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

by Rob Delaney

  I was too ashamed and scared to talk to any friends or family, so all I could think to do was to go to NYU’s health services and find out how fast-acting my particular strand of AIDS was. I sat in the waiting room imagining how, exactly, I would tell my mom I arrived at college and, as my first order of business, immediately went out and got AIDS. The doctor who saw me was an older gentleman who didn’t seem shocked by my AIDS. In fact, he said pretty quickly that it didn’t look like any STD he knew of. He thought it was probably just a heat rash or a skin irritation of some kind, but just to be safe, he suggested that I go to a dermatologist.

  I walked a half a block to the dermatologist’s office and sat in the waiting room, still figuring that I had some type of advanced AIDS rash which would perhaps take many forms before it finally appeared as Death bearing a scythe and a wheelbarrow to cart me off to the particular hell reserved for naughty eighteen-year-old boys who drink alcohol, do marijuana, and then put their penis in nice people. I was eventually sent to an examination room where a ravishingly beautiful young woman, not possibly over twenty-seven years old, walked in.

  “Hello. How can we help you today?”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, um, I really wish that you were an old man and not a young woman.”

  “Don’t be silly; I have all sorts of patients. Young and old, male and female. No reason to be embarrassed about anything.”

  “Okay …”

  “So you have a rash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I unzipped my pants and pulled down my boxers so that the top of my pubic hair was just visible.

  “Take them all the way down.”

  I pulled my pants and underwear down, fully exposing my eighteen-year-old penis and testicles to an extraordinarily beautiful young doctor with long brown hair and green eyes who smelled very good.

  She stuck her face right on in there and checked everything thoroughly. Then she said this to me: “Is there any irritation around your anus?”

  “NO. NO, THERE IS NOT. MY ANUS IS FINE.”

  “How do you know? You can’t see it. Let me take a quick look.”

  “I am certain there is no rash there.”

  “Turn around.”

  I turned around.

  “Spread your buttocks open.”

  I peeled apart my fear-clamped butt cheeks and showed her my shameful little butthole. She leaned over in her chair and gazed into it. I prayed fervently that God would give me a fatal stroke.

  “Looks okay to me. Nothing out of the ordinary back there. You can pull your pants up.”

  I pulled my pants up and she wrote out a prescription for a topical cream that she claimed should clear the rash right up. I ran from her Washington Square Park office.

  Why, I asked myself, WHY did she need to look at my butthole? Couldn’t she have prescribed the cream based on what she saw up front? Was she some type of butthole enthusiast? Should a doctor be allowed to be so beautiful? Was she really a doctor at all or had I been tricked and filmed by the Candid Camera: Special Butthole Unit? I was on fire with embarrassment and shame. I had spread open my most secret of areas and a beautiful woman I had just met had CAREFULLY STUDIED IT. She could draw my butthole from memory! Later that night, as she lay in bed replaying her day, she might think about my butthole. Over lunch, with another beautiful young doctor, she might say, “I saw the weirdest butthole today.” Perhaps the girl I’d had athletic sex with had been unsatisfied and hired an actress to dress up as a doctor and shame me. ALL THESE WERE POSSIBILITIES.

  The third place I visited that day was a clinic where they drew a vial of my blood.

  They sent me a letter a week later that said, “Congratulations! You do not have AIDS.” I’m paraphrasing; I really should have saved it. It probably said something like “HIV STATUS: NEGATIVE” or something clinical and deliciously severe.

  After my inaugural AIDS test at age eighteen, I became a diligent condom carrier and when most subsequent lovers had the good fortune to lie under my grunting, sweaty mass, they were always the grimacing recipient of an eager and rubber-sheathed penis boner.

  une liaison fatale

  I’ve eaten a lot of Zankou Chicken. Zankou Chicken is a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles that serve amazing Armenian fast food. I’d be more than content to have a chicken Tarna plate with their signature garlic paste for my last meal on Earth. If you can’t eat there anytime soon, you can listen to Beck’s brilliant soul epic, “Debra,” in which it’s featured. No one who’s eaten at Zankou is surprised that Beck felt the need to immortalize the restaurant in a song. It’s that good.

