brushing my teeth made me puke. My whole body ached. My particular depression was accompanied by intense physical pain. I ached all over, all the time. I had no sexual desire of any kind. And mind you, I’d masturbated days after the accident with two broken arms and regularly while living in rehab and in the halfway house. During those times, I’d actually been delighted that THAT desire hadn’t deserted me. But it sure as shit was gone now, along with even the slightest positive thought or belief. I saw doom everywhere, especially when my eyes were closed.

  Another bizarre aspect of my depression was the obsessive-compulsive behavior that attended it. I involuntarily kept my hands balled into fists, squeezing my thumb the way a newborn does. Time and again I’d look down and realize they’d squeezed up again and force myself to relax them. Also, whenever I parked my car somewhere, I’d get out and walk toward my destination, then be seized by the fear that I hadn’t locked my car. Sometimes I’d get a few blocks away and then have to return to the car to be sure I’d locked it. This was doubly odd because it was a sixteen-year-old Volvo station wagon that no one would have stolen if I’d left it unlocked and running. Plus its contents were McDonald’s wrappers and apple cores and Fugazi cassettes, so no one would even want to break in. But fuck me if I was going to leave that treasure on wheels unlocked. It was so odd and unsettling. I’d park, walk toward whatever shitty purgatorial experience I had in store, then the thought “DID YOU LOCK YOUR CAR?” would thunder through my brain and not shut up until I’d gone back and verified that, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER FUCKING TIME I’d acquiesced to the voice, my car was indeed locked.

  Twice in a short period of time I drove away from a gas station, leaving the cap to my gas tank behind. Studies have shown that people who suffer from depression are more likely to experience dementia when they’re elderly, and I don’t doubt that for a second. You get a little preview—a teaser, if you will—of what that nightmare must be like with depression. Dementia would certainly ride well on the thought grooves established by depression. I’m certainly not resigned to dementia; fuck that. I read, exercise, write, and try to keep my mind malleable and in good shape. Plus it would be terribly silly to hear about a study that posited a negative future for yourself and then believe it. There is massive, pulsing truth in the statement “Ignorance is bliss.” Willful ignorance or resistance to alleged facts has been a big ingredient in any success I’ve had.

  “Ride it out,” I would tell myself every night. “Don’t do anything. You can always kill yourself tomorrow.” I’d try to push that thought away every day. After weeks of abject horror, I thought, “I will try medication, and if that doesn’t help, then I can kill myself.” I thought about my friends from the halfway house who’d overdosed or committed suicide in the past few months and wondered if I was destined to join them. I finally relented, after talking to my therapist and several relatives who came forward and told me they’d benefited from medication. I decided to give it a shot.

  I remember saying goodbye to my sister, over the phone, as she was preparing to spend a semester of her junior year in Spain. This was when I was at my absolute lowest and about to fold and take medication. I tried to steel myself as we spoke and not give away how depressed and scared I was. I was afraid that I might do something to myself and would never see her again. My beautiful little sister, my best friend. She’s five years younger than me, so between that and the fact that we’re opposite sexes, we were never competitive about anything and were just free to be pals pretty much from the day she was born. I remember being in fifth grade and seeing her come around a corner one day as a kindergartner and just being ecstatic to see her, even though I’d seen her at home three hours earlier and would see her there again three hours later. It’s pretty much the same when I see her now. Although I do remember trying to teach her how to wash dishes when we were little and her taking two infuriating hours to do it because she refused to run the water above a tiny trickle. Other than that, she’s a good person.

  After our parents’ divorce, whic
h happened when she was nine and I was fourteen, we became very close and assumed larger roles in each other’s lives as our parents dropped a few rungs from infallible god people to flawed earthlings.

  Funny. As I think about that phone call now, it’s actually almost a fond memory, because it represented an actual feeling—sadness—and I hadn’t felt anything in what felt like an eternity. I think it’s important to explain that major depression is not even peripherally related to “sadness.” Depression is the absence of emotion. I never cried during my darkest periods of depression. Crying would have been A HOLIDAY. It would have been FUCKING CHRISTMAS. A fight or a feeling of anger would have been AN EASTER EGG HUNT AT DISNEYLAND. I am vocal about my depression now because it was so fucking Satanically awful that I view it as one of my life’s primary missions to help other people understand and overcome it.

