Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me - Chelsea's Family, Friends [77]
These encounters were par for the course and they went on ad infinitum. It was a pleasure. Chelsea used the CPA office as a sort of tree house escape from our regular house. Inexplicably, no one really questioned why an overly developed teenage girl was there during working hours, and most of my coworkers got used to her presence.
On a few occasions, when I worked alone past midnight and long after everyone else had left, Chelsea would pass out on an empty couch in a partner’s office, presumably after stealing all of the desk change first. Sometimes she would leave early without telling me and walk the half mile back home alone. Sometimes, not realizing she was passed out on one of the couches, I would leave without her. That was a small problem, because one time she accidentally activated the security alarm when she tried to escape the locked office and ran back to the house in full criminal mode. Fun stuff, especially when you’re a twelve-year-old girl.
When I worked late and nobody else was there, Chelsea would walk around the office making phone calls to friends and family from people’s desks. Sometimes my work buddies knew Chelsea was there and they’d call in just to talk to her. Stan the homosexual had no personal life and he would often call in to speak to Chelsea in a lame attempt to psychoanalyze her. Chelsea would proceed to psychoanalyze him and tell him to get a fucking life. They would then proceed to give each other the silent treatment over the phone for about thirty minutes before one of them hung up. Deranged? Certainly, but refreshing nevertheless. Stan still talks about those phone calls.
I was particularly friendly with coworkers Marco, Mitch, and Ross, since we all were in our early twenties and liked to drink, smoke pot, and try to meet girls on the weekends. In fact, there were plenty of other twentysomething aspiring accountants in the company and they all joined in on the frivolity; it was more or less like one big happy fraternity. Most of us played on the company softball team together and got drunk afterward, and went to the same big alcohol-cocaine-pot-fueled house parties and got absolutely wasted. Chelsea would sometimes accompany me to those parties. Hey, why not let your underage high school sister tag along for some wholesome fun?
Obviously I wasn’t the most responsible brother Chelsea could have had, but it would be too much for me to shoulder the blame for her errant behavior. She was going to do what she wanted. She was on a mission, and that mission was to party and meet men.
Chelsea spent several summers with her insane girlfriend Nicole rampaging through the house party scene on the island playground that is Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t know exactly what they did, except that they were always cheerfully drunk and slept very late. They worked as waitresses at the local restaurants; in exchange for good customer service, they managed to systematically ingratiate themselves with their customers for the specific purpose of being invited to all the alcohol-fueled house parties that might be occurring anywhere on the Vineyard. In spite of their very teenage DNA, they somehow came off as legitimate, albeit somewhat fermented, twenty-two-year-old women who were trying and wildly succeeding at having a good fucking time.
Chelsea at a teenage beauty pageant. She was fourteen in this picture.
My mother and father had essentially abandoned any further parental supervision, since that was the equivalent of trying to paint the ocean; it couldn’t be done and it had never worked and they were tired anyway. Besides, our mother, Rita, was busy most of the time reading nine-hundred-page books and befriending strangers she met at the A&P. The best strategy for raising Chelsea was to hope for no disasters while endlessly shaking your head in disbelief at her daily encounters with the neighborhood watch, at the confused victims of her prolific storytelling, at Nicole’s German shepherd’s psychological and self-esteem issues, and at Chelsea’s run-ins with Carly Simon.
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