In his later years Eddie had come to realize that he was a very bad father (though, to his credit, unlike Harry, I don’t think I ever heard him pass gas). His less than commendable paternal skills were never far from his mind, and you have to give him a lot of credit for acknowledging that. I know I do. I mean, he truly knew that any attention I gave him during the last few years of his life was not of a reciprocal nature. I was caring for him not because I was expected to but because I wanted to. Because he so enjoyed my visits that it was a pleasure to give them to him and my pleasure increased his even more. He appreciated being taken care of, and it was largely for that reason that I did it.
Essentially he truly understood that he’d really blown it with me—I mean blown it with all of his kids, but I like to think he regretted his lack of relationship with me the most. Not that that’s necessarily true. It’s just that it’s never too late to want to be the favorite.
Near the end he was doing all he could to get to know me, everything from hugging me tighter than any man had ever hugged me in my life to calling me fifteen times a week. I mean, if when I was young, I had gotten even one of those calls a month, I would’ve been over the moon. I talked to him on the Fourth of July, a few months before he died, from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I was on vacation with a few friends, and I was telling him all the stuff we were doing—river rafting and fireworks and all this other cool stuff—and when I finished he said, “I wish I had your life.” To which I replied, “You did, Daddy. That’s why you’re in bed.” And the great thing was that he totally got it. It wasn’t just something I was saying for my own amusement that whizzed over his head, and that I would tell my friends about later. My dad had a real sense of humor, and on top of that he had this huge appreciation for irony. He was packed to the gills with a hunger for fun. FUNGER! The guy was loaded with it, that and especially in the end so, so much more.
When my father died, I lost something I never had. Something I sort of got in the bottom of the ninth. But by then things were reversed. I was the parent, to the point that sometimes he even called me Mommy.
But you know what? What was great was that if he loved you—and he truly did love me, maybe he especially loved me even more in his desperate state—he could make you feel that your world lit up brighter than any star, movie or otherwise. More than almost anything this was a joyous man, which is the thing I truly realized about him right in time to lose it. But at least I had it to lose. Which was for me, in the end, the thing. Ultimately I’m grateful that we connected at all. Because a little of him was a whole lot for me. Not really enough, of course, but a big bunch of something essential.
I did an interview recently where I was talking about, of all things, myself. And I said that sometimes I felt like I was more a persona than a person, designed more for public than private, and I illustrated this notion with the thing that Cary Grant famously said: “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant, even me.” And the interviewer said, “Yeah, but no one really wants to be Carrie Fisher.”
I mean, he said it in the nicest way possible, and I completely understood what he meant. “Well, you know, actually there is an area where you should want to be Carrie Fisher,” I told him. Because there is something in me that is joyous, that’s joyful. I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.
And that, along with an unfortunate affinity for illegal substances and a diagnosis of manic depression, are among the many gifts bequeathed genetically by my father.
The man Eddie and I forged a relationship from common characteristics that most people don’t actually covet and some of these characteristics were immaturity, forgetfulness, a perhaps unhealthy fondness for shopping (continuing to make purchases long past the point that we could afford to) and an enthusiasm for the altered state that bordered on suicidal. Not that we went to those lengths while in one another’s company, but there was an unspoken understanding that we were willing to go to any lengths in our attempt to escape experiencing any and all intense and/or unwelcome feeling (i.e., the high) that’s simply not otherwise inescapably low.
So this is what we shared in addition to brown eyes, good singing voices, and kidney stones. This is what we shared instead of a wealth of common experience and history. We shared a love for escape from reality, a sense that any reality one found oneself in could, and should, be improved. And for a long while, that was enough, perhaps because it had to be and partly because I finally realized that the way to have a satisfying, even fulfilling, certainly reliable and predictable relationship with my dad was for me to take care of him. To make him feel loved, appreciated and understood. To parent my parent was the pathway to my relationship with Eddie Fisher, my old Pa-pa. Enough of a relationship to where I miss him now. A lot. And I miss him in a very different way than how I missed him throughout my childhood.
Then I missed the idea of him. Now I miss the man—my dad.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my dad for staying alive long enough for me to have a relationship worth savoring (but I can’t thank him because he passed away).
I’d like to thank my mother—so I will! Thank you, Mama, I mean, who’s a more bitchen parent than you, right? Seriously, there are no words. There are, however, a few dance moves.
Thanks to my brother Todd, his loyal cat, my Uncle Bill, Trisha and Joely and their respective clan, which pretty much covers things on the immediate family front.
Thanks to Clancy Immusland for the years of keeping me so close to sanity, I can sometimes feel the breezes.
Thanks to Garret, my familiar, my memory and without whom I would be something—but the sum of that wouldn’t be as high (but I might be).
Thanks to Gloria Grayton and Mary Douglas French, without whom I hope I’ll never have to find out how close to nothing I’d be.
Thanks to my old, but not elderly, friend Paul Slansky, who’s been known to save me from myself, or someone just as short.
And finally I’d like to thank my tribe: Bruce Wagner (for the title, for wanting to be a nurse, and for knowing what a lie is), Dave Mirkin (innovator of the “blurse” phenomenon—hybrid of blessing and curse), Cyndi Sayre (my souped-up new improved savior), Michael Tolkin, Wendy Mogel, Melissa North, Edgar and Rachel Phillips, Fred “the fixer” Bimbler, Roy Teeluck, Abe Gurko, Chas Weston, Michael Gonzales, Gale and Nikki Rich, Quinn Tivey, Nancy Braun, Teresa Crites, Kerry Jones, Dr. Jeff Wilkins, Dr. Barry Kramer, Bryan, Bruce & Ava, Penny, Bev, Sean, Salman, Melan, Max, G deB of Fee and Gee, Griplin, Helen, Nichols, Marcus, Graham, Ruby, Rufus, Buck, James B., Corby, Cynthia, Art, Merle, Carol, Steve, the Cohens, AWK & Co. and the Godchildren (James Goodman, Little Ed, Dash, Olivia and Anton), and my father’s nurses: Sarah and Augie and everyone else from the far flung east.