Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

The weird thing about all this is that I had been straight for months—the whole time I was filming Sleight of Head in London and all through my vacation. But then I got home and BOOM! four weeks of drugs. I hated it, I even wanted to stop, but I just couldn’t. It was like I was a car, and a maniac had gotten behind the wheel. I was driven, and I didn’t know who was driving.

DAY FIVE

I let Irene cut my hair today. It’s kind of horrible. She’s only twenty, and her skin is all broken out from PCP and heroin. I got so absorbed listening to her stories of blackouts and arrests for prostitution that I didn’t notice how badly the haircut was actually going.

Julie is so cheerful I want to punch her. And two guys who get out of here next week, Roger and Colin, almost swagger. They’ve got it all over us, because they haven’t done drugs in almost a month. They really know how to not do drugs now. Big fish in a little rehab.

I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel. I’m consumed with panic that everyone will find out about this and hate me, or laugh at me, or worst of all, feel sorry for me. Pity me for taking my Everything-That-a-Human-Can-Possibly-Be-Offered and turning it into scallops and Percodan on the emergency room floor.

I can see where people would think that my life is great, so why can’t I feel it? It’s almost like I’ve been bad and I’m being punished by rewards—this self-indulgent white chick whose inner voice says, “Look how spoiled you are. Go on, have another great thing. What are you gonna do about it, huh? What are you gonna do about it?”

The thing about having it all is, it should include having the ability to have it all. Maybe there are some people who know how to have it all. They’re probably off in a group somewhere, laughing at those of us who have it all but don’t know how to.

The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass. I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere.

DAY SIX

This is hard—I feel like I’ve got bugs flying around inside of me. I called my friend Wallis today, and I tried to get the operator to say, “Collect call from hell, will you accept the charges?”

After not feeling anything for years, I’m having this Feeling Festival. The medication wears off and the feelings just fall on you. And they’re not your basic fun feelings, either. These are the feelings you’ve been specifically avoiding—the ones you almost killed yourself to avoid. The ones that tell you you’re something on the bottom of someone’s shoe, and not even someone interesting.

I talked to my agent and ended up in tears, which is not my favorite presentation of myself. Crying to my agent. I tried very hard not to, but I didn’t have a chance. I’ve used up all the Not Cry I was issued at birth. Now, it appears, it’s crying time.

I talked to my mom briefly. I was afraid that she’d be mad at me for messing up the life she’d given me, but she was very nice. She said a great thing. I told her I was miserable here, and she said, “Well, you were happy as a child. I can prove it. I have films.”

What went wrong between what she gave me and how I took it?

DAY SEVEN

How old do you have to be to get past caring?

Sid looked over at me during lunch and said, “You look so unhappy.” I was sort of startled, since the picture of myself that I carry around in my wallet of a head is of a peppy, happy-go-crazy gal. I keep my eye on this picture when evidence to the contrary is all around me.

How could I have gotten all this so completely wrong? I’m smart. I guess I used the wrong parts of my brain, though—the parts that said, “Take LSD and painkillers. This is a good idea.” I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I’ve ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction. Everything hurts now, and nothing makes sense.

DAY EIGHT

Drama in Drug Ward Six!

Irene got kicked out of the unit for smoking dope in her room. She offered some to Carol, the agent’s wife, and Carol came to me crying and asked me what she should do. I told her we should turn Irene in, so we told Stan, the therapist who was on duty.

Stan called Irene in, and she had this real defiant look on her face, like she’d been caught doing something noble for her country and now she was going to be killed for it. Carol was crying and I was sitting and holding her hand. Stan said, “Irene, we hear you’ve been smoking dope.” Irene said, “Well, I didn’t know where I was gonna be when I moved out of here, if I was gonna go to a halfway house or whatever, and I was confused so I smoked dope.” Stan said, “There are a thousand excuses and finally no reasons to do drugs.”

Most of the people in here share the desire to seem cool. They can be aching from heroin withdrawal, but ask how they are and they’ll say, “Pretty good, man. Hangin’ in there.” The answer comes too quickly, and hovering over a grin, a look of desperate loneliness gazes across the abyss. The only thing worse than being hurt is everyone knowing that you’re hurt.

DAY NINE

So, essentially I could have died. Not only this time but probably several times, forgetting how much I took and when I took it, not to mention why I took it. Was I celebrating, or drowning my sorrows? Or celebrating my sorrows?

The junkies were up in arms this morning. Half of them wouldn’t speak to Carol and me because we snitched on Irene. The other half thought it was pretty stupid for anyone to have smoked dope at a drug rehab. They had to call a special little group session to defuse things. These aren’t people with a good handle on their emotions, and without their chemical coping skills it’s every man for himself. It doesn’t run hot and cold here, it runs hot and hotter . Bart, the homosexual triple Scorpio, called me an asshole in the Ping-Pong room.

It turns out Irene got the dope from one of the cleaning men who she was fucking in the stairwell during lunch. My kind of people.

DAY TEN

Three new people checked in today. Marvin, a retired bus driver in his fifties, is probably here for alcoholism. Wanda is a heroin addict who says she’s a model and brought the makeup to prove it. And Mark is a crazy kid from Vacaville—I don’t know what his drug of choice is, but I don’t think it matters anymore. This is a cross section of village idiots from all over the state. Everyone you ever would have thought was too loaded at a party is in one place.

After group, Bart apologized for calling me an asshole and told me a story about the time that he spilled amyl nitrate on his testicles and his balls melted into the sheets, and he had to take the sheets and his balls to the hospital and have them separated. I told him it was a great idea for a TV movie.

We had lunch and watched The Outer Limits . Drug addicts pretty much all have the same taste in shows: science fiction and MTV. It’s so bizarre. Everyone is acting like where we are is sort of normal, and we’re in a drug clinic.

DAY ELEVEN

The new people came out of detox today and joined our group. Marvin said he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he likes it here. He thinks all of us are interesting. It’s like he’s on a field trip for Psychology Today , or a segment of Bloopers, Blumpers and Bleepers where they send a healthy person to blend in with a wardful of addicts just to see if anybody notices.