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

My mother had actually purchased the mop for me years before, and it hadn’t been used since. I couldn’t think of a better time to get involved with my apartment’s personal hygiene. After I filled up a salad bowl with water and shampoo, I moved all of the furniture in my living room and kitchen against the wall so that I could really get at the floor.

After thirty minutes of full-blown mania, I decided to rearrange my furniture. I hadn’t had this much energy since splitting an eight ball with my rabbi at my bat mitzvah. I put in another good nine-and-a-half minutes of elbow grease before I lost any and all interest in finishing what I had started. I couldn’t imagine what my cleaning lady, Fantasia, had to hop herself up on to get through a solid eight hours of this shit. It occurred to me that it probably came easier to Mexicans, considering that they inherit the cleaning gene, but I still had a huge amount of respect for her.

All of a sudden I felt extremely wiped out. I walked back into my room, got under my covers, pulled on my eyeshades, and passed out. Two-and-a-half hours later, my phone rang. I had woken up from a dream where I was still in high school and thought it was the bell. I looked around my room in complete confusion, wondering who I had hooked up with in order to end up here. I didn’t understand why the bell kept ringing until I looked over and saw my cell phone on my nightstand. Right next to the wrapper of my turkey pesto sandwich.

I answered the phone and it was Lydia. Apparently, I had agreed to pick her up from the airport and I was an hour late. No wonder she hadn’t answered her phone earlier. I felt like I’d been in some sort of nuclear explosion. My head was pounding. I had left my contacts in and they were having trouble finding their way back to the centers of my eyes. I felt exactly the way people describe feeling after being slipped a roofie, minus the anal pain. It occurred to me that what I may have been suffering from was a sugar hangover. I hadn’t really had any chocolate in weeks, and my body was completely appalled with what I had shoved into it.

I slowly got out of bed and held onto my desk, and then the wall, as I tried to maintain my footing on the way into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror to see my hair matted to my forehead and some chocolate stuck to the side of one of my cheeks. “When did I get bangs?” I wondered out loud. What a disaster. I walked out of the bedroom and slammed my shin straight into a leg of the couch that was now sitting in my kitchen. “Fuck me!” I screamed as I hopped up and down on one foot and then fell over. I craned my neck to look around the corner at the clock in my kitchen, which read 3:59 p.m.

I got up, went and brushed my teeth, and put on a pair of flip-flops, all the time wondering why I agree to pick people up from the airport. It really is a ridiculous activity if you’re not sleeping with the person. People in their thirties need to know that if they can’t afford a taxi, then they don’t deserve to go on a trip. I reminded myself to say this exact thought during one of my stand-up routines the next time Lydia came to a show; hopefully that would get the point across.

My vision still wasn’t twenty-twenty, but I hoped that it would clear up once I got outside. I ran out the door and jumped into my dark blue Volvo. I drove to the end of the alleyway, then slammed on the breaks when I saw three young teenage girls wearing backpacks, crossing. I couldn’t have been going more than five miles per hour since the entrance to the street was only a hundred feet from my space, but I’m sure I still scared the girls, so I lowered my window and leaned out. “I’m sorry, girls,” I said as I waved.

“Fuck you, cunt,” one of the girls responded, while the other two girls gave me the finger.

I couldn’t believe my ears. These girls couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, and they were calling a complete stranger a cunt? I didn’t even start using that word until my late twenties, and I curse all the time. Two of the girls were Mexican and one of them was white, but looked like she was trying very hard to be Mexican. In my opinion, pretending to be Mexican is right up there with wearing a mock turtleneck. Why would you pretend to be wearing a turtleneck?

By this time they had crossed over to the other side of the sidewalk, the side closest to my passenger door. I opened my car door and got out. “I’m sorry, did you just call me a cunt?” I asked the chunky Latina who had yelled it.

“That’s right, fucking bitch, cuz that’s what you are!” she yelled.

This was too much. I couldn’t believe how anyone, never mind three young girls, could talk to a complete stranger like this. These girls were clearly walking home from school, which disturbed me even more. “I’m sorry…” I had to press on. “Where do you get off talking like that to complete strangers? How old are you?”

The girls had stopped where they were at this point, and the one I was talking to started walking back toward my car with her fingers and arms waving around like an orangutan. “Because that’s what you fucking are,” she replied. “A fucking cunt. How the fuck old are you is the better question, and where the fuck did you learn to drive?”

“Listen, you little bitch,” I screamed, completely losing any remaining dignity that hadn’t been lost earlier when I had inhaled more than five thousand calories in one sitting. “I didn’t fucking hit your ass, and believe me it wasn’t easy to miss, so I suggest you tone it down a notch. I was apologizing to you, and then you call me a cunt? Where are your parents?”

The girl was now standing on the other side of the car, still moving her head around in circles. “Who the fuck do you think you are, asking me about my parents? I know you’re not my fucking mother, I know that! Shit!” Her girlfriends were now laughing as she turned around to join them. The fact that this girl wasn’t backing down and had no qualms about talking to me like that-when in my mind, I thought I was being reasonable-pushed me over the edge.

Fully aware of my newfound upper body strength, I walked around the front of my car toward them and yelled, “Really? You’re that tough that you can just yell at strangers? You think you’re some sort of badass? Let’s go,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and bouncing from foot to foot with my fists clenched. “Let’s do this!”

The fat girl seemed surprised by my reaction, as she should have been, knowing what I knew about my recent combat training. This little bitch was going to get what was coming to her. She was messing with the wrong person. A few months earlier I wouldn’t have been able to defend myself in this way, but I tightened my abs, jumped up and down a couple of times, and got ready to rumble. She yelled something in Spanish, and then turned around and walked toward her friends. I, however, kept going.

“That’s exactly what I thought. Think about it next time you want to shoot off your mouth!” Then, for good measure, I threw in a “puta!” I turned and walked back to my car, got in, and put my foot on the gas. That’s when all three girls started running back toward my car, so I slammed on the brakes and got out again.

“Oh really?” I screamed. I stayed on my side of the car while the girls stopped where they were and all four of us assessed the situation. “This is ridiculous,” I said, throwing my hands up, and went to get back into the car. Just as I did, all three girls took a few steps toward the car, and the wannabe Mexican girl kicked my passenger side door. That was the straw that broke the cameltoe’s back.

I got out, and before I could even stand up, one of the girls was on the roof of my car, and the fat one had somehow managed to airlift herself to my side of the car and had a lock of my hair in her hands. Hair-pulling is a very painful experience, especially when your head is already pounding from an alarmingly volatile sugar misfire.