Chapter Eleven
Deep Thoughts by Chelsea Handy
My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate. The following is a catalog of lies that have been left open-ended, and in all these instances, the victims have not been made aware that they have fallen prey to complete and utter nonsense. “Dumbassness” is the word I would use to describe the condition they suffer from.
SILLY SULLY
My friend Stephanie believes that Sully, the pilot who landed the US Airways flight in the Hudson River, is currently Ted’s and my personal pilot. We had arrived in Turks and Caicos a day after Stephanie, on a regular plane like everyone else. That night at dinner, Ted mentioned the turbulence on the flight and casually mentioned that had Sully been our pilot, he would have been a lot less stressed. Stephanie was sitting a couple of seats down and asked me if she heard correctly.
“Did I hear you say Sully, the guy who landed that plane, was your pilot?”
“He’s an American hero is what he is,” I told her.
“I know he is!” she exclaimed. “How did that happen?”
“Ted called and offered him a bunch of money,” I told her. “Apparently he’s a huge fan of the E! network and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. He now provides this service for a lot of people. We’re third on his list. So if no one else is flying that day, we get him. He’s a pretty interesting guy.”
“That is so cool!” Stephanie exclaimed, while everyone else at the table was rolling their eyes except for my brother Ray, who has always been a little slow on the uptake.
Ted got up from his seat and moved down to the other side of the table while I explained to Stephanie that Ted isn’t the best flier and Sully has basically become a member of our family. “He and Ted go golfing together all the time. He was supposed to come on this trip, but Beyoncé needed him tomorrow. He says she uses the ThighMaster the entire flight. She just sits there working out her thighs for hours straight while Jay-Z raps.”
“Oh, my God!” Steph cried. “She is such a mess!”
My friend Paul was sitting across from me, shaking his head and pretending to be texting on his BlackBerry. Eva piped up. “Sometimes he lets Ted sit in the cockpit.”
“That is so cool. Ted must feel like one of the Beatles! Who else is on the list before you?” Steph asked.
“That’s so funny you just said the Beatles because it’s actually Beyoncé and Sir Paul McCartney.”
Stephanie stopped chewing her food. “Shut up.”
I never told Stephanie I was kidding, and sometime later, when I was flying out for a stand-up show in Atlantic City, she texted me on the way to the airport and asked if I was flying with Sully.
“Yup. He just texted me that he got Marley & Me for the flight. How cute is that?”
“I want to meet him! Also, see if you can get any more dish on Beyoncé and Jay-Z,” she wrote.
“I already did. Apparently, Beyoncé has to load up an entire separate plane for her wardrobe because Sully hates the House of Deréon and thinks Beyoncé’s mother is trying to exploit her own daughter with her tacky designs. Sully refuses to do it. He’s way in on the drama.”
“Who knew a pilot from Pennsylvania would have such a good eye?” she responded. “Please keep me in the loop. Invite him to your birthday this year. He sounds like one of us.”
“I’m on it,” I typed back. As for my brother, I’m unclear if he even knew who we were talking about, since there’s a chance he entirely missed the news story about Sully landing on the Hudson in the first place.
THE CHALLENGER
A year ago I told one of the writers on my staff, Heather McDonald, that I was being offered the main role in a movie about Christa McCauliffe and the Challenger space shuttle blowing up. Heather is by far the most gullible person on my staff, and all the writers on the show are constantly making up ridiculous stories to tell her just for the sake of our own amusement. She’s not stupid; she just seems to love anything involving free items, money, or drama.
“The weird part,” I told her, “is that it’s a comedy, and they’re allowing me to hire my own writer to write my part.” This was enough to pique Heather’s interest and motivate her to put some ideas together and get a head start before some of the other writers came up with anything substantial. “Meryl Streep is playing Christa McCauliffe,” I added, “but she’s dead and only comes down from heaven to talk to me in the movie.”
My partner Tom walked into my office halfway through this debacle and took no time to jump in and add his own spin. “Chelsea plays her daughter, who grew up never knowing her mother and is now married and in the process of becoming an astronaut. But every time she gets into a space shuttle, she has terrible flashbacks about the day.”
“Are you going to do it?” Heather asked me.
