Wishful Drinking Read Online Free PDF

over for a tour of the house, and if Harry was home, there were always gales of laughter.
    Anyway, the whole manicurist thing made marriage to my mother awkward, so she took a musical in New York to get out of the marriage, which is a legal way to dissolve a union in Hollywood without involving lawyers. And so when I was about sixteen, my mother took us out of high school, and moved my brother and me to New York for the year, and put me in the chorus of her show.
    I don’t care what you’ve heard—chorus work is far more valuable to a child than any education could ever be. I grew up knowing that I had the prettiest mother of anyone in my class, as long as I was in class. But even after, she was the funniest, the prettiest, the kindest, the most talented—I had the only tap dancing mother.
    In New York, we all lived on a nice little street on the Upper West Side, sandwiched conveniently between a music school and a funeral home. Anyway, on one particular evening I was out on the town with some of the other “kids” from the chorus of the show, trying my best to be very grown up, as they were all at least ten years older than I was.
    Well, somehow my mother knew what restaurant or club we were all at, so at about 10:00 or 10:30 someone comes and tells me that my mother is on the phone. Well, I’m not thrilled to have my hijinks interrupted by my mommy—reminding everyone I’m with that I’m far younger than they are and not to be taken seriously. Shit. So I grumble my way through the people and tables, making my way to the waiting phone.
    “Yeah, Mom, hey—could I talk to you la—”
    She interrupts me.
    “I’m at the hospital with your brother. He shot himself in the leg with a blank.”
    “What???” I say.
    “He’ll be fine,” she continues. “He’s in surgery now—they’re cleaning the gunpowder out of the wound. He’s very lucky. A few inches up and—”
    “He could’ve blown his penis off?”
    “Dear—please—language. Anyway the police are here and they want to come to the house to examine the gun. Apparently, if it can shoot blanks—oh, I don’t know—they’re saying it might be an unregistered firearm—or unlicensed—something, I don’t know. Anyway
    Where was I?”
    “The police,” I reminded her.
    “Oh yes—now, dear, I need you and Pinky (my mother’s hairdresser’s name was—naturally—Pinky)—I need you to get to the house before the police to let them in, but also I need you to go through the house and hide all the guns and bullets and—what else
    Oh yes! I need you to flush your brother’s marijuana down the toilet. So you think you can do this, dear? Let me talk to Pinky.”
    Well, this part was kind of thrilling, I have to say. Who knew we had bullets and guns in the house? Granted, they were my stepfather’s show guns that he wore ridiculously in some Christmas parade some years back, but it turned out it was considered a firearm! We were suddenly more like a mafia family than a show business one!
    So Pinky and I rush back to our town house and hide the guns and bullets in the washing machine (they’ll never look there!). And we sadly flush an enormous plastic bag filled with practically an entire lid of particu larly pungent pot. Then I go out to check the scene of the crime—my mother’s bedroom—where the shooting had occurred, and I have to say, it was quite something to behold. There are flecks of blood all over the walls and a considerable amount of blood on the bed. A sheet had been shredded in an effort to make a tourniquet. Wow, this was truly drama and it was happening in real life, of all places. My real life, surreal as it all too frequently became when I was living with my show business family and not the Regulars of Scottsdale.
    But if I thought it was surreal at this point, it was about to get a whole lot surrealer. (I know—not an actual word.)
    So now it’s Saturday night in New York—you would normally think that this wouldn’t be a particularly slow night for crime in New York—but you wouldn’t