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  Harry was always well dressed and groomed. He ought to have been, since a barber came to see him at the house every day. Nighttime was another story. As Harry slept sans pajama bottoms, causing his privates to be anything but, his horrible flaccid elephant trunk of a penis was regularly on display, actually looking more like a long ball than anything else. Ah, the fabulous waltzing we did at Harry’s Long Ball!

  Debbie Reynolds and Harry Karl, happier than two people have ever been (clothed).

  Debbie Reynolds and Harry Karl standing on either side of President John F. Kennedy, a photo opportunity they would later re-enact (in bathing suits) with a lesser president.

  Naturally he had hemorrhoids, which was probably partly why he eschewed pajama bottoms, leaving him to sleep bare bottomed on a towel. (Yes, with an HK monogram.) He also had a special toilet so he didn’t have to exacerbate the tissue down there with any undue wiping. I apologize for these descriptions. Horrific, I know. But, having shared this, I hope you’ll someday be able to find a way to forgive me. I know I won’t be able to forgive myself. Harry would push this little lever on the side of the toilet and it would spray water on him, after which he’d push the lever the other way and a tiny door would open and blast warm air to dry his now shiny clean parts. This was my favorite thing in the house to demonstrate to my fellow teenage classmates.

  Given what I’ve told you so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that, in addition to Harry’s previously catalogued attributes, he was also a lifetime member of the Frequent Farter Club. He rarely spoke, apparently preferring to converse flatulently. He communicated in Morse code from his ass.

  He was almost twenty years older than my mother, and had informed her of his impotence early on. I doubt that this was much of a heartbreak for her, for a host of reasons, but—as it turned out, this “impotence” turned out to be more that he just preferred to have sex with hookers who came to the house pretending to be manicurists.

  After my mother found out about the “manicurists,” a gossip columnist named Joyce Haber wrote that the marriage was on the rocks. That night my mother came to my room (because by now you’ll perhaps be happy to hear that all four of us were finally sleeping in separate bedrooms), and, shutting the door discreetly behind her, she held out this article, held tight in her right hand. “Don’t show this to Harry,” she instructed me solemnly. The chances of my doing this were quite slim, as Harry and I rarely spoke—but I assured her I had no plans to do so. Later the same evening Harry uncharacteristically also came to my room, saying and doing almost the exact same thing my mother had done moments before. Clutching another copy of the same paper he said, “Don’t show this to your mother.” As if, in either case, this was something I would have done.

  Then, in part as an effort to keep the family together, we all went to Europe. Todd and my first trip there. My most vivid memory of the trip occurred one evening when we were in Venice. As we floated along in a gondola, Harry’s hand drifting beside him in the water, while the gondolier singing his passionate song—la, la, la—and with the singing in our ears and the Italian twilight glowing around us, Harry’s hand slowly came out of the water holding a wet lump of excrement. Are you beginning to see a recurring theme in Harry’s overall presentation?

  Later back at the hotel, my brother and I were giggling about the feces that Harry had just been scrubbing off of his hand when he suddenly yet casually appeared in the doorway (I don’t recall where my mother was) and announced that he had a joke to tell us. Todd and I were stunned. In more than a decade with Harry Karl, nothing like this had ever happened. Harry simply never spoke, except when he got on the intercom to call out for assistance.

  It was a miracle! Maybe there was magic in the shit Harry had pulled from the dark water in the canal!

  “There’s an orchestra,” he began, frowning, “and the first violinist is standing in front of the conductor.” Not only was he telling us this joke and speaking in fully punctuated if somewhat simple sentences—“And the conductor is conducting and conducting . . . ”—but he was also acting it out, grandly performing the conducting with his arms. “And all of a sudden he smells something that smells really bad”—he made an unpleasant smell face—“but the conductor keeps conducting and conducting, until after a while he can’t stand the stench any longer. So he turns to the first violinist and asks . . . ” Harry mouthed as he continued to conduct. “ ‘Did you fart?’ ” Then Harry acted out the part of the violinist, waving his arms in enormous violin-playing movements. “And the violinist looks at him with a big smile on his face”—and one on Harry’s—“and shaking his head he whispers, No, he didn’t. He definitely did not fart.” And Harry kept playing the violin. This was an unprecedented spasm of personality from Harry. This joke that had apparently remained pent up inside of him for over thirteen years now came flowing out as if he’d had a comedic boil that had now been lanced.

