My day should have started with an important meeting, but when I made a right turn off the FDR onto 37th Street, the police—dressed like Gestapo in high boots with semiautomatics—pulled me and 10 others over one by one as if we had just severed the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge and were about to detonate the Empire State Building. (Are we being prepared for a police state? If we wanted Gestapo cops we’d move to L.A. Sorry, Bill Bratton!) Turns out, you cannot make a right turn off the FDR on 37th Street, and must drive through the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island to get where you want to go IN Manhattan!

With the recent police-force cuts, it’s easy to see why cops feel a little hot under the collar, which is probably why they held each of us up for a half hour and checked us out like card-carrying Al Qaeda members. Hey, doesn’t anybody get it? New Yorkers live in a terminal rush—how else are we supposed to earn a living??? One delay can give a New Yorker a coronary! “Didn’t you see the traffic sign?” I was accused. Yes, I saw the sign—all 20 of them in a clump, with arrows sprouting in all directions—but you need a hieroglyphics expert to decode them and a telescope to read the fine print! For a minute I considered ditching my car altogether and jumping on the subway, but I didn’t have the time to hawk my jewels for the price of a MetroCard.

I did make the meeting after all, an hour late, but returned to my Mercedes to find a ticket plastered on the windshield for an expired inspection sticker! Hey, does anyone ever LOOK at their sticker — NO!, not until a ticket is issued! Given the cash-strapped city’s ticket blitz, I shouldn’t have been surprised—but why don’t the powers that be send a notice out like they do when your car registration or license is due? MONEY!!! That’s why! I guess the ticket is the notice. Besides, you can’t get an inspection sticker in THIS city. Unless a mechanic has known you personally from birth, all you get is attitude and are told to come back in two or three weeks and be prepared to wait in line for days. I don’t know about you, but I’m allergic to lines! So now I drove to a Mercedes service center. They told me that because I don’t service my car with them, but with the Hamptons’ dealership, I could have an appointment in three weeks. I needed the inspection NOW if not SOONER ... and after aiming my .32 caliber PEN at them I got an appointment in two days!

I came home steaming, only to open the mail—and my property-tax bill! The taxes are 10 times my maintenance and mortgage payments!!! I would have had a stroke, but remembered that with emergency medical services cut to the bone there are no paramedics in New York and you’re expected to crawl on hands and knees to the nearest ER in case of trauma. Plus, the day was totally wasted fighting city bureaucracy and I had to get ready ASAP for my nightly round of parties and openings...

On arriving at each bash, my first reaction was, why are there mobs out front and billowing clouds of smoke? Is every place in New York on fire??? (Now that the city has no fire department left, you have to haul a hose and ladder everywhere you go and stamp out flames yourself.) Then I realized: They’re SMOKERS!!! With the smoking ban in every public venue, streets are clogged with puffers and you need a safari guide and gas mask to make it through the pack. Not to mention, your heels leave a trail of sticky cigarette butts at every A-list event. And now your clothes don’t stink from being inside—they stink from being outside!!!

Driving home after one long day in Bloomberg Town, I decided I needed a course in stress management or meditation, but I forgot you can’t find a teacher within city limits—they’ve all been sacked due to slashed funds! Yo, Mayor Mike! Cut us fast-lane New Yorkers some slack! This is the city that moves—stop holding us up!!! Slow us down and you lose even more money! New Yorkers hate rules, rules, rules! There’s a pace, a tempo, a flow—don’t mess with it! I know your intentions are well meaning, Mayor, but how about coughing up some of your billions to bail out the most exciting town on Earth? What a day!