Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me (3 page)

Then one day a mixer was thrown on our stage so people from the E! corporate offices could mingle with us Chelsea Lately folk. I wasn’t planning on going to it, until some grinning son of a bitch walked up to my desk and said, “Hey, Johnny, that guy Ken is downstairs.”

“Well, holy shit! Yippee ki-yay, Mr. Falcon!” Now let’s see what you look like.

I needed to know. I had been this close to sharing an intimate, lustful desert experience with this guy. I wanted to see if, had things worked out differently, he would have been up to my standards. I mean, if we had ever been seen out together, he’d better be pretty goddamn good-looking. I wouldn’t want people to think I couldn’t pull an attractive man. That would have been plain out embarrassing.

When I did finally catch a glimpse of him, while I was trying to look nonchalant, standing in the corner eating a piece of the delicious cookie cake, one thing stuck out immediately. He had a goatee, or as Chelsea likes to call it, a flavor saver. I don’t really care for facial hair on a man, especially a goatee. But in a perfect world, I’m sure I would have been able to persuade him to shave it.

One final thought: Chelsea Handler is my friend.

Johnny Kansas is like the sister I never had, even though I have two. There is truly no one on this planet I would rather spend time with sober, drunk, or asleep than Johnny Kansas. It’s not my fault she feels abused and terrorized at work. That is the only way I know how to show affection. It isn’t mature, it isn’t right, but it’s what I know, and it keeps everyone on their toes, or, in Johnny’s case, her talons.

—Chelsea

Johnny, finally accepting his species and reading up on himself.

STEPHANIE STEHLING

The first lie Chelsea told me was on the day we met. She was a new hire at the franchise wannabe Italian restaurant where I worked, and we immediately bonded over our ridiculously large families where every sperm was sacred and everyone shared a contempt for all things ignorant. Naturally it wasn’t long before we got into personal matters.

“So, I’m about to be homeless,” she casually mentioned while on a smoke break. “My fucking aunt and uncle are kicking me out.”

“That’s terrible!” I replied.

“Whatever. It’s not like I want to live with all those kids and farm animals anyway.” Chelsea’s always had a remarkable ability to look onward and upward without concern.

“You live on a farm?” I asked.

“It’s worse. At least a farm has the decency to have stables. Those disasters keep the pigs in the house. There are so many children and so many animals, you don’t know who is who.”

“You can stay with me,” I blurted out. I’d just met her, so I didn’t think she’d accept, kind of like when you ask how someone’s day went. You assume they’ll say, “Fine,” not tell you they’ve got a yeast infection.

“That would be great, thank you,” she quickly responded.

Later that night, as Chelsea entered my apartment carrying two plastic bags filled with clothes, I wondered how I was going to tell my roommates there’d be another box of tampons in the bathroom.

“How long do you think you’ll be staying?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not fancy, but you’re welcome as long as you want.”

“Couple weeks, maximum,” she replied, taking in the room’s appointments, which were, as I’d said, not fancy.

We lived together for almost two years.

One night we headed out to a club, where Chelsea pretended to be Pamela Anderson to get out of waiting in one of those cattle call lines where the biggest boobs, celebrities, and attitudes were allowed instant access, and the rest of the suckers, like me, were left pining. Even though the doorman was adamant that she wasn’t Pamela Anderson, Chelsea was even more adamant that she was, and so through the velvet ropes she went.

I expected to be left with the rejects when I couldn’t pull off “Helen Hunt,” per Chelsea’s mandate. But always a loyal friend, “Pamela” demanded that I and my sensible blazer, scrunchie, and Payless shoes, which she had earlier condemned as “day wear,” be allowed inside with her. This was the first time I’d seen her in action and I was immediately impressed. I watched as she knowingly smiled at her minion from our VIP table.

“Someday I’m going to be pretty successful,” she informed me. “And I’m probably going to make a lot of money.” Her nineteen-year-old confidence was infectious.

“Of course you’re going to be rich and famous. You think you already are,” I replied.

