Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me - Chelsea's Family, Friends [29]
My bodily twitches are always morphing. There is the constant teeth grinding and jaw clenching, and, currently, I’m gnawing on the inside of my left cheek, which is causing a widening wound that’s the size of Kate Gosselin’s vagina. I also blink my eyes rapidly, drying them out, and flex the veins in my neck, which makes me look like a Velociraptor. Or at least a Velociraptor that’s had a stroke and whose mouth is pulled back at the side. It’s really unattractive… especially when I’m making love.
In fifth grade I got in trouble once for raising my eyebrows—my twitch of choice at the time—at my teacher. She thought I was flirting with her. How she even thought that, I will never know. I was (and still am) a clean freak, and she was a hippie teacher who worked in the Peace Corps in Nepal and had hairy underarms. Fucking gross… and that’s just concerning the Peace Corps.
My twitches aren’t lost on Chelsea. She thinks they are hilarious and is constantly noting new ones. But rather than being sympathetic, she attempts to mimic the twitch for comedic effect. She’ll usually do this when I come into her office to talk about something personal or request a day off. In the middle of a serious conversation she will start squinting her eyes uncontrollably and exaggeratedly and then start gnawing on her lower lip.
Now that you understand my emotional fragility, you can better assess the psychological toll Chelsea and her lies take on me and my weak mental state. I’m incredibly insecure, and she has no trouble exploiting that.
In truth, her lies start innocently enough, kind of like one of those guys pretending to be a teenage girl in a chat room. At a party once, she said she was going to the bathroom and hadn’t returned after twenty minutes. I thought she was taking a massive dump, but she had slipped out the back door. At another gathering, she insisted on driving me home because I was “too drunk,” but she just wanted to get away from a creepy guy who was trying to aggressively pet her. Turns out, she ended up dating that “creepy guy” for four years.
Don’t get me wrong. Her lies can be hilarious, but not when you’re the poor pawn in her cruel game. Just this past year several of us were on a vacation in Napa Valley. My wife, Shannon, and I were staying with my parents at their home, while Chelsea, Johnny Kansas, and the Texas lesbians were staying at a high-end luxury resort. Their hotel had a strict “no dog” policy, which Chelsea found out when she called to reserve the room and inquired about bringing her dog, Chunk. She felt so bad about leaving Chunk at home most every weekend while on tour, so despite the resort’s policy, she opted to bring him that weekend anyway.
Chunk was sneaked into her room and didn’t cause a problem until the final night. After a debauched evening of drinking and smoking weed provided to us by one of the resort employees, we got hungry at around two in the morning and ordered some room service. Too high to recall the stringent no-pet policy—and too hungry to care—we carelessly opened the door without any concern when room service arrived. No one seemed to remember that a large, dopey German shepherd/chow mutt might alarm hotel staff. Chunk, clearly not aware of the anti-pet policy, trotted into the main room of the suite to greet the server and inquire about his own order.
“Is this your dog?” the hotel employee inquired.
The rest of us were dumbfounded, entirely ill equipped to answer the question. We’d been busted. No way out of this. I picked up my iPhone and started dialing the local cab company, knowing we were about to get kicked to the curb and that none of us would be able to drive back to my parents’ house in our condition. But Chelsea didn’t miss a beat.