Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  “Chelsea, I don’t really see how this has anything to do with me, and your psychopathy is way off. You’re treating this dog like he has polio.”

  “Tread very carefully, Bradley. Studies are showing that polio is making a comeback. And for that matter, so is Lionel Richie.”

  The truth of the matter is—I believe Chunk is my mother reincarnated. My mother would have loved to go on the trips I am now able to take my family on, and she would have loved all the perks that go with becoming successful. This setup would have been perfect for her. Reincarnating as a half-German, half-Asian dog who could go with me everywhere but not have to speak to a soul would be her version of paradise.

  “Brad, would you leave your own mother behind if you could afford to bring her on a family vacation with the very family she created?”

  “Okay,” he said, waving his hand around. “The whole idea that Chunk is your mother is a bunch of hocus pocus. Don’t you think that’s a little insulting to your mother? That she is now a dog?”

  “Let me ask you this, Bradley. What if this is the trip that sends Chunk over the rails and he stops going to the bathroom altogether, and then dies from being so backed up? How would that make you feel?”

  “That would be very sad for both of you,” Brad agreed begrudgingly.

  “Do you know that when I stay home in Los Angeles on the weekends, he will go the entire weekend without going number two? By the time Oscar [the dog walker and landscaper] arrives on Monday morning, he comes back with the reportage that Chunk took four dumps on his morning walk through the neighborhood.”

  “You hate the word dump,” Brad reminded me.

  I do hate the word dump, especially when referencing feces. Oscar apparently thinks that’s a perfect word to throw around his employer. He’s very fat, very Mexican, and has an unusually large cranium—so it doesn’t really matter what he says, because he knows as long as he maintains his body weight and head shape, it would be impossible for me to ever fire him.

  “Isn’t Oscar your one-armed landscaper?” Brad asked.

  “Yes, but he loves the dogs and asked if he could start walking them for extra cash. I wasn’t about to say no to a guy with one arm.”

  “So, he walks two dogs with one arm?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about that. Perhaps he straps one of the leashes around his waist. Again, not my problem.”

  “Another amazing executive decision.”

  “Brad, I’m not going to fly my dogs to another country just to have them quarantined. After Canada, I’m heading to upstate New York for a week, and it’s just not right for me to leave my dogs for that long. They have lives, too, and for me to jet-set in and out of their worlds with no warning is undignified. If I left them in LA, I would essentially be holding them hostage on two of the biggest holidays of the year: Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “As if they know what holiday it is.”

  “Of course they know what holiday it is. They’re not fish!”

  “You can fly them on a doggy airline!” he wailed. “You do realize with a little research that you wouldn’t even have to do it yourself? You could hire someone to escort Chunk across country on a bus or a even a train?”

  “A train,” I guffawed. “That’s rich. As if I would put a Jewish dog on a train. He’d go berserk.”

  “Chunk has lived a pretty charmed life since you quote unquote rescued him. I think he could handle a train ride, especially since the Holocaust ended about sixty years ago.”

  “Then why do you bring it up at nearly every morning meeting?” I begged to know.

  “Because as a Jew,” he replied, “I think it’s important to remind other non-Jews that what our people went through was not only horrific but heroic. Only the blacks can really understand our journey.”

  Cocking my head to the side and collapsing my chin in the same way one would when one is getting ready to vomit is the way I most often respond to anything Brad says.

  “You don’t think Jewish people still get discriminated against, Chelsea? I’ve got news for you. You’re wrong. Even redheads get discriminated against. I know that’s hard to believe since you live in your little bubble, but things are happening, Chelsea. Believe you me: things happen every day that make me shake my head.”

  “Brad, please shut the fuck up. You’re so annoying when you talk like that. I’d like to see you talk to a black person about discrimination and then get back to me. You’re one of the most translucent males I’ve ever come across, and you have somehow managed to be on two television shows and have a hot wife. Clearly, things are going well for you in the affirmative action department.”

  “Chelsea, do you have any idea how unreasonable this is?”

  “Listen to me, you little whiny Jew… I am growing quite tired of having to defend my parenting skills to everyone in my life. What about the fact that I am responsible enough to not have a baby? Why does no one give me any praise for that?”

  “You did have a baby!” he screeched. “What about Gary?”

  “Really, Brad? That’s a low blow. Even for you.”

  I’m not proud of my decision to acquire my dog Gary, but I stand behind the failure like I stand by the failure of the NBC sitcom based on my life.

  Gary is my biggest regret, and the story goes like this: I woke up one day on the wrong side of my newly acquired twin waterbed and decided it was time to add to my brood. If I was never going to house a baby, at least I could give back to society by rescuing a top-bred canine.

  My affinity for Bernese mountain dogs hails from my affinity for anything oversized, and Bernese in particular—in my estimation—are the closest thing to having an actual silverback gorilla.

  One of our production assistants at work, Blair, grew up on a farm—and I decided that that meant she specialized in animals—so I appointed her chief executive in charge of finding me a Bernese mountain dog to rescue. Under no uncertain circumstances did I want anything but a rescue dog. PETA was already on my ass for saying one night on my show that I would eat a cat.

  After Blair and my assistant Karen searched high and low for hours, they revealed to me there was not a single Bernese mountain dog anywhere to rescue. Karen was promoted from an internship on the show. She is not a quitter.

  “There’s got to be some somewhere,” I announced, looking at the world globe in my office.

  “There are three breeders in Southern California who have babies available that we can get by the morning, but we haven’t found any rescues. It’s a very high-end breed, and not many people give them away.”

  “That won’t do,” I told them. “It has to be a rescue.”

  “Okay,” Blair told me. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Okay,” I told her, giving up. “Just pick up one of the ones for sale.”

  Gary was a little bear.

  Gary on his first night at home.

  I loved him very much but in the end… not enough. Chunk and Jacks did not take to having a new brother. At first, I was disappointed in their inability to welcome a baby brother, but after a few weeks, Lesbian Shelly and I both realized that Chunk and Jacks had good instincts: Gary was an idiot.

  The first night he came home he urinated everywhere: on me, on Shelly, on the other dogs, and on my shoes. I asked Blair when he would stop doing this and she told me, “When he becomes potty-trained.”

  “When does that happen?” I asked, slightly annoyed that this hadn’t been taken care of on the car ride home.

  “When… you potty-train him?”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone?” Blair was being dodgy, and I didn’t have to be a moron to sense that she was intimating that I would somehow be involved in the potty training. I had rescued Chunk when he was four—so urinating indoors wasn’t an issue, and dog or human potty training was definitely not a hobby I was looking to take up.

  I was staunchly opposed to the notion of crate training, and against Shelly’s advice, I insisted that Gary sleep with