Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (19 page)

She went on to tell me that not only did she marry again, but her current husband was in prison for grand larceny. She lived with her mother, who has never accepted the fact that she married someone in prison.

“Wait a second,” I interjected. “You met him while he was in prison?”

“Yes, but he got out right after we met,” she told me. “But he ended up getting caught again. This time he didn’t do it. He was framed.”

“Of course he was,” I said in complete agreement. The idea that Kimmy was involved in something as sophisticated as a framing was alluring. My mind ran the gamut of criminal possibilities, from espionage to high-level racketeering, until I was interrupted by Kimmy asking if she could borrow money to pay her phone bill.

I was a little thrown off guard, but told her that wouldn’t be a problem. If this little spark plug wanted to squeeze me for a couple hundred bucks, that was fine with me. I was more intent on getting the waiter to take a picture of her sitting on my shoulders without causing too much of a stir.

Kimmy was on her third rum and Coke when she told me that she had almost all the money to bail him out, but was short one thousand dollars. “His trial isn’t until the spring, so I want to get him out before then, just in case he ends up getting convicted.”

I was beginning to become concerned with Kimmy’s alcohol intake and asked her if her little body would be okay handling that much liquor.

“Oh, I get fucked up all the time,” she said in a deeper voice than she had started the night with. The waiter came over and set down the tri-tip steak Kimmy had ordered. I was too nervous to eat and had only ordered a Caesar salad. I wanted to keep my hands free in case Kimmy needed me to cut her meat.

I squinted at her. “We still have to go to The Comedy Store, so maybe you should hold off on the booze.”

She told me more about her mother, who was collecting money from the government for disability, and a father who had left home when she was three. I wanted to tell her to look on the bright side—she couldn’t have changed that much in her condition, so at least he knew what she would look like twenty-two years later.

After Kimmy polished off her sixteen-ounce tri-tip, she asked me if I’d like dessert.

“You go ahead,” I told her. “Anything you want.” It was becoming pretty obvious that Kimmy probably didn’t get out of her hometown much and that her life in Pittsburgh was pretty bleak. I started thinking of different ways that I could help turn her life around.

Maybe I could move her out to Los Angeles and we would start our own detective agency, or maybe I would just quit showbiz, move to Pittsburgh, and she and I would open an arcade. I wondered if she would eventually get on my nerves if we lived together.

I thought about all the fun baby pictures I could take of her and then send out to my relatives. We would go to the mall where people take their infants for pictures, and I would have her surrounded by ducks, pumpkins, or maybe holding a bat and baseball. Would she be opposed to sleeping in a planter? I didn’t have the answers yet, but I knew my life would never be the same. I needed to help Kimmy and nothing was going to stop me.

After we finished dinner, the waiter obliged in taking a picture of us. Wanting to avoid causing a scene, I simply walked around to her side of the table and picked up the booster seat she was sitting in. I held it next to my body—Kimmy and all—the same way a professional soccer player would hold the World Cup.

I helped her out of her booster seat and we walked to the car holding hands. Kimmy kept thanking me for her dinner the whole way to The Comedy Store.

I got there just as they were calling my name onstage, and I motioned for Kimmy to come with me.

“Come onstage with you?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything, just follow me up, sit on the stool, and don’t say a word. That will be funnier. Do you need help getting up there?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll climb it.”

I got onstage with Kimmy following closely behind, and sure enough, she was able to wrangle herself to sit on top of the stool. I did my act and Kimmy would let out high-pitched squeals of laughter after every punch line. Other than that, I didn’t refer to her once. When I was finished, I looked over and saw that Kimmy had maneuvered herself around and was on her stomach, sliding off the stool.

Once we were off the stage, Kimmy sped up and poked the side of my leg. “Get me another Captain and Coke. I’m going outside for a cigarette.”

I got her drink and went outside to find her holding court with five male comics. She was standing in the center of the group, smoking a cigarette with one of her nipples fully exposed. Her speech was slurred as she explained to them that she had come out to Los Angeles to work on
Girls Behaving Badly
, and that she was only here for one night and wanted to make it count.

