Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

  By now the desk was vibrating, and I knew that Brad wouldn't be able to hold out much longer, so I ended the conversation with a final sniffle. "I'll call you later," I said, then hung up the phone.

  "Did you tell John that you were faking his dog's death?" Tom asked.

  "No, but he's familiar with the inner workings of this office, so he must have put two and two together."

  "Pretty impressive work on John's behalf. I didn't know he had it in him. I think your next move is to have Eva call John's assistant and have her send out an e-mail asking everyone at the party if they saw Dudley eat any of the hors d'oeuvres at the party. And make sure you e-mail Claire and Jake just in case Ted starts calling the whole town."

  "Exactly," I replied while looking over at Brad, whose face had turned two shades darker than a lobster.

  "After that little desk performance, you are definitely not going to the pier," Tom told him.

  "Pleeeeeease?"

  I walked over to Eva's desk to give her instructions on the next phase of Operation Dudley Is Dead.

  The next e-mail was sent by Eva a few minutes later:

  Hey guys. Did any of you see Dudley ingest or eat anything last night that maybe he shouldn't have? The animal doctor that is doing the autopsy asked John's assistant to find out. It's a little awkward so she asked me if I could help.

  Before I even finished reading the e-mail, my phone rang. "Did you get the e-mail?" Ted asked me.

  "Yes. They know it's me."

  "No, they do not!"

  "They're gonna find out when they do the autopsy. They're gonna find the crab right next to that black napkin in Dudley's belly."

  "Yes, but they aren't going to know who did it."

  "I have to come forward."

  "No, Chelsea! We don't even know if the dog is allergic to shellfish. It could have been something else."

  "Was allergic to shellfish. Dudley is dead, Ted."

  "We don't know that it was the shellfish. It could've been anything. Just wait until we get the autopsy results."

  I took a deep, loud, dramatic breath.

  "Chelsea," he said in the voice that a grief counselor would use with a patient attempting to do bodily harm to herself. "I have to go into a meeting now. Please don't talk to or call anyone who was at the party. Did you tell Tom?"

  "Yes."

  "Anyone else?"

  "Brad."

  "Why did you tell Brad?"

  "Because he saw me crying."

  "Oh, honey. You poor thing. Sweetie, you have to remember, this was an accident. The dog could have had another heart attack. We don't know it was the crab. It might just have been his time."

  "I'm fine. I have to go, Ted. This is all too much."

  A little later Eva walked into my office to tell me that Ted had called her and made it very clear to her that she saw nothing unusual at last night's party. "He also said that you were in a very fragile state and that I should keep an eye on you." Eva told me all this with a straight face and then turned on her heel and laughed all the way back to her desk. I was impressed with this side of her and her skill set in dealing with an unexpected dog homicide.

  Luckily for me it was Friday. The spreading of the ashes would be Saturday, so I would have to go through with this charade for only one night and a morning.

  Needless to say I had a terrific day planning the next day's events. I hadn't been this charged up since the presidential inauguration. On my way home from the show that evening, my attorney Jake called.

  "Chelsea. I was on the phone with Ted trying for forty minutes to figure out who fed the dog what. He was trying to protect you and convince me you had nothing to do with it. This is so fucking stupid. I kept having to put the phone on mute. Are you really going to take the CEO of a cable company to a dog funeral?"

  "Yes, it's at the pier. Would you like to come?"

  "Yes, but I have my kid's soccer game tomorrow. Can't we do it Sunday? How can he believe this?"

  "Johnny is filming it, and he has a christening on Sunday. Your loss."

  "Shit. I really want to see this."

  "Well, unless Ted hits me, I'll probably show it on Leno Tuesday night."

  "You should tell Ted that John's hiring a pet detective to put on the case."

  "I don't have time for shenanigans," I told Jake, and hung up.

