Uganda Be Kidding Me

by Chelsea Handler

  I called Shmitney, wondering how I was supposed to get out of my house if she was blocking the only car left in my driveway and my Bentley had been stolen. She didn’t answer her phone, which she never does. Instead, she will text you back while you’re in the middle of leaving her a voice mail, and tell you that she’s in a business meeting or in therapy and will call you in an hour.

  When she did call me an hour later, we reviewed the night’s events, and then she asked me why I had left the party so early.

  “Because no one at the party was dancing,” I told her.

  “So, where did you go?” she asked, laughing.

  “Back to my house. So I could dance in peace.”

  “That was for the best,” she admitted. “By the way, I have your Bentley.”

  “You have my Bentley? Why?”

  “Because I came back to your house last night after you left me at the party, and every door was locked and you were already sleeping.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, relieved I didn’t have to interact with the FBI. “But why wouldn’t you just take your own car?”

  “Because my key was in your house and the doors were all locked.”

  “Then, how did you get the key to my car?” I asked her.

  “The key was in your car.”

  “The key was in my car?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that does sound like something I would do, and stealing my car sounds like something you would do.”

  “Aaaahhhhh!!” she said, cackling. “Do you need your car?” Shmitney laughs all the time when no one else is laughing. I do this, too, but I find it more annoying when she does it.

  “Well, I’ll need my car at some point,” I told her. “But I guess I can just bring your car to you and switch it out. I’m hungry and I want a margarita.”

  “Great. Why don’t you head over here and we can grab lunch?”

  “All right,” I told her. “I’ll do that.”

  “OK, great. Would you want to go spinning before? There’s a class that I love which is just around the corner.”

  “No, Shmitney. Are you not listening to me? I already played tennis today. And I wouldn’t want to go spinning even if I hadn’t played tennis.” This must have been the tenth time Shmitney had brought up spinning in the past three months. I had explained to her on several occasions that I prefer one-on-one supervision when any sort of coordination is involved.

  Shmitney’s problem is that she doesn’t listen and she never shuts the fuck up. She is running on fumes and can’t sit still for longer than ten minutes. She also eats chicken like Brittany Murphy’s character in Girl, Interrupted. She is constantly gnawing on chicken or salmon, and she always smells like one or the other. She loves to go to Alanon meetings, and talk about Alanon and talk about sobriety and talk about enabling and all the other fascinating things that go along with that.

  She excels at overexamining every part of the human psyche, and she will send me daily healing messages from some book called The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency.

  I’ve had to tell her repeatedly to stop sending me daily messages about patience and loving myself. “I don’t mind them once in a while,” I warned her. “But it can’t be a regular thing.”

  If Shmitney had her druthers, she’d spend all day in transcendental meditation doing EMDR therapy to retrieve the childhood she claims she lost to alcoholism and drug addiction. I don’t believe she has ever done drugs, and I know for a fact she doesn’t drink a respectable amount of alcohol, not enough to have ever had a “drinking” problem.

  “Why would I make that up?” she’ll ask me defensively, when I tell her that she knows nothing about drugs or alcohol except for what she’s gleaned from her alcoholic family members and myself.

  “I have no idea, Shmitney,” I’ll tell her. “I don’t know why anyone would pretend to do drugs.”

  “Chelsea,” she’ll exclaim. “I didn’t drink because of my sitcom. I didn’t want my eyes to get puffy.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shmitney’s sitcom, it was on NBC for two seasons and it was called Shmitney. It wasn’t great.

  Regardless, anyone with a real affinity for alcohol doesn’t just stop drinking for nine months at a time because they’re on TV. Maybe once or twice a week, but a nine-month run of sobriety isn’t practical or plausible for someone with a real hankering for cocktails.

