The Kardashiad, Week 5.1: Spend A Little More Money So You Don’t Eat Someone’s Face

Olivia Salazar/Getty Images Kourtney Kardashian

Khloe, behind the wheel, driving Kim and Kourtney: “You ever want to take Viagra, just to see what happens? Do you become a horny little toad?”

They realize they’re on the part of the MacArthur causeway “where the guy with the bath salts like ate that guy’s face off?” Khloe wonders why you’d take bath salts if you knew something like that could happen.

“I think it’s like a cheaper meth,” Kim says.

“Spend a little more money, so you don’t eat someone’s face,” Khloe says. This recap has already titled itself at least four times. At some point in this scene Khloe says, “Oh my Godula,” which is apparently another word she is trying to make happen. Or maybe her God is a giant Dracula.

They pull over. This is where it happened. Or maybe it isn’t, but there are some arrows and lines spray-painted on the sidewalk. Kourtney stays in the car, like the girl in the zombie movie whose party-pooping saves her life, for a while. Kim and Khloe get out to look around.

“He probably started to get hungry over here, then moved his way down this way,” Kim says. Khloe screams and starts running and says “Help, she’s eating me!” It’s funny because this is a place where a human being died! Khloe and Kim are both wearing little black jackets and brightly colored jeans.

Kim and Khloe do a bunch of satellite-media interviews promoting the Kardashian Kollection. Some of the satellite-media people are doing audio-only interviews and they keep asking questions meant for Kourtney, who couldn’t be bothered to show up for this, so Kim does an eerie Kourtney impression, saying things like “I’m all about my kids.”

Khloe makes Kim pull her black Rolls-Royce over at a Cuban coffee stand because she wants a green iced tea, which go figure they don’t have. Instead she gets a Cuban coffee called a cortadito and it’s delicious — like, contrived-TV-show-B-plot-generatingly delicious. In a meeting, Kim starts having an allergy attack. Then there’s a quick sepia-toned montage of other times Kim’s sneezed on the show, just for this guy. Khloe says, “Why don’t you call the doctor like a normal person?” Kim calls Dr. Boris in Los Angeles while holding her phone in that reality-TV walkie-talkie way. Close enough! Dr. Boris tells her to get an allergy test and Kim says, “Can I do that here in Miami?”

Kim and Khloe in the car again. Kim points out that Khloe’s outfit is “basketball wife in full effect” — jumpsuit, “slicked-back pony,” diamonds, sunglasses. Khloe says something about representin’ her peeps to the fullest. She’s looking for a cortadito. She asks a blurry-faced man if he knows where there’s a coffee shop. He doesn’t. She says to Kim, “That guy was on bath salts for sure.” Kim sees a woman who looks like she’s even more on bath salts than the last guy — she’s sitting at a bus stop, for one thing, I mean come on — and hangs a U-turn so she can make Khloe talk to her. She turns out to be deaf! It’s hilarious. Luckily they’re able to locate a Cuban coffee place without having to talk to someone really creepy like a leper or a person who takes the bus to work.

Back at the new house Kourtney begs out of a QVC appearance. Khloe says, “This is work — this is what we have to do.” Which is laughable but also true; if you are a Kardashian who doesn’t do things like go on QVC and hawk Kardashian-related products, do you even exist? Their promotional obligations are their art; it’s not like the work of promoting themselves is keeping them from painting a painting or digging a ditch or writing a medium-funny blog post making fun of a TV show.

Khloe’s hanging out in the kitchen with Scott. She’s got two Cuban coffees. It’s nighttime. Scott refuses to drink Cuban coffee with her, and the implication is that she pounds both of them, because then there’s a Risky Business–meets–Paranormal Activity security-video montage of Khloe jumping on couches and bouncing off walls and stuff. So this is a Very Special Episode about caffeine, I guess. The next morning Khloe’s slurring “I need a cortadito” from inside a blanket-coccoon when it’s time for a photo shoot.

A bunch of coffee-related business follows — Khloe tries to get out of the moving car when they pass the Cuban-coffee place, Khloe spits the regular, bland American photo-shoot-catering-table coffee on the floor.

Kim peruses a Cosmo quiz in the makeup room. “If I were a guy,” she says, answering a question, “I would want to have sex with myself. I just want to know what it would feel like to hit it from the back.” Kourtney gets her photos taken first and says Toodles. “Maybe I’ll have a baby and not have to do as much work,” Kim says. Pass.

Kim goes with Jonathan Cheban to the allergist, who asks if being around cats and dogs affects her symptoms; Kim looks worried, thinks of Mercy, and says, “I just got a cat.” They stick a bunch of needles in her back. She’s demurely-but-teasingly topless on the table. From couch-left, my wife volunteers that she’s had this same battery of tests and they stuck the needles in her arm. It’s like Kim is willing to do weird things to get attention.

Cheban takes pictures of Kim’s back, hashtagged with allergen prick-marks. He notices that where her shoulder blades come together in the picture it looks like a butt. He calls the nurse over, says he’s found a butt on Kim’s back. The nurse laughs, because this is the funniest thing she’s ever heard. The doctor tells her she’s allergic to Mercy. In the car Kim and Jonathan talk about how bad traffic is and whether or not Jonathan should get a scooter, because you have to keep living. Kim gets copied on an email from Kris Jenner asking Kourtney if she’s going to join Kim and Khloe for a personal appearance in New York. Cheban reads it aloud; Kim bitches about how Kourtney’s not doing enough work.

Jonathan test-drives a scooter out the door of the scooter dealership and straight into a wall of paparazzi waiting on Kim. He comes back looking shaken, like the scooter took him on a jaunt through the Fifth Dimension or something, and says it’s not for him. Kim buys four, for her and Khloe and Kourtney and Scott.

