Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (6 page)

I climbed up on my bed and put my head down on the pillow, which had the consistency of a pancake. I placed my sandwich under it for extra support.

“You not gonna eat that?” asked a frosted blond-haired white woman in the top bunk next to mine, her mouth full of the sandwich she was already gnawing on.

“Do you want it?” I asked, jumping at the opportunity to make a friend.

“Shit, I’ll take it,” she said, and put out her hand. Her name was Lucille.

“What are you in for?” I asked her.

“Murder.”

The notion that someone who used a fake I.D. was put in a bed next to a killer was not lost on me. What kind of operation were they running here? I suddenly realized that this was what people were referring to with the phrase “hard time.”

I searched my mind for the correct lingo to converse with a murderer. “Who’d you knock off?” I asked nonchalantly, trying to hide my fear by picking in between my toes and then smelling my fingers.

“My sister, the cunt,” she said.

“Really? I’m thinking about killing mine,” I told her as coolly as I could.

“Yeah, sister was a cunt, slept with my man.”

“Did you kill the guy?”

“Nah, didn’t get the chance, would’ve though,” she said as she piled my whole sandwich into her mouth in one sweep.

“Right.” I nodded. I didn’t want to pry, yet I wanted to know how this frosted-blond petite woman murdered her sister and where in her body she was storing the two sandwiches she had just demolished. She couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred pounds and she was about five-foot-six. This woman/ killer was a testament to my theory that the crazier you are, the more calories you burn. That’s why psychos are always so skinny.

“The best sandwiches are around Thanksgiving. That’s when they use the real shit,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be here over Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” she told me.

“No, really.” I told her. “I’m Jewish.”

“Lights out in ten minutes. Lights out in ten minutes!” someone announced over the loudspeaker. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom since that morning before I got on the bus, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it in much longer. I had seen an open area that looked like a bathroom near the information booth, which I had made a personal pact with myself to try and avoid. I thought I could hold it if I didn’t ingest any liquids.

“Do you want to go to the bathroom together?” I asked Lucille.

“Sure.” She smiled. “I’ll go to the bathroom with you. Ain’t nobody gonna bother you.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” I lied. “I play karate. I’m a black belt.” I wanted to trust Lucille, but knew if she had turned on her own sister, the chances of her turning on me were pretty strong. I wanted her to know that if it came down to it, I could protect myself. “I’ve done time before,” I added as we headed toward the bathroom.

“Yeah, where?” Lucille asked.

I searched my mind trying to think of another prison. “Alcatraz.”

“Fuck.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I told her. There were a few stalls in the bathroom as well as some open seating, but I opted for some privacy. The first stall I walked into looked like someone had just had a miscarriage. I walked out and chose the next one. I peed for about three minutes straight and when I came out of the stall, Lucille was sitting on a toilet taking a dump.

“Hold on,” she said with her teeth clenched. “I’m just finishing up.” This was obviously how she stayed so thin: She immediately shit out any food she consumed.

“Hand me some toilet paper.”

I grabbed some tissue and handed it to my new best friend.

After she wiped her ass, she pulled up her pants and headed back out to the main room. I wanted her to wash her hands, but didn’t want to be bossy. “I’m just gonna wash my hands,” I said, hoping she would take the hint. Instead, she took a menthol cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.

We walked back to our respective bunks and hopped in. I laid my head down facing Lucille, wondering if she was my prison soul mate. I was starting to understand the tales of lesbianism you hear on the outside. It made perfect sense that without any men around, women had only two options: weight-lifting or other women. I wondered if Lucille and I would have a wedding ceremony by our bunk beds or in the cafeteria. I would be so skinny by that time from all this self-starvation that I could probably fit into any gown my heart desired. Maybe Lucille and I could even fit into the same gown.

I wasn’t really attracted to her, but I had on occasion slept with guys I wasn’t attracted to, and figured there wouldn’t be a huge difference. I stared at her as she mashed her cigarette out on the side of her bedpost. “So, how did you kill your sister?” I asked, trying to make small-talk with my future bride.

