Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me (11 page)

“Nope,” I said, looking straight into Gary’s dark, scary eyes. “Can’t think of anything inappropriate that I’ve ever said, Gary.”

Hell, yeah, I remembered everything, but I was not about to admit it… and certainly not to a Mercury-driving Armenian. I didn’t know which side Gary was on. For all I knew, Comcast was paying him to try to trap me.

My stomach dropped and my eyes drifted to the crayon doodles strewn across Gary’s wall that his daughters had drawn. The contrast between the innocence of those pictures and the severity of the moment wasn’t lost on me. Neither was the realization that I, too, would someday have to hang on my office wall the shitty little drawings my kids made.

“Really, you can’t think of anything you’ve ever said?”

“No,” I insisted. After a moment of silence, I asked, “Was it Elvira?”

The lady I was referring to wasn’t actually named Elvira, but it was the name we assigned to the security guard who’d just been fired from the show. She was black, but had these electric blue eyes, and when she spoke, it was with an indistinguishable accent. It was kind of faux-British, but not really. She wore the strangest, witch-like outfits, which made no sense since there was a uniform for security guards. She was fucking creepy. It had to have been her. She was clearly pissed about being let go and wanted retribution. And even though she and I rarely, if ever, spoke, I was loud, outgoing, white, and well known in the office. I was an easy target. “Blame that boisterous fire crotch.” Everyone else did.

“I can’t say, Brad. Listen, Ted is on his way in to talk with you. We’ll reconvene when he gets here.”

Shit, this was serious. It was Saturday and Ted, the CEO, was on his way in to dress me down personally? It had gotten that high up already? Immediately my entire career flashed before my eyes. This was it. My stupid mouth was going to cost Comcast millions of dollars to settle this suit, I would be fired, and the entire industry would turn its collective back on me.

What would I tell my parents? What would I tell my fiancée? How would I earn a living? Did this go on some permanent record? Would I go to prison? I couldn’t go to prison—I’m small, white, and, again, very rape-able.

After leaving Gary’s office, I lumbered back toward my own office, where Tom and Sue were waiting.

“You’re never going to believe this,” I said as I walked in. “Someone is suing Comcast for harassment based on something I said.”

Immediately they peppered me with questions. Who was suing? What had I said? How did I react when Gary told me? What was I going to do? I slinked down in my desk chair and stared off into the distance, pondering my fate.

“Well, let’s finish writing this stuff,” Sue suggested.

Had she not heard me when I said that Comcast was being sued by some unidentified loon because of something I’d said? If the tables had been reversed, I would have been a little more concerned with consoling my officemate than making another fucking Lindsay Lohan joke.

Sue clearly didn’t understand the gravity of this situation. Soon all of the big Comcast executives in Philadelphia—these industry titans—would not only know who I was, but would despise me for costing them millions of dollars. I was toast. Fuck, I was also a Comcast cable subscriber. Would they raise my rates or, worse, drop ESPN from my cable lineup?

My anxiety was increasing as I kept replaying the conversation with Gary over and over in my head. That’s what compulsives do—we continuously replay the same scenario in our heads, hoping for an alternative resolution or perspective on the event. That’s what compulsives do—we continuously replay the same scenario in our heads. That’s what compulsives do—we continuously replay the same scenario in our heads. We wonder if there was anything we could have done differently. It never helps. We just end up wallowing in our dread. With that, the twitches came roaring back and I was soon making popping noises with my lips.

I called my fiancée for some consolation. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I get fired, Shannon, but we’ll stick together.” She didn’t admit it, but I could hear the concern and panic in her voice. She was clearly wondering how she’d gotten engaged to such a perverted loose cannon.

After twenty minutes of sitting in shock, I was jarred to my senses by my office line ringing. It was Gary. “Come down to my office. Chelsea’s here and we want to speak with you.”

Oh shit. I hadn’t even thought about Chelsea. A new terror was upon me. When Chelsea gets mad, she gets bright red and the veins in her neck flare up, kind of like mine when I have that certain twitch. She, too, looks like a Velociraptor… only redder and with huge breasts. She was clearly going to be pissed. I shuffled back down to Gary’s office, all the while picturing Chelsea yelling, “I fucking told you. You just couldn’t shut your mouth.”

