Uganda Be Kidding Me

by Chelsea Handler

  “Chelsea, I don’t really see how this has anything to do with me, and your psychopathy is way off. You’re treating this dog like he has polio.”

  “Tread very carefully, Bradley. Studies are showing that polio is making a comeback. And for that matter, so is Lionel Richie.”

  The truth of the matter is—I believe Chunk is my mother reincarnated. My mother would have loved to go on the trips I am now able to take my family on, and she would have loved all the perks that go with becoming successful. This setup would have been perfect for her. Reincarnating as a half-German, half-Asian dog who could go with me everywhere but not have to speak to a soul would be her version of paradise.

  “Brad, would you leave your own mother behind if you could afford to bring her on a family vacation with the very family she created?”

  “Okay,” he said, waving his hand around. “The whole idea that Chunk is your mother is a bunch of hocus pocus. Don’t you think that’s a little insulting to your mother? That she is now a dog?”

  “Let me ask you this, Bradley. What if this is the trip that sends Chunk over the rails and he stops going to the bathroom altogether, and then dies from being so backed up? How would that make you feel?”

  “That would be very sad for both of you,” Brad agreed begrudgingly.

  “Do you know that when I stay home in Los Angeles on the weekends, he will go the entire weekend without going number two? By the time Oscar [the dog walker and landscaper] arrives on Monday morning, he comes back with the reportage that Chunk took four dumps on his morning walk through the neighborhood.”

  “You hate the word dump,” Brad reminded me.

  I do hate the word dump, especially when referencing feces. Oscar apparently thinks that’s a perfect word to throw around his employer. He’s very fat, very Mexican, and has an unusually large cranium—so it doesn’t really matter what he says, because he knows as long as he maintains his body weight and head shape, it would be impossible for me to ever fire him.

  “Isn’t Oscar your one-armed landscaper?” Brad asked.

  “Yes, but he loves the dogs and asked if he could start walking them for extra cash. I wasn’t about to say no to a guy with one arm.”

  “So, he walks two dogs with one arm?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about that. Perhaps he straps one of the leashes around his waist. Again, not my problem.”

  “Another amazing executive decision.”

  “Brad, I’m not going to fly my dogs to another country just to have them quarantined. After Canada, I’m heading to upstate New York for a week, and it’s just not right for me to leave my dogs for that long. They have lives, too, and for me to jet-set in and out of their worlds with no warning is undignified. If I left them in LA, I would essentially be holding them hostage on two of the biggest holidays of the year: Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “As if they know what holiday it is.”

  “Of course they know what holiday it is. They’re not fish!”

  “You can fly them on a doggy airline!” he wailed. “You do realize with a little research that you wouldn’t even have to do it yourself? You could hire someone to escort Chunk across country on a bus or a even a train?”

  “A train,” I guffawed. “That’s rich. As if I would put a Jewish dog on a train. He’d go berserk.”

  “Chunk has lived a pretty charmed life since you quote unquote rescued him. I think he could handle a train ride, especially since the Holocaust ended about sixty years ago.”

  “Then why do you bring it up at nearly every morning meeting?” I begged to know.

  “Because as a Jew,” he replied, “I think it’s important to remind other non-Jews that what our people went through was not only horrific but heroic. Only the blacks can really understand our journey.”

  Cocking my head to the side and collapsing my chin in the same way one would when one is getting ready to vomit is the way I most often respond to anything Brad says.

  “You don’t think Jewish people still get discriminated against, Chelsea? I’ve got news for you. You’re wrong. Even redheads get discriminated against. I know that’s hard to believe since you live in your little bubble, but things are happening, Chelsea. Believe you me: things happen every day that make me shake my head.”

  “Brad, please shut the fuck up. You’re so annoying when you talk like that. I’d like to see you talk to a black person about discrimination and then get back to me. You’re one of the most translucent males I’ve ever come across, and you have somehow managed to be on two television shows and have a hot wife. Clearly, things are going well for you in the affirmative action department.”