I walked over and pulled her shirt back over her nipple. I didn’t like the way Mini-Me was carrying herself. Her hair was a mess and she wasn’t too steady on her feet. Between slurred sentences, she’d laugh maniacally while her eyes rolled back into her head.

“Kimmy,” I said, hiding her drink behind my back. “Are you ready to go back to your hotel?”

“No fucking way, are you kidding?” she shot back. “I’m just getting started. You can leave if you want to.”

As if I was just going to leave my little doppelgänger alone at a comedy club, surrounded by a group of male comics. I didn’t even want to think about all the horrible things that could happen to her.

“Kimmy, I am not leaving you,” I told her.

“I’m twenty-five years old, for Christ’s sake,” she told me as the guys all started laughing. One of the comics offered to give her a ride home.

“I don’t think so,” I replied gruffly, and then turned back to Kimmy. “I’m not kidding, we need to go now.”

“Fuck off!” she yelled, and then fell back into the ledge of plants behind her.

Now this was turning into blatant disrespect. I had not raised Kimmy to behave like this, and I didn’t know what kind of discipline was appropriate for a nugget. Would I just give her a time-out, or would I have to opt for a full-blown pants-down spanking?

“Listen, Kimmy, I am not leaving here without you. So you can either walk with me over to my car on the count of three, or there is going to be big trouble.”

Her next move was to pull her tank top down in the middle of her chest, exposing both of her nipples. I walked over to her, picked her up underneath her arms, put her on my hip, and headed for the car. All the while, she was kicking and screaming. I got to my car, opened my door, and threw her into the car seat I had rented.

Now Kimmy was crying. This made me feel terrible, but fortunately, right before Kimmy’s arrival, I had read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, and knew I could not let her manipulate me with tears. I had to remain strong. “Kimmy, please don’t cry. Please. What about if we get you some ice cream?”

“I’m thorry,” she slurred. “I’m tho thorry. You have been tho nithe to me, and I had the beth day today of my life, and I juth don’t want it to end.”

“I understand that,” I told her. “But you are wildly intoxicated and I really think you need to go to bed. You can barely stand up straight.”

I pulled out of the parking lot as she kept repeating herself over and over again. “I’m tho thorry…. You are tho nice…. I’m tho drunk.”

We pulled up to her hotel and she was still crying as she hugged me good-bye. One of the valets came over and I asked him to make sure she got up to her room safely. He took one look at her and flashed me the A-okay sign. I wrote down her address and told her I would send her the pictures we’d taken of me weighing her at the winery. As she was sliding out of the passenger seat, she turned back with tears streaming down her face and asked, “Can I get fifty bucks?”

At this point logic should have set in and I should have recognized a pattern. I, of course, was like a wife who keeps getting backhanded by her husband, but instead chooses to focus on the fact that he brings home a steady income.

I didn’t have that much cash left, so instead I wrote her a check. I threw in an extra twenty-five for good measure.

When I woke up the next morning the cloudiness that had taken over my brain the night before had dissipated, and I was finally starting to think clearly. I knew what had to be done: I had to raise money to get Kimmy’s husband out of the clinker.

I got dressed, drove directly to the production office of our show, and made everyone chip in.

The only resistance I got was from our line producer, Sam, who looked at me like I asked him for money to support Tonya Harding’s return to figure skating. “You must be fucking kidding me,” he said. “I’m not giving that little bitch a dime. That bitch is a con artist if there ever was one, and you must be a fucking idiot.”

Not only was I horrified by the blasphemy of Sam’s accusation, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach, and reacted as such. “Pipe the fuck down!” I told him as I took a few steps in his direction, with one finger pointing in his face and the other in my jacket pocket, trying to make it look like I might be carrying a pistol. “You are going to give me money, you cheap shit, and you might want to think about what kind of damaging things you say before you ruin someone’s reputation. She is just a baby.”

“No, Chelsea, she is not a baby; she’s twenty-five and she’s a victim. I’ve seen people like her before and she’s full of shit. And the fact that you are stupid enough to fall for it is really disappointing. I thought you were smarter than that.”

I was offended that my intelligence was being called into question, but even more appalled by the way Sam was talking about a small child.

