Amy Winehouse is going to die. She’s practically dead already.

I really hate to be the one to just come out and say it like this. I wish it wasn’t true almost. (Oh, merciful heavens, how I wish almost!) But it seems inevitable, doesn’t it? The writing is on the train. I can hear the wall coming down the tracks. The milk is spilt and the baby is crying over it. And so forth.

I am from Seattle, you see, where the smack runs fresh and free (figuratively speaking–it’s actually quite expensive) and musicians drop like stone pelicans. And if it one thing (if only one thing) that Seattle people can understand, its rock stars melting into a narcotic puddle of dead. It happens every ten minutes.

And do you know what she did? That made me give her up completely? Do you? Well, she went wandering around the shady alleys of London clad in only a dirty bra and jeans, no shoes for Christ’s sake, looking like she just suffered a pepper-spray blast to the face, snorted a pound of powdered chlorine, then watched an Old Yeller/Steel Magnolias marathon: swollen, chapped, droopy and wan, a jaunty shade of red peppering her waxy jaundiced face, stumbling around and mumbling. Her hair was pretty much the same, though.

It was 5:40 a.m., they say, and she was “leaving a friend’s house”, which in England means “shooting the horse”. A report: “Amy came out and started stumbling around. She popped her head over the fence like she was looking for something. It was freezing and she had no shoes and just a red bra. She was mumbling something incomprehensible. It wasn’t the behavior of someone in the right state of mind.”

So. I wonder if I’ll be invited to the funeral, which doesn’t really matter, because I’ll crash either way. Funeral food: the only real free lunch.
Adrian Ryan

Share It!