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  Contents

  Before I Forget . . .

  Shockaholic

  Wishful Shrinking

  The Senator

  The Princess and the King

  Waiting for the Shoe (Tycoon) to Drop

  Oy! My Pa-Pa

  Acknowledgments

  Wishful Drinking excerpt

  Introduction: An Abundance of Apparentlys

  Chapter 1: Shores of Experience both Dark and Unfriendly

  For Billie and Barack,

  who make my world a better place.

  Despite the obstacles you’ve had to overcome—whether posed by my antics or the über-unfortunate antics of the Tea Partiers and the rest of their distressing ilk—long may you wave.

  There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.

  —Hannah Senesh, poet, playwright,

  and paratrooper (1921–1944)

  Before I Forget . . .

  What was it I wanted to tell you? Was it the new T-shirt-ready saying I came up with: “There’s no room for demons when you’re self-possessed”? No, that wasn’t it, although I did want to get that in somewhere and now I have . . . Oh, yeah. I wanted to tell all you naysayers who bought this book begrudgingly—or received it as a gift from someone who doesn’t know you that well—that by the last page you will say to yourself (as I did), “That Carrie Fisher! I picked up Shockaholic expecting to read way more than I wanted to about some eager-to-please fucktard blathering on about her drug addiction and her mental illness and her poor sad life. I mean, come on, this woman made millions of dollars on Star Wars. What is she complaining about? She’s so self-involved that they need to come up with a new word for what she is. I mean, does she have any other topic but herself? No wonder she’s mentally ill. She’s got herself on her mind ten, fifteen, twenty hours a day! It never ends. ‘Oh, here’s something about me, and here’s another thing about me, and, wait, here’s something about me I don’t think I told you. Oh, I did? Well, here it is again in case you managed to forget it.’ And the thing is, Who’s asking? Does anyone hear any questions? I think someone actually has to pull her aside—if you can get her to shut up for five seconds—and say, ‘No one has asked you a single question, not in twelve thousand years. Can’t you just give us all a break? We all have lives, too, but how can we live them with her continuously blowing the lunch of her life into our existence. No one has asked!’

  “But I truly had no idea she was so smart—and so funny! And more to the point, so real! I was so completely fascinated and charmed by what she wrote that by the last page I had completely forgotten that she was an over-the-Beverly-Hill mediocre ‘actress’ with a wrinkly neck and unsightly upper arms. And probably the most important thing I came away with is that I now have the ability to forgive myself for all those judgmental, hateful, preconceived notions that I harbored for a well-meaning person who was only trying to make me take a good, long hard look at myself by sharing her story with me, after which I said, ‘Wow. I now realize for the first time that I need to love and respect others before I can truly love myself.’ And by ‘others,’ for the most part, I mean Carrie Fisher. From Shockaholic, I learned that a person doesn’t have to finish high school to have insight and use big words. Ms. Fisher may not be what is considered conventionally attractive—among other things her tits are so big that they’d have to add letters to the alphabet in order to identify her bra size—but it’s my opinion that you couldn’t find a better example of ‘good people’ in all of history. And, you’ve got to respect someone who has managed to overcome the previously unappreciated challenges of growing up surrounded by an unending procession of maids and governesses and cooks and guards, depriving her of the joys of being raised by a mother and father in a cozy house in a regular neighborhood with a dog and home-cooked meals and chores. This is a person who missed out on the ordinary, everyday essentials most people can count on as a foundation from which a sane, predictable life can be built, and who had to forge an existence for herself that made up for never having known the joy of saying, ‘What’s for dinner, Mom?’ or ‘No, I did not flush the fish down the toilet.’ Instead, Ms. Fisher had to develop values in the face of the hard reality of wanting for nothing. Sure, from the outside, her life looked too good to be real—but, if you think about it very briefly, I think you’ll come to the conclusion that perhaps it was too unreal to be good.”

  You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson’s last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel—how shall I put this?—mentally sound.

  So, after all this and more, you have no doubt guessed by now that I finally relented and agreed to submit to a controversial treatment that a long line of reputable psychiatrists had been urging me to consider for what seemed like centuries. With no small nod to squeamishness, I consented to undergo electroconvulsive therapy, formerly and perhaps more commonly known as shock treatment. Now, I, too, of course, believed what pretty much the entire Western world believes, thanks in large part to Hollywood’s portrayal of it—I believed that this treatment was an extreme measure primarily administered as punishment to mental patients for being crazily uncooperative. But it turns out that if you’re in sufficiently agonizing shape, you—or maybe not you, but, for example, I—will finally sob, “Fuck it. Let’s say it even does turn out to be a punishment, which I doubt very much that it will, but if it did it couldn’t be much more horrifically harsh than what I’m barely able to endure now, so what are you waiting for?! Go on! Do it! Do it before you don’t have a mind to change.”

