by Marc Maron
The next thing I remember is being in the hospital surrounded by cops and doctors. What I had done is, I had been like, “Well, I’m going to sleep at my friend’s house,” and everybody had left and I just went to sleep on her floor, then apparently I got up in the middle of the night. This is the first time that I know of that I had done this, but I got up still in a blackout, so I kind of began my new day and the first thing I decided to do was take a car, not my car, at like four in the morning.
I got in the car and I drove it, not anywhere near that party or near where I lived at the time, and I drove it really fast into the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at the intersection of Pico and Genesee and that was a pretty cataclysmic car accident. There was no one else involved except me, thank goodness. I didn’t know that at the time. I did have to ask the cops if I had killed anyone and they told me that I had not. I took out three parking meters, two trees, a lightpost, and then the building and the car.
I was in the building. Half in, half out.
Marc
You don’t remember having any sort of anger at the water company? No water problems at home?
Rob
No, it had nothing to do with my bill.
Marc
There was no momentary, “Those fuckers!”
Rob
Water and power! Grr!
Marc
Fuck them! I saw Chinatown.
Rob
None of that. I don’t even remember. It could have been the kind of a thing where I fell back asleep within my blackout and then drove into it, it could have been an aggravated “fuck that building.” I don’t know.
I broke both my arms. You can see, there’s a pretty big scar on this wrist where they kind of rebuilt it. This longer scar on my arm here is, that’s all titanium in there. This was very badly broken. I’m slightly bionic. My legs were not broken but they were kind of torn open, my knees, so they had to sew them up with hundreds of stitches and put me in leg stabilizers so I couldn’t bend my knees. They recovered fairly quickly. For the first few days afterward I was in things that did not allow me to bend my knees, which I should tell you is kind of the aha moment. Being wheeled around in a wheelchair in jail by the cops and I couldn’t use my arms. They took me to the hospital in an ambulance and did what they needed to do to stabilize me, and then the cops said, “Mind if we take him now?” So they took me to jail.
They said, “You were extremely, unbelievably drunk.” They drew my blood and it was a .271, which, you know, a .08 is illegal so that’s effectively three and a half times the legal limit. They brought me to jail to book me and all that. When I was in jail I couldn’t use my arms on the wheels, I couldn’t use my feet on the ground, so occasionally I would slide out of the wheelchair in my bloody hospital gown, which was covered in blood and would come up over my dick and balls and asshole and show that to everybody in jail, which if you’ve been to jail you know you’re not supposed to do that.
Nothing happened. Nobody fucked my ass or anything.
Marc
I guess they draw a line. They’re like, “I want him to be able to fight a little.”
Rob
I know. That’s when I knew. I was like, “This is a problem.” When nobody will rape me. It’s funny because it was right then that I was like, as they say with drinking and stuff, if you need to go there to stop, that’s where you need to go. For me, I’d been trying to quit for years before that.
Marc
Is it a family situation?
Rob
It is, yes. Alcoholism, drug addiction, depression are pretty rampant.
I would have stayed in jail for days but they were like, “We can’t take care of you here so we’re going to take you home but here, come back on this date to court and then you can come back to jail for a long time.”
The next day I went back to my apartment, they took me back, they folded me in half and put me in a cruiser and drove me home, and I remember lying on my bed for a few hours and then I got up to piss and my urine was neon blue. That was terrifying to me because my urine is never neon blue, and I started to cry. I went to blow my nose and a bunch of bits of glass came out, which I later found out were windshield chunks, so then I started to sweat and I took off my hospital gown and there were stickers all over my body, but they were heart monitor anchor things that I had no idea, and I’m peeling them off. I would find more of them a week later.
I found out later from reading the hospital intake thing that the blue stuff, they had infused my bloodstream with something called methylene blue, which is what they flood you with to see if you’re hemorrhaging internally. I hadn’t been, but they didn’t tell me that. They weren’t like, “Just FYI, your urine will be the color of Gatorade for the next five pees.” That was the worst hangover of my life, that day.
Marc
Peeing blue, covered with stickers, blowing glass out of your nose.
Rob
Then basically I was sentenced. They said I could go to jail for x amount of time or I could go to rehab and a sober-living halfway house for four and a half months. I picked that because I didn’t want to go to jail, and I genuinely at the time was like, “I’ve had enough and I really want to get better and not do this anymore, and I don’t know quite how to do that,” so I definitely threw myself at their mercy.
CRAIG FERGUSON
After I got sober, that’s when things began to change. I’ve been sober now almost twenty years. I’ve been sober much longer than I ever drank alcohol. It’s very difficult for me to define my life by that one thing. That I’m still an alcoholic is beyond doubt, but that doesn’t mean to say that alcohol is a problem in my life, because it’s not. It fucking could be in a heartbeat, but it’s not right now.
Marc
The interesting thing about sobriety is that it’s much more difficult to be sober than it is to drink. Really, actually stopping drinking, once you get the hang of it, is the easier part of it. It’s fighting that fucking itch and that weird discontentment and that weird neediness. That’s the evolution, right?
