"[Bono] had never seen Mr. Buck drunk or taking drugs. 'I could not believe my eyes and ears,' [Bono] said of the allegations."--BBC News, March 25
"[In] the American South, there is what is called a Southern gentleman, and Peter is my definition of such."--Michael Stipe, BBC News, March 27
Despite what I or anyone else may have said or written, I have never taken a drink or been drunk. Nor have I ever taken a drug. Jacque Mann-Israel, my best friend of nearly two decades and a woman whom I hope to Jesus never refers to me as "homely" in my defense (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1897000/1897001.stm), does not recall ever once having seen me behave in an unladylike manner, and swears that the bottle that flew from the wings of a Tucson stage and landed in the middle of an all-ages audience 22 months ago did not launch from my right hand while I held a joint in my left.
Jacque will go way back and also testify that I was not driving a scooter while high on MDMA the night we went to see the Clash, and that I never told the police officer who pulled us over that I was doubling the speed limit while driving the wrong way down a one-way street because it was "too cold to go the speed limit." She'll reject the notion that the "World Famous Barf Sweater" (retired to my closet since 1988) earned its name because the combination of hard liquor and the cardigan's multi-colored weave never failed to induce projectile vomiting in the wearer, and that while wearing WFBS late one evening, hurling a hot pizza out of a 10th-story window was never an option I explored, let alone carried out. Jacque can tell you that it just wouldn't have been like me to do something so rude and thoughtless.
When we traveled to Albuquerque for a week. I did not follow Jacque to Babe's Sports Bar, down five shots of Goldschläger, and then (after proclaiming my colon to be "paved with gold") proceed to hijack the night's bikini contest by staggering up to the contestants and loudly ascertaining whose tits were real and whose weren't.
Bono, whom I saw rip a gash into his chin as he fell from a stage in Tempe, Arizona (the scar of which is visible to the naked eye), might someday testify that he has never seen me drunk. He could also testify that he has never seen me, period, although careful observation of Rattle and Hum reveals I was in the crowd as U2 performed "Bullet the Blue Sky" in what, back in the day, was called Sun Devil Stadium, a year after the chin-ripping incident. Which, by the way, I did not react to by pointing and guffawing, because I am--as my friend Jacque can attest--a gentle and polite soul.
