Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (8 page)

"You're right," I said, and grabbed her shoulder. "You're an amazing friend."

We grabbed the closest table to the bar that was available and were joined by Lionel and Sharona, a couple Ivory and I both knew, but who were much closer with Lydia. Two hot messes who had one baby and one on the way. It took a few minutes for Sharona to lower herself down into the chair, with Lionel and Ted assisting.

"Is there table service, or do we have to go up to the bar?" Lionel asked, before Sharona had completely lodged her ass into the seat. Then he looked over, smiled at her, and punched her in the shoulder. "Look at ya, ya fat monster!"

The five us were now apparently sitting together. After Sharona told us her due date was the next day and we deduced that there was no table service, Ted volunteered to go up to the bar and get everyone a drink. When Sharona ordered a vodka with cranberry while resting both hands on her belly, Ted nodded, looked at her belly, then looked back at me.

"I'll take the same," I told him.

Ted came back saying he had a found a waiter who would be by momentarily to take our drink orders. After Lionel and Ivory both made mention of a helicopter almost flying over the wedding, Ted and I looked up at the sky in confusion and said we hadn't even noticed.

Lionel was telling us a story about how he and Sharona had gotten into a pretty serious accident on a drive to Santa Barbara the weekend before. "The guy in front of us slammed on his brakes in the middle of the freeway, and we were able to stop, but when I looked in my rearview mirror, the woman behind us was texting and didn't see that we had stopped in time for her to stop. She tried at the last minute, but it was too late, and she slid right underneath our car, and the car was airborne for what felt like a minute. Nothing scarier than looking at your child in the rearview mirror screaming and not being able to protect him." At this exact moment, Ted spotted a waiter walking by and ordered a cocktail.

"I'll take a Belvedere rocks, splash of cran, splash of orange. Great. Thanks."

When he looked back at us and saw that all our mouths were open, he seemed surprised. "Oh, I'm sorry, did anyone else want anything?"

I waited until we were alone with Ivory walking to the reception before I confronted him. "Listen up, shitstain. Under no circumstances are you allowed to order a cocktail in the middle of someone telling a story about a car accident that
he and his child
were involved in."

"I didn't want to risk having the waiter go away!"

"I understand how important drinks are, but if someone is telling a story about a car being airborne with him and his child in it, the sensitive thing to do is at least pretend you care and avoid interrupting the story with a cocktail order."

"How about an appetizer?"

Ivory was no help, because she found this exchange hilarious and thinks Ted is the funniest person in the world. I disagree with that assessment and am strongly opposed to anyone suggesting it.

We were greeted at the reception by three industrial-strength box fans outside each of the three entrances to the mini-ballroom. When I asked one of the waiters what the fans were for, he said that the air-conditioning in that room had broken.

Ivory sat down next to me sweating and grinding her teeth. "Guess who's here?"

"Lance Bass."

"Better. Calypso."

Calypso was the drug dealer that this whole group of people relied on. When I asked Ivory if he'd been called for delivery purposes or if he was invited to the wedding as a guest, she didn't have an answer. "Maybe he came to fix the air-conditioning," she suggested.

I looked over and saw him leaving Rooster's table. Rooster was also grinding his teeth, which meant one of two things. I knew that Ted wouldn't want anything, but I was definitely interested in getting my hands on some sort of muscle relaxer or painkiller.

Ivory went to tell Calypso I would like his next stop to be my table. Steph came and sat down next to me and asked if everyone at the wedding was on drugs. I told her I doubted that Joey and Lydia were on anything other than an emotionally passionate high, and I also didn't think either set of parents would be high, since they're all in their sixties and none of them is Keith Richards.

As soon as Calypso made his way over, Steph got up and let him take her seat. Calypso was wearing his version of a suit: light blue and a cotton/poly blend, with a black shirt and high-top sneakers. He was Mexican.

"Hey there, what kind of goodies you got?" I asked him.

Calypso half opened his jacket to reveal a pharmacy-like arrangement of all the different products he was peddling. "I got blow, 'shrooms, MDMA, Ecstasy, weed, Ambien--what do ya need?"

Ted tapped me on the shoulder. "Can I talk to you for a second, Chelsea?"

We got up, walked outside the reception room, and stood behind one of the fans. "What is your game plan with that guy?"

"I don't know yet. I'm trying to see if he has any Vicodin."

"I assume Calypso is a pharmacist?" Ted inquired.

"Yes, he's with Cobra. My calf hurts."

"Well, whatever you think you need, please get double, because I do not ever want to see 'Calypso' again." Ted is adamant about denouncing drugs, but I believe in my heart of hearts that if he worked as a bricklayer instead of as a CEO, our lives would be more prone to illegal activities and our relationship would benefit exponentially from the cocktail of chemicals.

