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

“No.”

I could tell already that listening to my father speak Spanish for the entire trip was going to get really irritating. The only advantage I could think of was that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with him.

“Hey, Chels,” he said as he shoved his Lacsa Airline map into my lap. “You were wondering where Costa Rica is located, and here it is. Right between Nicaragua and Panama. Your lack of geographical knowledge is truly astounding.”

“Well, I am an American, and we’re pretty stupid,” I reminded him. “Besides, I knew Costa Rica was in a general southerly direction from Mexico; I just didn’t know where exactly.”

“Sometimes, Chelsea, I really wonder how you get by from day to day. It’s a good thing you’re voluptuous.”

“At least I asked where it was,” I said. “And please don’t refer to me as voluptuous. Can you please go back to speaking Spanish?”

Just as I turned to look out the window, the flight attendant handed my father a bottle of champagne and grabbed my hand. “Congratulations, dear. I’m sure the two of you will have a wonderful life together.”

It took a full minute of hand-holding with a perfect stranger to realize we had been upgraded to first class due to them thinking my father and I were on our honeymoon…because that’s what my father told them. This was my first trip alone with my father, and so far, I wasn’t having a good time.

Once in Costa Rica, we rolled off the airplane and through customs without any major setbacks. I was in charge of carrying my father’s passport, which isn’t much more reassuring than giving it to an illegal alien. We walked outside into the smoldering heat while fifteen local taxi drivers gathered around us, yelling things in Spanish.

Then a homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something that I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food. How can they have the nerve to beg for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there? I didn’t care if this guy understood English or not. “Tell me when you’re out of dog, buddy. Then we can talk about splitting a falafel.”

I heard someone yell “Papa Handler!” from across the street and looked over to see Shoniqua waving her arms at us. Her mother was parked on a bench beside her, looking like she had just given birth to a water buffalo.

“There she is!” my father exclaimed. “How’s my Black Magic?” he said, dropping his duffel bag and suitcase next to me and crossing the street, stopping traffic. I picked his bags up and stumbled over to where they were standing. They were embracing each other like mother and child penguins.

My father loves Shoniqua because she can listen to him talk for hours on end. But mostly he likes her because they both share the belief that the less money they spend, the better. They met when she and I were on a television show together years earlier, and their fondness for each other was based on the fact that they are the two cheapest people I have ever met in my life. My father also revels in the fact that, by having a relationship with Shoniqua, he is somehow in with the black community.

Her mother, Latifa, had never met my father before, and when he went in for a kiss on the cheek, he somehow managed to spray the entire side of her face with his saliva. Latifa grimaced, looked at me with her glasses pulled down on her nose, and without whispering said, “Well, that was disgusting.”

I’ve known Latifa for as long as I’ve known Shoniqua, and consider her to be my black mother. Mostly because I only have one black friend, and Latifa is her mother. She has raised ten children of her own, has fostered more than a hundred other children, and runs a childcare center. She supplements this income with donations from Shoniqua, myself, and anyone else stupid enough to give money away to someone just because they ask for it. “It’s fucking hot,” she said as she wiped her forehead.

My father started speaking Spanish to one of the drivers and before I knew it we were in a cab on the way to a smaller airport, where we had to take a puddle jumper from San José to Tambor. We pulled up to a single-engine, five-seater plane.

“What the fuck is this?” Latifa muttered upon seeing the size of the plane. My father’s head jerked around with wide eyes upon hearing the word “fuck” come out of her mouth.

“It’s a private plane we have to take to Tambor,” I told her.

“Nobody said any motherfucking thing about a private plane.”

“The language!” Melvin said, looking shocked. “This one’s worse than you, Chels.”

“Mama, I told you we had to take a little plane; driving there would take eight hours and a one-hour boat ride,” Shoniqua told her.

“I love boats,” my father declared.

I walked my father, who didn’t take his eyes off Mama Latifa, over to the seat next to the pilot, assuming that was the only seat with enough room to fit him. The pilot and I helped him step up into the seat, and after trying to get his seat belt around his stomach for a full two minutes, I gave up and walked to the other side of the plane to sit down.

“Hold up,” Shoniqua said. “When are we going to check in with the embassy?”

I looked at her and then looked back out the window, shaking my head.

“Chels, I’m serious. We need to check in with the embassy. What if our asses get kidnapped?”

“Shoniqua, you are six feet tall with an ass the size of a giraffe. Who the hell is going to kidnap you? And furthermore, I doubt there is an embassy where we’re going.”

“First of all, bitch, my ass has gotten a lot smaller since I started acupuncture.”

“Fine,” I replied exhaustedly. “A baby giraffe.”

“That’s better. And of course there’s an embassy. Every country has an embassy.”

“Yeah, I know that, but they’re not usually on the beach.”

“Listen, if one of these little Costa Ricans fucks around and tries to get my ass, don’t think for a second I won’t fork the motherfucker.” Apparently, along with my father’s bag of artillery, the dinner fork that Shoniqua travels with everywhere in case of an attack also managed to make its way through airport security.

The plane took off with about as much control as a whitewater raft in a Category Five hurricane. I put my headphones on and stared out the window, trying not to vomit.

Forty minutes later, the plane started its descent and, from what I could tell, looked like it was headed for a landing strip not much bigger than the ones you see in Playboy.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Latifa said with a moan, looking out the window.

Minutes later we were on the ground. We were greeted by a young Costa Rican boy who led us all to his mini-SUV. Right before my father got in, he walked ten feet away to a tree, turned his back to us, and peed.

“Shit, I gotta go too,” Latifa said as she hopped out of the car in the direction of another tree and squatted behind it.

“Well, looks like we got a pair of fuckin’ winners here,” Shoniqua said. “These two must have been separated at birth.”

The dirt road leading us to Santa Teresa couldn’t have been more bumpy if we were driving through the outback in a rickshaw. Ten minutes into the ride, I grabbed my carry-on bag, rifled through it until I found two sports bras, and put them both on over my shirt. During this time, my father and the driver were deep in a Spanish conversation, with the driver hysterically laughing at everything my dad was saying-a clear sign that he couldn’t understand a word of it.

An hour later we arrived in Santa Teresa, and pulled up to the two villas I had rented. The villas were one hundred feet apart from each other in front of a beach, and separated by several dirt paths and what looked like a mini rain forest. At least a dozen dogs gathered around our taxi, wagging their tails.