Who among us hasn’t gone on a soul-crushing bender because of a Brexit argument?
Who among us hasn’t gone on a soul-crushing bender because of a Brexit argument?
I n late 2015, in the weeks after his father announced he would not run for president in 2016, Hunter Biden was living in an apartment in Logan Circle in D.C. and drank “every day, all day” from Christmas until the end of January. (Naomi, the oldest of his four daughters, celebrates her birthday on December 21; Dad wasn’t invited to participate.) Joe Biden would call constantly; Hunter would say he was fine, then go out for a “handle” of Smirnoff vodka (roughly half a gallon) a day. He’d use a knife to dig out the gizmo that regulates the pour at the top of the neck so he could guzzle straight from the bottle and imbibe for twelve to 16 hours a day. Sometimes the ache would hit him so badly that he’d start gulping on his walk back home from the liquor store across the street. “I would turn on the TV, sit on the couch, drink, pass out,” he writes. “Even drunk — especially drunk — I never slept in my bed . . . I’d cry for hours without realizing I was crying. I hardly ate.”
This was not rock bottom, though. That was still to come.
Joe Biden, by the way, comes off as nothing but a concerned dad throughout all of this. The old man showed up with an unusually light security detail, told the younger man he needed help and extracted a promise that Hunter would detox in Big Sur, at the Esalen Institute. “Dad saved me,” Hunter writes. “He jolted me out of whatever state I was in . . . Left on my own, I’m sure I would not have survived.” Four months after he got back from Esalen, he sank lower than ever.
Hunter Biden took his oldest daughter to Monte Carlo in 2016 for a Burisma board meeting/party weekend and started drinking again, he says, because he was stressed out after offering the opinion that Brexit might pass the following month. Apparently some people present disagreed, and this set him off on a binge. Yeah, I don’t believe it either, but that’s what he says. “When the group of graybeard wisemen dismissed my Brexit handicapping with what I took to be patronizing arrogance . . . The discussion quickly turned combative, then bordered on ugly . . . I got through it but reached for a couple of drinks afterward.”
Who among us hasn’t gone on a soul-crushing bender because of a Brexit argument? “When I went to the restroom, someone offered me cocaine. I took it,” he continues. The craziest things happen to this guy. Anyway, he confessed it to his counselor when he got home, but objected when he was told that his then-wife would have to be notified and that he would have to take a drug test. The stress of this episode, he said, led him to go out looking for some crack. So, in a way, Hunter Biden became a crack addict because he was right about Brexit.
He met a small-time but unusually kind-hearted dealer named “Bicycles” in the game in D.C., she tried to steer him away, but then “gave me a brief tutorial” in how to use the drug. “I experienced what’s called a ‘bell ringer,’ — crack’s holy grail.” Soon he was in crack’s grip, and stayed there until spring of 2019.
Reading Hunter Biden’s memoir Beautiful Things, hair-raising as it is, I couldn’t help but detect a slight comic undertone, mainly because my impression of drug addicts was formed by the hilarious desperation of Vinnie Barbarino: “Gimme drugs, gimme drugs . . .” I learned so much from Hunter about what it’s like to submit to the embrace of crack. Basically, you do everything the opposite of the normal way.
First: Go to a liquor store or a gas station at night, preferably in one of those sirens-and-skanks neighborhoods, then, instead of getting away as fast as possible, hang around outside. When someone approaches you asking for spare change, you give them some money. Then you utter the magic words: “Got any hard?” Or “Can you get some hard?” “Hard” is crack. This is how you announce to the world, “I’m a crack shopper, and I won’t spend overmuch time haggling about price, quality or the prospects for my bodily safety. Have your way with me, drug demimonde, I’m a rich degenerate who needs to get high.”
There is a lot of hepcat lingo involved when you’re on the pipe. For instance, it’s understood that you can go in any small grocery store in D.C. and request a “one and one.” This means you want one ChoreBoy copper scrubbing pad, aka a “choy” (used as a screen to catch the delicious crack smoke and hold it in, ideally with enough smoke retained in its tangle that you can take another rip off it) plus a little Chinese-made glass pipe with a rose in it, the size of a 100 mm cigarette, called a “stem” or a “glass rose,” after the decorative paper rose inside it.
A tip every beginner crackhead should learn is that if you meet a guy and he promises to run off and score for you if you give him the money up front, you should not trust him if he offers, as a kind of security deposit, one of his shoes. Shady dudes keep piles of cast-off shoes for just this purpose. They give you an old shoe they didn’t want anyway and disappear with your money.
