Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  “Well, anyway,” she interrupted, “traffic is a mess. If you guys need to go ahead without me, it’s fine.”

  I handed the phone to Sue.

  “Hannah, we’re going to Africa, not to the Cheesecake Factory,” Sue told her. “We’re not going to just leave without you.”

  “Just hang up the phone,” Shelly told Sue. “She’ll be here. Or she won’t. If she misses the plane, she misses it. Air Emirates doesn’t sound like they let Americans call the shots.”

  By the time Hannah arrived at LAX, we were all three sheets to the wind. We had found a Bloody Mary bar in the lounge and were told there was no table service; therefore it was necessary for us to make the Bloody Marys ourselves. If this was a sign of things to come, then our future held a significant amount of Worcestershire sauce. I made a mental note to pocket an entire bottle in case there was some sort of Worcestershire embargo in Africa, which wouldn’t surprise me.

  Sue and I hustled over to the breakfast buffet, which included lukewarm spaghetti and potatoes au gratin. She saw me ogling the breakfast options and reassured me that if we ran out of tomato juice while making the Bloody Marys, there would be enough spaghetti sauce to substitute.

  Hannah announced upon arrival that she was going to find some kiosks in the airport to buy her nephews some authentic African trinkets.

  “Don’t you want to get them something from Africa?” Sue asked. “After all, we are going there. Or you could just get them a copy of A Raisin in the Sun.”

  “It’s easier to just get it here and get it over with,” Hannah replied. Side note: we were allowed one 40×40-inch suitcase and one carry-on per person.

  “All right,” I told her. “We’ll meet you at the gate.”

  I was asleep before the plane even took off. I had told the pilot I was pregnant and suffering from severe motion sickness, and after he agreed to let me turn my chair into a bed, I ordered one more Bloody Mary, popped a Xanax, and woke up in Dubai.

  I like to sleep as much as possible. I like to sleep on planes primarily to avoid technology. My grasp of electronics is commensurate to my grasp of the moon; I’m unclear as to how either arrived at its current status. Nor do I have the attention span or wherewithal to make heads or tails of why I’m so far behind the general populace in accepting the theory of space and time, and its relevance to my own life. On a side note: I find most astronauts to be class A narcissists.

  Other things I like to avoid on planes are “cooked” meats and conversation. Why flight attendants take my lack of alertness on a flight as a personal affront is not something I’m able to comprehend. You’d think they would be delighted that one of their passengers is knocked out during the course of the flight, but they seem more insulted than anything. They act as if we had made plans to hang out and then I came over to their house and passed out on their sofa for eight hours. Anytime I wake up to pee they immediately pounce on me, asking if I’d like a drink or to have the dinner that I slept through. When I tell them I am only getting up to use the restroom and I plan on putting myself back down to sleep when I return, they look dejected. When I wake up thirty minutes before landing, one of them will always come over and make a snarky comment like, “Well, you sure got a lot of sleep.”

  That said, I refuse to travel alone. So my friends are forced to travel with me and watch me sleep unless they have their own access to pills or pilfer mine, which I’m usually open to, unless I’m running low and headed to a third-world country with pharmacies I suspect will refuse to deliver.

  After a short layover, which consisted mostly of curated prosciutto, beef curry, and women shrouded in burkas, Hannah felt it was an opportune moment to regale us with stories of Muslim hate crimes against Jews. “Do you think they’re not all looking at our blond hair and exposed faces, wondering what country whores like us hail from?”

  We boarded our next flight, which transported us to Johannesburg.

  June 22, Friday

  We arrived in Johannesburg about ten hours and two Xanaxes later. At the airport in Joburg, which turns out to be short for Johannesburg, we were greeted by a dark-skinned man who introduced himself as Truth. We introduced ourselves as Honesty, Happiness, Honor, Witness, Serengeti, and Schnitzeldoodle. We didn’t find out until later, when we met our tracker called Life, that Truth wasn’t joking with us about his name. Personally, I felt terrible for telling Truth my name was Schnitzeldoodle. I still think about it. Sometimes I just have to rock myself back and forth and say, “You’ve offended so many people at this point. Don’t try to keep track now, girl.”

