“Um, listen up, little snooty assistant,” I told her. “I’m not crazy. I accidentally took two hits of Ecstasy, so you don’t have to take me to the emergency room.”
Linda has never done drugs in her life. Not once. She goes to church on Sundays. So this news floored her. Then Chelsea walked in the room, was informed of the situation at hand, and didn’t miss a beat as she proceeded to make me a cocktail.
Once I figured out what the fuck my Monday had turned into, I had an amazing evening. Thank God for Ms Pac Man.
A VERY BLURRY LINE
We spend a lot of time in Mexico. We like the sun, tequila, and fish tacos. Chelsea loves to spend at least one day at sea on a yacht. Lucky for us she always takes an interesting group of friends along for the ride. Not so lucky for me, on one of these glamorous days she peed on me.
This is me on that day on the boat, pre-urination.
I was sunbathing on the front deck, when Handy came and got me. She said, “Amy, I want to show you something.”
We went to the back of the boat and she told me to sit in the captain’s fishing chair. She climbed up with me and said, “I just wanted to share this beautiful view with you. We are so lucky that we get to live this amazing life and I’m so glad that I get to share it with you.” As she spoke these lovely words, she urinated on me.
That pretty much sums up our beautiful and weird friendship.
This is me contemplating when my life took a wrong turn, post-urination.
I would like to take this opportunity to say that I would only ever urinate on someone I truly adored, and I would only do it pool- or seaside, so we could immediately rinse off… together. When all is said and done, it is a bonding experience, and there is only a handful of people who can say they have been urinated on by me. I take my urination very seriously and am selective about whom I share it with. I also promise never to take it any further than that. Shadoobies are off limits.
I believe the real question here is who are all these people who continue to be friends with me after they’ve been peed on?
—Chelsea
Chapter Eleven
Pubescent and Adolescent Mendacity, 1985–1991
GLEN HANDLER
Chelsea has three older brothers, of whom I’m the youngest.
In the summer of 1974, my parents told me they were “thinking” about having another baby. This was alarming news to me. I was a serious ten-year-old boy and I strongly advised my parents against this idea, because it was clear there were already way too many people in the family, and none of them seemed particularly solvent. My parents smiled politely at my counsel, and my mother, Rita, offered some soothing words of encouragement about how much I’d enjoy another sister or brother, since I had been so helpful and supportive with baby Shoshonna.
Easy for her to say, since it became obvious later that she was already three months knocked up, had no relationship with birth control, and was not “thinking” about having another baby; she was having one. Since I was eleven years old when Chelsea was born, I helped raise her with my mom. My father (aka Platypus) never changed her diaper.
1979, Chelsea on my shoulders in Martha’s Vineyard with Simone, Shana, and our family friend Sam Gaidemak.
Growing up with five much older siblings made Chelsea older through osmosis. She also was forced to think for herself, since no one in our family provided guidance of any kind. Don’t get me wrong. Our family was very loving and nurturing; we just were not in the business of offering one another meaningful counsel on how to navigate the world. Our upbringing was a very comforting, warm, and directionless love-in, but any efforts involving parental guidance and/or social interaction outside the four walls of the house were nonstarters. If you wanted a ride somewhere, to sign up for Little League, or your parents to go to the parent-teacher conference, you were completely out of luck, unless you assumed the role of the parent and became your own parent. So that’s what we did. We were child adults.
Not surprisingly, it was clear early on that Chelsea was advanced beyond her age in terms of sensibility and wit and that she enjoyed the attention of others, especially older people, while simultaneously barely tolerating those in her own age group. Her older-than-her-years outlook shaped her entire existence. It basically allowed her to skip the long parts of childhood that are a complete waste of time, such as art and music class and the Girl Scouts, and concentrate on the more interesting parts of life, such as why most people are so hopelessly fucked up in the head.
Chelsea was six when I left for college at age seventeen, and ten when I graduated at age twenty-one. She visited me at college with the rest of my family and was a little too comfortable hanging out with me and my fraternity brothers at the AEPi fraternity house at Emory University, in Atlanta. It’s always reassuring when your ten-year-old sister very easily flirts with your twenty-one-year-old fraternity brothers, who themselves act as if she’s just a fellow co-ed. It’s even more reassuring when the gaping age difference completely vaporizes the second your sister starts butchering your frat brothers’ hair, clothes, faces, and witless comebacks.
“You know she’s ten years old,” I’d occasionally remind my lecherous university comrades.
“I know, Glen, but I could really see myself going out with her,” said more than one frat brother.
“That’s great, guys,” I said. “Statutory rape has always been underrated.”
I moved back home after college, since my first job was with a CPA firm half a mile from my house. It was a fun place to work. It was full of weirdos, and was not too uptight as workplaces go. There was the usual collection of social misfits who formed the melting pot of mid-1980s New Jersey—lots of Jewish, Italian, and Irish accountants debating the dreadful merits of debits, credits, balance sheet adjustments, and deferred income taxes. Fortunately, most folks had a decent sense of humor, except for one or two born-again Christians and one or two complete pricks.