  We hung up, and I went downstairs to my kitchen to look for her car key. I’m well aware of the fact that I’m not good at finding things, but her key was nowhere to be found. I looked through everything in my kitchen twice and then I ate a banana. In my ongoing effort to become more self-sufficient, I had ceased having my cleaning lady or any other employees come to my house on the weekends, so there was no one to help me look. I did one last sweep, cognizant of the fact that I had forgotten what I was looking for after the second sweep.

  I called Shmitney again and asked her if she had gone anywhere in my house besides my kitchen. “Did you go upstairs?”

  “No, I left it on your kitchen counter. It’s a single Mercedes key.”

  “Oh, thank you. I thought it would be a Volvo car key. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Pretty fucking stupid. Just keep looking. It’s somewhere. I left it somewhere in the kitchen.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. That sounds like something I would do.”

  “It’s there somewhere. Just call me after tennis,” she said, trying to get off the phone.

  “I just finished tennis!”

  “OK, let me call you back,” she said.

  “No!” I wailed. “It’s fine if you have my car, but I need to know where your key is, Shmitney. Who takes someone else’s car and then blocks the only other car in the driveway and doesn’t leave the fucking key to their car? Tell me. Who? Who? Shmitney? Answer me!”

  “Let me make sure I don’t have it. I’ll call you right back,” she said.

  I looked around my house and wondered what I should do next. I walked outside to my pool and threw a tennis ball across my backyard. Neither dog flinched.

  I walked back inside and saw the empty dog bowls on the kitchen floor. I picked them both up and loaded them into the dishwasher. There’s no reason I shouldn’t use this opportunity to do some housework, I thought. When I couldn’t find the dishwashing detergent, I took the bowls out, went into the laundry room, and threw them into the washing machine. I added some laundry detergent and hit “spin cycle.”

  I looked at my pool and thought about jumping in, but I didn’t feel like putting on a bathing suit or getting my hair wet. I decided to roll a few calls instead. I called Brad and invited him and his wife, Shannon, to brunch with the caveat that I would need a ride to the restaurant. They were busy and instead invited me to the Santa Monica Beach Club, where they were members. Beach clubs don’t have enough diversification for me. “No, thanks,” I said and hung up.

  It then occurred to me that I didn’t need a bathing suit in the privacy of my own home, and I that I could swim nude if I wanted to. But skinny-dipping alone sounded like something Shirley MacLaine would do, so I sat in my backyard on the cement ledge that separates the pool from the lawn. I called my sister Simone to get an update on her single life, and I was getting a play-by-play of her latest online lover when my sprinklers went off.

  “Aaaaahhh!” I screamed, as the cold water sprayed me in the face and left my whole body damp.

  “What’s wrong? Is it a snake?” Simone asked, panicking.

  “Nothing,” I said, walking inside defeated. I stayed on the phone and went upstairs to change my clothes. The sound of the sprinklers always make me have to pee, so I went into my bathroom, sat on the toilet, and peed. That was when I realized in the middle of all of the mayhem, I had forgotten to take off my underwear.

  “Oh god,” I moaned. “What the fuck?”

  “What’s wrong now?” Simone asked, in a slightly more irritated tone.


  “I just peed and forgot to take off my underwear.”

  “Are you outside?”

  “No! Why would I be outside?”

  “I don’t know, Chelsea. It wouldn’t be that outside the box for you to be peeing outside at your own house, no pun intended.”

  “What is wrong with me?” I wailed, trying to remove my underwear, while sitting on the toilet and listening to her story. She finished and then told me that Rex was in NYC for the week and that she was going to dinner with him on Wednesday. “I may get a hotel room,” she said. “For me and Rex.” My newly divorced sister was officially juggling men, and that made me have to get off the phone.

  “Can I call you later?” I asked, looking around my bathroom and landing on a big framed quote that read, WHAT MATTERS MOST IS THE COMPANY YOU KEEP WHEN YOU’RE ALONE.

  Molly called me moments later. “Everything OK?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Just wondering whatcha’ doin’?”

