“That’s it, we’re heading home early,” I announced. Shannon freaked, but I told her that she and I had, in theory, a lifetime together but “This may be my only shot for Time magazine.” As she continued to yell at me, I snapped, “Fine, you can stay here and I’ll head home early.” This marriage was clearly getting off on the right foot.
I hustled my ass up to the hotel’s business center, plopped down at a desk, and used the phone to call the airline. We had originally booked first class, but the only available seats were in economy, and the fee to downgrade was almost a thousand dollars—not to mention our having to forfeit the final night at the hotel, for which we’d already paid. “Fuck it,” I said. “Advertisers pay millions to be in Time magazine. I can afford to pay eighteen hundred dollars to be in Time.”
The tickets home were changed—Shannon was coming back early with me whether she liked it or not. And she was definitely not going to like it… especially since we were now both in economy—and I put her in the middle seat. Hell, I was hating the thought of travelling sixteen hours in coach, too, but I was focusing on the greater good: a Time magazine photo spread.
Having made the change, I felt better but understood that this was not the ideal way to end a honeymoon. From champagne to shit. I was still not sure how to tell Shannon that we needed to go pack up immediately. So I didn’t. When I returned to the pool, I pussyfooted around the issue, telling her that I’d “looked into changing the tickets, but didn’t actually make the change.” Even “looking into” got me in trouble.
She was pissed off and started crying. She couldn’t believe that I would even consider going back early. I began to realize I would be in deep shit when it came time to tell her that I hadn’t just “considered” it; we were going home early. At that moment, I fully accepted that I might have to resort to drugging her and dragging her ass to the airport.
“They’re just fucking with you and you’re stupid enough to fall for it!” she yelled before storming off.
I yelled after her, “But what if they’re not?! I have to be in Time magazine, Shannon!” I decided to hang back a bit and let her cool off. At least I hoped she was going to cool off.
Needless to say, the pool boys hadn’t been by to rotate my umbrella recently—they wanted no part of our marital problems. I got up and glared at the nearest pool boy as I struggled to rotate the umbrella myself. Then I slinked back down into the deck chair and checked my e-mail again. There was a message from Johnny.
Too timid to defy Chelsea outright, he responded to my last pleading e-mail as best he could without actually revealing anything. But like death row inmates sending coded messages, I understood the subtext of his e-mail.
BRAD, THERE IS NO REASON TO LET THIS RUIN YOUR HONEYMOON.
Oh shit. Just then I realized that the whole thing had been a lie—an awful, tumultuous Chelsea Handler lie that had sought to drive me crazy and disrupt my blissful, once-in-a-lifetime (I think) honeymoon. I was now out $1,800, my wife was pissed at me, and worst of all, there would be no Time magazine shoot.
How would I reveal this to Shannon? She’d been right and I’d been wrong. Not only would I pay the immediate consequences, but for the rest of our marriage I knew that she would lord this over me, never missing the chance to remind me who was right and who was dead wrong.
It was going to be bad enough when I told her that it was all a lie. I couldn’t top it off with “Oh, and we are actually going home a day early… and we’re in economy… and it cost us eighteen hundred dollars.” It would have been too traumatic for her. And she would have wasted no time insisting that, as punishment, I buy her an eighteen-hundred-dollar Chloe purse. Somehow my losing money means I always have to spend the equivalent on her. I’ve never been certain of her logic there.
I returned to the business center to change our flights back to the original itinerary. Good news: we could switch back for a very slight fee. Bad news: there was only one seat left in first class. Relieved just to be back on the initial flight, I accepted and decided to worry later about explaining to Shannon why she was flying economy and I was still in first.
With the matter resolved and our love restored, Shannon and I wrapped up the honeymoon as intended.
Checking in at the airport on the day of our departure, we received our boarding passes and Shannon wondered why we weren’t sitting together. Still attempting to cover my tracks, I stupidly decided to sternly ask the ticket agent, “Sir, why are we both not sitting in first class as our itinerary states? There has to be an error.”
