“Addict Schmaddict”
by Kelly Anneken, managing editor
Hi, I’m Kelly. I’m the managing editor of Hobo Pancakes and I’m a drug addict.
There, Isa, I said it. I’m sure our readers can tell that I didn’t mean it, just like my sponsor and all the other losers at Narcotics Anonymous. They said they can’t kick me out, but I am calling their bluff. Ten bucks and an eight ball says they give me the boot by Thanksgiving, especially once I dump a whole bunch of laxatives into the samovars.
If you recall, dear readers, in my last “No Comment,” I suggested that human effort could only be sustained by copious amounts of uppers. Never one to back away from following my own advice, I obtained an illegal prescription for Adderall and made friends with my local coke dealer, an adorable spinster named Maybelle Von Triers. Fueled by hubris and amphetamines, I made my way to Florida on foot to work on my new novel, Our Cheetos, Our Selves.
Though my supply of hubris quickly depleted itself, Maybelle made certain that I had access to a friend of hers in Pensacola to keep me up to my nostrils in the white stuff, and Target’s $4 generics plus my bogus scrip ensured a steady supply of Adderall.
It’s hard to say what happened next. My last conscious memory is of swimming laps in the hot tub at a Motel 6. The next thing I knew, I was being manhandled into the back of a squad car by some of Mobile, Alabama’s finest. Evidently I had been curled up in a booth at a local Waffle House for thirty-six hours, mumbling, “All Original and no Cheddar Jalepeno makes Chester a bad cheetah!” So instead of realizing that I was merely mulling over my research, the Waffle House management felt the need to hand me over to the fuzz.
And that’s how I wound up in this Mickey Mouse operation known as NA, where they say that the first step to conquering an addiction is to admit you have a problem, which, okay, fine, maybe I got a little too enthusiastic with the drugs. But then they make you hang around and do eleven more steps, like I don’t have an entire season of Mad Men to catch up on from my blackout down south! Who has the time to sit around listening to a bunch of burnouts named Debbie crying about how they spend their rent money on crystal meth? Hello, just marry some dude who will pay all your bills like I did! I could solve the problems of every single person in my group in a snap, except the leader was all like, “You aren’t allowed to talk in meetings until you get an attitude adjustment, young lady, and I was all like, “You’re not my mom!”
I couldn’t even do more drugs if I wanted to. While I was gone, the Feds caught up with Maybelle and now she’s serving 25 to life, which for her is probably the same thing, and Target Pharmacy put my face on their “Do Not Fill” list after the cops reported my scam. And then Isa got them to put one of those substance monitoring anklets on me like Lindsay Lohan to make sure I don’t start using again, which is ridiculous, because I don’t have willowy, anorexic ankles like LiLo and it just looks all wrong. Have you ever seen a monitoring device on a cankle? It is truly one of the Seven Horrors of the Modern World, right up there with Madonna’s veiny hands and Kobe Bryant’s continued evasion of the justice system.
Anyway, the real tragedy here is that I lost all the work I did on Our Cheetos, Our Selves, which, if my feverish, gap-ridden memory serves me correctly, was a masterpiece on par with Finnegan’s Wake and Pat the Bunny. So I guess the lesson is that you should definitely get super high if you want to write an amazing book, just make sure that you keep some sober loser around who can keep track of your writing and won’t narc on you like one Isa Hopkins. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to put my cankle in a plastic bag so I can go do laps in my neighbor’s hot tub. That’s one thing they can’t take away from me, goddammit!
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