Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler Read Free Book Online Page B

“We are related!” I told him.
    “That’s really shitty, Chelsea,” he replied as he took another sip of his double vodka and grapefruit. “I’ve been like an uncle to you.”
    “You are my uncle,” I reminded him.
    “Not by blood,” he replied.
    A couple hours later a female officer came in and handcuffed me. “The bus is here to take you to Sybil Brand.”
    “I hope you realize that you’re making a big mistake,” I told her. “My father works for the Department of Sanitation.”
    “Well, then, you should have no problem getting released.” She smiled. She walked me on the bus and sat me down next to a Hispanic woman with two gold front teeth who looked like she was in her nineties. Then the female officer shackled our ankles together.
    “Are you being serious?” I asked her. “Do you really think ankle cuffs are necessary? I am not an outlaw.”
    “Standard operating procedure,” she replied.
    I looked around the bus at all the other prisoners. There were close to twenty women altogether. The only race not represented was Asian, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Mandarin and Cantonese are two dialects I knew wouldn’t be easy to pick up, not to mention the pressure that would come with joining an Asian gang. This was years before the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , and my martial arts weren’t anywhere near the level they are today.
    I looked over at the woman shackled to my ankle and made the peace sign.
    She didn’t respond, so I had no choice but to vocalize it. “Peace,” I said, leaning in to make sure she could hear me.
    “Peace,” she responded without looking in my direction.
    I turned around to look at the two black women sitting directly behind me. One looked like she’d only be a voice if she lost any more weight, and the other was about four hundred pounds and looked like she was very close to eating the woman sitting next to her.
    I lifted my chin and jutted it in their direction. “Word.”
    A cold stare met my eyes from Fat Albert’s sister, and the skinny woman kept staring out the window, shaking. “You wanna get bitch-slapped, Barbie?” was the next thing I heard from a black woman sitting behind Fat Albert’s sister.
    I was tempted to let Foxy Brown know that it wasn’t really possible for anyone to bitch-slap me with handcuffs on, but decided to keep a low profile. I turned around and wondered when Malibu had become so heavily integrated.
    The bus ride lasted for about forty-five minutes, and I kept to myself the rest of the trip. It became clear that this wasn’t my crowd and that once I got to prison I would have to find the girls with good teeth and run with them.
    Once we got to Sybil Brand, all twenty of us were put into a holding cell with benches, while they would call us out one by one to be booked and fingerprinted again. They unshackled us, and the minute Goldfinger was separated from me, she walked over to a corner of the room, pulled her pants down, and peed on the floor.
    It was quickly becoming apparent to me that this situation was much more serious than I had realized. This was turning into a full-blown episode of Survivor: Women of the Outback . Not only were some of these woman behaving like wild Indians, but looking around the room, I knew that if I had any hopes of blending in here, I would have no choice but to get a tattoo.
    Soon after we arrived, an officer came in with a bunch of sandwiches covered in Saran Wrap. You would have thought these women were getting food airlifted in a war zone. One woman was knocked to the ground as others ran to the officer bearing sandwiches.
    How anyone could have a sandwich at a time like this was beyond my imagination. I stayed seated on my bench and watched this pandemonium in disgust. I avoided further eye contact with any of the women until finally my name was called.
    I was taken in to be booked and fingerprinted. Again, I tried explaining to the officer taking my picture that this was a huge