  “So the conductor”—now he went back to acting like the conductor—“he continues to conduct, but the smell is also continuing, so he turns yet again to the first violinist and mouths, ‘Are you sure you didn’t fart?’ And the first violinist has a huge grin on his face”—as did Harry, a massive, yellowed-toothed grin, accompanied by more big violin-playing movements—“and shakes his head. No! No, he most certainly had not. He absolutely, positively did not fart. So the conductor continues to conduct, but this unbelievably terrible smell stiil permeates the air around them. So now he finally looks back down at the first violinist and mouths, ‘Did you shit?’ And now the first violinist, still grinning madly”—as was Harry, with more pleasure than we’d ever seen him evidence—“nodded yes.” And the crescendo, with the most enormous, joyous head nodding from Harry: “Yes! He did! He most certainly had shit!” The violinist actually shit! Right there in the orchestra! From the looks of Harry’s pantomime he was playing nothing less than Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata!

  That, I promise you, was the longest conversation Harry ever had with either of us. Not that it really was a conversation, but it was close. Someone talked, others listened, an understanding of sorts was achieved. The idea of him telling us this joke after having just washed the shit from the canals off of his hand will never cease to amaze me. Well . . . almost never.

  Sadly, the European excursion did not save their marriage. I sometimes think that perhaps it would have if my mother had been there to hear about the first violinist and his unruly intestines.

  Oy! My Pa-Pa

  I didn’t see my father all that much growing up, which resulted in him becoming a kind of mythic figure to me. I probably knew as much about him as some of his more rabid fans. I’d been told stories by other relatives of ours about how he would make plans to come pick up Todd and me and then not show up. This apparently occurred enough so that by the time I was three, when someone would tell me, “Your dad’s coming!” I would shrug as near to indifferently as possible and say, “Maybe.”

  Several years later, after his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor had come to an end, he was living in an Asian-looking house in a development called Beverly Estates, located up on a hill overlooking, of all things, other Asian-looking houses in what is now part of Benedict Canyon. Now, my father was not what you might think of as an industrious type person. I mean, if you could get something done for you by someone else, my dad would have it done (obviously with the exception of having sex), so, to assist him in his very basic existence, he had this very capable, imposing black man named Willard, a man who he referred to as his “butler” as people still did in those days. Willard, who actually dressed like a butler, in a white jacket and black pants, pretty much took care of my dad for about twenty years. You might say he made my father—an extremely charming womanizing drug enthusiast—possible. He looked after him and cleaned up after him and even sometimes fed him (on the rare occasions that he ate, because by then he was shooting speed, courtesy of the original Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Max Jacobson).

  I remember this one time, when my fa
ther was living with this beautiful Scandinavian Playboy model named Ula, my brother and I were going to spend the night. Amazing, right!? A sleepover at Dad’s! But somehow my mom found out that he was living in sin with Ula, who also happened to be a Playboy model. So, when the four of us got back from the movies, there was my mom’s Cadillac in the driveway, with her leaning against it, furiously smoking a cigarette. Then she waited while we gathered up our overnight bags and drove us home in uncomfortable silence, Todd and I staring gloomily into our laps.

  On another occasion, when I was about thirteen, I remember taking a walk with him down the road near his home. So, you know, what do you say to someone who really didn’t know how to ask questions and coincidentally happened to be your father? I mean, our exchanges never really went much beyond an assortment of, “How are you?” or “What grade are you in now?” or “What’s your favorite subject?” This time though he turned to me quite casually and said, “I see you’re developing breasts.”