I went back to the table and asked Calypso if he had any Vicodin, which he did. I bought two and split one with myself at the table.

Three hours later my dream of seeing a bride smoking a cigarette and Ivory's dream of seeing Rooster introduce himself to Ted in the middle of the dance floor both came true. Ted came up to me drenched in his own dance sweat.

"That Poultry guy will not leave me alone. Can we go now? Seriously, Chelsea, you're lucky I came into your life when I did. You'd probably be living under a freeway somewhere."

We headed to the lobby to grab our bags. Ivory and Rooster ran up to us at the front desk, while I pretended to be looking at room rates.

Rooster leaned in and grabbed Ted's shoulder. "Where do you guys think you're going? Fred, I was just going to ask you to dance. I like that little 'Thriller' move you do."

"We're going to Laguna for the weekend," Ted told him.

"By car," I added.

Not one to take a hint, Ted immediately jumped in and asked me, "What do you mean?"

"We were just walking outside to get a taxi to take us to Laguna,
Fred,
" I said loudly.

So instead of going up to the roof where we were expected, we were escorted outside by Ivory and Rooster, got into a taxi, rode around the block, came back to the hotel, and then ran to the elevators as fast as we could.

Once we were airborne, Ted told me that he thought Poultry still had feelings for me. "You should see if he wants to get back together, and then you'll never have to ride in a helicopter again. You can ride around in his go-cart."

"His name is Rooster."

"He actually seemed like he'd be a nice guy if he wasn't so hammered. I could barely understand a word he said. He kept moving his mouth around in circles."

"Yeah, he must have been tired."

"And by the way, Ms. Handler, he and I turned out to have more in common than you would think."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, really. For your information it turns out I'm not the only one who missed a day of work when Michael Jackson died."

"I'm sorry?"

"He didn't work the next day either, because he was too upset."

"No, Ted. He didn't work the next day either because he doesn't have a job."

Ted opened up the bag of chips he had managed to have on board.

"Now, let's focus on us. We have a choice for dancing tonight. We can either go to a dance club I found online or just dance in our room if you want. I brought my iPod dock and just downloaded all of Earth, Wind & Fire's greatest hits."

"Let's stay in tonight," I said, envisioning all the twenty and thirty-something stares I would have to endure while Ted slid across the dance floor, crying if a Michael Jackson song came on. "Although you
are
already warmed up. Maybe we should go out."

"Nah, let's save it," he said in complete seriousness. "We don't want to spoil people."

I looked down at the coastline and at the waves crashing on the shore and said something I never thought I'd say. "I miss Tito."

Chapter Six

Water Olympics

L
ike any self-respecting brother-and-sister combo, Greg and I decided to eat some mushrooms. We were out to dinner in Martha's Vineyard with my sister the Mormon and her fiance, Mike.

When the server came over, Mike ordered a Heineken, I ordered my standard vodka with lemon, and Greg decided to go with a double-gay Bay Breeze.

"When do you think you'll be starting your first period?" I asked my brother.

"Chelsea, I think we both know I've been getting my period since the third grade."

Greg is not a gay man, but he has some very gay qualities, which he is not only quick to admit to but even quicker to embrace. Today he is married to a Russian woman and has three small Russian sons who live in New Jersey and speak with thick Russian accents. This dinner took place long before we lost him to Communism and room-temperature orange juice.

"Can you two please not talk about periods?" Sloane piped up, looking sideways at Mike.

I didn't know Mike very well at the time, but what I did know was that trying to get a conversation started with him was like trying to go sleigh-riding in a straitjacket. He was extremely quiet.

Greg and I are not quiet and have never pretended to be. We both have extremely unfortunate personalities and thrive on embarrassing anyone we're in a room with. Somehow we have both managed to carve out lives for ourselves and yet maintain an attitude of utter disrepair. He is a certified public accountant, and I have a real life.

"When do you think you'll get our sister knocked up?" Greg asked Mike, taking a bite out of the cherry that came in his drink. Sloane was five years older than Mike and was interested in getting married, penetrated, and knocked up. In that order. The best news about Mike was that, unlike Sloane, he had not been captured by Mormons.

From what I could gather by his facial expression, Mike didn't seem to have any problem with the topics of penetration or menstruation.

"I have mushrooms," I announced.

"Oh, that's nice," Sloane said.

"Where did you get them?" Greg inquired.

"From a drug dealer."

He put his hand out. "Please give me some."

I pulled a Ziploc bag from of my purse. "Would you like some mushrooms, Mike?"

Mike looked at Sloane, who looked back at him like he was four years old.

"Nah," he said, "that's okay."

Greg pointed his finger in Mike's face, sternly. "Mike, if you want some mushrooms, my suggestion is that you have some mushrooms. These are your last months as a free man."

"Mike is not doing mushrooms," announced Sloane.

