The Comedy Tribune

The car pulled into the driveway of the cheapest rehab centre we could find, which still cost about the same as a year’s worth of cocaine. It seemed insane that doing blow and not doing blow would both be so wildly expensive. No wonder so many people choose the drug. If the eventuality is spending fifteen grand, do you want to spend it having fun or invest it in never having fun again?

The reality of addiction is not fun, of course, but the disease is a crafty sorcerer. You’ll smile while you burn.

It was warm for December. At the end of the driveway loomed an era-blending structure, comprised of different additions. The sort of Franken-house stood indifferent to my arrival. It was the crown jewel of a modest plot and adorned with a few road hockey nets and mismatched pieces of patio furniture. This would be home for the next 30 days.

The pandemic had mostly come and gone, but some pesky restrictions lingered, and so my two accompanying friends, Alex and Ryan, would say goodbye in the yard. I was required to produce a negative Covid test, which wasn’t much bother to me. After years of drug abuse, you could poke my brain with a Q-tip without touching the sides of my nostril.

A welcome party of one was sent to meet us.

“Hi, I’m Mike,” he said, friendly enough. He had a Chicago Blackhawks shirt on and seemed like he had been through it himself.

I would drink until my skin was a perfect medium rare.

“Hi, Mike,” my friend Alex replied.

“How’d you know my name?” answered Mike, who had a moment ago told us his name was Mike.

This confused man was to aid in the rewiring of my brain. His senior moment did not inspire confidence, but I had already paid the deposit.

Mike asked which of us was there to stay. When my friends pointed to me, I joked that I was only there to restock the vending machine. Mike’s blank look in response let me know it was going to be a long month.

Alex and Ryan said some kind of farewell, laced with words of encouragement. I heard them in the same way you can always hear your fridge humming. My brain was elsewhere. I was panicked and my ego was working hard to understand how it could have led us here.

The admission process was what you’d expect. I signed papers. Introductions were made. Questions were asked. Things were explained. I peed in front of a guy I didn’t think I liked very much. Later, I found out he was the guy everyone didn’t like very much. In his defense, “Guy Who Watches You Pee” is probably a tough gig. All of my personal items were also inserted into a bedbug-killing microwave device– a humiliating precaution.

Eventually, I was shown to my shared quarters, empty at that time while the men who would become my family were in group. The beds were magical. No matter the height of the man, their length was the same, minus two inches. If anyone ever dreamed of sleeping on old clock parts, this was about as close as they would get. I was given sheets and instructed to make my bed. It was made clear the bed was to be made each and every morning or there would be consequences. “What’re you gonna do? Send me to rehab?” my brain thought, but I was still gun-shy from my vending machine joke eating shit, so I just made the stupid bed.

A few minutes of alone time were granted to me. I’d been under constant surveillance since my intervention three days prior. Interventions have a terrible energy. Like a surprise birthday party mixed with a parent-teacher interview. One of the truest bad times out there. Everyone writes letters. People cry reading their own words, which feels indulgent. There are no snacks. You’d think if you were going to sit someone down and accurately describe every single thing wrong with them directly to their face, you’d break out a bag of chips.

A bed to save your life and ruin your back.

The letters written were long and mentioned a lot of things about me I wish weren’t true, so I’ll just give you the gist. All of my closest friends were fed up with me and if I did not agree to go to rehab, they would no longer be my friends. I tried to plea-bargain myself out of rehab, saying I would instead go stay with my parents and begin to attend meetings and therapy, but I ran into a brick wall. Rehab was the deal. I looked around the room, decided having these people was cumulatively worth rehab’s $15,000 price tag, and agreed to go.

The phone call to my parents was hard, but easier than I thought. My older brother had already been to rehab (bless him for that), so this was all a bit old hat for them. The folks had seen it before. They seemed concerned, but not afraid.

After an intervention, you feel naked and raw. You’ve been emotionally flayed and the people doing it don’t want to, so they’re a bit shaky with the blade. My friends understood that and treated me gently afterward. I was brought home, given Chinese food, and allowed to watch a violent cartoon I like. It was explained that I had their love, but not their trust, so someone would be with me at all times until I was dropped at rehab. There was concern that I would go on one last bender and die.