“With a hammer,” she replied. “Took the bitch a good forty minutes to finally die.”

I was not prepared for that response. My body immediately went into shock. It was everything I could do not to vomit. The only other time my body had this reaction was when I was ten years old and my next door neighbor pulled down his pants and showed me his penis. But even then, I was less taken aback. I leaned my head over the edge of my bed gagging, but nothing was coming out. I knew this was not the appropriate reaction to Lucille’s declaration. I put my hand up to say I was okay until moments later, when I finally stopped heaving.

Lucille was sitting on her bed looking at me. I racked my brain trying to come up with an excuse for my reaction, but was so thrown off-guard, I just put my head back down on my pillow and said, “We should definitely keep in touch after I leave tomorrow.” Then I rolled over and cried myself to sleep. I thought about how lucky my sister was that Lucille wasn’t in our family. I wanted to hug Sloane tightly and tell her, “You stupid, stupid girl, do you know that under no circumstance would I ever hammer you?”

I woke up very early the next morning and opened my eyes. I looked around the room trying to think of a situation that could be any worse than this, and decided that the only thing that could be worse than prison was the navy. I looked over and Lucille wasn’t in her bed. I grabbed my bag of toiletries and went straight to the bathroom. I had to pee and I desperately needed to floss.

Once I was done washing my hands, I heard my name being called over the loudspeaker along with five or six others. “Finally!” I exclaimed, and ran over to the glass booth, where a guard was waiting with a clipboard. I stood there while we waited for the other girls called to find their way over, thinking about how thin I felt. One more day of this, and my stomach would officially be concave. I loved it. Once the others arrived, the guard led us out a door, down a hall, and down two flights of stairs into what looked like a principal’s office.

My name was called rather quickly and I went into the office, sitting down across from a Latino woman in her forties.

“Hi,” I said, with a bounce in my step.

“Hi, Miss…Handler?” she said, looking up at me with what I took to be sympathy. Finally.

“Yup, that’s me,” I said, shaking my head at the injustice of it all.

“Okay, there are a couple of options. Do you have any special skills?”

“Skills? Not really, no. I’m good at reading, I can type pretty fast…. I’m not sure what you’re asking me?” I asked, confused.

“Well, you’re here for work placement, so there are different things to choose from: You could work in the kitchen, or you could work in the industrial shop, where you could make anything from license plates to wooden wind chimes, or you can enroll in school and get your GED.”

“What are you talking about? No, no, no…I’m not working here, you don’t seem to understand. First of all, I am supposed to be getting bailed out this morning. I do not want a job making wood chimes or fixing cars, and I already graduated from high school…barely, but I did, so I don’t need a GED! I want to go home! I just want to go home! What exactly is the problem with you people?”

“Listen, Miss Handler, everyone thinks they are going home. But the reality of the situation is that eighty-five percent of the inmates booked end up spending a minimum of six months here, and if you want to start earning money, the best thing for you to do is get a job.”

That was it. I stood up and placed my hands on her desk. “Listen up, miracle ear,” I told her. “I spoke to my aunt last night, and she has already paid the money to get me out, okay? I am waiting for them to release me any minute. That is the situation. So for all I care, you can put my name down to plant prison flowers, or style inmates’ hair, or head up the women’s fucking field hockey team. I am not staying here!”

“Next,” she said as she shuffled some paperwork. I walked outside her office and sat down. I was incensed and I also really wanted my mommy. Why wasn’t anyone getting the fact that I would not be taking up permanent residence in a women’s prison?

I looked up at the ceiling. “Are you there, vodka? It’s me, Chelsea. Please get me out of jail and I promise I will never drink again. Drink and drive. I will never drink and drive again. I may even start my own group fashioned after MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but I’ll call it AWLTDASH, Alcoholics Who Like to Drink and Stay Home.”

