Uganda Be Kidding Me Read online

  Not long after 8 p.m., Hannah came out of her bungalow and announced she was feeling ill. Sue, Shelly, Simone, Molly, and I all suggested that she stay behind and skip our last dinner at camp.

  Our attempt failed, and Hannah insisted on coming anyway.

  On our way to dinner, some sort of branch we had all managed to avoid somehow hit her in the face. Hannah clearly lacked any natural instinct to duck when objects were flying at her face, which coincided with her terrible driving ability and her accusation that my driveway hit her car.

  The dinner was held outside in the boma, which was basically a pile of sand with a fire at the center. We were grouped with all the other guests staying at the myriad lodges in our camp, including the triplets. Rex was in the worst shape we had seen him in and insisted on us all taking shots of Jägermeister.

  Not long after dinner commenced, he got up and made a toast, declaring to the other safarigoers that he had never met women like us. Simone gave me a half-scrambler eye roll—meaning this was, in fact, not a compliment.

  During dinner Sue was talking about how incredible Londolozi had been when Hannah interrupted her with a completely unrelated topic about Rod Stewart’s new autobiography and his current concert ticket sales. I turned to Molly and asked her what she thought Hannah was on. Somehow in the midst of two different conversations being interrupted, Hannah was able to overhear my comment and turned to me. “You’re not being very nice, Chelsea. I heard that.”

  “Hannah, you’re not being very nice, either. You have bitched and moaned all day about one thing or another, interrupted more than ten conversations, and have gotten upset with Life for not wanting to bring you on as his sixth wife.”

  “Chelsea,” Hannah rebutted, “I told you that you looked less bloated today than yesterday. How is that not a compliment?”

  “That’s true, Hannah, but you also wouldn’t walk alone with one of the camp guides because you were convinced he was going to rape you.”

  “That’s not what I said!” she bellowed. “I said if he did rape me, I would get on top.”

  “I didn’t hear that part,” I admitted.

  “I was simply surprised that Life thought I wasn’t marriage material. As if I’m too old to procreate, or I’m not good-looking enough.”

  “That’s amazing insight, Hannah. It also may have to do with the fact that you are borderline anorexic and only choose to scream or yell when interrupting a conversation.”

  “Fuck you, Chelsea,” she replied. “We’re on safari. Why don’t you just calm down and relax?”

  Simone had been privy to many of my outbursts, and knowing one was coming, kicked me under the table.

  “Hannah! We’ve gone over this before. The two major components necessary for storytelling is for it to be either (A) funny or (B) compelling. Please pick one.”

  After dinner twenty or so African women danced and sang for us. Sue got the triplets to dance, since it was their birthday. Soon Shelly, Hannah, and Simone were dancing, too. I used my knee as reason not to dance. Molly sat by my side and insisted she was too sober and white to dance among such accomplished performers.

  Rex fell down repeatedly but managed to meander over to Molly to ask if she had cigarettes. “No,” she replied. “We don’t smoke.”

  “I can’t believe girls who drink like you don’t smoke.”

  “Sorry,” Simone responded. Then she looked down and asked me why I was wearing one motorcycle boot and one sneaker. I had no answer to this line of questioning due to the fact that I had no recollection whatsoever of losing a shoe.

  It was at this point in the evening that I realized Lilly and Rex made no contact with each other. I determined that not only did they not belong together, but that Lilly was trying to make Rex jealous by allowing other male camp workers to put their arms around her and flirt. It was clear to me what was going on. Lilly didn’t feel safe with Rex because Rex never really liked Lilly, and Rex was looking for someone more worldly, like me, to share his life with.

  I tried to discuss this with Molly, then Simone, then a stranger: the insincerity and unlikeliness of a long-term relationship between Lilly and Rex. Simone advised me to take a Xanax and go to bed.

  After four days of monkey rape, drinking like sailors, and embarrassing the United States of America, it was time to go destroy another country. We were off to Camp Dumbo and then Botswana.

  On the morning of our departure, I announced the following: “I would like to go on the proverbial record before we get to Botswana and say that I do not believe a gorilla would ever attack me.”

  “I don’t mean to sound like a paleontologist, but there are no gorillas where you are going, Chelsea. They are in the Congo,” Rex replied, then paused. “I would also like to announce I have another furlough coming up in four days, and if you need a seventh addition to even out your group, I would be willing to join you girls when you get to Botswana.”

  This was the best news I had received since winning my second-grade spelling bee, where I had come in third, but I managed to play it cool, with my one boot and one sneaker firmly planted in the sand.

  “Either way, I don’t believe one would attack me.”

  I kissed Rex on both cheeks as if we were in Europe and bid him adieu, even though, secretly, I knew this was not good-bye.

  CHAPTER 3

  CAMP DUMBO

  June 27, Wednesday

  It wasn’t easy leaving Rex after spending four days bonding with him and watching him get shit-faced every night, but it was time to move on. The six of us were very quiet on the flight to Camp Dumbo; no one had the guts to admit it was because we were in mourning for our new boyfriend. We knew we had to be big girls, and we all felt like we had matured beyond our years (except Hannah) just by traversing to this unknown continent. We were international, we had all turned into plus-sized models, and now we were ready to mount elephants.

  Camp Dumbo was pitched to us as the perfect interim safari sandwiched in between South Africa and Botswana. Here, we would be able to ride elephants, play with lions, and feed hyenas; basically, it was a zoo for slow adults.

  I sensed there was an issue as soon as we were picked up from our forty-minute plane ride by another white South African named Corbin, whose accent wasn’t nearly as charming as Rex’s and whose mouth and lips looked like a cross between a seven-layer dip and a vagina. He was fat, in his fifties, and not fun. He sounded like Crocodile Dundee with a horrifying lisp, and his hair was a thinning, desiccated mullet. He wore a gold necklace with the Star of David on it, and told us he was a “Jew for Jesus.” He had the worst breath I’d ever smelled in my entire thirties. The fact that we were in an open-air vehicle and I was sitting behind him and could still smell his breath made me want to capture a bumblebee and trap it in his mouth. I pulled the bandana that was wrapped around my head down around my mouth and turned it into a surgical mask.

  Within minutes of meeting him, he told us that he and his wife had been unable to conceive, and that was why they had decided to start an elephant camp—an obvious alternative for a couple trying unsuccessfully to make a baby.

  Corbin was like a human calzone, the type of man who would walk around his house in front of his wife wearing nothing but a Hawaiian button-down shirt. I imagined the phone in his house ringing and him running from the kitchen to answer it in nothing but that Hawaiian shirt and a pair of tube socks with his dick swinging around like a ceiling fan, and in one hand holding a tube of Velveeta.

  The six of us exchanged looks of consternation as we set out on a long, flat dirt road with nothing in sight. It was clear from the abominable landscape that we were in a different kind of camp. There were hardly any trees, almost no wildlife, and miles of dirt. When Corbin pointed out a single impala to the right and slowed his jeep down, we told him to keep going. “We’re over impalas,” I explained. “They’ve turned into deer for us. You don’t need to slow down.”

  “Aha! I was warned from Camp Londolozi that you girls don