  In 2003, four years after Beck wrote and released “Debra,” Zankou Chicken’s cancer-riddled owner, Mardiros Iskenderian, shot and killed his sister, his mother, and then himself, because he allegedly didn’t trust his closest relatives to run the Zankou Empire after he died.

  I had eaten at the Hollywood Zankou Chicken the night before, after one of my earliest stand-up experiences, where I told a joke about cartography that bombed so bad that Mr. Iskenderian would have been acquitted if he’d shot me, too.

  Eight years later, Zankou Chicken had nine locations around Los Angeles and was running strong. One day I went to the West L.A. Zankou, since it happened to be located between a meeting I had and an audition for a role in a show about an invisible dog. I hadn’t been to Zankou in a long time, so I was excited. Their proprietary blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, and garlic is as satisfying as a mid-grade sexual experience. It is genuinely exciting to eat their food; it’s like your mouth is learning something as it chews.

  I ordered a chicken Tarna plate and a medium Pepsi. They gave me a number and I found a table next to a window. As I sat down, I knocked over my Pepsi and its cap came off. The entire contents of the cup poured out onto my crotch. Twenty-four ounces of Pepsi soaked my jeans, its landfall centering on my penis and wreaking havoc outward.

  The other Zankou patrons were happy. You can’t blame them—it’s fun to see someone spill things on himself, especially when the result is a wetness pattern that resembles nothing other than urine. A pretty Asian woman in an expensive business outfit handed me some napkins. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was more fascinated by the spill’s majesty, its perfection. It was a great spill, centered as it was on my crotch, and I did not have time to go home and change my pants before my audition, nor did I know where I could buy a new pair of pants in time. I was preparing to go to an audition with visibly wet pants and “see what happened.”

  I wasn’t going to let soaking wet pants prevent me from eating my chicken Tarna, however, so I dug in and vacuumed up those succulent chicken chunks and mentally rehearsed for my meeting, saying things like “This? Oh, it’s just urine,” or “I like to take away any negotiating advantage you may have by pissing myself in advance. Now let’s do this.”

  When I was done with my chicken and replacement Pepsi, I walked the two or three blocks back to my car, which was parked on the side of Sepulveda Boulevard. I noticed a commotion gathered near it. People were clustered in groups and half of them were looking up toward the top of a four-story parking garage across the street. When I reached my car, I saw that they were surveying a brand-new hole in the side of the building’s top story. I then followed the gaze of the other half of the crowd down to the Mercedes SUV lying upside down in the middle of the intersection now filling with emergency personnel. The top of the car had been totally crushed. Instead of being about six feet tall, it was now only around three and a half feet tall.

  A guy said to me, “An old lady drove through the wall. She’s dead.”

  I didn’t want to stick around while they pulled her out, so I got in my car and drove toward my meeting. I rolled down all my windows, opened my sunroof, and turned the air on full blast in an effort to dry my pants. It worked reasonably well. Only an astute observer would have noticed the faded brown rim that traced from the middle o
f one calf, up around my crotch, and back down to the other calf. No one said anything if they did notice.

  I haven’t been back to Zankou and I might never go again. I don’t want any more people to have to die.

  le beguin

  I spent my junior year of college in Paris. I enjoyed French film and literature, and it seemed like Henry Miller had a good time there, so I thought I should go check it out. When I applied for NYU’s Paris program, one question commanded more of my attention than the others: Would I prefer to live in my own apartment or in a French household? I figured living with a family would help with my language acquisition, so I picked “household.” But when I arrived some months later, I was reminded that “household” doesn’t have to mean “family.” It can mean a big apartment inhabited by one eighty-five-year-old woman. And that’s what it did mean, for me. I became roommates with a lovely old woman named Jacqueline who lived in the apartment where she was born in 1912, was raised, and survived Paris’s Nazi occupation. And as one of her final earthly adventures, she got me as a roommate. While we didn’t spend too much time together, when we did, she’d ask me to bring her pizza and, if it wasn’t too much trouble, to put on my red sweater that she fancied. In retrospect, I admire her: having a strapping foreign student bring you pizza and dress by request? I think that might even be sex to an eighty-five-year-old. Ahh, Jacqueline, I miss you. You are one hundred and one now, and/or dead.