When we were taken back to the main room, there weren’t many women there. Apparently it was breakfast time, but I opted to go back to bed. As I climbed back into my bunk, I wondered how much weight I had lost already. Would people even recognize me when I was released?

I daydreamed about what it would be like when my father finally saw what my body had been reduced to; I even considered shaving my head for a more dramatic effect. “You have no idea what it was like, Dad. Some of the stuff…I just can’t even say….” I would take long pauses while looking down and shaking my head. I would imply that there was penetration, possibly sodomy, if not only to play the sympathy card for years to come, but also to remind everyone that my sister was an alien and needed to be excommunicated from our family.

I dozed off and was awakened moments later by Lucille smacking me in the face. “No! Noooooo!” I screamed.

“Your name. They’re calling your name to be released.”

My eyes lit up bigger than the first time I had seen Jon Bon Jovi perform live. I jumped off the bed and started to run toward the booth.

“Wait!” Lucille yelled. “Aren’t you even going to say good-bye?”

I turned and ran back to give her a hug, but was dumbstruck when she planted her lips directly on top of mine and held them. My arms fell to my side and I waited for her to finish kissing me. There were hoots and hollers coming from the women around us, and one of them yelled out, “Hammertime’s got a girlfriend! Hammertime’s got a girlfriend!”

“I’ll e-mail you,” I said as I slowly backed away.

“Barbie’s going home to her daddy,” a large black woman with dreadlocks yelled as I was taken by an officer out of the room and downstairs to an outbooking room, where I was handed a bag filled with the clothes I had come in wearing.

Twenty minutes later I walked out the doors of Los Angeles County Women’s Prison, otherwise known as Sybil Brand Correctional Facility, into the bright sunlight. I wondered who exactly Sybil Brand was and who she had pissed off in order to have an entire women’s prison named after her. I made a mental note to google her later.

I saw Lydia’s car parked at the far end of a circular driveway. Upon seeing me, she and my friend Ivory jumped out and started running toward me with their arms outstretched, like a scene out of
Chariots of Fire
. “Thank God I’m alive!” I cried. “Thank God I’m alive.”

The whole way to the car, Lydia and Ivory were telling me how horrible the past thirty-six hours had been for them and how they both had to call in sick to the restaurant where we all worked.

“Does everyone know I was in jail?” I asked.

“Yeah, Chelsea,” Ivory said. “We got together a fund and everyone chipped in. Even Hermano the busboy. We were worried your aunt wasn’t going to get the money fast enough, so we started asking everyone.”

“How much did you get?” I asked her.

“Fifty-five dollars.”

“None of us are ever driving drunk again,” Lydia said. “We are all taking taxis from now on…well, for a while anyway.”

“I don’t want you guys to be jealous,” I told them, trying to distract myself from the fact that they could only raise fifty-five dollars on my behalf, “but I’ve made a new friend and her name is Lucille. We’ve already kissed on the mouth.”

“Oh my God,” Lydia exclaimed looking back at me. “Were you raped?”

“Face raped,” I proclaimed as I got in the passenger seat of Lydia’s car. I wanted to get home as soon as possible and weigh myself.

I went to court about three months later, when I was given my sentence: five hundred hours of community service, a fine of twenty-five hundred dollars, and three months of DUI school.

My favorite of the three was DUI school. The instructor was a small Asian man who repeated one thing at the beginning and end of each class: Under no circumstances, when being pulled over by the police, do you admit to having had anything to drink. Advice I would have valued much more had I received it months prior to getting my DUI. But still I valued it all the same.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bladder Stones

I
was visiting my parents in New Jersey for a three-day break during my first book tour, and I had just come from the car wash, where I had taken their minivan to be disinfected. My parents are two of the most unsanitary people I know. They will leave fast-food bags, soda cans, coffee cups, and perishable items in their car for weeks at a time. When my father picked me up from the airport, there was a half-eaten apple rolling around on the floor mat, a melted chocolate bar stuck to the passenger seat, and a small order of McDonald’s french fries in the glove compartment.

