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

by Rob Delaney

  After some addled thought, I reached out to the telephone wires. (I’m assuming they were telephone wires and not electrical wires, since I’m typing this as an alive, non-crispy person.) I then hung my full weight from the wires and began to “walk” with my hands, out and away from the telephone pole and twenty-five or so feet above the street.

  Todd watched my progress from the ground. My “plan” was to try to make it to the next telephone pole. The task grew difficult pretty quickly however, and I became too tired to make it. At that point, I couldn’t make it back to the telephone pole I’d started from either. So I let go of the wire. I fell, rather far, to the street below and my feet hit the ground maybe a tenth of a second before my forehead did. I remained conscious but began to bleed from a new hole I’d made above my left eyebrow. Todd’s mouth was frozen in an “O” shape from the shock of seeing it all. It took him a while to relax.

  We went back to my front steps and smoked some more cigarettes until my mom got home and took me to the hospital to get sewed up. For many years she believed that I had tripped over our cat, Lava. Because that’s what I told her had happened. I figured it was better for her sanity to believe that her son was a drunk klutz than an actively suicidal daredevil with the stunt proficiency of a trash bag filled with blueberry yogurt.

  When my sophomore year began, I was suspended for coming to school hung over. My chemistry teacher said I was acting weird, so I was brought to the vice principal’s office where I was given a breathalyzer test. I don’t know what I blew, but it was more than zero, so I was suspended for a week. My mom seemed to divide her anger, focusing twenty-five percent of it at me and the other seventy-five percent of it at the vice principal. How dare they punish me based on a measurement system approved by law enforcement officials across the world! She felt vindicated when I took a breathalyzer to get readmitted to school and the mouthwash I’d used that morning registered as .001 or so on the machine. I then rinsed my mouth out in the vice principal’s bathroom sink and blew a zero, allowing my mom to continue to hold a grudge against Ms. Loomis, Marblehead High School’s vice principal in 1992. Not that my mom wouldn’t (and didn’t) punish me; she just was one of those parents who preferred to do it “in-house,” and seeing any other adult exert any authority over her own kid pissed her off whether it made sense or not.

  That same year, my friend Michael had a party and we got an older guy who had U2 vanity plates on his car to buy us booze. While all my friends had him get them a six-pack of beer, I got a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I got drunk quickly and blacked out early in the evening. I’m told I stripped naked and went into Michael’s younger sister’s closet (she wasn’t home) and put on her Halloween costume, which was a cheap polyester skeleton costume. I was already six foot three and the costume was made for a child. It was terribly tight and looked like a unitard for murderers. My dick and balls bulged through the diaphanous material. Though it was technically a Halloween costume, I’m sure its designers never imagined it would be worn in such a terrifying scenario. I then went up the stairs back to the party.

  At the time, my friends Michael, Pat, Chad, and I had a band called “Scaramanga.” Francisco Scaramanga was the name of the villain in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. In the beginning of the film, Bond finds out that while no one in British Intelligence has seen Scaramanga’s face, he does have the distinguishing characteristic of having a prominent third nipple. So Bond poses as Scaramanga, wearing a prosthetic third nipple.

  I remember Michael looking through a Bond encyclopedia for band name ideas and when he brought to my attention the fact that there was a man in whose honor a prosthetic third nipple had been designed and worn, I said, “That’s our band name.” And so it was.

  The night of Michael’s party we’d set up our equipment to play some Huey Lewis songs to entertain our friends. I was immediately too drunk, but when I reemerged from downstairs as a hulking girl-skeleton with a beefy cockpouch, I sat on a couch and screamed unintelligibly into a microphone for a few minutes anyway. Then I got up, walked back to the top of the stairs, and leapt down the whole flight. At the bottom, my head went through a very nice stained glass window. Miraculously, my head popped out several pieces of the window from the lead outlines that held it together and no glass actually shattered.

  I’ve offered the above anecdotes because they highlight that I had bad, potentially fatal things happen as a result of my drinking right out of the gate. And I kept on drinking. Through high school, through college, and then for a few more years after that, while the blackouts, pissed beds and couches, and sickness continued to pile up. I won’t catalog every event, as a laundry list would get tiring to read pretty quickly. Suffice to say that alcohol and I never mixed well.

