“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.