“I have an idea, Chels,” my father said to me as I walked in the door. “I think you should start your own clothing company but only design thongs and lingerie.”

My sister Sloane was sitting on the couch playing with her new baby girl, Charley, while our dog Whitefoot looked on in disgust. With every baby my brothers and sisters had, our dog became more and more depressed.

“He’s been talking about it for the last two hours,” Sloane said as she rolled her eyes. “He also wants you to write on all the clothes
‘I’M A CHELSEA GIRL
.’”

“Whaddya think, love? We could really rake in the big bucks,” my father went on. “You’ve got a great sense of style, and with a shape like yours, you could also model the stuff.”

“Why would I design clothing?” I asked.

“Why would she design clothing?” he asked the air and then Whitefoot, as if the answer was so obvious, even the dog would know. “Why
wouldn’t
you design clothing, is the real question. You’ve got a huge fan base.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Sloane said. “Not big enough to launch a clothing line.”

“A lingerie line, goddammit! A lingerie line!” he yelled.

My father is always yelling for no apparent reason. He yells at unsuspecting people all the time, but his favorite person to yell at is Sloane, who usually responds with a “what the fuck is your problem?” look.

“Calm down, Melvin,” my mother chimed in, as she emptied an entire box of Carr’s crackers into Whitefoot’s bowl along with some freshly made egg salad. Whitefoot’s “bowl” is a stainless-steel baking tray. My parents are under the impression that our dog is Edward Scissorhands and can somehow manage to put the egg salad on top of the cracker and enjoy it like a human.

“Don’t give him the pepper crackers,” my father said. “He only likes the plain ones. The pepper ones give him gas.”

I looked over at Sloane, who was rubbing her temples.

“Anyway, back to the thongs,” my father continued. “We’ll have your sister Sidney run the company—”

“Can you please stop using the word ‘thong’?” Sloane said, with her eyes now closed. “How do you even know what a thong is?”

“Yeah, Melvin,” my mother added. “How do you know what a thong is?”

“Oh, come on! Thongs are the new bloomers. What are you girls, living in the dark ages? All the girls are wearing them; Chelsea’s been wearing them for years. Sylvia, I wouldn’t mind seeing you in one,” he said, looking at my mother with his bowling-ball head tilted to the side and an enormous grin on his face. Suddenly Whitefoot started to bark uncontrollably and run back and forth from the front door to the living room while we were seated.

“That’s the mailman,” my father said as Charley began to wail. “Whitefoot, quiet!”

“Ugh, that dog has some serious problems,” Sloane said, as she picked Charley up. “You need to send him to a dog trainer.”

“He has a little social anxiety, that’s all. You don’t send a ten-year-old dog to obedience school,” my dad screamed over the dog’s barking. “It’s just not done.”

“No,
you
don’t do it,” my mother said in her most argumentative voice, which is about a half an octave lower than her regular voice.

“The mailman comes here every day,” Sloane said. “You’d think the dog would figure that out by now. He’s so stupid.”

“He’s not stupid, he’s just depressed! But he’s a good Jewish doggy who’s very loyal, isn’t that right, Whitefoot? Goddammit, Whitefoot, come here and shut up! Sylvia, look and see if that’s the mailman.”

“No,” she said, looking in the direction of the front door. “I don’t think so.”

“Dad, how are you supposed to fit ‘I’m a Chelsea girl?’ on a thong?” my sister asked him once Whitefoot also realized it wasn’t the mailman and had quieted down.

“We’ll put it on the front.”

“And who’s going to run this company?” Sloane asked. “JLo?”

“Nah, I don’t like the stuff JLo’s coming out with. Too trashy. Something a little more sophisticated. You and your sisters will design the garments and I will make all the executive decisions.”

“Yeah, you seem to have created quite a prolific empire with your used-car company; the obvious next move would be to branch out into women’s lingerie,” I told him.

“There she goes again, beating up on her daddy. You hear this, Sylvia?” he yelled to my mother, who was standing three feet away, ironing a pair of my father’s sweatpants.