  Truth took us to the hotel airport, where we met up with Simone, who had arrived in Johannesburg about eight hours earlier and had ruined two sets of pants by getting her period on the plane and completely bleeding out.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” I demanded upon seeing her.

  “These are my safari pants,” she informed us, while unzipping the top part of the leg from the bottom part. “They convert into shorts.”

  “Did you wear them on the plane ride over?” Hannah inquired.

  “Yes, because we’re only allowed to bring one bag the size of a moccasin and I needed to pack some other minor necessities. Thank god I did. You should see the other pair of pants I had to wash in the airplane bathroom and put back on soaking wet. This was my only other option.”

  I am always happy to see my sister Simone, yet I couldn’t conceal my disgust. “You look like a cell phone from 1991.”

  “Or a CB radio,” Hannah chimed in.

  “Well, you should get rid of it—them. Are they singular or plural?” Sue asked, regarding Simone’s shorts.

  Simone has always leaned toward lesbianism; not emotionally or sexually, but physically. She looks like a lesbian, and if you saw her rounding a corner in a tankini, you’d be hard-pressed not to try to get out of the way. She can sleep with as many men as she wants, but physical dimensions exist and science is science.

  “Can you imagine the man you were sitting next to taking a good, hard look at what you left behind in your seat and coming to the conclusion you had miscarried?” I said.

  Simone informed us she had a sweater to cover the evidence, then changed the conversation by alerting us that she had ordered a round of margaritas, which arrived in martini glasses without ice.

  “Do you think the lack of ice in Europe and other continents—such as the one we’re on—has anything to do with global warming?” Hannah asked. We all ignored Hannah and ordered food.

  Something orange-y arrived, and Hannah went in for a taste. The next thing she did was grimace out of the side of her mouth and declare, “These carrots taste fishy.”

  “That’s probably because it’s salmon, Hannah,” Sue told her. We all got up from the table a little more buzzed than when we had sat down and directed ourselves to bed. We were ready for the next leg of this never-ending journey. It felt like we had been traveling for days and still hadn’t quite gotten anywhere.

  As I lay next to my lesbian roommate, Shelly, I turned my head and said, “Tomorrow will be our very first day in the bush. You must be in heaven. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  CHAPTER 2

  INTO THE BUSH

  June 23–26, 2012

  Forty-eight hours after we left Los Angeles, we finally arrived at Camp Londolozi in South Africa and were staying in what was called the Tree Camp—one of the five camps the place had to offer. We assumed that since we were six women traveling together, the Tree camp was where they stored the lesbian guests.

  For someone who’s never been more than moderately interested in animals, the place was surreal and, to be honest, borderline amazing. We were transported from a tiny nugget airport by an open-aired jeep to an outdoor lodge, where we were served iced green teas on a tented deck that overlooked a view of the reserve and exposed granite that the river had carved through. Right before our eyes was this majestic landscape filled with brooks, boulders the size of planets, and hippos wading into
watering holes while wild elephants called to each other. It was like being on the set of Jurassic Park but with room service.

  The most alarming discovery was the baboons everywhere doing what baboons are prone to do—raping each other. I found it of moderate interest that at no time during the planning of this trip did anyone, including our travel agent, ever mention that baboons were constantly jumping from tree to land in search of their next rape victims. They were unsightly, uncontrollable animals, with piercing screeches and protruding assholes shaped like a human’s lower intestines.

  Over the next three days, we allowed ourselves to soak in the beauty of their high-pitched penetration. I had never contemplated baboons as a species or how they mated, and what I saw was definitely unsettling and a harbinger of things to come.

  I don’t know how or why, but somewhere in my sick brain I had envisaged beautiful, soft lovemaking between wild animals, complete with gentle caresses and French kisses and male lions stroking the female lions’ manes while telling them how much they loved them right before they came.

