Life Will Be the Death of Me

by Chelsea Handler

  The first few days the dogs were home, Bert was picking up what I was throwing down, but then things started to shift. In the span of one week, he turned on Brandon, then Tanner, and then me. The only one he chose to have a relationship with was Big Mama.

  He’d follow Mama around from room to room every day. If any of us even walked by him, he’d shudder as if we had all taken turns beating him the night before. I couldn’t get anywhere near Bert unless I had fifteen minutes to kill, because it was a multipronged process to gain access. First, he would hear me coming and attempt to run away. I use the word “run” for lack of a better term to describe Bert in motion. Bert’s movements are more labored, and unexpected—like an elephant starting to run and then giving up. Once he capitulated he’d sit down—with his back to me—and I’d have to make my way very gingerly to the front of his body, using a very soft voice, and then wait patiently for an opening. If he made his version of eye contact—essentially side-eye, head down—I would carefully move my hand underneath his chin and rub his chest for a beat, then I’d work my way around his neck to get to his ears and head. Once I got to his ears, he’d finally give in, and then he would allow me to do almost anything to his body. But if there was no gentle prelude and he saw my hand approach his head to pet him, he’d haul ass in the other direction in search of Mama.

  “Jew have to go slow,” Mama would tell me over and over again when Bert ran into her arms with his tail wagging and his tongue out. The minute Bert heard Mama arrive at my house each morning, he’d run out my bedroom door, down the steps, and into Mama’s arms, where they would literally rub noses for five to ten minutes. It was torture watching the two of them together right under my own roof, and Mama never missed an opportunity to throw it in my face.

  “Look,” she’d say, smiling, as she walked away from the kitchen and into the living room, swinging her hips with Bert two steps behind, swinging his. “Papa go everywhere Mama go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I can’t believe you have to tie your dogs to your bed. That is so pathetic,” my friend Allison said one Sunday night over family dinner at her parents’ house. She was referring to an Instagram story I had posted the night before of Bert and Bernice in my bed—with their leashes on.

  “I don’t tie my dogs to my bed,” I told the rest of the Azoffs sitting around the dining room table. “Sometimes, with his mood swings, Bert doesn’t know what he wants, so I’ll coax him up the doggy steps into my bed.”

  “Coax how?” Allison asked, leading me like a witness.

  “With a handgun,” I declared, flatly, to everyone at the dinner table. “I bring my dogs to bed at gunpoint.”

  “You may as well. She uses a leash to get them into her bed,” she broadcasted, laughing.

  “Repetition, asshole,” I told Allison, trying to maintain some dignity. “That’s what they teach you in every parenting class.”

  “You’re going to be teaching a parenting class if you don’t go back to fucking work soon,” Irving said, homemade fried rice flying out of his mouth. The rice was made by their trusty chef, Craig. Craig is not Chinese.

  Irving is my manager, but really he is a big-deal music manager who has no interest in anything I do—unless the payment exceeds one million dollars. Allison is Irving’s daughter, and although we are not related by blood, we are sissies and we love each other big-time.

  No one in the Azoff family really approved of my foray into politics after the election. They thought I was too strident and too amped up about Donald Trump. They thought I was being histrionic. Irving liked to remind me, and anyone else who would listen, that I wasn’t making any money zigzagging across the country, speaking at colleges and campaigning for candidates.

  “I’m sorry I care about the country I live in,” I said, mistaking my chopsticks for my vape pen, and trying to take a hit off one.

  “She needs to go back to stand-up,” Irving’s wife, Shelli, chimed in between bites of spareribs, not looking up.

  “Well, I’d rather be hysterical and wrong than be right and wake up to Hitler standing at my door,” I declared.

  “Oh, Sissy,” Allison said as she passed her vape across the table. “Take another hit of this.”

  * * *

  • • •

  If Chunk read The New York Times every morning, and Tammy read the New York Post, Bert and Bernice are reading The Sun.

