Life Will Be the Death of Me

by Chelsea Handler

  “We’re going to Peru,” Molly declared, shimmying her shoulders.

  “Well, if you’re going to go to Peru, then at least go to Machu Picchu,” Glen replied. “At least that has a shred of history.”

  “No one’s even talking to you,” I reminded him as I tapped on my Fitbit for an update on steps taken and calories burned.

  I had recently ended my show Chelsea Lately and had signed a deal with Netflix. I had about six months off, a time I was referring to as my sabbatical.

  “Chelsea’s taking a semester at sea, Glen. Why can’t you be more supportive?” Molly asked with no expectation of an answer.

  Molly is always game for anything, so we ignored Glen and booked some lodge that sat on one of the tributaries of the actual Amazon River, Madre de Dios—or Mother of the Gods—and headed to Peru in search of anacondas.

  Not only did we not see any anacondas, we didn’t see a single animal. Except piranhas—if those even count as animals. We went on a fishing expedition one day and were expected to jump into the water with the piranhas for some sort of cleansing/pedicure experience, and when everyone in our motorized canoe declined to hop into the river, I decided I would be the one to do it—until Molly announced to everyone that I had my period.

  For the record, it was Molly who actually had her period, but she knew full well I was only trying to be brave and that I had no real desire to have my legs nipped at by piranhas simply because it had been suggested as an activity. Instead, our guides all fished the piranhas and then fried them for lunch. Obviously, they were delicious—because anything fried is delicious.

  The trip was a quarter past awful. I even had Juan, our guide, take us out in the middle of the night with headlamps on like coal miners to search for anacondas—or any snake, for that matter. He had a machete and everything. I was ready to combat my fears, and I was indefatigable in my efforts, yet we saw nothing. Each activity was more boring than the one before, and the whole experience was tantamount to being at a landlocked Sandals resort. We did see lots of large bugs and went on about six nature walks through miles of woods with large walking sticks, where the most exciting discovery was a butterfly. All the other guests at the lodge were in their mid-seventies, and at some point we realized it was a bird-watching lodge.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Ugh, Peru again. That feels like two times too many,” I said, lacking any enthusiasm.

  “Maybe Peru is calling you back because the ayahuasca will help you conquer your fear of snakes,” Molly said, excitedly. “Maybe it’s all related. It says here: ‘After ayahuasca, people have claimed to get over phobias, quit addictions to drugs and alcohol, and some people end up moving to the jungle and doing it for years.’ ”

  “Well, I’m not going in there with that intention. To shit my pants and then get sober?”

  “What about living in the jungle?” Karen asked. “That sounds like an environment you’d thrive in.”

  “You would never have to deal with Wi-Fi ever again,” Molly added. “Or Bluetooth. Or passcodes. Everything could just be J-U-N-G-L-E.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Anyhoo, a few months later, our production team flew out to Peru with two of my friends in tow. Jenny Mollen and Dan Maurio had agreed to come down to the jungle and take ayahuasca with me. Jenny is pretty much open to anything, and Dan is a small man with a weak constitution. Molly came on the trip as a producer; Karen stayed back because she has a weak stomach—and South America equates to diarrhea in her mind. She’s not racist—but she does get diarrhea anytime she leaves the country, whether she’s headed north, south, east, or west.

  Before you take ayahuasca, it’s recommended that you “cleanse.” That’s usually where my train jumps off the track. I don’t like to cleanse in order to do drugs; it feels counterintuitive. They tell you not to eat meat for six weeks or drink alcohol a week prior to your “journey.” For the record, I also despise the word “journey.” The Bachelor ruined that word about ten years ago. A manufactured relationship on a reality show is not a “journey.” It’s a fake situation—one that has been admitted to time and again by the producers and “contestants.” So I skipped the cleanse.

  Whatever the cleanse was all about turned out to be true. I took the ayahuasca the first night with two of my friends who had both “cleansed,” and both of them intermittently vomited and broke down, while I somehow became more and more sober. I spent the night holding and comforting Jenny, while Dan was moaning on a mat in the corner of the room. I think he had diarrhea, but between his crying and Jenny’s crying, it became hard to decipher which noise was coming from what orifice. The situation couldn’t have gotten any worse—the final blow being that it was all caught on film and would be airing on Netflix.

  Ayahuasca is meant to put things into perspective, and for many, it shines a light on whatever you love most in this world. It turned out Jenny was horrified at how much she loved her husband, while Dan was horrified that he left his pregnant wife and two kids to come to Peru with me, of all people. His contempt for me was apparent on his face and has never quite gone away. We worked together for two years following that trip, and every time I walked into an edit bay where he was running post-production, he would shake his head in disgust.

  The next day, the shaman declared that instead of having a full camera crew, we were allowed to bring only one camera. Furthermore, I would have to take double the dosage and not have any friends with me—almost like a work camp. Normally, being forced to take psychedelics solo wouldn’t sit well with me, but after seeing both Jenny’s and Dan’s reactions to the ayahuasca, I welcomed the respite of hallucinating alone.

