by Rob Delaney
If you’d asked me to hand you an envelope filled with feathers, I would have said, “My apologies; that’s just too much for me right now. Please go away.”
I also vomited once or twice a day.
What was odd though is that it wasn’t an “Oh my God, I am overwhelmed with a tummy typhoon! I must expel my stomach’s contents immediately.” It was more that I could feel poison gradually accumulating in my stomach throughout the day and I’d think, “I guess I should get rid of this now.” I could, quite literally, “schedule” my pukes.
I went in on Monday and they drew blood. I’d remained yellow, had no appetite, and was puking once or twice a day. After the visit to the doctor, I foolishly went back to work. As long as I didn’t poop in or near anyone’s mouth or food, others were fairly safe from infection. I figured I’d soldier through, since all I did was sit in a chair and write jokes.
And then the fun started!
I’d been back at my desk for maybe five minutes before Christian, one of the show’s producers, came in and said, “Dude, guess what: Chrissy and Ellen have hepatitis!”
“Oh, wow,” I said.
“How did your doctor appointment go?”
“Um, well, I was tested for hepatitis too, and they think that might be what I have.”
The tone of the room changed and the four people in it looked at me the way you’d look at a dead crow you’d found on your living room floor.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “they told me I’m only contagious if you eat my poo. So, um, don’t do that and you’ll be fine.”
Someone found out that Chrissy had been in the hospital for several days. Ellen had been home sick for a week. Then our executive producer came in and announced that his wife had hepatitis. It was an epidemic! Not long after, our executive producer told me to go home and await further instruction. Then my doctor called me to confirm that I did in fact have hepatitis A. He told me I’d just have it until it went away, that there was nothing we could do, and that it might take a couple weeks to start feeling normal. I eventually found out that two other people in our office had contracted it, bringing the grand total up to six.
I called my wife to tell her I sure did have hepatitis A and would have a couple more rough weeks to look forward to. She was much more pleasant once it was confirmed that I had a reasonably serious disease.
All of the women who got hepatitis were really beautiful and I wish I could have gotten the hepatitis from them, or at least have been quarantined with them once we found out we had it. I guess since the only way you can get hepatitis is to eat poop in one form or another, I’d rather have gotten chlamydia from them. Chlamydia! Now there’s an STD! It’s the only STD I ever got and I didn’t even know I had it until a doctor tested me for something else. Then you just take drugs and it goes away. Not that it can’t have very real ramifications for women—it absolutely can—it’s just nice that if you catch it and treat it early enough, it goes away, unlike AIDS, herpes, or BUTTHOLE WARTS, which stick around for the long run. When I was at the halfway house after rehab, one of my roommates asked me to give him a ride to a health clinic to get his genital warts frozen off. It hadn’t occurred to me the type of maintenance one would have to do if they had witchy warts around their junkyard.
In any case, they didn’t send me and the sick, sexy women I worked with to a quarantined biosphere in the Arizona desert; they just sent us home to recover individually. Pretty lame if you ask me. I’m surprised I ever truly “healed” emotionally. My wife was at work, so I just stayed in bed for entire days and only got up to vomit periodically.
Your liver very much does not function normally when you have hepatitis. The symptoms are actually kind of fascinating. First, as I said earlier, my skin was yellow. If you’re normally whitish, that’s unsettling. The yellowness of my eyes was even more upsetting.
The way you get rid of hepatitis is the best. You poop it out. What’s odd is that that’s the least unpleasant part of the whole affair. Poops that you associate with sickness are usually awful, carnage-ridden affairs. But with hepatitis, you are producing these claylike, nonoffensive-smelling piles of matter that are more weird than anything else. And with each little clay butt-sculpture, more hepatitis exits your body.