  I like dogs that can make the distinction between television and reality. Dogs that are excited by other dogs in dog-food commercials are, in my opinion, slow on the uptake. Chunk would never lose his cool and bark at the television. Chunk was barely interested in reality; he certainly didn’t have time for fantasy.

  Bert is constantly confused by the same things he has done moments before. His memory is so short-term that when I’m gone for a few hours, I have to reintroduce myself every time I come home. The dirty looks he throws my way when I try to gain re-entry into his world are so full of disdain that sometimes I don’t even have the stomach for it.

  At one point, things got so bad that I considered moving out and getting a small apartment so that Bert could have more time to adjust to his new surroundings without me there.

  Bernice is a little more coquettish. When Bernice comes up the stairs to my bedroom, she is quick and agile, and it’s almost like she’s taunting Bert—showing him what it’s like to be quick on your feet. She will come upstairs, but when I reach out my hand to pet her, she’ll run away maniacally, as if I’m holding an ax.

  When Bert comes up the stairs of his own accord—which he eventually does even if I don’t guide him—it is slow and deliberate, like a sloth, taking one giant step every thirty seconds. It can take weeks. This happens when the house is dark and he has given up any hope of Mama returning home for the night. I am his second choice, and after months of getting used to this, I take whatever I can get.

  It can take a laborious forty-eight hours to get Bert out of his funk after Mama leaves on a Friday. It’s what I imagine it must be like to lay bricks. He won’t look at me—as if he blames me for her leaving—and if I get underneath the dining room table with him, where he hides, he will turn his head away from me and eventually reconfigure his body so his ass is in my face. He is a moody, moody fuck.

  When I realized one day that I could trick Bert into coming out from under the dining room table by turning off the lights and speaking in Mama’s accent, I started speaking in a Mexican accent for entire weekends.

  Mama was the one who fed them and took them outside every day and went over their training exercises and played ball with them. I was sometimes home just two days a week, so in their eyes, she was their real mother and I was just some slutty au pair who came by every couple of weeks to babysit.

  “Ber-r-r-t, Ber-r-r-t,” I said, in my best impersonation of Mama, demonstrating for Allison the challenges I faced as a single parent.

  “He resents me for being away all the time,” I told her.

  “Or he just doesn’t remember you.”

  “Well, then he’s pretty dumb.”

  “Don’t say that,” Allison said.

  “Oh, please. He’s a dog; he can’t understand me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know it, because of that expression on his face,” I said. “He’s dumb. Talk about old injuries. Every day is like Groundhog Day. It’s like he’s permanently concussed.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you, words have meaning,” Allison said.

  “Well, then in five minutes, I’ll tell him he’s smart. He won’t even remember this conversation.”

  Those weren’t the only challenges the new dogs posed. It was impossible to get any lingerie on Bert’s body. Weeks of making inroads, of sleeping in bed with him, of taking him on walks and in car rides—all of it would fly out the window the minute I tried
to pick up one of his paws and slip it through the shoulder strap of something silky. Bernice wasn’t obsessed with Mama, so I set my sights on her, which ultimately resulted in her playing dead anytime she saw me coming. Bert doesn’t play dead, because Bert is mentally dead.

  I even made a play for Mama’s seven-year-old son, Guillermo, who comes with Mama to my house on school holidays and when he’s sick. I started luring him to my bedroom with videogames and candy, just to demonstrate that I could beat her at her own game. This became an issue when Guillermo started following me throughout the house, wanting to play games all day long. I ended up giving him a hundred dollars to just play the videogames without me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three months into having the dogs, Tanner took Bert to the vet and reported that Bert had gained twelve pounds, weighing in at a whopping seventy-two pounds.

  We were given strict instructions when we got the dogs back from their six-month training program that no treats were allowed, because Bert had lost twenty pounds while at training camp and needed to keep the weight off.

