Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me Read online

  I called Chelsea later to tell her I knew about everything. “Nice work,” I said.

  “You are so dumb,” she said, before hanging up on me.

  Actually I was smart enough to realize one thing. If Chelsea doesn’t fuck with you, she doesn’t care. And it’s easy to see why I keep coming back for more. She’s spontaneous and compassionate. She favors individuality. She roots for the underdog, and her loyalty never wavers, not even for the sake of a joke. She is truly a friend.

  But I’ll tell you this. If that bitch ever learns how to use Facebook, we are all fucked!

  I would like to go on the record and say that Amber is currently pregnant, so in essence, anything I was “lying” about was simply me telling the future. As with many psychics, my facts are right but my timing can be off.

  As far as Zoughi’s knee injury goes, there is still time for that.

  Love,

  Chelsea

  Chelsea and me at my real wedding.

  Chapter Seven

  Go Lakers

  JOSH WOLF

  The one thing that has been consistent about Chelsea Handler since the day I met her is that she is painfully honest. She will tell you the truth, even if you don’t want to hear it, anytime she feels it needs to be said.

  At the same time, you can’t believe a fucking word she says.

  Crazy combo, right? She is one of the truest, most loyal friends you could ever hope to have in your lifetime, but if the window is cracked open even a bit for her to fuck with you, she will say and make you believe anything so she can have a good laugh.

  That’s harder to handle than you would think. Luckily, I was prepared. I grew up with three older brothers who waged mental warfare on me for my entire childhood. They had me convinced for years that I was adopted but that my parents would never admit it because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. They said that if I talked to our parents about it, my mom would most likely kill herself. Not wanting to be responsible for my mom’s untimely demise, I resisted the temptation.

  After a while, I suspected they were lying. There were pictures of me all over the house, and my brothers and I kind of looked the same, but every time my mom or dad yelled at me, my oldest brother would be sure to tell me that they were harder on me because “I wasn’t blood.” It wasn’t until I heard my grandmother talking about how she was at the house when my parents brought me home from the hospital that I was able to put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

  “I knew it! I knew I wasn’t adopted!” I shot up and screamed. Everybody just stared at me. They had no fucking idea what I was talking about. Shit, my brother barely remembered. He hadn’t teased me about it in years. I was eleven years old. Since then, I have learned to take everything anyone says with a grain of salt. Especially assholes like Chelsea Handler.

  My wife does not.

  My wife, Beth, is an extremely intelligent woman. She’s a writer and director whose films have won awards all over the world. She also might be the single nicest person on the face of the earth, someone who always comes from a place of truth and who takes what people say at face value because that’s how she treats people in return. Unfortunately, all of those amazing traits also make her very susceptible to practical jokes.

  How did she end up with an asshole like me? No idea.

  My wife, Beth, and Chelsea in NYC.

  Sometimes I feel bad bringing her around my jerk-off friends because we are all such assholes. Our idea of fun is hurling insults at one another and pulling pranks that have a good possibility to humiliate. So when I started bringing her around Chelsea and the gang, I thought, This might get ugly.

  Things were fine for a while, until one day when we were all hanging out at Chelsea’s and somebody brought up the Lakers. As soon as Chelsea heard the word Lakers, she said, “Oh yeah, I just won fifty thousand dollars on that game last night.” This is her thing. Whenever someone brings up a sports team, she talks about how much money she won on a game they played in. Every single time.

  My wife then said, “Fifty thousand dollars? Oh my god, Chelsea. That’s amazing.”

  And that’s when Chelsea smelled blood.

  Let me say, first of all, that Chelsea Handler does not know one thing about sports. Totally retarded. Wait, I take that back, she knows one thing: the 1986 New York Mets. And I have to admit, she’s kind of a genius the way she uses them. Since it’s the only sports team she knows anything about, she brings it up in any sports-related conversation to make people think that she has a clue. She doesn’t.

  I picked up on this one day when I heard her reference the team for the one hundredth time. I said to her, “You don’t know shit about sports, do you?”

  She said, “Of course, I do. Didn’t you just hear what I said about the Mets?”

  “That’s the only team you ever talk about when people bring up sports.”

  Beat. Chelsea then walked away in her usual style—pretending to text. This is what she does when she’s been caught at a lie and doesn’t have the energy to maintain it. There is no way a person texts as much as Chelsea pretends to. It is just one more way for her to ignore and hide from the people she so often disappoints.

  So when Chelsea realized that there was someone in the mix who didn’t know that she was full of shit, she went in for the kill. She told my wife at a party that she’d won more than five hundred thousand dollars the year before gambling and that she bet on games every weekend.

  “That’s incredible,” Beth said. “So, do you bet on everything?”

  “Pretty much,” Chelsea said. “I call my bookie once or twice a week. Last year I won so much that for tax purposes, I had to hide half a million dollars under my mattress. My business manager had me sit out last football season and I had to miss the play-offs. I’d never been more irate in my life.”

  I really believe that when Chelsea spins stories like this, she’s almost waiting for you to call “bullshit.” She pushes and pushes, expecting you at some point to tell her that she’s full of crap and then she just moves on to the next target.

  Back to that evening at Chelsea’s house. After Beth believed her story about winning fifty thousand bucks, Chelsea got up and walked away, asking if anyone needed a drink. This was when my wife looked at me with her eyes as big as quarters and said, “Is that true?”

  She turned to me to tell her the truth. She turned to me to lead her down the right path. She turned to me, and do you know what I said?

  “Absolutely.”

  Fuck. Wait, what did I just say? Did I really just say “absolutely”? What was I thinking? I’ll tell you what I was thinking, and it’s an answer I think I gave a little earlier.

  I’m an asshole.

  Look, I love my wife—have her name tattooed on my finger—but I just couldn’t help myself. It was instinct. And I know some of you are thinking, It’s your instinct to lie? No, that’s not it at all, and that’s what makes people like me different. The instinct isn’t to lie; it’s to fuck with people. Whenever we have Thanksgiving and all of my brothers are around, one of us always puts a plate in the oven for a long time, takes it out, and leaves it on the counter. Why? Because someone always picks it up, burns their hand, and drops it to the ground. It happens every year and it’s funny every time. Is this male humor? Of course. Most women wouldn’t find this entertaining in the least, but Chelsea would, and do you know why? Because Chelsea is a man. A man with really big tits.

  Go for the joke and then let shit sort itself out afterward. Not always a great trait but, at the very least, it’s entertaining.

  By the end of the evening, I had almost forgotten about Chelsea’s story. Since the joke had no real payoff, no big “Ha-ha! Joke’s on you!” ending, I figured that it would just eventually fade away. I was wrong.

  Two things I underestimated: Beth’s sudden interest in gambling and Chelsea’s love of fucking with people.

  In the house I grew up in, for a prank to be worth it, there had to be a big payoff. So