Not appreciating my tone, the all-business ticket agent wasted no time in looking at the monitor and explaining ever so bluntly, “Because our records show that you changed your flight, and when you changed it back there was only one first-class seat remaining.” He looked at Shannon and said, “Your husband bought you a ticket in coach, Mrs. Wollack. Enjoy your long flight and enjoy your marriage to him.”
Shannon glared at me. The jig was up. I offered a sheepish grin, and she simply said, “You’re an idiot.” Then she took my first-class ticket and handed me hers. That’s why I married her: she knows me so well.
As Shannon settled into her plush first-class seat with a mimosa, I lumbered back to the forty-eighth row of the plane, climbed over two smelly Greeks, and assumed my seat in the dead center seat of the middle row. Even worse? The smelly Greek to my left was reading—wait for it—Time magazine. Clearly that was someone’s way of saying, “In your face, asshole.”
While I forgave Chelsea soon after, Shannon did not forgive as easily. My first day back at the office, I received the following e-mail from her.
TELL THEM THAT WE WANT THE $1,000 BACK FROM THE NIGHT/DAY THEY RUINED AT ONE OF THE BEST HOTELS IN THE WORLD. I COULD BUY A NEW PURSE WITH THAT MONEY.
Considering that Chelsea had helped fund half the trip with her wedding gift, I wasn’t going to ask her to pay us back, but I did appreciate that Shannon, my wonderful new bride, clearly had her purse-buying priorities straight.
Chelsea Handler has caused me extreme turmoil, angst, fear, and thousands of dollars in psychiatry bills that aren’t covered by my insurance. However, in the end, I’ve realized what this all means: if Chelsea takes the time and energy out of her insanely hectic life and goes to extraordinary lengths to screw yours up royally, leaving you utterly humiliated and degraded, then you’ll know you’re good to go. She clearly loves you.
My dad, Chelsea, and me in Tahoe. You can see Chelsea’s enthusiasm in hanging out with my family.
Chelsea, for everything you’ve done, thank you and… fuck off.
I want to go on record that Shannon is a very close friend of mine, and I would never have allowed Brad to return from their honeymoon early. I would have come clean had I known that Brad was egomaniacal enough to shortchange his bride on her honeymoon for a picture in a magazine. He is a sad, sad clown. My apologies to Shannon exclusively.
-Chelsea
Shannon and Chelsea in Turks and Caicos without me. Chelsea says she prefers not to see my body on her vacations.
Chapter Six
Dial Tone, a Chelsea Specialty
AMBER MAZZOLA
Chelsea and me in London on her very first book tour.
Chelsea Handler is a dirty fucking liar. But what most people don’t know is she respects honesty and loyalty more than anything. That is, if it’s on her terms. But she’s okay with lying if it’s for a joke because for her, laughter trumps all.
My friendship with Chelsea started ten years ago, when she was one of the stars of the hidden camera show Girls Behaving Badly. She would offer happy endings at car washes, sit in shopping carts yelling at passersby, drink vodka and sodas at bars while wearing a pregnancy suit, and test out makeup artists for her “newborn,” to name a few stunts. I was the girl who jumped out of a cardboard box, camera in hand, in the middle of Ventura Boulevard, screaming, “You’ve just been pranked by Girls Behaving Badly!” We were quite a pair.
Back then, C
helsea was paid to lie. Now she does it as a hobby.
“Sarah” is the pseudonym Chelsea gave me in her three books. The anonymity was a nice touch, until she decided to blow my cover on Jay Leno when she referred to her friend Amber who took off her shirt in the London restaurant Dining in the Dark. Immediately after, I got dozens of text messages from people I hadn’t heard from in years, people I wasn’t that interested in hearing from.
“That was you? Did you really take your top off at a restaurant?”
