Carrie Fisher - Wishful Drinking

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:

So yeah, he knew me.

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

Yup, I’m a bitch.

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

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:

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:

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.

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.

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 father 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! ”