Much as I loved being entertained by Chelsea’s harmless shenanigans, I was a rookie when it came to their execution. Once, she hooked up with some guy at our weekly Santa Monica stomping ground and ditched him shortly before the sun rose. Our practice was, if you met them in the bar, you left them in your dust, never to be seen or heard from again. Unless they frequented our place of employment, which this sad sack had the misfortune of doing.

“Fuck!” Chelsea grunted as she used her finger to stir some poor customer’s iced tea one day at work.

“What?” I asked while stealing bites of some other poor customer’s pasta. We were standing near the wait station.

“That’s what’s-his-name.”

“Who?”

“That guy with the outdoor apartment,” she said, finger-stirring another iced tea as we surreptitiously watched a not-too-unattractive guy take a seat in my section.

As she passed among the tables, head low, on a mission not to be noticed, the guy grabbed her arm.

“Hey!” he said, smiling. “I thought you were going to call me.”

“What are you talking about?” she countered.

“Chelsea, it’s me, Bobby, from last weekend?”

“Oh, I’m not Chelsea,” she responded, her deadpan already perfect. “I’m her twin sister, Kelsey. Ugh, Chelsea is such a slut.”

She walked off to deliver the iced tea the customers regarded as the best they’d ever tasted, then returned to me.

“If he asks, I’m Chelsea’s twin, Kelsey.”

The only problem in this situation was that I was not a very good liar. “What am I supposed to say?” I asked.

“Nothing, unless he asks, in which case you say I’m Kelsey.”

“But your name isn’t Kelsey,” I pointed out.

“It is today. It’s not that complicated, Stephanie.”

The whole Chelsea/Kelsey thing was beyond stupid, but she was so committed to it, I started to believe she was Kelsey. I had seen her pull the same line on several other occasions when she ran into people she had no interest in connecting with again, be it an old neighbor at the grocery store, a customer from work, or someone she had accidentally fornicated with. One would have thought people would catch on to this, but, as Chelsea explains it so well, “No one would ever believe anyone was that psychotic.”

“Just fucking do it,” she ordered me in the restaurant that day.

“Okay,” I quickly responded, wanting to get this right. Chelsea was the kind of friend who always had your back, so you wanted to be able to do the same. Knowing she was watching and expecting me not to fuck up something so simple, I casually strolled over to Bobby and offered him something to drink, perhaps a Pellegrino?

“That girl over there, what’s her name?”

I looked around, past Chelsea and back to the guy. “Who?”

“Her. The one right there.”

“I don’t see anybody… So, that was a Pellegrino, right?”

“The one hiding behind the bread display.”

“Oh!” I successfully feigned surprise, pleased with myself. “You mean Chels—Kelsey?! Goddamn it!”

I scurried away, passing Chelsea on my way to the Pellegrino.

“You are retarded.”

Like I said, not a good liar. And when I’m on the receiving end of a lie, I’m a sitting duck. While I’m older than Chelsea, I’ve always looked up to her and have a tendency to believe whatever she says, even though experience should have taught me time and again not to.

Such as the time Chelsea called me with a very important request.

“You want me to do what?” I asked, incredulous.

“You gave me that stupid vibrator for my birthday and I think I hurt myself. I need you to reach into your coslopus and see if you have the same injury. I’m telling you, I’m really worried.”

“Why don’t you go to the gyno?” I asked.

“You got me into this mess with that thing,” she not so calmly replied.

Chelsea had been very good to me, so I couldn’t really say no to anything she asked. “Right now?” I asked.

“Yes, right now!”

“Okay. Just a sec. Let me put you on speaker.”

And so I did. With Chelsea on the other end of the line, I pulled down my pants and started feeling around.

“What exactly am I looking for?”

“An injury. Some scraping, chafing, possible scabbing, and definitely something bulbous.”

“Bulbous?” That sounded odd and certainly couldn’t be good.

As I stood there, my foot on my desk, my hand inside myself with such intensity one would have thought I was spelunking, I sensed I had a responsibility to figure this one out. It was like a Nancy Drew mystery, but more awkward, and so gross.

“No, no scraping, chafing, or scabbing,” I said, relieved.

