Uganda Be Kidding Me

  I was minding my own business skiing down a double black diamond at around forty-five miles an hour with my legs in the same position they would need to be in order to birth a midsized kangaroo. My skis didn’t come off, and from the clicking sound I heard during my wipeout, I was certain the bottom halves of both my legs had separated from my thighs and were already on the chairlift back up the mountain. Once I stopped writhing in pain and pounding my forehead into the snow, I looked up at Johann who, in perfectly low-key fashion, informed me that I had just torn my ACL and that a helicopter of Nazis were on their way to medevac me to the nearest burn unit. Then he offered me a cigarette.

  To add insult to injury, I was dead sober, and I hate getting injured when I’m sober. This proves my theory that sobriety is not for me and is, in fact, for the birds. The helicopter landed and three big hot Swiss EMTs got out. One of them yelled at Gina, Shelly, and Sue—who were all filming me on their iPhones—to back the fuck away. The propeller was blowing the snow in every direction as two guys ran over to me.

  “Are you in pain?” one asked. I was in pain. I was in a tremendous amount of pain, but for some reason I told him no.

  “No morphine?” he asked.

  “I meant, yes. I am in pain.”

  “Would you like some morphine?” he asked again, pulling a liquid vial out of his ski jacket.

  “Yes, and I have a very high tolerance for drugs, so whatever you normally give someone, double it.” I have never had morphine, and it had been on my bucket list since I saw my mother die. The last three days of her life were the happiest I’d ever seen her.

  I smiled at the EMT. What a good sport I am, I thought. The three guys lifted me up onto the stretcher. One of the Germans attached my stretcher to his boots and skied me down to the helicopter. Once they skied me closer to the helicopter, which was noisier and seemingly much more dramatic, Johann wrapped his arms around my head to protect me from the propeller-driven wind and snow. I was more than a little turned on by this move.

  I’d like to go on record and say that Germans are the worst.

  Not only do I love helicopters, but we were flying right over the Matterhorn and it was an incredible view. The morphine was amazing, and I felt like I was on top of the world. I was trying to take pictures with the pilots while we were flying and they wouldn’t even smile.

  The female doctor at the hospital was the biggest German bitch I had ever encountered in a medical facility—and needless to say, I’ve been to a lot. I’ve had numerous injuries as well as many elective procedures done in order to amplify my coordination. Never had someone aside from a receptionist been lacking in empathy. Why would a person get into the medical field just so they could be mean to people at work in addition to being a bitch at home?

  I was left alone in an examining room long enough to call whomever I was dating at the time, then my sister, then my doctor in LA, who patched me through to an orthopedic specialist, who asked me if I could pop my knee in and out of its socket. I tried and I could, and then I couldn’t stop doing it because it was so weird. The doctor on call walked into the examining room, took one look at me on the phone, and angrily pulled the curtain shut before I could even tell her that I was speaking with my doctor.

  She hissed something in German that sounded like “Schitzenschfuckle,” and stormed out.

  What in the hell is the matter with these Germans? I thought. You’d think they would feel guilty about what they’ve put everyone through. I mean, seriously.

  “That’s it.” I told my doctor to hold on, hopped off the table on my good leg and went after her. “Excuse me.” I hobbled over to the nursing station she was at with my bad leg in the air, and I put my hand on the wall to balance myself. “What is your problem, Fraulein? I happen to be on the phone with my doctor in Los Angeles. I’m not on a social call. You need to be a little more professional.” I handed her my phone. “Here, talk to him.”

  After she hung up and handed me back the phone, I told her, “Just so you know, I’m Jewish.”

  After a very nice man wrapped my leg up and put it in a nice brace, I called Shelly. When she didn’t answer, I called Gina. When she picked up, she told me that they had gone to a chalet to have a drink, and Shelly had slipped on a set of stairs and landed on her elbow. They were all at the hospital.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, she slipped and fell down the stairs in her ski boots.”

  “Oh, my god. What the hell is wrong with us?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” she said. “It’s you two idiots. They think she cracked her bursa.”

  “What is a bursa?”

  “I thought it was a dance, but it’s not. It’s a bone in your elbow.”

  “Oh my god. So where are you? I’m still here in the ER.”

  “I don’t know. We’re at the hospital in Zermatt. Johann said the one they took you to is a two-hour drive away.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I guess yours is a bigger hospital. They thought you were seriously injured.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to get back?”

  “I guess a taxi.”

  “A taxi?”

  “Yes. It’s stupid for us to drive four hours when you can just drive two.”

  “Thanks a lot. Like I know how to get a taxi in German.”

  “Chelsea, you can get a taxi,” Gina assured me.

  “Well, why can’t I just get a helicopter?”

  “I don’t know. You can try. Shelly wants to grab a drink. She’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Yeah, so am I,” I reminded her. “Well, I guess I’ll just walk back. I don’t know how to get a taxi.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “There’s no prognosis. They took an X-ray and said nothing’s broken, but my doctor in LA said it sounds like I tore my ACL. Something’s definitely wrong, but I’m just going to wait until I get back to the States.”

  “So, can you ski tomorrow?”