It wasn’t unfounded to think I might die. It was a smart bet. The majority of my caloric intake was draft beer, I was doing cocaine more days than I wasn’t, and I had developed somewhat regular heart pain. More than once I had sat alone in my room, high beyond comfort or joy, thinking I was about to overdose. I had to force myself to stay awake because I was scared that if I slept I wouldn’t wake up. The dying didn’t frighten me, but I found the circumstance embarrassing. If there was some way to heroically overdose on cocaine, I would have taken that deal.

If I was conscious, there was probably a beer this close to my face.

My new bunkmate for the month walked in. He looked to be about 5'9", so he sat down on his 5'7" mattress. This was Jared. His story ain’t mine to tell, but believe me when I tell you this is one of the strongest motherfuckers walking. You could tell right away this guy was going to turn it around. Attending the cheapest rehab on the market meant the facility was mostly me and guys on parole, so I was nervous about who I’d be paired up with, but Jared was normal and nice and offered to show me around. I didn’t yet know how loud he snored, so I was happy we were going to share the room.

The layout of the house was a bit odd, like an N64 GoldenEye level no one likes, but all the essentials were there. We had a dining room, common area with a TV, a couple quiet rooms to work, a kitchen, a laundry room, bathrooms, and shower stalls. Throughout the month, people would admit their darkest secrets to each other, but the one thing never discussed was that those shower stalls were the only logical place to masturbate.

It was a barebones facility, but that had been my choice. Bougier options had been presented. One place even boasted equestrian therapy. That’s therapy with a horse. Apparently you groom and feed a horse while supervised by a mental health professional. Sounds an awful lot like someone making you pay to look after their horse for them. People will fall for anything. Maybe the really sick folks get to shovel the horse’s shit.

The last task of the day at my mercifully horseless rehab was to see the nurse.

“So, we have you for 35 days,” she said.

“I thought it was 30 days,” I replied, desperately hoping I was the correct one.

“Nope, 35,” she confirmed.

Fuck.

“At least day one is pretty much in the books,” I said to her, in an effort to cheer myself up.

“This is day zero,” she said. Her words stung. “It doesn’t count towards the 35.”

In an unbelievable display of maturity and growth, I accepted this woman was just a messenger and I would not intentionally vomit on her desk.

So be it. Thirty-five days. December 7th to January 11th. No visitors allowed, thanks to the bat soup virus. I was going to miss Christmas, New Year’s, and to a lesser extent Hanukkah. I’m not Jewish, so that shouldn’t have mattered, but when you are institutionalized, it’s easy to feel bad for yourself. I was missing fucking Hanukkah.

Jared snored in IMAX. The sound wrapped around the room. He was far from the only offender. The house had thin walls, and a chorus of badly damaged nasal cavities all sang in terrible harmony.

I was too stressed to sleep, anyway. I had debt to deal with, old and new, and the stay here meant cancelling a fair amount of gigs. I’m a comedian, by the way. I’d been doing stand up for about 12 years at this point and drinking heavily for the same. The cocaine abuse came along later, as it does. There was a time when I juggled all three of these things beautifully. I had three jobs, an active social life, shows were going great, and I was wrecked the whole time. A couple times I had fallen asleep at work, standing up, while chopping vegetables, but mostly everything was fine.

Functional addiction is a curse, and the “functional” part is temporary. Imperceptibly, the disease chips away at you. Too slowly for you to see the change. At my lowest, I still believed I was the guy I had always been, while to the people who loved me I was unrecognizable, both in appearance and action. I’d become unreliable, a notorious DM-sliding creep, and worst of all none of my T-shirts fit anymore. I had become bullshit.

Day two, which was day one, the work began.

As begrudging as my attendance was, I am also competitive and insane. My friends wanted me sober? I’d be so sober. I’d be exactly the person they remembered fondly again! That would show them. Spite is a powerful motivator until you find a better one.

