Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
Blacklisted
I was nine years old and walking myself to school one morning when I heard the unfamiliar sound of a prepubescent boy calling my name. I had heard my name spoken out loud by males before, but it was most often by one of my brothers, my father, or a teacher, and it was usually followed up with a shot to the side of the head.
I turned around and spotted Jason Safirstein. Jason was an adorable fifth-grader with an amazing lower body who lived down the street from me. I had never walked to school, had a conversation with, or even so much as made eye contact with Jason before. After lifting up one of my earmuffs to make sure I had heard him correctly, I nervously attempted to release my wedgie while waiting for him to catch up. (A futile effort, as it turned out, when wearing two mittens the size of car batteries.)
"I heard you were going to be in a movie with Goldie Hawn," he said to me, out of breath.
Shit. I had worried something like this was going to happen. The day before, I had forgotten my language arts homework, and when the teacher singled me out in front of the entire class to find out where it was, I told her that I had been in three straight nights of meetings with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, negotiating my contract to play Goldie Hawn's daughter in the sequel to Private Benjamin.
The fact that no sequel to Private Benjamin was in the works, or that a third-grader wouldn't be negotiating her own contract with the star of the movie and her live-in lover, hadn't dawned on me.
"Yeah, well, that was kind of a lie," I mumbled, recovering my left mitten from in between my butt cheeks.
"What?" he asked, astounded. "You lied? Everyone has been talking about it. Everyone thinks it's so cool."
"Really?" I asked, quickly changing my tune, realizing the magnitude of what had happened. It occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to get some of the respect I believed had been denied me, due to my father dropping me off in front of the school in a 1967 banana yellow Yugo. It was 1984, and my father had no idea of or interest in how damaging his 1967 Yugo had been to my social status. He had driven me to school on a couple of really cold days, and even after I had pleaded with him to drop me off down the street, he was adamant about me not catching a cold.
"Dad," I would tell him over and over again, "the weather has nothing to do with catching a cold. It has to do with your immune system. Please let me walk. Please!"
"Don't be stupid," he would tell me. "That's child abuse."
I wanted my father to know that child abuse was embarrassing your daughter on a regular basis with no clue at all as to the repercussions. Word had spread like wildfire throughout the school about what kind of car my father drove, and before I knew it, the older girls in fifth grade would follow me through the hallways calling me "poor" and "ugly." After a couple of months they upped it from "ugly" to "a dog," and would bark at me anytime they saw me in the hallway.
Our family certainly wasn't poor, but we lived in a town where trust funds, sleepaway camps, and European vacations were abundant, along with Mercedes, Jaguars, and BMWs -- a far cry from my world filled with flat tires, missing windshield wipers, and cars with perpetually lit check engine lights.
The idea that showing up at school in a piece of shit jalopy led to me looking like a dog didn't make much sense in my mind. It really irked me that I had to be punished because my father thought he was a used car dealer and insisted on driving us around in the cars that he couldn't sell. I wanted to tell my classmates that I didn't like his cars either, and I certainly didn't like being called a dog. I hadn't had a low opinion of myself before then, but after being called the same nickname for six months straight, you start to look in the mirror and see resemblances between yourself and a German shepherd.
Dim Sum and Then Some
Sarah and I had been back from London for almost two months, in which time she had landed herself another man. Lydia, Ivory, and I met Sarah for breakfast and were grilling her about the new guy she had started seeing. "He's really sweet," Sarah informed us.
"He's Hungarian," Ivory said, correcting her. Ivory doesn't often mince her words and has a different way of expressing herself than I do. Her style is more direct and she doesn't lie.
While she is a very supportive friend, she makes no bones about telling people the absolute truth no matter what. When, months earlier, I had gotten my eyebrows bleached in hopes of making my hair color look more natural, she said, "You look like an albino, and not one of the fun ones. You need to get your money back and have them fix it. If they can't fix it, you're better off without any at all."
"Who cares if he's Hungarian?" Lydia said, defending Sarah. "What's important is the way he treats her."
"Does he have a big penis?" I asked.
"Not sure," Sarah said.
"What does that mean?" Ivory asked.
"We've only dry humped," Sarah told us.
By the way Ivory reacted to this information, you would have thought Sarah had told her that she had become romantically involved with Flavor Flav.
"Dry humping is disgusting," Ivory declared, throwing her fork down onto the table. "It's for junior high - schoolers. What is the point of a guy lying on top of you fully clothed, and then coming in his pants? What does that even mean?"
"It obviously means that the two people involved are at the beginning of a very meaningful relationship," I answered. "What do you think they did in the seventeenth century when there were layers and layers of petticoats and knickers?" I redirected my attention to Sarah. "I have no problem with the dry hump. I think it can be very magical, especially if you've got one of David Hasselhoff's records playing in the background. What's his name again?" I asked, knowing full well what his name was but wanting Sarah to say it aloud.