  A medium or psychic once told me to think of my mom sending bright, positive beams of light down over me whenever I needed positive energy to calm my nerves or to meditate. I filled my brain with my mother, and everything felt radiant, and warm, and hopeful.

  I didn’t want to have the same experiences Dan and Jenny had had the night before. I also knew that I wouldn’t. If I had been able to control my emotions for this long, and do as many drugs as I have done without ever having a truly bad experience, I knew I would be able to control this experience as well. If it brought up something I couldn’t bear to deal with—like Chet—I knew I would be able to shift gears. Then I thought maybe my mother would come through first, but that just seemed too obvious, and besides, with my mother there was no unfinished business.

  I could sense something good was going to happen; I knew I had the strength of mind to make something useful come of this. That was my thing—not to leave empty-handed.

  I looked at the tiny shaman, in a wifebeater and stone-washed True Religion jeans held up by a giant belt buckle with a Virgin Mary on it, and wondered how he kept any weight on if he was doing ayahuasca every night, shitting his pants. Then I wondered if I would also be lucky enough to lose weight during this experience, and this would be one of those situations I could look back on and say, “After ayahuasca, I was never able to put weight on again.”

  He instructed me to keep my eyes closed as he chanted a bunch of prayers in a version of Spanish that I assume is only used in the woods, and then he gave me a double shot of what hadn’t worked on me the night before. It tasted pretty awful, but if you’re a girl trying to look tough in front of your camera crew, you handle it. We went to a different room than we’d been in the night before, much more low-key, with only the shaman, the camerawoman—Nicola—and me. It all felt a little too intimate, but I am often able to do things in front of cameras that I am unable to do when there are no cameras around.

  My director and a few others were outside the hut watching on monitors, but the bulk of the crew was all downstairs—presumably drinking.

  I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with my eyes closed, and what I experienced first was a light show—a panoply of blues and purples
and greens swirling through the air and this undeniable feeling of complete and total equanimity.

  Seconds later I was vomiting into the bucket that had been placed next to me, but even that felt peaceful. It was a pleasant vomit because it just flew out of me—there was no nausea preceding it, and vomiting itself is an art I had perfected in my twenties. Somehow, I did not end up shitting my pants, so once I was done vomiting, I settled into a sort of cruise control, or artificial intelligence—sitting up and looking back and forth at all the images that were speeding by before my eyes.

  The blues and purples and greens finally settled on the body of water I spent all of my childhood summers on—Katama Bay. The water was dancing and the laughter was echoing up off of it, up to the sky where I was perched. The laughter was my sister Shana’s and mine—as little girls. It was as if I were watching a movie in fast-forward—memories I hadn’t thought about in years but were somewhere in my subconscious. Jumping off the dock on Martha’s Vineyard, tipping each other over in kayaks, looking for hermit crabs on the beach, all with the buoyancy of little girls’ laughter. Nothing ominous. Nothing scary. The laughter was innocent and infectious and uproarious and sweet. That’s what it was like—a film I was watching from the sky. You are outside your life, but it is your life. Every memory is real.

  There was a dog running along the beach that I had forgotten we had growing up. I saw Shana in the blue-and-white pinstriped bathing suit she wore all the time, throwing him a tennis ball—and then I saw myself as a little girl, running after Shana with my blonde curls bouncing and then grabbing her leg, clumsily pulling her down to the sand with me. Little bellies filled with dancing laughter. I couldn’t have been more than three, and I was already tackling my sister.

  The dock we used to push each other off of, the little sandy beach we used to play Kadima on. The images were all moving so fast, a phantasmagoria of memories that were all real—memories that were so ingrained in me, that I’d taken for granted and stored in the deep receptacles of my brain. Tears were streaming down my face. I was overwhelmed with love for my sister.

  In this moment, I was overcome. I felt the love that Jenny and Dan described—but for my sister, which I hadn’t expected. It was this delightfully perfect reminder of what she and I truly are—sisters who’ve experienced more together than apart. We witnessed how we both have been shaped—that was true intimacy. No self-consciousness, no pretending.

  Building sandcastles, digging sand out of our bathing suits, learning to fish, all bundled into the innocence of childhood—before puberty, and boobs, and acne, and boys. How had I forgotten all the times we held hands without even thinking?

  All of these images were coupled with this voice in my head telling me that just because my sister wasn’t like me didn’t mean I had any right to judge her. My sister was perfectly happy being a housewife and living in suburbia; the fact that for some reason that bothered me held absolutely no merit.

  My sister and I were two different people, and all she ever wanted was my love. I needed to have more patience and more understanding for her, and I needed to love her harder. Love her harder. That’s what I was being told. Be kinder. Be more gentle. Do you know how hard it must be to be your sister?

  Then my thoughts shifted gears to a scene of us on a bunny slope at Vernon Valley Ski Resort. My older brothers and sisters would take us skiing and leave Shana and me in ski school all day. Shana thought that was perfectly fine, but the very notion used to drive me up a wall.

  “How could you be okay going up and down the bunny slope on a T-bar while they’re out there having the time of their lives, living it up on the slopes?” I asked her, gesturing with my hot chocolate during one of our ski school snacks. “They’re making a mockery of us. I think we need to teach them a lesson.”

