Sooner or Later, Your Legs Give Way
“My process is to try and live my life without letting the grief consume me.”
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Today we’re rerunning two essays: the first, by A.J., about the Dopey podcast and its founders, Dave and Chris, both recovering addicts who met in rehab; the second, by Dave, about losing Chris to a relapse and overdose. “The worst thing that could have ever happened did,” A.J. writes about Chris’s death. “So where do you go from there?”
Dave’s essay isn’t the answer to that question because there isn’t a singular answer. No singular answer for everyone; no singular answer for anyone. How do you move forward in the wake of a bad thing, a worse thing, the worst thing? is a question with as many answers as there are people, as there are days to be faced and reasons to face them.
Dave is on this week’s episode of The Small Bow Podcast, which you can find all the usual places podcasts are found.
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Where Do You Go From There?
Originally published July 1, 2020
I’m intimidated by former heroin users. If one of them shows up to an AA meeting I’m in, I’m always concerned that they’ll be quietly judging me if I share. Like, why does this guy think he has a problem? Just take some Tylenol and a yoga class, man. You’re fine. Even my best drug war stories don’t have the same desperation or degradation as most hardcore heroin users have experienced. I’ve contemplated punching up my qualifications a bit, exaggerating my personal losses, just to connect to the person who routinely passed out with a needle stuck halfway in their arm in a McDonald’s toilet and let them know that yes, I was also in the shit.
Instead, one of two things will happen then: a) I will not share at all, or b) I’ll focus more on my depression. How else can I offer some relevant “experience, strength and hope” to someone who’s survived homelessness and five overdoses and been to rehab 12 times in six years? But most of the time I just listen. I listen because I’m in awe of how some people’s lives can blow up so spectacularly — whose overworked hearts have actually stopped on several occasions — yet they have managed to reattach their own limbs and walk among us civilians again. They have a level of humility and perseverance that I want.
Plus, heroin users have the best stories.
*****
My friend Dave doesn’t suffer from depression at all. When I tell him some of my problems, including my most recent setback, he can’t relate. Dave used heroin for more than a decade and has been to several rehabs and half a dozen detoxes, so he has plenty of those desperate, degrading, upsetting stories. He is 46 — my age exactly — and he now has a wife and two kids in a Long Island home and shows up for work on time with consistency — a sense of urgency, even — and his gratitude is leveling. Even on bad days, when kids and jobs and bills become overwhelming, he’s grateful. He has perspective, he helps me have perspective. He has empathy for all humans in a way that I find disarming, gentle even. Plus, he has the best stories.
Like, this one time, while living in Los Angeles, Dave got a gig as a children’s birthday entertainer. He had to learn how to make balloon animals — he actually took classes to learn how to do this, which is amazing that these classes even exist, but makes total sense. How else would someone learn how to make a horse or a hat out of balloons?
Anyway, Dave got this gig one time while he was a full-blown heroin addict playing Big Bird for a kid’s birthday party. That was the down side of this balloon animal job: he had to dress up in costume for most of them — a Power Ranger one day, a clown the next. But on this day, he’s hired to play Big Bird. So he’s racing to this kid’s birthday party, chain-smoking cigarettes on the 101 because he’s very late, he’s high as hell, and he’s missed the exit to Temecula several times. He’s so distracted, so sweaty and riddled with the anxiety that’s unique to those of us who are late to everything even though we don’t want to be. This was 2005, he had no GPS. He had to pull over to the side of the road several times to read one of those impossible-to-read “Maps of Los Angeles” books he’d picked up before he moved, shoved in a glove compartment, and never read before until the moment he had become so lost. He was going to be so late. This was so bad.
When he finally arrives at the house, he can tell already that the six-year-old’s birthday party is in full-swing, full of happy kid noises echoing through the neighborhood of pretty, respectable houses with expensive-looking mailboxes. He can see the colorful streamers from where he’s parked on the street. Even from a distance it’s easy to spot that the house he’s about to enter is full of joy, full of kids anxiously awaiting the Big Bird who was hired to make the birthday boy’s party super-extra special. It’s at that moment right before showtime when Dave realized that the Big Bird costume he’s brought to this party has not come with yellow tights. So now he has to wear the Big Bird costume with his naked, hairy legs exposed. This along with the fact that his costume is positively ghastly looking — matted yellow plastic feathers, deranged eyes going different directions — has amped up his anxiety to nauseating levels.
