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

I hung up the phone and sat down, stupefied. It wasn’t that she lied about what she intended to do with the money. What really got my goat was that after everything we had been through together, she had never once mentioned to me that she could swim. I would have killed to see that.

I woke him up at 3:30 a.m. I walked into his room, looked at the black pair of boxer shorts he was sporting, decorated with swiss cheeses that had smiley faces, and repeated the phrase “Dad” four times until his arm spasmed and smacked me on the side of the head.

“Get up,” I said, and walked out of the room, cradling the left side of my face. My mother had passed away a few months earlier, and I was taking my father, or as I affectionately like to call him, “Bitch Tits,” to Costa Rica for two weeks with my friend Shoniqua and her mother, Latifa. I was expecting to bond with my father on this trip. What I wasn’t expecting was for people to think we were a couple.

His descent down a flight of stairs makes the same sound a gorilla would make if he came upon a staircase, except that a gorilla would make better use of its arms and legs. Slow, deliberate, and confused is the best way to describe his gait. Stairs require him to negotiate his weight from one foot to the other while also steadying his corpulent frame with one hand on the railing and one hand on the wall. Due to the arduousness of the task, he makes sure only to come down once in the morning and to go up once at night.

After he took five minutes to walk down ten steps, and then a smaller set of five steps leading into the kitchen, I watched him sidle up to the medicine cabinet and take one pill each out of fourteen separate bottles. After he had compiled his collection, he placed each of the seventy-five pills into a white, letter-sized envelope, licked and sealed it, and then placed it in his back pocket.

“Are you planning on mailing those to someone?” I asked him.

Without responding to my question, he barked for me to get his pill bag out of the hallway. Bitch Tits’s pill bag turned out to be a red duffel bag large enough to carry a golden retriever. I looked outside and saw a black Town Car in the driveway with its headlights on.

“Do you have a toiletry kit?” I asked, thinking of his shaving supplies and oral hygiene accoutrements that I would surely be overseeing.

“I use a towel.”

Excluding one trip to the Dominican Republic that my mother had strong-armed him into the previous year, he hadn’t been out of the United States since their honeymoon forty-seven years earlier. Prior to that trip, he claims to have traveled all over the world, but only by boat. He talks incessantly about how he lived in several different countries and is constantly announcing that he speaks eight languages. If saying, “hello,” “good-bye,” and “thanks for nothing,” constitutes being fluent in a different language, then I speak three: English, Hebrew, and Jive.

Bitch Tits opened our front door to find the driver standing there. “Hola, señor. ¿Como estás?”

The driver, who looked like he was straight out of The Sopranos , looked quizzically at my father and replied, “¿Bueno?”

“Dad, we’re not in Costa Rica yet. Cool it with the Spanish.”

After we arrived at the airport and checked our larger bags, we came upon the metal detector and were abruptly stopped on the other side by a large black woman with penciled-in eyebrows and fingernails long enough to fight off a porcupine. She held up my father’s red duffel bag and asked if she could search it. I told her yes and looked at my father, who threw his hands up as if he was being asked to submit to an anal cavity search and exclaimed, “Do what you gotta do. I don’t know what you think you’re going to find!”

Seconds later, the female security officer grabbed a pair of my father’s shorts from the top of the duffel bag and emptied out the contents of his pockets. A lighter, three nail files, a pocket wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a nectarine fell onto the folding table. I looked at the woman, looked at my father, and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching.

“What’s the problem?” my father asked the woman.

“Sir, I’m going to have to take this lighter away from you,” she said.

“The lighter?” I asked her. “What about the bomb kit he’s carrying around? He could do a lot more damage to a person with that wrench.”

“I need the wrench!” he shrieked.

“For what?” I asked.

“What if something goes wrong with the plane?”

The woman put everything back in his bag except the lighter. Three miles later, we found our gate.

“Well, this is a joke,” he huffed as he sat his oversize body down. “What kind of airport is this, with gates miles away from the entrance? It’s a good thing I had that quintuple bypass surgery last year.”

Good for who? I wondered. “Dad, why don’t you go up to the ticket counter and try to get us upgraded?”

My father has about as much shame as Star Jones and, being the Jew that he is, loves to get something for nothing. My negotiating skills are on par with George Bush’s reading ability. And, just like Dubya, every time I’ve tried to put forth an effort, I am reminded that my only true strength lies in drinking.

I was engrossed in an issue of Us Weekly when my father sauntered back over to where I was sitting and sat down without saying a word. Just as they started boarding I heard my name over the loud speaker, and with a huge smile on her face, the woman handed my father and me our first-class tickets. “Wow, Dad, I’m impressed.”

“Quiet, don’t say anything,” he said through clenched teeth as he poked me in the ribs. “Just smile.”

There were twelve seats in first class. Nine of them were empty, and the only other person in the section was a black man wearing three large gold chains. After my father barked something in Spanish at the male flight attendant, he turned to the black man covered in gold jewelry and said, “Where ya’ headed, Q-Tip?”

Bitch Tits primarily watches two networks-CNN and MTV. The only thing he’ll turn Christiane Amanpour off for is Total Request Live , or, as he and Justin Timberlake refer to it, TRL.

“Dad,” I said pleadingly while looking over at the black man seated across from us. “I’m sorry. He’s retarded.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” my father jumped in.

“I would.”

“Well, retardation is a very serious affliction and no one has ever confused me with being one.”

“With being what?” I asked.

“A retard, Chelsea. Please try and follow the conversation.”

I realized that this flight alone could send me over the edge, so I took an Ambien out of my purse, bit it in two, swallowed my half, and dropped the other half in the orange juice Bitch Tits had just been handed.

Five hours later we were landing in San José. I slipped off my eyeshades to find my father with his bowling-ball head resting on his shoulder and a steady flow of drool coming out of his mouth and pooling on his stomach, where most of the contents spilling out of his mouth usually end up.

“Geez, I don’t know what the hell happened,” he slurred, completely out of sorts. “One minute I was awake and the next minute I was zapped, just like that,” he said as he tried to snap his fingers, but he was too disoriented to make the necessary connection between his middle finger and thumb. “¡Me gusta agua!” he yelled out to the flight attendant and then turned to me. “¿Te gusta agua?”

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he yelled. “Do you want some water or don’t you?”