“What are you ironing, Mom?” Sloane asked her.

“Dad’s sweatpants,” my mother said with a groan.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, it’s not slave labor. She likes it when I have the creases in the front.”

“No, Melvin, I told you I would prefer you to wear slacks but you insist on wearing sweatpants, and if you’re going to wear them, I at least want them to be ironed.”

“I look good in sweats,” my father proclaimed. “Besides, I can’t keep my slacks on with this extra weight.” The “extra weight” my father was referring to has been there for thirty years.

My two-hundred-fifty-pound father then proceeded to try and get up off the couch, which took three false starts. When he did get up, he called out to Whitefoot. “Let’s go, Whitefoot, you wanna go to the bathroom?” He walked over to the sliding-glass door that leads to our backyard and went outside with Whitefoot. While the dog lifted his leg, my dad chose to simply face the woods and pee in our backyard.

“Mom, I don’t want Charley to come over here if Dad is just going to pee anywhere he feels like it and then not wash his hands,” Sloane said.

“He’s got those bladder stones, Sloane. When he has to go, he has to go,” she said.

“I understand that, but it wouldn’t take him any longer to walk to the bathroom than it does to walk outside, Mom,” Sloane accurately pointed out. My father complains about these bladder stones on a regular basis but refuses to get the operation needed to remedy the situation because it involves sticking a small tube into his penis.

“Just be happy he’s not peeing in the driveway anymore, Sloane. It took me months to get him to go in the back. And to wear suspenders.”

“The suspenders are an improvement, Mom,” Sloane told her. “At least he doesn’t walk around holding his pants up with his hands anymore. You have to make sure he keeps wearing them.”

The problem with the suspenders my mother bought for him is that he hasn’t adjusted the straps since he got them. So instead of attaching somewhere around his midsection, the suspenders clip onto his pants three inches below his nipples. Now picture the suspenders attached to a pair of sweatpants. This vision is what first led me to coin the term “camel balls.”

My father came back inside and headed straight for Charley. “Hold up, Dad,” Sloane interceded. “You need to go wash your hands. Pronto.”

He looked at my sister as if she had asked him for heroin. My mother then took the spray water bottle she was using to iron and sprayed my father in the face. “Melvin, you know you have to wash your hands when the babies are here.”

My mother likes to pretend that she’s on top of the hygiene factor because my brothers and sisters are always dropping their kids off with her, but the truth of the matter is, my mother isn’t washing her hands all that much either. My mother is European and likes to remind us of that every time any of us ask her when she took her last shower.

My father returned from the bathroom holding up his hands to show us the water dripping. “All clean.” Then he came back and sat on the couch across from Charley, chanting her name but not pronouncing the letter
r
, so it sounded like “Chahley.” He does this slowly but loudly about fifteen times in a row at random intervals throughout the day while my sister sits with her eyes closed.

The phone rang and my mother looked around, startled, as if a helicopter had just landed on our roof. “Telephone!” my father yelled out. Not only can neither one of them ever find the actual phone, but on the rare occasion when they succeed, the battery is almost sure to be dead, or the answering machine has already picked up. I’ve never had a phone conversation with either one of my parents when the answering machine didn’t pick up or I didn’t hear static. “Where is the goddamned phone, Sylvia?” my father asked her.

“Look in between the cushions,” my mother said, as she ran around the room like she was trying to catch a mosquito. “Here it is,” she said, as she picked up at the same time as the answering machine. “Hold on,” she told the person as I got up and unplugged the answering machine. “It’s for you, Melvin; it’s the manager at Shop Rite.”

“Aha. This is Melvin…. Yes, sir…. Okay then. Very good.”
Click.
The dial tone is the only indication to any caller (myself included) that the phone call is over. “All right, everything’s all set. You have a book signing Monday morning at the Shop Rite,” he said, looking in my direction. My sister started to perk up—she found this new development very amusing. Her eyes were still closed, but a large smile had emerged on her face and her shoulders were shaking.

