Rock Bottom

Day 45

Today I had a meeting with my therapist, Barbara (she of the hairy upper lip) who told me I had hit rock bottom.

I was told I hit rock bottom today by my therapist – Barbra “she of the hairy lip”. Just because I was found licking up the rancid grape juice that had spilled behind the kitchen radiator with the hope that I could get high off the pseudo-alcoholic fumes.

Rock bottom?! Really? You think that’s bad? Oh my dear, you haven’t even seen rock bottom. You should have seen me when I was touring Vegas…

Young men offered me yard glasses of Irish whiskey, and I accepted. I ate dinner at 24-hour steak and crab diners and all-you-can-eat coleslaw buffets. I did rounds of whiskey shots with the Elvis Presley Experience back-up band. I danced in a fountain with a Tom Jones impersonator and stole a flamingo from the gardens at the Flamingo Hotel. I got into games of craps with Texan bankers, and won $10’000 in a round of three-card Monte in a back alley.

Once I was legally married to a Bengal circus tiger for two hours. I volunteered for a magic show, passed out in the mirror box and had to be resuscitated by a rodeo clown.

I danced on the main strip with a chimp in rollerskates and told passers by that I’d left my no good tiger husband and remarried. I saw a man drink a tequila sunrise out of a drag queen’s shoe. I played strip poker with the entire cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and started a drinking contest with the sax player from KC and the Sunshine Band.

I went and saw a burlesque performance in the wee hours of the morning with a woman sitting in a giant martini glass. After the show I drank all of this “martini” (not realising that it was actually a slurry of lukewarm cough syrup, cleaning fluid, and food colouring) and then proceeded to throw up onto a still-spinning roulette table in the high-rollers room of the Venetian. I was banned from drinking Tequila for four weeks by the Nevada Gaming Commission.

I drank and smoked and dazzled the people of Vegas.

And, invariably, I would wake up the next morning with fourteen half-smoked cigarettes stored in my cleavage, a hipflask of brandy in my suspenders, and a half-eaten tub of coleslaw in my glomesh purse.

That, my dears, is rock bottom!