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