Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang Read online

  "Then you get him," I said.

  "I just rescued Lucifer three months ago, and he's really skittish still. I have four, and my husband says we're at our limit."

  "What about Sarah?" I asked.

  "I live in an apartment," Sarah replied, opening a magazine to signal that this wasn't a conversation she was interested in pursuing. Then, for good measure, she snickered and added, "Chelsea, you've been trying to rescue a dog for months."

  I didn't have the energy to turn around and punch Sarah in the coslopus. I wanted Tanya to stop talking. I wanted to stop hearing about kids and dogs and even Beyonce if she were to come up. I was weak from the wrestling and from the detox cleanse that Ivory, Sarah, Tanya, and I decided to start that morning. The three of us had committed to do it together in anticipation of Sarah's wedding and were excited at the prospect of losing ten to forty-seven pounds in six days. I had already ordered a thermal track suit to assist in shedding any additional bloat. Like every other time I've tried to deprive myself of food, my head was slowly spinning and a wave of nausea was throwing my equilibrium off course.

  I looked at the picture, looked at the tarmac that hadn't started moving yet, and felt feverish. I wondered how long it would take me to get my hands on some Excedrin once the plane landed, and then I wondered how cavemen dealt with hangovers without access to Excedrin. I looked at Tanya, who was staring me down from the seat next to me, and thought that she would have made a good caveman. If getting a dog was what it was going to take to end the conversation so I could sleep, then that's what it was going to take. "Fine. I'll have Eva pick him up tomorrow."

  "Who's Eva?" Tanya demanded.

  "My assistant."

  "You can't have your assistant pick him up, Chelsea. You need to bond with him," she advised me, gripping my wrist very aggressively. I pulled my hand away with a buoyed confidence; we were in public, and she was less likely to harm me with so many witnesses. I was fed up with Tanya and wanted her off my jock.

  "I hate to break it to you, but I have a job that requires me to actually be there during the day. I once saw a special on rescuing dogs, and the interview process is more complicated than the one for buying a cleft-palated Vietnamese adolescent. I don't really have time to head to the L.A. pound for a cool four and a half hours during my lunch break. I said I'd get the dog, okay? Can we just press on to something else, like when you're going to confront the fact that you're most likely a lesbian who wants to work as a night guard at a women's detention center?"

  Sarah shot me a look, and I changed my tune quickly.

  The last occasion when I'd spent time with Sarah's friends from childhood was when her previous wedding was called off and we all gathered at Tanya's mom's house in Brentwood for moral support. For reasons still unknown to me, I took the breakup harder than anyone else, including Sarah. After three days of me sleeping over at Sarah's apartment with the two of us in her bed and me waking up each morning in tears, Sarah basically told me she needed a break.

  "I think we need some time apart," she informed me while I was folding her laundry one afternoon and watching Another World. "I've been dumped, I have a wedding to cancel, and I need you to accept it and move on. You need to get your life going in the right direction. It's not healthy for me to be sitting around here every day watching daytime television while you're in a housedress."

  I was bringing her down. I had felt so blindsided by the breakup that I didn't know if I would ever be able to date again.

  After that it took a while for any of her friends to accept the fact that I wasn't deranged, and I didn't want to cause any more rumblings now. I wanted them to know that I was normal and healthy and could take on responsibilities without shitting my pants.

  "I'll get the dog myself," I told Tanya. "I promise."

  I did intend to get the dog, but I had zero intention of actually picking it up from the pound. Largely because the words "Los Angeles" came before the word "pound," and the words "Los Angeles" at the beginning of any establishment's name imply to me large, smelly, disorganized rooms filled with large, smelly, disorganized people. My last experience with a circus tent of that caliber was with the L.A. County Women's Prison. L.A. Free Clinic, L.A. Animal Shelter, LAPD--you name it, they all sound appalling. "Los Angeles" came to have the same negative connotation as the word "adult" before something: adult braces, adult diapers, adult acne--all incredibly discouraging.

  The day after we returned from the bachelorette weekend, I woke up hallucinating in a pool of my own detoxification sweat. Twenty-four hours of not eating any real food and chugging three thirty-eight-ounce concoctions of something brown had taken their toll on my pituitary gland. By 8:00 A.M. I had vomited three times and made the executive decision that my body had too many toxins to release. Ted looked at me with my head inside the toilet and gently reminded me that starting a cleanse after a weekend of drinking wasn't the smartest life choice for me or my vessel.

  "I was trying to do it in solidarity with Sarah for the wedding," I whimpered, with one hand on the side of the cold toilet and the other hand making a chignon out of the hair I was trying to keep from falling in.

  "Cleanses are stupid, honey," he said, shaking his head. "Can I get you some ginger ale, or water, or oatmeal?"

  "Yes, Ted. Oatmeal sounds fabulous right now. Do we have enough for three bowls?"

  Instead I stopped by Del Taco on my way in to work. I ordered a breakfast burrito, and when the drive-through attendant asked if I wanted hash browns or french fries, I yelled, "BOTH, BITCH!" Then I took a picture of the drive-through window on my camera phone and e-mailed it to Ivory and Sarah with a heading attached that read "Breakfast." I didn't e-mail Tanya for obvious reasons.

  Eva confirmed that she received my e-mail about the dog but wanted to verify that I was serious about getting it before she headed to the pound. "What if he's a bad dog or something's really wrong with him when I get there?" she asked me. "Do you want me to just make a judgment call, or should I bring him back no matter what?"

  "Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Whatever you think."

  "Okay, got it," she told me. "Let me just finish alphabetizing your makeup, and I'll try and get back to the office before lunch. And what about Ted? Does he know about this?"

  "Yes," I lied.

  Eva and Ted were in cahoots, and if you wanted to keep something from one of them, it was best to lie to both.

  I was sitting in my partner Tom's office getting ready to tape the show when Eva walked in with the dog. "Here he is!" she said, panting. "They said at the pound that they think he's half chow, half German shepherd, and he's a really good dog. He knows how to sit and give a paw, and his paperwork says his name is Guinness, but his tag says Princess Leia."

  "Is he a cross-dresser?" I asked her.

  She frowned. "I don't know, but he really is good. I kind of can't believe it." Normally Eva can't be trusted for a real opinion, because she refuses to say anything negative--not my favorite quality in a person--but from what I could deduce, she seemed to be right about the dog.

  He was wagging his tail and gently sniffing my coslopus. I stood up in order for the dog to get ahold of himself and assessed the situation. He looked like the dog I grew up with, Whitefoot.

  "Are you Whitefoot?" I asked the dog, and waited patiently for a response. "Whitefoot? Is that you?" He wasn't responding to that name, and after I got out my pocket calculator and tapped some buttons, I gave up hope when I realized that Whitefoot would be 247 years old had he faked his own death.

  "Chunk" is the nickname I give to anyone I love who I also want to squeeze. I called my mom "Chunk," and she called me "Chunky" when we would snuggle in bed together and I would squeeze her one boob. She had a mastectomy when I was nine and never bothered to get reconstructive surgery, so on one side she had a rice pack that she put in her bra every morning, and on the other side was a giant booby. I call Chuy "Chunk," and I call Ted "Chunk," and of course Sylvan is my "Chocolate Chunk."

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