At this firm, one was required to work Tuesday and Thursday nights and Saturdays during the busy so-called “tax season.” The company provided dinner, so the accountants could quickly get back to churning out tax returns. These extra hours were somewhat flexible and not strictly enforced, so I always went home after the day shift ended, since home was just up the block. I would eat my mother’s cooking, get rid of my suit and tie, and come back in a more reasonable wardrobe: jeans and a T-shirt. Sometimes I would take a nap and come back to work kind of late.
I started bringing then-twelve-year-old Chelsea to the office on those nights, most likely because there certainly was nothing for her to do at home and because I thought she was the perfect party favor for a wretched evening of tax-related drudgery. Naturally she was a huge hit at the office, and she loved it because there was no real supervision, since the partners didn’t work late. She had an instant large audience of mutant adult accountants to insult, and there was free Coca-Cola, which we would eventually wind up stealing by the caseload when we expanded our visits to even more oddball hours.
Chelsea didn’t exactly befriend people as much as steal coins from their desks, insult the introverts and the socially awkward, and entertain anyone whom she wasn’t insulting. Typical of the conversations she had with the staff were the following:
CLOSETED HOMOSEXUAL AND AWKWARD ACCOUNTANT STAN ISAACSON (after being introduced to Chelsea): Well, it was nice meeting you.
CHELSEA: I wish I could say the same… Why would you ever choose to be an accountant?
SI: It’s what I do best and I enjoy it… Why are you so obnoxious?
CHELSEA: It’s what I do best and I enjoy it… Now, moving along, did you dress yourself this morning or did your mother pick out your clothes, because you look ridiculous.
SI: Glen, what’s up with your dick of a sister?
CHELSEA: Oh, did I hurt your feelings?
SI: I don’t have to put up with this nonsense.
CHELSEA: No, you don’t… but you will and you’ll enjoy it.
SI:
Get your little sister out of here, Glen.
These encounters were par for the course and they went on ad infinitum. It was a pleasure. Chelsea used the CPA office as a sort of tree house escape from our regular house. Inexplicably, no one really questioned why an overly developed teenage girl was there during working hours, and most of my coworkers got used to her presence.
On a few occasions, when I worked alone past midnight and long after everyone else had left, Chelsea would pass out on an empty couch in a partner’s office, presumably after stealing all of the desk change first. Sometimes she would leave early without telling me and walk the half mile back home alone. Sometimes, not realizing she was passed out on one of the couches, I would leave without her. That was a small problem, because one time she accidentally activated the security alarm when she tried to escape the locked office and ran back to the house in full criminal mode. Fun stuff, especially when you’re a twelve-year-old girl.
When I worked late and nobody else was there, Chelsea would walk around the office making phone calls to friends and family from people’s desks. Sometimes my work buddies knew Chelsea was there and they’d call in just to talk to her. Stan the homosexual had no personal life and he would often call in to speak to Chelsea in a lame attempt to psychoanalyze her. Chelsea would proceed to psychoanalyze him and tell him to get a fucking life. They would then proceed to give each other the silent treatment over the phone for about thirty minutes before one of them hung up. Deranged? Certainly, but refreshing nevertheless. Stan still talks about those phone calls.
I was particularly friendly with coworkers Marco, Mitch, and Ross, since we all were in our early twenties and liked to drink, smoke pot, and try to meet girls on the weekends. In fact, there were plenty of other twentysomething aspiring accountants in the company and they all joined in on the frivolity; it was more or less like one big happy fraternity. Most of us played on the company softball team together and got drunk afterward, and went to the same big alcohol-cocaine-pot-fueled house parties and got absolutely wasted. Chelsea would sometimes accompany me to those parties. Hey, why not let your underage high school sister tag along for some wholesome fun?
Obviously I wasn’t the most responsible brother Chelsea could have had, but it would be too much for me to shoulder the blame for her errant behavior. She was going to do what she wanted. She was on a mission, and that mission was to party and meet men.
Chelsea spent several summers with her insane girlfriend Nicole rampaging through the house party scene on the island playground that is Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t know exactly what they did, except that they were always cheerfully drunk and slept very late. They worked as waitresses at the local restaurants; in exchange for good customer service, they managed to systematically ingratiate themselves with their customers for the specific purpose of being invited to all the alcohol-fueled house parties that might be occurring anywhere on the Vineyard. In spite of their very teenage DNA, they somehow came off as legitimate, albeit somewhat fermented, twenty-two-year-old women who were trying and wildly succeeding at having a good fucking time.
Chelsea at a teenage beauty pageant. She was fourteen in this picture.
My mother and father had essentially abandoned any further parental supervision, since that was the equivalent of trying to paint the ocean; it couldn’t be done and it had never worked and they were tired anyway. Besides, our mother, Rita, was busy most of the time reading nine-hundred-page books and befriending strangers she met at the A&P. The best strategy for raising Chelsea was to hope for no disasters while endlessly shaking your head in disbelief at her daily encounters with the neighborhood watch, at the confused victims of her prolific storytelling, at Nicole’s German shepherd’s psychological and self-esteem issues, and at Chelsea’s run-ins with Carly Simon.
