Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  The first half of the week was spent finding opportunities for me and my two older nephews, ages thirteen and sixteen, to sneak out of the house to swim in caves or jump off of cliffs, where their mother couldn’t find us. Advance work was necessary to introduce the boys to fun. If Olga sees anything adjacent to danger—which in her mind could be an open body of water, a lap pool, or a can opener—she will insert herself and cancel the fun. One must always be one step ahead of her. In the beginning of the trip, I held high hopes for the adventures I would take the boys on. By the end of the week, I was beaten down, having given up on the hope of a meaningful relationship with my nephews until they graduated from high school and became legal.

  “Can you believe how annoying Olga and Glen are with the kids?” I asked Gaby.

  “It’s pretty unreasonable,” she agreed.

  “I mean, how much sunblock can you put on someone before it stops working?”

  “I’m surprised she doesn’t put it in their mouths,” Gaby said, handing me a plate of jamón to put on the table. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  My aunt doesn’t say a lot, and it’s a nice quality in a person, but “nice” isn’t the word anyone would use to describe Gaby. Every time she sees me, she shakes her head, almost as if she can’t believe what I’ve gotten away with in life. When I moved to Los Angeles at nineteen and lived on her sofa, she told me if I wanted to be in the entertainment industry, I had better drop some weight.

  I have retold this story for years to friends and family alike, while Gaby has consistently denied it ever happened, ridiculing my flair for the dramatic and propensity for exaggeration. I was finally vindicated when Molly found some old home videos from that time in which you can actually hear Gaby saying on camera that if I wanted to make it in Hollywood I had better drop some weight. Molly knows my memory has a solid track record, and when she found the evidence to support what I had been claiming for twenty years, she made sure the whole family watched the footage together in order to clear my good name. In the video, you can see my face turn bright red. Even I felt bad for me. Gaby must have felt like Hitler in that moment, but ever since then we’ve had a better understanding of each other.

  Gaby is Molly’s mother, and my mother’s sister, and in exchange for the living accommodations I was provided at nineteen, I was required to drive Molly and her eight brothers and sisters to school each morning at seven o’clock. This is when I discovered that I never wanted children. I wasn’t upset by the realization that I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. I was only upset that I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the end of our family vacation week in Spain, I stopped going to meals with my brother and his family. If I woke up and heard anyone speaking Russian, I’d go downstairs for my medication.

  “I can’t take any more kids or any more Russians,” I told Gaby, popping a doggy Xanax. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  “You just woke up,” she told me.

  “Who’s that person?” I asked Molly, gesturing to the front balcony, where a woman and my sister-in-law were sitting.

  “That’s Olga’s Russian friend who stopped by last night when you came down from your bedroom in your bra and underwear to get another Xanax.”

  “So, I’ve already met her?”

  “Well, she met you, but I wouldn’t say that you met her.”

  That’s how I felt about my trip to Formentera—it met me, but I didn’t meet it.

  * * *

  • • •

  On our return flight, Chunk and I had the two seats next to each other with the option of putting the partition up or down. We chose down.

  Once Chunk and I were both comfortably settled in and each watching our respective movies, I popped a Xanax and then realized there was none left for Chunk. I didn’t want to knock myself out with Chunk awake, so I took one of my weaker sleeping pills I had brought and tried to get him to swallow it. After failing to get it down his throat for the third time, I opened the capsule and emptied it into about two ounces of water and Chunk drank it down.

  I had been using Sonata ever since I learned how terrible Xanax was for your brain: the memory loss, the irritability the next day, the fact that it makes you dumb. I justified abusing it that week because of the Russian interference in my summer vacation. Right before I passed out, I wrapped Chunk’s leash around my waist and tucked it into the back of my jeans.

  Hours later, a flight attendant shook me awake and told me that my dog was loose and running around the first-class cabin. The simple task of standing up suddenly became incredibly difficult to accomplish, as I was lying on my side and had one leg swung over Chunk’s seat, where his body had been. My body was confusing me, as was the situation. I could hear Chunk’s panting, which sounded almost maniacal. I stumbled through the first-class cabin in a fugue state, scared by the heavy throat-clearing, coughing sounds I was hearing—and at one point during all the confusion, I called out Brandon’s name.

  When I found Chunk, he was licking the bathroom door with no leash in sight. I grabbed him by the collar and ushered him back to our double pod, where I had to force him to get back up on the seat. His tongue was almost touching the floor and there was foam on either side of his mouth. He looked like he had just snorted an eight ball.

  I had never seen Chunk in that state before. I grabbed one of those miniature bottles of room temperature water they give you on planes, but thought Chunk would appreciate something more refreshing—like a Fresca—and then bounced back to reality and recognized I was talking about a dog who was on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. I started by pouring the water into the tiny plastic lid, but after Chunk almost swallowed that, I made a cup out of my hand and started pouring the water in there. When that didn’t suffice, I gave up and just started pouring the water directly into his mouth. He wouldn’t sit still and kept yanking his head around to get out, but I held him down, trying to get a handle on the situation. The shame that enveloped my double pod took the shape of two blankets I converted into a fort covering the tops of our seats in an effort to prevent the two of us from causing any more of a scene.

