Uganda Be Kidding Me

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This book is dedicated to all my friends whose

friendships I’ve ended by writing this.

MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED TRAVELER’S QUESTIONS

What is the proper way to spell traveler—with one l or two?

Answer: Who cares?

Where are the best places to shoplift?

Answer: It doesn’t matter as long as you walk out of the store with the items over your head. This has the opposite impact one would expect.

Why is there no app along the lines of Grindr to find little people within a fifty-yard radius?

Answer: This is more of a pitch than a question. There should not only be an app for little people to find each other sexually, but also for fully grown people to be alerted when a nugget is nearby. The app should include their height, dimensions, and nationality—and, of course, locations for viewing.

Why do black people have better night vision?

Answer: I think it would be racist to presume I know.

Where is the best place to get a bikini wax in Paris?

Answer: Ask Gwyneth Paltrow.

Why do people think other people want to hear about their dreams?

Answer: The same reason other people feel the need to tell you that they were once almost hit by a car.

What are three must-haves when traveling?

Answer: A compass, skis, and a shotgun.

Why do people in certain countries consider meat and pastries to be perfectly acceptable companion pieces to gluten?

Answer: Because they’re Communists.

CHAPTER 1

OUT OF AFRIKA

June 21, Thursday

I woke up at 4:45 a.m. in Johannesburg, South Africa, in my bra, underwear, and eyeshades. My head was torqued to the right due to the length and width of the pillow I was resting it on, which had the same dimensions as a panty liner. The duvet accompanying this “pillow” was an inch or two wider and could have doubled as a buffet napkin. I hadn’t traveled halfway around the world to dislocate my collarbone while sleeping. The idea was to go on safari; if I had wanted to go to camping, I would have driven four hours north of Los Angeles to Big Sur, taken some mushrooms, and sexually assaulted a tree.

I manually maneuvered my head forty-five degrees in the opposite direction to look over at my lesbian friend Shelly, who was sound asleep and fully clothed in a quasi-respectable pair of pajamas. Adults wearing pajamas are already hard to take seriously; it’s even harder to respect that person when she’s a forty-five-year-old professional, and the pajamas in question have toy crop dusters silk screened all over them.

Our pickup time from the hotel wasn’t until 9:15. I looked at the clock again and deduced that another Xanax would likely induce an eight-hour run of sleep, when really I only needed to kill four hours. My doctor had told me very specifically not to take more than four Xanax in two days; I had already taken seven and slept a total of twenty-five hours in a period of forty-eight. So I picked up a Xanax, bit it in half, and then popped both halves into my mouth, chasing them with a large sip of champagne that was on my nightstand from the previous evening.

My thoughts then meandered to the entire continent of Africa itself, and I whispered a question to myself, so as to not wake Shelly. “When Kim Kardashian finally births Kanye’s next black baby, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they named the baby Africa with a k? Or better yet, Afrikash?”

In my limited experience as an adolescent/immature adult, I’ve found it’s always best to travel in even numbers, so there were six of us being flown into the “bush.” One was my cousin Molly, twenty-six. She is the younger, whiter version of Tyler Perry’s Madea. Large—and in charge.

I remembered that Molly loved animals and wanted to become a zoologist before her parents convinced her to aim lower and work on a reality show. If you’ve ever heard a hippo entering a watering hole, then you know what it sounds like to hear Molly chuckle. Her birth name is Ulrike (pronounced “OOL-reekie”) because our mothers hail from Nazis, and in an effort to live a peaceful life alongside our Jewish brethren, she chose her middle name—Molly—to use personally and at McDonald’s. While everyone else refers to her as Molly, I call her by her birth name because I find Ulrike both appalling and embarrassing. Over the years, it has been shortened to Ricky or Rick the Dick. However, Rick the Dick has never caught on with others, and I constantly have to explain to people who know her why I’m calling her Rick or Ricky. So I’ve adapted to referring to her with either name only in intimate settings such as texts or in a whirlpool.

Accompanying us would be my newly divorced sister Simone (I facilitated it). She resisted coming because she and her three children were moving into a newer, better house, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. I thought it best to bulldoze right over her plans by hiring movers and getting her a plane ticket, then telling her it was nonrefundable and that I’d be out twenty-five thousand dollars if she didn’t come. Simone often refers to me as a relationship wrecker.

The other safarigoers were Shelly, the aforementioned lesbian lawyer who lives with me in Los Angeles; Hannah, my oldest friend from LA; and Sue Murphy, who is a co–executive producer on my TV show, Tracey Lately.