  This was definitely the first time in my life I actually felt transported to another continent. The scenery left each one of us speechless. When we had arrived, nearly two silence-filled minutes went by before Shelly made the realization that would change our African experience thereafter. She turned on her heels, faced the five staff members who were standing behind us with empty trays waiting for our next move, and asked, “Do you guys know how to make a good margarita?”

  The answer was no. Africans do not know how to make good margaritas, but that didn’t stop us from ordering twenty-seven of them on our first afternoon there. We were informed by the gay lodge manager, Ryan—who wasn’t and probably still isn’t out of the closet—we had two hours to freshen up before our first afternoon safari ride.

  We had just traveled for two full days and thought it reasonable to assume that by “freshening up,” Ryan meant celebrating as if we had just been released from an Asian labor camp. “Does anyone else feel bloated?” I asked the group as I dipped a piece of parmesan into my sixth margarita.

  This was how the next four days would break down: a safari ride at six a.m., then a high-end picnic-style breakfast outside on the reserve at ten a.m., and then back to camp for some R & R, and then another safari ride at four p.m., followed by champagne and African potato chips under the stars, followed by what the staff hoped would be showers for us, followed by an eight-course dinner.

  Ryan, said gay camp manager, whose body belonged in the front window of any Abercrombie and Fitch along with the brain of a person that belongs in the front window of any Abercrombie and Fitch, told us how much he loved working in camp, but that “fashion was his passion.” He was twenty-four and claimed to be the lodge’s wine sommelier. I let Ryan know that any twenty-four-year-old wine sommelier worth his salt had to have been raised inside an actual grape.

  Ryan told us that the number one rule at Londolozi was to never walk alone at night because animals will sometimes walk in and out of camp—therefore guests always needed to be escorted back to their villas by one of the local Shangaan rangers who worked there or by Ryan himself.

  “But what if you’re busy letting a bottle of wine breathe?” Sue asked him. “How do you choose which takes priority? The wine—or the lion?”

  He let us know that the Shangaan rangers all carried guns in case of an emergency.

  Our actual safari guide’s name was Rex. Upon our arrival, he came over to our table on the tented deck, where we had parked ourselves, and introduced himself. He was a blond, white South African with one dead tooth, but rugged enough for me to imagine the tooth being Crest Whitestripped and him living with me in my house in Los Angeles.

  I asked him what Rex was short for. Before he was able to answer, Molly and Hannah both shouted “Rexington!” Molly purred, “Ooh, I like that,” and then tried to find her margarita straw with her tongue, which she was not successful in doing. “R-R-Rexington. Blahh…”

  Sue countered Molly and Hannah’s drunk and disorderly behavior with a more serious question. “Not to sound like a veterinarian, but is it okay to wear red on the safari rides, or would that make us look too much like wounded prey?”

  “Yes,” I added, backing Sue up. “My sister has her period. Is it okay for her to be outdoors?”

  Like Ryan, Rex emphasized that we were not allowed to walk around camp unattended at night.

  “This is starting to sound like a dare,” Sue declared.

  “I know you ladies have had a lot to drink,” Rex told us in his native South African accent. “If you want to skip the afternoon ride”—which he pronounced “rahd”—“you can all just take a nap, and I can meet you girls at dinner to go over the next four days and what kind of animals we’ll be encountering.” Every “s” came out like a “z.”

  “Sounds like someone is trying to lay down the law,” I said, trying to mimic his accent by replacing all my “s’s” with “z’s,” but instead sounding Indian. “I am Zexy for Rexy,” I slurred under my breath.

  Shelly reassured Rex that this was no amateur hour, and we were willing to behave ourselves in order to go on our first safari “rahd.” He then politely informed us that he would be willing to take us on our ride as long as we followed the rules and did not “yell at any of the animals.”

  “Oh my god,” Simone muttered. “It’s like we’re Make-A-Wish adults.”

  There’s a very fine line in the African sand between being an asshole and being an American. So we drew it. “Rex, I apologize,” Sue told him. “We are not as obnoxious as we seem; we are just very happy to be off the plane and are blown away by this place. We knew we were coming on safari, but we didn’t know this is what it would be like.”

