I got up and walked over to his seat, where I found him sleeping peacefully. I learned in closer than I wanted and announced, “I don’t mean to sound like a hairdresser, but you need a root canal.” He shifted a bit in his seat, and I hurried back to my own before he woke up and another confrontation ensued. Once safely back in 5C, I mused about my never-ending battle with halitosis.
I had someone who once worked for me who had a severe case of Type 1 halitosis. I spent hours a day deliberating with other coworkers what the best approach to this issue would be. We talked of leaving an industrial-sized case of Chiclets on his desk and then upon further discussion realized they wouldn’t be strong enough. We went from Chiclets to Altoids to tongue scraping. Was there new technology in tongue scraping? How does one approach another regarding that very matter? Who would be in charge of confronting this person if it came to an actual conversation, and how did one avoid encountering his breath during said conversation? I offered three different coworkers five thousand dollars to have an honest, caring conversation with this employee, and after serious contemplation, I was denied by all three. None of my other staff members had the guts to show up to work with either a Dentyne Ice truck or a surgical mask and have a frank conversation. The memory of this made me madder. Why was I the only one willing to take action in the world? Even Obama had become useless.
Needless to say, the rest of the trip was a disaster, and by the time I arrived in Montenegro, I had not only stopped speaking, I had stopped responding verbally. Couple that with learning that Montenegro was not in fact two words and had nothing to do with mounting anything, and you could describe my condition as going from bad to worse.
The intimate birthday of my boyfriend’s “close friend” ended up being attended by fifteen hundred of his other close friends. Where I was seated next to an African king who couldn’t geographically describe where his country was, and two Serbian prostitutes on the other side. I found out that the birthday boy was some rich banker my boyfriend had met twice. That was for whom I had traveled fifteen hours. A stranger. I broke up with Montenegro the day I left there, and I broke up with that boyfriend shortly thereafter.
My father is currently in a new living facility where the staff is ninety percent male, my brother’s “friend” is now a production assistant on Chelsea Lately, and I’m about to become the spokesperson for lice.
This is me on my way home from Montenegro.
CHAPTER 8
THE SWISS ALPS
For a long time as a child, I thought Switzerland and Swaziland were the same place. When I decided to go skiing in the Alps, I was once again mistakenly intoxicated at the prospect of interviewing tribal leaders.
The group this time was Lesbian Shelly, Sue, and myself. We needed a fourth, so I decided it best to throw in a wild card and invited my makeup artist, Gina, to join us. She is the female version of Steven Tyler but with a deeper voice and bigger lips. Gina is one of my only friends who doesn’t drink excessively, and I thought it might be a nice change of pace to have a chaperone. Gina is a bitch. She doesn’t mean to be, but she is. She acts like she knows everything, and the main problem with people who think they know everything, is that they usually know nothing at all.
I can walk out of my bathroom at work in a bathrobe with wet hair and she’ll stare at me with a puzzled look on her face and her mouth open for ten seconds until she is able to confirm the obvious. “Huh?” she’ll say, looking at me confused, and then come to the slow realization that any normal person would come to right away. “Ahhh… you took a shower.”
“No, Gina,” I’ll say drily. “I’m about to.”
Then you can watch her thoughts circle back around trying to figure out what is the truth and what isn’t. She’s not stupid. Well, a little stupid… but mostly just incredibly slow on the uptake. She reads the New York Times every day, though she is unable to really comprehend anything other than the headlines.
“Did you hear about Syria?” she’ll ask, walking into work.
“Are we going in?”
“I don’t know, but there was a big piece in the New York Times.”
“So, what did it say?”
“I don’t know,” she’ll say, exasperated. “It was pretty complicated.”
“Well, then why bring it up at all, Gina?”
She has been doing my hair and makeup every day on my show for four years and sits offstage watching the show so she’s nearby to touch me up in between commercial breaks, and is somehow still oblivious to the fact that it is literally my business to know what’s happening in the cultural zeitgeist. She consistently thinks she’s revealing huge news to me that has been made public for a large window of time. “Did you see Miley Cyrus at the VMAs?” she’ll ask in disgust, three weeks after the VMAs have aired.
“Yes, Gina. We’ve been discussing it on the show ever since it happened and have done several reenactments. You’re here every day. How did you miss that?”
“All right, all right!” she’ll say, walking away with her hands in the air. “I give up!”
It’s worth it to me to have Gina around, because from the way she name-drops and tells stories, you’d think she’s been in the business since the turn of the seventeenth century. Once she does actually get the joke, she laughs really hard with one eye closed, which gives me a lot of joy. She is also extremely devoted to me and is very tolerant of my increasingly ridiculous behavior, even though we argue on a daily basis. Plus, she’s good at packing my clothes.
This is the only photo I have of Gina looking friendly. She lived in London for a while shooting one of her hundreds of thousands of feature films, and she’ll be the first one to tell you how much the English love to take baths.
I love to ski and had yet to ski in Switzerland. An added bonus was that Zermatt is right on the border, so you can ski from Switzerland to Italy and back all in the same day. Zermatt had all the amenities I love the most: skiing, a weight-loss spa, and a casino.
There was no weight-loss spa or casino, but I told Shelly, Sue, Gina, and myself there would be.
We flew from Los Angeles to Geneva, and from Geneva we took a four-hour train ride up the mountain to Zermatt. I don’t like trains because I’m Jewish. I didn’t like this train because it went from side to side switchbacking in order to get up the mountain, which made four hours feel like four days. I do not suffer from motion sickness, but when I asked the conductor when the train was built and he told me the late 1800s, I deduced the obvious: this was a train that had transported Jews out of Zermatt during the Second World War. I could smell the Holocaust.
Lesbian Shelly told me to drink some water, citing dehydration from the plane ride as the cause of my nausea.
I hate water, especially room-temperature water. The water on the train, which had some German label I couldn’t make out, tasted like Chilean sea bass. The girls were all drinking wine and eating cheese, and the smell was making things worse. I took the hair clip out of my bag and used it to clip my nostrils together while I found an empty seat at the back of the car. The irony of being Jewish and having a strong sense of smell wasn’t lost on me.
“I’ve never seen Chelsea take a nap,” I overheard Gina say to Shelly and Sue.
“She’s just sleeping because she thinks she’s being taken to a concentration camp,” Shelly explained.
I fitfully slept most of the way on the train, because I was awoken by a voice with a violent German accent yelling out each stop on the way up the mountain. It hadn’t once crossed my mind that the main language in this part of Switzerland was German. When I was finally able to sit up, I asked Gina to give me French braids on either side of my head so I would look less Jewy. She reminded me I was half German, but like any half-black person will tell you, the stronger minority always takes over.