  I went to college at New York University. While there were hundreds of excellent schools in the great city of Boston, I wanted to live in the biggest city of all, plus NYU was the destination for kids who wanted to do musical theater with their lives, which is what I fantasized about when I was seventeen. I didn’t really have the grades to get into NYU my freshman through junior year of high school, so for my senior year I buckled down and got straight A’s. This, shockingly, was easier than putting myself through the mental and emotional contortions of procrastination that netted me C’s for the first three years of high school. My SATs were good, since I’d pretty much jerked off to standardized tests ever since the first one I took in elementary school. Fill in a dot and get a prize? Yes, please. In the ambiguity and shifting playing field of adult life, I often wish I could just fill in a dot and have someone say “Yes” and hand me a chicken leg, or “No” and slap me with an old fish. I got accepted based on my grades and test scores, but also based on the monologue and two songs I performed for a man in a tiny studio who wouldn’t let me shake his hand when I was done because he said he’d recently blown his nose into it.

  Wisely, whoever ran the housing department at NYU decided to provide mattresses that were covered in sturdy plastic. After running a large university for over a century, the university’s data must have determined that students were pissing themselves frequently enough to justify an all-plastic mattress policy. And piss myself on their mattresses I did! And not just my own. At the end of my freshman year I fell asleep on my roommate Rohit’s bed when he was out of town. I’d taken a girl to a screening of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I’d struck out. So I convinced my other roommates to drink ten or fifteen beers with me, then passed out in Rohit’s bed instead of my own and pissed in it very thoroughly. When I woke up and realized what had happened, I sprang into action. I washed his comforter, sheets, and mattress pad. Then I dried them and, in the process, melted his mattress pad. Great holes were seared into it, all over, but I put it on his bed anyway with the sheets and comforter over it. When he got back to the dorms, lay down on his bed, and felt the crunchy mattress pad under him, he pulled the sheets off and asked the Heavens, “What the fuck?”

  Rather than admit I’d passed out on his bed and irrigated it, I told him, “Sometimes mattress pads melt under your sheets when it gets hot.” I don’t know if he believed this, but we didn’t speak of it again, and we went to our respective homes for the summer a few days later. He is a vice president at Citibank now, as is another of our suitemates, Guang, with whom I smoked pot regularly through a hose that hooked up to a Vietnam-era gas mask that we would take turns strapping to our faces.

  I graduated in 1999 and moved in with my friend Kiyash into an apartment in Alphabet City—a charming area of downtown New York. The main differences between then and now were that very few people had cell phones and I thought it was okay to wear tank tops. One rainy night, soon after moving in with Kiyash, I called 911 because there was a man with no legs who had fallen out of his wheelchair, drunk, and passed out in the gutter. When the EMTs responded I helped them lift the drunk into the ambulance. Life can be a real cunt sometimes.

  The best thing about that apartment was its view of the Em
pire State Building. I used to sit inside and watch it get struck by lightning during storms. That’s a question I’d ask Accountant-Zeus: How many bolts of lightning did you hurl at that motherfucker? I saw it happen at least fifty times in one year. It’s a real spiritual palate cleanser too; I hope you get to see the Empire State Building get struck by lightning sometime in your life. It’s much more exciting than riding a fart-filled elevator up to the top and having the powerful wind blow your Cardinals hat off your head. You can’t think about anything else when you’re watching a tall building get struck by lightning, either. Ayn Rand and Howard Roark can take turns sucking my dick while Sarah Palin takes pictures, but a skyscraper is a magical thing and watching nature turn one into a hundred-story lightning rod is like watching heaven and earth bumpin’ pretties.

  At the Alphabet City apartment, I slept on a futon, which was not coated in plastic. As such, the fact that I pissed aggressively into it every few nights surely tripled its weight over time. I know because, when I eventually moved out, I could barely carry it down the four flights of stairs to throw it on the Alphabet City sidewalk for a sanitation worker or homeless person to deal with.

