A friend of mine got in a pickle lately, and I advised her to give my old Well friend and legal genius Mike Godwin a call.
Mike said to her, "Hey, it could be worse— you could be stalked by an astronaut in diapers with a BB gun."
So true! Really, all of life's challenges shrink like hemorrhoids by comparison.
I'd like to venture an opinion about Captain Nowak. Everyone says, "She's crazy!" But what kind of crazy? She's too old for adult onset schizophrenia. I have another (entirely unproven) theory: she's strung out on amphetamines.
I don't know whether it's meth, Ritalin, or Reverend Ted's crack pipe, but Nowak's delusions, paranoia— and most of all, her changing appearance— made me think: speed kills.
The drug's utility would be an attractor in her profession, where, as her superiors described, she was "a vibrant, hardworking, energetic person who did her job very well."
Mother of three, married for almost twenty years, separated just weeks ago. Her friends and family say she was perpetually cheery, always "disciplined." The stress in these kind of jobs to be more vibrant, always perfect... you can imagine the pressure if things didn't go just right, and you had access to a performance enhancer. Mother's Little Helper gets her through her busy day.
It was Nowak's booking photo that gave me pause. I'd like to see her smile or scream, so we could see the dental situation. She's lost weight from her previous photos, her hair looks to be falling out— and her skin, even for a mug shot, is like parchment. And, of course, she drove all those hundreds of miles in Depends so she wouldn't have to stop for anything.
People talk all the time about meth epidemics in their hometowns, but no one ever points it out when it hits the prestige or celebrity circuit. I was in a neighborhood café not long ago when I overheard the waitress bitching about her ex-husband to the chef: "Oh yeah, he's gotten it all taken care of, with his mom... His mom does his laundry, his mom takes care of his kids, his mom scores his meth."
It's exactly that ubiquitous. Speed is driving everyone crazy, and it's more of a middle-class and rat-race epidemic than anyone likes to admit.
Meanwhile, diapers are making headlines this week. Dan Savage's column split my sides open with his answer to the loving wife of a diaper-baby-man. The missus wrote Dan to say that despite her devoted practice to peg and fill all her husband's infantilist whims, he was now withholding all vanilla sex from her— the one thing she needs to get off, every blue moon or so!
Dan replied:
Does your "baby girl" realize what he's got in you? The world is crawling—literally crawling—with adult babies who are alone and single and miserable and always will be. While the internet has made it possible for adult babies to find each other more easily, a shared interest in nappies and nurseries doesn't guarantee compatibility. Plus, female adult babies are scarcer than folks who can read "my husband whines and cries and pretends to be a baby during sex" without hurling. Your husband should be doing everything in his power to keep you happy.
My advice: Take that break. Cut the little brat off—no more baby games until he can successfully wrap his bonnet around this: Your pleasure matters as much as his does. Then tell him that although he may not be interested in regular sex, he better learn to fake it convincingly. And finally, tell him that his continued failure to meet your vanilla needs is gonna get his diapered ass divorced, leaving him single and shit out of luck, sex-partner-wise, for the rest of his adult infancy.
Putting the gun down and the diapers aside, I have to ask— what is it about us mortal dingbats that we always have to fuck things up when we hold paradise in our hands?
Photo: No slander is intended to lovely Marta (Yvonne Craig), starring in Star Trek as a green Orion Slave Girl. She's as sane as they get.