Craig
Though I subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a disease, and if treated, you will recover from it, like it’s a disease. I think with me it’s not a disease. I think with me it’s a character description. I’m a personality type. What’s your personality type? Alcoholic. Some people are winter. Some people are summer. I’m a fucking alcoholic. It’s just what I am. I can’t be cured of my personality. I’ve tried. By drinking.
JASON SEGEL
A month into not drinking, I was driving down the street. I was driving back from San Diego Comic-Con. I was listening to the oldies station. All of a sudden I realized I was singing along to “Rock Around the Clock.” I was like, “Whoa, I feel good. I feel pretty happy. I’ve seen this in movies where people sing in the car in a real happy mood.” I’ve never looked back. It was the best decision I ever made for myself.
ARTIE LANGE—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, RADIO HOST
Remember that slogan “Hugs are better than drugs”? You remember that? Bumper stickers. I remember when I first saw that, I thought, “Oh jeez, I don’t know if that’s true. I never went to the Bronx to get somebody to hug me.”
ROBIN WILLIAMS
I’d go from doing Mork and Mindy and then coming to do The Comedy Store and then go to The Improv. Then you’d go hang out at clubs and then end up in the hills at some coke dealer’s house. (knock knock) “Angel, it’s Robin.” You haven’t gone to sleep. You’re like a vampire in a day pass.
If you’re famous, most of the time, you get it for free, which is weird. It’s like the same thing when you get gift baskets at award shows going, “I don’t need this stuff, thank you,” but my coke dealers would go, “Here, dude! It’s part of our advertising campaign. I got Robin loaded.” It’s part of the whole thing of a little dust for you and then you’ll spread the word to other celebrities and eventually, if they get busted, then they could subpoena you.
My dad was on drugs when I was a kid. As I got successful he cleaned up. Smart. Smart move by this man. Very smart. When I was a kid he was just in and out of rehab.
My dad was cocaine. My dad was heroin. Weed. That’s probably it.
My mom kicked him out when I was young, but he was still in our lives. He was in and out of jail. My dad was a rebel. I love him for it, though. I know what not to do because of what my dad did.
As I got older, me and my brother figured out we got to help Dad. We put him in rehab, it didn’t go, he came out, and I think the disappointment on your sons’ faces as we look at you, is enough to make you feel like you need to get your shit together. I think that’s what did it. You can put a person in all the help you want, at the end of the day if they don’t mentally want to do it, they’re not going to do it.
For us, it was saying, “You know what, Dad? Do you. Live your life. We can’t change you.” He had the realization on his own. I’m glad, honestly, that he went through what he did. I don’t have a drug itch in my body. I will never touch drugs. Just because of what I saw, but if you take him out of my life, who knows? With all this money I’ll fucking be snorting up piles of cocaine. Who knows what I would be doing? I wouldn’t know why it was bad or why not to mess with it. Now I have a visual reality of what it could do.
JOHN DARNIELLE—MUSICIAN, WRITER
Speed was my thing for a while. There’s very little that wasn’t my thing at some point or another, but speed in ’85, ’86. Back when it was made in bathtubs and back when you would split a quarter into two-eighths and just slam it one at a time. When it became clear that you could get AIDS and die from that, your first AIDS test was remarkably terrifying. That week-long wait that you used to have. Everybody you were going to have to apologize to, everybody you were going to have to call up and go, “I killed you.” The terror.
ARTIE LANGE
I was taking fifty pills a day. I went to this one club and I was in full-blown withdrawal when I got there. There were three sold-out shows. I was sweating bad. The manager was like, “What do I gotta do to get you onstage? I need to get you onstage.”
“Can you get me a hundred Percocet?”
He says, “I can. How many are you taking a day?”
“Maybe like thirty.”
He says, out loud, “You should try heroin. It’s better for your liver.”
And I said, “Thank you, Doctor.”
He got me the Percocet to get me through the show. But then at the end of the night he had four bags of heroin. And it was brown. It was good. He says, “Just snort it.”
I go back to my hotel. I did three lines of it. Liberal, generous lines. I put on the TV and there was some movie on. And when my head hit the pillow I said out loud—knowing me—I said out loud, “I’m in trouble.”
It was euphoria like I never felt before, going through me. My head hit that pillow, and you know how I could tell heroin’s great? People ask, “Why is heroin addictive?” This is my answer: the movie that was on was Alex & Emma with Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson, and I never turned it off.
AMAZING JOHNATHAN—COMEDIAN, MAGICIAN
I did a lot of cocaine. I did a lot of it. For a long time. I wasn’t one of the guys who quit after John Belushi’s party. That’s when everybody quit, around that year. Everyone thought, “This is serious. This could kill you.” No, I kept going man. That didn’t faze me at all. I ended up smoking it. You know what got me off of it? Speed. I couldn’t get coke one night, so speed was the only thing left to do. I actually smoked that too. I smoked it like a fiend and I would go in my garage and I would write and write and write.
Then it stopped. I stopped being creative on it and it was like, now I was a normal guy with a habit.
