We put our stuff on some lounge chairs and lotioned up. At first the boys (aged six and three at the time) complained about the loud noise coming from the DJ spinning techno beats, but they forgot about it as soon as they got to the slide. Brandon was psyched because no lifeguard was there to tell him he was too short to go on the ride. At around one, Chelsea came to the pool, and my kids, who adore her, went over and asked if she would go down the slide with them. She looked horrified and said, “Oh, kids, I would, but I’m afraid I’ll get pregnant. I don’t want to give birth to a baby that craves Ed Hardy.”
I started to notice that the pool area was getting more crowded, but with no other kids. I was seeing Jersey Shore types. Every guy was super-tanned, roided-out, and had greasy Guido hair. The women were even more memorable. It’s not like they were Miss Americas in the bathing-suit competition. They were the type to wear super-tiny triangle tops that just covered the nipple and thong bikini bottoms, paired with clear strappy platform heels. They reminded me of those Bratz dolls that Mackenzie used to play with. They come in a box with huge glossy lips and big hair, wearing crop tops, a pleather miniskirt, and no underwear so they can get in the club for free. Basically, they’re Barbie’s slutty second cousin who comes to visit her in college and does Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken, in her dorm room while Barbie is at her Poli Sci 101 class. There were so many tattoos of hearts and butterflies and inspirational sayings written appropriately just under their tits. We were becoming outnumbered.
The boys couldn’t have cared less, because they had the waterslide all to themselves. Strippers tend to avoid water-slides, since their high heels could get caught in the twists and turns, and their hair extensions would frizz up if they got wet.
At one point, Brandon needed to use the restroom, which was located by the second pool near where the party was really happening. People were dancing and grinding like it was a nightclub at a pool. I picked Brandon up on my hip so that I could hold him. As we made our way, we passed plenty of women drinking Mojitos out of penis-shaped straws. Suddenly, I noticed that the men were looking at me. I know I’m pretty, but I definitely couldn’t compare to these types of Vegas showgirls. I figured they must have come to see my stand-up act the night before. Right as we got to the bathroom, some kind girl exclaimed to me, “Oh my God, the top of your bathing suit . . .” I looked down and saw that Brandon had mistakenly pulled down my top while he was holding on to me, completely exposing my boob. I immediately repositioned myself to stop my nipple from winking at the world and took him into the bathroom. As we walked back toward our lounge chairs, I finally noticed the signs that said 21 AND OVER ONLY, STRICTLY ENFORCED. It was definitely past two in the afternoon. When we got back to our area, I went to the bar to get the boys two Sprites. The only option was to get the forty-eight-ounce sipper with Sprite minus the vodka, which I still had to pay for. Chelsea and her entourage were now in a cabana. Chelsea said, “Heather, are you kidding me? It’s time for you to leave and let the grown-ups play. This isn’t Kids Gone Wild.” I said, “I’m not as inappropriate as you may think. I’ve been trying to get them to leave but they just keep saying, ‘Please, Mom, just one more time down the slide.’ ” Chelsea said, “You mean the Hepatitis C slide? Heather, aren’t you the mother? If you stay another ten minutes, they are going to see something that will scar them for life.”
I took Chelsea’s advice and gathered up my family. We left the pool area and the party, which was called “Rehab.”
Brandon on what my colleagues referred to as the Hepatitis C slide.
When I got back to work on Monday, everyone was making fun of me for bringing my kids to the pool. They were threatening to call Child Protective Services and have my children removed from my care. Brad Wollack, one of my fellow writers, said to me, “Heather, don’t you know they have paramedics on hand for when people OD, or pass out from alcohol poisoning? I decided to Google Hard Rock Hotel and Rehab and discovered something that read: “Everyone knows [except for me] that some of the best partying in Las Vegas happens during the daytime poolside. And the ultimate Vegas pool party? The Hard Rock Hotel invented it with Rehab. The once intimate poolside party has grown into a destination with weekend revelers in the thousands. Get ready for Rock Star Lemonades, world-famous DJs, celebrity guests, and the best time you’ll have in Vegas. The beautiful, the tattooed, the rich, the famous, large and small, everyone gets down on Rehab Sunday.”