He quickly tries to put the costume on in the driveway, soaked with sweat, the kind of sweat consistent with running a marathon or having just fallen into a lake. He can smell all the cigarettes on his own body, which is rare for regular pack-a-day smokers, so think of how the cigarette smell will be for the six-year-olds and their parents at this party?
Good news is that he shot up just a short time before getting lost on the way to Temecula and he’s going to feel nothing very soon.
The party goes as terribly as expected — he shakes as he ties balloons together to make horses that don’t look anything like horses, no cheery Big Bird banter, sweaty hairy legs attached to a smoky pear-shaped Big Bird body and over-sized rubber Big Bird feet. At one point he takes a seat in a high-backed chair in the backyard — an inappropriate and ballsy move for a Big Bird who has shown up an hour late without tights — and proceeds to nod off. There is no faking it today: Big Bird’s a stone cold junkie.
When Dave retells this story he does so with a heavy amount of shame and still a cannonball-sized amount of guilt in his stomach.
“Just think of how sad that kid’s birthday party was,” he says.
See? Empathy!
*****
After a 2011 stint in Mountainside rehab in Connecticut, Dave met a guy named Chris who he really liked. Chris had equally ridiculous, insane Big Bird-level stories from his drug-fueled days of yore. He was a bit younger than Dave, a bit more handsome, New England-raised, yet they connected on a cellular level about idiot drug stories. Chris saw value in those stories as well.
Dave had some aspirations of having his own radio show before he messed up his life with drugs. So after rehab Dave and Chris maintained the friendship and began a collaboration on a project based on an idea they’d developed there — a podcast that talks about drugs and drug addiction. Not healing and helping stories, either, they gunned for the Big Bird ones, ones that reveled in the absurdity and excess of hardcore addiction.
They knew there were more people out there like them — they’d hung out with them, they’d gone to rehab with them — so they did exist. They named their podcast Dopey. It advertised itself as a show that would explore “the dark comedy of drug addiction.”
Their show was as immature as the concept and their early ones were just the two of them using Garage Band and speaking directly into the microphone on Chris’s laptop. It was inconsistent, boorish, mostly offensive storytelling and bullshitting from two guys whose only area of expertise was how to fuck up your life.
But they’d survived! That was the overarching theme of the show — that they’d both lived to tell these tales. All the hijinks and stupidity and overdoses hadn’t taken them out. Dave had repaired his relationship with the mother of his young daughter and began to raise a family, mostly by working as a waiter at Katz’s deli. Chris had become a counselor and was on his way to get his PhD in psychology. There was hope for both of them. They’d made it out.
*****
The podcast was just a hobby but both had ambitions that, one day, they’d be able to quit their day jobs and focus on Dopey full-time. Over time, the podcast that had double-digit downloads started to have hundreds of downloads, then a couple thousand. More than that, though, they were connecting with an audience — really connecting. Dopey fans began to call in to their hotline to share their own tallish tales of rock bottoms and debauchery which were subsequently replayed on the following week’s podcast. Their audience got the joke. Dopey Nation was born.
After a couple years, the rapport between Dave and Chris became more established — Chris was more steeped in recovery and the language of 12-steps and the science of addiction, while Dave maintained the show’s self-indulgent id. They even began to have guests on — ones with actual name recognition and not just each other’s friends. Bob Forest became a regular. Artie Lange came on, albeit completely trashed.
They were on to something, but nobody knew what it was exactly. After 142 episodes both Dave and Chris began to believe that the show would actually succeed.
Then Episode 143 happened. Here’s Dave’s intro to it:
“So hello and welcome to Dopey, the show about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit; I am Dave and for those who aren't on Dopey’s social media, the worst thing that could have happened did: Chris relapsed and died. And here I am alone at my dad’s with one microphone plugged into the mixer with Garage Band open on my computer recording Dopey, which I’ve never done. Every time we ever did it Chris recorded it on his computer and I’d be able to futz around and now this is gonna be very weird. It’s gonna be very weird, and it’s obviously gonna be very, very, very sad.”
On July 24, 2018, Chris’s girlfriend found him dead on the bedroom floor of their apartment. The autopsy found fentanyl, booze, benzos, and coke in his system. He was 34 years old.
