How would you feel if you found out your mayor smoked crack?

Toronto’s Rob Ford, the World’s Greatest Mayor, Smokes Crack

There came a point on Thursday afternoon—after learning that Toronto mayor Rob Ford had taken some time off from an important city-council meeting to wander around a parking lot sticking “Rob Ford” magnets to cars—that I figured it would be time to update you about the ongoing saga that is Robbie’s intoxicated reign over the Kingdom of Toronto. Way back when, before the already infamous crack-cocaine scandal of May 2013, the magnet controversy of 24 hours earlier didn’t seem so important. That is, of course, until Gawker broke the story that some guy, somewhere, has a video of King Robbie smoking crack from a glass pipe. And the footage is for sale. Until someone buys it, you can always watch the Taiwanese CGI reenactment.

Gawker—who have decided that this is not an “alleged” or “supposed” crack-smoking incident, given that they’ve got a graphic that reads “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smokes Crack” on their homepage—have caused a major firestorm for King Robbie the First in the City of Toronto. The Toronto Star, an ungrateful and petulant organization that is hell-bent on taking down the mayor, has viewed the tape “three times” but was clearly too cheap to buy it and stream it for the royal subjects of the Rob Ford empire. Plus, according to them, they saw this video on May 3. Why keep all this crack-smoking mayhem a secret? And what kind of incompetent blackmail-video salesman is behind this controversy? How can you mess up on monetizing such a golden piece of footage? One must assume they’re ready to let it go at fire-sale prices right now.

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Cat Marnell’s Amphetamine Logic: Goodbye to All That (the End for Now)

Amphetamine Logic was kind of making me psychotic.

I sat down for lunch with my agent at an overpriced bistro on Park Avenue South.

“So Cat,” Byrd Leavell, literary agent extraordinaire, said. “What’s new?”

“Well,” I said, surreptitiously picking a peroxide scab off my head. “I guess I’ve finally burned out like everyone wants me to.” I was eating on a steak and trying not to gag while I chewed.

“Hmm,” said my agent. “Well, what are we going to do—”

“I don’t know, man,” I gulped, and my hands started shaking. “Let me just try to explain the situation. I have no money and everyday eat empanadas from the corner that I pay for in laundry quarters. My apartment looks like a fucking personality disorder. You can barely open the door—”

“Uh huh,” said Byrd.

“—I mean there are perfume bottle shards in my feet and there’s blood and oatmeal on the floor—”

“Cat,” Byrd said. “You can’t live like this anymore.”

*****

But couldn’t I? On the way home I thought about all of the things instead of writing that I’d been doing.

I was Rolling Stone’s ”Hot Bukowski.” I was the toast of the town. I was puking flowers afterhours; I was letting everybody down. I read a Tatler article: “London’s Seven Loveliest Lesbians.” I mocked a skeleton dressed as Kenny Scharf at Gold Bar. There was ethanol, Adderall, night rainbows, Nalaxone. I sat around stoned in Soho House while the concierge charged my iPhone. I stuffed Artforum in my oven and stacked Richardson on the stove. I saw Pointbreak at MOMA; I saw 3 PM Hunger Games in LA at the Grove: “(PG-13) for intense violent thematic material and disturbing images—all involving teens.” I bleached everything I owned and my knuckles burned and scabbed from the bleach.

I snorted dope in DUMBO and I smoked dust on the beach. I preyed on editors during the day and slept with monsters at night. Life’s never dowdy in an Audi scoring pudé up in Washington Heights, is it babes? I drank Diet Coke and had coke sex and sat in Yorkville townhouse basements playing Mario Kart on a grimy old Super Nintendo. We smoked crack until our fingers turned black and watched Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. I chilled with famous downtown stupor freaks tweaking and listening to Diplo.

“WHY IS EVERYBODY DRESSED LIKE MR. PEANUT?!” I screamed once at Le Baron. I had about 40 pounds of fake hair on.

“Shhh,” Same said. “You are dusted.” And though I was confused of course I trusted him.

The Boom Boom Room was always full of doom. Our PCP smelled like burnt balloons. I was dressed Boricua heroin chic. Shaun was asking me if I saw Wu Tang at Milk Studios that one weird Fashion Week.

“Wu Tsang?”

“Wu Tang!”

“WU TSANG?!”

“Cat.” Shaun said.

“Oh Jesus God, does it fucking matter?” I screamed. “Is this a ‘Big Picture’ problem?” The bathroom line disasters are as disastrous as disasters can be. “Shaun, the little coke girls are STARING AT ME.”

“They are staring at us because we know them,” Shaun said. “You’ve had them over to your house to do drugs at least four times. Invite them over. They’re the little LES… dominatrixes. They have tons of tons of drugs and money and they’re nice.”

“OK,” I said, and I walked over and did.

*****

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Amphetamine Logic - Cat Marnell

Other names I could’ve used for this column: Adderall Logic, Vyvanse Logic, XR Logic, Time-release Logic… It’s 2012 in Manhattan, the island of cell phones and no clocks. Of dead Blackberry batteries, New Museums, old money—trust funds, angel dust funds, acid rains, and dead brains. Ritalin kids are generic adults living on vampire schedules. The Lost Boys soundtrack is always playing at the Dream Hotel and everyone’s forgotten their iPhone chargers: Yo, what time is it?

Oh hiii babe! [kiss] What time is it, you say? Well. It’s a time when time’s stopped.

And I’m spinning like a top.

____
 

If you live in my neighborhood in Manhattan, maybe you’ve seen me. If you like reading beauty and style blogs, or the “Page Six” in the past week or so, you’ve probably at least heard of me. My name is Cat Marnell.
 

I’m the one with $40 French beauté self-tan who’s dressed like a sort of slutty Commedia dell’Arte Zanni, in white rags, a Dior slap bracelet, a Winston—I know, inexplicably—tucked behind my ear, a nameplate necklace that says “methadone” in cursive (indeed, roll your eyes; please), filthy white Topshop flats, three plastic rosaries in pastel colors that are all chewed up. I’m all PCP eyes and Adderall thighs, gagging down Gatorade at the encouragement of a bored friend, vibrating like a mild seizure.

That’s me tonight with the shorts falling down, all Skeletor, blasting “Gimme More” from my janky headphones. Under the shorts is one of those cheap-to-the-point-of-unwearable rhinestone pink thongs Betsey Johnson gave out for years at every Fashion Week show. I’m in front of you in line at the deli at 5:30 in the morning, clutching a box of tinfoil.

I notice you watching me, so I start to caress my own ribcage. I am fucking high. I smell like Ligne St. Barth sunscreen oil, the underground afterhours across from Planned Parenthood on Elizabeth Street that I disappear down into like a rabbit hole, and Bumble shampoo. Weight report from the previous afternoon: 102.

I’m cracking my cinnamon gum like a whip, jangling my house keys around on my wrist. “How Will I Know” is playing on the radio.

I dust-stutter, “W-W-Whitney.”