Everyone knows Chelsea is a liar, so I just chalked it up to that. “Oh, come on! Do you really think I would take my top off? Of course not!” Chelsea’s reputation comes in handy.
Sometimes, very rarely, she lies for the right reasons, if that’s at all possible.
When I was going through a horrible breakup that would make most women curl into a ball and never leave the house, Chelsea had a rough time.
“It’s okay, Chelsea,” I would say to console her, handing her a tissue. “Everything happens for a reason.”
“I know. It just sucks,” she would say in between crocodile tears.
“I know. I know it does.”
This was my breakup, but for some reason, Chelsea was taking it way worse than I was. One night, while we were at her aunt and uncle’s house in Bel Air drinking vodka and eating more than a pound of Costco-size brie, the usual Sunday staple at the Burkes’, a hot guy came over to pick up Chelsea. Chelsea got a little weird and tried to hurry the guy out of there, saying he was her accountant and she had to go do her taxes.
I didn’t question the tax session with a hot guy on a Sunday evening in July. Why would I have? Who would lie about doing taxes? As soon as Chelsea left, her aunt informed me that the guy was a date, someone Chelsea had met on Myspace (yes, Myspace) and didn’t want to tell me about because she thought it would hurt my feelings, what with my breakup. Truth is, Chelsea needed this rebound to get over my ex more than I did. I had been encouraging her to start dating again for weeks.
At 2:00 AM, Chelsea came over to my dad’s house (I had moved in with him after the breakup) and crawled into bed with me, to make sure I didn’t spend the night alone or wake up alone. She was very persistent about this, and for months she had slept in my childhood room, in my canopy bed draped in Paper White linens, with my glow in the dark solar system overhead and the Laura Ashley flower-print border wrapped around the room.
One morning, I woke up to sunlight pouring in through my bedroom window, heating up the room like a sauna. Chelsea was lying above the sheets buck naked except for her underwear. Her tank top, which had started the evening on her body, was tied around her eyes like a bandana to shield her from the light.
“Um…?” I couldn’t help but laugh. She looked ridiculous.
“Fuck off. It’s ninety degrees in here! How can you sleep like this?” Chelsea asked.
“I dunno. I’m used to it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to start sleeping at my place.”
My seventy-five-year-old father is always freezing. In ninety-degree weather, he sports a long-sleeve shirt and pants. There’s no way he’d let me sleep with the air on. I tried it once. The minute he heard it, he shut it off immediately.
That night, I started sleeping at Chelsea’s apartment, which was a whole different experience. Air-conditioning on full blast, curtains as dark as a hotel room in Vegas, and eye shades. Regardless, the company was nice, and Chelsea was right—it would have sucked to go to bed and wake up alone. While promoting her first book, My Horizontal Life, she flew from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to San Francisco and then back to Los Angeles all in one day just to make sure I wasn’t alone.
I think what got me through the breakup was the fact that I had to be strong—for Chelsea. This brief period may have been the only time in our friendship when Chelsea didn’t fuck with me. But the moment she heard me talking about other boys and dating again, she was back at it.
Let me explain something before you think I’m just another one of those gullible idiots duped by Chelsea. As an only child, I didn’t grow up playing practical jokes on siblings. My biggest lies involved why I was late for curfew. I am an amateur; Chelsea is a professional. And what makes her so good is not only her commitment to the lie, but a deadly combination of speed and creativity. When you’re grilling her for the truth, she has already thought of the next answer before you even have the question. Plenty of times I’ve smelled such an answer coming from a mile away and called her out for being full of shit, but there has been a time or two when I’ve fallen prey to one of her lies.
I was on the phone with my psychic one morning when Chelsea called on the other line. I didn’t want to click over to her because I was getting good info on my love life, but Chelsea was relentless. She kept calling until I picked up.
“What’s your game plan?” she asked.
“I’m on the phone with Sydney.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Whatever. It’s not like you don’t call her.”
“Not every day. You have to stop taking advantage, Amber,” she said.
