Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (17 page)

Six took her present off the pile next. Aubrey opened it to find a basket of lotion and bath oils. Lotion and bath oils are the most impersonal gift you can buy someone, which is why it’s perfect that when she opened Jen’s present next, it was another basket of lotion and bath oils. This was getting good. “Oh, how funny!” Six exclaimed, clapping her hands together.

She reached for my present, but I knew patience was a virtue and that soon I was going to have my moment in the sun. “Open Lydia’s first,” I told Aubrey as I watched Ivory continue to ride her wave.

“What are you laughing at?” Aubrey asked Lydia, who was now starting to laugh more and more uncontrollably. This was all too much for her. When Lydia laughs hysterically, it’s infectious. It is also not long before she starts snorting. I was trying to avoid losing it completely and kept averting my eyes from Lydia to Ivory, who had assumed Lydia was still laughing at Ivory’s clever gift to Aubrey. Ivory was looking at me proudly, like she had given us all a night to remember.

“Let’s take a picture!” shouted Aubrey, as she pulled out her camera.

I took this opportunity to walk over behind Ivory’s chair and whisper, “You are hilarious, so funny!” and then leaned in, put one arm around Ivory and the other around Aubrey, and smiled like I had just gotten a B12 shot.

I sat back down on my side of the table and Aubrey opened Lydia’s gift from the Gap.

“That’s sweet,” Aubrey said condescendingly to Lydia. “I know you’re on a budget.”

This was the only time of the night Lydia stopped laughing. I could see her mind scrambling to say something, but surprisingly, she was able to stop herself. The last present was mine. Ivory leaned in with Aubrey, who was squinting to read my writing on the gift.

“Oh, how dear,” Aubrey said with a grimace on her face. “I haven’t seen newspaper wrapping since the sixties.”

“How do you know about the sixties if you’re only turning thirty?” I asked her inquisitively.

“Ha, ha, ha, somebody is paying attention,” she said with a wink in my direction.

Did this mean she was lying about her age? Aubrey was exactly the type of person who would lie about her age.

She was unwrapping my gift with her head cocked to the side when Ivory’s head also cocked to the side. It brought back memories of the synchronized swimming team I had never been part of.

Aubrey pulled the Rehab game out and held it up. Ivory was still unsure of what was taking place and looking at the game the same way you would look at someone you met ten years ago.

“Wait a second! That’s the same game I bought you for your birthday,” she said, perfectly oblivious.

“Yes,” I said, with my teeth closed and eyes wide. “The exact same.”

“But where did you get it?” she asked, genuinely perplexed. “I found it at some store in the Valley.”

My expression remained the same as I responded, “In my apartment!”

Aubrey was too horrified by her gift to be paying attention to all the commotion at the table. Lydia’s composure had long since vanished and she was now vacillating between snorting and violently shaking. Jen has a quieter laugh but had her head in her hands with her shoulders bouncing up and down. I had my drink in between my legs and was trying to redirect the urine that was seeping its way out of my vagina. Six had no idea what was going on, and it was taking Ivory even longer to connect the dots.

“Did somebody already play this?” Aubrey asked as she emptied the mismatched pieces in their little plastic bags that were no longer sealed. That’s when Ivory’s mouth opened.

I tasted blood in my mouth from biting my lip so hard, but had to retain composure.
What if blood just starts spilling out of my mouth?
I thought. I thought of the scene in
Million Dollar Baby
where Hilary Swank chews up her own tongue trying to kill herself and envisioned Clint Eastwood coming over to my table and telling me I was his “Baklava” or whatever the hell he called her in that movie.

“What is so funny?” Aubrey asked, looking at Lydia, who was face-to-face with the wall next to her, slapping her hands against it.

Any normal person at this point would be completely disgusted by our behavior. Not Aubrey. She was so wrapped up in her own bubble of delusion that the next thing out of her mouth after seeing each one of us laughing hysterically was, “Who wants to make a toast?” Before anyone responded, Aubrey interrupted herself and stood up.

