My Friends And Their Addictions

BY MICHAEL STRANGE

As we embark on the New Year, with all its dodgy resolutions, there's no better time to take a look at my friends and their addictions. All my nearest and dearest are considering giving up their vices, but should they? Marriage, though sometimes wonderful, can make a vice necessary because, you know, over the long haul there has to be something to tamp down the migraines, the ennui and the enduring question, "Is this it?" No one can know the interior of another's marriage. However, I'm always the first to say, "Darling, if a little of this or that makes it better, why the heck not?"

There are the girls who can't get through the day without a V.O.P, as in Vicodin, Oxycontin, or Percocet (interestingly, always supplied by the friendly social doctors). These women choose pills to avoid tattletale breath or bloodshot eyes. When one particular friend declines a cocktail, I know she's already, shall we say, "up" there. But she smiles agreeably at her self-obsessed children, and her clueless husband, who has one of those jobs with a security clearance, and who I'm told does have a pulse and a sense of humor, though he fooled me. She needs something to keep her otherwise lively personality at low volume, so not to challenge the order of things, and thus preserve the happy family.

Where do I begin with the girls who get quietly sloshed? The empty-nesters do it at lunch, because they can. The mothers who make a show of carpool (as in, "Look, it's not my maid or house man who's picking up Billy; it's me!") get the car safely parked in the garage around 5 o'clock and then start their own engines. They have one glass of wine with the evening bath to celebrate getting through the day, another because that one didn't quite hit the spot, and then a few more when the hunter-gatherer returns to the nest in need of love and attention. Too often he arrives home sullen, because of a spat with his girlfriend, who's sullen herself because he sleeps with her only on Saturday at noon after golf at the club and before the evening's dinner plans with the wife. (Note: That's why among married men in this town, most of the sex happens between noon and three on weekends.)

Then there are the stoners. Don't be naive - Washington has plenty of A-list soirées where the high and mighty are, indeed, high. One celebrated Georgetown author particularly amuses me because she's the last one you'd expect to be as proficient with her command of the written word as she is with a pipe and some E-Z Widers. As much as she loves to get blitzed, part of the appeal is the renegade turn-on that comes from knowing she has credit absolutely everywhere, but has to pay cash to her dealer, whom she met, coincidentally, while in the jury pool at a drug trial. He arrives at her front door every couple of weeks with an ounce of rare premium medical marijuana packed discreetly in a Saks Jandel bag. Before he's down the steps and out the gate, she's rolling a fatty, and most certainly inhaling.

The girls with their dolls and their drinks and their doobies are my personal favorites, but there are also, among my friends, the routine shopping addicts, Botox addicts, fitness freaks and gamblers; caffeine addicts, food addicts ... and a sex addict here and there, as well - but, they are somewhat ho-hum compared with my mood-altering pals. My addiction? Well, I certainly have one, and like my girlfriends with theirs, it gives me a sense of marital security. But while my habit is dosed often and well, it is not something I take (though someday Mr. Strange might disagree). A littleknown personal detail is that my stepfather was a notorious espionage professional who long ago taught me the value of a private, numbered Swiss bank account. My vice, and a good one, is my account at a discreet little bank in Geneva - and there's not a chance I'm giving it up in a resolution this New Year or any other. I believe a woman's best addiction is providing for her own little self.