Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  I harass Geof via e-mail and on television. Most recently, I had an eighteen-foot ficus plant delivered to his office when he was on vacation. I wanted something that was ugly enough to annoy him and large enough for him not to be able to physically remove without assistance. His ceilings are sixteen feet high, so the ficus actually reached the ceiling and then was forced to bend at a ninety-degree angle and creep horizontally for the remaining two feet. I do my research and I do it well. (I actually never do research; I just think things turn out lucky for me.)

  Shmirving caught wind of my shenanigans and respected my style. He reached out to me via e-mail, introducing himself and volunteering his midget services if there was ever a time Chuy wasn’t available. I responded by telling him that he absolutely could fill in for Chuy as soon as he told Christina Aguilera to stop wearing adult diapers on The Voice.

  He invited me to an outdoor Neil Young concert with his wife, Shmelly. She is also a nugget like her husband, but she has a mouth on her like a rugby player who got hit in the head too many times with a cricket paddle.

  Shmelly and me in the Bahamas.

  First of all, let me say this: Neil Young was a little before my time, but I grew up with five brothers and sisters who played nothing but Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, the Eagles, and Peter Frampton. I was no idiot when it came to icons, and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to listen to the very man who elicits almost every good memory I have from my childhood. Hearing any Neil Young song on the radio will always remind of when I was six years old and would watch my brothers playing football on our lawn in Martha’s Vineyard, with the sun glistening off the water in front of them, the smell of my mom’s fresh-baked blueberry pie wafting out of the house, and every once in a while my brothers’ taking turns lobbing the football to me in my bikini bottom.

  My dad would be reading the newspaper on the deck facing us, and every so often he would yell inside to my mother to get me a T-shirt. “Goddammit, Rita! How the hell is she ever going to grow any boobs if the boys keep throwing footballs at her without a shirt on? I can already see her nipples starting to slope.”

  I’m not a huge fan of concerts, because I’m not a huge fan of parking, but I absolutely love Neil Young and know every word to every song he may have ever sang.

  “This is will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die.” Every time I hear that lyric, I think of the very day, three years after our topless football matches, my mother came to the top of the steps at our house in Martha’s Vineyard and looked at me and my two sisters, who were all holding ice cream cones, and said: “Your brother’s dead.” I wanted to meet the man who engrained that song in my head for the rest of my life. Bye Bye Miss American Pie. That was what my brother called me: Miss American Pie.

  I took my boyfriend along to the concert with the Shmazoffs, and the four of us walked backstage. Shmirving likes to strut his swagger, so we were whisked to the green room where the families and entourages were all mingling preshow.

  “Thanks for coming,” the last man I met said. I really had no idea how to respond to that, considering I had no idea whom I was talking to or why he was thanking me for coming.

  “Well, thanks… for having me,” I said, searching for something natural to say. I looked down at my huge, oversized suede shoulder bag that my boyfriend had just given me on the aforementioned trip to Croatia, and I realized it would be a mistake to take it outside where it would be on the ground and most likely covered in my own alcohol by the end of the show.

  “Would you mind watching my bag?” I asked the stranger. “Or just put it back here, and I can come grab it from you after the show?” I leaned in and whispered, “My boyfriend just bought this for me, and I think he would be really insulted it if I ruined it this soon after I got it. I haven’t even had it Scotchgarded.”

  Ten minutes later I was sitting in a box in the Greek Theatre sipping on a glass of champagne with a splash of iced tea when that very same man bounded onto the stage after they announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Neil Young.”

  I looked at my boyfriend, who was shaking his head in typical disappointment, and at Shmirving and Shmelly, both of whom were laughing like Jews who’ve eaten too much.

  “You really are an asshole,” Shmirving leaned over and whispered.

  I barely knew any of the songs Neil Young played that night. It turned out that not only could I not pick Neil Young out of a lineup and had him hold my purse at his own concert, but that I was also confusing him with a completely different musician named Don McLean.

  After that, the Shmazoffs and I became buddies, and I spent many nights out to dinner or at different events with them and their family. Shmirving sometimes acts as my manager, since I don’t have one, and I often refer to him and his wife as my parents. Shmelly caught wind of this one day and told me she wasn’t old enough to be my fucking mother and to stop referring to her as Mom.

  The Shmazoffs invited my lesbian Shelly and me to the Bahamas on our way back from Africa. This seemed like the perfect pit stop to recuperate from our jet lag on the way back to California. Until Shelly and I discovered that our travel agent had booked us on an around-the-world ticket that flew us all the way back to Los Angeles from Africa, and then to the Bahamas.

  “Where’s the North Pole?” I asked Lesbian Shelly as I looked at a map of the Galápagos. “And why do we need to fly over it?”

  Three days and one travel agent later, we arrived safe and sound in the Bahamas via Atlanta. By this time, Shelly and I had put on an estimated combined weight of seventeen pounds, and I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in eight days. This is not an exaggeration.

  Showcasing our bodies in bathing suits wasn’t an option. It was July, and Shelly pointed out it was going to be extremely uncomfortable wearing nothing but our safari gear in the hot sun. I told her that we would simply have to choose off-peak hours to submerge ourselves in the Atlantic; a spray bottle was another option to keep cool during the day. She proposed we wear our khaki shorts over our bikinis. I pointed out that while that was a good plan for her, I was straight.

  Shmelly and Shmirving brought their fourteen-year-old son, Shmameron. He’s another asshole, so I immediately took to him. Shmirving tried to convince me all weekend that it would be easier on the whole family if I would just de-virginize Shmameron over the vacation. He thought Shmameron having sex would help calm some of his teenage angst, and this way the deflowerer would be someone they approved of. Plus, it would make for a funny family story.

  “First of all, he’s a minor, but that’s not my main issue,” I revealed to Shmirving, after much prodding. “He’s got braces, and the last time I hooked up with someone with braces, my vagina looked like a cleft palate.”

  Shmameron hitting on me in the Bahamas.

  The best part of this trip was that the resort where we were staying was managed by a forty-year-old, delusional Grateful Dead enthusiast named Sargeant, who presented himself in a pressed, pastel-colored golf shirt and khaki shorts, and drove around the property in a golf cart. When I asked him what his real name was, he told me the story of his family coming from a long line of Sargeants. That was his real name. He was Sargeant John Riley Black the Sixth.

  “Speaking of black people,” I asked Sargeant, “where are they?”

  “I’ve heard about you, my dear,” he said, with raised eyebrows and waving his index finger in my direction. “You are quite the little devil.”

  “First of all, please don’t make faces like that while talking to me—or just skip talking to me altogether—and secondly, I’m serious. We’re in the Bahamas and I haven’t seen one black person. We just came from Africa and I’m not prepared to go cold turkey. What’s the story?”

  He ignored my question and for the next fifteen minutes proceeded to tell me and everyone else within earshot that he was a single man looking for love, and he thought from what he had heard about me, I might be the woman for him.

  “You’re wrong,” Shelly an