  Sue does this a lot. She excessively apologizes on everyone’s behalf. I rolled my eyes at Shelly, but she was preoccupied with looking through her binoculars out over the deck—presumably trolling for single women.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered. “I see a cheetah.”

  “Shit’s about to get real,” Hannah announced, looking cross-eyed in my direction. “Oprah or NOprah?”

  “Oprah,” I declared. “Let’s roll.”

  A herd of elephants would have made less noise than the five of us clambering over each other on the deck to get a sobering look at the cheetah.

  It didn’t take long for Rex to glean that although we were assholes with a hankering for libations—and lip balm—we were all genuinely interested in the adventure we were about to embark on. He took a long hard look at us, spit on the ground, and surrendered. “All right [which he pronounced ‘al-raht’], let’s go see some wildebeest [‘vilde-be-ast’].”

  His tracker, the man who sits in the front of the safari truck mumbling in different directions, was named Life, which Rex pronounced as “laugh.” I’m a sucker for a good accent along with strong forearms on a man, and his happened to be covered in blond hair, which was an added bonus. Looking at him was like seeing myself in male form.

  We pulled up to a watering hole and saw ten to fifteen hippos. One of the hippos was standing next to a crocodile whose jaws were wholly open. Upon hearing the six of us shriek with excitement, all the hippos charged into the water and the crocodile shut his mouth and whipped his tail.

  Molly clutched my arm and blurted, “That’s how I feel when I enter a swimming pool.”

  Rex on his walkie, telling another safari guide the coordinates for the hippos’ location.

  When I asked Rex how crocodiles and hippos can just hang out together without one of them eating the other, Rex seemed irritated. He explained to us that the hippo is one of the most, if not the most dangerous animal in the world. They will swallow you whole or tear you apart by throwing your body around crocodile style; obviously that was why the two were such close friends.

  Then he firmly informed us that we were going to need to shut up if we wanted to see any more animals. At Rex’s forcefulness, my sister glanced in Molly’
s and my direction with squinted eyes. I know this look of intrigue, because the three of us all came from the same gene pool and we are all attracted to the same type of man.

  After admiring the hippos, we ventured on and eventually managed to shut our mouths. Life would nod in a direction, and Rex would steer the car in that same direction. On that first day, we also saw wildebeest, buffalo, impala, and a single giraffe who hadn’t made the cut with his own family.

  “Poor loser,” Hannah mumbled. “Do you think he did something to deserve being rejected by his own family?” she asked Rex. “Like Chelsea?”

  “No,” he said, ignoring her last remark. “Sometimes they just reject some of their own because they sense they are weaker.” Rex seemed to know everything there was to know about animals, which was obviously a turn-on. He also went off road several times, knocking down tree after tree in his path in order to find a carnivore. This was when our vaginas collectively started to rumble. It was probable that one of us would require penetration from Rex, and it was up to me to decide if I wanted to volunteer my services.

  Two hours later we pulled over and had champagne in the middle of an empty field, where we were also told that if we felt compelled to urinate, this would be the place to do it. I personally found it oddly comforting to pee outdoors. “Not to sound like a urinary tract infection, but I can’t wait to get back to Los Angeles and try this out,” I told Hannah. She and I put our heads together and smiled for Shelly, who was taking our photo. After Hannah pulled up her pants and left, she continued taking mine.

  After we had dispensed with the necessities, I went and sat by Rex, leaned over seductively, and half-fell and half-whispered into his ear, “When will we see tigers?” Rex politely informed me that tigers were located on a different continent. More specifically, Asia.

  At dinner that night we discovered that the only other people at our lodge was a couple on their honeymoon, which I always find unsettling. My sister was kind enough to point out to me that this is because I am incapable of spending more than two days alone with any person, never mind any man I’d ever dated. It was discouraging to realize the truth of this statement, which led me to observe this couple like a zoologist stalking a den of baby hyenas.