Wishful Drinking

by Carrie Fisher

  Oh, and remember that white dress I wore all through the first movie? Unless you didn’t see Star Wars, in which case, why are you still reading this?

  Anyway, George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, “You can’t wear a bra under that dress.”

  So, I say, “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”

  And he says, “Because…there’s no underwear in space.”

  I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere.

  Now, George came to my show when it was in Berkeley. He came backstage and explained why you can’t wear your brassiere in other galaxies, and I have a sense you will be going to outer space very soon, so here’s why you cannot wear your brassiere, per George. So, what happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn’t—so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.

  But George actually does have a point, because you know when they send out those space probes and they beam back footage of what it looks like up there? All those films ever show are sand and rocks. I’ve never seen a bra in any of that footage.

  So instead of a bra, what do you think I wore for support, intergalactically?

  Gaffer’s tape.

  I used to think there should have been a contest at the end of the day for who in the crew would get to help remove the tape.

  Well, I was just thinking of others. Even then. I was just giving, giving, giving.

  But clearly, they’ve gone as far as they can go with this whole doll thing. I mean, what are they going to do next? Make a life-size Leia doll? A kind of Stepford Leia? Which would render me obsolete. You’d read her book. So, thank God they haven’t done that. And thank God they haven’t come up with a life-size Leia sex doll. Because that would be truly humiliating. Thank God that they haven’t made an $800 sex doll that you can put in your cornfield to chase away crows. Oh, wait, they have!

  Okay, I admit, I knew about this, and I have to say it does turn out to be kind of a useful thing. Because if ever anyone tells me to go fuck myself, I can actually get the doll and give it a whirl. Well, this actually happened one night at my show. Someone from the far balcony screamed, “Go fuck yourself, Carrie!” So I had the crew load the doll up into my car and I took it back to my hotel and I have to tell you, I spent hours. But here’s the thing I have to point out. The doll is cement. Now I don’t know how erotic that is for you, but it just doesn’t do it for me…anymore. Anyway, at about 3:30 A.M. I tried to get the doll to do something with her hand, and it just fell off. So finally at about 4:00 A.M., I think, oh my God, epiphany! The doll is heterosexual. But I really have no way of proving this theory because I no longer have a penis. It is being revoked until the financial crisis is over.

  6

  “FROM WHAT I CAN SEE OF THE PEOPLE LIKE ME, WE GET BETTER BUT WE NEVER GET WELL”

  —PAUL SIMON

  Years ago, there were tribes that roamed the earth, and every tribe had a magic person. Well, now, as you know, all the tribes have dispersed, but every so often you meet a magic person, and every so often, you meet someone from your tribe. Which is how I felt when I met Paul Simon.

  Paul and I had the secret handshake of shared sensibility. We understood each other perfectly. Obviously we didn’t always agree, but we understood the terms of our disagreements.

  My mother used to say, “You know dear, Paul can be very charming—when he wants to be.”

  And my father just wanted Paul to write an album for him.

  Anyway, Paul and I dated for six years, were married for two, divorced for one, and then we had good memories of each other and so what do you think we did?

  No—no, we didn’t remarry. We dated again. Which is exactly what you want to do after you’ve been married and divorced.

  Samuel Johnson once said that remarrying (and he’s not talking about marrying the same person here, just remarrying) is the “triumph of hope over experience.” So for me, remarrying the same person is the triumph of nostalgia over judgment.

  So Paul and I were together for over twelve years (off and on) and we traveled to a bunch of places—all over the world really. And the last place we went to was the Amazon, which I highly recommend by the way—if you like mosquitoes. Anyway, when we got back, Paul wrote an album based on South American music called The Rhythm of the Saints—and on this album is the last song he ever wrote about me—and it’s called “She Moves On.” (An ironic title.) If you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you, do it. Because he is so brilliant at it. Anyway, one of the lyrics in that song goes like this:

  She is like a top / She cannot stop…

  So yeah, he knew me.

  But the lyric I really wanted to tell you about was this:

  And I’m afraid that I’ll be taken / Abandoned and forsaken / In her cold coffee eyes…

  Yup, I’m a bitch.

  Now, Paul didn’t just write unpleasant songs about me.

  She’s come back to tell me she’s gone / As if I didn’t know that / As if I didn’t know my own bed / As if I didn’t notice the way she brushed her hair from her forehead

  See? Recognize me now?

  He wrote other nice things about me and our time together, but you know how with exes you tend to remember more of the negative things rather than the positive ones?

  No? I guess it’s only me then.

  He wrote another song called “Allergies.” And the lyric in that was:

  …my heart is allergic / To the woman I love / And it’s changing the shape of my face…

  Do you think that’s flattering? I don’t think it really is.