Amid all of these amazing stories of his own stupidity and the many times he was ripped off by the worst people you can imagine, every so often Biden drops in a sanctimonious cliché to make him sound like a normal, non-crackhead political figure, and it’s all the funnier how random these little confetti bursts of self-righteousness sound amid all the depraved nightcrawling. “Politics is not the family business — service is,” he insists on page 88, and a page later drops this scurrilous little bag of flaming poop on a previous president’s doorstep: Referring to his dad in 2009, he says, “We believed he would go on to be the most influential vice president ever — that is, if you discount Dick Cheney, who had the advantage of manipulating an unwitting commander in chief.” Hang on, the son of Joe Biden is suggesting that a previous president was a few aces short of a deck? And he claims that Barack Obama valued his counsel more than any other president did that of his veep? Would this be the same Obama who basically slammed the door in Biden’s face when he was going to run for president in 2016, didn’t endorse him in 2020 even over Bernie Sanders until he had locked up the nomination, and said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up”?
Hunter is such a dullard (“You stupid motherf***er,” were the first words spoken to him by his good friend “Bicycles”) that he never sees the comedy in anything. He casually mentions an ObamaPhone — cell phones handed out free to poor people in the Obama years — without grasping quite how funny it is to think that taxpayer money was used to give cellphones to dirtbag drug dealers.
“Obama Phones are mocked by conservatives as another liberal scheme to redistribute wealth,” he scolds us, before noting how they personally benefited him, the spoiled son of the veep of the guy they were named after, in the following way: “Before I gave [the dealer] my $100, I’d told him to leave behind his Obama Phone.” Let’s hear it for big government, bringing together crack dealers and millionaire wastrels and helping them do business together. Barack must be honored.
Biden has no sense of how he comes off when he attempts to sound like a man of principle instead of the lowlife he is, which yields the single funniest detail in the book. Let’s set the scene: When you’re a rich guy who has shamelessly lined his pockets selling your family name, you can afford to take a hotel room at someplace like the Chateau Marmont and make the party come to you. But that places you in a vulnerable position: When the scum of the earth gain admittance to a free-spending crackhead’s hotel room, they immediately take advantage. Biden’s drug-binge guests would drink up the minibar, then order Dom Perignon and steak from room service. Biden watched helplessly as one woman ordered filet mignon and then fed it to her little dog. People would roll up in their late-model Mercedes wearing Lakers jerseys and have themselves an absolutely hilarious time soaking Biden for every dollar they could. Once in a while, some nice lady would take all of his clothes from their jumble on the floor, neatly fold them and put them in drawers — making sure to withdraw all valuables from pockets as she did so. Biden would later discover, say, $15,000 worth of purchases had been made at Best Buy on one of his missing credit cards.
Many of these various miscreants would bring their own habits: “heroin, meth, drinking themselves to death.” Their stripper girlfriends called up their girlfriends to come join the party. After a two or three-day binge, “they’d walk out with the hotel’s monogrammed towels and throw pillows and comforters and ashtrays.”
Other guests would take notice of the bedlam, some of them going so far as to call up the front desk “complaining about the parade of ne’er-do-wells traipsing in and out of my room and asking me to leave.” So what was Hunter’s reaction to this? “I saw it as blatant racism and let them know it.”
Perfecto! One of the most privileged white guys in the world holds a 24/7 drug party in his hotel room, paid for by the money he made by cashing in on being a vice president’s son, then plays the race card when someone objects. Biden has been through many twelve-step programs, but if this book is any guide, he hasn’t internalized their central lesson, which is to own up to your own actions instead of pointing the finger at others.
That is consonant with his mentions of the laptop that wound up in the hands of the New York Post after he forgot he had dropped it off at a repair shop. He mentions this debacle only by saying that the Post “purported” to have the laptop; this has been the Biden camp’s strategy since Day One, to suggest that the laptop in the possession of the Post is not really his laptop without going so far as to say, “That’s not my laptop.” It’s his laptop. It’s his signature on the receipt. It’s his personal information, embarrassing photos, and jokey use of the N-word on the device. The shop is near where his dad lived at the time. Vladimir Putin may find this as funny as the rest of us, but he didn’t use his powers to create a fake Hunter Biden laptop and dupe Hunter into dropping it off at the repair shop.
Hunter’s dishonesty and failure to take responsibility are even more apparent, and more reprehensible, when it comes to his fourth daughter, who was born to a former stripper from Arkansas and whose name he does not mention in the book. He denies even remembering how she was conceived, but that’s clearly a lie, as I’ll explain in my next piece.