  I knew Simone had called Molly, because there is a round-the-clock guardian conservatorship between Molly, Shelly, Simone, and about thirty others. Molly, Sue, and Shelly are the serving board members, and there are different tiers beneath them in case any of them are out of town. They work in shifts and they think I don’t know about it, but I do. They check in on me on a regular basis, because everyone knows if I were left to my own devices, I could die.

  Gina had spent the day at my house yesterday getting me ready for the Emmy parties, which was silly since I didn’t really need hair and makeup for the parties. I’ve never been nominated for an Emmy in my life, and I was going only to a party for the Emmys, not the actual Emmys. Then Shmitney came over to tag Gina out and babysit me for the rest of the night. Sundays are usually Molly’s shift when Shelly is out of town.

  If I am left unattended for too long, people start showing up at my house, so Molly’s call wasn’t completely unexpected.

  “Well, Molly. Not to sound like an alarmist, but Shmitney stole my car and said she would be here about an hour ago, but she is a liar. I need to get to Hotel Bel-Air.”

  “Do you need me to come and get you?”

  “Are you coming to brunch?”

  “I can come to brunch. Can I bring Kerry?” Kerry is Molly’s sister and also my cousin.

  “Yes.”

  “So, should we come get you?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know because she won’t answer her phone, but she keeps texting me that she’s fifteen minutes away.”

  “Well, I’ll come over that way and if she gets there first, then just call me.”

  “OK.”

  I hung up the phone and checked my texts. There was one from Shmitney.

  “Do you want to come over and go on a bike ride?”

  “No!” I responded. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “I’m fifteen away,” she texted back. “Had to drop off my friend from Spin class.”

  I almost ate my phone.

  There was no way Shmitney would make it from Burbank all the way to Bel Air in fifteen minutes. I drive like a maniac and have never made it from Bel Air to Burbank in fifteen minutes, and I happen to drive there almost every day for work.

  Even though I lie compulsively, I don’t appreciate being lied to, especially when it involves what time I’m going to be picked up. I don’t like being late, and I don’t like being picked up late.

  I went into the kitchen to look again for her car key and then saw Shelly’s Mercedes key. I was such an idiot for not putting this together before. Mercedes-Benz has been ahead of the curve since they were making ovens for the Holocaust. It was highly probable that the key to Shelly’s Mercedes would also work in Shmitney’s Mercedes. I was wrong. Strike four.

  I needed to find the number to Hotel Bel-Air and see if they could pick me up. I looked through my kitchen cabinets for a phone book and gave up on that project shortly after I started. Instead, I decided make better use of my time.

  I made the executive decision to use my time wisely and make an online dating profile for my makeup artist, Gina. If my sister was having such success online, then there was no good reason Gina shouldn’t also be reaping the benefits of Internet penetration. I got my computer and went over to my purse on my dining room table. I got my credit card out, sat down, and got focused. This was going to take awhile.

  My makeup artist Gina hadn’t been penetrated in something like five or ten years, and I could hear it in her voice. I desperately wanted her to meet someone, or at least get felt up. She’s one of those people who thinks she’s too cool to meet anyone online, so I was going to have to take it upon myself to do the legwork. Plus, she’s a terrible speller, so if she ever could be convinced to date online, she would only attract other elementary school graduates. I looked on Match.com’s questionnaire page, and it seemed a little too gay to me, so I Googled “popular dating sites” and clicked on the first one that popped up.

  I filled out all the pertinent information required to join the site and gave my e-mail dress as the contact so that I would be the one filtering any matches and corresponding with potential candidates.

  First, I had to come up with what is called a profile headline in thirty-five characters or less. After that came a series of questions that included multiple options to choose from, or I could ignore that part and write my own answers. I opted to utilize my creative writing skills.

  Profile Headline: Fifty, fun, flirty, fresh, fish lover, fruit lover, famine hater, looking for laughter, sex, and fresh food.

  About Yourself: Love to laugh, and love to be in funny situations. Like my morning coffee with the paper and like to mingle.

