I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  My Best Paw Foreword

  Dum-Diddle-Dum-Dum

  A Dog Day of Summer

  Dogs Are the New Children

  Oedipus Rex

  Ménage à Dog

  There’s No Place Like Home, Judy

  The Lone Wolf

  The Evil Stepmother

  Scratching at My Door, Tail Between His Legs

  Walking My Dog Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Is a Nice Way to Start ...

  A Courtly Soul

  The Little Rascal

  Are You a Rascal or a Ringo?

  Squatting with Stella by Starlight

  Peekapoo, Where Are You?

  Pimping Out Delilah

  Wuzsha, Wuzsha, Wuzsha!

  My Dog, the Dominatrix

  Are You Smarter Than a Terrier?

  Fairy Tales Can Come True

  Contributor Bios

  A Note from the Editor

  Acknowledgements

  Wade Rouse, Editor

  Praise for Wade Rouse’s Memoir

  It’s All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs,

  34 Holidays and 50 Boxes of Wine

  “Damn you, Wade! I missed two eBay auctions and delayed taking my Ambien every night for a week so I could finish It’s All Relative, but it was so worth it. This book rocks! Charming, funny, and saucy enough to make me blush.”

  —Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of We Thought You Would Be Prettier

  “Wade Rouse’s books combine the one-two punch of hilarity and heart and never cease to delight. Filled with uproarious one-liners and enough soul to truly satisfy, readers are going to clamor for a seat at Rouse’s holiday table. I can’t tell you how much I loved this book.”

  —Jen Lancaster, New York Times bestselling author of If You Were Here

  “Wade Rouse has officially become the laugh assassin. . . . [His] remembrances of his family holidays are masterfully gift-wrapped in delightful dysfunction and topped with a bow of laser-sharp sentimental insight designed to help you not only laugh at but also fall in love again with your own jacked-up gene pool. This book is the gift that keeps on giving.”

  —Josh Kilmer-Purcell, star of The Fabulous Beekman Boys and New York Times bestselling author of The Bucolic Plague

  Praise for Wade Rouse’s Memoir

  At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream:

  Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life

  A Today Show Summer Must Read

  “A wise, witty, and often wicked voice.”

  —USA Today

  “Rouse is a master raconteur and his transition from city slicker to country mouse is filled with sidesplitting humor, heart, and, of course, bands of marauding raccoons. This book has now taken its place at the top of my favorites list!”

  —Jen Lancaster

  “A funny, good-natured chronicle of a fish out of water, slowly learning to breathe.”

  —Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of The Abstinence Teacher

  “In the spirit of David Sedaris, a laugh-out-loud funny book!”

  —John Searles on NBC’s Today show

  “You laugh when you least expect to—and then you realize you’ve been laughing almost nonstop.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “This is David Sedaris meets Dave Berry . . . . Every page is good for a laugh.”

  —Library Journal

  “Immensely entertaining.”

  —A. J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2011

  Copyright © Wade Rouse, 2011

  Foreword copyright © Chelsea Handler, 2011

  For individual author copyrights see page 261.

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  I’m not the biggest bitch in this relationship: hilarious, heartwarming tales about man’s best friends from America’s favorite humorists/edited by Wade Rouse; foreword by Chelsea Handler’s dog, Chunk. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54410-5

  1. Dogs—United States—Anecdotes. 2. Dogs—Humor. 3. Humorists, American—Biography—Anecdotes. I. Rouse, Wade.

  SF426.2..7—dc23 2011020250

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences and the words are the authors’ alone.

  While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  For Marge

  July 16, 1997–April 11, 2011

  Fourteen years, five books, three major life changes, thousands of

  walks, millions of kisses, billions of silent farts, zillions of snuggles,

  infinite belly rubs, laughs and treats…

  and one man whose life has forever been changed by one rescue

  dog’s unconditional love. You helped teach me it was OK to love

  again, with wild abandon, heart be damned.

  For Mabel

  You make me laugh. You remind me to play like a child. You sleep on

  my legs until they are numb. Yo
u wake me at dawn to start the day.

  You were your sister’s keeper.

  My Best Paw Foreword

  Chelsea Handler’s Dog, Chunk

  Hello. My name is Chunk Handler.