Then it hit me. When they said large and small I don’t think they meant six- and three-year-old boys.
I hoped that would be the last time I would ever take my sons to rehab. However, I would like to go to rehab one day, not for any problem I have but just to go to Promises in Malibu for a thirty-day stint paid for by insurance. I could enjoy days of yoga and journaling, and going to group therapy to talk about myself. I wouldn’t wear makeup and would let my hair dry naturally so by the time I left I’d be glowing and my hair would shine like a L’Oréal commercial from not having heat on it for weeks. When not telling stories about myself I’d offer up my motherly advice to the real addicts. I’d say things like “It’s not that your mom had a favorite, it’s just that their personality traits are more evident in one child over another and therefore it is easier for them to relate to and parent that child versus the one who is drinking and doing drugs. Did you ever think your sister might have been more enjoyable to take shopping because she wasn’t shooting up heroin in the dressing room?” I’m sorry, but in my research of watching Celebrity Rehab and Sober House on VH1, I think parents get blamed a little too much.
On Chelsea Lately, I used to do a wicked Amy Winehouse impersonation. After she died, I thought, What a waste of my talents. It was such a good wig and now I had to just hang it in my office to remember Amy. I got many condolence Facebook postings and tweets, and for a moment I empathized with what Amy had gone through.
I performed again in Vegas recently, and the boys asked if they could go to the cool place with the slide called Rehab.
But I said, “No. No. No.”
10
WILD WORLD
Wild World USA is an amusement park in Valencia, California, and approximately a forty-five-minute drive from our house in Woodland Hills. When I was growing up, my parents preferred Wild World over Disneyland since it was closer. Because my parents worked every day selling residential real estate, at the beginning of my summer vacation, my dad would open his rugged calendar, pick out one day, and write “Wild World” on it in red pen—not pencil like everything else. That meant no matter what, they would not make appointments on that chosen day. My mom, my dad, Shannon, and I would spend the entire day riding roller coasters until the park closed.
Summer in Valencia, California, is the closest I will ever get to hell (I’m praying). An average afternoon in July can get as high as 115 degrees. But not to worry—after waiting in line for two hours and fifteen minutes, you can get sprinkled with ten drops of cool water as the log that you are sitting in flies down a rinky-dink river, completing your fifty-four seconds of bliss.
As a kid, I could barely sleep the night before our trip to Wild World. I remember having my pink shorts and matching halter top all laid out along with my clear jelly flats so that if they got wet on the Wet ‘n’ Wonderful—the best of the water rides—they’d dry quickly, unlike the pairs of sneakers my amateur sibling was wearing. I planned on wearing a ponytail and hot-pink visor. I put my Chapstick, sunscreen, and some money in a small purse that I’d wear diagonally across my chest, so there was no way it could fall off while I was going 110 miles per hour upside down on the Rebellion.
I woke up at eight a.m. and quickly ran to Shannon’s room. I was nine, and Shannon was eleven. After waking her up, I went into my parents’ room and said cheerfully, “Mom, Dad, wake up! The park opens at ten.” Then I heard my mom moan, “Oh, Bob, I don’t feel good.” My heart fell. She has to get better. I prayed three Hail Marys. This was the one day I’d been counting down the days, the hours, the m
inutes, and the seconds for to arrive. I knew how many active listings my parents had, so if it wasn’t going to be that day, it wouldn’t be until the next year that we could go again. I guess Shannon and I laid enough guilt on my mom, because she got dressed and we were on the freeway to Wild World within an hour. Why she didn’t just suggest that she stay home and make my dad go, I don’t understand, but I guess she felt like I do now. As a guilty working mom she really wanted to spend the day with us having fun and not miss out on the memory. Within minutes of entering the gates my mom said, “Bob, I need to sit down.” Next thing we knew, she was lying down on a bed in the Wild World hospital, but she insisted that we leave her and enjoy ourselves, so the three of us were off to wait in the lines. Every few hours we’d go by to check on her and the nurse would say she was fine, but sleeping. At around eleven thirty p.m. we took our last ride (you can see we were serious about our time at the park, sick mom and all). We had the nurse wake Mom up when it was time to go. My mom said she never felt better and it was one of the best days she’d had in the past decade. As a mom, I totally get it now. She was sick and needed to sleep, but if she had stayed home, she would have felt guilty about resting. At the Wild World hospital, however, she had found her happy place. If only I had caught on a little quicker.