“Yes, obviously, I want to! Meryl Streep? I can’t pass that up. And they have an offer out to Hank Azaria to play my husband.”
“That’s so weird.” She sat on the sofa in my office looking at me. “How can they make this a comedy?”
“That’s where you come in, Heather,” Tom told her. “We’re going to have all the writers submit ideas for the story line, since the studio is willing to hire a personal writer from Chelsea’s staff to outline the story. They definitely want it to have a comedic twist.”
“It’s so weird that they would make it a comedy,” she said. “That was a really horrible event.”
“It is weird,” I agreed. “It’s downright creepy, but who am I to take a moral stand on someone else’s vision? That’s why I need help. I’m going to ask all the writers to come up with an outline for the movie and some really funny scenes. Apparently there’s going to be a lot of improv. Meryl loves improv, I guess, and never really gets to do it.”
“She does?”
“Yes,” Tom assured her. “I’ve seen her talk about it on Inside the Actors Studio. She feels robbed.”
“Well, it is a good subject for a movie. I mean, everyone remembers where they were that day. I remember when they announced that the Challenger blew up. I was in fifth or sixth grade, I think,” she said.
“Yeah, I remember, too. Although I was younger, of course.”
“So basically,” Tom interjected, “you need to write a few pages of dialogue and/or plotlines and submit them along with the other writers, and then we’re going to decide who will make the seventy-five-thousand-dollar writing fee.”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars?” Heather asked.
“At least,” he told her. “Could even turn out to be more. How soon can you get something to us?”
“I’ll start working on it this weekend,” she said. “Is there any other information you can give me?”
“Well,” I told her, “my husband in the movie hates for me to be in space. He just wants me to do something where I spend the majority of time on earth. There’s actually a scene where I shit my pants in a space-shuttle simulator.” I looked at Tom, who had turned around and was going through my belts. “I already told her they have an offer out to Hank Azaria to play my husband.”
“No,” Tom corrected me. “Actually, the last I heard was that he passed and they were going in a different direction. They were going to make an offer to Justin Timberlake, who they say is interested.”
“Shut up!” Heather wailed.
“No way!” I exclaimed, jumping out of my seat. “I have to do it now.”
“You have to do it. Let me start brainstorming.” She got up to go to her office. “One last thing—do they have a title?” she asked me.
“Yes,” Tom told her. “It’s called The Sky Is Crying.”
TURKS AND CAICOS
At some point during our vacation, Sylvan asked me if my friend Paul was gay, which he is. Instead of giving him a straightforward answer, I saw an opportunity and told Sylvan that not only was Paul gay but that he was actually still a woman who was currently going through gender-reassignment surgery. He was raised as a boy until he was eighteen and started dating a girl. He found out that boy parts are different from girl parts and that he had the exact same parts as his girlfriend. Gender reassignment is a pretty laborious process, so each month he got estrogen injections, and his body had been slowly transforming his girl parts into male parts. After this trip he was getting his penis.
“Holy shit, Chels.” Sylvan was horrified. “What happened to the girl?”
“She was freaked out,” I told him. “She enlisted in the military immediately after he told her and has since been deployed to Iraq.”
“So he has girl parts right now?”
“Yes. He has a clitoris, but after this vacation is when they inject him with the hormones to enlarge the clitoris into a full-blown penis.”
“Why didn’t he want to stay being a girl?”
“Because he spent his whole life thinking he was a boy and associates more with boys. If you look closely at his tits, you can see that they used to be bigger.”
“Oh, my God, Chels.” Sylvan was rubbing his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
“Yup. What they do is give you pills to basically turn your clitoris into a penis. Pretty fucked up, huh?”
Sylvan and I were on a boat watching Paul swim around with a snorkel, looking for fish. “He looks so much like a guy,” Sylvan said.
“I know. It’s taken a lot of work for him to get there. He used to have hair longer than mine. It’s amazing to actually watch the transformation. His body has been through so many stages. At least now people think he’s a guy. There was a time not long ago when you couldn’t tell what he was.”
Sylvan was flabbergasted, and I was having the time of my life. He was still rubbing his head as if he were in pain and asked me, “So is he technically a boy or a girl right now?”
