Carrie Fisher - Postcards from the Edge

How could I not have found this before? I’m so happy. Maybe I should just call the party and ask for that girl. What’d he say her name was? No, maybe I’ll just… Is it rude to jerk off in people’s houses? I’ll just get up and…

“No, no, no, I’m okay, man. I just wanna use your can. What? No, I’ve snorted heroin, but I would never shoot it. Oh, you would do it for me. Well, I suppose that doesn’t count, then, right? But I wouldn’t have to… ? And it’d just be a little bit, right?”

It seems like it would be good. Heroin’s like the natural drug. I don’t know, though. This is so weird.

“You wouldn’t do anything bad to me, would you? You have such a great expression on your face right now. All right, sure, I’ll trust you. But just give me a little bit. And Steve, you’re driving us back, right? Well, maybe I’ll just crash here then. That’s cool, right? I like Brentwood.”

I can’t believe this. I’m tying off. This is so weird . I never thought I would do this. But I’m just gonna do it once .

“Okay.”

Oh, my God! Now I understand everything. This is so intensely great. Smack. It sounds like a breakfast cereal. It sure doesn’t feel like a breakfast cereal. Shit, I love this. It’s like floating down the Nile in your mind. Deep sea diving in your head. This must be well-being.

Does this make me a drug addict? No, I’m just celebrating tonight. What a great night this is.

I’ll never do cocaine again. Uh-uh. Maybe a little Ecstasy, a little heroin, but I’ll never do cocaine again. And I’m gonna start working out tomorrow. I’m gonna start an aerobic workout tomorrow on my bike. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. I wish I’d never had that wheat-grass juice, though. I feel sort of nauseous.

“Oops, sorry, man. Let me clean it up.”

God, that was the easiest puke I’ve ever had. I wish I could have always thrown up that way. That felt almost good.

“Sure, take my car. I’ll wait here. I’ll just… be… here…”

What a nice, kind apartment this is. I think everyone should just love each other. That’s what I think.

I don’t know when I’ve felt this rested. I’ve never truly been relaxed. I’m finally relaxed. I feel like Jesus slipped me in the pocket of his robe, and we’re walking over long, long stretches of water.

My parents were so fabulous to have had me. This is just… everything . My teeth feel so soft. This is why people take this. It wouldn’t even be so bad to die of really good heroin. I wouldn’t mind just living two more weeks and dying at the end of it if I could have two weeks like this. Although it would be much better to have years and years. I don’t think you can even call this a drug. This is just a response to the conditions we live in.

I wonder what that art student at the party is doing. She had such soft, silky hair. She seemed so invested in everything, like the now was exactly where she wanted to be. And now I know how she feels. This is perfect.

If she were here now, it would be like Adam and Eve. We would make this the Garden of Eden, this apartment. Anywhere we were would be the Garden of Eden. And I could really communicate with my heart. It’s just a question of finding the right person. If she were here now, I would just hold her and hold her and hold her, like we were twins waiting to be born out of this apartment in Brentwood.

She’s probably my soulmate. What if I met my soulmate and now I’ll never see her again? But we met and kissed on the astral plane. We flew in the astral plane, and now I’m flying toward her. If she’s my soulmate, and I truly believe she is, we’ll meet again. We’re always meeting. There is no meeting for soulmates. They’re always together and never apart.

We’ll have a child, and we’ll bring it up on heroin so that it’ll have a happy childhood. And I’ll buy her lots and lots of black shirts and sweaters. And she’ll play the bongo drums in a jazz club in the East Village, while I recite stream-of-consciousness poetry that everyone thinks is brilliant. I am brilliant. I’m everything.

Sometimes I wonder if I really am Jesus, but I just haven’t grown into it yet.

I wonder what color Jesus’s eyes were. And if he needed glasses.

He had the sweetest face…

DAY SIXTEEN

They brought a new guy in today, Alex. He’s very good-looking, in a Heathcliff sort of way. He had a seizure an hour ago. I didn’t see it, but Sam said it was pretty amazing.

Carl told me Sam was in jail for rape. My reply was, “Oh.” I casually asked Sam about it, and he said he was framed—that his friend had done it. I asked him what he did when he wasn’t in jail, and he said he was a scalper. He told me he’d sold tickets to the concert of an ex-boyfriend of mine, as if to say, “What a coincidence that we should finally meet.” Sam is homophobic and hates Bart. He calls him “Barf.”

Wanda told me she likes to be tied up and have her clothes torn off before sex. She said it really makes her happy. I don’t know what makes me happy, but that doesn’t ring a bell.

…That fucker Steve! How did he find my parents’ number? How could they have put me in a drug clinic? This is humiliating .

So I overdosed. Well, of course I did. I’d never shot heroin before. I told them I’ll never do it again. I was on Ecstasy and I thought it would be okay. I was more open to the heroin because of the Ecstasy and the Percodan. So I won’t take Ecstasy again. I only took it in the first place because he didn’t have ludes. I’ve gotta get out of here.

How did this happen to me? How did this happen to me? I’m in here with drug addicts . It’s so degrading. I keep telling them I’m not an addict, but they laugh at me. My problem isn’t drugs, it was just those two drugs that made the other one possible. I hope they didn’t tell Joan.

Detox! I took heroin once , what am I detoxing from? My mother—God, she was upset—said something about alcohol withdrawal, but I didn’t drink… Well, I drank every day, but I didn’t drink like they imply I drank. I can’t be an alcoholic. That’s insane. I’m twenty-nine years old.

And they expect me to go to these meetings, these Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I don’t like groups. I like to be alone. I’m kind of a lone animal by nature. I can just imagine the kind of scum you’d meet there. Greg Friedman used to go all the time, and he had to stop. He said, “I never would have taken drugs with half those people. How am I supposed to get straight with them?” He died of cocaine poisoning, but I really trusted him.

It’s so wimpy to have to lean on groups of people. Do it alone! It’s a private matter. I think it’s bullshit to go to a public place to handle a private matter. I don’t want someone getting in my face and talking about drugs all the time. It’s just mindless. And then what happens? You give up drugs, and then you do something else to death. I want to do this to death. If I’m going to do something to death, I mean, which I don’t think I am. You learn from your mistakes, I think. You’re human, you have to fall down a little bit, and you learn from that. Pain is growth.

I wish I had some blow…

DAY SEVENTEEN

It struck me today that the people that have had an impact on me are the people who didn’t make it. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin, John Belushi. It’s not Making It to be Marilyn Monroe, but it is to me.

In our culture these people are heroes. There’s something inside of that—a message that killing yourself like that isn’t so bad. All the interesting people do it, the extraordinary ones. A weird, weird message. Most of the people I’ve admired in show business—comedians, writers, actors—are alcoholics or drug addicts or suicides. It’s bizarre. And I get to be in that club now. It’s the one thing I cling to in here: Wow, I’m hip now, like the dead people.