Kim shows Jonathan around the new house — Kourtney’s master suite, Kim’s guest-house bedroom. “Why does Kourtney have a house and you have a garage?” Jonathan asks, because it’s Jonathan’s job to tee up situations like the one he’s teeing up right now. Then everybody’s hanging out in Kourtney’s bedroom. Khloe’s yawning and drinking a cortadito. Kim hassles Kourtney some more about the New York appearance and how she’s been shirking since she had the second kid. Jonathan chimes in. To Kim: “Hasn’t she been pregnant for like four years, I swear?” To Kourtney: “I’m not getting involved but she’s right — I feel like you haven’t been working for, like, years, no offense.”

Go figure, the words “no offense” fail once again to cast their magical spell. Kourtney tells the talking-head camera that this is sisters’ business and Jonathan shouldn’t get involved, no matter how much he wants “to live inside of Kim.” Like a tauntaun! Out-of-context messageboard comment I found while Googling “tauntaun fetish” instead of typing this paragraph: “a tauntaun fetish is the supernova of furrydom.”

“Sorry that you literally like eat Kim’s dingleberries off,” Kourtney says. “Your entire job is literally following Kim wherever she is.”

It’s getting ugly — except, honestly, it’s just getting factual. Cheban follows Kim around the country like a nerd doing a mean girl’s algebra homework, real talk. Of course he acts appalled, asking Kim “What is she talking about?” like she’s accused him of being Al-Qaeda. Kourtney makes a remark about how far up Kim’s ass Jonathan is shoved and calls him a “f—ing loser.”

Jonathan regroups, marshals appropriate snaps: “At least my job is not collecting Kim’s money as it falls out of her ass.” If you’re keeping count, that’s three and possibly four Kim’s-ass references within one exchange of hostilities. “Without Kim,” he continues, “you’d be nothing. All you’d be doing is chasing Scott at nightclubs every night.”

I can’t even transcribe the crosstalk here but Cheban calls Kourtney delusional and psycho and a bitch and then Kourtney tells him to leave, and then Jonathan says, “Scott’s never going to marry you” and Kourtney smacks him, and I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s real because the cameras don’t have good coverage on it. Kim walks out of the room like her human-interaction-processing circuit is overloaded; Cheban threatens to press charges and walks out with an authentic Kardashian handprint throbbing on his cheek.

The next morning Kourtney says she has juicy news for Scott. Scott says he’d like to see the juicy news between her legs, if she knows what he means. Not right now, Scott. Kim tells Kourtney she should apologize and Kourtney says she won’t. Kim leaves the house dressed all in white with Mercy in a pink cat carrier. She’s taking Mercy to the cat groomer to get her shampooed and Jonathan’s coming with her so as to disprove the specious notion that all he does is follow her around while she does dumb things.

Let’s skip ahead to the B-plot: Early the next morning, Khloe wants a cortadito. She can’t find the car keys so she takes one of the scooters out. It’s like four o’clock in the morning so all the Cuban-coffee places are closed. Khloe stops to sit on a curb and look up another coffee place on her phone and ends up dropping her keys down a storm drain. She dumps her moped in some sketchy-looking part of Miami, calls Lord Disick, tells him the story, adding, “And I’m right where bath salts happened.”

This leads to everybody in the house being up early enough to see Kourtney drinking what appears to be a measuring cup full of clarified butter for breakfast. This development is not sufficiently investigated.

Kim shampoos the cat in the laundry-room sink and OH MY GOD I UNDERSTAND NOW WHY MERCY WAS IN A BOX IN THE CHRISTMAS-CARD PICTURE. It was a miniature hot-suite designed to protect Kim from a histamine flare-up! Mercy limps around wet and depressed on the counter. Khloe’s coffee addiction is compared to “Rob and his food.” Let it never be said that Rob does not, in some sense, suffer for what he has.

Khloe and Kourtney real-talk Kim about Mercy and how it’s messed up to keep a pet around when you’re biologically incapable of giving it affection. Mercy sits on a nearby chair looking bummed out. Khloe volunteers that her assistant Sidney just lost a cat and suggests that Kim is not a bad person for not being able to keep Mercy, which is in a letter-of-the-law way true.

Kim tricks Jonathan into joining her at a restaurant called Quattro for rapprochement Italian-style with Kourtney. “You smacked me in front of Kim and Khloe — it was kind of embarrassing,” says Jonathan, who as you may recall put on a breast pump a few episodes back and therefore knows exactly where his embarrassment-threshold is. Stuff is admitted to and blame is grudgingly accepted; the important part is at the end, after everybody’s supposedly forgiven everybody, when Jonathan, perusing his menu, says he’s going to order the “Kourtney smack” and Kourtney says, “Coming right up,” with exactly zero mirth, like she’d do it again given 1/16th of a chance. If we know one thing about Kourtney from watching this show it’s that forgiveness is not her lane.

Later Khloe’s leaving for the airport and Kim stops her and says she’s decided to give Mercy to Sidney. She gives Mercy to Khloe in a hard-sided cat carrier — which, incidentally, means Mercy is going to have to ride under the plane. In the driveway, Kim thanks Khloe for taking the cat and Khloe thanks Kim for “just being so voluptuous” and grabs her breasts. Kourtney and Khloe hug and do a weird Myposian joy-dance. “You guys,” Kim says, “this isn’t a time to be like happy and fun. This is a sad moment for me.” Khloe says “Oh my Godula” again. Mercy goes to a new home, where she will die.

Filed Under: Kim Kardashian, Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, Kourtney Kardashian, Reality TV, Scott Disick, The Decline and Fall of American Civilization, The Kardashiad

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for Grantland.

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