  Most of the other American kids that were in my NYU program only signed up for a semester, but I figured one semester wouldn’t really be long enough to get a good handle on the French language, so I, and a few other diehards, went for a full year. That proved to be a good decision because only at the very end of my first semester I realized, “Holy shit; I speak French.” I’d taken French back in eighth and ninth grade, then met with a tutor a few times in the weeks leading up to my departure, so it is encouraging to know that brutal immersion into a country that speaks another language can result in language proficiency, even in adulthood.

  The kids who went for the full year were, as a rule, bonkers. There was a German basketball player who was six foot six and had long, black hair; a brilliant former child model who, a few years after we left, returned to France to marry a billionaire imam and literally became a princess; and a kind and hilarious bookworm junkie with whom I remain friends to this day, both of us having gotten sober twelve years ago, only days apart. So the people who went for the full year represented a great crew. They were all too smart for their own good, and they loved to get fucked up, just like me.

  During my second semester, I took a class in art history that was taught by a tall, thin, green-eyed woman named Madame Royer. I had a crush on her and would dream about her frequently. She also happened to live right next to our school with her husband and two beautiful children. This was the first instance I can remember of my being enamored of a mother. Now I’m a total momaholic, but I was twenty at the time and hadn’t realized that being a mom is, on its own, fucking sexy.

  I paid extra special close attention in her lessons, sat up front, and asked a lot of questions. She probably thought I was retarded. Which, in a way, I was. Whenever I really like a woman, I get nervous around her and stammer and the blood that would normally feed my brain-functions floods my extremities and makes me tingly and mostly useless.

  So day in and day out I’d try to manage my love for her and not embarrass either of us too much, and I probably did a passable job. Until she assigned our final project. She asked us all to become experts on a work of art in a Paris museum and then do a hearty, on-site oral report for the class. We were scheduled to visit one or two museums a day at the end of the semester to hear the presentations. The other twelve or so students read up on their painting or sculpture and did a perfectly fine job explaining it to the class. They did normal things like detailing the historical significance of their painting along with the techniques the artist used to create it. I, on the other hand, went bananas.

  First off, I got my hair freshly cut and coordinated an outfit to wear, for Madame Royer was an elegant Parisian woman; I didn’t think a Robert Parrish jersey and Carhartt jeans would be appropriate attire. I brought my best brown corduroys and a smart V-neck sweater to the dry cleaner days in advance, and under the sweater I wore a blue-and-white-striped French naval-style shirt.

  I wanted my outfit to say, “I’m just your average brilliant, yet totally chilled-out, art historian expounding on nineteenth-century Symbolism. No big deal. Everybody be cool, but feel free to let it all hang out and have sex with me if the need arises.”

  I also crawled up the ass of my selected painting, Gustave Moreau’s “Jupiter et Semele,” and built a research facility.

  I lived within walking distance of the Musée Gustave-Moreau, which also used to be Moreau’s house and studio, so I was free to study his work with the day-in day-out dedication of a psychopath. And I did! The museum’s staff would greet me with increasing familiarity with each visit I made.

  “Wow, this kid loves him some Moreau,” I imagined them saying in a break room whose walls were adorned with half-finished Moreaus, his warm-up sketches, and maybe a bejeweled water cooler wrapped in a ruby sash—the way he would have wanted it.

  When the day for my presentation came, I was in fighting shape. Our class took the metro to the museum and walked around looking at Moreau’s cluttered paintings in his cluttered home. Moreau was a Symbolist and most of his paintings are complex depictions of Greek myths, gods, and heroes. His best paintings illustrate one or perhaps two classic stories, but he also painted complex works of ornate imagery that aren’t terribly fun to look at but are ideally suited to a love-struck student’s top-heavy, indigestible presentation designed to impress a married art professor.

