Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  “We’re going to Peru,” Molly declared, shimmying her shoulders.

  “Well, if you’re going to go to Peru, then at least go to Machu Picchu,” Glen replied. “At least that has a shred of history.”

  “No one’s even talking to you,” I reminded him as I tapped on my Fitbit for an update on steps taken and calories burned.

  I had recently ended my show Chelsea Lately and had signed a deal with Netflix. I had about six months off, a time I was referring to as my sabbatical.

  “Chelsea’s taking a semester at sea, Glen. Why can’t you be more supportive?” Molly asked with no expectation of an answer.

  Molly is always game for anything, so we ignored Glen and booked some lodge that sat on one of the tributaries of the actual Amazon River, Madre de Dios—or Mother of the Gods—and headed to Peru in search of anacondas.

  Not only did we not see any anacondas, we didn’t see a single animal. Except piranhas—if those even count as animals. We went on a fishing expedition one day and were expected to jump into the water with the piranhas for some sort of cleansing/pedicure experience, and when everyone in our motorized canoe declined to hop into the river, I decided I would be the one to do it—until Molly announced to everyone that I had my period.

  For the record, it was Molly who actually had her period, but she knew full well I was only trying to be brave and that I had no real desire to have my legs nipped at by piranhas simply because it had been suggested as an activity. Instead, our guides all fished the piranhas and then fried them for lunch. Obviously, they were delicious—because anything fried is delicious.

  The trip was a quarter past awful. I even had Juan, our guide, take us out in the middle of the night with headlamps on like coal miners to search for anacondas—or any snake, for that matter. He had a machete and everything. I was ready to combat my fears, and I was indefatigable in my efforts, yet we saw nothing. Each activity was more boring than the one before, and the whole experience was tantamount to being at a landlocked Sandals resort. We did see lots of large bugs and went on about six nature walks through miles of woods with large walking sticks, where the most exciting discovery was a butterfly. All the other guests at the lodge were in their mid-seventies, and at some point we realized it was a bird-watching lodge.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Ugh, Peru again. That feels like two times too many,” I said, lacking any enthusiasm.

  “Maybe Peru is calling you back because the ayahuasca will help you conquer your fear of snakes,” Molly said, excitedly. “Maybe it’s all related. It says here: ‘After ayahuasca, people have claimed to get over phobias, quit addictions to drugs and alcohol, and some people end up moving to the jungle and doing it for years.’ ”

  “Well, I’m not going in there with that intention. To shit my pants and then get sober?”

  “What about living in the jungle?” Karen asked. “That sounds like an environment you’d thrive in.”

  “You would never have to deal with Wi-Fi ever again,” Molly added. “Or Bluetooth. Or passcodes. Everything could just be J-U-N-G-L-E.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Anyhoo, a few months later, our production team flew out to Peru with two of my friends in tow. Jenny Mollen and Dan Maurio had agreed to come down to the jungle and take ayahuasca with me. Jenny is pretty much open to anything, and Dan is a small man with a weak constitution. Molly came on the trip as a producer; Karen stayed back because she has a weak stomach—and South America equates to diarrhea in her mind. She’s not racist—but she does get diarrhea anytime she leaves the country, whether she’s headed north, south, east, or west.

  Before you take ayahuasca, it’s recommended that you “cleanse.” That’s usually where my train jumps off the track. I don’t like to cleanse in order to do drugs; it feels counterintuitive. They tell you not to eat meat for six weeks or drink alcohol a week prior to your “journey.” For the record, I also despise the word “journey.” The Bachelor ruined that word about ten years ago. A manufactured relationship on a reality show is not a “journey.” It’s a fake situation—one that has been admitted to time and again by the producers and “contestants.” So I skipped the cleanse.

  Whatever the cleanse was all about turned out to be true. I took the ayahuasca the first night with two of my friends who had both “cleansed,” and both of them intermittently vomited and broke down, while I somehow became more and more sober. I spent the night holding and comforting Jenny, while Dan was moaning on a mat in the corner of the room. I think he had diarrhea, but between his crying and Jenny’s crying, it became hard to decipher which noise was coming from what orifice. The situation couldn’t have gotten any worse—the final blow being that it was all caught on film and would be airing on Netflix.

  Ayahuasca is meant to put things into perspective, and for many, it shines a light on whatever you love most in this world. It turned out Jenny was horrified at how much she loved her husband, while Dan was horrified that he left his pregnant wife and two kids to come to Peru with me, of all people. His contempt for me was apparent on his face and has never quite gone away. We worked together for two years following that trip, and every time I walked into an edit bay where he was running post-production, he would shake his head in disgust.

  The next day, the shaman declared that instead of having a full camera crew, we were allowed to bring only one camera. Furthermore, I would have to take double the dosage and not have any friends with me—almost like a work camp. Normally, being forced to take psychedelics solo wouldn’t sit well with me, but after seeing both Jenny’s and Dan’s reactions to the ayahuasca, I welcomed the respite of hallucinating alone.

  A medium or psychic once told me to think of my mom sending bright, positive beams of light down over me whenever I needed positive energy to calm my nerves or to meditate. I filled my brain with my mother, and everything felt radiant, and warm, and hopeful.

  I didn’t want to have the same experiences Dan and Jenny had had the night before. I also knew that I wouldn’t. If I had been able to control my emotions for this long, and do as many drugs as I have done without ever having a truly bad experience, I knew I would be able to control this experience as well. If it brought up something I couldn’t bear to deal with—like Chet—I knew I would be able to shift gears. Then I thought maybe my mother would come through first, but that just seemed too obvious, and besides, with my mother there was no unfinished business.

  I could sense something good was going to happen; I knew I had the strength of mind to make something useful come of this. That was my thing—not to leave empty-handed.

  I looked at the tiny shaman, in a wifebeater and stone-washed True Religion jeans held up by a giant belt buckle with a Virgin Mary on it, and wondered how he kept any weight on if he was doing ayahuasca every night, shitting his pants. Then I wondered if I would also be lucky enough to lose weight during this experience, and this would be one of those situations I could look back on and say, “After ayahuasca, I was never able to put weight on again.”

  He instructed me to keep my eyes closed as he chanted a bunch of prayers in a version of Spanish that I assume is only used in the woods, and then he gave me a double shot of what hadn’t worked on me the night before. It tasted pretty awful, but if you’re a girl trying to look tough in front of your camera crew, you handle it. We went to a different room than we’d been in the night before, much more low-key, with only the shaman, the camerawoman—Nicola—and me. It all felt a little too intimate, but I am often able to do things in front of cameras that I am unable to do when there are no cameras around.

  My director and a few others were outside the hut watching on monitors, but the bulk of the crew was all downstairs—presumably drinking.

  I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with my eyes closed, and what I experienced first was a light show—a panoply of blues and purples