“You would never talk that way about a full-grown woman,” I told him as I stormed out. It disturbed me on many levels to think that Kimmy, someone who could just have easily been born in my shoes, or me in hers, wasn’t getting the support she deserved. There were so many similarities between us, and I felt it was my duty to help her achieve the most that a short life expectancy had to offer.

I ended up collecting $476 from the rest of the crew and then threw in $200 of my own money. I wanted to give her more, but was also saving up to adopt a highway, and knew I had to act responsibly.

I sent Kimmy a cashier’s check for $676, assuming she probably didn’t have a checking account, and waited for her call to thank me. The call never came. Three months later I got Kimmy’s contact information from our production manager and called her mother, who informed me that not only was Kimmy’s husband still in jail, but Kimmy had taken off to Costa Rica with the money I sent her and was now working as a scuba instructor.

I hung up the phone and sat down, stupefied. It wasn’t that she lied about what she intended to do with the money. What really got my goat was that after everything we had been through together, she had never once mentioned to me that she could swim. I would have
killed
to see that.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Costa Rica

I
woke him up at 3:30 a.m. I walked into his room, looked at the black pair of boxer shorts he was sporting, decorated with swiss cheeses that had smiley faces, and repeated the phrase “Dad” four times until his arm spasmed and smacked me on the side of the head.

“Get up,” I said, and walked out of the room, cradling the left side of my face. My mother had passed away a few months earlier, and I was taking my father, or as I affectionately like to call him, “Bitch Tits,” to Costa Rica for two weeks with my friend Shoniqua and her mother, Latifa. I was expecting to bond with my father on this trip. What I wasn’t expecting was for people to think we were a couple.

His descent down a flight of stairs makes the same sound a gorilla would make if he came upon a staircase, except that a gorilla would make better use of its arms and legs. Slow, deliberate, and confused is the best way to describe his gait. Stairs require him to negotiate his weight from one foot to the other while also steadying his corpulent frame with one hand on the railing and one hand on the wall. Due to the arduousness of the task, he makes sure only to come down once in the morning and to go up once at night.

After he took five minutes to walk down ten steps, and then a smaller set of five steps leading into the kitchen, I watched him sidle up to the medicine cabinet and take one pill each out of fourteen separate bottles. After he had compiled his collection, he placed each of the seventy-five pills into a white, letter-sized envelope, licked and sealed it, and then placed it in his back pocket.

“Are you planning on mailing those to someone?” I asked him.

Without responding to my question, he barked for me to get his pill bag out of the hallway. Bitch Tits’s pill bag turned out to be a red duffel bag large enough to carry a golden retriever. I looked outside and saw a black Town Car in the driveway with its headlights on.

“Do you have a toiletry kit?” I asked, thinking of his shaving supplies and oral hygiene accoutrements that I would surely be overseeing.

“I use a towel.”

Excluding one trip to the Dominican Republic that my mother had strong-armed him into the previous year, he hadn’t been out of the United States since their honeymoon forty-seven years earlier. Prior to that trip, he claims to have traveled all over the world, but only by boat. He talks incessantly about how he lived in several different countries and is constantly announcing that he speaks eight languages. If saying, “hello,” “good-bye,” and “thanks for nothing,” constitutes being fluent in a different language, then I speak three: English, Hebrew, and Jive.

Bitch Tits opened our front door to find the driver standing there.
“Hola, señor. ¿Como estás?”

The driver, who looked like he was straight out of
The Sopranos
, looked quizzically at my father and replied,
“¿Bueno?”

“Dad, we’re not in Costa Rica yet. Cool it with the Spanish.”

After we arrived at the airport and checked our larger bags, we came upon the metal detector and were abruptly stopped on the other side by a large black woman with penciled-in eyebrows and fingernails long enough to fight off a porcupine. She held up my father’s red duffel bag and asked if she could search it. I told her yes and looked at my father, who threw his hands up as if he was being asked to submit to an anal cavity search and exclaimed, “Do what you gotta do. I don’t know what you think you’re going to find!”

Seconds later, the female security officer grabbed a pair of my father’s shorts from the top of the duffel bag and emptied out the contents of his pockets. A lighter, three nail files, a pocket wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a nectarine fell onto the folding table. I looked at the woman, looked at my father, and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching.

“What’s the problem?” my father asked the woman.

“Sir, I’m going to have to take this lighter away from you,” she said.