Gary was in his chair and Chelsea was in one of the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk. Before I could even sit down, Chelsea launched into me.

“What did you say, Brad?!”

Yep, there were those veins… and those breasts.

“I don’t know, Chelsea. I haven’t said anything you haven’t heard. I think whoever this is is just crazy.”

“You must’ve said something, Brad. These things don’t just come out of nowhere.”

“I mean, you know we say all kinds of things in the writers’ room.”

“Well, Ted is on his way down here,” she assured me. “And he is not happy. You’d better start thinking. Never mind this is a Saturday and this is his swimming time. Think, Brad!” Chelsea screamed. “What did you say?”

I racked my brain. Again, a million things came to my mind, but I was not about to incriminate myself.

Then Chelsea launched into a barrage of ridiculous questions.

“Did you ever say that someone had a nice ass?”

“No,” I insisted.

“Did you ever ask someone to lift their shirt and show you their breasts?”

“What? No!”

“Did you ever tell someone you masturbated thinking about them?”

“That’s fucking gross, Chelsea. No!”

And then came the question to end all questions.

“Brad, did you ever say you wanted to rape someone?”

For a moment the world stood still. I had to repeat Chelsea’s question in my own head just to make sure I’d heard it correctly.

“What?!” My face became flushed. “No, I never said I wanted to rape someone, Chelsea!” The truth is, at one time or another, we’ve all said these things to each other.

“Even as a joke?” Gary added.

I whipped my head around. “No, Gary, not even as a joke,” I said, even though I knew, for sure, that not only had I been threatened with rape, but I had also threatened a rape. We all threaten each other all the time. But I had never, nor would I ever have, gone up to someone and said, “Hey there, I want to rape you.”

At this point, I was not sure how any answer I gave would help the situation. If, for some reason, I did admit to telling someone I wanted to rape them, what was Chelsea going to do about it? Probably not a whole hell of a lot. It was safer to deny everything, but I had second thoughts. Maybe, I thought, I’ll admit to one rape comment to make it more believable that I’m denying everything else.

It was at that point that even Chelsea couldn’t take it anymore. She clearly saw the torment I was going through and had a rare soft moment. She initially presumed—and rightfully so, given my history—that I would go apeshit and throw a childish tantrum and start telling everyone that they could “Fuck off and suck my big, long balls! You can’t bring Brad Wollack down!” Instead, I succumbed to the severity of the situation. No ranting or raving, just quiet panic.

I was terrified and had just turned, if possible, a paler shade than I normally was, when I saw her face softening into a wide smile and she began cracking up. Within seconds, tears were flowing from her eyes.

I turned to Gary, who was also laughing. Tom and Sue, who had been waiting outside the office listening to the whole exchange, came in applauding. Chelsea was now pointing to one of Gary’s shelves.

I was so caught up in the moment I hadn’t even noticed the video camera with the blinking light resting on the bookshelf behind Gary. These assholes were taping the whole thing, hoping to show my complete mental breakdown on a future Chelsea Lately episode.

I had never experienced a greater wave of relief at seeing a video camera taping me. I realized this was all a prank. Gary pointed to the camera on the bookshelf as if he were the Armenian Ashton Kutcher and we were on Punk’d, but all I could manage to say was, “You fuckers. I saw my whole career flash before my eyes!”

The tape never made air. At least there was one real takeaway from that day: Grumpy Gary isn’t a bad actor.

Chelsea has never, for the life of her, understood what my wife, Shannon, could possibly find attractive about me—a pasty, red-haired, nerdy Jew. Nonetheless, her disapproval of our nuptials, strictly on an aesthetic basis, didn’t stop her from attending our wedding in June 2008.

It was a beautiful summer evening as I wed the love of my life in Beverly Hills. At the end of the evening, Chelsea approached me and handed over an envelope containing a very generous check. She never said what we should use the money for, but my best guess was that she probably wanted us to put it toward adopting a child in hopes of our avoiding procreation, thus altogether eliminating the possibility of a child coming out looking like a mini version of me.