For a moment I was overwhelmed with guilt. What if my prank birthday gift had permanently maimed my friend? The one who had done so much for me? I felt horrible. Until I felt something. Something bulbous.

“Oh, my God.”

“What?” Chelsea asked.

“I feel something bulbous.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Way up there.”

“Then you need to go to the doctor and get to the bottom of things.”

“I’m on it.”

I hung up and immediately dialed my gynecologist. What the hell could be going on up there? Could excessive masturbating really do something like this? Cause a “bulbous” growth? Had I given Chelsea and myself self-diddle cancer?

Later, as I lay there in the stirrups, my super hot gynecologist investigating the situation, the last thing on my mind was asking him for the fifth time if he was still married. Instead, I just rambled.

“And I don’t know what could have happened. I mean, it just appeared out of nowhere. I’m not even having sex… with anybody. Am I dying?!”

My super hot gynecologist emerged, doing his best to conceal a chuckle.

“That’s your cervix.”

“My what?”

“Your cervix. You’re perfect.”

Later that afternoon, when I met Chelsea to deliver the good news, she was laughing before I even sat down. That bitch had gotten me good. She knew what I’d find, that I would have no clue what it was, and that, in a panic, I’d race to my super hot gynecologist and make a fool out of myself.

“I’ll bet you asked him again if he was still married.”

I had asked him, but I wasn’t going to give her any more ammunition.

It turns out Chelsea had gone to her gyno before calling me. And when she found herself in the same exact humiliating position of being told that what she was feeling was one of her internal accessories, she decided right there in those stirrups that it was the perfect opportunity to humiliate someone else. All she thought as the speculum was being removed was, “Who else can I make this happen to?” I wasn’t mad at her; how could I be? How often does someone convince you to give yourself a pap smear while they’re on speakerphone?!

A short while later we found out our friend Rose was getting married. We were happy for her. What we were not happy with was that along with her engagement came her conversion to a born-again Christian who never missed an opportunity to pray for our lost souls, make us attend pre-wedding prayer circles, and host four different showers. That her wedding was going to be a monster became obvious when she invited us to be bridesmaids by presenting us with handmade papier-mâché greeting cards that carefully explained in calligraphy what our responsibilities were and how grateful to Jesus she was for us.

“Who is this Jesus character?” Chelsea asked the group. I choked back a fry, shushing her. This Jesus stuff was serious to Rose, who was suddenly oblivious to the fact that Chelsea was and had always been Jewish.

Rose explained that she was concerned about how she was going to pay for her lavish wedding.

“Removing the word lavish might do the trick,” Chelsea suggested. “You could do something simple and still have it be really nice.”

Rose quickly dismissed that idea. “Chelsea, people are expecting big things from me.”

When Chelsea and I left, she pointed out that Rose was expecting people to think big things about her. Rose liked to be the center of attention, and while we loved her, it could get really annoying. Nonetheless, we accepted the honor and did our duties with smiles painted on our faces. We also decided that in order to help her out, we’d pay for her wedding dress accessories, and we informed her of this via a lovely note on a generic, store-bought greeting card.

Chelsea said I had better penmanship, so I had to write it, but what we didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t good about reviewing my work for punctuation errors.

Later in the week, we watched Rose try on wedding gown after wedding gown until she found “the one.” It was very pretty and very expensive, which was something we discovered when she turned to us as she was purchasing it.

“Okay, so you don’t have to make the first payment for thirty days. Then you’ll just make subsequent payments every thirty days for the next six months.”

We could literally hear the seamstress’s pins drop.

“O… kay…” I mumbled in complete shock and disbelief, not knowing how to respond to this turn of events. Chelsea yanked me into a dressing room as Rose reviewed veil options, which were also part of our new budget.

“What is she talking about?!”

“I have no idea!” I shouted back as I removed her vise-like grip from my forearm.

“It’s obviously something you wrote, because I don’t recall telling her I had an extra three grand lying around to pay for her dress! We’re waitresses! What is she thinking?!”

“I don’t—”

“You need to fix this. You need to say something.”

“Me?! Why? You’re the strong one! I’ll just cave and end up paying for the honeymoon, too!”