  “Chelsea, do you have any idea how unreasonable this is?”

  “Listen to me, you little whiny Jew… I am growing quite tired of having to defend my parenting skills to everyone in my life. What about the fact that I am responsible enough to not have a baby? Why does no one give me any praise for that?”

  “You did have a baby!” he screeched. “What about Gary?”

  “Really, Brad? That’s a low blow. Even for you.”

  I’m not proud of my decision to acquire my dog Gary, but I stand behind the failure like I stand by the failure of the NBC sitcom based on my life.

  Gary is my biggest regret, and the story goes like this: I woke up one day on the wrong side of my newly acquired twin waterbed and decided it was time to add to my brood. If I was never going to house a baby, at least I could give back to society by rescuing a top-bred canine.

  My affinity for Bernese mountain dogs hails from my affinity for anything oversized, and Bernese in particular—in my estimation—are the closest thing to having an actual silverback gorilla.

  One of our production assistants at work, Blair, grew up on a farm—and I decided that that meant she specialized in animals—so I appointed her chief executive in charge of finding me a Bernese mountain dog to rescue. Under no uncertain circumstances did I want anything but a rescue dog. PETA was already on my ass for saying one night on my show that I would eat a cat.

  After Blair and my assistant Karen searched high and low for hours, they revealed to me there was not a single Bernese mountain dog anywhere to rescue. Karen was promoted from an internship on the show. She is not a quitter.

  “There’s got to be some somewhere,” I announced, looking at the world globe in my office.

  “There are three breeders in Southern California who have babies available that we can get by the morning, but we haven’t found any rescues. It’s a very high-end breed, and not many people give them away.”

  “That won’t do,” I told them. “It has to be a rescue.”

  “Okay,” Blair told me. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Okay,” I told her, giving up. “Just pick up one of the ones for sale.”

  Gary was a little bear.

  Gary on his first night at home.

  I loved him very much but in the end… not enough. Chunk and Jacks did not take to having a new brother. At first, I was disappointed in their inability to welcome a baby brother, but after a few weeks, Lesbian Shelly and I both realized that Chunk and Jacks had good instincts: Gary was an idiot.

  The first night he came home he urinated everywhere: on me, on Shelly, on the other dogs, and on my shoes. I asked Blair when he would stop doing this and she told me, “When he becomes potty-trained.”

  “When does that happen?” I asked, slightly annoyed that this hadn’t been taken care of on the car ride home.

  “When… you potty-train him?”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone?” Blair was being dodgy, and I didn’t have to be a moron to sense that she was intimating that I would somehow be involved in the potty training. I had rescued Chunk when he was four—so urinating indoors wasn’t an issue, and dog or human potty training was definitely not a hobby I was looking to take up.

  I was staunchly opposed to the notion of crate training, and against Shelly’s advice, I insisted that Gary sleep with
Chunk and me on his first night at home. I left the two doors to my balcony open with pee pads outside for when Gary needed to urinate. When I woke up at 3 a.m. the drapes in my bedroom were gone, my duvet was half eaten, and there was vomit, urine, and dog shit all over the floor. Chunk was nowhere to be found, and I panicked that Gary may have also eaten him. I almost called the police, but instead called Shelly on her cell phone downstairs and told her to come upstairs with a Hazmat suit.

  “How in the hell did you sleep through this?” Shelly asked moments later, looking around groggily.

  “Do you see Chunk anywhere?” I asked her. She opened the closet door and found Chunk hiding in a corner. The fact that Chunk was able to open and shut a closet door was just another confirmation that I was dealing with my mother.

  Meanwhile, Gary was rolling around in his own feces like a one-eyed gambler. “What are we going to do?” I asked Shelly.

  “I don’t know. I’m putting him in his crate.”