“The lighter?” I asked her. “What about the bomb kit he’s carrying around? He could do a lot more damage to a person with that wrench.”

“I need the wrench!” he shrieked.

“For what?” I asked.

“What if something goes wrong with the plane?”

The woman put everything back in his bag except the lighter. Three miles later, we found our gate.

“Well, this is a joke,” he huffed as he sat his oversize body down. “What kind of airport is this, with gates miles away from the entrance? It’s a good thing I had that quintuple bypass surgery last year.”

Good for who?
I wondered. “Dad, why don’t you go up to the ticket counter and try to get us upgraded?”

My father has about as much shame as Star Jones and, being the Jew that he is, loves to get something for nothing. My negotiating skills are on par with George Bush’s reading ability. And, just like Dubya, every time I’ve tried to put forth an effort, I am reminded that my only true strength lies in drinking.

I was engrossed in an issue of
Us Weekly
when my father sauntered back over to where I was sitting and sat down without saying a word. Just as they started boarding I heard my name over the loud speaker, and with a huge smile on her face, the woman handed my father and me our first-class tickets. “Wow, Dad, I’m impressed.”

“Quiet, don’t say anything,” he said through clenched teeth as he poked me in the ribs. “Just smile.”

There were twelve seats in first class. Nine of them were empty, and the only other person in the section was a black man wearing three large gold chains. After my father barked something in Spanish at the male flight attendant, he turned to the black man covered in gold jewelry and said, “Where ya’ headed, Q-Tip?”

Bitch Tits primarily watches two networks—CNN and MTV. The only thing he’ll turn Christiane Amanpour off for is
Total Request Live
, or, as he and Justin Timberlake refer to it,
TRL
.

“Dad,” I said pleadingly while looking over at the black man seated across from us. “I’m sorry. He’s retarded.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” my father jumped in.

“I would.”

“Well, retardation is a very serious affliction and no one has ever confused me with being one.”

“With being what?” I asked.

“A retard, Chelsea. Please try and follow the conversation.”

I realized that this flight alone could send me over the edge, so I took an Ambien out of my purse, bit it in two, swallowed my half, and dropped the other half in the orange juice Bitch Tits had just been handed.

Five hours later we were landing in San José. I slipped off my eyeshades to find my father with his bowling-ball head resting on his shoulder and a steady flow of drool coming out of his mouth and pooling on his stomach, where most of the contents spilling out of his mouth usually end up.

“Geez, I don’t know what the hell happened,” he slurred, completely out of sorts. “One minute I was awake and the next minute I was zapped, just like that,” he said as he tried to snap his fingers, but he was too disoriented to make the necessary connection between his middle finger and thumb.
“¡Me gusta agua!”
he yelled out to the flight attendant and then turned to me.
“¿Te gusta agua?”

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he yelled. “Do you want some water or don’t you?”

“No.”

I could tell already that listening to my father speak Spanish for the entire trip was going to get really irritating. The only advantage I could think of was that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with him.

“Hey, Chels,” he said as he shoved his Lacsa Airline map into my lap. “You were wondering where Costa Rica is located, and here it is. Right between Nicaragua and Panama. Your lack of geographical knowledge is truly astounding.”

“Well, I am an American, and we’re pretty stupid,” I reminded him. “Besides, I knew Costa Rica was in a general southerly direction from Mexico; I just didn’t know where exactly.”

“Sometimes, Chelsea, I really wonder how you get by from day to day. It’s a good thing you’re voluptuous.”

“At least I asked where it was,” I said. “And please don’t refer to me as voluptuous. Can you please go back to speaking Spanish?”

Just as I turned to look out the window, the flight attendant handed my father a bottle of champagne and grabbed my hand. “Congratulations, dear. I’m sure the two of you will have a wonderful life together.”

It took a full minute of hand-holding with a perfect stranger to realize we had been upgraded to first class due to them thinking my father and I were on our honeymoon…because that’s what my father told them. This was my first trip alone with my father, and so far, I wasn’t having a good time.

Once in Costa Rica, we rolled off the airplane and through customs without any major setbacks. I was in charge of carrying my father’s passport, which isn’t much more reassuring than giving it to an illegal alien. We walked outside into the smoldering heat while fifteen local taxi drivers gathered around us, yelling things in Spanish.