  But, as you may have heard, the main side effect of ECT is that it really messes with the part of your brain that deals with memory. What I’ve found is that, at least for the moment, most of my old memories remain intact, but I totally lose the months before and after the treatment. Exactly how much time I lose is really difficult to say, because what I’m ultimately doing is trying to remember how much I forgot, which is an incredibly complex endeavor, to say the least.

  It occurs to me that perhaps one of the reasons I found myself sporting my enormous bulk is another by-product of that memory-addling ECT. I may have simply forgotten how to not be overweight. So, before I fail to remember anything else that could result in any future social embarrassment, I thought I would jot down a few things that I might one day enjoy reflecting on. Or, if the ECT continues to take its toll, reading some of the things I’ve jotted as if for the very first time. Because, let’s face it, if the disastrous should occur and I fail to reduce my ever-expanding girth, I’d better have something funny to say. And perhaps even an insight or three. You know, something along the lines of the amusing musings of a chubby sidekick.

  To pa
raphrase The Onion—and when I say paraphrase, I mean basically steal one of their headlines and change one word in an attempt to make it my own—you haven’t lived vicariously until you’ve done it through me. So, before I forget, what follows is a sort of an anecdotal memoir of a potentially more than partial amnesiac. Remembrances of things in the process of passing.

  Shockaholic

  It turns out that the Italians are the unsung heroes electroconvulsive therapy–wise. It is these brilliant wise guys who gave us ECT, or as it was formerly and less respectably known, SHOCK TREATMENT. Actually, it was really one Italian in particular, though I like to think of all Italians banding together and coming up with one of the finest alternative treatments for depression and mania.

  The particular Italian who brought it to us (and when I say “us” I mean “me”) was a very thoughtful neurologist named Ugo Cerletti. Dr. Cerletti was a specialist in epilepsy and, as such, had done extensive experiments on the effects of repeated seizures over time in animals.

  Well, we all know how crazy cats and dogs can get, and who among us hasn’t had to cope with our share of nutty pigs? I can’t count how many nights I’ve spent haunted by terrifying images of pet pigs in the throes of a seizure. Many of us are familiar with the expression, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Well, perhaps a lesser known saying (but certainly just as apt) is, “What’s good for the anesthetized pig prior to slaughter is also effective in treating a devastated human susceptible to suicide!”

  Over time, Dr. Cerletti managed to convince several other bold colleagues with sufficient spare time to assist him in developing an apparatus able to deliver brief electric jolts—at first merely to the odd crestfallen cat but eventually to actual psychotic human beings.

  It was in April of 1938 that Dr. Cerletti began delivering, on alternate days, to some of the more psychotic and suicidally depressed patients, between ten and twenty ECT shocks. And you’ll be happy to hear that the results were nothing short of miraculous. For example: 90 percent of the gang with everything from your wilted-garden-variety depression to hopeless catatonia showed everything from moderate to tremendous improvement! (The unhelped 10 percent were probably the agents of the improved 90.) And of course the other handy upside was that, for the most part, these patients wouldn’t remember much from right before to a few weeks after their treatment, so it was rare that patients complained about the experience.

  Not that, in the beginning, there weren’t complaint-worthy aspects of the procedure. In the earliest days, the ECT seizures could be so violent your bones might break, especially those that were commonly referred to as the “long bones.” But it wasn’t long before doctors discovered a medication that could not only prevent the previously unavoidable convulsions but would also protect the longer bones of the formerly vulnerable arms and legs. Soon after, the administering of a short-term anesthesia ensured that the patients no longer even had to be conscious during those miraculously healing seizures.

  Of course, ECT is rarely considered as treatment until all other valuable medications and talk therapies have failed. Then, and only then, do they suggest that you light up the dark and gloomy skies behind your forehead.

  To say the least, this treatment has anything but good PR. You won’t be stunned to hear that “shock” turns out to be one of those words that is almost impossible to put a positive spin on, which I’m sure is why they’ve done all they could to phase it out of the current official term. (Not that “convulsive” sounds all that great, or even “electro,” for that matter.) I mean, come on, whenever you see ECT depicted in a movie it’s pretty much always a terrifying event, like pushing someone out a window or under a train. Now, I have long been someone whose TV is on twenty-four hours a day tuned to movie channels old and new—my television is a bit like complicated wallpaper, eager to entertain but all too frequently unable to oblige. So, given the relentlessness with which I’m exposed to both the classic films and the more current offerings, I think it’s safe to say I’ve seen pretty much all of the available mental hospital movie fare: everything from The Snake Pit to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to Frances, and all the way up to Changeling.

  Yes, even in the 2008 film Changeling, ECT was portrayed as the undisputed finest method available to both control and render mute the more problematically uncooperative patients in the ward. So, when doctors first proposed that I might find this treatment beneficial, there was absolutely no way on God’s less-and-less-green Earth that I was going to subject myself to its reputed horrors. I, like most others, thought you had to be completely insane to consider it, or have it considered for you, and up to then I guess I didn’t feel completely insane.