  When I got home, I jumped on the treadmill. As soon as Ted walked in, I texted Eva to send the follow-up e-mail we had coordinated earlier:

  Hi guys. John's assistant just told me confidentially that the autopsy revealed that Dudley was allergic to shellfish and that seems to be the culprit. Chelsea, if I recall correctly that is not what you gave him. I'm pretty sure it was one of those raviolis. Poor guy!

  I liked Eva. I liked her a lot.

  Our treadmill is on our balcony, and Ted was standing in front of it talking to me when he read the e-mail.

  "Oh, dear Lord. I knew it."

  He went to grab my BlackBerry off the treadmill in an attempt to shield me from the horrible discovery.

  "What?" I asked, as I took it back from him.

  "It was the shellfish," he said, with his arms open for me to run into.

  "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!"

  This is the picture I shot with my BlackBerry of him consoling me right there and then on the balcony:

  It took several minutes for me to calm down long enough to forward the picture to my team. The hysterical crying was interrupted by hysterical laughing, which I had to cover up with more fake crying, so it became a vicious circle. Luckily, it was a windy day, and Ted is ridiculous.

  The rest of the night was more of the same as I was e-mailing with Tom, Jake, and Brad. Brad had to pull over several times on his way to dinner just to gain composure, and Jake kept calling me from his house in the Palisades howling. "This is the stupidest fucking joke in the world. Ted is going to dump you in the Santa Monica Bay, and I'm going to be laughing so hard I won't be able to do anything about it!"

  "I thought you had a soccer game."

  "I do, but I'll be laughing at the soccer game."

  I told him to stop calling me, because I couldn't keep running out of the room. You could hear him screaming through the phone, and I'd have to jump up and scram every time it rang. "Fuck off," I repeated over and over again.

  Ted ran in after the third time Jake called and found me kneeling next to my bed. "Who are you telling to fuck off?"

  "My father."

  "Oh."

  I finally had to take a Lunesta to get to sleep so that I wouldn't have to face him anymore. I woke up the next morning and lay in bed thinking about the difference a day can make. So much had happened in twenty-four hours. So many lives had been touched.

  The funeral wasn't until five, so I had to maintain my composure but keep it somewhat real by pretending I was dreading it as well. Ted had been e-mailing everyone at the party to see who was coming to the funeral and he was concerned about who he'd be standing next to during the spreading of the ashes. "I'm worried I'm going to laugh," he kept saying. "Please make sure I'm not anywhere near Tom."

  "Don't worry," I wanted to say. "No one else is coming, moron."

  But I didn't.

  At around four-thirty we headed to the pier. On our way down the ramp, I took a photo of the back of Ted's head and sent it off to everyone who was waiting to hear, with a caption that read "Ted on his way to Dudley's funeral."

  I was texting furiously with Johnny Kansas, and he was telling me to stay on Ted's right when we got to the end of the pier. The sign we had made would be set up there on a railing. In order to capture Ted's reaction, we needed to choreograph our arrival perfectly. I realized then that I had forgotten to get flowers and texted Johnny, "We have no flowers."

  "Get churros," he replied.

  There are churro stands about every two hundred feet at the Santa Monica Pier, so it felt totally natural to yell, "Ted, that's why Dudley liked the pier. The churros. He loved churros
!"

  "Oh, Jesus Christ. No wonder the dog is fucking dead if he was eating fucking churros."

  At this point I was starting to pee a little and kept having to grab my vagina. Luckily it was windy, so it was easy to hide my face behind the hair being blown across it. This was beyond ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as Ted taking a bite out of one of the churros as he crossed back over to where I was.

  "What the hell is that?" I asked, pointing at the top of the bitten churro.

  "What?" he said, trying to hide the churro under his lapel.

  "Those are for Dudley, Ted!"

  "But he's dead."

  "They wanted to spread the churros with his ashes."

  "Chelsea, you can't throw churros over the pier into the water. Dudley would want us to have them. Come on, we're going to be late."

  "Just flip that one upside down and don't take another bite."