You would think the guy on the right was my coke dealer, but he’s not. That’s my favourite magician.

Saving my career was also a big motivator, but I made myself turn off the comedian brain for the first two weeks. That would too easily become a form of escapism. I was not there as a comedian, I was there as a sick man, and those did not always have to be the same thing. I was determined to drink the Kool-Aid, trust the process, and come out the other side looking $15,000 healthier.

The most powerful form of healing might be watching others heal. Monkey see, monkey do. Rehab brings you face-to-face with the knowledge that your pain is not unique. I thought no one could understand me and then was marched into a house full of myself. “Is your head poofy and fucked? Our heads are poofy and fucked too,” they all said to me with their eyes. Our traumas were different, but we had the same problem.

We did not love ourselves (at least, not outside the showers) and permanent change is impossible without self-love. We would have to learn.

Watching the light come back into my brothers’ eyes was a privilege. As a straight white man, I added it to my pile of those. I was getting to see people become themselves again in real time. It was powerful. It made me want to be myself again, too, whatever that looked like.

And so I worked. And I did it for me. Not just to prove to my friends that I could.

Some days were harder than others. Decorating the Christmas tree was bleak. We were left to do it as a group activity. A lot of people went for a smoke. Smoking is the one vice I don’t have, so I stayed. We tarted the tree up with all the enthusiasm of Amazon factory workers and an energy the opposite of Feng Shui. It came time for the tree to be adorned with a star atop and easily the most inappropriate candidate emerged. Tom, bless him, was in his sixties, heavy set, and made the step ladder look like some kind of even smaller ladder. I remember staring eye-to-eye with Tom’s ass crack thinking, “I may have made a few mistakes in my life.” Credit to Tom, he got that damn star up there.

Other days were not so bad. My favourite day was learning about getting a sponsor. One guy’s first question was if his sponsor could be a “chick”. He was told no. He asked why. Matter of factly, the counsellor told him, “Because you’re all perverts.” In a room of 23 men, not one of us protested that statement. God, that makes me laugh. He was right, we knew it, we moved on.

By Christmas Day, I was more than halfway done. Hanukkah had come and gone, probably, and I was feeling good. I was exercising twice a day, absolutely dominating the house’s dish pit, learning a ton, and eating as clean as I could. It is hard to slim down in rehab. Some guys come in dangerously underweight, so they have to cater to that first, before the vanities of the fatso alcoholics. But I tried. Every day after our first group session, they would leave out fresh baked muffins. And every day, for 35 days, I would pick up one of those muffins, smell it, and then eat an apple.

It was time to start writing. This was the scariest part. Could I be funny without drugs and booze? If sober me wasn’t funny, what then? Would I have to quit stand-up and do improv?

I put pen to paper. My hand was shaky. For once, it was from nerves and not alcohol withdrawal. It took a few minutes, but the pen galloped.

A stunning revelation came upon me. Repeatedly ingesting poison to the point of memory loss and regurgitation may not have been helping my brain at all. It might even have been slowing it down a touch.

From there, I started to have some fun. I laughed easier. I slept better. I smiled when I saw myself in the mirror. I still do sometimes. Life is better when the feeling forces the smile, instead of trying to do it the other way around. When your real confidence comes back, you don’t miss the diet product your vices provide.

By the time the new year rolled around, I was basically the mayor of rehab. A few others and I were soon to graduate and we had a new crop to show around, repaying those that showed us. Life had become strangely comfortable. I was in tight enough with the kitchen staff to get some extra pancakes with breakfast. I was in tight enough with the evening staff to weasel some extra phone time for me and the boys. During leisure time, I would poll the group on what movie to watch, and put on the consensus. It was a joint decision, but I held the remote.

I was in control.

Readers may be happy to find this piece’s author currently sits seventeen months sober, with zero relapses. In that time, he’s run a marathon, developed a keen interest in the making of butter tarts, and caught up on a lot of sleep. His shirts fit.

Andrew Barr - @andrewbarrcomedy