  I mean, clearly no one would vote for volts until everything else had failed. It’s reserved for those languishing in the suicidal ideation lounge, and I had never been truly suicidal. Not that I haven’t, on occasion, thought it might be an improvement over the all-too-painful present if I could be deadish for maybe just a teeny little bit of it. You know, like a really good sleep, after which I’d wake refreshed and equal to whatever the problem had been, that problem would have now vanished.

  In my first novel, Postcards from the Edge, my main character, Suzanne Vale, who many have pointed out bore an uncanny resemblance to me, was asked if her drug overdose had been a suicide attempt. Suzanne dismissed this notion as absurd, to which the doctor then pointed out, “Well, some might find your behavior very suicidal,” to which I—excuse me, Suzanne—responded, “Well, the behavior might be, but I’m certainly not.” You might even find that, with my particular combination of poor judgment and recklessness, it could be seen as being a very good impression of suicidal. It really does convince people, particularly doctor-types, and it’s almost impossible to unconvince them.

  My emotional difficulties were exacerbated during the period following the death of my friend Greg Stevens, whose name almost never appeared in print without the identifying phrase “gay Republican political operative.” So why break tradition here? My gay republican political operative friend had only recently died, and try as I might, I couldn’t help but blame myself for not having saved him. I did this largely because he died sleeping next to me (though not, technically, with me—see “gay”) from a combination of OxyContin use and sleep apnea. But because it happened on my watch, I subsequently had a very difficult time putting it safely behind me. And, over time, I hope you won’t find it entirely preposterous that I came to believe that my house was haunted. Specifically, of course, by Greg’s gay Republican political operative ghost.

  I’d heard that my home was the scene of a few spectral sightings prior to my having moved in. For example, the woman who’d lived there the longest, eight-time Academy Award–winning costume designer Edith Head, was said to roam the property on the weekends wearing a yellow nightgown. Why a woman so involved with the creation of a large number of cinema’s most memorable costumes worn in some of Hollywood’s treasured films, would choose to wear something so unadorned as a nightgown—and a yellow one at that—is beyond me. Maybe she was tired of fashion and chose to wear something she could nap in for a very bland eternity. Perhaps she wore a nightgown for haunting at night! That would be a practical solution, no? But whatever the reason, if Edith did happen to roam her once-beloved home, she never floated past me. Nor did I spot any visions of Bette Davis, who sold the property to Edith, or Robert Armstrong, King Kong’s captor in the original film, who built the house and sold it to Bette. No, my house was blissfully apparition-free until my gay Republican political operative (GRPO) friend Greg died in it.

  Given my enormous sense of guilt, I suppose part of me wanted Greg to come back. In any form. And since corporeal was totally out of the question, ethereal would have to do. I didn’t actually feel his presence until about nine months after he’d died. It was close to Christmas, and I would open the front door to the house, stand on the threshold, and call out, “Hi, Greg!” Or, “Homo, I’m Hun!” Naturally,
I avoided these salutations if I thought my daughter, Billie, was anywhere she might hear me. Not to mention anyone with some authority to have me committed.

  At some point around this time, I was conferring with my book editor, and when I mentioned feeling Greg’s GRPO energy around the house she recommended I call the author of a book she was editing, who coincidentally also happened to be a psychic and who she felt might be able to shed some light on my recent darkish times. I did finally phone the woman, who told me that she felt that the reason Greg might still be around—and as I said, in my opinion, he was very around—was because he hadn’t realized yet that he was dead. He had been yanked from the world so suddenly that he didn’t know that he was no longer still in it. I told her that I felt that for quite some time now the air in the house seemed saddled with something more complicated than air. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that heaviness, either. A lot of people staying with me at the time had told me that they felt something, too. Okay, so maybe not all these people were safely on the sober side, but I’d spent a shitload of time in my life more than slightly shitfaced and not once was I ever troubled by spirits—alcoholic or otherwise. Over the next six months, this Greg-ish feeling diminished until one day I noticed it had gone away entirely. Perhaps he finally realized he wasn’t alive anymore.

  But in my stressed state—oh, no! Unfortunately oh, yes!—I had begun using drugs again. And not just any drug. No, I had to start using the drug that Greg had so recently done to his premature death. I began snorting OxyContin.

  Now, I am not a stupid person. I’m a fairly intelligent person who does stupid things. Incredibly stupid things. I can’t defend it. I can explain it until the end of time, but that still doesn’t make it in any way excusable, especially when you factor in the impact it had on my daughter (along with anyone else in my bonkers life who gave a shit about me). And I did it knowing full well how painful it was to have a parent who was unable to resist the impulse to resort to getting consistently altered. Altered and unavailable.