Then something amazing happened. The Los Angeles Department of Health swooped in to investigate. Apparently when you’re diagnosed with hepatitis, your doctor immediately notifies the D.O.H. I was BLOWN AWAY by how good and thorough these people were at their jobs. They interviewed every employee of our show to figure out where they’d been and what they’d eaten for the last month. I had several conversations and spent a total of about two hours with different doctors and nurses helping them zero in on suspected sources of the disease. It was an almost hypnotic interrogation process where they’d help you relax, then expertly guide you through food and restaurant memories you weren’t aware you’d even stored. Though I was never told definitively, we all figured it was probably a cake from a fairly high-end bakery we had all eaten. It had some fruit on it that—we decided—had been watered with dirty water or handled by an employee who had dirty hepatitis poo-hands. It made me realize, “Hey, how about that? There are amazing government organizations primed and ready to pounce and help fix potentially deadly situations.” It was one of the few times I was happy to have a little bit of my paycheck go to taxes. It turns out the government uses our money to good effect here and there. It makes me think of Ron Paul’s popularity and people’s tendency to embrace Libertarianism. I just can’t imagine a world, or perhaps I should say a United States, where that philosophy would work. There are three hundred million people in the United States. Many good, some bad; but there are a LOT and they represent the poor, the wealthy, every race and creed and profession there is, and a government can form a pretty good lubricant for the engine of society.
Also, MTV was magnificent throughout the whole affair. They paid everyone who missed work due to poo consumption and bought every staff member immune globulin shots. It was my favorite type of problem-solving by a big organization: Acknowledge a problem and deal with it thoroughly and transparently. Big ups to MTV for that one. Maybe they sense their karmic debt to the world for creating Jersey Shore, and thereby spreading untold numbers of new, incurable strains of sexually transmitted diseases.
The fantastic news is that we all had hepatitis A, not B or C. Those ones kill you. Hepatitis A rarely kills people and then once it’s gone, it’s gone and you’re immune to it. So if you’re test-driving hepatitises, may I recommend hepatitis A? It really is the Cadillac of hepatitises.
I didn’t really care that I had hepatitis; while it sucked when you had it, once it went away, you were fine. I was terrified that Leah would get it, however, because she was five months pregnant. Information on whether a pregnant woman could safely be vaccinated and/or receive the immune globulin shot that they recommended for people who’d been exposed was not terribly easy to get. Doctors and nurses contradicted one another and you could tell they were filtering their answer through their “I don’t want to get sued”-ometers. Ultimately, we averaged their answers and figured we’d get her treated, the rationale being that it was worth it to ensure her liver’s functionality during pregnancy. To help safeguard her, I remained a vigilant bather and hand-washer. I also made sure we didn’t share cups or utensils and I took strict care not to poo in her mouth, even at night. We didn’t have sex either, which was fine with me since I would have probably thrown up on her and, like many women, Leah hates that.
During the three or so weeks I was symptomatic, I didn’t dream at night. I’m normally a vivid dreamer and I am fortunate to remember many of them. When I had hepatitis, however: no dreams. Hepatitis stole my dreams. And what types of dreams did it steal? Dreams about cats, primarily. For the last several years, my dreams have been DOMINATED by cats. I know nothing about dream analysis, nor do I put much faith in what I’ve heard about dream analysis. But if dreaming about cats means anything, I am
“that thing” times a thousand.
In real life, I love cats. I’m not a cat “person.” I don’t even have a cat. We had a kitten briefly, when I was a boy. Her name was Lava and we gave her to my uncle after our neighbors’ Maine Coon cat attacked her, necessitating surgeries and rendering her terrorized for life. My uncle had a bigger house and yard, and we thought she might have more fun being terrified there.
I love dogs, too, so I don’t take a side on the cats vs. dogs battle many of earth’s citizens are involved in. That said, I fuckin’ love cats. And they love me. In me, they recognize a true friend. They’ll run across the street to say hello to me. More than once I’ve been driving, seen a cat on a sidewalk, stopped and rolled down my window, and the cat’s run up and let me reach out my window and pet it. We have an understanding.
When night falls, and I wrap up my day and hop in the sack, I very frequently dream about more cats. Often we’re talking and just hanging out, they way cats and dudes do, but just as frequently, I’ll be lying on the floor with five or so cats just sitting on my body or, worse yet, I’ll be just smooshing my face into a cat’s belly and tickling it and trying to wear it like a hat. Why? I don’t know. They’re just such little fucking cutie pies I want to pet them and play with them and make them happy. Funny, I feel like much more of a weirdo writing about this than I do about showing my naked butthole to a person. Hey, at least I’m not hurting anybody. Especially the cats. They love it. And who are you to judge me? Fuck you, that’s who. Leave us alone.
