Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me Read online

  Even though Johnny’s submissive, I was still surprised that he accepted Chelsea’s offer to move in with her and, in effect, his big boss, Ted. It’s a bit odd, but knowing Chelsea, I’m sure she insisted that he stay with them. She always has people staying with her. She’ll have the most random people crash with her, most of the time even in her own bed. She’s basically become the Michael Jackson of comedy.

  A couple of nights into Johnny’s stay and all seemed fine. I was really curious about the specific living arrangements and how everything in the house was playing out. After all, this wasn’t a little weekend getaway for Johnny; he was full-on living with his bosses. That meant sleeping, meals, laundry, etc.

  From the outset, I was so uncomfortable with this setup that I needed to know every detail. For example, what did Johnny sleep in? I, for one, sleep in boxers and nothing else (that’s right, ladies, start visualizing). But I’m not sure I could wear just boxers while residing in someone else’s home. What if there were a midnight fire alarm, an earthquake, or an early morning visit from the Breakfast Burrito truck and everyone had to get outside quickly? It would have been a little inappropriate if Johnny came running out in underwear and nothing else. How would they take him—and his girlish figure—seriously at the office the next day? That could negatively reflect on his capabilities as an employee. Besides, in someone else’s pad, you must be ready for anything. In fact, in this situation, I’d sleep in jeans so I could be prepared for whatever went down. Perhaps a sweatshirt, too. My nipples harden quickly in the cold air.

  At every chance I got, I expressed my discomfort with the arrangement, but Chelsea insisted that this was standard operating procedure and made me sound like I was the idiot.

  “Brad, it’s not that big a deal. He stays in the guest room, wears boxers and a T-shirt, and, yes, we have dinner together every night.”

  I was a little disappointed in Johnny’s choice of sleepwear, but it wasn’t my place to correct him. One morning Chelsea said, “Ted makes breakfast for everyone. Johnny loves Ted’s oatmeal.” That’s stupid. Who has a special oatmeal recipe? (By the way, if someone were to have a special oatmeal recipe, it would be Ted Harbert.)

  As days turned into two weeks, any comfort I had with this deal completely subsided. This was not healthy and it couldn’t end well. Johnny was getting too intimate with his bosses.

  I began assessing how I would have handled the situation if I had been Johnny. First, I would most likely have tried to get the landlord of my flooded building to pay for a hotel for me, or at least crashed at a buddy’s place. In my obsessive mind, I can’t get comfortable staying in someone’s home unless they are a direct relative or an old friend. I always feel like it’s an imposition and that the person hates me and resents my existence. I even feel like that at home with my wife at times, but that’s another book. I think it’s a reflection on how I would feel if someone I wasn’t close to stayed with me: What the fuck are you doing here? Don’t touch my shit, and did you pick up my dry cleaning? They’d have to earn their room and board.

  I constantly asked Johnny how long he planned on staying with Chelsea and Ted, yet he couldn’t give me a straight answer. “I don’t know” was his standard response. I was livid; how could he not know? It’s not like he’d been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and lost all his worldly goods and maybe even a few family members. There’d been a little flood in his shitbox of a studio apartment. This didn’t require FEMA-type relief. For some reason, I needed a timeline for exactly how long Johnny planned on shacking up with his boss. This couldn’t be an open-ended stay; that was just not appropriate. And while Johnny, in my mind, had already done the unthinkable and accepted Chelsea’s invitation, I knew that he was a good kid with good manners and he’d never overstay his welcome.

  I pressed him further. Was this stay going to last another week? Another two weeks? A month? When he refused to give me a hard-and-fast date, I became preoccupied with calculating the amount of time—based on Johnny’s description of what had happened to his apartment—it would take for his landlord to fix the flood damage.

  As a Jew who never does manual labor, I could have been slightly off in my calculations, but assuming they had stopped the gush of water in Johnny’s crappy studio apartment, I figured the whole process couldn’t take longer than two weeks. Again, I’m not a contractor, but I have certain expectations and know the timeline I would have accepted.

  I impressed this upon Johnny, but he couldn’t be bothered. How was he not concerned with how long he was going to be put out? He was effectively homeless. He had some clothes and that was about it. Didn’t he want to go home to his things and his own space? Even if the remodel was going to take a year, he couldn’t realistically think he was going to live with Chelsea and Ted the whole time, could he? What kind of a sick world were we living in?

  It wasn’t even so much his overstaying his welcome with Chelsea that concerned me. Because of her age, relative immaturity, and obsession with Johnny, she was much more of a peer than a boss to him. What I was fixated on was how Johnny could live with Ted. After all, Ted is somewhat of a legend in the TV landscape. He ran ABC and NBC studios and is considered a big-time television executive. I mean, he was the guy responsible for such hits as Boy Meets World. To an up-and-coming producer like Johnny, it was best not to overstep his boundaries with a guy like Ted, but Johnny seemed to have no concerns.

  In truth, I was actually a little envious of Johnny getting so much face time with Harbert. I relished any one-on-one time with Ted so I could pepper him with questions about the industry. Now here was Johnny going to sleep in his boxers and T-shirt and waking up with the guy. In my mind, his future as a successful TV producer was a lock. I was now obsessed with assuming that Johnny was quickly becoming Ted’s “guy.”

  If you think I was overreacting, then you’re right, I probably was, but Johnny and Ted’s relationship was rapidly blossoming. Stories of their camaraderie were making me sick.

  First came Chelsea’s announcement at a meeting that Ted had gone into Johnny’s room that morning and said, “I’m doing a load of laundry. Do you have any colors, Johnny?” Really? Johnny was letting his host, the CEO of Comcast Entertainment, do his dirty laundry? I started to twitch.

  Then came the dinner at Katsuya, Chelsea’s favorite LA restaurant. It was a Thursday night, and my wife and I were there with Chelsea, Ted, and another couple. I was conveniently situated at one end of the table, next to Ted, and hoped to capture some wisdom or insight from him. Ted loved answering my questions, and I saw this as a chance to reassert myself as his number one. I always had this weird fantasy that I’d say something so profound that he’d respond with “You’re right, Brad. That’s genius!” and anoint me as his new programming guru and I’d become his most trusted adviser. In reality, I usually ended up getting drunk and passing out. Yet I always clung to that dream.

  We’d been seated for fifteen minutes when Ted’s cell phone rang. He looked at his screen. “Oh, it’s Johnny. Hold on.” With that, he answered the phone. “Hey, Johnny. What’s up?”

  Wow, I thought, I can’t believe Johnny has the fucking nerve to call during dinner. What was so important that Johnny, knowing full well that Ted was out to dinner, would call him? It had to be a critical, time-sensitive matter… something like Ryan Seacrest wanting to refrost his hair and needing Ted’s approval on the color scheme. Johnny hates imposing on anyone at any time, so he would never be so forward as to interrupt someone’s dinner.

  “You want to watch a DVD in the living room?” Ted asked. “Sure, I’ll walk you through how to do that.”

  Unreal! That took major balls to call and ask something like that.

  “Oh, that’s cute,” Chelsea said. “He wants to watch a DVD.”

  That’s not “cute.” That’s obnoxious. Figure it out yourself, Johnny. Suddenly I envisioned Johnny lounging around Ted and Chelsea’s condo like a sloth, probably in his underwear, helping himself to popcorn and whatev