Chelsea and I have known Sydney for years. We have each driven over sixty miles outside of Los Angeles to see her, for the sole purpose of pumping her for information about our lives—as if she weren’t onto us. She knew exactly what we were doing. But I think she enjoyed our company as much as we enjoyed the brain-picking sessions.
In fact, one day Chelsea even endured an hour-long lecture on birds from Sydney’s boyfriend, who is a falconer, just to get a kernel of information from Sydney. Who’s the asshole now?
Sydney once told Chelsea she would have a talk show one day, way before she had one. Chelsea didn’t believe her. Back then, she had no desire for a talk show. So, regardless of how Chelsea likes to poke fun at my friendship with Sydney, she’s still a true believer.
“See if Sydney tells you that I hooked up with P. Diddy last night,” Chelsea said.
“Oh, my God, did you really?”
“Call me when you’re done.”
“Wait, are you really sleeping with P. Diddy?”
This is a recurring problem with Chelsea. You can’t believe a word she says. She’s the girl who cried wolf.
“Hello?”
There was a dial tone, a Chelsea specialty. When she is done talking, she hangs up mid-sentence. This isn’t reserved for phone conversations, either. It is Chelsea’s MO for all forms of contact. When she is done with whatever it may be—a party, a date with a guy, dinner with a friend, a phone call—she’ll abort. She’s not very good with good-byes.
I called Chelsea back to pump her for the P. Diddy info, but she wasn’t biting. She just said, “This is going to be an interesting fall…” Then, clearly changing the subject: “What are you and the Persian doing for New Year’s?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
The Persian she was talking about was my fiancé, Zoughi. She’s never called him by name. I know, you’re probably thinking, Fiancé? Weren’t you just breaking up with someone? I don’t mess around.
“A bunch of us are going to the Bahamas for New Year’s,” Chelsea said. You guys should come.”
I have been all over the world with Chelsea—Australia, London, Mexico, Turks and Caicos. And the vacations have a lot in common: a beach, a boat ride, lots of Belvedere, late night dance parties, and chicken fingers at 4:00 AM. They’re really the perfect getaways. So I’ve always welcomed another Chelsea adventure, and at that point in my life, the Bahamas sounded great.
I think I was more excited about this trip because it would be my first with Chelsea and Zoughi, and Chelsea was finally accepting that I was in a relationship with the “Persian” and not her brother Roy, whom she had been trying to set me up with since their mother’s funeral. Literally, at the funeral. In fact, Chelsea continued to try to hook me up with Roy well into my engagement and at my bachelorette party. It got a little awkward a couple of times. But that might have been b
ecause I always did have a little crush on Roy. He’s the sarcastic, witty, loyal male version of Chelsea. What’s not to like?
Bahamas prep began. I waxed all the hair off my body. I tried to wax Zoughi’s back, so Chelsea wouldn’t take pictures of him and show them on national TV or Twitter, but no such luck. Ever since Zoughi had heard what a pansy my ex-fiancé was, he overexerted himself to be the polar opposite of him in every way. And this included the area of hair removal.
After an eighteen-hour travel day, Zoughi and I finally arrived at The Cove to find the usual suspects in the usual position: poolside with margaritas.
“Hi, Zoughi!” Chelsea yelled. “Hi, Amber!”
We approached the pool, said hello to friends, and met a few newbies to the group. There was always a newbie or two. Chelsea’s philosophy has always been “the more the merrier.” She gets bored with us at times and likes to spice up vacations with fresh meat she can prey on.
“Zoughi, meet Navid. He’s a fellow Persian like you,” Chelsea said.
Phew! Now it won’t be Zoughi getting the brunt of all the Persian jokes, I thought. And there would be someone in our party with a hairier back then Zoughi. I gave Chelsea a lot of credit. Two Persians on one vacation, in one pool. She must have been feeling charitable. I do find it funny, though, that Chelsea would make such fun of Persians when she dated one for quite a while.