Chelsea Handler - Are You There, Vodka, It's Me Chelsea

I was relieved that the attention had shifted from me, but was also regaining my confidence and wanted to give my accent another shot without talking about my personal history.

“So let me ask you,” I interrupted. “What is it like having to compete with all these other Brits who seem to be stealing your thunder. Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, Shakira.”

“Can we get the check?” Sarah yelled to our server across the restaurant.

“Cheers,” I told them both as we got up to leave after paying our bill in a flurry.

“Cheers,” they said and kissed Sarah good-bye. They awkwardly smiled at me and opted for a handshake. Then Don handed Sarah his card before we walked out the door.

“You should write fairy tales,” Sarah said, wrapping her scarf around her neck. “I have no idea why you write real stories when you’ve obviously got an imagination on par with J. K. Rowling.”

“I prefer to think of it as quick in a bind.”

“No, Chelsea, quick in a bind is when you have to make up something fast. Your lies are completely unnecessary and, above all, ludicrous. Some of the things that come out of your mouth have never even crossed my mind.”

“Why would they cross your mind, Sarah? I’m the one who’s thinking them.”

“It’s truly fascinating,” she said. “I think there’s a pretty strong chance you could be a full-blown sociopath.”

“I wouldn’t argue that,” I replied.

Sarah took the card Don Henley had give her out of her pocket and squinted while trying to read his name. “Chelsea, what does this say?”

“What?” I asked, leaning in to look at it.

“Does this say ‘The Equals’?”

“Oh my God.”

“Oh my God, I’m so stupid. And his name is Pat Lloyd. I thought that was Don Henley.”

“So did I. By the way, I have no idea what Don Henley looks like.”

“Me neither,” she said.

“Well, I’m glad I didn’t humiliate myself in front of a music legend, that’s all I have to say.”

“I’m sure at some point you will.”

I lay awake in my hotel room later that night listening to Sarah snore and wondering why no one else I knew ever seemed to get themselves into the situations I did. I was officially thirty and wondered if there was an age when this kind of behavior should be curbed.

After much deliberation coupled with back-to-back hiccups, I decided to blame the English. They were responsible for my feeling ashamed of my Native American-Jewish-Mormon roots. Had they not subjected me to such blatant discrimination, I would never have tried to use a fake accent in order to blend in with all the other Great Britainers.

I prayed that night. Not only for England, but for my children. I hoped both Earls never had to face the adversity I had seen that night at Dans le Noir. I prayed for their future, for their well-being, and most of all I prayed for them to have manners to send me a thank-you card. I had sent them both a DVD of my half-hour Comedy Central special two months earlier and hadn’t heard from either of them since.

Sarah and I had been back from London for almost two months, in which time she had landed herself another man. Lydia, Ivory, and I met Sarah for breakfast and were grilling her about the new guy she had started seeing. “He’s really sweet,” Sarah informed us.

“He’s Hungarian,” Ivory said, correcting her. Ivory doesn’t often mince her words and has a different way of expressing herself than I do. Her style is more direct and she doesn’t lie. While she is a very supportive friend, she makes no bones about telling people the absolute truth no matter what. When, months earlier, I had gotten my eyebrows bleached in hopes of making my hair color look more natural, she said, “You look like an albino, and not one of the fun ones. You need to get your money back and have them fix it. If they can’t fix it, you’re better off without any at all.”

“Who cares if he’s Hungarian?” Lydia said, defending Sarah. “What’s important is the way he treats her.”

“Does he have a big penis?” I asked.

“Not sure,” Sarah said.

“What does that mean?” Ivory asked.

“We’ve only dry humped,” Sarah told us.

By the way Ivory reacted to this information, you would have thought Sarah had told her that she had become romantically involved with Flavor Flav.

“Dry humping is disgusting,” Ivory declared, throwing her fork down onto the table. “It’s for junior high-schoolers. What is the point of a guy lying on top of you fully clothed, and then coming in his pants? What does that even mean?”

“It obviously means that the two people involved are at the beginning of a very meaningful relationship,” I answered. “What do you think they did in the seventeenth century when there were layers and layers of petticoats and knickers?” I redirected my attention to Sarah. “I have no problem with the dry hump. I think it can be very magical, especially if you’ve got one of David Hasselhoff’s records playing in the background. What’s his name again?” I asked, knowing full well what his name was but wanting Sarah to say it aloud.

“Coolio,” Sarah said in the lowest voice possible.

“And he’s white,” I added.

“That’s not so bad,” Lydia said unconvincingly. “There are a lot of worse names than Coolio.”

“Like what?” Ivory asked. “Rumplestiltskin?

“No, like…Eminem.”

“Yes,” I said, “but Eminem is a rapper. At least he has some tie to the African-American community. Coolio is Hungarian.”

“Does Coolio rap?” Ivory asked Sarah.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“I think you’d know if he rapped,” I told her. “That’s not exactly something you just do on the side.”

“That can’t be his real name,” Ivory said.

“It’s not,” Sarah said. “He told me the other day that it was time for me to start calling him by his first name, but I have no idea what it is. Everyone calls him Coolio.”

“I’m sorry, but that is a really ridiculous nickname. That’s worse than Sugar Tits,” I said, remembering what was written under my high school yearbook picture.

“Chelsea,” Lydia jumped in. “I don’t think you have any room to make fun of Sarah’s fat, smelly boyfriend. You dated Big Red and then got dumped by him.”

“This is true,” I said. “But Big Red was cute in a…different kind of…way.”

“No he wasn’t,” all three of them said in unison.

“The point is,” Lydia announced, “that you like him and he likes you, and after everything that’s happened to you in the past year, you deserve it.” Lydia was of course referring to Sarah being broken up with by her fiancé two weeks before their wedding.

“Do you have a thing for foreigners?” Ivory asked Sarah, realizing a pattern.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Lydia declared.

“Wonderful is a word that should really only be used by gay men,” I said to Lydia.

“It really is,” Ivory agreed.

“Shut up,” Lydia said to both of us. “Just shut up.”

Lydia was experimenting with her newfound positivity and it was hard to get used to such a drastic change. A month earlier, after popping two Vicodin on a plane from L.A. to New York, Lydia had cheated on her boyfriend of three years with the Navy SEAL sitting next to her. They were in a full make-out session until the flight attendant approached her and said there had been several complaints from other passengers about “groans” they had heard coming from her aisle. Based on her therapist’s advice, Lydia joined the Landmark Forum, one of those life-enhancement seminars, and she already had a completely new lease on life. She had become increasingly sympathetic and supportive, and it was becoming almost intolerable.