Sue is best described as a female Hunter S. Thompson but with her shit slightly more together. Every once in a while, usually on vacations such as this, she will walk into someone’s room or onto someone’s balcony at around one in the morning, glue a couple of sentences together that sound as if she had moments earlier suffered a stroke. She is the type of person who upon finding herself with a bottle of pinot noir and no available glass will gladly empty the contents of the bottle into a bowl of cereal and then proceed to ingest both the wine and the Frosted Mini-Wheats with a soup spoon. Sue is probably the best traveling companion of all time, stateside as well as internationally.

We refer to Sue as “sixty, single, and looking.” She is not close to sixty, but after this mantra is repeated in front of enough strangers, people often come up and whisper that she looks great for her age. Sue doesn’t bother correcting them, and more often than not she introduces herself as Shelly’s mother even though Shelly and Sue are the same age.

She is also the only one in the group who is in something along the lines of a “relationship,” with a man who goes by the name of Chuck. There are three male names that top the list of making it impossible for me to take them seriously: Chuck, Howard, and Ducky. Sue and Chuck’s relationship takes a beating every time I break up with a boyfriend, decide to take a trip across the planet, and force everyone to come with me.

Sue and Lesbian Shelly on the plane to Johannesburg, South Africa.

“When the hell did you decide to go to Africa?” Sue asked me when I rode my Segway into her office and gave her information about the typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B shots we would all need in order to traverse to Africa.

“The doctor will be here at three today for you, me, Hannah, and Shelly.”

“Chelsea, we tape the show at three thirty p.m. Did you forget that you have a TV show?”

Out of fairness to Sue, there have been times when I have indeed forgotten that I do have a TV show. I’ve gone to lunches on a Monday or Tuesday with a friend, had a couple of margaritas, and on my way back home gotten a phone call from one of my producers asking if I forgot we have to tape the show at 3:30 p.m. that very day. This, by the way, has never happened, but it’s a fantasy of mine. I do, however, happen to be very absent-minded and will sometimes forget about an event moments after it’s happened or moments before it’s supposed to take place.

“Sue, I’m quite familiar with the show, but we can push it a half hour or do the shots after.”

“I don’t think I can swing it this time,” she told me. “Chuck has planned this entire weekend and booked plans for us to go up to San Francisco to see a Giants game. He surprised me with it on my birthday and he even made a map of San Francisco and a highlighted route from the airport to the stadium. It would be a little bit soul-crushing to tell him I’ve decided to skip San Francisco and go to Africa because Chelsea’s bored.”

“Well, first of all, Sue, he didn’t need to make a map of San Francisco. That’s a little over the top. They have them everywhere, unless the topography has changed—or he’s in a Learning Annex summer program for mapmaking.” Then I started to sing: “Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map, show me a star…” I trailed off, forgetting the rest.

Sue stared at me expressionless. “The song is ‘Matchmaker,’ not ‘Mapmaker.’ And there’s nothing about stars mentioned, either.”

“Sue, we can move the show or we can do the shots after the show. Whatever. San Francisco isn’t going anywhere.”

“When did Africa come up? I thought you were going to the south of France.”

“I want to know where rappers come from. You know that’s always been a passion of mine.”

“That wouldn’t be South Africa where this safari camp is. You know this, right? What you’re thinking is more along the lines of Kenya, where the Great Migration is. Plus, the last time I blew Chuck off for our hiatus, I had to walk around Rome with you and your boyfriend in togas. I mean, can’t we go next year, Chelsea? You just had knee surgery. You can’t even walk normally. It’s starting to feel like we’re chasing the dragon.”

The incident Sue was referring to was the ACL surgery I had on my knee exactly three weeks prior. I had wiped out badly in Switzerland a few months earlier, and now I was basically walking like a Vietnam vet with Bell’s palsy. (If you want the complete Switzerland story now, turn to page 161.)

Due to my newly acquired immobility, I knew that I needed a vacation that would keep me occupied instead of lying around all day on a beach drinking margaritas. I was unable to do any proper exercise, and added calories from alcohol were unwelcome to my atrophied body. My left leg was already half the size of my right; I was starting to morph into muscular dystrophy territory.

“Sue, you can come or not come, but you’re probably going to die soon, so it’s really your call.”

Hannah, who has had different names in all my books and I simply don’t have the energy to reread any of them to find out what they were, was also newly broken up and seemed to be extremely upbeat about it. In addition to being my oldest friend in LA, she is also a terrible driver. Once, Hannah left my house on a Saturday afternoon, only to call me the following Sunday and alert me that my driveway had “hit her car.” Normally, I would argue with a person this out of touch with reality, but I’ve known Hannah for fifteen years, and her self-denial is superseded only by her peripheral vision. She can’t fucking see.

