Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me - Chelsea's Family, Friends [49]
How did she end up with an asshole like me? No idea.
My wife, Beth, and Chelsea in NYC.
Sometimes I feel bad bringing her around my jerk-off friends because we are all such assholes. Our idea of fun is hurling insults at one another and pulling pranks that have a good possibility to humiliate. So when I started bringing her around Chelsea and the gang, I thought, This might get ugly.
Things were fine for a while, until one day when we were all hanging out at Chelsea’s and somebody brought up the Lakers. As soon as Chelsea heard the word Lakers, she said, “Oh yeah, I just won fifty thousand dollars on that game last night.” This is her thing. Whenever someone brings up a sports team, she talks about how much money she won on a game they played in. Every single time.
My wife then said, “Fifty thousand dollars? Oh my god, Chelsea. That’s amazing.”
And that’s when Chelsea smelled blood.
Let me say, first of all, that Chelsea Handler does not know one thing about sports. Totally retarded. Wait, I take that back, she knows one thing: the 1986 New York Mets. And I have to admit, she’s kind of a genius the way she uses them. Since it’s the only sports team she knows anything about, she brings it up in any sports-related conversation to make people think that she has a clue. She doesn’t.
I picked up on this one day when I heard her reference the team for the one hundredth time. I said to her, “You don’t know shit about sports, do you?”
She said, “Of course, I do. Didn’t you just hear what I said about the Mets?”
“That’s the only team you ever talk about when people bring up sports.”
Beat. Chelsea then walked away in her usual style—pretending to text. This is what she does when she’s been caught at a lie and doesn’t have the energy to maintain it. There is no way a person texts as much as Chelsea pretends to. It is just one more way for her to ignore and hide from the people she so often disappoints.
So when Chelsea realized that there was someone in the mix who didn’t know that she was full of shit, she went in for the kill. She told my wife at a party that she’d won more than five hundred thousand dollars the year before gambling and that she bet on games every weekend.
“That’s incredible,” Beth said. “So, do you bet on everything?”
“Pretty much,” Chelsea said. “I call my bookie once or twice a week. Last year I won so much that for tax purposes, I had to hide half a million dollars under my mattress. My business manager had me sit out last football season and I had to miss the play-offs. I’d never been more irate in my life.”
I really believe that when Chelsea spins stories like this, she’s almost waiting for you to call “bullshit.” She pushes and pushes, expecting you at some point to tell her that she’s full of crap and then she just moves on to the next target.
Back to that evening at Chelsea’s house. After Beth believed her story about winning fifty thousand bucks, Chelsea got up and walked away, asking if anyone needed a drink. This was when my wife looked at me with her eyes as big as quarters and said, “Is that true?”
She turned to me to tell her the truth. She turned to me to lead her down the right path. She turned to me, and do you know what I said?
“Absolutely.”
Fuck. Wait, what did I just say? Did I really just say “absolutely”? What was I thinking? I’ll tell you what I was thinking, and it’s an answer I think I gave a little earlier.
I’m an asshole.
Look, I love my wife—have her name tattooed on my finger—but I just couldn’t help myself. It was instinct. And I know some of you are thinking, It’s your instinct to lie? No, that’s not it at all, and that’s what makes people like me different. The instinct