Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me Read online

  “You want me to do what?” I asked, incredulous.

  “You gave me that stupid vibrator for my birthday and I think I hurt myself. I need you to reach into your coslopus and see if you have the same injury. I’m telling you, I’m really worried.”

  “Why don’t you go to the gyno?” I asked.

  “You got me into this mess with that thing,” she not so calmly replied.

  Chelsea had been very good to me, so I couldn’t really say no to anything she asked. “Right now?” I asked.

  “Yes, right now!”

  “Okay. Just a sec. Let me put you on speaker.”

  And so I did. With Chelsea on the other end of the line, I pulled down my pants and started feeling around.

  “What exactly am I looking for?”

  “An injury. Some scraping, chafing, possible scabbing, and definitely something bulbous.”

  “Bulbous?” That sounded odd and certainly couldn’t be good.

  As I stood there, my foot on my desk, my hand inside myself with such intensity one would have thought I was spelunking, I sensed I had a responsibility to figure this one out. It was like a Nancy Drew mystery, but more awkward, and so gross.

  “No, no scraping, chafing, or scabbing,” I said, relieved.

  For a moment I was overwhelmed with guilt. What if my prank birthday gift had permanently maimed my friend? The one who had done so much for me? I felt horrible. Until I felt something. Something bulbous.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What?” Chelsea asked.

  “I feel something bulbous.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Way up there.”

  “Then you need to go to the doctor and get to the bottom of things.”

  “I’m on it.”

  I hung up and immediately dialed my gynecologist. What the hell could be going on up there? Could excessive masturbating really do something like this? Cause a “bulbous” growth? Had I given Chelsea and myself self-diddle cancer?

  Later, as I lay there in the stirrups, my super hot gynecologist investigating the situation, the last thing on my mind was asking him for the fifth time if he was still married. Instead, I just rambled.

  “And I don’t know what could have happened. I mean, it just appeared out of nowhere. I’m not even having sex… with anybody. Am I dying?!”

  My super hot gynecologist emerged, doing his best to conceal a chuckle.

  “That’s your cervix.”

  “My what?”

  “Your cervix. You’re perfect.”

  Later that afternoon, when I met Chelsea to deliver the good news, she was laughing before I even sat down. That bitch had gotten me good. She knew what I’d find, that I would have no clue what it was, and that, in a panic, I’d race to my super hot gynecologist and make a fool out of myself.

  “I’ll bet you asked him again if he was still married.”

  I had asked him, but I wasn’t going to give her any more ammunition.

  It turns out Chelsea had gone to her gyno before calling me. And when she found herself in the same exact humiliating position of being told that what she was feeling was one of her internal accessories, she decided right there in those stirrups that it was the perfect opportunity to humiliate someone else. All she thought as the speculum was being removed was, “Who else can I make this happen to?” I wasn’t mad at her; how could I be? How often does someone convince you to give yourself a pap smear while they’re on speakerphone?!

  A short while later we found out our friend Rose was getting married. We were happy for her. What we were not happy with was that along with her engagement came her conversion to a born-again Christian who never missed an opportunity to pray for our lost souls, make us attend pre-wedding prayer circles, and host four different showers. That her wedding was going to be a monster became obvious when she invited us to be bridesmaids by presenting us with handmade papier-mâché greeting cards that carefully explained in calligraphy what our responsibilities were and how grateful to Jesus she was for us.

  “Who is this Jesus character?” Chelsea asked the group. I choked back a fry, shushing her. This Jesus stuff was serious to Rose, who was suddenly oblivious to the fact that Chelsea was and had always been Jewish.

  Rose explained that she was concerned about how she was going to pay for her lavish wedding.

  “Removing the word lavish might do the trick,” Chelsea suggested. “You could do something simple and still have it be really nice.”

  Rose quickly dismissed that idea. “Chelsea, people are expecting big things from me.”

  When Chelsea and I left, she pointed out that Rose was expecting people to think big things about her. Rose liked to be the center of attention, and while we loved her, it could get really annoying. Nonetheless, we accepted the honor and did our duties with smiles painted on our faces. We also decided that in order to help her out, we’d pay for her wedding dress accessories, and we informed her of this via a lovely note on a generic, store-bought greeting card.

  Chelsea said I had better penmanship, so I had to write it, but what we didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t good about reviewing my work for punctuation errors.

  Later in the week, we watched Rose try on wedding gown after wedding gown until she found “the one.” It was very pretty and very expensive, which was something we discovered when she turned to us as she was purchasing it.

  “Okay, so you don’t have to make the first payment for thirty days. Then you’ll just make subsequent payments every thirty days for the next six months.”

  We could literally hear the seamstress’s pins drop.

  “O… kay…” I mumbled in complete shock and disbelief, not knowing how to respond to this turn of events. Chelsea yanked me into a dressing room as Rose reviewed veil options, which were also part of our new budget.

  “What is she talking about?!”

  “I have no idea!” I shouted back as I removed her vise-like grip from my forearm.

  “It’s obviously something you wrote, because I don’t recall telling her I had an extra three grand lying around to pay for her dress! We’re waitresses! What is she thinking?!”

  “I don’t—”

  “You need to fix this. You need to say something.”

  “Me?! Why? You’re the strong one! I’ll just cave and end up paying for the honeymoon, too!”

  “Well, I’m not going to do it, because I’ll make her cry, so you’re going to have to.”

  Contrary to what people might think, as much as Chelsea loves fucking with people, she has a big heart, one that prevents her from wanting ever to truly hurt someone’s feelings. And this was one of those situations.

  Later, after I spoke with her, Rose was hysterical as she reviewed the card for fifteen minutes. “See, right here.” She pointed to the minuscule black mark between the words dress and accessories. “There’s a comma after dress. I just don’t know how I could have misunderstood that. I’m so ashamed,” she wailed.

  I couldn’t take it. “Chelsea wrote the card!” I bellowed, at that point not wanting to be the bad guy.

  Chelsea was not pleased with me for selling her down the river, not so much because I was inept, but because Rose made her attend extra prayer circles to pray for better lines of communication in their relationship. I should have known it would be but a matter of time before I had to do my penance.

  A few days before the wedding, Rose announced that she had a surprise.

  “You’re pregnant!” Chelsea exclaimed.

  “No, that’s not something Jesus would approve of,” Rose replied.

  “I can assure you that if there is indeed a Jesus, he’s not up in heaven strategizing about your wedding,” Chelsea commented. I didn’t have a fry this time, so I laughed into a pillow.

  Rose put in a CD, then ceremoniously stood and announced to me, Chelsea, and the other two bridesmaids, Shannon and Theresa, that she was going to perform an acoust