  “No, asshole, I cannot ski tomorrow. I can pop my knee in and out of its socket, and I’m on crutches. A torn ACL is what athletes get when they do a split by accident.”

  In transgender voice: “Athletes?”

  “Yes, like basketball players. Those are athletes. Thanks for nothing, Gina.”

  I hung up the phone and looked down at my knee, which had been wrapped in an Ace bandage with a brace on top. A nice German emergency room man came over with my crutches and told me in English (but still in that accent) that there was a taxi waiting for me outside. I thought that was a nice gesture from a country that had already put me through such hell. I asked for some more morphine and pain pills, and went on my merry way.

  Getting back took more than two hours, but I was on such a high at that point that I didn’t really mind. It was a beautiful day outside and it was a beautiful drive alongside a beautiful river.

  Once at the hotel, I found Shelly, Sue, and Gina in our suite. Shelly and Sue were smoking cigarettes. Gina was not because she, of course, quit that forty years ago. Shelly’s arm was in a sling.

  Next up: dinner.

  Chez Heini is a restaurant in Zermatt that came highly recommended by our concierge. It is written up and recommended as one of the best places in all of Switzerland to get rack of lamb. Shelly had been there before, and she explained that the owner or manager comes over and sings, and the whole place turns into a party after 9 p.m.

  There was some confusion over the reservation name, but once we sorted that out we were sat next to what I presumed to be a lamb oven. The waiter came over and Shelly ordered a bottle of wine for the table. I for some reason didn’t want to drink. The morphine was perfect and I didn’t want to mix it with anything, food included.

  “You’re not having a drink?” Gina asked. “That’s a first.”

  “This isn’t just a liver cleanse, you guys. It’s a lifestyle.”

  “Well, I guess you weren’t faking it, because in four years [tranny voice] I have never seen you lose your app
etite.”

  “It takes a lot for me to lose my appetite,” I agreed.

  “Cat-sitting for someone would probably do it,” Sue said, perusing her menu.

  “Anyway, there’s no way I’m getting back on that train. I’ve been here for two days and have had two separate medical emergencies. I don’t trust these people, and I’d like to get to Italy as soon as possible. So,” I said, taking in the scenery, “we’re going to have to charter a helicopter to Florence.”

  “Leave it to you to get into a fight with Switzerland,” Sue said, putting her arm around me.

  The waiter came over with food we hadn’t ordered and started serving us on our plates.

  We were all a little confused but started digging in to what seemed to be escargot and some sort of cheese array. Just then, a German homosexual stormed over to our table and told us to get out.

  We stared at him in silence, wondering if this was part of the show. Then he stomped his foot and said it again. “Get out of this restaurant. You are not supposed to eat off those plates, you dumb women!” When I looked down at the plates I saw they had a picture of him and were also encrusted with what looked like Swarovski crystals.

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you serious?” I asked him through my morphine haze.

  “Get out!” he screamed. “Don’t talk out loud!”

  “You brought us the food,” Sue told him calmly.

  “Um, is that how you talk to women, you fucking lunatic?” Shelly asked.

  “Get out!”

  Shelly got up and announced, “We’re leaving.” As if it had been our decision. I was confused, and in my drug-fueled haze I was comprehending the events taking place at the same pace as Gina.

  “We are leaving, you German asshole!” Shelly yelled at his face.

  “What about our bottle of wine?” Gina asked.

  “You get out, too!”

  I had no idea if something had happened that I didn’t know about. I looked around the restaurant, which was packed, and no one was even looking at our table.

  “Come on,” Sue said, helping me up. “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on,” I told them. “We didn’t do anything. I’m not even drinking.”

  We were basically tossed out of a restaurant in twenty-degree weather with no transportation back to the hotel. I had left my crutches in the restaurant, and when Sue realized it, she wanted to go back and get them.

  “Never mind,” I told her. “Crutches are a sign of weakness. Let that asshole realize that he kicked out a handicapped lady.”

  “Like he gives a shit,” Sue said. “Listen. I’ll be the first one to admit there have been many occasions in which we deserved to be kicked out of a restaurant, but that was not one of them.”

  “We didn’t even get our wine,” Gina chimed in.

  “That’s not really the point, Gina,” Sue went on. “How were we supposed to know not to eat off the plates they put the food on? We haven’t even ordered anything. Was that some sort of test?”

  “That was so fucked,” Shelly said. “Ow, my elbow is killing me.”

  I felt absolutely nothing at that point, because I was so high and the Velcro brace I was wearing was allowing me to put weight on my foot and just swing it around without bending it. The four of us walked home in shock and with a definite feeling of shame and humiliation. Four grown women walking home in the snow.

  The next morning we were up and on a helicopter by 9 a.m. “Look what this country did to us,” I said, tapping Shelly’s sling on her arm with my leg brace.

  “I got injured because I’m your codependent. I knew you had hurt yourself and I needed to hurt myself, too.” Then Shelly and I kissed on the lips.

  “Oh, my god.” Gina moaned. “The two of you are so stupid.” Then Sue and Shelly kissed on the lips as our helicopter took off. This was the happiest moment of the trip. Being airlifted to Florence.