Fortunately I got all my cat dreams back after I shit out all the hepatitis.
Now, I’m happy to say I’m immune to hepatitis A. Not that I’ll go out and deliberately consume a human shit burger, but if I eat one by mistake, I’ll be A-OK.
It saddens me that my wife’s immunity (or anyone’s immunity who gets vaccinated) comes from a shot rather than a month or so of puking, yellow skin, and dreamless sleep. Not that I want them to endure what I did, I just feel that they took the equivalent of an express bus to their position of relative safety, missing out on some truly fascinating neighborhoods of scalding piss and crushing fatigue along the way. I, on the other hand, walked.
la paternité
Since my son Billy is a boy, he came with a penis. We had declined to find out his sex when Leah was pregnant because we wanted to be surprised.
When he came out (of Leah’s body, via her vagina) our amazing ob-gyn, Dr. Allyson Gonzalez, held him up and said, “Look what you had!” I had to scrutinize his genitals to realize he had a penis and testicles. Not because they weren’t lovely and fully formed and all, but because I was just so in shock that if you’d held a clearly labeled cup of peach yogurt in front of me, I would’ve needed a full minute to register, “This is peach yogurt.”
We had previously decided not to circumcise if we had a boy. We did our homework of course, and since the official opinion of the medical community in 2011 was “Do whatever you want,” we figured we would not have immediate elective surgery on our baby boy’s beautiful little penisette the moment after he was born. I’m not a doctor, or even smart, so do your own research and make your own penis decisions, but since soap is generally accessible as needed these days, we decided we’d teach him good hygiene and let him have one hundred percent of the penis he came into this world with.
The sole argument we could come up with to circumcise him was that I’m circumcised. New-parent books and other parents we spoke to often suggested you “do what the dad did” (or had done to him). But since the cycle of voluntary baby penis laceration must stop somewhere, we figured it would be with us. That said, we’ve come up with an explanation as to why his penis looks different from mine that we are ready to give him when the time comes.
In all likelihood he’ll see my penis when we’re showering or I’m showing him how to pee standing up and wonder, “Daddy, why is my penis different-looking from yours?”
Per the plan my wife and I have developed, I’ll tell him, “Well, when I was your age, my mommy asked me to put my toys away, and I didn’t. So she cut off a portion of my penis. So—put away your toys when Mommy asks.” I think that’s a good parenting decision.
Since bringing Billy home, I’ve decided that I like him a lot; I love him, even. This is probably because (head reason) I’m programmed to, and (heart reason) the sight/smell/sound of him is intoxicating and I can’t get enough of it. I want to smell him so hard that I smell all the nutrients out of the top of his head and make him stupid.
I want his first words to be “Dad? Stop smelling me.”
If you have a kid, you know what I mean. If you don’t, you don’t. You don’t know it if you have a pet, no matter how much of a snuggle muffin your pet may be. I would put my neighbor’s cat Dave, whom I love deeply, into a blender and puree him should a situation arise where some modern-day Moriarty told me that doing so would ensure my son’s safety. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but know that I am prepared for it.
One major thing I realized when he was born is that I am definitely going to die. Of course I knew that on paper prior to his birth, but seeing a human life commence in front of my face drove bone-deep the knowledge that lives must also end, just as thoroughly. For the first few days after he was born I would look at his adorable, smooshed-up little face and think, “You little cutie pie! You will attend my funeral!”
At least I hope he does. And I hope that funeral is way, way, way in the future, much further than I’d hoped it would be before I became a father. The way I see it, my new primary function on this earth is simply to die before my son. Hopefully it’ll happen as far into the future as possible so he is best prepared to deal with the vicissitudes of life, which can range in pleasurability from eating a fresh key lime pie you made yourself after a rewarding sixty-nine session with a new lover, all the way to having to pay for back surgery with three credit cards because you couldn’t afford the COBRA payments on the health insurance you lost when you were laid off from your job as a teacher.
