Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  I called Shmitney, wondering how I was supposed to get out of my house if she was blocking the only car left in my driveway and my Bentley had been stolen. She didn’t answer her phone, which she never does. Instead, she will text you back while you’re in the middle of leaving her a voice mail, and tell you that she’s in a business meeting or in therapy and will call you in an hour.

  When she did call me an hour later, we reviewed the night’s events, and then she asked me why I had left the party so early.

  “Because no one at the party was dancing,” I told her.

  “So, where did you go?” she asked, laughing.

  “Back to my house. So I could dance in peace.”

  “That was for the best,” she admitted. “By the way, I have your Bentley.”

  “You have my Bentley? Why?”

  “Because I came back to your house last night after you left me at the party, and every door was locked and you were already sleeping.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, relieved I didn’t have to interact with the FBI. “But why wouldn’t you just take your own car?”

  “Because my key was in your house and the doors were all locked.”

  “Then, how did you get the key to my car?” I asked her.

  “The key was in your car.”

  “The key was in my car?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that does sound like something I would do, and stealing my car sounds like something you would do.”

  “Aaaahhhhh!!” she said, cackling. “Do you need your car?” Shmitney laughs all the time when no one else is laughing. I do this, too, but I find it more annoying when she does it.

  “Well, I’ll need my car at some point,” I told her. “But I guess I can just bring your car to you and switch it out. I’m hungry and I want a margarita.”

  “Great. Why don’t you head over here and we can grab lunch?”

  “All right,” I told her. “I’ll do that.”

  “OK, great. Would you want to go spinning before? There’s a class that I love which is just around the corner.”

  “No, Shmitney. Are you not listening to me? I already played tennis today. And I wouldn’t want to go spinning even if I hadn’t played tennis.” This must have been the tenth time Shmitney had brought up spinning in the past three months. I had explained to her on several occasions that I prefer one-on-one supervision when any sort of coordination is involved.

  Shmitney’s problem is that she doesn’t listen and she never shuts the fuck up. She is running on fumes and can’t sit still for longer than ten minutes. She also eats chicken like Brittany Murphy’s character in Girl, Interrupted. She is constantly gnawing on chicken or salmon, and she always smells like one or the other. She loves to go to Alanon meetings, and talk about Alanon and talk about sobriety and talk about enabling and all the other fascinating things that go along with that.

  She excels at overexamining every part of the human psyche, and she will send me daily healing messages from some book called The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency.

  I’ve had to tell her repeatedly to stop sending me daily messages about patience and loving myself. “I don’t mind them once in a while,” I warned her. “But it can’t be a regular thing.”

  If Shmitney had her druthers, she’d spend all day in transcendental meditation doing EMDR therapy to retrieve the childhood she claims she lost to alcoholism and drug addiction. I don’t believe she has ever done drugs, and I know for a fact she doesn’t drink a respectable amount of alcohol, not enough to have ever had a “drinking” problem.

  “Why would I make that up?” she’ll ask me defensively, when I tell her that she knows nothing about drugs or alcohol except for what she’s gleaned from her alcoholic family members and myself.

  “I have no idea, Shmitney,” I’ll tell her. “I don’t know why anyone would pretend to do drugs.”

  “Chelsea,” she’ll exclaim. “I didn’t drink because of my sitcom. I didn’t want my eyes to get puffy.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with Shmitney’s sitcom, it was on NBC for two seasons and it was called Shmitney. It wasn’t great.

  Regardless, anyone with a real affinity for alcohol doesn’t just stop drinking for nine months at a time because they’re on TV. Maybe once or twice a week, but a nine-month run of sobriety isn’t practical or plausible for someone with a real hankering for cocktails.

  We hung up, and I went downstairs to my kitchen to look for her car key. I’m well aware of the fact that I’m not good at finding things, but her key was nowhere to be found. I looked through everything in my kitchen twice and then I ate a banana. In my ongoing effort to become more self-sufficient, I had ceased having my cleaning lady or any other employees come to my house on the weekends, so there was no one to help me look. I did one last sweep, cognizant of the fact that I had forgotten what I was looking for after the second sweep.

  I called Shmitney again and asked her if she had gone anywhere in my house besides my kitchen. “Did you go upstairs?”

  “No, I left it on your kitchen counter. It’s a single Mercedes key.”

  “Oh, thank you. I thought it would be a Volvo car key. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Pretty fucking stupid. Just keep looking. It’s somewhere. I left it somewhere in the kitchen.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. That sounds like something I would do.”

  “It’s there somewhere. Just call me after tennis,” she said, trying to get off the phone.

  “I just finished tennis!”

  “OK, let me call you back,” she said.

  “No!” I wailed. “It’s fine if you have my car, but I need to know where your key is, Shmitney. Who takes someone else’s car and then blocks the only other car in the driveway and doesn’t leave the fucking key to their car? Tell me. Who? Who? Shmitney? Answer me!”

  “Let me make sure I don’t have it. I’ll call you right back,” she said.

  I looked around my house and wondered what I should do next. I walked outside to my pool and threw a tennis ball across my backyard. Neither dog flinched.

  I walked back inside and saw the empty dog bowls on the kitchen floor. I picked them both up and loaded them into the dishwasher. There’s no reason I shouldn’t use this opportunity to do some housework, I thought. When I couldn’t find the dishwashing detergent, I took the bowls out, went into the laundry room, and threw them into the washing machine. I added some laundry detergent and hit “spin cycle.”

  I looked at my pool and thought about jumping in, but I didn’t feel like putting on a bathing suit or getting my hair wet. I decided to roll a few calls instead. I called Brad and invited him and his wife, Shannon, to brunch with the caveat that I would need a ride to the restaurant. They were busy and instead invited me to the Santa Monica Beach Club, where they were members. Beach clubs don’t have enough diversification for me. “No, thanks,” I said and hung up.

  It then occurred to me that I didn’t need a bathing suit in the privacy of my own home, and I that I could swim nude if I wanted to. But skinny-dipping alone sounded like something Shirley MacLaine would do, so I sat in my backyard on the cement ledge that separates the pool from the lawn. I called my sister Simone to get an update on her single life, and I was getting a play-by-play of her latest online lover when my sprinklers went off.

  “Aaaaahhh!” I screamed, as the cold water sprayed me in the face and left my whole body damp.

  “What’s wrong? Is it a snake?” Simone asked, panicking.

  “Nothing,” I said, walking inside defeated. I stayed on the phone and went upstairs to change my clothes. The sound of the sprinklers always make me have to pee, so I went into my bathroom, sat on the toilet, and peed. That was when I realized in the middle of all of the mayhem, I had forgotten to take off my underwear.

  “Oh god,” I moaned. “What the fuck?”

  “What’s wrong now?” Simone asked, in a slightly more irritated tone.