  “Can I get some more water bottles and a bowl?” I whispered, peeking out from under the covers.

  “I don’t work here,” the passenger across the aisle said, as she sat back down in her assigned seat. The procuring of water became a tricky endeavor, as I couldn’t leave Chunk to his own devices and I couldn’t find his leash. I looked around for the call button, which I generally try to avoid using because of how rude it seems. I also made a mental note of possibly installing that option when I got home to Bel-Air. Brandon would love a bell.

  When I stood up to press the button above my head, Chunk made a run for it. I dove over my seat, grabbing his tail. I hit the floor face-first and felt a sharp burn around my stomach. I discovered that Chunk’s leash was wrapped around my waist, under my shirt. In my delirium, instead of fastening the clip of the leash to Chunk’s collar, I had clipped it to one of the belt loops on my jeans.

  “Can we please get him an entrée?” I asked the flight attendant from the floor, when she headed over to me with three large bottles of water.

  When the flight attendant looked at me sideways, I told her I was pregnant. Once I got Chunk nicely settled with his second gallon of water and a bowl, I looked at the map in front of my seat, which told me there were six hours left of our flight to Los Angeles.

  When the flight attendant arrived with a Salisbury steak and some other gross side dishes, I took out my tray table to play the part of being the passenger who would be eating it. To cement my credibility, I asked her for a glass of red wine and some bread options. I went through the motions of taking out the silverware and cutting off a piece of the steak on the tray, and once the flight attendant was far enough away, I handed it to Chunk. By the time she ret
urned, the entire tray was facedown on Chunk’s side of the seat, with food splattered everywhere, while I was wrestling him to get the entire slab of uncut meat out of his mouth. She didn’t even bother stopping; she just turned around and took the red wine and bread with her.

  There was water, food, and dog hair everywhere. I fastened Chunk’s leash to his collar and placed the handle grip around my ankle. It was time to get real. I recovered the blankets and reinstalled our fort until I could get the situation under control.

  I rang the call button once more and ordered a double espresso.

  “Would you like one or two?” she asked, eyeing Chunk.

  * * *

  • • •

  A week earlier, Chunk had been too dignified to lie on his back to get his belly rubbed. He would rather be caught shoplifting than lie in such a submissive position. It was too ungentlemanly. Chunk even knew it was wrong to get a hard-on. He turned his back when he had to go number two. He was august. He was esteemed.

  And now here we were—on a flight where Chunk had lost his last shred of dignity because his delinquent mother force-fed him a human sleeping pill.

  I could see the headlines now: “Chelsea Handler Kills Dog on Flight from Spain.” PETA would have a field day with this.

  Once Chunk was hydrated, his breathing slowed and he started to calm down, and then, finally—exhausted from the emotional turmoil—he fell asleep. In between checking his pulse and cleaning up the food and dog hair that was splattered all over our area, I became aware of a soreness on my back and abdomen. When I lifted my shirt, I discovered several rope burns.

  I quickly realized that I had to start planning for the very real possibility that Chunk might shit his pants on this flight. I had my very aromatic grapefruit hand lotion in the toiletry bag inside my purse, so the plan I devised was to scoop up any fecal matter with the Maxi Pad–grade pillowcase, douse it with the hand lotion to cover the smell, and then flush it down the toilet. I had empty water bottles lined up and ready to place over Chunk’s penis in case he decided to pee. I didn’t know the protocol for when your dog shits on a plane. Would we be arrested upon landing? Surely, this can’t be a felony.

  * * *

  • • •

  Not only did Chunk not die on the flight, he didn’t urinate or take a shadoobie. He waited the entire haul through customs, where the officer greeted the two of us with a “Welcome home, Chunk” and then asked me for my passport. This kind of shit happened with Chunk all the time. Chunk was a national treasure, and I was his plus-one. He’d get recognized on the streets when my houseman Oscar would take him for his morning walks, and even when he would be catching a breeze in the backseat of my car on our way to work. You’d hear other drivers at stoplights say, “Look, that’s Chunk,” and he’d wag his tail and smile. People would stop us and ask me to take pictures of them with Chunk. He probably went through life assuming getting recognized daily happened to all dogs.

  By the time I got home, I looked like the one who should have been on a leash through customs. I was using my eyeshades as a scrunchie, I was covered in dog hair and food stains, and I was bleeding from one arm. I looked like a streetwalker.

  Later, when I told my vet what had happened, he informed me that giving a dog a sleeping aid when they’re in a state of agitation will just prolong that state of agitation. I told my vet that I was in a constant state of agitation, and whenever I took a sleeping pill, it worked. I didn’t mention to the doctor that I had prescribed my own medication for Chunk, or that I had pilfered his on my family vacation.