Then a homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something that I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food. How can they have the nerve to beg for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there? I didn’t care if this guy understood English or not. “Tell me when you’re out of dog, buddy. Then we can talk about splitting a falafel.”

I heard someone yell “Papa Handler!” from across the street and looked over to see Shoniqua waving her arms at us. Her mother was parked on a bench beside her, looking like she had just given birth to a water buffalo.

“There she is!” my father exclaimed. “How’s my Black Magic?” he said, dropping his duffel bag and suitcase next to me and crossing the street, stopping traffic. I picked his bags up and stumbled over to where they were standing. They were embracing each other like mother and child penguins.

My father loves Shoniqua because she can listen to him talk for hours on end. But mostly he likes her because they both share the belief that the less money they spend, the better. They met when she and I were on a television show together years earlier, and their fondness for each other was based on the fact that they are the two cheapest people I have ever met in my life. My father also revels in the fact that, by having a relationship with Shoniqua, he is somehow in with the black community.

Her mother, Latifa, had never met my father before, and when he went in for a kiss on the cheek, he somehow managed to spray the entire side of her face with his saliva. Latifa grimaced, looked at me with her glasses pulled down on her nose, and without whispering said, “Well, that was disgusting.”

I’ve known Latifa for as long as I’ve known Shoniqua, and consider her to be my black mother. Mostly because I only have one black friend, and Latifa is her mother. She has raised ten children of her own, has fostered more than a hundred other children, and runs a childcare center. She supplements this income with donations from Shoniqua, myself, and anyone else stupid enough to give money away to someone just because they ask for it. “It’s fucking hot,” she said as she wiped her forehead.

My father started speaking Spanish to one of the drivers and before I knew it we were in a cab on the way to a smaller airport, where we had to take a puddle jumper from San José to Tambor. We pulled up to a single-engine, five-seater plane.

“What the fuck is this?” Latifa muttered upon seeing the size of the plane. My father’s head jerked around with wide eyes upon hearing the word “fuck” come out of her mouth.

“It’s a private plane we have to take to Tambor,” I told her.

“Nobody said any motherfucking thing about a private plane.”

“The language!” Melvin said, looking shocked. “This one’s worse than you, Chels.”

“Mama, I told you we had to take a little plane; driving there would take eight hours and a one-hour boat ride,” Shoniqua told her.

“I love boats,” my father declared.

I walked my father, who didn’t take his eyes off Mama Latifa, over to the seat next to the pilot, assuming that was the only seat with enough room to fit him. The pilot and I helped him step up into the seat, and after trying to get his seat belt around his stomach for a full two minutes, I gave up and walked to the other side of the plane to sit down.

“Hold up,” Shoniqua said. “When are we going to check in with the embassy?”

I looked at her and then looked back out the window, shaking my head.

“Chels, I’m serious. We need to check in with the embassy. What if our asses get kidnapped?”

“Shoniqua, you are six feet tall with an ass the size of a giraffe. Who the hell is going to kidnap you? And furthermore, I doubt there is an embassy where we’re going.”

“First of all, bitch, my ass has gotten a lot smaller since I started acupuncture.”

“Fine,” I replied exhaustedly. “A baby giraffe.”

“That’s better. And of course there’s an embassy. Every country has an embassy.”

“Yeah, I know that, but they’re not usually on the beach.”

“Listen, if one of these little Costa Ricans fucks around and tries to get my ass, don’t think for a second I won’t fork the motherfucker.” Apparently, along with my father’s bag of artillery, the dinner fork that Shoniqua travels with everywhere in case of an attack also managed to make its way through airport security.

The plane took off with about as much control as a whitewater raft in a Category Five hurricane. I put my headphones on and stared out the window, trying not to vomit.

Forty minutes later, the plane started its descent and, from what I could tell, looked like it was headed for a landing strip not much bigger than the ones you see in
Playboy
.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Latifa said with a moan, looking out the window.

Minutes later we were on the ground. We were greeted by a young Costa Rican boy who led us all to his mini-SUV. Right before my father got in, he walked ten feet away to a tree, turned his back to us, and peed.