  “Do we have any medical slippers?” I asked, trying to figure out how I was going to navigate my way through the room without stepping in shit. I carefully got out of my bed and onto Shelly’s shoulders to descend down the stairs back to Shelly’s room, where I spent the rest of the night.

  When our cleaning lady, Mabel, arrived the next morning, I apologized to her and explained how her day was going to play out. “Grande accidente upstairsee. Pero, no bueno. Grande oopsie whoopsie,” I explained.

  “Oh, Gary,” Mabel squealed. That was one of the incentives of naming him Gary—hearing Mabel say it over and over throughout the day. She pronounced it with a wide Mexican “a” and sounded like a special Olympian every time she said his name. “G-A-A-A-R-Y, you are such a good boy, G-A-A-A-R-Y.”

  Gary had more energy than a hamster after an eight ball and chewed up anything he could get his mouth around. He ran through the house, knocking anything and everything over, and he was somehow able to jump on top of the kitchen counter from eight feet away.

  He was seven weeks old when they brought him home and he weighed ten pounds. The next day he was twelve pounds, and a week later he was twenty. His feet were too big for his body, so not only did he knock everything over, he constantly ran into walls and fell down the stairs. The rate he was growing combined with the lack of control he had of his own body was a recipe for disaster. He once ran down the hill in my backyard so fast his entire body flipped through the air when he tried to stop himself and he ended up doing a front handspring right into the pool. I was on my way to a friend’s movie premiere and had to jump in fully clothed to rescue him.

  Needless to say, he got to safety long before I did, and by the time Shelly got home from work, I was sitting on the steps of the pool in a Dolce and Gabbana dress and heels, soaking wet, with mascara running down my face. I could barely take care of myself, and now I had somehow convinced myself a mountain dog would be a great addition to the family.

  Jacks was nicer to Gary than Chunk, but after letting Gary gnaw on his face for three days straight we had to get Jacks a cone for his head, because he looked like he was decomposing. Gary was a nuisance with incredibly sharp teeth.

  “Do you think Gary is stupid?” I asked Shelly one day over a Chinese chicken salad.

  She breathed deeply. “I will say… that I do not think he is smart.”

  Shelly repeatedly reminded me over the first few months that Gary was a puppy and we needed to remember that. She also said it would be sad for us as professional adults to not be able to handle a third dog. “We’ll look like failures,” she told me, then asked, “Who would we give him to?”

  “Molly?”

  “Molly would be good.”

  “But we have to wait at least six months, Chelsea. He is a puppy. It can take dogs up to a year to calm down.”

  Six months, five area rugs, two jackets, and thirteen pairs of shoes later, Shelly and I took all three dogs to the doggy park in our last attempt at assimilation. We had been sending Gary to doggy kindergarten every day, where they tried to exhaust his energy by strapping a weighted belt onto him and putting him on a treadmill.

  On our way to the dog park, we stopped at a Starbucks for coffee and left the dogs in Shelly’s car with the two back windows halfway down. Gary was sitting in the front seat.

  When we returned, Gary was gone. Chunk and Jacks were sitting in the backseat looking guilty and relieved.

  “Oh my god!” I screamed. “Where the fuck is Gary?”

  “Jesus Christ! The doors were locked!”

  “Well, he didn’t unlock the door,” I told her. “He’s not Edward Scissorhands.”

  “Chunk may have.”

  “Don’t blame this on Chunk!” I snapped at her.

  “You go that way and I’ll go this way!” she barked back.

  We scrambled in opposite directions around the parking lot until we heard a loud crash and looked to see a minor two-car collision. Gary was standing to the right of both cars with his tongue hanging out and his tail wagging, looking as clueless as ever. At this juncture, he had grown to be one hundred pounds, yet he had managed to slip his body out of a window that was opened ten inches.

  When Shelly and I returned home that night, we filled two large glasses with vodka and agreed that Gary was tearing us apart. It would have to be couple’s therapy or an outside adoption for Gary.

