Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me - Chelsea's Family, Friends [59]
“Are you seriously crying?”
“I’ll be right back,” the waiter said and left.
“Okay, Shana, let’s hit it. Grab your shit and nonchalantly walk to the beach,” Chelsea whispered. Over my shoulder I could see our waiter with two large security guards on either side of him heading toward our spot. They were both ridiculously overweight, so I wasn’t worried about outrunning them, but I wasn’t fast enough for Chelsea. “Step it up! They are onto us!” They started running after us, but we were able to lose them fairly quickly.
That was too much excitement for me already, but when you’re with Chelsea, there’s always more to come. We found a nice spot on the beach, and Chelsea said we were both looking pretty pale and should forgo the sunscreen to get a jump on our tans. She also forced me to join her in having a piña colada, which resulted in our quickly falling asleep for a few hours. We spent the next two days holed up in our crappy hotel room treating extremely severe cases of sunburn. We were in agony and were ridiculously red. Chelsea rationed off a few Percocet she had been saving for a rainy day and we watched a marathon of Lifetime movies until we reemerged.
Day four was, much to my sister’s dismay, luau time. Chelsea was bitching about it all day, but I had already paid for it and wasn’t about to let her forget that. Besides, I had a feeling I was going to meet Prince Charming there.
When we boarded the bus, though, it appeared as if we had just been admitted to a nursing home.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Chelsea said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “What kind of luau is this? There isn’t a single person on this bus under seventy. Shana, you signed us up for a senior citizens’ luau? You are such a moron. I will never go anywhere with you ever again, do you understand me? And good fucking luck finding your soul mate.”
After she calmed down a bit, she decided to have a little fun and make me pay. She put her arm around my shoulder and struck up a conversation with the ladies across the aisle. “Hi y’all! I’m Fannie and this here is Bertha, my lesbian lover. We are just so doggone happy to be going on this trip. Are you two ladies together, too? This is the lesbian luau, right?”
I knew I was turning different shades of fuchsia because my red was all used up.
All night long, Chelsea told anyone who would listen stories about how we’d met and what our hobbies were. The stories were absolutely ludicrous, and every time she said “Bertha,” I stiffened up. She told one couple that we’d met at the Junior Olympics when we were both on the young women’s high dive team. She interspersed all of this banter with a quick kiss on my lips, and whenever I refused, she pinched me severely under the table. I am sure it was pretty rewarding for her to see me so unnerved.
I didn’t think she could keep up this charade, but as the night wore on she was clearly getting into it; I noticed her lesbian accent was improving greatly. She had gathered quite a crowd around her for her description of our “African safari” trip the year before to visit a special lesbian animal reserve. The highlight of that fake trip was her saving my life. I was supposedly picked up in the trunk of a lesbian elephant. The elephant wouldn’t put me down, and started to trot off with me, while I screamed and cried. Everyone in the luau group was staring at me incredulously. Then Chelsea topped it off with “I just had to save her any way I could. Bertha was my soul mate, and so I ran after that elephant and launched a gourd at its ass, and that was that. Bertha tumbled to the ground like a house of cards.” The tale was just preposterous, and as per usual, I was at a total loss for words. Chelsea was so good at telling the story that these