In spite of Chelsea’s completely adult lifestyle, my parents had persuaded her that she needed to continue with high school. Chelsea halfheartedly agreed, but she was violently opposed to returning to Livingston High School in New Jersey, since she felt that the student-teacher-asshole ratio, combined with the demanding structure of actually attending standard classes, was unacceptable and outrageous. Fortunately, my parents were able to enroll her for the next two years at the Livingston Alternative School, which of course was a wayward public school program for the disabled, unmotivated, agoraphobic, triskaidekaphobic, and/or those students who were unusually high on marijuana.
Chelsea flourished at the Alternative School because absolutely nothing was expected of the students there. Self-study was the prescribed teaching plan; this entailed reading books of your own choice and talking about them later whenever the hell you felt like it. Homework didn’t exist, teacher interaction was like camp counselor interaction, and attendance was not viewed as an indicator of achievement. Lunch was served, but only after most students got high together. There were only a small number of students at the Alternative School, and the student-teacher-asshole ratio was nil. My mother often asked Chelsea how her day at school was. “Reeeally good” was Chelsea’s general reply, which was proof-positive that nothing educational was happening. Chelsea continued to have minor flare-ups and meltdowns during her last two years at Happy High School, mostly mild bouts of teenage girl clinical insanity, but they were relatively benign compared to her much more turbulent early teen years.
The longer-term concern, though understated, was what the hell would happen with Chelsea when she was finished with Happy High School. The other five siblings had mysteriously found random professions—mechanical engineer, culinary chef, CPA, lawyer, and registered nurse—but somehow a profession didn’t quite seem plausible or logical for Chelsea. She clearly didn’t belong in college—or high school, for that matter. Neither my family nor I had any idea what would become of her. She was clearly entertaining to be with, but how was that going to translate into supporting herself, given her exasperating, volatile, and unpredictable daily behavior? Maybe she’d turn out fine, but she might just as easily spiral violently out of control. Because of her penchant for an off-the-charts lifestyle, I was impressed that she was even alive and had avoided a fatal accident, the mental ward, and spontaneous personal combustion.
After high school, she attended a semester and a half at the local county college, but everyone knew it was a charade, like putting a tomato in the microwave and expecting a nice glass of tomato juice to jump out after two minutes on high. After dropping out of college, she waited tables and drank her way around New Jersey for another year or two before getting bored. At that point, I used some frequent flyer miles and brought nineteen-year-old Chelsea to Los Angeles to visit our aunt, uncle, and nine cousins.
Before the return trip to the airport, I said, “Chelsea, let’s go to LAX. We have to fly back to New Jersey.”
She faked a polite “have a good flight” to me and stayed in Los Angeles for good. That was the beginning of Chelsea’s brand-new foundation of fresh lies to be shared with a brand-new audience of unsuspecting Angelinos.
When I returned to New Jersey, my parents, in a rare act of parenting, asked, “Where’s Chelsea, Glen?”
“Don’t worry, Mom, Dad. I donated her to Los Angeles.”
My brother Glen thinks that he is the funniest and smartest person in the family. He is funny, but I don’t find him hilarious. They all had to put up with a lot of my chicanery and wild ways, and the truth is, they’ve all been rewarded tenfold for it.
—Chelsea
Exhibit A: The five of us in Anguilla this past Christmas. Shabbat shalom.
The following is an example of a typical birthday note Glen sends me each year. I’m convinced that he’s convinced himself that he’s a direct descendant of Socrates. The note’s sentiment is nice, and imagine his surprise when I use one of these very same quotes when I give the commencement speech at Emory University this spring, the college he graduated from and I was denied entry to.
P.S.: For the record, I didn’t get accepted into any college.
&nb
sp; Chapter Twelve
Standards and Practices
S&P is the abbreviation for Standards and Practices. This is the department of Comcast Entertainment that reminds us on a daily basis to bleep bad words we say on our show, and the department that attempts to rein us in when we’ve crossed the line, language- or taste-wise. Every day after we tape an episode of Chelsea Lately, we receive an e-mail from someone named Tom O’Brien outlining what needs to happen before the show airs on the East Coast.
It is hard for me to take seriously any department that specializes in monitoring me. Much like the gays in the South, the more the powers that be say no, the more I say, “Fuck off.”
I have included what I consider to be the ten most amusing e-mail exchanges of this kind.
Sincerely,
Chesty
FROM: E! Entertainment Television
SENT: Monday, December 20, 2010, 1:50 PM
TO: Chelsea Lately Staff
SUBJECT: S&P Note for CL: jokes 5181
One S&P heads-up on today’s script:
TOPIC #4 Vagina Steaming
“Queef” will need to be bleeped, so you may want to lose the joke.
Thanks
Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me Page 18