Hannah also has a very unusual tendency to whisper in the middle of a conversation, for absolutely no reason other than to strain the listener’s ears. She will be in the middle of a story about her nephew’s summer camp and will then start talking so softly that she’s practically lip-synching. And what you can hear her saying is so incongruous to the actual subject matter, you are left with the notion that she is in deep negotiations with Somalian pirates about high- and low-tide patterns. She lacks either of the two key ingredients necessary for a story to be funny or compelling: (A) being funny, or (B) being compelling.

When the doctor who specialized in safari inoculations came to my office, he asked us for all of our personal shot history, specifically hepatitis A and hepatitis B. Hannah arrived thirty minutes late (she’s always thirty to seventy-five minutes late) and couldn’t get ahold of her personal physician, who coincidentally happened to be on his own safari. She sat in my makeup chair, looked at the doctor we had all just met moments before, and said the following: “[Normal voice] I once dated a guy, [whisper] Luke, and he was a heroin addict—not when I was with him—but anyway…” She looked up at the doctor and whispered, “He had his hep A and B shots. [Back to normal voice] So.… do you think I had my hep A and hep B shots?”

This was the moment it should have been clear to me that Hannah was not the right selection for a safari. Sue looked at me, looked at the doctor, sighed loudly, rolled up her sleeve to expose her shoulder for the shot, and announced she was next.

Safari appealed to me for a bevy of reasons: six grown women in pigtails, matching khaki shorts, open-holed army belts, lesbian hiking shoes, and armed with assault rifles. We would parachute in like typical asshole Americans and be completely clueless about what kind of trip we were actually on, asking questions like, “When do we start shooting the animals? Where is the freshest sushi? When do we meet Aretha Franklin, and where are the squash courts?” I’d also insist on hunting live lobster and killing it with my handgun.

It’s also worth mentioning that I’m not a huge fan of brushing my hair and/or showering. In my own defense, I will say that I do not have feculent body odor. I believe my scent is natural, beautiful, and banana. I have several eyewitnesses/employees who can vouch for me. I don’t live in the woods and I make it my business not to camp, dine, or linger at Benihana. I do shower before or after working out, but I find excessive showering just for the hell of it overrated. I believe people who shower twice a day are hiding a secret, or a sandwich.

Having said that, I want to be clear that I do not endorse anyone (Brandy) who thinks swimming in the ocean is a logical substitution for a shower. I also do not value a visitor coming over to my house in Malibu (Brandy, again), borrowing a bathing suit, leaving with it, and then returning it to me days later in a plastic bag—still wet.

The main issue with my recent ACL surgery was that due to the anti-inflammatory tape around my knee, showering had become a major pain in the ass.

My Filipina physical therapist guffawed when I mentioned the mere idea of going on safari. This made me more intent than ever to go on one. When I told her I would have no choice but to go over her head and speak with my surgeon, she simply replied, “Well, I guess that means you’ll be going, since he’s incapable of saying no to you.”

This was coming from the same person who approached me when I was on a stationary bicycle during physical therapy and told me I wasn’t allowed to read.

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.

“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.

“This is starting to sound like a dare,” Sue declared.

“I know you ladies have had a lot to drink,” Rex told us in his native South African accent. “If you want to skip the afternoon ride”—which he pronounced “rahd”—“you can all just take a nap, and I can meet you girls at dinner to go over the next four days and what kind of animals we’ll be encountering.” Every “s” came out like a “z.”

“Sounds like someone is trying to lay down the law,” I said, trying to mimic his accent by replacing all my “s’s” with “z’s,” but instead sounding Indian. “I am Zexy for Rexy,” I slurred under my breath.

Shelly reassured Rex that this was no amateur hour, and we were willing to behave ourselves in order to go on our first safari “rahd.” He then politely informed us that he would be willing to take us on our ride as long as we followed the rules and did not “yell at any of the animals.”

“Oh my god,” Simone muttered. “It’s like we’re Make-A-Wish adults.”

There’s a very fine line in the African sand between being an asshole and being an American. So we drew it. “Rex, I apologize,” Sue told him. “We are not as obnoxious as we seem; we are just very happy to be off the plane and are blown away by this place. We knew we were coming on safari, but we didn’t know this is what it would be like.”

Sue does this a lot. She excessively apologizes on everyone’s behalf. I rolled my eyes at Shelly, but she was preoccupied with looking through her binoculars out over the deck—presumably trolling for single women.

“Oh my god,” she whispered. “I see a cheetah.”

“Shit’s about to get real,” Hannah announced, looking cross-eyed in my direction. “Oprah or NOprah?”