  But Paul also wrote another album—a beautiful album—of course they’re all beautiful, but this particular one was called Hearts and Bones, and the title song, “Hearts and Bones,” was about us…and it went like this:

  One and one-half wandering Jews / Returned to their natural coasts / To resume old acquaintances / Step out occasionally / And speculate who had been damaged the most…

  But that couldn’t be it because I didn’t get permission to reprint those lyrics. So that would be really bad, wouldn’t it?

  Oh, it isn’t really bad, because I didn’t take any alimony from Paul. So try to think of this as you reading my alimony. And lovely alimony it is.

  —One and one half wandering Jews…speculate who had been damaged the most.

  Guess who won that contest?

  Poor Paul. He had to put up with a lot with me. I think ultimately I fell under the heading of: Good Anecdote, Bad Reality. I was really good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was more than he could take.

  We once had a fight (on our honeymoon) where I said, “Not only do I not like you, I don’t like you personally!” We tried to keep the argument going after that but we were laughing too hard.

  So, I married Paul at twenty-six, we divorced when I was twenty-eight, and at twenty-nine I went into rehab. Not because I needed it, but because I was doing research for my novel Postcards from the Edge, and I needed to meet some real drug addicts and alcoholics, to give the book some veracity.

  7

  SADNESS SQUARED

  Okay, have it your way, I’m a drug addict.

  You know how they say that religion is the opiate of the masses? Well, I took masses of opiates religiously.

  But you can’t chalk it up to my goofy childhood. You can try, but you’ll have a hard time because my brother, Todd, coincidentally, had the same exact childhood and, freakishly, the same parents, but Todd has never had a substance abuse problem. So it’s not what you’re given, it’s how you take it. My brother is, however, Born Again Christian. But, what I like to say about that is—what fa
ther could Todd find who was more famous than Eddie Fisher—but who he could talk to everyday? Because you can—

  (Oh, Jesus.)

  Now, I’d always written—ever since I was about fourteen. You know—poems and journals and stuff like that. But when I was twenty-eight, I was interviewed for Esquire magazine—you know, Enquirer, Esquire, give me a choir I’m there—and the interview turned out funny I guess. I mean, it had one-liners in it like “instant gratification takes too long.”

  Anyway, a publishing house saw the interview and liked it, so they wrote me a letter asking if I wanted to write a book.

  And the letter was forwarded to me in the rehab. And I was glad to get mail from anyone.

  But I did—I did want to write a book, and I knew what the first line would be: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but he’ll never call me anyway. No one will ever call me again.”

  And this was based on a true thing. See, the doctor that pumped my stomach sent me flowers. With a note that read: “I can tell that you are a very warm and sensitive person.”

  All that from the contents of my stomach! I was tempted to marry him so I could tell people how we met.

  Anyway, I wrote Postcards from the Edge in Los Angeles when I was twenty-eight, and then I got back together with Paul again, so I wrote the screenplay for Postcards in New York. Then they started filming the movie in Los Angeles with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine! Well, I want to be on that set. So I started flying out to LA from New York a lot—and this was really bad for my relationship with Paul, and pretty soon we both knew it was over. (He might have known a little sooner than I did.) Mike Nichols used to say we were two flowers, no gardener. No one was minding the relationship.

  One time when I was flying back to LA—one of the last times—Paul and I had been fighting all morning, so he drove me to the airport to get rid of me faster and as I was about to get on the plane, I turned to him and said, “You’ll feel bad if I crash.”

  And he shrugged and said, “Maybe not.”

  Oh, and around that time I got a call from my business office that Bob Dylan wanted my phone number.

  And I said, “Fuck you. You get that stalker away from me. I don’t want anymore sixties icons fucking up my life!”

  That’s what I said in my head.

  Out loud I said, “Absolutely. I’ll be waiting by the phone.”

  Dylan wasn’t calling to ask me on a date. He was calling because this cologne company had contacted him to see if he would endorse a cologne called Just Like a Woman. Now Bob didn’t like that name, but he liked the idea of endorsing a cologne. And he wanted to know if I had any good cologne names.

  Do I look like someone who would be wandering around with a bunch of cologne names rattling around in my head?

  Well, tragically, I did. I did have quite a few ideas for cologne names and so I told them to Bob.

  There was Ambivalence, for the scent of confusion.

  Arbitrary for the man who doesn’t give a shit how he smells!

  And Empathy—feel like them and smell like this.

  Well, Bob actually liked those! And then he said he thought he might like to open a beauty salon, and I said, “What? Like Tangled Up and Blown?”

  Anyway, a couple of weeks later, I saw George Harrison at this dinner party, as one does, so I tell him that Bob called and he said, “Don’t worry, becaue you know whenever Bob is on the road for a long time, he starts thinking about finding a regular job. You know, a job that will take him off the road.”

  It turns out that Bob had phoned George the week before to see if he wanted to open The Traveling Wilburys Hotel.

  So, a short time after this, I invite Bob to a party at my house, and he arrives with his girlfriend (who was my neighbor at the time) and he’s wearing a parka with sunglasses.