We, on the other hand, applied the whole thing to our lavish honeymoon. Shannon and I had planned a ten-day trip to the gorgeous seaside town of Positano, Italy, and the island of Santorini in Greece. We’d spared no expense, opting to stay at the nicest of hotels, eat the best of foods, and go on whatever excursion we desired.

Ten days with your new bride and away from work seems idyllic, but I think the honeymoon is really an old-fashioned phenomenon. I haven’t cross-referenced this, because I hate research, but it obviously dates back to the days when couples didn’t know each other at all and women were still virgins when they got married. Basically, honeymoons, in my mind, were created so newlyweds could get emotionally and physically acquainted with their life partner.

However, Shannon and I had been together for six-plus years. We had been living together for two years, already had a healthy sexual relationship, and knew everything there was to know about each other. Needless to say, no matter how exotic the locale or romantic the setting, after ten days alone, two people run out of things to do and shit to say.

We were so desperate for conversation with other people that we were siding up at restaurants with couples we would never have associated with back home. I’m talking uber-Jews from New York and elderly widows from Florida. We became so anxious and delusional that we were even exchanging phone numbers, as if we were actually going to visit these a-holes back at home.

I became so jaded at points in the vacation that I thought about checking my e-mail. Before we left for the trip, I had made a promise to myself and, most important, to Shannon, that I wouldn’t check my work e-mail during our honeymoon. I was going to focus on her and total relaxation—that was it.

I made it through Italy okay, mostly because my fat face was too busy buried in a plate of pasta twenty-four hours a day to think about anything else, but by the final few days in Greece, I was bored. Sure, we were at a beautiful resort, but it was nothing but sunlight. I can’t stand the sun; it gave me melanoma once, so now I avoid it at all costs. In fact, when we sat by the gorgeous, peaceful infinity pool overlooking the deep blue sea, all tranquility at the resort was rudely disrupted every twenty minutes by one of the pool boys coming over to our chaise lounge and rotating my umbrella—by physically scraping the base of it across the pool deck. This was done to ensure that not one ounce of my skin was ever exposed to the sun. The other guests would look over, I would nod and give an apologetic wave, and Shannon would scold me. It was, however, great service.

Even in total shade, there is only so much sitting out I can do. I get restless and fidgety. Yes, the view was spectacular and my wife was—and is—gorgeous, and it was such a special place… blah, blah, blah. But I was fucking bored. And that’s when I made the fatal mistake of checking my work e-mail on my iPhone.

After a few insignificant e-mails—most of which were from Chelsea and included photos of coworkers in compromising positions—I saw a message from an E! network publicist, John, with the subject line: Time Magazine Shoot.

Our show had been on the air for roughly a year and Chelsea was starting to get some big-time press. Naturally I assumed that John’s message was just an informative e-mail about a Chelsea article and the accompanying photo shoot that would take place in our offices. Basically, these e-mails are code for “Stay the fuck out of the way.”

Instead, this was what I read.

HEY ALL:

THE PHOTOGRAPHER FROM TIME MAGAZINE WILL BE AT YOUR OFFICE AT 11AM TO PHOTOGRAPH ALL OF THE WRITERS. IF THERE ARE ANY PROBLEMS, LET ME KNOW ASAP.

BEST,

JOHN

My heart dropped and my face turned pale. Yeah, I have a fuckin’ problem… I wasn’t going to be there! Shannon saw my look of horror and asked what was wrong.

“They’re doing a Time magazine photo shoot of all the Chelsea Lately writers.”

“That’s great. So why do you look like shit?”

“Because it’s on Friday and we don’t get back to the States until Sunday.”

I don’t think of myself as a vain person per se, but there are a few things I like, and “credit” is one of them. The thought of being left out of a story about the people “behind Chelsea” in an international publication was too much to bear. Other than Tom, I had been with Chelsea the longest out of all of them. I deserved to be there! Immediately my mind began racing, wondering how I would answer all of the nagging questions from family and friends. “Why aren’t you in the big article about Chelsea’s writers, Brad? Does she not like you? Are you really even a writer for her? Are you a liar? Can you still get me tickets to a taping of the show?”