  I looked like I was eight, and Shana would have been thirteen, and this would have been our exact dynamic.

  Shana wanted to stay put, to follow the rules. I was in an uproar.

  “You and I can go skiing on our own. We’re too old for ski school. You’re definitely too old for ski school,” I told her, tossing my hot chocolate in the trash.

  “They probably just want me to watch you,” she told me, half assuring herself.

  “Or the other way around,” I reminded her. Then I got my mittens and hat, and stormed away from Shana in my ill-fitting ski boots, headed toward anything but the bunny slope.

  I remembered the hot chocolate, and I remembered how uncomfortable those boots had been.

  Moments later, when I was returned by one of the mountain employees for not having a proper lift ticket, Shana just shook her head and said, “Do you ever think anything through?”

  Watching us together at that age was hilarious. We were both so ridiculous.

  Then there was another whoosh of lights that brought me to my sister’s living room. This was different because I wasn’t in this scene; it was a conversation she had relayed to me months earlier in an email.

  My father had come over to her house—this was before we moved him into a facility, before he needed twenty-four-hour care, while he was still a homeowner and the proud driver of the same beat-up gold minivan he had been driving since my mother died, with the same used, empty coffee cups that were in there when she died. My father’s idea of a car wash is to drive by one. Why he still needed a minivan and who he was transporting in it were questions none of us wanted the answers to. He would frequently stop by one of my siblings’ homes, wearing a diaper that would somehow always manage to leak, forcing them all to dread his visits and put towels down when he came over. Does it get any more undignified? (Not a question.)

  Shana had just gotten a call from a man claiming to be my father’s son. His story was that my dad got his mother pregnant right before my father met my mother, and that when said woman came to tell my father she was pregnant, my dad told her he was getting married and to back off. The son was interested in my father’s medical history for the purpose of his and his children’s genetic inheritance. My sister told our new brother that our dad had a lot of health issues. That he was alive, but in decline.

  Our new brother told Shana that, ideally, he’d like to talk to my father, to which she responded, “You’re going to be disappointed. He’s old, and he’s not completely with it. He’s a real piece of work.”

  Shana conveyed all of this to me in an email with a photo of our so-called brother attached. He looked more like my father than any of us.

  I remember that the very act of her sending that information via email made me laugh so hard that I ran to the bathroom when I read it.

  Now I was sitting in Peru, laughing again. Her treatment of such serious news in the form of an email tells you everything there is to say about my father; nothing surprised any of us anymore. We had all had it with him, but for Shana to throw her hands up was particularly amusing. It was like a priest finally declaring, “Yes, I do want a hit of that joint. Enough is enough.”

  Later, when Shana and I spoke on the phone, she filled in some details of how she confronted my father about his illegitimate son. This was the scene that played out for me word for word, in a real-time pace, during the ayahuasca trip. It was like watching a play.

  “So, Dad, I got a call from Anthony,” Shana said.

  “Who’s that?”

  Shana was walking with the pizza that had just been delivered and plopped it on my father’s lap as he sat on the beach towel.

  “Your son. The son you had before you married Mom. The woman you told to take a hike when she came to you to tell you she was pregnant? Anthony?”

  “Oh, Tony,” he said, as if they spoke about him regularly. Then he opened the pizza box and asked, “Why is it full pepperoni, when I asked for half mushroom, half pepperoni?”

  “Pepperoni, Dad? I got a call from your son Anthony today. Do you know who that is?”

&n
bsp; “Ah, Anthony. What did he say?”

  “What did he say?” she screamed at him. “What did he say?!”

  My sister doesn’t have one iota of incredulity in her day-to-day life. She never screams or yells or throws fits. She never loses her temper. She’s a nurse, and she’s soft and nice and sweet, just like my mother was.

  “What do you have to say, Dad? What do you have to say for yourself?” Shana screamed at him. “You have another son whose mother came to you and told you she was pregnant and you blew her off, and this kid has grown up with a father who raised six other children, without ever acknowledging him? How do you think that made him feel? How could you not care about your own son? What is wrong with you, and how many other Anthonys are out there?”

  “What else did he say?” my dad asked, unperturbed, trying to angle two stuck-together pieces of pizza into his piehole.

  “Who?”

  “Anthony,” he clarified, recovering one of the pieces of pizza that had fallen on the beach towel. “What else did Anthony say?”

  “No, Dad. My question is: What do you have to say? What do you have to say for yourself?!”

  This was one of my favorite moments for Shana. She was finally standing up for something. She was fighting. She had had enough, and she was fierce. She had outrage. I sat there in my hut in Peru, beaming. And then—it hit me.

  The realization that I liked my sister the most when she acted the way I would have. Oh, my God.

  My sister had my outrage; she just used it more sparingly. My way wasn’t the only way and it wasn’t the right way. There are many ways.

  As soon as that clicked in, the images stopped and reshuffled.

  The next thoughts in my head were telling me that it was okay to be by myself. That I didn’t need so many people around me all the time. That I was enough on my own, and that more time alone would be good for me. That there was too much clatter, too many people always swirling in and around my life—that happiness can come without all that noise, and that I can choose to find that happiness alone.