“I just want to say (long, dramatic pause)…that without any blood relatives at the table, I want everyone here to know that this has been the single most meaningful birthday of my life. I am the type of person that will remember this for the rest of my life (another long, dramatic pause, this time with tears)…I want you to know that when I get my
inheritance
, and my family, who have caused me nothing but pain…”

“We’re your family now,” Ivory interrupted, and got up to give Aubrey a hug.

I stood up. “Oh, Chelsea, that’s sweet, you want to go next?” Aubrey asked.

“No, I just need to use the bathroom.” I grabbed my things and went to the bathroom. After I was done, I headed straight out the back door, around the front of the restaurant, got in my car, and drove home.

The next morning around 9 a.m. I was checking my e-mail when Lydia walked through the door looking haggard. “Thanks a lot for leaving last night, asshole. I had to sleep over at Aubrey’s house with that girl Six. Aubrey ended up crying all night long and telling us it wasn’t even her birthday. And then she tried to get us all to take a bath together.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Ivory and Jen were so pissed. They both got up and made toasts. Then three hours later we ended up at Formosa, where she reveals that she’s actually thirty-six and has no brothers and sisters. They both said they were going to the bathroom and left me there. Ivory took the game back. She said she’d rather give it away to an orphan.”

“I can’t believe that, what a lunatic!” I said.

“I know. Can you imagine lying about having brothers and sisters? She’s a sociopath who—”

“No,” I interrupted. “I can’t believe Ivory thinks Rehab is an appropriate game for an orphan.”

“I’m going to bed,” she said, and walked into her room.

I sat at my computer, elated. It turned out that there was someone out there who was even more mentally unstable than me. And that special someone’s name was Aubrey.

CHAPTER TEN

Jumped

I
t was a Friday morning and I was on MySpace exchanging messages with a guy who had asked me to go to dinner. My immediate response was, “How big is your penis?” His return message was, “I’ve never had any formal complaints.”

This made me laugh out loud. As if when women encounter a small penis, we wake up first thing the next morning and lodge a formal grievance with the LAPD. I consider myself to be a very obnoxious person, but even
I
would never tell a guy that he has a small penis.

Men don’t seem to understand that, under no circumstances, will we confront them on this issue. That would be on par with telling a girl she has a smelly vagina, which, by the way, is something I have once been told by a woman, but only during a particularly disturbing massage. Most men would never tell a girl her Pikachu smells like a crab cake. It’s just not done. But they would have no qualms telling their guy friends. Similarly, if you’re a guy and you pull your pants down, and the girl you’re with immediately starts text messaging her friends, you have a small penis.

After I decided to never meet this person in public, I looked down at my gut. My body had really taken a turn for the worse, and the surprise party I was throwing for my thirtieth birthday was three weeks away. I knew I wasn’t out-and-out fat, and I don’t think anyone would have described me as a heifer, but there was definitely some toning up needed. It had gotten to the point that the only body parts I felt comfortable exposing in public were my forearms.

Everything else seemed to be in some state of disrepair, especially my abdomen, which somehow managed to divide itself into three sections when I was sitting cross-legged. Something had to be done, so I closed MySpace and Googled the word “fatass.”

While looking at a website for liposuction, I learned that it was a six-to eight-week recovery period, the clincher being that, during that time, I would under no circumstances be able to use street drugs. Obviously I had to think of a more realistic approach.