  Over the next two years, I drank a lot. I rarely drank every day, since whenever I started there was no real way to tell if I’d go totally off the rails and black out or pass out somewhere. I acted in musicals, plays, and had the odd small role on All My Children. Susan Lucci was very nice. Josh Duhamel was very muscular. I also happened to be an extra on one episode of Saturday Night Live in a fake commercial for a reality show called The Cannibal, where you had to figure out if the cannibal was me or Will Ferrell. It was Will Ferrell. I remember him eating pieces of real ham covered in fake blood and being understandably grossed out by it.

  My girlfriend at the time was bummed out by my drinking, but not horrified. She never really saw it all, since I’d try to keep it together around her. One time I yelled at her in the street when she tried to get me to come home with her after a lovely date where we’d had a few drinks, rather than go to a bar where I said I had friends “waiting for me.” There were no friends there; I’d lied, and then went there and drank alone until I was garbage. I brought her flowers the next day and I very clearly remember her roommate glaring at me with the wholly warranted disgust you focus on a textbook scumbag. Beyond that, I’d try to sound chipper when I spoke to my mom on the phone and mask the depression in my voice that attended my hangovers. I was basically “trucking along” as a functional drunk who knew he had a problem but hoped nothing truly terrible would happen. I’d quit for weeks or months at a time, which allowed me to feel physically much better and not piss in my bed, but I’d always start again, picking up—AS A RULE—right where I’d left off.

  In 2001, two years after graduating, during which I’d lived with Kiyash, toured the U.S. as Sir Lancelot in a national tour of the musical Camelot, and worked as a bellboy at the Hudson Hotel, I moved from New York to L.A.

  I had decided to finally buy a real bed after having destroyed my final New York futon and throwing it on the sidewalk in Queens as my neighbor’s big fuzzy Akita cheerily barked “What are you doing?” at me. I loved that dog. I never got to hug and roll around with him (or her; fuck if I can tell what a dog’s gender is if it doesn’t clearly display its junk to me) the way we would’ve liked, but I spent hours petting him over a fence and talking to him.

  After arriving in L.A. and securing an apartment in Silver-lake, I dialed 1-800-MATTRESS and ordered a queen-size bed. It was a big step—deciding to stop peeing in a futon and start peeing in a real bed—and I took it seriously. When I went to Bed Bath &Beyond to buy sheets along with a little trash can and a bathmat and such, I knew I’d also need plastic sheets for my queen-size bed. I was a big boy now, and big boys pee in big beds! I walked right up to a young woman in her blue Bed Bath & Beyond apron and asked her where the plastic sheets were. She told me they were in the kids’ linen section with other kids’ things.

  “Uh, I’m looking for plastic sheets for a queen-size bed.”

  “Oh …”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh, um, we don’t have those. We could order them?”

  “Well, then, yeah. Order them.”

  In a moment of utter sobriety, I was one hundred percent at peace with the fact that I was a voluntary, habitual, adult bedwetter and I was comfortable discussing it frankly with a stranger.

  Yes, there were flashier episodes in my drinking career, like car crashes and drunken fights with my girlfriend in the middle of the street, but the elegance of asking a stranger to help me find a specialty product that helped me reduce the damage that my routine bedwetting caused was a beautiful, shimmering red flag.

  la peur

  My dad and I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was maybe ten or so and it blew my young mind. It’s the first film I can remember that made me weep. Interestingly, my parents’ first date was going to see the theatrical production of Cuckoo’s Nest when it was staged in Boston. Hell of a first date, guys. It should also be noted that a pigeon shit on my dad’s head as they walked through Boston Common on their way to the theater. I may as well also tell you that on a recent morning I was walking with my son in his little carrier on my chest and a bird shit so copiously that it got on both my son and me. So that is three living generations of Delaney men who have functioned as toilets for birds. May the tradition continue! I’m not aware of any stories of my grandfather Bill being shit on, although my dad did tell me that as a kid during the Depression he and his friends would pick horse shit up off the ground and throw it at one another for fun. That is all I know about Delaney men and animal shit. If you know anything I don’t, please contact my publisher.