“Oprah,” I declared. “Let’s roll.”

A herd of elephants would have made less noise than the five of us clambering over each other on the deck to get a sobering look at the cheetah.

It didn’t take long for Rex to glean that although we were assholes with a hankering for libations—and lip balm—we were all genuinely interested in the adventure we were about to embark on. He took a long hard look at us, spit on the ground, and surrendered. “All right [which he pronounced ‘al-raht’], let’s go see some wildebeest [‘vilde-be-ast’].”

His tracker, the man who sits in the front of the safari truck mumbling in different directions, was named Life, which Rex pronounced as “laugh.” I’m a sucker for a good accent along with strong forearms on a man, and his happened to be covered in blond hair, which was an added bonus. Looking at him was like seeing myself in male form.

We pulled up to a watering hole and saw ten to fifteen hippos. One of the hippos was standing next to a crocodile whose jaws were wholly open. Upon hearing the six of us shriek with excitement, all the hippos charged into the water and the crocodile shut his mouth and whipped his tail.

Molly clutched my arm and blurted, “That’s how I feel when I enter a swimming pool.”

Rex on his walkie, telling another safari guide the coordinates for the hippos’ location.

When I asked Rex how crocodiles and hippos can just hang out together without one of them eating the other, Rex seemed irritated. He explained to us that the hippo is one of the most, if not the most dangerous animal in the world. They will swallow you whole or tear you apart by throwing your body around crocodile style; obviously that was why the two were such close friends.

Then he firmly informed us that we were going to need to shut up if we wanted to see any more animals. At Rex’s forcefulness, my sister glanced in Molly’s and my direction with squinted eyes. I know this look of intrigue, because the three of us all came from the same gene pool and we are all attracted to the same type of man.

After admiring the hippos, we ventured on and eventually managed to shut our mouths. Life would nod in a direction, and Rex would steer the car in that same direction. On that first day, we also saw wildebeest, buffalo, impala, and a single giraffe who hadn’t made the cut with his own family.

“Poor loser,” Hannah mumbled. “Do you think he did something to deserve being rejected by his own family?” she asked Rex. “Like Chelsea?”

“No,” he said, ignoring her last remark. “Sometimes they just reject some of their own because they sense they are weaker.” Rex seemed to know everything there was to know about animals, which was obviously a turn-on. He also went off road several times, knocking down tree after tree in his path in order to find a carnivore. This was when our vaginas collectively started to rumble. It was probable that one of us would require penetration from Rex, and it was up to me to decide if I wanted to volunteer my services.

Two hours later we pulled over and had champagne in the middle of an empty field, where we were also told that if we felt compelled to urinate, this would be the place to do it. I personally found it oddly comforting to pee outdoors. “Not to sound like a urinary tract infection, but I can’t wait to get back to Los Angeles and try this out,” I told Hannah. She and I put our heads together and smiled for Shelly, who was taking our photo. After Hannah pulled up her pants and left, she continued taking mine.

After we had dispensed with the necessities, I went and sat by Rex, leaned over seductively, and half-fell and half-whispered into his ear, “When will we see tigers?” Rex politely informed me that tigers were located on a different continent. More specifically, Asia.

At dinner that night we discovered that the only other people at our lodge was a couple on their honeymoon, which I always find unsettling. My sister was kind enough to point out to me that this is because I am incapable of spending more than two days alone with any person, never mind any man I’d ever dated. It was discouraging to realize the truth of this statement, which led me to observe this couple like a zoologist stalking a den of baby hyenas.

We only ever saw them at mealtime, and I constantly found myself watching them interact: how many gaps of silence there were and what each person did when the silence arose. (Each inevitably took a sip of wine or looked into the fire. The husband was constantly journaling with the help of his new captor. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of reaction one would have to the prospect of looking through animal journals for the next ten to possibly seventy years.)

“Remember, Chelsea,” Hannah gently said, interrupting my gaze, “there is a lid to every pot.”

Something is definitely wrong with my feelings about marriage and procreation. I worry that not only am I missing the chromosome that allows me to dance respectably, but that I am also lacking a conventional vagina.

Simone and my other sister, Shoshanna, had come out to visit me in Los Angeles two months prior with their five children. After two days of nonstop pool noise, I stared at the smaller children with deadness behind my eyes, looked at Shoshanna, and declared, “I just don’t get the upside of having kids.”

She regaled me with her perspective: “Chelsea, sometimes I wake up and Russell [three years old] touches my face and says, ‘Mommy, you’re beautiful.’ ”

I stared at her waiting for her to finish. Then I told her, “That’s not enough,” and went inside for some more hummus.