Another thing I’ve learned firsthand is that moms are more important than dads. Measurably. The baby knows the mom when it comes out; it’s been inside her for about forty weeks. The dad is just some guy, albeit a nice one, hopefully. And the baby borrows the mom’s immune system as it begins feeding from milk the mother’s body makes just for it. But dads are still important. Having assisted my wife during her pregnancy, the birth of our son, and as much as possible over the first years of his life, I’d like to put in writing that a man who gets a woman pregnant and doesn’t stick around to help is a sad little cunt.
The argument could be made that mother and child are better off without this cunt-faced, cunty-cunt, non-man hanging around, but I still think he should have his bank account drained twice a month and seventy or so pounds of pig-iron hung around his neck for at least eighteen years. I also endorse him being pelted with human diarrhea eight to ten times a day without warning, so he knows what he’s missing. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to smell the baby his lazy load helped create, as it may result in an alchemical reaction where he transforms so quickly into a man who takes responsibility for his orgasms that he dies of a heart attack on the spot.
Perhaps my favorite thing about my son is how much weaker he is than me. The reason for that is that I want to hug and tickle and squeeze and sniff him WAY more than he wants me to. If it were up to him, he’d wriggle away and play with blocks or pretend he was a chicken for half an hour alone in his room.
But he can’t, because my strength is vastly superior and I pin him down and snuzzle him and smoosh my face into his stomach and tickle his face with my hair and yell, “BLORP BLORP BLORP!” in his face until I feel like stopping. And he can quite literally do nothing about it. The other day I was lying on our couch reading a book and he climbed up and sat on my head and read his own little book about a magic crayon. And I let him. Only for, like, forty minutes, though.
the LA riots. @robdelaney When you’re really angry
, instead of saying a filthy curse word, try yelling “Finnegan’s Biscuits!” I find it quite satisfying. @robdelaney San Francisco airport has RUG on the floor so I can’t “kickslide” my bag around. What an embarrassing failure of a city & its people. @robdelaney On this day in 1776, Amerigo Vespucci held Betsy Ross’s hand as she struggled mightily to birth this great nation. @robdelaney Mitt Romney’s email password is “Chamomile.” @robdelaney 10 years ago today, Canada received its first indoor toilet. @robdelaney I haven’t seen Republicans this excited since Ronald Reagan invented AIDS! @robdelaney Facebook has made me hate birthdays more than funerals. @robdelaney “Daddy, may I trouble you to clean a shocking amount of poo off my genitalia?” - if babies could talk @robdelaney Remember when Michael Jackson hung his baby off that balcony as a goof? He’s dead now. @robdelaney The Navy should develop something based on “gaydar” that would allow ships & planes to recognize approaching objects. @robdelaney “The club can’t even handle me right now.” What, like structurally? Should we call an engineer? Evacuate? Please advise. @robdelaney “Sorry I didn’t reply to your email Terry, a wolf ripped my hands off… Oh these? Um, I got new hands? Gotta go!” @robdelaney “Can I maim myself with it?” - my toddler’s mental checklist before deciding to play with something @robdelaney My son just announced “I like snacks.” I’m off to draft a press release. @robdelaney “Buttocks! Sexy sexy buttocks! Introduce me to your buttocks! My name is Tony!” - from my new song, “Dusk in Vienna” @robdelaney ME WATCHING OLYMPIC EVENT: “Holy shit that was amazing!” COMMENTATOR: “Ooh, that was not good at all. He must really be upset with himself.” @robdelaney Stressed? Try this: Picture a lake at dawn. Ducks beginning to stir… Then drink 22 beers & drive your car into a church. @robdelaney If someone’s Twitter picture has 2 or more people in it, I write a letter to my senator. @robdelaney If your ad has one black person, one white person, one brown person & one Asian person in it, I will not buy your product. @robdelaney Just saw a great panel at Comic-Con, “How to Talk to a Human Woman.” @robdelaney In certain Eastern cultures, it’s considered a grave insult to shit all over the floor in someone’s home. @robdelaney One of my favorite things about raps music is the fun ethnic code words they use for everyday things like money & women. I’m learning a lot! @robdelaney My dog got hit by a train today & we found out my brother didn’t make parole. Talk about a case of the Mondays!! @robdelaney I bet 2 guys named