  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was on TV another time when I was young. My parents were out and our beloved babysitter Lauren was watching us. Lauren said she didn’t want me to watch it because I would cry and she didn’t want to deal with that. I promised her I wouldn’t cry and begged her to let me watch it. But when our hero, the beautiful, elemental McMurphy, was lobotomized after attacking the cuntly Nurse Ratched, CRY I DID. I sobbed. And so did Lauren! I think, having seen it before too, she knew that she would cry and she didn’t want to deal with that.

  It’s actually a treasured memory of mine; both of us crying, Lauren saying between sobs, “I told you I didn’t want you to watch it! I told you you’d cry!” I laugh to think about it.

  Lauren was a very good babysitter who watched my sister Maggie and me for years. As an adult and now a parent, I recognize the importance of carefully choosing the people you leave with your kids. Lauren sort of felt like a third parent or an older sister to me. I thought she was the coolest thing that ever happened. Her favorite band was Duran Duran. Thus, my favorite band was Duran Duran. When her mercurial teenage tastes changed overnight, and Tears for Fears became her favorite band, I immediately followed suit, removing all the pictures of Duran Duran’s keyboard player Nick Rhodes from my bedroom wall and replacing them with pictures of Tears for Fears’s Curt Smith. Since my adolescence and the last years of my parents’ marriage coincided, Lauren felt like a safe person to be around and admire. I could complain to her and just be an eleven-year-old. I remain grateful that she was the babysitter my parents chose to hire.

  When I was a freshman in high school I saw Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear. I also saw and read Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon that year. It was a time in my life when I enjoyed being terrified. My parents were getting divorced and I think it was somehow comforting to watch actual madmen hurt people terribly. On some level I thought, Well, at least that’s not happening in my home. I’d always loved reading and fantasizing but when my life became painful on a day-to-day basis, escaping into books, movies, and music became necessary in addition to “fun.” I also began to drink more frequently around that time, and I thought about drinking constantly. I don’t pin my drinking on my parents’ divorce. I drank when I was sad or
when I was happy, and so many members of my family are alcoholics or in recovery that I’m pretty sure alcoholism was in the cards for me, whether my parents divorced or not. Alcohol allowed me to toy with fear, map its edges, and try to exercise a little control over it. The operative word being “try,” since I would routinely be ejected from the driver’s seat of my body and mind when I got drunk. My drinking got worse throughout high school and into college, and while it wasn’t always dramatic, it would be punctuated every few months or so by events genuinely dangerous or, at best, frightening.

  One Easter weekend when I was home from NYU, I went with my mom and my uncle Johnny to pick up a honeyed ham for our big family meal. The honeyed ham place was out on the old Route 1 in Danvers, Massachusetts. Danvers, it is fascinating to note, was not always called Danvers. Three hundred years ago it was known as Salem Village. Growing up I’d assumed the events leading to the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 took place in plain old Salem, which still very much exists. But at some point along the way, Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. While the actual witch trials took place in what’s now downtown Salem, the events that led up to them took place in Danvers. So whether or not you believe in any type of “Other,” be it good, bad, or something beyond either, there is a strong argument to be made that Danvers is charged with some intense metaphysical juju.

  My travels rarely took me out that way but whenever they did, the black iron spires of Danvers State Hospital looming over the treetops in the distance called to me. At that time in my life, my dreams were often about architecture and civil engineering. Most nights I traveled through factories and warehouses and armories, just exploring. I hung out in sewers and air ducts and subway systems. It was wonderful. Something about man-made passageways and storage areas and transportation systems just excites me, and always has. I’ll practically jerk off to photographs of abandoned and dilapidated buildings. And old mental institutions? Don’t get me started. Heaven, for me, would be a place with unfettered access to old, shut-down hospitals and the ruins of train stations. Seeing these massive, useful, beautiful structures and systems rot and fall apart reminds me that even things made of iron and stone will collapse and be swallowed up by the earth, which will in turn be eaten by the sun. That doesn’t depress me at all; rather, I find it invigorating. So I mentioned to my mom and uncle that I’d always wanted to check out Danvers Hospital.