  I’m a chow mixed with a handsome dash of German shepherd. I’m a dog. A canine. A mutt. A fleabag. I have four furry legs and a missing pair of nuts, and I refer to most girls as bitches. I dream in color, but my life is in black and white.

  Let’s go on a walk—careful though, I tend to pull the leash. Don’t forget a plastic baggie, because I tend to take big dumps. My mom is Chelsea Handler. She’s a comedian, a television host, and a bestselling author. If you don’t know who she is, don’t worry. When I met her I had no idea who she was, either. That’s probably because I don’t watch the E! channel. I mainly enjoy classic film noir, but I also like any dating show that involves a slut bus.

  When I was approached to contribute to this book, I was naturally annoyed. I mean what . . . a pain in the ass. Typically, the only thing I like to do with an ass is sniff it. The idea of writing a foreword for a book about a bunch of idiots and their mutts sounded awful, but it did get me thinking about where I came from. I’m a long walk away from where I was about a year ago. Once upon a time, I was just some poor shelter pooch with an expiration date. I was like a carton of spoiling milk.

  Just one year ago . . .

  It was springtime in Los Angeles; the irony that everything else was in bloom all around me while I was in my dire situation wasn’t lost on me. I was stuck at the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter, and it was the day I was sentenced to be assassinated. They were going to electrocute me in a cute little doggy electric chair. Everything that’s little and doggy usually sounds so adorable, but an electric chair sounds sick. I don’t believe that’s how they were actually going to kill me. It’s just a little gallows humor.

  So, humor me.

  I thought I’d get shot by a firing squad or something.

  Here’s a rule of non-opposable thumb: If you ever end up in a place with the word “shelter” in it, life’s not going great for you. Like a bomb shelter. That’s pretty bad. Or, if you’re sheltered as a kid, and when you grow up you can’t relate to the adult world. It’s like how most men expect to have sex on the first date. You’re kind of screwed there, too.

  Most dogs don’t care much about dying. We don’t sit around fearing the end on a daily basis like humans do. You never see a dog with a cardboard sign hanging around his neck that says “The End Is Near.” The only end I want near . . . is a rear end. But when it’s actually happening to you, I don’t care if you’re a dog or a bumblebee or a little cell inside a dumb fish, you won’t want to die. Trust me, girl.

  The biggest regret about my life is that I never felt like I was a part of anything. I always felt more like I was apart from everything. It’s funny how “a part” and “apart” are complete opposites, yet only differ by a little space.

  God, I’m deep.

  My entire life I’d been passed around from one family to the next more times than the common cold. I’ve gone by a dozen different names, from Cinnamon to Escalade. It was a black family that named me Escalade. What a shocker. Nothing against black people, they just come up with really stupid names. I mean, white people are crazy, too. This one hick from Texas named me Booger. He would always try to feed me his boogers. What an a-hole. Right now, my name is Guinness. I hate that name, it sounds so pedestrian for a dog of my taste.

  On the other paw, I guess it doesn’t really matter what my name is. A name is just a sound that someone utters to get someone else to turn around. You could call me Litter Box Dump and I’d be fine with that. So, go off.

  I suppose what this all adds up to is that I’ve never been a good enough dog to capture the heart of just one person who could love me forever. It’s probably my fault.

  In fact, somehow I’ve earned the reputation in the shelter world as being a “problem dog.” Please don’t ever give a dog a reputation. It’s a loser thing to do. We’re just who we are.

  We bark, we bite, we chew, and we shadoobie. So, get used to it. I don’t really want to die, but it’s not like I want to sit around the shelter and watch Cesar Millan on National Geographic for the rest of my life, either. I’m just a tail wagger on the red list, and there’s only two ways off the red list. I either go home in a loving person’s car or in a doggy bag. At least all dogs go to heaven, right?

  And that’s where my life got weird.

  See, that should have been my last thought. All dogs go to heaven. I’d been rehearsing it for years. I should’ve been shot to sleep. Everything should’ve faded to black. The end.

  But it wasn’t.

  There are a thousand dogs, in a thousand shelters, on a thousand different days. I don’t know why she did, but she walked into mine. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and Chelsea was my sweet Ingrid Bergman. She was like a vision in faux blond strutting into that shelter, and she rescued me.

