I Have Never Used Performance Enhancing Drugs
I write about issues of the day, I write opinion pieces, short stories, historical material, interviews, proposals, little quirky things. It runs the gamut. (Thanks for fixing that, spell-check.)
Nobody else writes on such a broad range of topics and as much as I do. And now the word is being bandied around by others, many of them jealous journalists who cannot keep up with the pace of this output, that I take performance enhancing drugs.
I have never taken performance enhancing drugs. I want to repeat that. I have never taken any of the performance enhancing drugs, not EPO, not cortisone, not testosterone, not none of them. Never.
Those who say I take them are liars. One in particular, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (you know who you are, madam), is not only a liar but a prostitute and an alcoholic. Just because she has taken photographs of me from afar, sitting in my chair on the beach, that she says show me shooting testosterone into my arm proves nothing. These are doctored photographs. I was scratching a mosquito bite.
Note: Write tomorrow about the problem with mosquitoes on the beach in the summertime.
There may be other journalists who take performance enhancing drugs. Whether they want to admit to this or not is a matter for each one of them personally to decide. Personally, when I have visited with them as a paid writing instructor to help them right better, I have seen them do this, shooting up in their little cubicles in newsrooms around the country. I will not say who these people are. I am above that. I do not tell on others. Never. I, however, do not need to do this. I have the seagulls, the ocean and the surfers as my inspiration.
I have read recently about an anonymous person from Southampton who has told a rival newspaper he saw a hypodermic needle on the dashboard of my car parked at the beach. I want to know: who is this person, why does he or she not reveal his or her name—and what is he or she doing looking into other people’s automobiles? There are laws against looking in other people’s automobiles. A man’s home is his castle.
As a matter of fact, that hypodermic needle was what I used that day to inject some “upper” into my dog. There is nothing wrong with that. If you want to have a dog running around fetching and so forth with enthusiasm, we all know that is how to do it.
All that tattle-tale person reporting what he saw in my car had to do was turn around and look out at the beach and he would have seen me sitting there quietly with my laptop while my dog ran around fetching in that hyper-manic way they have.
Yes, I was talking on my cellphone to a drug dealer while sitting in Starbucks in Bridgehampton the other day, as reported in the East Hampton newspaper that week. I happened to be doing a story about drug distribution in this area. Before writing, I went right to the source, as I always do. Isn’t that what I am supposed to do?
My work speaks for itself. I have enormous energy and ability, honed to perfection over the years by lifting weights and running (along the beach) to build up my stamina. I also frequently do mathematical equations to sharpen my mind. This is a matter of fresh air, sweat and strain, and it is not my fault that others, even with their performance enhancing drugs, cannot keep up.
Yes, I have won many awards. You can read about me in the record books. You can see all the trophies I have won in various niches in different rooms in the many houses I own around the country (if invited). But I want you to rest assured when I tell you, once again, looking you straight in the eye, that at no time over all these years have I ever, not once even, taken anything stronger than, say, an aspirin. Not once.