*****
I first heard about Dopey when This American Life did a segment on it. The segment was called “Two Dope Kings” and did a sharper, more stylized longer version of Dopey’s origin story and Chris’s death than the one I just breezed through. The episode aired in February of 2019, which gave the show some brief national notoriety. More publicity followed that, with the narrative always kicking off with the sad irony of Chris’s death as it related to the show’s subject matter.
Dave continued to do Dopey and its audience has continued to grow. There is Dopey merchandise. There is a Dopey street team. There are 17 people on planet earth who actually have put Dopey tattoos on their bodies. The recent guests on the show are more famous. Marc Maron. Jamie Lee Curtis. Kristen Johnston. Margaret Cho.
But there’s no Chris.
The more I get to know Dave the more I hear him wrestle with the ethics of his own grief and the complicated nature of having bigger ambitions without his friend. Part of Dave wants to succeed to honor Chris’s memory, but he has an uneasiness about the show’s increased popularity and publicity due to Chris’s death. Remarkably, Dave has not missed one episode. There is a dueling psychoanalysis there: Is this catharsis or avoidance?
The worst thing that could have ever happened did. So where do you go from there?
Everyone needs to figure that out, eventually.
On Grief: The Dead Stay With Us
By Dave Manheim
The surviving member
After we started making Dopey it became obvious that death would be a part of it. First we lost our close friend Dave Marshall. He set up our Facebook page and loved the show. He actually owned a gym in Connecticut and played Dopey over the speaker system. We also lost a few listeners. The ones I was in touch with were named Scott and Troy. We also lost one of our interns, his name was Andrew. Chris visited him in rehab and I met him in Manhattan a few times. He died the day after we met the last time. He was excited about getting to work on Dopey. It was pretty terrible.
All of these losses were to overdoses which really hammered home why we were in recovery in the first place. Then one of my closest friends, Todd, overdosed and died. It totally changed my life and my view on the show. It became necessary to stress recovery and trying to be safe, aware that even sniffing a couple of bags could kill you.
I hadn’t really gotten over Todd’s death and then, boom, Chris died. It totally fucked me up. Losing the two of them was shattering, but I had two kids, a new house, and a job that I needed to do in order to keep my family functioning. My grief for them was intense. I’m still grieving.
But my process is to try and live my life without letting the grief consume me. After someone dies they stay dead, but they also stay with us.
Dopey is a huge mechanism for dealing with their losses because I do not let a show go by without mentioning Todd or Chris or both of them. They are massive figures in my recovery — the ultimate consequence — and I know their deaths have deeply affected the thousands of strangers who listen and have become the Dopey Nation. I believe their deaths have helped our audience which is one great positive. I hate that they’re gone, but I also feel very strongly that life must go on. Recovery requires us to do the best we can.
That’s what living our best life is all about.
*****
You can listen to The Dopey Podcast wherever.
*****
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
MORE ON LOSS:
The Art of Intimate Sorrow
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*****
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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Some Things Last
by Ahmad Almallah
*********
These windows, these panes, at the beginning of light
looking where they look, eyeing the east and the rust
and here they are, protected by shade and shadows:
branches and birds strike them, fly into them and out.
You can see nothing through them, you can only see what
bounces off: back at the world and then you return,
to the lemon, that is the self, squeezing drop after drop—
there’s nothing left of you now, no juice! Can you go on
lubricating the mind, musing on you as disaster,
and the rest of you as the elements?
Here, they go one by one
into a flame set down, beneath all the steps, at the very
bottom of it all ... and God! The eyes wish you didn’t!
They look away from the blank space remaining—oh these
birds in the mornings are funny and the little tricks they
repeat and repeat, like these sounds they make, in order:
they fly off together or one by one, puffing up their small
bodies, extending a peak that opens up a view, that finds
space in whatever looks shut and closed—a wall has
some hole, a tree trunk can manage a crack, and under
the ledge, a window knows something
of the hidden world.
— Poetry, January/February 2024
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I read with interest Dave’s story about Dopey and how he goes on without his good friend, Chris. It’s very much like what I do since my son, Patrick, died of an overdose nearly 3 years ago. I consider it Pat’s Legacy that, while I continue speaking at AA meetings, I have also been speaking at overdose awareness events. Both areas of substance abuse are in my wheelhouse as I was dually addicted and managed to survive. The way I put it at these events is “If I can recover, anybody can!”
I had "Save It For Later" in my head the whole time I read this post. Perfect title. Beautiful post.