Diary – 15 October 2011

I wake up early at my house in Hidden Hills, California, and go downstairs to make myself some toast and a pot of my special atomic coffee (you double brew the beans, add a double shot of espresso, and stay awake for days). And there on the table as I walked into the kitchen was a bottle of champagne that my wife Sharon had left open from the night before. Now, a few years ago, this would have been a disaster for me: I would have polished off that champagne for breakfast, disappeared for a month, then tried to come home by driving my Ferrari through the front door. But I didn’t. I just put a cork in the bottle, and put the bottle back in the fridge. The only thought that popped into my head was, ‘I hope it ain’t gone flat, because that would be a terrible waste.’ I’m not saying that all those years in rehab have finally worked — because you never recover from what I’ve got… but I must be making some progress. Or maybe the economy cured me. I gave up heroin during the last recession: it made me throw up so much, I thought it was a terrible waste of beer.

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Speaking of my Ferrari — I just got a new one: a 458 Italia. I wanted it to look like one of those stealth fighter aircraft: completely black, with no shine on the paint. But the guys at the dealership said it would scratch too easily, so I ended up getting it in silver, and they put these matt-black stickers over every panel, which you can wash regularly, then peel off and replace whenever they get too messed up. Now all I need to do is persuade somebody to get in the car with me.