  “Bert’s butt has gotten huge,” Brandon confirmed. “Someone asked me the other day if he had implants.”

  That’s when I connected the dots: Mama was sneaking Bert food in order to ingratiate herself. For the first time in my adult life, I was the one who had stuck to the rules, and Mama was working undercover. When I confronted her in Spanish, she told me she couldn’t understand what I was saying. When I confronted her in English, she lashed out.

  “Me? Oh, no, Little Mama,” she told me. “I don’t give him treats. I stick to the schedule. Do jew?” she asked, pointing her finger at me, her other hand on her hip.

  “No!” I replied. “Not ever.”

  “La verdad?” she challenged me. “What about all the cookies and chocolate jew eat in bed all the time, Little Mama?” Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen, with Bert following close behind. The two of their asses walking away from me looked like two giant locomotives leaving the station on twin tracks.

  “Little Mama” is what Big Mama calls me when she’s correcting my Spanish or telling me how Bert prefers to be petted. In these moments she is talking down to me, but because of all the things that Mexicans have had to suffer since Trump got elected, I feel it’s my duty to take one for the team.

  Bert had been looking more voluptuous, but by then his fur had started growing back, so it was hard to tell what was fluff and what was reality.

  “So, he’ll need to go on a diet?” I asked Tanner, disappointed.

  Tanner told me they gave Bert a thyroid test and it came up negative, but that the vet also noted that thyroid tests often deliver false negatives.

  Honestly. What is one supposed to do with that non-information? Isn’t medicine science? Isn’t science pretty solid, until we find out that the most recent studies have debunked whatever theory we have been living with as fact for the past forty years? For fuck’s sake, when am I ever going to get a straight answer from a vet?

  “They also said that Bert is most likely eight years old, but that Bernice seems younger.”

  “I thought they were from the same litter!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands in the air.

  “They are,” Tanner confirmed. “I think we need to find a new vet. Again.”

  “Well, get a DNA test anyway.”

  Tanner thought I meant that he should get a DNA test, but that didn’t come to light until weeks later, when he told me he was 81 percent Dutch, and we still didn’t know if the dogs were brother and sister—or, for that matter, if they were even Chow Chows.

  “They are brother and sister,” Mama chimed in that day. “As a mama, I know such things. Bert is just too fat right now. The weight adds age.”

  “Well, I wonder how that fucking happened?”

  “Amigas, come on,” Brandon interjected. “We’re all on the same team here.”

  “Estamos nosotros?” I asked Mama, cocking my head to one side.

  “For jears, I watch all jour doggies in this house give jew all the love and attention anyone could want. They love their mama. Chunk never loved me the way he love jew. No matter how much we play, he never love me like he love jew. Tammy, okay, but she was not my baby. Bert is my baby. He love me, and I love Bert.” Then, in perfect English, she said, “Doggies are not a zero-sum game.”

  “Sounds like someone just got served,” Brandon said, as he made an overhead tennis-serve motion with the wrong hand.

  The bottom line was this: If Bert was too fat to get up the stairs and get in my bed to cuddle with me, then what was the point of having dogs to begin with? If Bert was in fact five, or eight, or any of the other ages suggested to me, then we didn’t have that long before the stairs would become his nemesis. When Chunk got old, I could carry him up the stairs, but carrying Bert was not physically possible for me. So either Bert had to lose some weight or I needed to move into a ranch house. I put Bert on a diet, and I put my house on the market. Whichever happened first, happened first.

  What happened first was that I came home from being away for five days and found Bert and Mama strutting around the house both wearing ankle weights—two for her and four for Bert. Bert and Mama had started their very own weight-loss challenge, and guess who didn’t get the group text? This felt like a blow on two fronts. I loved Mama’s big, fat curves, and when she lost weight there was less to squeeze, but I knew on an intellectual level that those feelings were irrelevant. We were now living in a time and place where fondling my cleaning lady was no longer acceptable—no matter how welcome those advances appeared to be. This became a story of not only a weight-loss challenge but a loss of sensory pleasures.