  And I say, “Thank God you wore that, Bob, because sometimes late at night here the sun gets really, really, bright and then it snows.”

  Later, at the party, I introduce Bob to Meryl Streep, and he takes her hand and says, “Oh, yeah, I know you. You were great in—”

  And while he’s holding her hand, she now has to go through what turned out to be basically all of her movies, which takes a while, because his favorite turns out to be—Ironweed.

  My mother doesn’t always come to my parties. She doesn’t have to really, because she’s right next door and can listen to them from across the driveway.

  But she has always been there for me.

  I mean, obviously she was upset about my drug addiction—what mother wouldn’t be. But on some level she wasn’t as upset as she was with my failure to do a nightclub act.

  Well, that, and dating an agent. She grounded me for weeks when she found out about that. But when he ended up allegedly fathering her extraordinary granddaughter, Billie, all was forgiven.

  One of my dozens of psychiatrists once told me that it’s important to be able to distinguish the difference between a problem and an inconvenience. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a problem as a thing thrown or put forward; hence a question propounded for solution, a set task, a difficult or puzzling question proposed for solution. The first use of the word was in 1382—so I suppose prior to that there was either no way to put a name to one’s difficulties—or everyone lived in a world of different levels of inconvenience. Then, after 1382, problemizing could be the order of the day. An inconvenience, on the other hand, is defined as being troublesome—this was in the mid-1600s so I imagine there were three hundred years of problems between 1382 and 1656.

  But no matter what the dictionary says, in my opinion, a problem derails your life and an inconvenience is not being able to get a nice seat on the un-derailed train. Given that, I’ve had three and a half problems. A dead guy in my bed, substance abuse, and manic-depression. My final little problem-ette stems from the difficulty I seem to have in romantic relationships. Specifically, I’m referring to the last categorically “serious” relationship I had; I was left by a man for a man. Billie’s father left me for a man named Scott when she was one year old (making Scott the man who got the man who got away).

  Anyway, armed with my understanding between a problem and an inconvenience, I realize I’ve been blessed with very few problems in my life. Let’s face it, to complain about my childhood or even a sizeable portion of my life would be as unattractive as it would be inaccurate. I had a very privileged life growing up. A beautiful, loving, eccentric mother; an even-tempered—and consequently odd to me—bright, kind, religious brother; a charming, handsome, womanizing yet virtually absent father; lovely grandparents; and a series of dogs and a bird. I mean I had it all. Which is to say a hearty mix of good and not so hot like so many people.

  Right after I got sober (the first time), an interviewer asked me if I was happy, and I said, “Among other things.”

  Happy is one of the many things I’m likely to be over the course of a day and certainly over the course of a lifetime. But I think if you have the expectation that you’re going to be happy throughout your life—more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time—well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic. Which is obviously what I became. But actually, through therapy and exposure to the wisdom found in twelve-step programs and beyond, I’ve gotten an enormous portion of my compulsion for comfort under control.

  One night I had to go to a meeting—this three-hour meeting I’ve gone to every week for the last ten years. (By the way, no, I haven’t stayed sober that long, but my failure to achieve long-term sobriety is just that—my failure—not the failure of “the program.”) I first started going to meetings when I was twenty-eight, but it was at this particular three-hour meeting that I heard someone say that I didn’t have to like meetings, I just had to go to them. Well this was a revelation to me! I thought I had to like everything I did. And for me to like everything I did meant—well, among other things, that I needed to take a boat load
of dope. Which I did for many, many years. But if what this person told me were true, then I didn’t have to actually be comfortable all the time. If I could, in fact, learn to experience a quota of discomfort, it would be awesome news. And if I could consistently go to that three-hour meeting, I could also exercise, and I could write. In short, I could actually be responsible.

  But I didn’t learn this until after three of my three-and-a-half problems had occurred—the overdose, the bipolar diagnosis, and the man that got the man that got away.

  It seemed like a lot of my trouble showed up in sex, it being the alleged road to love and all. In almost—well, I won’t say every other situation, but in a lot of situations, you can hardly tell that there is anything really wrong with me—I just have basically too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two. But in the area of romance, Boom!—you know right away.

  When I was little—about seven, I guess—I remember getting in the car with my mother when she picked me up from school and telling her that I’d seen the word “fuck” written on the handball court at the playground and I wanted to know what it meant.

  And she said, “I’ll have to tell you later, dear—when I can draw you diagrams.” Well, needless to say “later” never came and neither did—I’m sorry to report—those promised diagrams. Which is a shame, really, because I think they would’ve come in pretty handy from time to time. Armed with my mother’s diagrams I might’ve moved through the world of dating in smooth easy motions, like a queen, with that straight-backed certainty that comes with being entitled, cared for, and wearing crowns. But without those diagrams—I shuffle around like some street person, clumsy and stooped with the carriage of someone who picks through the trash, shopping for dinner.