  Depression kills people because in the normal weather patterns of human emotion over a day or a week or a decade, actual unipolar major depressive disorder doesn’t appear. It’s like The Nothing in The NeverEnding Story. It eats your anger, your sadness, your happiness, your testicles and/or ovaries. Your solid shit. And it would love to kill you dead and attend your funeral and call your mother a cunt as you’re lowered into the ground after a closed-casket funeral where everyone was mad at you. What’s funny is how much less afraid I am now of anything life throws at me.

  Another good way to illustrate how bad it is, is to say that it made being in jail in a wheelchair with four broken limbs feel like a cruise among the Greek Isles. (I’ve never been to the Greek Isles, but that’s the first lovely thing that sprang to my currently nondepressed mind.) I might also add that while depressed, creativity or imagination is close to impossible. Those who think that depression is “good” for creative people may form a line and very aggressively blow me. I may be “creative” or a “weirdo” but I’m one thousand [literally] times more productive and useful to my fellow man when I’m firing on all happy cylinders. Just to be clear, I’d rather be in jail than depressed in my apartment. A jail sentence ends. You know roughly when it will end too. I would rather have four broken limbs in jail than be depressed and fully ambulatory and independent. Broken bones knit and wounds heal. There is a commonly agreed upon method for fixing them too; you set them or stitch them up. Properly and thoroughly treating depression is much touchier. There are numerous types of medication and therapies and any honest doctor will tell you that trying to fix it involves rolling the dice, or, as they might call it, “trial and error.” What a horrible term.

  I am very, very ecstatically happy to report that the first medication my psychiatrist prescribed, worked. For the record, it was Lexapro, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. I remember sitting on his couch, sullen, emaciated, and folded in on myself, with dark circles under my eyes, wondering, “Can this Russian psychiatrist help me?” (Since the information flow in his office was primarily a one-way street from me to him, the only things I knew about him were that he was Russian, he had two kids, and he saw patients only one day a week. The other days he worked in the Los Angeles jail system.) He gave me a sample packet of Lexapro and a prescription. I left his office and drove to a pharmacy and bought a pill cutter because the first week I was only supposed to take half a pill. I remember sitting in my car and cutting the first pill and it shot out of the pill cutter and landed somewhere on the floor of my car. I panicked. Even though I had a full prescription, I literally thought that the pills were little puzzle pieces that might add up to sanity for me, so the possibility of losing one half of one pill would be a travesty that couldn’t be remedied. I found it under my seat after scouring my car’s dirty floor and put it in my mouth.

  That evening I felt an inkling of peace, not because the chemicals had begun to work, but because I felt I’d surrendered to the fact that other people cared about me and might have a better idea about what I should do to get better and because going to a psychiatrist, getting a prescription, and filling it was a tacit admission that even I believed (somewhere in my addled mind) that I deserved to feel better.

  Gradually, I did begin to feel better. After a while I could brush my teeth without vomiting. My poops began to firm up and exit my butt as horrible solids rather than horrible liquid. After a couple of weeks, I noticed a familiar feistiness in my trousers, and when I addressed it, the amount of semen I produced was around seven hundred gallons. (I’m estimating.) Most wonderful of all though: I could sleep again. I didn’t wake up at 11:15 after having been asleep for forty-five minutes and lie in bed terrified for seven hours. I began to interact with other people more at work and socially. I asked women on dates and sometimes they said yes. Only a couple of months later, I did my first stand-up open mic.

  which he fills diapers he KNOWS I’LL BE CHANGING suggests otherwise. @robdelaney Why do babies have to cry? Why couldn’t they like, glow, or beep rhythmically to get our attention? Shitty babies… @robdelaney “I saw a really nice chair yesterday.” - if your grandma tweeted @robdelaney Just bought diapers and toilet paper because all my family does is shit. @robdelaney I hope there’s a magazine for cool college bros called “Frattitude.” @robdelaney Obviously we have our own shitty lives to worry about now but it would be fun to all move into a Twitter nursing home in 50 years. @robdelaney If you use the term “man card” seri-