“Now, how are we gonna get the books?” he asked.

“First of all, Dad, I’m not doing a book signing at a grocery store. Second, we can’t just have the publisher overnight us books; it takes a couple of days,” I told him.

“Well then, call Amazon,” he said.

“You can’t call Amazon, Dad, you have to order them online and it’s not like they just hot-air balloon them over. Furthermore, I’m not signing books at a grocery store. Who’s even going to show up?” I asked him.

“I’ll print up flyers,” he said, which caused my sister to spit up a little bit.

“Print up flyers?” Sloane asked him. “You can barely use the telephone.”

“Where am I going to sign the books, anyway?” I asked. “In the produce section?”

“Really, Melvin, I don’t know if that’s really Chelsea’s audience,” my mother chimed in.

“What about the car wash?”

“No,” I said.

“How about the deli?”

“No.”

“I sold three at the Starbucks the other day.”

“To who?” my sister asked.

“To customers, Sloane! Who do you think? I told them my daughter is a bestselling author and she’s a graduate from Livingston High School and they should buy the book. I’ve been a salesman for forty-some odd years. You don’t think I know how to move a couple of books?”

“Well, if you’re such a good salesman, why don’t you sell some of those cars in the driveway?” my mother chimed in.

My parents fight about two things: the ten to fifteen cars my father has had parked in the driveway for more than ten years, and his eating habits. My parents live in a nice neighborhood, and my father doesn’t seem to understand why our neighbors are continually calling the police to report him for having too many cars in our driveway.

“Oh, here she goes,” he says, looking at my sister and me. “Listen, right now my focus is on Chelsea and the book. I’ve got a lot of plans. How about doing a signing at Best Buy? God knows they’ve got the equipment for a speech.”

“I turned to Sloane and asked her if she wanted to see a movie.”

“Oh yeah,” said Sloane, immediately perking up. “Let’s go see
Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
”

“Excuse me?” I replied disgustedly.

“I’m dying to see that movie.”

“If you think I’m going to go give those two homewreckers my money, you’ve completely lost your marbles. I will never go see another Angelina Jolie movie again.”

“Oh, please,” she said, groaning.

“Oh, please, nothing!” I told her. “I will not support the two of them. The only temptation, obviously, would be a third installment of
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
. But I think I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Please,” she begged, “I really want to see it.”

“Absolutely not,” I told her. “It’s either happy hour, or we can go see
Herbie Fully Loaded
.”

“I’m not going to happy hour,” Sloane said. “I have a baby.”

My sister had been using this baby excuse ever since she had the kid, and it was starting to get on my nerves. “Oh, would you shut up with the baby already?” I said. “That’s all you ever say anymore, as if you’re the only one in the world who’s ever had a baby. I could have a baby too…if I had gone through with any of my pregnancies.”

“Chelsea,” my mother said, with the same look she reserves for me whenever I tell my sister that the back of her baby’s head is flat.

“I’ll take a baked potato,” my father blurted out, the same way an attorney would yell “objection” in a courtroom.

“Here, Melvin,” my mother said as she handed my dad his freshly ironed yellow sweatpants. “Please put these on.”

“And not out here,” Sloane added.

“Aren’t there any regular pants you can put on?” I asked my dad. “I really don’t think sweatpants are a good look for the outdoors. Especially on you.”

“They’re the only thing I can fit into right now, love; why can’t you just accept your daddy the way he is?”

“Because, you’re not the biggest man on the planet, Dad. There are other men who seem to find pants that fit them.”

“What if I wear a tie?” he asked.

“Sloane, dear, how about some fresh grapes?” my mother asked in a voice more appropriate for a six-year-old.

“I’ll take some grapes,” my father called out. You’d think my father was stapled to the couch the way he barks out orders, but the simple truth of the matter is that he’s entirely too top-heavy to make a clean sweep from the sofa to the kitchen without knocking something over.