  I avoided eye contact with Chunk for days after we got back from Spain. He knew I was the culprit in this situation, and I had absolutely no defense. For fear of being accused of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, I stopped giving Chunk his CBD oil too. I knew I had overstepped, and it was time to get my dog clean.

  “Wouldn’t you just kill to know what Chunk is thinking?” Molly asked me one day over oysters I had shucked earlier that afternoon.

  “Not anymore,” I told her. “That’s a slippery slope.”

  My brother Glen once told me the reason your firstborn is so special is because they’re the one that makes you a parent. That’s how I felt about Chunk. He made me a mother. A delinquent, useless one—but a mother nonetheless.

  The first thing my mother did when she woke up was take a nap. She took on average two naps per day and was in bed for the night no later than nine P.M. Our whole family has the sleep gene, and although I can easily get into bed for the night at 7:30 P.M., I have an aversion to taking unmedicated naps. The last time I fell asleep during the day was after a marijuana facial, when I came home in a stupor and passed out for four hours—at eleven o’clock in the morning. I was high for three days after that and haven’t felt entirely right since.

  My mother was a lah-dee-dah-dee-dah kind of person. She would go about her day humming “Lah-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah.” She wasn’t unintelligent; she was just the kind of person who was interested in having a pleasant, ho-hum kind of day. She would never insert herself into anything adjacent to conflict. She wasn’t really very good at follow-through, so she had lots of different half-completed projects at home that would usually involve some sort of jury-rigged, repurposed household item that didn’t quite cut it, like a bedsheet that was converted into a window shade and embellished with a makeshift border she’d knitted that afternoon. When the project was interrupted by a nap, it was likely to be abandoned.

  Our house looked a lot like Sesame Street—the main distinction being it was unsafe for children. She always wanted change. She wanted newness. She got it mostly by experimenting with casseroles and rearranging furniture. I’d come home one day only to stub my toe on a bunch of cinder blocks that had been placed under my bed as my new “bed frame,” because my mom had decided my actual metal bed frame looked better in the backyard as an enclosure for our dog, Mutley. She would have knit something for that too—crafting it to look like a questionable art installation. She wasn’t crazy. She didn’t drink or take drugs. She was a homemaker, and sometimes her ideas were out of left field…or in left field…many just belonged somewhere in a field.

  My mother could sew, knit, plant a garden, and cook. She made the thickest, creamiest macaroni and cheese and the richest, gooiest brownies—both of which were out of a box. But she always made home and food feel better. She could cook pretty much anything, but if you ever asked her for a recipe, she’d just say, “Put a little of this, and a little of that…lah-dee-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah.” There was nothing exacting about her, ever. Everything with her was always very vague.

  She could build pretty much anything too—a deck, a doghouse; she even once built a stone retaining wall in our backyard. She could probably have built a car. It would have broken down eventually, but she definitely could have gotten something going.

  The women in our family are on the masculine side, to say the least. We are not girly, we are not wearing dresses, and most of us are not getting laid. My mom had two sisters, and between the three of them they had nine daughters, and somehow, my mom was the most feminine of us all. Her name was Rita, but I called her Chunk.

  When I think of her, the first image that comes to mind is of her standing upstairs, leaning over the balcony that looked down over our living room on Martha’s Vineyard, eating whatever sandwich she had made to lull her to sleep that night, watching us play board games at the kitchen table. She liked hearing us before she went to sleep. She wanted to listen to us eating and drinking and laughing and playing Balderdash, but she never played, even though my dad always did. She was never a participant. She was always in the background—but always front and center.

  My mom knew that her kids needed her after Chet died, and she came back to us way sooner than my dad did. Whereas my dad was incapable of grieving and finding joy at the same time, my mother instinctively managed to do both.

  *
* *

  • • •

  I was thirty-one years old and in London for my very first book tour, when my cellphone rang in the middle of the night. It was my sister Simone.

  “You should come home. Mom isn’t doing well.”

  I knew this call was coming. I knew when I flew to London that my mother was going to interrupt things.

  Two months earlier, I was sitting in my parents’ living room when Simone came down the stairs from their bedroom, slumped down on the sofa, put her head in her hands, and sobbed. It was eerily reminiscent of when my dad had lost his composure after Chet died. I had never seen Simone be weak. If I had, I didn’t remember it. She wouldn’t have been weak in front of me, since she had always been a mother figure to me.

  My sister gets along with every person she meets. Everyone loves Simone. She’s a conflict avoider, a passive, popular, easygoing sorority president—she’s eminently reasonable.

  Is she really surprised by this outcome? I thought, sitting next to her on the couch. This was my mother’s third bout of cancer…What did Simone think was going to happen? I didn’t say those things to my sister. I felt bad for her. I also felt guilty that I wasn’t dreading my mother’s death as she was—I just wanted to get it over with. My mom had been fighting cancer for so many years—in and out of chemo and radiation, bald, not bald, always a little sick. She never complained, and when she started sleeping more hours a day than she was awake, and could eat only applesauce for weeks at a time, it seemed the writing was on the wall.