Free Isn't That Rich?: Life Among the 1 Percent by Richard Kirshenbaum, Michael Gross Page B

two married women (to men) I knew who were gyrating and making out in the corner.
    “That’s my point. You don’t feel old, you feel free. You’re having a renaissance,” she said as she toked.
    “Any downside?” I said, taking a Jell-O shot.
    “I haven’t heard any bad reviews.” She shrugged in her vintage Halston halter. “Honestly, I want to go out there and have a great time. I want to be wasted, entertained. I just want to fly high and have fun. Take the edge off,” she mused.
    “The cause for all this fun?” I probed like a proctologist.
    “It’s a midlife crisis. Lots of rich girls doing coke, Mollys, and edibles behind their husbands’ backs.”
    “And your husband?” I asked, wondering what the straitlaced banker would think.
    “We don’t have that kind of relationship,” she said. “I’m honest.”
    “Honest?”
    “I said to him, you’re missing out. If you want to go out and have to deal with all these people unmedicated , that’s your issue.”
    After I got back from LA, I was catching up with a friend after his family’s ski trip to Aspen.
    “How was your trip?” I asked.
    “Half of New York was there,” he said. “It was a crazy party.”
    “How was the skiing?” I asked.
    “Everyone in Aspen was high. They were bumping off trees on the mountain like pinball machines. You cannot believe the dispensaries out there. By the end of the trip, the whole town was sold out. People were bringing back the infused gummy candies by the garbage-bag full.”
    “Are you serious?” I asked.
    “People were eating those gummies like sunflower seeds. They were whacked.”
    “What do you think about it all?”
    “Look,” he said, asking his assistant to bring him a double espresso, “it’s people trying to hang on to their youth. You can get wasted when you’re in your forties and fifties but it’s kind of sad when you see people in their sixties who are sloppy. So you might as well do it while you’ve still got it going on.”
    Our first weekend back from the left coast saw us at a dinner party in an elegant Normandy pile in Greenwich. It was a well-heeled and conservative crowd, which prompted me to ponder whether drug usage had made its way to suburbia. My dinner partner, a vivacious and convivial gal, seemed taken aback by my line of questioning.
    “No. None of my friends do drugs here,” she said with distaste. “They only drink. I think New York is just a faster crowd.” She eyed me suspiciously as she took a spoonful of crème brûlée.
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you and ask if you were partaking. It’s just that I am writing an article.”
    “Yes, I’ve read some of your pieces. You seem to know the most ridiculous people.”
    “That I do.” I smiled.
    “Wait.” She turned to me in a discreet fashion, as if offering up the tidbit like a peace sign. “I think I have something for you. Do you know how all these women stay so thin?” she whispered, as if giving up the secret location to the Maltese falcon.
    “How?” I leaned in.
    “They take their children’s ADD medication. It’s all speed, suppresses the appetite.”
    “I was sober for a decade,” a fellow charity board member and fairly new acquaintance revealed over lunch at Bill’s. “My drinking was honestly the cause of my first divorce.”
    “First?”
    “I’ve also been married multiple times. Runs in the family.”
    He asked the waiter for a whiskey, neat. “My mother was an artist, a socialite, an alcoholic, and, honestly, a drug addict. I was shipped off to a different boarding school with each new husband. That said, she had great style.”
    “All those schools,” I sympathized. “That must have been difficult.”
    “It’s all a blur between the beer and the bong hits.”
    “Do you and your friends still do drugs?”
    “Well, everyone on the North Shore and in Palm Beach is friendly with the drink. Drinking is part of the culture—cocktails before dinner, roadies at