ARTIE LANGE
The thing about heroin to me was you didn’t forget your problems. You remembered them but you didn’t give a fuck about them. It was great. It was like, “Fuck you, I don’t care.” Again, the same thing with coke. I finally said, “I can control this. It’s all right.” First six months, my tolerance wasn’t up and it was great. I was able to get a contact that kept me supplied.
My tolerance got built up after six months and then I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not getting high anymore.” I couldn’t stop withdrawals. Then I started missing shit. Showing up to shit looking bad. Trips on the road were hell because I’m like, “I got to find a contact in Pittsburgh, otherwise I’ll die in Pittsburgh from withdrawals or something.”
I hired guys to keep me away from drugs and one guy was my security who was getting me drugs. It’s all you think about. Fuck pussy, money, a career, friendships, and family. All you think about is the next fucking hit. And avoiding the withdrawals because it’s the worst flu times a million.
NATASHA LYONNE—ACTOR
So many people struggle to stick with sobriety. It is not for the faint of heart.
If you are really going to do it. If you are as low-bottom of a case as I was, which was like a real sort of I-hope-to-die junkie, then I wish you good luck and godspeed. I had someone describe it to me as not only do you have to smash down the house, but you have to then take out the Indian burial ground underneath the foundation of the house and then begin to rebuild. That process to me is certainly why I think a lot of people twenty-eight days later can’t really hack it because it’s not a twenty-eight-day scene.
For me, and the existential angst of my teenage years, I was really getting hooked on the aesthetic appeal of just so many of these heroes. This mass of characters that just seem like I’m walking in line with, like they’re my friends. That’s part of what’s tricky. It’s hard to listen to music when you get clean because it just brings up all of that stuff. Like, I want to be the fucking cool guy. You romanticize it. And a series of platitudes certainly don’t feel very romantic by comparison. If you have the sort of makeup that leads you to want to shoot up while listening to Lou Reed in the first place, “one day at a time” feels like the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life as a solution to my fucking problem.
I think it was the hard drugs that really took it to another level. The full-blown addiction. I remember making a very clear decision when I threw in the towel on life. I made an active choice to walk away and be like, listen this is the fucking truth, it’s the belly of the beast. It’s not about dancing on tables, this is about hanging out with one-legged Tony who has a colostomy bag in his fucking project apartment with the little tiny roaches crawling down the wall. You know, passing the pipe and going in the bathroom to shoot heroin with the girls who are turning tricks and luckily I have residuals.
I think I was sort of like, “What is this about? Fame? Why is that the big end in life?” To be like, “Let me borrow your dress so I can go to your big movie premiere so you can take my picture and then maybe you’ll give me a job if I’m skinny enough.” Fuck you. I didn’t want to do it. There’s no there there.
So once that happened is when it really got bad. I made the decision that the best way to get rid of my heroin problem was through crack.
I spent so many years being like, I hate myself and I want to die, that like, I’m going to fucking die, I might as well live a little. I just did so much of that thinking that I’m just relieved now.
The first bunch of years are so just really brutal. I hated myself a lot. My first few years of being clean and functioning, I was just so angry. Like, what the fuck do you mean I have to make my own bed? These basic things that nobody taught me. What do you mean I’ve got to get there on time?
You have to constantly monitor yourself. “All right, you’re doing a good job. You’re doing all right. Listen, you brushed your teeth at night too, this is a fucking epic day.”
Marc
People who don’t have the bug, who don’t have the hungry animal inside of them that is never sated, never fed, that demands that you feed it, with the idea that you’re going to feel whole and better, there’s just no end
to that. If you’ve never had the feeling where your brain locks in on something so hard, whether it’s drugs or food or gambling or sex, there is a trigger within people that have addiction where it’s like, before you get it, all you can think about is getting it and your brain then locks in on the obsession. Once you get a taste of whatever it is, that fucking animal will not stop eating. It’s baffling. You can’t explain it to somebody who doesn’t have it.
But a lot of people have it.
ROB DELANEY
I can name a few works of art that do effectively communicate it kind of well. I think, honest to God and it’s going to sound cheesy, but the film Trainspotting has elements of it that show the horror of it. That movie Requiem for a Dream, I think when it gets really dark, addresses it.
One of the best ones, and I feel like such a dork for saying this, is in the Lord of the Rings movie when the Gollum thing splits into two pieces and argues with himself and one of them is trying to rip it apart. That struck home for me because I felt like I had a physical, alive monster with a voice and feelings and all that shit that lived inside. My rib cage was like a jail cell and it was shaking, rattling at the bars, just saying, “Give me, give me, give me,” and it’s maddening. That is what it feels like.
I don’t feel guilty now if I feel like, “Oh, I’d like to be really high right now,” or whatever. I don’t feel bad about that, I just kind of let that thought go.
It feels like a chemical equation is being completed. I’m a percentage of what I could be, but add drugs or alcohol, now I’m 100 percent and let’s fucking roll. Introduce it and then I’m like, “Here I am.” I’m not myself until you put drugs or alcohol into me.