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

Our other rules were that we were both required to lie in the sun with nothing higher than an SPF 2 and for no fewer than three hours per day. I explained to Ivory that you could get better color while actually in the ocean, but even with Cuban parents Ivory had never learned to swim. I wasn't a good enough swimmer to teach her, so instead, I bought her a pair of yellow water wings.

Ivory and I had taken enough pot to the Vineyard to last us through the end of the month. I fancied myself quite the pothead. We ended up getting so high on the drive up, however, that we rolled each and every morsel of it into finely rolled joints, then proceeded to smoke our entire supply the first night on the island. I had a similar experience with macaroni and cheese once. I haven't had either since.

One of the more enjoyable rules we came up with that summer was to photograph our victims of sexual abuse. We took pictures with every guy we brought back to the house.

One night we were at a bar playing pool with two guys. Ivory and I were on the same team and hadn't shot a single ball into a pocket when I picked one up and stuffed it in a side hole. The guys took my lead, and it turned into a game of handball with all of us throwing balls in every direction we saw a pocket. Unfortunately, I don't have the best hand-eye coordination, and in an attempt to corner pocket one of the balls, I sent it reeling over the pool table straight into the wall behind it, where it stayed. Shortly after, the bartender asked us to leave.

We took our cue and went back to my parents', got wrecked, then took our men to our respective love lairs. As I was rolling around in the bed I was probably conceived in, I ripped off my guy's T-shirt to discover a completely hairless chest. Since there were no burn scars, I had to assume that this young man had done this to himself voluntarily. There was no hair anywhere on his body. Not in his pants nor on his legs.

"Where's your hair?" I asked him.

"I shave," he told me.

"On purpose?"

I was instantly nauseous and may have thrown up a little, which ended up working to my advantage in orchestrating my escape.

"Are you okay?" he said.

I blushed and said that this had been my very first night of drinking. "I guess alcohol is not really my thing," I lied.

He said it was okay and maybe I'd feel better in the morning.

"Maybe," I said, "but you won't be around to find out."

Unfortunately, I had to break up Ivory's party in order for her to drive my guy home. She wasn't thrilled, but it turns out her guy was missing a few hairs too. The ones on his head. As they were rolling around on her bed, his toupee came flying off and landed on the curling iron that was left on for what could very well have been the entire summer. Ivory liked older men, but not old enough to have no hair. Apparently, this guy really got the short end of the stick in the looks department. How he did in the other stick departments, we would never know.

Later on that summer, I started fooling around with a guy named Turtle. This was to become a common theme of mine-dating men nicknamed after animals. Later on there was Chicken, and for a brief two-week absence of mind, there was a boy named Rooster. Chicken got his name because he could outrun anyone, and Rooster got his because he got up every morning at the crack of dawn. Needless to say, my relationship with Rooster didn't make it past our first sleepover. Chicken and Rooster were not related.

I liked Turtle. I had met him when I stopped at the gas station where he worked. There was only one bathroom, and as I was leaning down to cover the seat with toilet paper, with my pants around my ankles, the door flew open.

"Whoah! Sorry about that," he apologized hastily as he shut the door.

When I walked out he was waiting next to the door with an embarrassed look on his face.

"That's not really my best angle," I told him.

Both our faces were red with embarrassment and we started laughing uncontrollably. To the point where I had to use the bathroom again.

"Did you leave me any toilet paper?" he asked as I came out of the bathroom the second time.

"Yeah, there's a little left on the seat."

Turtle and I got along great. He was the type of blue-collar alcoholic that you could have a really solid fling with. Turtle was more laid-back than the Dalai Lama. He was the perfect prototype for a summer fling; a cute, flirty island boy, but not the type you'd miss in the fall. He fixed bikes at the gas station for the summer, and he definitely didn't go to college. He had a vocabulary that could battle my six-year-old nephew's.

Turtle had an uncle named Marty whom Ivory immediately took a shine to. He owned his very own gas station, and Ivory loved the smell of gas.

So there we were, two middle-class Jewish girls from Jersey hangin' tough at the gas station where our paramours worked. Our parents would have been so proud. We'd go by there from the beach for about a month straight, refill Ivory's water wings at the air pump, and watch our men fix cars. Joey Buttafucco-style. We'd sit around sipping our Mike's Hard Lemonade waiting for the boys to finish working so we could head out to some dive bar that accepted fake IDs. We each had our favorite pair of cutoff Levi's that we wore low on our hips and ripped up the sides. Sometimes we wore a shirt, but if we skipped eating that day, we'd also skip wearing shirts and just sport our bikini tops.

"This is like the prime of our life," Ivory said to me one day as we watched our men work and I had just finished pumping a customer's gas.

"Yeah." I smiled as I lit up a Marlboro Red. "It really doesn't get any better than this."

Marty and Ivory got into a big fight one night at a bar that had a lot of wood chips on the floor. He made a comment to her about not drinking anymore and she started screaming, "Oh, so now I'm an alcoholic, is that it?" Marty was mostly soft-spoken, but I think he and his liver had just had enough. The four of us had been hanging out for a month straight, every night.

Being the supportive friend I was, I decided to storm out with her. Unfortunately, I lost my footing, ended up sliding out the door, and got a splinter right below my right butt cheek. I fall a lot, but other than that I can pretty much control my liquor. Ivory's the kind of girl who gets drunk and immediately starts slurring. I have a lot of friends like that, and I think it's because it makes me look "more together."

The next morning Ivory told me she wanted to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Great, I thought. Just what I needed. The summer was going so well. I had to sit down and explain to her that AA was for quitters, and that "alcoholic" was one ugly word. You spend one night in women's prison, and all of a sudden people want to label you! I told her I didn't think she had a drinking problem, and besides, they don't have AA in Martha's Vineyard. After all, it was an island. Any normal person wouldn't have believed me, but Ivory loved hearing me lie, especially when it meant she didn't have to do something she wouldn't be good at anyway.

Marty called the next day to apologize, for what I don't know. This happened with all of her boyfriends. They would somehow convince themselves overnight that they were the ones who were wrong. It was too late, though. Once Ivory made her mind up about a guy there was no turning back. She never whined or complained after a breakup; she just moved forward. She had just come back from her morning jog where she met her new boyfriend, deciding we were done with the whole "blue-collar" thing. I was fine with that because I was getting tired of hearing myself scream the name Turtle in bed.

"We're moving on to Latin America," she told me.

"Salud," I said, holding up a glass of Slim-Fast. "Finally, we can get back to your roots."