“Right now he’s both. His parents, wanting a boy, decided that even though he had a coslopus, they would raise him as a boy. After he found out he was a girl, he got into real estate, because he knew that was the quickest way to make a buck, and he’s been saving money ever since to make ‘the change.’ ”
“But, Chels, he looks and talks and walks like a guy,” Sylvan told me.
“I know, Sylvan. Medicine is amazing,” I declared. “A-mazing, His real name is Bernice, but his parents just called him Bernie, and then when he found out that they were lying to him his whole life, he changed his name to Paul.”
Sylvan couldn’t stop asking questions. Luckily, I had an answer for each one. When Paul came in after snorkeling, Sylvan got up and handed him a towel. He also started pulling out Paul’s seat each night at dinner, which clearly confused Paul every time, but was enjoyable for me to watch.
“I don’t get it, Chels,” Sylvan asked. “Does he like girls or boys?”
“Boys.”
“But if he likes boys, wouldn’t it have been easier to just stay a girl, instead of becoming a man and then becoming gay?”
“That’s a pretty good fucking question, Sylvan,” I told him. “One that I ask myself every day when I look at Paul’s ass. It’s hard to understand the transgender community and what their thoughts are. Why they want to cross two hurdles instead of one, but I don’t ask questions, Sylvan. I don’t judge. I’m not the Lord.”
At the end of the trip, Sylvan told Paul that he was one of the most amazing people he’d ever met and that Paul had more guts and courage than half those soldiers who go over to Iraq.
“Thank you, Sylvan,” Paul said quizzically. “That’s a really nice thing to say to someone. I think.”
“Gosh,” Eva remarked to Paul. “You must really have made an impression on him.”
Paul told me after that that he felt bad for judging Sylvan based on the fact that he couldn’t swim. “That guy’s a sweetheart through and through. You should have heard what he told me when we said good-bye. I’m definitely going to use him as a driver the next time I’m in New York.
“You should definitely use him,” I told him.
IKE TURNER
On the same trip, Paul and I got into a food fight one night around three in the morning. This is something we frequently participate in after seven to ten cocktails. We are respectful enough to do it only in the privacy of our hotel room, and I usually end up the champion, as Paul is gay, which can lead to terrible hand-eye coordination. While we don’t intentionally involve others, it usually requires anyone else in the room to run and duck for cover, as it can get pretty violent, with one or two fruit items ending up stuck to a wall and Paul screaming that I’m an angry dyke. I’m more apt to fight with Paul instead of someone like Tanya, because I consider Paul to be more of an equal and Tanya to be more of a mad harlot.
Things got particularly hairy one night on our vacation in Turks and Caicos, and fruit throwing eventually graduated from grapes and decorative acorns to ripe nectarines. When I turned around to peg a strawberry in Paul’s direction, I didn’t have time to duck before a nectarine hit me square in the eye. It hurt, but not enough to make me cry, and I quickly recovered, although all our other friends were a little taken aback at our level of violence.
Ted scolded us both: “Stop it, you two! Chelsea has a television show, and I already gave her one black eye when we were playing Wii tennis. People are going to think I beat her.”
Sylvan was more impressed with Paul’s hand-eye coordination, because at that point he didn’t know if Paul was a boy, a girl, or a sea animal.
Either way, the party came to a screeching halt with Paul really concerned that he’d hurt me. He hadn’t, but when I woke up the next morning, my friend Stephanie suggested that it would be a good idea to have me fake a black eye. With Eva and Stephanie’s help, I was able to make one side of my face look like Rihanna’s, and then I headed down in the bright sunlight with a hat and sunglasses, like any respectful abused woman.
My brother, Delicious, Ted, Paul, and Sylvan were all down at breakfast already when the girls and I arrived. When Paul caught on to my face, he was horrified. I assured him it was no big deal and that I had time to heal before I had to tape the show again. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I bruise easily. If it’s still there by Monday, I’m sure my makeup artist can cover it up. Or I’ll just tell the audience my friend hit me with a nectarine.”
“You should take iron,” Ted told me as he got up from the table, giving me a thumbs-up for my cosmetic handiwork. Ted was in our room that morning when I applied my shiner and was excited to be included in a joke. “Good job, Paul,” Ted told him, and threw his napkin down on the table dramatically before heading over to his beach chair.