  Naturally, I didn’t really know how to respond to this. I mean, maybe it would have been different if he’d been more of a . . . well, a more present sort of parent, you know? Like where there are a sufficient assortment of other subjects that we could discuss that might, say, provide us with any kind of context where that exchange could maybe occur, right? But all out there on its own . . . I have to say, well, it was awkward, to say the least.

  Here’s the thing. Very early on in my father’s life it became obvious that he possessed a beautiful singing voice. Untrained, undeveloped, it just emerged—strong, pure, remarkable. So, from a very early age he was singing professionally, performing initially at bar mitzvahs. And somehow there wasn’t a huge leap from being the most gifted bar mitzvah boy to headlining in the Catskills.

  I could go back and check one of his two autobiographies, but from what I can recall, my father was winning talent contests and appearing on local radio shows beginning at the age of twelve or thirteen, so that by the time he was fifteen, he had officially been “discovered” by none other than Eddie Cantor.

  The upshot of this early career download is, my father was treated like a celebrity from a very early age. He had six siblings, but his mother doted on him. Clearly, he was her favorite, her Sonny Boy, dark haired and adorable. And it did not stop with his mom. No, from the first, all the girls loved him. And as such, whatever rules there were simply didn’t apply to him. He was young, he was talented, he was handsome, and he was Jewish. What more could you ask for? So by the time he was eighteen, my father was making more money than his father, and by the time he was twenty-one, he was making more than his father ever had. So what all this came tumbling down to was that my father could do no wrong, or if he did do what might ordinarily be considered “wrong” for someone else, for him these were just some of the quirks that might be found in the very blessed and gifted.

  In his universe, from the very earliest of formative years, his every gesture, every utterance, every otherwise inappropriate action was not only indulged but in many cases celebrated. I don’t say this to excuse him, but in a way he was somehow guileless. I don’t know how else to describe it. I mean, he just . . . he always seemed to be able to assume the best about others—especially women, of course—and he was always ALWAYS up for a good time.

  After the developing breasts talk, I think there was a seven-year gap where, instead of merely having no relationship, we had no relationship at all. Then, suddenly somehow it was 1977, the year everything changed. I was living in New York on the Upper West Side. Star Wars had opened recently, and I happened to be in it, and my life . . . I mean, what can you say after that? No, I’m really asking you? What can you say? Well, whatever it is, there’s every chance it would be said in a very weird robotic voice. Coincidentally, this happened at almost the exact same time when my term as a teenager was up. But because I had been in Star Wars, for the first time I could afford my very own apartment. I paid the rent with checks that had my name on them, money I’d earned by playing Princess Leia Organa in a movie that was so popular—so unbelievably popular—that it took whatever my life had been up to that point and transformed it into this very different thing. I mean, sure I’d spent my whole life around fame. Who hasn’t, right? But that fame was generated by my parents. This shine was mine.

  Well, sort of mine anyway. And by that, I mean that Princess Leia was famous. And I just happened to look amazingly like her—I mean aside from her hair. But this was not dissimilar to the associative fame I’d lucked into with my scandal-generating folks. I now had this new and super-attenuated, dialed-up sci-fi fame and if that wasn’t enough, this fame came with Leia Organa’s salary. And it was with that salary that I rented my very own semi-private apartment between 90th and 91st on Central Park West—300 CPW. Yes, that’s right, the El Dorado. Apartment 12J1 with its actual terrace quietly overlooking . . . other buildings. No, it wasn’t big or fancy, but whatever it was, it was mine. Mine not only to live in, but to decorate and even invite people to. My life had begun, and gosh darn it all to Pete, it was gonna have all the earmarks of adventure and all the Groucho Ear Marx of fun. So there it was—spread out all around me. So, what else could I do but hunker down and live it? Naturally, one of my first stops on this new life’s journey of mine was yes, that’s right—dropping acid.