I decided to call a nutritionist my friend Lydia had used, and set up an appointment for Monday. He asked me to keep a food journal of everything I ate over the weekend. I decided once and for all to commit to eating healthy. I have always worked out, but my diet has never been the best, and I knew things were only going to go downhill after thirty. This was my chance to make a change, and I made a commitment to be completely honest about what I was eating. Unfortunately, that Sunday I had to go to a good friend’s baby shower, where there was an abundance of unhealthy food. When I met with Matt, the nutritionist, on Monday morning, I handed him the following list:

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

Friend’s baby shower

17 jalapeño poppers

1 brick of cheddar cheese/12 whole wheat crackers

14 chicken wings/no bleu cheese dressing

1 bagel with low-fat cream cheese

34 strawberries

8 Bloody Marys

14 pigs in blankets

I thought I had made some healthy choices on Friday and Saturday. Obviously Sunday was a complete disaster, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a little proud of the will power I demonstrated when opting for the whole-wheat crackers to go with my brick of cheddar cheese.

I must have repeated that I had been at my friend’s baby shower seven times, and the phrase “I don’t normally eat like that” at least four times. I could tell the nutritionist was repulsed, but I explained to him emphatically that I was ready to commit to being a healthy eater, and that jalapeño poppers were a thing of the past. “I wanted to go out with a bang,” I told him, staring at my stomach with my head hanging down.

He explained to me what clean eating was and had a whole diagram with charts, percentages, a pointer, and a blackboard. The whole presentation was no different than what you’d see on an episode of
CSI: Miami
.

Then Mark weighed me and measured my body fat with a body-fat clipper. I was 131 pounds and 25.2 percent body fat. “Is that good?” I asked him.

“No.”

Mark was about six-two with blond hair on his head, but no hair anywhere else. Not my favorite quality in a man, but I guess when you get down to 1 percent body fat, you’re also required to wax yourself.

We talked for an hour about what I had to do to get lean, and he put together a meal and exercise program for me and showed me how to log on to a website where I would type in every morsel of food that entered my body. I would also have to change up my exercise routine. He explained that since I had been jogging for so many years, I’d plateaued. He suggested that any martial arts or kickboxing would be just the kind of jump start my body needed.

I explained to Mark that I had been kicked out of three separate aerobics classes due to severe motor challenges when moving my arms and legs in different directions.

He seemed suspicious of me and I didn’t want him to think I was making up excuses. I told him about the first time I took a step class, when I hit my neighbor after I had somehow managed in my confusion to step my way over to her step. The first time I backhanded her, the instructor let it slide. The second time, my victim had fallen to the floor and was covering one side of her face when the music came to a screeching halt. I would have been an idiot not to figure out that I had made a major step faux pas.

The last incident was during a class called the Bar Method, which uses ballet bars and poses that focus on concentrated areas. This was the only class I hadn’t been kicked out of due to my spastic hand-eye coordination. But I did get kicked out for giving the instructor the finger.

Mark recommended I try boxing.

“Done,” I told him. “What’s next?”

He then guided me through all my dietary options, like how to replace a yam with four ounces of broccoli if I so desired. “Let’s talk alcohol. Are you with me?” I asked as I pounded one fist on his table.

“No. Alcohol is all sugar,” he replied. I tried to remain calm.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What about vodka?”

“Nope.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Vodka is empty calories, Chelsea. Alcohol is carbs that cannot be used for energy.”

“Well, that’s not true,” I told him. “I get tons of energy when I drink.”

“Vodka turns to sugar, Chelsea, and whatever you’re mixing it with is going to have a lot of sugar.”

“Well, isn’t there anything that doesn’t have sugar that I can mix it with?”

“You can drink it straight, or use fresh lemon juice.”

“I can do that.”

“Chelsea, alcohol slows down your metabolism and is not going to help you get lean. You can have one drink a week, but any more than that is going to bloat you.”

I was left with no choice but to cover my ears and shake my head from side to side. It’s not easy to hear negative stuff about the person closest to you, even if it is true. He had obviously never seen an episode of
Jerry Springer
.

“Listen up, Mark. I am committed to this, but I absolutely must drink more than once a week.”

“How many do you need?”

“Well, I’m a comedian.”

“How many do you need?”

I tried to undershoot in order to sound like I didn’t have a problem. “How about seven?”

“A week?”

“Yes.”

“No,” he responded. “You can have two drinks a week. Vodka with lemon juice and that is it.”

