GRADUATION

Greetings from Aspen, Colorado! I am here taking photos with my friend IMDB. She’s a multi-talented artist (painter, videographer, rapper) and she's using me and my homegirl T-Rock as models. Why? Because T-Rock and I are very in. Unfortunately, like St. Tropez, Capri, the Maldives, and Dubai, Aspen is beautiful but over, done with, kaput. Here’s why.

• Gas – There are two kinds of gas in Aspen. The kind that starts a fire in your fireplace via remote control and the kind that constantly pops out of your ass of which you have no control. For some reason, the height of this place makes you poot. I’m ready to deflate right back down to New York City. I’m a little bored of being in a town of full of embalmed women who walk in constant cloud of farm fresh farts. It’s like wrapping Bo Derek in a few layers of cooked Brussels sprouts and calling her an It Girl.
  

• Altitude Sickness – Aspen sits about 8,000 feet above sea level. When you get that much closer to God, creepy stuff starts to happen. Particularly to sinners like me. Dr. Barry Mink of Aspen Valley Hospital warns visitors to avoid alcohol. As a broke-ass drunk, I will avoid the advice of a “doctor” so rich his last name is mink. Yes, altitude sickness causes constipation, nausea, insomnia, and a fast heartbeat. But so will cocaine and anorexia and no one I know seems to be avoiding that. So if you must come to Aspen, by all means, drink up!

• The Rich vs. The Help – The Rich live in great big homes and have to hire The Help to take care of these homes. The Rich think they are helping The Help by giving them jobs. But The Rich only live here like six days out of the year and, my goodness, they can’t help it. They have twenty other homes to occupy! And so The Help spend most of the year helping themselves to cashmere sweaters, cable television, and expensive cheese while lolling around on other people’s 1,000 thread count sheets. Oh, shit. I’m The Help.
  

• Pictures of Politicos – Very often, the rich people display photos of public office holders to whom they have donated funds. This is great because you can quickly see who is a Democrat and who needs to be slapped.

• Sting – They love him out here. Particularly his later, more tabouleh-and-tantra inspired tunes. Like that song where he cajoles some Kurd out of his mountain cave to go “yodelly, yodelly, yeah.” No one should like that song except Sting and his lady. And only if it makes her want to have sex with him. If it doesn’t even do that, she should hate it, too.

• Audio Visual – When you touch a light switch in Aspen, the lights come up or fade out gently, theatrically. I think it’s meant to ease the blow of the rhinoplastic truth that is the face of today’s female gentry of the provinces. This is a fringe jacketed, turquoise jeweled marvel that cascades through her Western estate like a river through the desert. She operates racks of state of the art stereo equipment so that it endlessly yodelly, yeah, yeah, yeahs in every bed, living, and exercise room. Neither the bar nor the steam bath is untouched by these gentle sounds. Not that I’ve studied her every move or anything.

• Graduation – This happens when, say, a manicurist at a fancy hotel named Laura meets the owner of that and forty other hotels. She accepts his gifts, injects her lips, marries him, then births a baby which dissolves entire clauses out of the prenup. Congratulations, Laura: you have graduated! Personally, I think graduating is out. Who wants to spend the rest of their lives hiding the old man’s Viagra? Not me. I have always earned my own way. And I’m not too proud to start as a bottom. As a bottom? At the bottom. Whatever. Anyway, like I was saying, though I think Aspen is over, I did pick up a shift as a hostess in a member’s only establishment called the Caribou Club. Though several of the hostesses have graduated, I’m only doing it for the experience. And jewelry.