Wishful Drinking

One and one-half wandering Jews
Returned to their natural coasts
To resume old acquaintances
Step out occasionally
And speculate who had been damaged the most

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.

—One and one half wandering Jews
speculate who had been damaged the most.

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.

7. SADNESS SQUARED

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!”

That’s what I said in my head.

Out loud I said, “Absolutely. I’ll be waiting by the phone.”

Dylan wasn’t calling to ask me on a date. He was calling because this cologne company had contacted him to see if he would endorse a cologne called Just Like a Woman. Now Bob didn’t like that name, but he liked the idea of endorsing a cologne. And he wanted to know if I had any good cologne names.

Do I look like someone who would be wandering around with a bunch of cologne names rattling around in my head?

Well, tragically, I did. I did have quite a few ideas for cologne names and so I told them to Bob.

There was Ambivalence, for the scent of confusion.