Chelsea Handler - My Horizontal Life - A Collection of One-Night Stands

I fell asleep shortly after I resigned myself to the idea that I was, in fact, sharing a bed with someone who wouldn't put out. This was not the ending I had envisioned for the evening. Instead of steamy South American sex, the entire night was spent with Lupe holding on to me for dear life like a koala bear to a tree branch. Being cuddled while awake is nice, but when I'm sleeping, I need space. I kept waking up every hour, trying to nudge him toward the other side of the bed, but he slept like a big dead log. My shoulder started to ache from lying on my side, but there wasn't any other choice; whenever I turned around all I got was hot breath in my face. I was close to tears and thought about calling hotel security, but I didn't want Lupe to end up in the clinker.

At around seven A.M. I picked up the hotel telephone, went into the bathroom, and called myself on my cell, which I had placed next to Lupe's head with the ringer on high. I ran out of the bathroom in a fit of panic to answer my cell and saw his eyes open slightly. "Hello?" I answered inquisitively. "Oh, no, we do? Oh, of course, I'm just, I'm just aaaah… okay, I'll be here." I hung up. "Shit!" I screamed.

Lupe bounced up. "What is it?"

"I have a meeting in ten minutes, and it's in this room. You're gonna have to go. I am sooooo sorry."

"It's okay, it's okay, what kind of meeting is it?" he asked.

I wasn't prepared for his English to work first thing in the morning and was thrown off guard by the question.

"It's with the manager of this hotel, actually. Shoniqua and I are thinking about buying it."

"Oh, I didn't know you were into real estate. Shoniqua told me you were a professional ballerina."

This was news to me. "I am… a ballerina… but I also buy buildings… hotels mostly… and then fix them up and sell them." I said this with about as much believability as Pamela Anderson as a lifeguard.

"Oh, okay… when do you think you'll be done?"

"It's gonna be a long one," I said. "Why don't you give me your cell number and I'll call you tonight."

"I thought maybe we could go to the zoo today," he said.

This came as no surprise to me, considering his affinity for things in captivity. "Probably not, but I'll call you later," I said. He told me he had no cell phone and asked for my number. I gave him Shoniqua's.

He got dressed and came over to kiss me good-bye, grabbing my face for what felt like an hour. He just kept staring into my eyes. "I had a beautiful time last night."

"Yeah, it was a real hoot," I said.

After he left, I locked the door, slept for another three hours, then put on a robe and went straight to Shoniqua's room.

"What's up?" she asked as she opened the door.

"What's up? What's up? Not Lupe's penis, that's for fucking sure."

"What happened?" she asked.

I got into bed with her and told her about my night of torture. "Well, bitch, that's what you get when you fuck with a sister and make her piss herself."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Think about it, Magnum P.I.," she said, with a big smile on her face. "You white bitches aren't the only ones who can plan some shit. I told Lupe that you only had three months to live and that this trip was our last hoorah. I explained that you had been treated terribly by men in the past and your dying wish was to be adored emotionally, not sexually." She paused and added, "I also told him you had herpes." Then she burst into maniacal, uncontrollable laughter.

"That's not fucking funny," I kept saying, all the while trying to control my own laughter. When I couldn't any longer, I decided to go up to my room and laugh in private. I refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing me entertained by my pathetic circumstance.

"Fuck off," I yelled as I left her room. "By the way, he wants to go to the zoo today!" I shouted as the door swung shut.

Lupe called Shoniqua several times after our trip to New York to check on my status. "I'll be honest with you, Lupe," she said on their last call, "it doesn't look good. It doesn't look fucking good."

I WAS ON the phone with my doctor's office trying to get my hands on some Vicodin.

"What do you need it for?" the nurse who answered asked.

"I'm in a lot of pain," I lied. "I had a bit of bad luck over the weekend."

"I'm sorry to hear that, but you'll need to be more specific, Ms. Handler."

"Fine," I said. "If you must know, I was skydiving and my chute didn't open."

"Oh dear god, are you all right?" she asked me.

"Yes, I'm okay, I'm just in a lot of pain," I told her.

"What… where… how did you land?" the nurse asked me.

"In a tree," I said.

"Have you been to the hospital? Is anything broken or bruised?" she asked me.

"No, it's mostly internal injuries, nothing you'd be able to spot externally. I also feel like I'm suffering from posttraumatic syndrome, so I may need some sleeping pills."

My call waiting beeped and I told the nurse to hold the wire.

It was my sister Sloane, whose wedding was two months away.

"You can bring a guest to the wedding if you want," she said.

"Hold on," I said and clicked back over to find that the nurse had hung up on me.

I clicked back to Sloane. "Fine. Who?" I asked her.

"I don't know. One of your girlfriends or if you meet a guy you want to bring."

The thought of bringing a love interest to my sister's wedding had about as much allure as joining the Navy SEALs. Every time I brought someone home to meet my parents, whether it was just a friend or an actual boyfriend, my family felt compelled to remind me that I had terrible taste in people, and that they liked me better when flying solo. They all agreed that my friends in California were shallow and brain-dead and we were all much better off when I left them behind.

My Mormon sister was engaged to a normal human, and it seemed he was helping her to slowly snap out of the spell the Mormons had put her under. Sloane's wedding was being held at our summerhouse in Martha's Vineyard. Though I had recently been out a couple times with a guy I liked, I didn't want to embarrass myself on our third date by asking him to fly across the country for my sister's wedding.

Since my gay friend Nathan had included me in many of his family events and vacations, it seemed like time for a little reciprocity. My father had never met a gay man in person before and I thought that this could be a time of great revelation. Once again, I was sorely mistaken.

For the record, Nathan is not your typical gay man. He's not as blatant a homosexual as Harvey Fierstein, but if you have any gaydar at all-which I don't-then it wouldn't take you more than a couple of nights out with Nathan to catch on.

I didn't realize he was gay for a long time, attributing most of his effeminacy and idiosyncratic ways to the fact that he was Jewish. He is tall and handsome, a sports fanatic, and a man's man in many ways-except when having a verbal disagreement, in which case he turns into an eight-year-old girl.

Nathan and I have been friends for many years. I met Nathan when I was nineteen years old and landed my first job waiting tables at Morton's, a restaurant in Los Angeles. He trained me on my first day, and when I spilled a glass of red wine on some woman who had more eye liner on than Liza Minnelli, he assured me that big things were in the cards for me.

Bringing Nathan home, however, was not quite the stroke of genius I had anticipated. Minutes after introducing Nathan to my mother, he sat down at our kitchen table and told my mom how famished he was from the trip. "What can I make you, sweetheart?" she asked. "We've got cold cuts, potato salad, I can heat up some chili…"

"I'll take four eggs over medium, absolutely no oil or butter. I'll also take a turkey sandwich on multigrain with some mustard- Dijon if you have it."