  My cousin Molly got Gary the very next day, and my dog walker, Oscar, cried the day Gary left. “I really love that crazy dog,” he told me. So a week later, when Molly returned Gary, citing similar damage to her house, I asked Oscar if he would take him.

  “I don’t have a yard for him to run in,” he told me.

  “I’ll buy you a house with one.”

  “What about when I’m here walking the other two dogs?” he asked.

  “We’ll send him to doggy day care.”

  “Where will the house be?”

  “Wherever you want. I don’t care. Please, Oscar. I’m begging you.”

  And that was the end of Gary living at our house.

  Brad knows how painful the experience of Gary and my failure with him was and is to me. I thought him evil for reminding me of such a horrendous time. One believes one can share stories with friends and loved ones as confidants. It is disappointing when these so-called confidants use these stories against you.

  “You’re a real asshole, Brad, you know that? I tried to love Gary, but something was wrong with him. He’s with someone who loves him now. Isn’t that the most important thing?”

  “I believe that to be true. But money and fame have infantilized you. You can’t even take care of a dog.”

  “Gary was ‘special needs,’ Brad. He is safer now in his new home. Had he stayed with me, I would have ended up accidentally barbecuing him.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “Technically, I still pay for Gary’s education and all his expenses, so there’s that.”

  “Great, so you’re his benefactor.”

  “That’s a lot more than I can say for you. You don’t even have a dog.”

  “You’re getting a little out of touch with reality, and I fear you are in danger of losing not only your mind but your fan base. And on top of that, the poor dog has to run around being called Gary for the rest of his life? Was that really necessary?”

  “That may be true, Brad. But your baby will most likely grow up and not only be a latchkey albino but also resent the fact that you only vacation without him. At least I have the decency to take Chunk with me.”

  “We’re getting off topic, Chelsea. Chunk has traveled the world. It might do him some good to take a rest.”

  “He’s traveled the country,” I corrected him.

  “Do I need to remind you what happened last year during this same winter holiday in Telluride?”

  The main problem with working on a television show for so many years is that the writers become like your family. Whether you like them or not, you have to hang out with them, and a familiarity deve
lops in which everyone knows everything about each other and nothing is off the table, because like in any family it’s hard to get fired.

  Chunk’s main weakness is that he’s confused. He’s half Asian and half German, so he doesn’t know if he’s a Nazi or if he just wants some dim sum. He’s skittish, he’s shy, and he’s my lover. If I could have sex with him, I wouldn’t, because I find it unsettling when I see his penis. This unfortunately happens every time he gets in a car or on a plane, because he loves to travel—even if it’s for just a couple of yards.

  He has jumped out of the windows of my dog walker’s car into an intersection upon the car turning the corner to my office building, jumped off the second-floor balcony of my house upon seeing me below at the pool, has waited behind the gate of my driveway for days in a row when I’ve been on vacation, and sleeps next to the gate every night when I’m not at home. So the idea that Chunk disappears because he is running away from me is not something I’m willing to accept.

  I know this because I’ve watched the surveillance videos in order to find footage to use on my show of my book agent, Michael Broussard, throwing himself and his dog over the gate. To be clear, Michael threw his dog over the gate to a taxi driver waiting for him on the other side. When I asked Michael what kind of taxi driver is trained in catching dogs, he deflected that question and instead regaled me with the difficulty he himself encountered climbing over my gate. “Chelsea, I had taken an Ambien, okay? One of the full, white, rectangular ones. You try taking a brick of Ambien and climbing over a fucking gate.”

  Even that time, after the gate opened, Chunk did not leave the property. He stayed put, and I respect him for that. I do not respect him for pulling the bullshit he did in Telluride.

  “I have never lost my dog, Brad. Chunk has transgressed, and I have always forgiven him. If you’re bringing up Telluride last Christmas, I would like to go on record and say that my family left for skiing that day and Chunk most likely followed the car because he thought I was in it. I had no idea he was gone until two hours later.”