  About three weeks later, I came into work and Sue had printed out several reviews of Chez Heini she found on TripAdvisor. The following are some highlights:

  “ridiculous” (March 20, 2013)

  “distinctly average” (February 15, 2013)

  “seriously overrated” (April 12, 2011)

  “a very strange place” (February 5, 2011)

  Needless to say, I haven’t been on a train since, and unless there’s another Holocaust, I never will be.

  CHAPTER 9

  TELLURIDE

  It is not lost on me that my life has become ridiculous. The very idea that I am able to live and travel the way I do is absurd. Losing all capability of using a remote control, brewing a pot of coffee, or peeling an orange are tasks I remember enjoying. I knew things had really taken a turn in my life when I woke up one morning in my bed and called downstairs to the kitchen to order a nonfat cappuccino from my cleaning lady. The only thing I seem to do well is drive a car, yet I can never get where I am going, because I don’t know how to use my navigation system.

  One morning, during a radio interview I was doing on my phone, I walked distractedly out my front door and got into the first car I saw. Ten minutes later, my house manager called me to tell my I had driven away in my landscaper’s Honda Legacy. I looked around the dashboard and in the backseat—where I spotted a large pail holding a pair of hedge trimmers and a square of sod. After hearing this story, one of my girlfriends suggested I see a neurologist. Another friend of mine reassured her that were I to take the day off to see any doctor, there were many others I needed to see before seeing a neurologist, first and foremost being a psychologist.

  While vacationing on Shelter Island one weekend, I needed to shave my legs and decided the most practical place to purchase a women’s razor would be at the local hardware store. When I received the look from the seventy-year-old man behind the counter as he tried to ascertain whether or not I was serious (a look I encounter multiple times a day), I had to think fast and invent a believable mix-up, and I left there with a handsaw.

  What I find even more alarming is how easily the human condition can grow accustomed to such luxuries as having three assistants, having an entire staff at home who do absolutely everything for you, and then becoming highly irritable when the private plane you’re flying on doesn’t have Wi-Fi, or the fact that your gardener has only one arm and you pay him full price. I should be happy to have a gardener in the first place. (For the record, I don’t have a problem paying my gardener the same price as someone who has two arms, but I am unclear as to why he refuses to let me buy him another one. Like soccer, gardening seems to be a vocation that would exponentially improve when one is supplied with the two limbs required to be good at it.)

  During our Christmas break, everyone who works on my show gets two weeks off. This particular year, I would spend the first week in Whistler, British Columbia, skiing with my family, and then fly to upstate New York the following week to be taken by a lover.

  While eavesdropping on a conversation I was having with my assistant Eva about our upcoming break, my writer Brad heard us going over flying options for the dogs.

  “Find out if the dogs have to be quarantined in Canada, because if they do, I’d rather just have them fly to New York and meet me there.” Then I heard Brad goose-step over to Eva’s office—a sound I can identify a football field away.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” he said, planting his two redheaded duck feet in front of Eva’s desk. Brad’s jealousy over Chunk is astonishingly transparent. I know for a fact that he has spent time during his commute home from work thinking of what it would be like to be Chunk. That’s fine once or twice, but any adult who consistently thinks of what it would be like to be someone else’s dog is really quite the loser.

  Brad and me the previous Christmas in Telluride… The first week was friends, the second week was family.

  “Why shouldn’t Chunk fly to New York? He is happier when he’s with me and I’m happier when I’m with him. And, by the way, I’m flying commercial to Whistle
r, then to New York, and Chunk is flying private to New York and then taking Uber to meet me upstate. I would think you of all people would respect the idea that I’m being somewhat responsible with my finances.”

  “How is that responsible?”

  “Only one of us is flying privately.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Hold on a second,” he said, taking his glasses off. “Are you telling me that Chunk is flying alone on a private plane from LA to NY, and there are going to be no other passengers?”

  “No, you idiot. Jacks will be flying with him.”

  Brad started violently scratching his arms. “So, two dogs on a private fucking airplane?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I told him, eyeing the rosacea on his forearm. “We’re still running the numbers.”

  The color of Brad’s face went from light blue to white with dark blue veins, to a pale pink, and then to a Swedish fish red. He slammed his right hand on the table but deliberately placed it on his hip in an effort to control his apoplexy. His eyes rolled back, and globules of saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth. He took a long inhale through his nose in yet another effort to maintain his composure. By that point he reminded me of a retarded walrus.

  “Please pull yourself together, Brad,” I told him. He took a long inhale through his nose in yet another effort to maintain his composure.

  “Can you imagine, Chelsea, training your whole life to fly—hours and hours of training—and then you finally get your first flight assignment, and you get onboard—only to find out that your two passengers are a boxer and a half German shepherd?”

  “First of all, Brad, I would never let Chunk fly with a first-time pilot. The poor dog is a nervous wreck. He hasn’t taken a shadoobie in front of me in over two years.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” he asked.

  “Because he’s obviously scared I’m going to leave while him while he’s mid-shadoobie. Why do I need to spell everything out for you? You’re supposed to be a writer.”