  Fifty yards later we came to the end of the pier, where there were people scattered about. I immediately saw Johnny facing us, wearing a hoodie and holding a video camera. The sign was to his right. I knew that Ted's keen sense of unawareness would help him take a while to find either one, so I let him run around like a labrador retriever for a few minutes looking for the funeral party while I was trying to stop my urethra from fully discharging all over the Santa Monica Pier. Once he came down from the observation deck, waving his arms in the air, saying, "We missed it! I knew we were going to be late!" I got myself together enough to point to the poster.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  This was the sign we had made:

  Two days later I showed the video on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I haven't played any jokes on Ted since, but Brad did try to persuade me to fake Dudley's death again a week later to see if Ted would believe it. "Say he really died this time!" Brad howled.

  Chapter Five

  Wedding Chopper

  My oldest friend in Los Angeles, Lydia, was getting married, and it was a miracle. I didn't ever expect her to have the wherewithal to actually follow through with a wedding that would require others to attend. She'd been engaged for over two years, and my assumption was that Lydia would approach her nuptials like most other milestones in her life: She would most likely lose interest.

  When she finally did notify me about the imminent wedding, it was by an AOL instant message: "Chels, save the date. The wedding is going to be on May 28 in the Palisades!"

  "Is this the invitation?" I typed back.

  "No! Of course not! What's your address? I'm doing them right now!"

  That is how Lydia operated. Her disorderliness had always been her strong suit, and this is coming from someone who hasn't worn a matching pair of socks since Reagan was shot. It wouldn't have been a surprise to me at all if I had received a third-grader's birthday-party invitation to her wedding with the time, date, and location all filled out in block letters on top of preprinted horizontal black lines.

  Something along the lines of:

  Occasion: WEDDING

  Time: 2-4 P.M.

  Location: OLIVE GARDEN

  I typed in my address and asked her where the wedding was.

  "At Mercedes's."

  "The dealership?"

  "LOL!!!"

  I wasn't joking, but I quickly lost interest in the conversation due to the fact that despite my having spoken to Lydia at great length about misplaced enthusiasm, she insisted on using exclamation points in lieu of periods and continued pairing them with my least favorite invention, LOL. You wouldn't say LOL if you were out to lunch with someone, so why would you write it in an instant message or an e-mail? Just laugh alone in your office or house. I don't need to be notified that you're laughing. If someone is busy laughing, then how do they have the time to be typing the letters LOL? More important, I was midway through a letter to Dear Abby that I'd been constructing for the better part of the winter, and I wasn't about to lose my confidence now. I hated that after Abby crossed over, her daughter continued her mother's advice column without changing its name from "Dear Abby" to "Dear Abby's Fucking Daughter." It wasn't an easy pill to swallow for those of us who didn't read the column the day Abby's daughter informed readers that she was taking over. The one day she decided to mention her mother was dead happened to coincide with me taking a one-day tie-dying class at the Y, and for months I was left nonplussed by Abby's out-of-left-field advice.

  "I'll be there," I wrote back to Lydia. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

  I hadn't spent a lot of time with Lydia since she'd gotten herself engaged. It wasn't intentional at all; we just sort of drifted apart after she asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding, and I coughed loudly enough to pretend I didn't hear her.

  I instant-messaged Ivory and asked her what Mercedes's was.

  "Some new girl Lydia's made friends with who works a pai gow table in Vegas."

  "Is she Asian?"

  "No, she's blond with Orange County boobs."

  "Well, the wedding's at her house, and Lydia should be instant-messaging you with the invitation shortly."

  "OMG. I can't wait for Ted to meet Rooster. Do you think they'll duel?"

  The thought hadn't occurred to me that I would have to bring Ted to the wedding and that he would meet several people I'd slept with, including Rooster. Rooster is someone I'd accidentally fallen into bed with several times in my twenties. He had taken up with Lydia shortly after I explained to him that I didn't want to deal with a long-distance relationship. The commute from Santa Monica to East Santa Monica was putting too many miles on my car, and his car hadn't started since I met him. Not long after we broke up, we all went to a costume party, and I woke up in an M&M's costume next to him and Lydia moaning.