"Fine," I said, making two small piles on the table. I then proceeded to eat my portion of the mushrooms as I perused the menu, trying to decide how much food would prevent me from getting a good high.

"That's really nice, you guys. You're just gonna get high at the table and then what?"

"We'll probably end up robbing a liquor store, Sloane. Mushrooms can be very violent," Greg told her with no inflection, grimacing at the flavor of the drugs. "These taste like a moose's asshole."

"Uh, I wouldn't bring up anyone's asshole at the same time you're holding a Bay Breeze with your pinky pointed toward the sun. It's better to mix it with some food. Wanna split the seafood tower?"

Greg nodded in agreement and then leaned in. "Do you know that in five states it is legal to mail your dump to another person, but if you do it more than once, you can get arrested?"

Sloane lifted her elbow to the table, resting her chin on her fist, and looked in any direction but ours. "This is just great. This is lovely dinner conversation, by the way. I'm so glad we did this."

I for one couldn't have been more fascinated. "You can mail a shadoobie to another person?"

"That's correct."

Even Mike was flabbergasted. "Wow. That's pretty intense."

"But, Chelsea," Greg said sternly, "you cannot do it twice."

"Well, that's stupid," I told him. "Who would need to do it twice? If the person you sent it to the first time doesn't understand that a shadoobie in the mail means that
that friendship is on the rocks
, he certainly isn't going to figure it out the second time. That would be a total waste of a stamp."

"Or two stamps, Chelsea. Depending on just how big that shadoobie is."

"So where are you guys going to go when you start hallucinating?" Sloane asked. "Back to the house to hang out with Mom and Dad?"

"Don't tell Mom and Dad that we did mushrooms, Sloane."

That was the last thing I remember saying before I started seeing flying Chinese babies. Sloane claims that Greg and I got up from the table before our food came and started dancing in the middle of the restaurant, together.

After she and Mike finished their meal, she came over to us and told us they were leaving and that we could take a cab home. Then she said that she told me, "There is no music playing, and you and Greg are related." I do in fact remember dancing, but I have a hard time believing there was no music.

About four hours later, I found myself in a cab back to my parents' house without Greg. I was still pretty high, but now the Chinese babies were at my eye level and were on foot.

At some point in the evening, my brother and I had separated. After the restaurant we'd gone to a bar across the street where they actually had an area designated for dancing, called a dance floor. I'm pretty confident I spent most of the night humiliating myself on it, but I had no idea when or where Greg had removed himself.

During the ten-minute cab ride to our house, I became increasingly concerned over Greg's whereabouts. Although I have been lucky enough not to ever have had a bad reaction to the drugs I've experimented with, some people are not as fortunate. It dawned on me that he could have been freaking out somewhere in a roadside bush. Once we pulled onto the dirt road that led to our house, the cabdriver recognized the road and said he had just dropped another person here an hour earlier. Thank God, I thought, and was able to go back to my previous jubilation of being in a paranoia-free zone of euphoria. This wasn't the first time Greg and I had crossed paths with the same driver in the hours of darkness.

A year earlier we had some hillbilly cousins from a small town outside Portland, Oregon, decide that it would be a good idea to get married. Neither of us had been invited to the wedding, but Greg called me in California and asked me if I wanted to crash. I had no desire to be in attendance at an affair that was most likely going to take place at either a VFW hall or a Chili's. He persisted in convincing me that we should go together and that it would be good material. Material for what was never specified.

I had no real commitments at the time, being twenty and just recently moved to Los Angeles, where I was in between thinking I should get a job and getting one.

"Fine," I finally said. "You need to use your miles for my ticket, and I'm not staying at a Super 8 or at one of our 'pseudo' cousins' trailers." I had to be very specific with Greg, as he is prone to spending as little money as possible, and that is something, try as I might, I cannot get behind.

"I want nice dinners, Greg. No Colonel Sanders shit." I had nothing against the colonel himself but am very leery of the idea that there was ever a colonel in the first place. What kind of colonel would allow his establishment to turn into such a mockery? After a lengthy negotiation, we compromised on moderately priced dining, as long as I agreed to at least one serving of the colonel's chicken, or, as I had grown to refer to it, Kentucky Fried Pony.

The wedding "reception" took place at a karaoke bar, which is one thing I do not and will not participate in. I've found that many of the people who have a passion for karaoke too often have misplaced confidence, which can become aggressive and at times border on sadistic. I know my limits, and karaoke is where I draw the line. I wouldn't put anyone through the hell of listening to me sing a song, and I sure as shit wouldn't wait in line to do it.

The bartender told me the kitchen was closed, so I looked around for my brother, who was hard to find in the sea of mullets that were related to me. Since this wedding celebration hadn't provided any food, it was my duty to provide myself with some sustenance.