  The first thing I did when I met Chelsea . . . I smelled her coslopus.

  You can learn so much from smelling someone’s crotch. Why do you think dogs always smell each other’s assholes? It’s instant knowledge. It’s like everything that encompasses that person is downloaded right into your brain the instant you take a whiff.

  Chelsea’s coslopus smelled like a mystery. As I climbed into the back of her Jaguar, I didn’t know where I was going or what was in store for my future. But I did think the backseat was a little tight. I didn’t give two craps about it, though. I was just happy to be alive. I stuck my head out the window and let the salty Santa Monica air blow through my coat, and I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  “Woof!”

  Now, just getting rescued is one thing. But getting rescued by a celebrity is like winning the lottery powerball scratcher mega millions jackpot bingo hole in one.

  I went from the red list to the B-list in one day.

  Well, maybe not the B-list, but at least the C-plus-list.

  This type of rags-to-riches life has to happen to somebody, though. It made me feel like one of Brad and Angelina’s adopted kids. Imagine that sense of surreal luck. You’re living in Cambodia, and then one day Angelina Jolie swoops in and rescues you. It almost seems more miraculous than actually being one of their genetic offspring.

  I’m like Chelsea’s Maddox.

  Thank God, she hated the name Guinness. And since Maddox was already taken, Chelsea looked at me and said, “I’m going to call you Chunk.”

  As much as I love the sound of that, I try not getting too attached to my names. I mean, there’s always that chance it won’t last. I’ve had it happen a million times. I’m sitting at a shelter, and a little girl pleads, “Oh, Daddy, please can I have a puppy?! Pleeaaase can I have him?!”

  The daddy begrudgingly agrees, but only after making his young daughter promise to take the dog on walks, and pick up the shadoobs, and do all the other hard work that goes along with having a dog.

  Notice how I didn’t say “owning” a dog. You don’t “own” a dog. You “have” a dog. And the dog has you.

  The problem is that one day that little girl gets bored with the dog, and she yearns for boys, and then she forgets about the dog. Shortly after that, her daddy gets tired of taking the dog on walks, and tired of feeding the dog, and that’s how the dog ends up back in the shelter. I just don’t want my relationship with Chelsea to end like that.

  I remember seeing this old cartoon when I was a puppy. There are these two polar bears standing next to an igloo. One of the polar bears has just taken a bite out of the igloo, and he says:

  “I love these things, they’re crunchy on the outside, and chewy in the center.”

  That’s how I feel: a little icy on the outside, but soft at heart.

  For a while after Chelsea took me home, I had a pretty bad case of the separation anxieties. To be honest, I’ve never been able to leave Chelsea’s side. When she goes to the bathroom, I sit by the door
. That goes for number ones and number twos. She once said that she’d never let a dog sleep in her bed. Well, guess where I sleep? I sleep in her bed. Sometimes I fart, and we laugh. I wag my tail to waft the stench around the room. Don’t always assume that if a dog is wagging his tail that means he’s happy to see you. A lot of times it just means he farted, or that he’s giving you the finger.

  If you’re a fan of Chelsea’s idiot-box television show called Chelsea Lately, then you’ve probably seen me wandering around the set from time to time. I’m practically quasi-famous. If only the mutts at the shelter could see me now. Soon, Chelsea and I will be moving into a big house, with a big backyard, and a big pool. I’d invite all the old dogs over if I knew where they were.

  I can’t believe it was just a year ago that I was supposed to be electrocuted in a little doggy electric chair. These days, I fly around the globe on private jets; I spend weekends with Chelsea’s hot friend Jenny McCarthy. I even have my own Twitter page to vent my frustrations. You can follow me at @chunkhandler, by the way.

  I mean, I’m living the life.

  That got me thinking about this book, and why it was important that I contributed. All these people came together to write about how much they love their stupid mutts. Well, I think one mutt had to come forward and say how much we love you guys, too. We aren’t very picky, either. You don’t have to be a celebrity to win us over. Most of the time all we need is someone who talks to us, rubs our belly, and picks our poops off the ground. I realize that we’re the dogs and you’re the humans, and you literally rescued us. But remember that we all play our own part.