Not knowing that it was a joke, Sylvan was disgusted by the whole event. He said to Paul, “If you weren’t a girl, I would have the right mind to hit you,” and then he stormed off. Brian, Ray, and Paul all looked at each other, wondering what Sylvan was talking about, until I explained to them that Sylvan didn’t have a ton of experience with gay men and that calling men girls was just English slang for gay guys.
Shortly after, I explained to Sylvan that the whole thing was a joke, that Paul really hadn’t hurt me and to just go along with it. He was bellowing with laughter. “Chels, you are a maniac! I can’t believe I fell for that. And what an idiot he is, too, for believing it!”
“I know,” I said to Sylvan. “Can you believe how stupid everyone is?”
As the day wore on, Eva, Steph, and I kept making the bruise darker and darker, until finally Paul took me aside with tears in his eyes.
Paul is gay with an exorbitant amount of energy and an annoyingly sunny disposition. He has the tendency to look at every situation as a glass half gay and is the type of person who says “Bless his heart” when he sees someone in a wheelchair getting off a ski lift.
“Chelsea,” he whimpered, “I just feel terrible. You are so generous to all of us, and you have been such a good friend, and I thank you by hitting you in the face with a nectarine, and look at you, you look awful.”
“Don’t worry about it, Paul. I’m seriously not mad at you. I know it was a total accident.” When tears started to fill his gay eyes, I took a towel and wetted it with a bottle of water. “Look,” I told him, “it will probably just wipe off.”
With Stephanie’s video camera capturing the event, including the disappearance of the bruise, Paul realized what I had done. “You are horrible!” he screamed. “Horrible! You’re a horrible, angry dyke!”
ONE-LEGGED WONDER
A while back I tried to set my friend Sarah up with my brother Ray, to no avail.
“Whatever happened to hooking him up with Sarah?” Sloane asked me when my sisters and I were on a three-way phone call discussing the fact that our brother had been single for far too long.
“It’s a little late for that, since she’s getting married in two weeks. I do love Ray, and I’d be willing to break up most relationships if it meant giving him one, but I have grown to love Sarah’s fiancé, even though Firouz is Iranian and has only one leg.”
“Come again?” Sidney asked me.
“I told you guys this already,” I lied.
“No, Chelsea. I think I would have remembered if you told me that Sarah’s fiancé was legless. Is he in a wheelchair?”
“No. I really can’t believe I didn’t tell you this already. He lost one of his legs in Iraq.”
“I thought he was an editor?” Sloane asked.
“He is,” I confirmed. “But he volunteered for the war and lost his leg in combat, so he’s got one of those plastic thingamijiggies.”
“Sarah is marrying someone with no leg?” Sidney asked.
“He has one leg. God, you guys are pretty judgmental. He loves her and she loves him. It’s not like he can’t walk around.”
“So let me get this straight,” Sloane asked. “She rejected Ray for a one-legged soldier? Is he a Republican, too?”
“No! Of course not! He’s a Democrat.”
“Where is the leg?” inquired Sloane.
“I have no idea where the leg is, Sloane. This isn’t CSI: Miami. I didn’t ask where the leg is. Obviously it’s gone. It’s probably still somewhere in Afghanistan.”
“Chelsea, you said Iraq,” Sidney reminded me. “Is this one of your stupid stories? Because it sure sounds stupid.”
“Then ask her!” I yelled, exhausted. “Like I’d make up someone losing their leg.”
A week later Ray moved out to Los Angeles to be the caterer for my show. He had come to learn about Firouz’s leg through my sisters and had questions of his own. Sarah was nice enough to invite Ray to her wedding, since he was new to L.A., and when Ray watched Sarah and Firouz dance to their first song, he leaned over and said to Ted, “For a guy with one leg, that guy can really move. Are Iranians known for dancing?”
It didn’t take long for Ted to come over and inform me that not only did he confirm my lie about Firouz’s having one leg, but he also took it up a notch and told Ray that Firouz was able to score Heather Mills’s old leg on eBay for only fifteen hundred dollars. Not an amazing attempt to corroborate my story, but a valiant effort nonetheless, especially for someone who took so long to get on board with my chronic storytelling. I was just glad we were finally on the same team. Like Serena and Venus playing doubles together. Not opponents but large black teammates.