  Acid had become my new best friend, my drug of choice, my companion in chief. It agreed with me—whoever I happened to be at that not so sharp point. Something about it was more of the same for me—but in a way that sameness was oh so very far from redundant. My experience of almost everything and everyone I encountered had always been intense, but I found it difficult to believe that everyone else’s was, too. But I found that when I took acid with whatever friend I was lucky enough to take it with, I knew with an almost sufficient amount of certainty that we felt something close to exactly the same way.

  So, it was a hot summer night in Manhattan, one of those nights just made for hallucinating that my friend (and Jerry Garcia’s friend) Mike and I dropped some liquid Owsley LSD and we lay out on a blanket on my terrace, gazing rapturously up at the night sky listening to Keith Jarrett, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan playing on the turntable, with the volume turned up high, realizing our way to morning.

  That summer, with an ever-increasing appetite for closures—random and otherwise—my open mind stretching ever wider, wider, reveling out there, shimmering in the distance . . . Who was that? It appeared to be—why, yes, it was a man—that was it! A silver-haired, half pajama-clad, plum-eating and Kent-smoking . . . WAS it!?!! YES! It was! It was my stepfather. That flatulent albeit well-groomed shoe tycoon.

  Harry Karl, the man who had disappeared from our lives—for very, very good reason—more than five years earlier, and to whom I’d never actually said goodbye. Wow . . . yes . . . it was all too crystal clear. Now would be the perfect time to correct this oversight.

  So, with the acid as my guide, I picked up the phone and dialed the inexplicably remembered ten numbers that would deliver me back to Harry. (God, remember dialing?) After enough rings to convince me I’d woken him, he picked up the phone and growled in his five-packs-a-day voice, “Yeah, hello?” prompting me to cheerily say something along the lines of, “Listen, I just wanted to call you because, you know, we did actually live together for twelve years or so and, even though you and my mom got divorced, you never did anything specifically awful to me, I mean, not really at all, right? So I just wanted to say, you know, I’m not mad at you or anything and I’m, you know, I’m sorry I never spoke to you for so many years up until now.” I may have even thrown in some version of “You were always good to us,” which, I mean, he really kind of had been, in his nonverbal, having-sex-with-manicurists-who-turned-out-to-be-whores-and-taking-all-of-our-mother’s-money sort of way. Hey, at least he’d been present, right? Even though that presence included not wearing pajama bottoms and passing gas incessantly.

  I don’t actually recall the ensuing conversation much beyond this po
int, but ultimately I know I was glad I’d called him, because soon after that we received word that he’d suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away. And not surprisingly, it was a fairly goofy, rarely heard-of type of death.

  Apparently late one afternoon, while he was shuffling and wheezing his way through the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a man approached him, smiling and holding out his hand, saying cheerily, “Hey, Harry, how the hell are you? Long time no see!!!” and gave him a friendly punch in the arm. It was several hours later that same night, that Harry was rushed to the hospital. It seemed that a blood clot had formed in his recently punched arm, which then subsequently continued on to a place it didn’t belong at all, leaving Harry very, very dead and subsequently leaving me very, very grateful that I’d dropped acid that night with Mike, inspiring me to talk, however briefly, to Harry before he’d passed on to that great shoe store in the sky.

  Anyway, having called Harry, I found myself working backwards through my mother’s husbands, leaving me to now call my actual and very own father, Eddie Fisher.

  Well, as luck would have it, by now the acid was peaking, and I found a person very like myself saying something like, “Hey, Dad, you know, whatever, I love you, and I’m sorry we never actually connected that much, and, you know, maybe one day you could, I don’t know, maybe one day you’d like to come visit me here in New York sometime or whatever.”

  Well, wouldn’t you know it? Eighteen hours later the doorbell rang and there, having caught the first flight out from LAX to JFK, was my long-lost papa, a grin on his face and a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag in his hand. Well, what could I say—however unconvincingly—but, “Come on in! Welcome!”

  Carrie Fisher and Eddie Fisher, blissfully unaware that the marriage of Norwegian president Sven Migdorf would collapse within hours.