"Coolio," Sarah said in the lowest voice possible.
"And he's white," I added.
"That's not so bad," Lydia said unconvincingly. "There are a lot of worse names than Coolio."
"Like what?" Ivory asked. "Rumplestiltskin?
"No, like &hellip; Eminem."
"Yes," I said, "but Eminem is a rapper. At least he has some tie to the African-American community. Coolio is Hungarian."
"Does Coolio rap?" Ivory asked Sarah.
"I don't think so," she said.
"I think you'd know if he rapped," I told her. "That's not exactly something you just do on the side."
"That can't be his real name," Ivory said.
"It's not," Sarah said. "He told me the other day that it was time for me to start calling him by his first name, but I have no idea what it is. Everyone calls him Coolio."
"I'm sorry, but that is a really ridiculous nickname. That's worse than Sugar Tits," I said, remembering what was written under my high school yearbook picture.
"Chelsea," Lydia jumped in. "I don't think you have any room to make fun of Sarah's fat, smelly boyfriend. You dated Big Red and then got dumped by him."
"This is true," I said. "But Big Red was cute in a &hellip; different kind of &hellip; way."
"No he wasn't," all three of them said in unison.
"The point is," Lydia announced, "that you like him and he likes you, and after everything that's happened to you in the past year, you deserve it." Lydia was of course referring to Sarah being broken up with by her fiance two weeks before their wedding.
"Do you have a thing for foreigners?" Ivory asked Sarah, realizing a pattern.
"I think it's wonderful," Lydia declared.
"Wonderful is a word that should really only be used by gay men," I said to Lydia.
"It really is," Ivory agreed.
"Shut up," Lydia said to both of us. "Just shut up."
DAY #5
Today I woke up and looked outside to see Dad urinating on a tree. I looked across at Shoniqua's villa and saw her mother squatted by another tree doing the same thing. It's amazing how in sync these two are. It's 9 a.m. I just ordered marijuana from the groundskeeper.
DAY #5 -- 20 MINUTES LATER
Things are really going downhill. I am begging any of you to come here. Shoniqua and her mother leave tomorrow. If left alone with this man for any period of time, I may take out a hit on him. I will not only pay for your ticket, I will also pay for you to bring a friend, a husband, a child, a stranger, whomever you'd like. I WILL ALSO THROW IN AN EXTRA $500 BONUS.
DAY #5 -- 12 MINUTES LATER
Is it wrong for me to encourage Dad to swim when the riptide is at its strongest?
After the last e-mail home, my sister Sidney responded with an e-mail saying that she was on her way and would be arriving the next morning with her three kids. I really needed the backup since Shoniqua and Latifa were leaving in the morning. Moments later Isabel arrived with my pot. Things were looking up.
Shoniqua and her mother were packed and waiting for their taxi the next morning. I walked downstairs and found Mama Latifa and my father in a bear hug.
"All right, Papa Handler, you behave yourself," she said. "And thank you for everything."
"No problem," my father said. "It's my pleasure."
His pleasure? In no way, shape, or form had he contributed financially to this vacation. To be completely honest, I wasn't even sure my father had brought any money. If he had, he certainly wasn't spending it.
"Good-bye," I said, and hugged Shoniqua and her mama good-bye.
"Try and be patient with Papa Handler," Shoniqua said. "And Mama put her massage on your tab. Thanks."
"You hear that, Chelsea?" my father asked. "She's right. You need to respect your daddy."
"Thanks a lot," I said to Shoniqua as she leaned in for another hug.
"Good fucking luck," she said in my ear, and then started laughing hysterically as she headed toward her cab.
Bitch Tits put his arm around me as we watched the cab pull away and said, "Chels, I gotta be perfectly honest with you. What I'm really in the mood for is a good slice of pizza."
"Good luck with that," I replied, and headed back inside and upstairs to smoke my weed.
Isabel had loaned me a pipe to smoke it in, and just as I took my first hit, I heard Shamu heading up the stairs.
"Chels, I'm not kidding about the pizza. All you have to do is get some dough, some tomato sauce, and some garlic."
"Dad, I don't know how to make a pizza. I can barely make eggs."
"What is that you got in your hand there?" he asked as I took another hit from the pipe. "Is that a peace pipe?"
"Yup," I told him. "I'm smoking the reefers."
"Well, that's a relief," he said. "Maybe they can help you relax a little. You're very uptight."
"Uptight" really isn't a word I think anyone would use to describe a girl who wrote a book documenting all of her one-night stands, but maybe my self-awareness needed a little sharpening. I was staring out at the ocean from the top floor of the open-aired villa, getting high with my father sitting next to me, when it occurred to me that this is what I needed all along.