Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

“I feel like maybe I’ve learned my lesson now,” Lucy said. “I want to have learned it. Maybe this could be my epiphany. Maybe Scott Hastings was my epiphany, and now I’ll just move into the rest of my life like it was lukewarm water.”

“That’s the way it works in movies,” said Suzanne. “Something happens that has an impact on someone’s life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that’s not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, ‘Well, what about the impact?’ You have epiphanies all the time. They just don’t have any effect.”

“Maybe they do,” said Lucy hopefully, “only we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. Maybe right now we’re at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, but we just don’t know it yet.”

“I think,” said Suzanne, suddenly serious, “that we should agree that we won’t get out of bed until we decide what to do with the second half of our lives. This is like life’s intermission.”

“It could take a long time,” said Lucy dubiously, “because we’ve really made a big mess of it. We’re in our thirties already. I mean, what’s our plan here? I don’t feel like we really have a plan yet.”

“We could find our plan on TV,” Suzanne said. “That’s where most people learn about morals and ideals and stuff like that.”

“Is it really?” asked Lucy. “Because I watched TV and never got any. Or maybe I did, and didn’t know it.”

“You were probably watching the wrong channels,” said Suzanne.

“Okay,” said Lucy, “so our plan is that we stay here and watch television, the right channels, and we’ll figure out our values. Good plan.”

Suzanne sighed. “We have no lives. I think it was Freud who said that the way they determined if people were crazy was whether their insanity interfered with love and work. Those are the two areas. And we have no love and no work.”

“Does that mean we’re crazy?” asked Lucy.

“Well, certainly we’re… defective. We’re defective units. Something broke in our heads, some way we look at things broke, and now we have to fix it. Maybe there’s a way to look at things that makes it okay to not have work, or to wind up as maiden aunts. If there is, we should know about it.”

“I had a dream last night that I was driving in the dark without any lights on and no brakes,” Lucy said.

“I wonder what that means.”

“I don’t need to see a shrink to figure out what it means, okay?” said Lucy, who had never been to one. “I’m out of control. I know that about myself. And when I go out of control, I latch on to something that looks stable, and married men look stable to me. They look like they were etched in air, and they’re there for me to make them unstable. I like to try to jar them. Anyway, while we’re on shrinks, how’s Norma?”

“Norma wants me to lead a life instead of follow one around,” Suzanne said. “But she’s been away for the past two weeks. I’ve been on kind of an enforced shrink break, so I thought I’d just go to bed and see what I think about all this. I don’t want any advice. I mean, I like to talk to you, but I don’t feel like you have any advice.”

“Thank you,” said Lucy. “That’s very, very beautiful of you to say. Hey, I hear Jack Burroughs is doing Ziz! II . What’s the status of that relationship?”

“That never was a relationship,” said Suzanne. “It was just a theory both of us had for a while. If we’d have had a relationship, we suspected, we wouldn’t have liked it very much, so we didn’t have one. We just talked constantly about the one we didn’t have.”

“Who ended the theory?” Lucy asked.

“I finally left,” Suzanne said. “I stopped in mid-sentence one day and decided that’s where I wanted to end it. You know, I always thought you could work on a relationship, but there’s work and then there’s construction work.”

“Guys are great before you know who they are,” said Lucy. “They’re great when you’re still with who they might be.”

“Did you ever sleep with Jack?”

“No,” said Lucy. “We fooled around once, but someone interrupted us and it just never got continued. We were both real stoned.”

“Interesting,” said Suzanne. “You never slept with Jack Burroughs, and I never slept with Todd Zane. It makes us unique.”

“Do you think there’s anyone else out there who’s never slept with one of them?” asked Lucy. “Do you think there’s anyone who’s never slept with either of them?”

“Yes, and she’ll probably show up soon,” said Suzanne. “We’re probably having a meeting and we don’t even know it.”

“Let me just ask you one thing,” Lucy said. “Don’t you think this is a little pathetic? To just be in bed watching television?”

“It’s pathetic,” agreed Suzanne emphatically. “I think if you’re going to be pathetic, you should be pathetic . People don’t dare to be pathetic anymore.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone about this until we’re really sure pathetic is the way to go.”

“I think we should just really explore doing nothing,” said Suzanne. “I mean, there are a lot of people who essentially do nothing, but none who are boldly going forward and really doing nothing. We’ll be pioneers in real nothing. We’re the new woman, the Woman of the Eighties, with nothing and no one. Look at it this way. We’ve spent years fixing up and futzing around and being as vivacious as our nerves would allow, and it got us unemployed as actresses and as dates. So if all that effort got us nowhere, we could just as easily get nowhere without the effort. The goal should be to remove all stimuli and find out what your instincts are, if any. Because living in Hollywood, we haven’t used our instincts for a long time. We’ve used the instincts of our environment. We’ve seen what other people do and we’ve done the same in order to achieve their success.”

She sighed. “Yap, yap yap, yap, yap, yap,” she said. “Let’s just hope there are no Third World flies on the wall. If anyone from another culture—from anyplace outside of this specific Hollywood culture—overheard this conversation, it would confirm the worst of their suspicions.”

“Sometimes I feel so spoiled,” Lucy said, “like something left out too long in the Now-Playing-Everywhere sun. Still,” she added hopefully, “I’m very encouraged by this act of hibernation. So, what kind of revenge do you think I can have on Scott Hastings?”

“Revenge may not be a particularly higher-consciousness-oriented activity,” Suzanne said.

“But it is fun,” said Lucy. “Karmically speaking, I agree it’s probably very bad, but I obviously already have a large karmic debt. Otherwise, why was I sent to this planet attracted to men that don’t like me and unable to get an acting job? What the fuck, I might as well act out some revenge on this guy. Wanna help? I mean, you can’t have incredible karma, either—you’re with me. Come on, double or nothing on bad karma.”

“You’re so crazy,” said Suzanne, laughing.

“I want to call him and tell him not to call me,” Lucy said.

“I did this stuff already,” said Suzanne. “Don’t you see? We’ve become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, ‘I’m angry at him and I didn’t express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it’s depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.’ It’s like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we’re allowed to do stupid things.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Lucy said. “Sometimes I feel like I should hum ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ underneath when you talk. But I feel bad, because he’s sort of famous, and I feel like maybe he’ll get more famous and I’ll have missed something.”