  When it was time for my presentation, Madame Royer gathered the class in front of the imposing eight-by-four-foot painting of a terrifying Jupiter who had just God-fucked the mortal Semele so hard she had died. Do I know how to pick a painting to impress a woman that I’m in love with? I’d say I do! Looking at the painting now, I can’t imagine someone describing it without using the words “scary” and/or “forensic.” Dead-eyed Jupiter looks like he might even eat Semele if you look at the painting long enough. Thirty or so attending angels, humans, and who-knows-what-the-fucks stand around averting their eyes, very bummed out about the lovely Semele, mother of Dionysus, who now lies nude and dead across Jupiter’s bejeweled lap. He didn’t even take his bejeweled robe off to give it to her. Classy.

  I dropped a hot load of art-science on the class, picking apart every horrid detail of the story, Moreau, and the Symbolist movement at large, his painting techniques, and when and how he enlarged the painting when he felt it wasn’t big and terrifying enough. The class watched, thoroughly weirded-out by how intimately I knew the painting. People shifted uncomfortably as I transparently sublimated my love for our professor into words about a bizarre and impenetrable painting. Some frowned. Madame Royer watched wide-eyed and amazed as I unspooled my knowledge of Moreau, which, at that point, probably even dwarfed that of Moreau’s wife and children. When I finished, she actually clapped and said, “Bravo, Robert!” In the U.S., she would’ve had me placed on a watch list, but in France, being obsessive about anything art-related, no matter how bizarre, is generally viewed as a positive.

  I’d like to tell you that we then began an affair with the blessing of her husband, and that I left Paris some months later, promising to return and build a house/museum filled with creepy Moreaus we could grow old in together, but that is in no way what happened. We had one or two short conversations after that, and on the last day of school I told her, “Votre leçons me manquerais.”

  While this story is certainly embarrassing and silly, I think it’s important to hurl ourselves at people with whom we have no shot from time to time. It’s good to be humiliated. It’s good to overreach and fail publicly, especially in romance. It helps us calibrate properly to the interpersonal
relationships that are appropriate for us. In Paris, in the spring of 1998, I was better suited to booze-fueled make-out sessions with non-moms in dirty bar bathrooms as we both made an effort not to puke in each other’s mouths. That is perhaps the greatest lesson Madame Royer taught me.

  une toquade

  During my junior year in Paris I tried to travel as much as possible on weekends. France is slightly smaller than Texas, so it was easy to get somewhere thoroughly exotic (to me) with a short flight or train ride.

  One morning, after my French political science class, my friend Alan asked me if I wanted to take the train up to Amsterdam with him for a long weekend and stay with a girl he knew. I’d never been to Amsterdam, so I said yes. Alan was another American student. He was around my height, six foot three or so, a first-generation child of German immigrant parents, and he was on the NYU fencing team. He had curly blond hair, an arresting gaze, and was a brash, outspoken, rich premed student whose entitled attitude suggested he’d gotten what he wanted from the day he was born. He talked about anal sex a lot. He liked to fuck women in the butt. He also liked muscular, athletic women with small breasts. In addition, he was extremely homophobic. I will let you draw your own conclusions from my description.

  Myself, I’ve never been a butt fucker. I started to try it a couple of times with a couple of girlfriends, after they’d said, “Sure, let’s give it a shot.” Pretty quickly into our effort though, they both said, “Ow. I don’t want to do this,” and that was A-OK with me. I’m of the mind that vaginas are a more than adequate place for me to put my penis and I have just never really had a hankering for ass. I squeeze ’em and bite ’em and spank ’em if necessary, but as far as thinking “I need my penis in there” goes, that doesn’t really happen. Probably the only scenario in which I’d be “jazzed” to fuck a woman in the ass is if she was like, “Hi, Rob, I’m an experienced recipient of le buttcock. Can you please do something to me that I like very much which is fuck my asshole while I moan and say things like, ‘I am enjoying this. Thank you. Thank you for fucking me in my tiny little asshole, you nice man.’” I would fuck that woman’s ass and probably like it a lot. But hearing “Ow” during sex is just about the hugest bummer I can imagine, so since I heard it twice from nice women I cared about, that kind of knocked butt fucking off of my wish list, where it had never held a high position anyway.