Shallow Not Stupid
They try to make you go to rehab and if you’re daft enough to agree, you meet a new dealer at the Priory and get a massive medical bill to go with your new habit. Or you die soon after detoxing, like Amy Winehouse, Peaches Geldof and my doctor, Dex, who had a sign on his wall saying: Drugs are only a problem when you stop taking them. They became a problem for Dr. Dex when his prescription pad was confiscated and he ended up in a straitjacket.
It’s a toxic world and we’re living in it. But being addicted to health is just as dangerous when the Whole Foods freaks have more will for war than the shooting gallery sloths. Hairy vegetarians who stink of hemp fight over the last carton of almond milk and fart all over you until you give them the beetroot from your basket. Their pupils are dilated from kale overdose and their teeth rotted from fruit fasts, and they’re losing sleep over the lack of avocados — because the farmers are all growing weed.
Overdosing on bananas is totes smelly for people whose noses aren’t blocked with coke, but those wacky-baccie weirdos who sit around talking rubbish and eating biscuits all day are even worse. But if men with hairy toes in sandals upset me, those barroom bores who boast about how much damage they’re doing to their livers have me reaching for the roofies. If you can’t shut them up, you may as well knock them out.
My father has given up kidney dialysis to spend more time in the bar. Instead of being taken to hospital three times a week with “a bunch of old guys in an ambulance,” he’s downing vodka shots with a gang of potbellied alkies. It’s his life and he can kill himself if he wants to, but crystal is kinder to the waistline than carby Cristal. If Daddy gets any fatter, he won’t fit in his coffin.
Alcohol’s for uncool crumblies and women who work at Vogue. But heroin addiction’s never been a career option for me either, having been surrounded from an early age by chunky junkies who defied smack’s rep as an excellent slimming aid. Behind every fat druggie there’s an enabler — some big burd feeding them fry-ups, keeping them alive for the next shot of woe. As Irene the Slut said while knocking back a valium with her martini, “You can drink and you can take drugs, but not at the same time.”
Sugar and fat are just the saddo drugs of the masses who used to get high on God and Santa Claus. Thank father fuck for my fat friend who reminds me every time I see her that people who eat too many cream cakes start to look like one.
Everyone has a poison and water’s mine. Blindfold me if you want to, I can tell Highland Spring from Volvic without even swallowing. Vodka may be God’s tranquilizer, but I’m addicted to Evian. It’s zero calories and odor-free. Next time I get fed up with the world and everyone in it, I’m taking a bottle of Fiji water to bed with me, to drink while I laugh at the sinister selfies of my Facebook friends.
I can’t stand people who put coconut in their water or diet coke in their whisky. To be fair, I’m a shallow not stupid sociopath who doesn’t really like people unless they’re dead, glamorous, or a combination of the two. Dead glamorous novelist Anna Kavan, who died with a hundred lipsticks the same shade of pink and enough heroin to kill the street, had an emergency shot of morphine from her silver syringe while guests were over for dinner. Why bother inviting them?
Whether your poison drips from your pen or your syringe, if they want you to detox, just say no. Don’t spoil your tiny acts of evil by feeling guilty about them.
Listen to Vivien Lash read from her evil twin’s book, Spying on Strange Men