  It also became an exercise in patience. I have had an infinite amount of love for all my dogs, but these two were the first ones whose love I had to work for. They operated in absolutes—black and white, no gray, you’re in or you’re out. I was finally getting a taste of my own medicine.

  After a full year, things improved for the most part, but I still don’t have the upper hand. Now, when I’m out of town, Mama will send me daily updates about the dogs, because she knows that for the first time in my life I suffer from guilt at not being home a lot, and when I am, she sees me spend hours on the floor with Bert and Bernice, begging them to cuddle with me. She knows how much I love Bert’s big, fat ass—probably because it’s the view I’m most familiar with—so she is always sure to send me one picture from the front and one from the back.

  I send her pictures of Bert sitting at her office door after she has left for the afternoon, awaiting her return. She claims she no longer gives Bert treats, and I claim I no longer give Bert treats, but we both know the other is lying.

  If I’m gone for a few days in a row, sometimes Mama will send me a full body shot of herself in lingerie, just to tide me over.

  * * *

  • • •

  If someone logged the amount of time I spend petting Bert and Bernice, I’d probably be arrested. I’m not going to pretend I don’t like Bert’s body more than Bernice’s—because I have a type—but I love them both the same. It’s hard for me not to molest my dogs. I know that if I squeeze them as tight as I want to, I’ll cut off their circulation. If I had gotten Bert before I met Dan, and not learned about impulse control, Bert would probably be dead.

  I didn’t know the snugglefest I was missing out on, because Chunk and Tammy were both affectionate, but they weren’t hedonists. Neither was interested in drawn-out body rubs and would always at some point politely let me know they were done being petted by me.

  Bert is the type of dog that could wake up to a beer every morning and then walk directly into a massage parlor for twenty-four hours straight. If I stop petting Bert, he will tap me on the shoulder with one of his paws and start whining. If Bernice comes up onto the bed, Bert will reposition his body to f
ace away from her, because he is very jealous and wants attention only for himself. Every morning when Bert wakes up, the fur beneath his eyes is soaked. This dog is so lazy that he is literally drooling out of his eyes while he sleeps. Mama will wipe the tears off his face, on average, three times a day. Bert is the epitome of male privilege at its core. Pure, unadulterated privilege. He is the neediest dog I’ve ever had, and when I hold his body like a giant baby lion in my arms, it feels almost as if he were genetically engineered for me. “Are you my little fat fucker?” I’ll whisper to Bert once I’ve got him in a supine position, or, “I love the way your weight is distributed.” I say these things in Spanish because no one in my house speaks English anymore.

  It took me a while to get past the fact that when Bernice cleans herself, it sounds like a car wash. Or that Bert sounds like a warthog when you turn him on his back, find the fat flaps underneath his two front armpits, and fondle his soft fur—after rearranging his body in whatever position gives me the most pleasure. I have woken up some mornings with him still in my arms from the night before. Something I never knew was possible…until Bert.

  It’s pretty remarkable to lose two dogs you love so much, only to find out that you can love two new dogs in a completely different way. It made me wonder—how many more kinds of love was I missing out on?

  These two fuckers made me step up my parenting. Chunk and Tammy were along for the ride, whereas I’m the one along for Bert and Bernice’s ride. I still travel all the time, but when I’m home, I deal with the dogs. I take them for walks and I pick up their dog shit. I’m the one who goes home now for their mealtimes, and I’m the one who takes them to the park. The last part of that sentence is not true. It feels awesome to parent and to know that my parenting matters. That these dogs do not love me unconditionally, and they will not spoil me with love. That we are on a day-to-day basis, and I have to work hard every day to prove to them that I am worthy. That I will be consistent and that my love is not contingent on them loving me the same way I love them. Have I turned into a stalker? Yes. Yes, I have.