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