It’s very rare that I am alone. But when I’m on the road performing stand-up and I don’t have anything to do the next morning, I just want to sleep. Sometimes I get so tired I fantasize about being admitted to the hospital and being treated for exhaustion, Mariah Carey–style. Like when I have what I like to call a “sleep party.” It’s a party where only I am invited, and it’s amazing. First I pee several times so I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, then I turn off my phone, and finally I take two Advil PMs. Sometimes they make me thirsty, so I make sure I have a glass of water by my bed. I dress in warm pajamas with socks, and I keep a sleep mask by my bed in case I need to put it on in the morning just to get a few more hours in. My record is ten and a half hours. The joy I feel when I wake up and count how many hours I slept is a feeling of amazing accomplishment. It’s the same jubilation I believe Neil Armstrong felt when he walked on the moon.
From that point on, my mom never joined us again at Wild World. She didn’t enjoy the scary rides anyway, and I think she came to that place of “Let’s not, and say I did.” We didn’t mind, just as long as we were going.
Once in line for the Swashbuckler, a pirate ship that swings really high from side to side, some boys around twelve years old were cutting in line by running under the iron bars to the next row when my dad, the Marine, reached down and grabbed one of the boys by his collar and lifted him in the air and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The kid was speechless and my dad continued. “All of you get to the back of the line, or I’ll call for security and have you little shits thrown out of here.” The boy called to his friends, who were witnessing what was happening, and said, “Come on, guys, this ride is lame anyway.” And the three of them bolted as other parents cheered and shook my dad’s hand. That day, I said to myself, “One day I’m going to be rich enough to rent out Wild World for my birthday and I won’t have to wait in line for any ride all day long. Could anything be greater than that?”
But I felt I always made the most of the hour-long waits to get on the rides. I loved to people-watch and kept myself busy reading all the tattoos of the people ahead of me. I wondered if their mothers were a little less disappointed if their tattoos were religious, or read I MOM. Yes, your son got a tattoo on his back, but it’s of Jesus Christ going to all twelve Stations of the Cross. I’d fantasize about one day having a boyfriend, where I could stick my tongue down his throat for four minutes then walk one foot forward in line, and then he’d stick his tongue down my throat for another four minutes. I think I officially learned how babies were made while in line for the Rebellion. I dreamed that one day in the future a boy would put his hands in the back pockets of my Jordache jeans as I put my palms in his back pockets, and we would walk facing each other like that until we eventually got to the front.
I’ve still never forgiven my dad for the day he grounded me from going to Wild World ten minutes before my friends came to pick me up because, in his opinion, I did a sloppy job stuffing the envelopes for their real-estate mailer. I hated running out and telling Tara, Liz, and Heather Cross that I couldn’t join them. At sixteen, you had to have a fourth person, otherwise one teenage girl would be subjected to sitting next to a possible pedophile on a ride, so I really felt like I let them down. Also, by now we were finally four somewhat cute teenage girls. I was planning on meeting a hot guy to grind on against the metal dividers in line.
My most traumatic Wild World experience occurred when I was about eleven. My dad, my sister, and I planned to go one weekday during our spring break. When you go to Catholic school, they give you the week off after Easter, which is different from the public schools’ spring break probably because they didn’t want us to socialize with the public-school kids. I remember my dad telling me to call and find out what Wild World’s hours were in case they were different from the summer, but I got distracted with an episode of Growing Pains and I never phoned. Driving there that morning my dad accidently missed the off-ramp, and as he was turning around, I was staring at their largest, most popular roller coaster, the Monster. After several minutes I still hadn’t seen the little train of screaming people go by. I got a pit in my stomach. Was the ride broken? Oh no! As we drove up my dad said, “Look, no one is in the parking lot. We must be the first ones here. Thank God you guys have a different week off than the public-school kids.” And then we saw it. A sign that read PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES. WILD WORLD WILL BE CLOSED FROM APRIL 9–15TH. I burst into tears. My dad was so sweet, he didn’t scold me for not calling. In fact, he didn’t even bring it up. Then he suggested going to the beach instead. “But we didn’t bring our bathing suits or towels,” my sister and I cried. So instead he got back on the freeway and drove all the way to Disneyland, in Anaheim, the Taj Mahal of amusement parks. We didn’t get there until one p.m., but we had the best time ever, and stayed until it closed at ten.
