I revealed the cover of the magazine. “It’s Newsweek,” I said defensively, as if I was in fourth grade and had just been caught masturbating to Hustler.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “Our patients are not allowed to read or talk on the phone out of respect for our other patients.” This was false. Every major Los Angeles athlete and several others in the facility not only conversed—ad infinitum—about the same exact injury that we had all endured, but plenty of people talked on the phone, especially the black patients.
“Well, I understand the not talking on the phone, but I’m not reading out loud, and I don’t see why anyone would care if I was reading a magazine or not. Is it my breath?”
“It’s not really me,” “she reassured me. “It’s the head physical therapist, and she believes that in order to recover from your surgery you need to be focused on every exercise.”
“Not to sound like Lance Armstrong, but I’m on a bicycle,” I said. “A stationary one. I really don’t think there is much more to focus on.” I stopped cycling and unsuccessfully tried to dislodge my feet from the foot straps. “Isn’t it really my decision whether or not I want to recover? The last time I checked, physical rehab was not court ordered—it’s elective. Would I really put in the time and effort to retrain my muscles if I wasn’t serious?” I flexed my bicep and furtively flipped her the bird with my other hand, which was hidden beneath my seat.
“It’s up to you, Chelsea… Again, I’m not the one who makes the rules.” She grimaced in the direction of the head therapist. Now she was backpedaling while I was front-pedaling, and an embarrassing moment became even more embarrassing, since I was still struggling to get my feet out of the goddamned foot straps that had been unnecessarily added by whoever was responsible for inventing a bicycle that never went anywhere in the first fucking place.
“It’s Newsweek!” I reiterated, waving the magazine in her face. “Why don’t you send the head physical therapist over to me and we can discuss what I am able and not able to do on what may as well be a tricycle? This isn’t preschool.”
That night, I called my travel agent and booked everyone’s ticket. Sue capitulated, and three days later, we were Africa bound.
Around 7:30 the morning of our departure, Sue, Shelly, Molly, and I were all arriving at LAX (Simone was flying separately), when I received a phone call from Hannah, which I promptly put on speaker.
“I don’t know if you guys took the 405, but traffic is a mess.”
I looked at Sue, who shook her head. “We all took the 405, Hannah. There’s only one way to get to the airport. Do you think we left yesterday, drove to Atlanta to circumnavigate the traffic, and then drove all the way back to the West Coast? Why—”
“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.