  About Yourself: Animal lover, have 2 dogs, 2 chickens. I ride horses every morning at my neighborhood barn, but haven’t ridden a man in years. I also love to cook, travel, ski, hike. Love the outdoors. Love to garden. Am not a great speller.

  Habits and Lifestyle: I have been married and have a 14-year-old son. Have a good relationship with my ex and we share custody. I’m a professional makeup artist and hairstylist with a steady job that I love. My boss says I come across as a bitch, but that I am really not. Looking for a solid guy with a solid career who also likes good wine, food, movies, travel. I work out regularly as well. Love to spin.

  Type of Relationship I’m Looking For: Would like to find a quality person to spend time with. Not looking for marriage but want to be in a serious, committed relationship.

  Religion: Other

  Ethnicity: Raised in California. Heritage: Italian (I’m adopted).

  Smoker: No

  Drinking: Not often, but enjoy wine with food.

  Height: 5’9”

  Marital Status: I have already covered this above, and if anyone reading this is indeed married, please do not contact me.

  Employment: Fully self-sufficient—but could get fired any day.

  Education: Makeup artist

  Children: One son (14).

  Body type: Tell ya later.

  My phone rang, and it was Shmitney.

  “Let me guess. You’re fifteen minutes away,” I told her.

  “Aaaahahhahahh! You are such a child. Do you want me to pick up anything on the way?” she asked. There was nowhere to shop between my house and hers.

  “I’m going to take an Uber. What’s their number?”

  “Shut up. I’ll be there in like twenty minutes. You can’t handle Uber. There’s a better chance of you picking up a weekend cashier’s shift at Walmart.”

  “Well, maybe if you would get your bony ass over here and stop saying you’re fifteen minutes away, I wouldn’t have to say things like Uber or Groupon!”

  “Aaaaaaaaaaah!” she howled and hung up on me, again.

  I looked back at my computer and the next step was to fill out what Gina was “seeking.”

  Seeking: A man who reads, likes to travel, and has his own life. Someone who loves to laugh, and can make himself laugh, because I’m not funny at all.


  Age Range You Are Seeking: 18–99

  Seeking Height: 4’–7’11”

  Weight: Nothing over 200 pounds unless you are over six feet.

  Ideal Man: Athletic, financially sound, outdoorsy, masculine. No wimpy bullshit.

  There were too many questions and I felt like I had already summed up the basics, so I skipped to the end.

  Ideal First Date: Waking up early on football sunday, making my signature homemade chili recipe, and getting to suck dick while the game is on.

  I would have to have Molly upload Gina’s photo later that afternoon, but at least I would be able to get her profile up and running.

  I needed to get out of my house, so I grabbed my sunglasses and the paper, and walked outside to my driveway. It was then that I realized it would have been nearly impossible to get my Bentley out without having first moved Shmitney’s Mercedes. One would have had to physically pick up my Bentley and throw it over Shmitney’s car.

  I walked down my driveway and down to the corner of my street, where I found a nice, cool spot in the shade, and sat on a corner of the cement perimeter of someone’s garden bed. Just as I flipped the paper over to read the Sunday Review, a pickup truck blaring heavy metal music made a sharp right turn at about thirty miles an hour driving over the puddle that I hadn’t noticed was directly in front of me. The puddle was brown—and then so was my face. I sat on the corner, stunned, as I typically do when I’m humiliated—wondering if someone was filming me. I don’t mean to sound like a narcissist, but I have a hard time believing these kinds of things happen to other people.

  I got myself together and hiked back up my incredibly steep driveway in what was now boiling hot sun. I walked inside and back up to my bedroom to wash my face and change my clothes for the second time that day. It wasn’t even 1 p.m.

  My phone kept dinging, and it was notifying me that I was getting several “winks” for Gina’s profile. It was already working. Gina was going to find love because Shmitney stole my car.

  I called Shmitney again to ask her if she was even coming at all. She didn’t answer but texted me back: “Fifteen away.”