I was silent. My eyes watered and I looked away to avoid Mark’s gaze. I didn’t want him to see me get emotional this early in our relationship, but the things he was saying were hurtful, and there was no denying that.

I decided on the way home from my visit with Mark that I would just not allow myself to drink as much as I’d like. Something had to be done about my body, and it needed to be done in time for my thirtieth birthday.

I drove straight to a kickboxing gym around the corner from my house and bought fifteen classes on the spot. I explained to the woman at the front desk that I could only focus on one body region at a time. I could box or I could kick, but I would not be able to do both at the same time. She suggested I take private lessons with a trainer until I felt ready to join a group class.

“Would that mean that I wouldn’t have to clap at the end of the class?” I asked her. “Because I would really like to avoid that.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she informed me.

“Great, let’s get this party started,” I told her as I triumphantly kicked out one leg and knocked over the table next to me. “Sorry.”

I met my personal trainer, Brad, and he was very patient with me. He told me he would incorporate the kicking part only when he felt I was ready. He understood my desire not to be humiliated in front of an entire class again. Surprisingly, boxing turned out to be fun, and something I could actually do.

Three weeks and six drinks later, I went for my third weighin. I had lost 4 percent body fat and three pounds. I felt amazing, had more energy than I’d ever had in my life, and was now a believer that muscle does indeed take up less space than fat. I didn’t care about only losing three pounds because I could see a major difference in my body. I noticed little muscle lines down the side of my stomach starting to form a two-pack.

This diet was actually working. No diet had ever worked for me in my life. I was the only one of my friends who had tried the Atkins diet and gained four pounds. Not to mention that after being on it for a week straight, my apartment, car, and all of my clothes smelled like a cheeseburger. Up until I met Mark, I was convinced I was having the same life experience with food that Paula Abdul was having with her meds. We were both hanging on by a thread.

I was practically skipping out the door of Mark’s office after I jumped into his arms and wrapped my legs around him, elated. “I love you!” I screamed. I knew I still had a little way to go before I’d be where I wanted, but I was just thrilled to know that I had stuck to a program that was actually working.

My boxing classes with Brad were amazing. He told me that I had a lot of resentment inside, and this was a great way to get in shape and also take out all of the anger I had stored about Pearl Harbor.

I would leave class so pumped up that I’d walk onto the street almost hoping to get mugged. I knew I could kick some serious ass and had dreams of heading downtown to an unsafe neighborhood just to test out my mad skillz.

Once in my car after class, I called my sister, my mother, and Lydia to tell them the great news. After not one of those people answered their phone, I decided I would celebrate with a coffee from Starbucks. This was definitely a “new me.” Just weeks earlier, if I had cause to celebrate, I would have headed straight to the nearest California Pizza Kitchen and ordered two spinach and artichoke dips back-to-back.

I walked in, decided to treat myself to a Frappuccino instead of my standard nonfat cappuccino, and then, before I knew it, I also ordered a turkey pesto sandwich, a coffee cake, a rocky-road brownie, one raspberry arugula salad, a fruit-and-cheese plate, three chocolate-covered graham crackers, and a chocolate-chip muffin. “Fuck it,” I said to the Samoan woman working the counter. “I’m going to town.”

I gathered up all of my purchases and bounced right out to my car to head home. I got a picnic blanket out of my closet that I had inherited from my former roommate Cameltoe, spread it on the bed and put on the lobster bib that came with it, and then got under the covers, turned on Lifetime, and dove headfirst into my rocky-road brownie. After shoveling all my perishables down my trachea, and on the heels of my third chocolate-covered graham cracker, I decided I wanted to vacuum, which was disappointing since my apartment is covered in Spanish tile. Then I thought about masturbating, but remembered my vibrator was in the shop. I had a ridiculous amount of energy and needed an outlet for it. I had to do something. I couldn’t sit in bed, so I got up, went into the kitchen, and got out my mop.