  PART IV la romance

  ously, I assume you use it to access your “man cave,” so you can hunker down & gobble some “man dong.” @robdelaney Hey, if the mood’s right under the mistletoe, don’t be afraid to go in for a little mistlefinger. @robdelaney Look at your disgusting balls. That’s LITERALLY exactly what Jesus wants them to look like. #Bible @robdelaney Not much of a “First Aid” kit if it doesn’t have peanut butter in it. @robdelaney Listen up: I wear the pants in this family. They’re a lovely taffeta with a subtle flare to draw attention to my lace-up sandals. @robdelaney Drive-thru worker just recoiled in horror when I rolled down my window & she got walloped by a bucket of moist farts. @robdelaney You know you’re getting old when you forget the name of the street you grew up on and break your hip and die. @robdelaney @Garfield because of your “cartoon” I fed my beloved Mr. Turtle lasagna & coffee for his birthday & he died. I will fuck your soul. @robdelaney Just thought I caught my wife looking at porn; turns out she was shopping for underwear for herself. What a fucking pervert. @robdelaney Bittersweet: Got the very last DustBuster at @Walmart, but the old man I beat to death to get it was my wife in disguise. @robdelaney It is alleged that Guy Fieri was hiding in the turkey Obama pardoned & can thus never be prosecuted for war crimes. @robdelaney Don’t even FRONT like you love your family, America, or God if you don’t have a DETAILED & REHEARSED Black Friday tactical shopping plan. @robdelaney That awkward moment someone begins a tweet with “that awkward moment” & I slap their face with my dong. @robdelaney I just read a pamphlet about sex & I’m gonna be honest: it sounds pretty cool. @robdelaney “Hey man… my mouth is like… a zoo for teeth…” - Mitt Romney, wandering around the Utah desert on peyote, 11/8/2012 @robdelaney Remember when putting something on the internet was the equivalent of hiding it in a

  SIDA?

  I’d had close to no sex when I got to college. When I was seventeen, I lost my virginity to my girlfriend and she to me. The experience was “nice” and we drove around and smoked unfiltered Camels afterward. About a year later I got drunk at a party and had sex with a girl I didn’t know terribly well on my friend’s waterbed. I’m sure I was both flailing and unskilled, but I can at least tell today’s teens that I had sex on a waterbed—something they’ll never do since nobody buys waterbeds anymore because they’re stupid. In other words, my penis had been inside a couple of girls, but I didn’t really know what to do with it, and I could have been charitably described as “very awful” at sex.

  When it came time for me to pick a college, I chose NYU. I’d decided I wanted to be an actor and NYU had a renowned musical theater program. I figured if I wanted to act, and do it w
ell, why not train the hell out of my body and voice rather than just study scripts, frown, and pretend an empty glass was filled with orange juice. From what I understand, that’s what one does in a regular acting class. I, on the other hand, wanted to sing and dance all day, every day—which is exactly what I did. During my college search, I only looked at schools in Boston and New York. As great as the schools in Boston were, I thought it would be more edifying to venture a little farther from home to a city I knew roughly nothing about. It proved to be a good decision, since merely living in New York City forced me to constantly vacuum up nonstop stimuli through every sensory door. Add college to that equation and you can see how it was a very thorough educational experience.

  When I arrived at NYU, I made a concerted effort—as part of my well-rounded education—to get my dinky stinky as often as possible. I was AS A RULE drunk anytime I even kissed a girl my freshman year, and none of those sexual experiences stand out in my mind as anything other than clumsy and desperate. That said, I definitely got some fuckin’ done.

  Early in my first semester I wound up having drunken and somewhat athletic unprotected sex with a girl who was in about forty of my classes. I wanted to make sure we could relive the horror eleven or twelve times a day when we made unintentional eye contact. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that we were firmly established pals before we got fucked-up and curdled our relationship with drunk sex. College!

  A couple of days later I noticed some little red bumps peeking out among my pubic hair. I was eighteen and had begun puberty at that magic time in the 1980s when kids were taught that having unprotected sex even once meant you’d die of AIDS within six months, and then your mom would have to light a picture of your face on fire in front of the White House and disown your memory in a special ceremony. I was sincerely terrified and I figured the extreme fatigue I was feeling wasn’t from my terrible hangover or from being up late studying, but rather from my rapidly diminishing T-cell count.