Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  My father is currently in a new living facility where the staff is ninety percent male, my brother’s “friend” is now a production assistant on Chelsea Lately, and I’m about to become the spokesperson for lice.

  This is me on my way home from Montenegro.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SWISS ALPS

  For a long time as a child, I thought Switzerland and Swaziland were the same place. When I decided to go skiing in the Alps, I was once again mistakenly intoxicated at the prospect of interviewing tribal leaders.

  The group this time was Lesbian Shelly, Sue, and myself. We needed a fourth, so I decided it best to throw in a wild card and invited my makeup artist, Gina, to join us. She is the female version of Steven Tyler but with a deeper voice and bigger lips. Gina is one of my only friends who doesn’t drink excessively, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace to have a chaperone. Gina is a bitch. She doesn’t mean to be, but she is. She acts like she knows everything, and the main problem with people who think they know everything, is that they usually know nothing at all.

  I can walk out of my bathroom at work in a bathrobe with wet hair and she’ll stare at me with a puzzled look on her face and her mouth open for ten seconds until she is able to confirm the obvious. “Huh?” she’ll say, looking at me confused, and then come to the slow realization that any normal person would come to right away. “Ahhh… you took a shower.”

  “No, Gina,” I’ll say drily. “I’m about to.”

  Then you can watch her thoughts circle back around trying to figure out what is the truth and what isn’t. She’s not stupid. Well, a little stupid… but mostly just incredibly slow on the uptake. She reads the New York Times every day, though she is unable to really comprehend anything other than the headlines.

  “Did you hear about Syria?” she’ll ask, walking into work.

  “Are we going in?”

  “I don’t know, but there was a big piece in the New York Times.”

  “So, what did it say?”

  “I don’t know,” she’ll say, exasperated. “It was pretty complicated.”

  “Well, then why bring it up at all, Gina?”

  She has been doing my hair and makeup every day on my show for four years and sits offstage watching the show so she’s nearby to touch me up in between commercial breaks, and is somehow still oblivious to the fact that it is literally my business to know what’s happening in the cultural zeitgeist. She consistently thinks she’s revealing huge news to me that has been made public for a large window of time. “Did you see Miley Cyrus at the VMAs?” she’ll ask in disgust, three weeks after the VMAs have aired.

  “Yes, Gina. We’ve been discussing it on the show ever since it happened and have done several reenactments. You’re here every day. How did you miss that?”

  “All right, all right!” she’ll say, walking away with her hands in the air. “I give up!”

  It’s worth it to me to have Gina around, because from the way she name-drops and tells stories, you’d think she’s been in the business since the turn of the seventeenth century. Once she does actually get the joke, she laughs really hard with one eye closed, which gives me a lot of joy. She is also extremely devoted to me and is very tolerant of my increasingly ridiculous behavior, even though we argue on a daily basis. Plus, she’s good at packing my clothes.

  This is the only photo I have of Gina looking friendly. She lived in London for a while shooting one of her hundreds of thousands of feature films, and she’ll be the first one to tell you how much the English love to take baths.

  I love to ski and had yet to ski in Switzerland. An added bonus was that Zermatt is right on the border, so you can ski from Switzerland to Italy and back all in the same day. Zermatt had all the amenities I love the most: skiing, a weight-loss spa, and a casino.

  There was no weight-loss spa or casino, but I told Shelly, Sue, Gina, and myself there would be.

  We flew from Los Angeles to Geneva, and from Geneva we took a four-hour train ride up the mountain to Zermatt. I don’t like trains because I’m Jewish. I didn’t like this train because it went from side to side switchbacking in order to get up the mountain, which made four hours feel like four days. I do not suffer from motion sickness, but when I asked the conductor when the train was built and he told me the late 1800s, I deduced the obvious: this was a train that had transported Jews out of Zermatt during the Second World War. I could smell the Holocaust.

  Lesbian Shelly told me to drink some water, citing dehydration from the plane ride as the cause of my nausea.

  I hate water, especially room-temperature water. The water on the train, which had some German label I couldn’t make out, tasted like Chilean sea bass. The girls were all drinking wine and eating cheese, and the smell was making things worse. I took the hair clip out of my bag and used it to clip my nostrils together while I found an empty seat at the back of the car. The irony of being Jewish and having a strong sense of smell wasn’t lost on me.

  “I’ve never seen Chelsea take a nap,” I overheard Gina say to Shelly and Sue.

  “She’s just sleeping because she thinks she’s being taken to a concentration camp,” Shelly explained.

  I fitfully slept most of the way on the train, because I was awoken by a voice with a violent German accent yelling out each stop on the way up the mountain. It hadn’t once crossed my mind that the main language in this part of Switzerland was German. When I was finally able to sit up, I asked Gina to give me French braids on either side of my head so I would look less Jewy. She reminded me I was half German, but like any half-black person will tell you, the stronger minority always takes over.

  By the time we arrived in Zermatt, I was delirious and had a fever. There are no cars in Zermatt, so they pick you up in horse-drawn carriages and escort you to whichever hotel you’re staying in.

  I walked straight into the hotel and asked to be pointed in the direction of the bar, where I ordered myself two margaritas to try to cure whatever I had caught on the train. Margaritas always straighten me out, and I didn’t see why this little episode would be any different. Plus, I hate checking into hotels, and Sue, Shelly, and Gina love it.

  Our suite was designed like a giant cabin/chalet, with two stories, two bedrooms, and a hot tub on the balcony overlooking the town and a direct view of the Matterhorn.

  This is what I was wearing when I arrived in Switzerland, and that’s the Mattherhorn behind me.

  “There are other people out here,” Sue warned me after I stripped down and came outside in my bra and thong. “Just saying…”

  I looked at the people on the balcony next to us and said hello. I was sweating and delirious and was hoping the cold air would help cool me down. I took some snow from the ledge of the balcony, packed a snowball, and smashed it into my face. Then I sat down Indian style and asked what time dinner was.

  “You’re going to catch pneumonia if you sit out here naked. Come in the hot tub,” Gina instructed me.

  “I hate hot tubs, and everyone who knows me knows that. Secondly, I was already hot, so why would I get into a hot tub to get hotter? Do you want me to die?”

  “You’re always hot,” Gina said with a wave of her hand. “Why don’t you take your temperature and find out if you have an actual fever?”

  “Thanks for your sympathy,” I said. “I would love to take my temperature, but I don’t carry a thermometer around in my ass. Do you?”

  I’m against thermometers, because (1) I believe they are archaic, and (2) they’ve fucked me over in the past. Specifically, when I was eight and trying to feign illness in an effort to avoid a math test that was supposed to be given in school that day.

  School was already a pain in the ass, and the very notion that we were expected to study for tests in addition to going to classes pissed me off. Pop quizzes were less of an affront to me, because at least I had no time to have anxiety about failing them. Algebra was a particular nuisance, and when I woke up the on the day of the test, I had to th