Wishful Drinking

4 BOTH HANDS, ONE HEART, TWO MOODS, AND A HEAD

A few years ago my daughter and I visited my father in San Francisco, where he lives because there’s a really big Chinatown there. And the day before, he had just gotten those tiny hearing aids that fit right inside his ears. They’re really, really expensive. Some people say $3,000—others say five—anyway, really expensive. So he’d gotten them the day before, so the night before, he didn’t want to lose them or forget where they were, so he put them in his pill box next to his bed so he’d remember where they were in the morning.

Yes, that’s right, he ate them.

So, whenever he couldn’t hear my daughter or myself, we’d yell into his stomach or his ass. Now he subsequently got those hearing aids again, and I had the opportunity to see them. They were the size of a lima bean—a rubber lima bean with an antenna.

Now look, I adore pills, I’m a huge fan, but these looked like none I’ve ever seen. Now, I don’t know how you are in the morning, I’m not that sharp, but I think I would know if I was eating a rubber lima bean with an antenna! Twice!

Well, if you have a life like mine, then these experiences gradually accumulate until you become known as “a survivor.” This is a term that I loathe. But, the thing is that when you are a survivor, which fine, I reluctantly agree that I am—and who over 40 isn’t?—when you are a survivor, in order to be a really good one, you have to keep getting in trouble to show off your gift.

My mother says, “Well, dear, what are the choices? Not surviving?”

But this is from a woman who when asked for dating advice says, “For what age?”

My mother, who incidentally lives next door to me, she calls me to this day and says, “Hello, dear, this is your mother, Debbie.” (As opposed to my mother Vladimir or Jean-Jacques.)

I have a very loud voice. I used to say that my voice was designed to wrest people from dreams. My mother grew up in Texas, on the border of Mexico, but she learned to speak “properly” with the assistance of Lillian Sydney, her vocal coach at MGM. Over time, she was able to gradually but completely lose her accent—unless she got really angry or frustrated with Todd and me—then she’s been known to say, “Carrie Frances—y’all get your butts in here!” But my mom has what I can only describe as a movie star accent. It’s very breathless and elegant—kind of mid-Atlantic. My brother and I frequently talk this way to each other now: “Hello, dear, this is your brother, Todd.”

A few years back I interviewed my mother for this tragic cable talk show I was doing. This was for the Mother’s Day show.

Anyway, we’re chatting along pretty gaily for straight people, and then suddenly somewhere in the middle of our little chat my mother casually says, “You know, dear, it’s like that time when I was a little girl and I was kidnapped.”

Huh?

“Oh, darling, I told you about all of this, you’ve just forgotten.”

(This was before my ECT, so there’s no way I’d forget something like that. I doubt that even electroconvulsive therapy could banish a story as creepy as that one.)

So on she goes with this horrendous story, which I’m sure you’re all dying to hear, like I was. Just desperate to hear each and every horrifically vivid detail of a tale increasingly tinged with darker hues of molestation. Happy Mother’s Day everyone! After my panic subsides somewhat, I hear her saying that when she was eight or maybe younger, her eighteen-year-old neighbor and his friend scooped her up for a little joy ride. I’ll spare you the more grisly details, but the good news is that despite the fact that something extremely unsavory occurred, my mother wasn’t, in fact, raped.

Anyway, long gross story short, the father of the boy who encouraged my mom to consider a part of his anatomy as a lollipop called my grandmother and pleaded with her not to go to the police.

“I guarantee you I’ll make absolutely sure he’ll never do this again.”

“How?” asked my grandmother, to which the boy’s father somehow conveyed his intention to castrate his son.

“I’ll fix him so he can’t.”

At this point my grandmother generously reminded the boy’s father that he hadn’t raped her daughter, to which the father allegedly replied, “I just wanna make sure he don’t have the chance to do what he done again and maybe next time it’d be worse. He’s disgraced our family enough.”

Ah, the lovely family stories one has.

When I was about fifteen, my mother had started dating a man named Bob Fallon, and my brother and I called him Bob Phallus, because he came equipped with exotic creams and sex toys. You know, aphrodisiacs. Well, actually, Anglo-disiacs, because we’re white. Anyway, thanks to Bob, that Christmas my mother bought both my grandmother and myself vibrators! As unusual as a gift like this sounds, you have to admit that they are the ideal stocking stuffers. I mean, you can fit the vibrator into the long top part of the stocking and still be able to get another cute little gift in the toe!

Well, I have to admit, I enjoyed mine, but my grandmother refused to use hers. She was concerned that it would short-circuit her pacemaker. She said that she had gone this long without an orgasm; she might as well go the whole way. (And that pacemaker, by the way, was later recalled.)

Now, look, I know you might be thinking that a lot of the stories I’m telling you are way over the top, and I would totally have to agree—but you can’t imagine what I’m leaving out!

Anyway, I’d been singing in my mother’s nightclub act since I was thirteen (like most teenagers) and I continued to perform with her until I was seventeen. The last show we did together was at the London Palladium, and I got pretty good reviews. So this choreographer contacts me and asks if I want to do my own nightclub act. And I thought, well maybe. I mean, I could end up being financially independent… and Liza Minelli—but you take the good with the bad. Anyway my mother thought this was a lousy idea. She thought it would be better if I went to drama college in England because it would bring respectability to the family. Like we were a bunch of hookers, and drama college in England is the only way to eradicate a taint like that.

So now it’s 1973 and I’m seventeen and I’m enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. And, like I said, I really didn’t want to go, but once I got there, it turned out to be some of the best times of my life. Truly. I mean it was the only unexamined time of my life, where I was just a student among students, going to voice and movement classes and learning weird little tongue twisters like:

Now if you enjoyed my performance as Princess Leia—and who could resist my stunning, layered, and moving portrait not-unlike-Mary Poppins performance—then it’s thanks to tongue twisters like that.

Consider: “You’ll never get that bucket of bolts past that blockade.” Proper coffee pot?

Or: “Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!”—proper copper coffee pot, I’ll have a cup of tea!

And don’t forget, I had that weird little English accent that came and went like weather or bloat all through the movie.

And all my friends made fun of me because they said the title of the film sounded like a fight between my original parents—Star Wars!