Wishful Drinking

Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, by the end of this book you could be gay and insane! Unless you began that way.

Anyway, ever since my fateful announcement on Diane Sawyer that I was mentally ill—like anyone really needed to know that. Don’t you hate it when celebrities just blah blah blah—talk about themselves—I mean, who asked?—I find it all so wearying

Anyway, where was I? So having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly. Probably one of the reasons I’m such a shoo-in is that there’s no swimsuit portion of the competition.

Hey, look, it’s better than being bad at being mentally ill, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?

The first time I did drugs was when I was thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverly Hills, where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together.”

Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it—even now—I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bi zarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not. So once it became obvious that our proposed experiment had slipped my mother’s mind, I snuck into the lab of her sacheted underwear drawer and stole the pot, subsequently experimenting my brains out in my backyard tree house with my friend May—who coincidentally also ended up in A.A.!

And you’ve got to figure that I enjoyed it, because I ended up experimenting with marijuana for the next six years until it suddenly—and I think rather rudely—turned on me. Where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly haze—it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary. What was a junkie to do? Well, the answer was quite obvious—I needed to find a new replacement drug. This was when I was about nineteen, while I was filming Star Wars. (It ultimately turned out to be Harrison’s pot that did me in.) So, after carefully casting about for a substitute substance, I finally settled into my new drug digs—hallucinogens and painkillers. Mind expanders and painkillers. (Though over time and protracted use their meanings got jumbled until they became mind reliev ers and pain expanders—a place where everything hurt and nothing made sense.)

Anyway, at a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do.

She called Cary Grant.

In case you haven’t heard, one of the many things Mr. Grant was known for at the time was the fact that at some point in the sixties he famously did a course of LSD while under a doctor’s supervision. It’s always been difficult for me to imagine this

do they actually drop the acid in the doctor’s office? Does the doctor do it too? I always thought there was a kind of strange dignity and an even stranger credibility given to acid done under the cool shade of medical supervision. Sometimes, when I heard the phrase “experimenting with drugs,” I imagined someone in a white coat excitedly emerging from a lab carrying a smoking beaker and shouting, “I found it, I found it!” But when I heard that Cary Grant had experimented with acid under the supervision of his doctor, well, in a way it was as if he was dedicating his hallucinogenic jaunt to modern science. I imagined him doing it a little reluctantly and with a quiet dignity. After, of course, washing his hands and putting on one of those backless hospital garbs ten minutes before the medicinal acid kicked in.