This past Christmas vacation, Peter’s sister, Karen, and her two kids, aged thirteen and fifteen, were coming to visit us the day after the holiday. We decided to go to Wild World, because for a group of ten it was only going to be twenty-seven dollars each—a serious deal. And I was kind of excited, as I had not been since I was a teenager and was curious to check out the new rides. The night beforehand, it was very warm, so we decided to heat up the pool and have some families over. We started drinking around two p.m. After going in the Jacuzzi, drying off, and getting dressed, I was pouring another glass of wine when I noticed Liz’s three-year-old son trying to get a ball out of the pool. This made me nervous, so I decided to get the toys out of the pool and put the automatic cover on. I got the ball out successfully; however, when I went to grab the water gun I lost my balance and fell in the pool—fully clothed, with my shoes still on my feet. My wineglass also fell in with me, making the pool one giant wine spritzer. My husband ran over with a camera and I posed while floating in the shallow end still holding my wineglass. Luckily, that convinced me to stop drinking for the night, so I felt fine the next morning for our big day at Wild World. Peter, however, had continued to drink red wine and smoke cigars, and was in horrible shape.
I don’t condone my husband smoking cigars. In fact, one night when I was telling Drake his bedtime story—which I’m required to do by Drake every night and it has to be completely made up and cannot have a character named Drake in it or any name that rhymes with Drake—I added how the little boy’s teeth got yellow from smoking and he had to smoke cigarettes out of a hole in his neck (yes, I draw from popular Public Service Announcements for inspiration). Drake then replied, “But Daddy smokes.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I snapped back.
“Yes, I’ve seen him do it with Mikey’s dad,” he argued.
&nbs
p; “Well, those are cigars, but you’re right, anything you smoke is bad and Daddy’s not going to do it anymore.” I didn’t want him becoming some pothead, thinking that’s OK because it’s organic or some other hippie shit. I immediately walked into the bedroom and told Peter, “The kids can’t see you smoke cigars anymore. We can’t preach what we don’t practice. I’m serious, if the kids are around, no cigars.”
A couple of weeks later, we were at Liz’s house and she had a few families over. At around eight p.m. I started to smell cigar smoke but didn’t know where it was coming from because none of the husbands were in the backyard. Then I heard a loud crash. Peter and three other men all well over two hundred pounds each had snuck up into Liz’s three-year-old son Ethan’s tree house to smoke their cigars so the kids wouldn’t see them, and the fragile wood planks in the floor could not hold the weight. Thankfully, no one was too hurt. I tried to make the best out of it and told the boys, “See? Smoking is dangerous and the mommy always finds out if you ever try to hide it like Daddy did.”
The morning we left for Wild World, I remembered when my mom was sick all those years ago, and found it in my heart not to push Peter to join us. Instead, I told him to stay home and clean up the backyard, take down the Christmas lights, and do three loads of laundry because that’s the kind of cool wife I am. Then my sister-in-law, Karen; mother-in-law, Ginny; and six kids and I were off for a day of fun.
When we drove up, we saw plenty of cars—thousands in fact, so at least I had the comfort of knowing it wasn’t closed. However, Wild World doesn’t have the little open buses that transport you from the parking lot to the front of the park, so after about five minutes of walking, five-year-old Brandon started whining, “Carry me, carry me, Mommy.” I put him on my back but after a few minutes he was feeling really heavy and I thought they should have guys you can hire for the day just to carry your kid around at amusement parks the way you pick someone up outside of a Home Depot to help you move or paint your gate. In our journey from our car to the gate I noticed several teenagers downing what looked to be tequila as they pushed their toddlers in strollers. I could understand why when we got to the top of the hill and saw the large sign prohibiting alcohol consumption.
My Inappropriate Life Page 7