  A plethora of misfits from my waitressing days would surely be in attendance at Lydia's wedding, and it was bound to be fairly horrifying.

  Two weeks before the wedding and fourteen days before I purchased her gift, Lydia e-mailed everyone telling us there was a change of venue. She was no longer having the wedding at Mercedes's house. It was now being held at a hotel around the corner from where Ted and I lived.

  I e-mailed Ivory. "Lydia just changed the locale of the wedding. No more Merecedes. What do you think her game plan is?"

  "With the wedding?"

  "With life."

  "Just be happy you're not a bridesmaid. You're bringing Ted, right?"

  "Yes, I'm bringing Ted. Don't worry. You'll get your day in the sun."

  The change of locale was perfect for Ted and me. His major issue other than having to attend a wedding for a person he was convinced he'd never met was that it was on the Saturday night before Memorial Day, and he wanted us to spend the weekend in Laguna Beach.

  "How long do we have to stay at the wedding?" Ted asked.

  "I don't know. It's probably like four or five hours with the ceremony."

  "Four or five hours? We're not going to get down to Laguna until midnight!"

  "Well, sorry, Ted, but this isn't a roller-skating party. It's somebody's wedding."

  "Who is this person again, and what is in your hair?" he asked, squinting at my head.

  "A hair clip, and her name is Lydia. You've met her three times. I've known her since I was twenty, remember?"

  "Why does it say Doritos on it?" he inquired upon closer inspection of my head.

  "Because it's a chip clip. I couldn't find any hair bands and I wanted to go for a run. Is that okay with you?"

  "So what's holding the chips together?" he demanded to know.

  "Really, Ted? The chips are more important than me getting some cardio in? I mean, seriously."

  "Chelsea, answer the question."

  "What is the question?"

  "What is holding the chips together?"

  "The chips are gone."

  "Exactly. Those were the chips for the helicopter, Chelsea. I swear sometimes I feel like I'm living with a refugee."

  I didn't want to travel further in the direction this conversation was headed, so I rem
oved the chip clip from my hair and tried to attach it to his penis.

  He dodged my attempt, retrieved the clip, and returned it to its proper surroundings.

  "We're going to have to get a driver if we're going to be drinking, so if the wedding starts at five, is it okay for the car service to come at seven?"

  "I don't know, Ted. Have you ever been to a two-hour wedding?"

  "Well, what if I have the car there at seven and then we have the option to leave whenever we want?"

  "That will be a waste of money, because we won't be leaving before nine. We need to be there a minimum of four hours. What aren't you copying?"

  "But I don't even know any of these people."

  "That's not their fault. I know Lydia. She knows me, and unfortunately I know you. You're lucky I'm even allowed to bring a guest. This could have gone either way."

  "I don't feel lucky."

  Ted has little patience for weddings or birthday parties and has no problem telling the person whose birthday or wedding it is that he doesn't understand why they're celebrating. I, on the other hand, take both of these events very seriously, as long as nothing more than attending and providing gifts is expected of me. I don't like to make speeches, and I don't like to wear assigned clothing. I love birthdays, and I love weddings. Funerals can also be fun, but only with the right mix of refreshments.

  Ted and I have always had different policies when it comes to other humans. He's generally not interested in people and doesn't even pretend to try, whereas I am fascinated by anyone and everything, especially if it involves a childhood story about an inappropriate uncle or obesity.

  I've attempted to explain to him that just because he doesn't think the anniversary of someone's death holds any real meaning, the person who lost his or her parent most likely feels differently.

  "Oh, honey, I'm sorry," he told me on the second anniversary of my mom's death. "I wish I had something to say. I just don't understand what meaning this day holds." Then he rubbed the back of my head while I looked at him the way I looked at my father each time he'd ask me if I was a C or a D cup.