I looked in the closed kitchen. The perfect condition I like a kitchen to be in when I decide to test out my culinary skills. I opened the freezer, got out some hamburger patties and some frozen onion rings, and then looked around for something to cook these items in or on. Soon after, I gave up and walked outside. I was standing in front of the bar, looking at the adjacent strip malls and intersections, with my forefinger pointed at my temple, trying to find something that piqued my palate.

Taco Bell was in the near distance, but I was in no mood to walk more than one-eighth of a mile, so I waved down the first car I saw.

A man in a dark brown Toyota low-rider sort of sedan stopped. When I leaned in, I saw that he had a nice smile, weighed close to four hundred pounds, and was solely responsible for the car being low-riding. "Any chance I could get a ride to that Taco Bell right over there?"

"Sure thing, kiddo, hop right in.

"
You
are a lifesaver." I smiled, calculating how many tacos I could buy with five dollars. I walked around to the passenger-side door and hopped in. "I know it's not far, but I'm at this wedding with no food, and I'm starving." I looked at his body out of the corner of my eye and concluded that if circumstances called for it, he would be able to crush me. However, he would have to catch me first, and unless he was some sort of Transformer or fat vampire, this was unlikely in his condition.

He was a very nice man indeed, and I liked the way his big fat body leaned when we were turning in to the intersection. He asked me where I was from, and when I told him New Jersey, he slapped his thigh. I couldn't tell which because together they equaled one gargantuan slab of meat. I wondered how many chicken tacos the geniuses at Taco Bell could make out of his carcass. Realizing this would require a measuring instrument, which I didn't pack, I pressed on to the task at hand.

"Well, what kind of coincidence is that?" he was saying. "I just drove a fella from New Jersey to the very same Taco Bell. He was an accountant. Real nice guy, real hungry."

"Was his name Greg?"

"Yes, it was," and then he slapped his leg again. "He done try and walk through the drive-through, and when they sent him away, he came and hailed me down in the middle of the road!"

"That sounds about right." We were at the window now, so my first goal was to get in my order for two Taco Supremes. Then I asked my date if he wanted anything.

"Oh, God no. I can't eat this crap."

"I'll take three, then!" I yelled back into the window.

When we pulled back in to the parking lot of the karaoke bar, I spotted Greg sitting on the top part of a bench facedown in a burrito.

We pulled up right in front of him, and with half of a taco in my mouth I yelled, "Greg, look who I found!"

Greg looked up and walked over to the car with a big smile on his face. He liked this kind of nonsense very much. "Good evening, Chelsea, I see you've met my friend Large Luke."

Greg still keeps in touch with Luke to this day, because that's how Greg is. He finds extreme joy in people who no one else would pay attention to. Then he'll invite them to stay at his house for the weekend while his wife hides in the bedroom with their three children and makes porridge.

By the time I got back to my parents' house, it was midnight. I walked in the door to find Sloane and Mike sitting at the kitchen table each having a bowl of cereal and my other brother Ray watching a Mets game in the living room.

"Is Greg here?" I inquired.

"No," Ray said, looking up from the game, eyeing the matted hair stuck to my forehead. "Where are you just coming from, a pole vaulting class?" I had gotten quite a workout dancing and had probably lost a significant amount of water. I was laser-focused on weighing myself.

"Don't ask, Ray," Sloane interrupted. "I thought Greg was with you."

"He was, but we lost each other, and the cabdriver said he dropped him off here an hour ago."

"I haven't seen him," she said, and then asked Ray if he had.

Ray has the demeanor of someone who really isn't bothered by much and would greatly prefer to watch the Mets lose one game after another while he idly sits by. "Heartbreakers," he mumbles every time a game ends. "These guys are killing me."

"Well, I'm a little concerned, Sloane," I said. "I don't know where he is."

"He's thirty-four," Ray said. "I'm sure he's fine. Chelsea, why don't you go into the kitchen and have some Gatorade? You look a little pale and stupid."

"I'm going to check in the basement," I announced, and headed toward the sliding glass door that leads to our front deck. "Ray, come with me. I'm scared."

"Wait for this inning to end."

"Sloane, come with me. I'm scared."

Sloane got up and came outside. We walked around the deck to the set of stairs that leads down to the basement, and we saw all of Greg's clothes folded neatly on one of the steps, with his sneakers next to them.

"Oh, my God!" I screamed, grabbing Sloane. "He probably swam to Chappy!" Our dilapidated house in Martha's Vineyard is positioned in front of Katama Bay. On the other side of it lies Chappaquiddick. Chappy, for short. This is the smaller island that became famous for the incident where a drunk Ted Kennedy drove his car off a small bridge and left a woman there to drown. Silly Kennedys.

The distance between our beach and Chappy's beach is a little under a mile. Greg likes to swim through all the boats docked in the bay to the other side. This activity performed sober and in the daytime is risky for anyone other than a salmon.