June 24, Sunday

The morning after our arrival we were expected to be awake at 6 a.m. to be served coffee and biscuits.

Shelly and I were sharing a room, and our alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. I immediately rose, opened the safe in the room, took my Invisalign out of my mouth, and threw it in there on top of my passport and my signed copy of Into the Wild.

It was dark and freezing while Shelly and I scrambled around the room half awake. I slathered sunblock over my entire body and face, and then layered on piles of clothing that I would be able to take off as the day wore on. Shelly removed her contacts from the champagne she had stored them in the night before, and moaned when she put them in. “Goddammit, these burn.”

Rex was floored when we all arrived on the deck in time, except Hannah, who in a surprising twist, somehow had reduced her normal thirty to seventy-five minutes of being late to only twenty. She was bunking with Sue, who was helpful in getting Hannah up on time along with putting her to bed when her slurring turned into screaming or crying.

“Who would have thought being on black people’s soil would have the reverse effect on being late?” Sue mused out loud.

They provided us with scones and coffee, which was disappointingly the best food we had on the entire trip.

“Do you girls want a Bloody Mary for the ride?” Rex asked.

“Sure,” we all said in unison.

I knew then that my feelings for Rex were stronger and more serious than I had first suspected. I dreamed of quitting my television career, moving to South Africa, buying an existing reserve, and living life wrangling baboons. Rex and I would settle down—after I convinced him he didn’t want children—and he would teach me how to herd buffalo, impala (pronounced “impaahla”), and littleneck clams.

I would eventually learn how to cook the meat, open up my own three-star Michelin restaurant on the reserve, and finally get back to my true passion: waitressing. I’ve always suspected that the reason I was so terrible and miserable at waiting tables was because I had had no other options. Now, with a little money saved and a bunch of uncashed traveler’s checks I had put aside as a nest egg, I could finally give people the service they truly deserved. This was especially important since my name would be on the restaurant door. I’d call it Chelsea… Later.

Simone looked at us drinking the Bloody Marys with a stink eye, which was not so different from her squinty eye, except for the additional eye roll at the end. She clearly wanted to take on the role of the responsible one who wasn’t willing to lose her credibility with Rex or Life. “I don’t need a Bloody Mary at six a.m.”

“But it’s not 6 a.m., it’s ten ’til,” Shelly calmly corrected her. “Technically, it’s still nighttime.” Shelly has a very soothing tone of voice when she’s trying to encourage someone to drink.

Rex told us that perhaps we were the first functioning alcoholic women he had ever met, and it became a mantra he repeated for the next four mornings when we continued to rise at 5:30 a.m. and start our day with Bloody Marys.

“ ‘Functioning alcoholics’ wouldn’t be the precise term, Rex,” Simone corrected him. “It’s more like ‘professional alcoholics.’ ” Simone was spot-on, and although she doesn’t drink as frequently or as much as the rest of us, she was able to keep up at a pace that I found as distrustful as her wardrobe choices.

I corrected her. “I would refer to myself, personally, as a first-generation alcoholic. My parents weren’t drinkers, and since it seems I have indeed taken to the drink, I am choosing not to procreate in order to not pass this gene on. Kind of like an environmentalist,” I told Rex, as he picked me up and put me in the jeep so I wouldn’t twist my knee.

“I brought you some ice today,” he told me.

I looked back at the other girls and winked. Game on, I mouthed.

It was thirty minutes into our morning ride, as the sun started to rise and my body and face started to lather, that I came to the realization that what I had mistaken for sunblock was actually shampoo. I was now completely covered in suds while sitting in an open-air Land Rover wearing an army belt and a bandana wrapped around my head like Jon Bon Jovi.

We sneakily pulled up to a watering hole and saw some more hippos and our first elephants. With our experience from the day before, we realized the importance of whispering when close to the animals and were on our best behavior. I took this valuable time to wipe the foam off my body with my excess layers of clothing and spare bandana.

I thought it time to redeem myself in Rex’s eyes, what with the prior day’s embarrassing tiger misunderstanding. I wanted to seem like I had been paying attention, so I pointed at the dirt road and asked, “Are those leopard prints right there, Rex? Or cougar?”

“No, Chelsea, those are elephant prints,” he answered with a sigh. “Do you see the size and roundness of them? Way too big for a leopard.”

Sue chimed in to defend me. “Rex, in all honesty, the leopard could have been wearing bell-bottoms.”

“That’s very funny, Sue,” Rex replied without laughing, “but as I’ve told Chelsea several times, there are no cougars in Africa. Or tigers. Tigers are in China.”

“Well, Rex… like I’ve told you several times,” I said, trying to not let the truck’s inability to drive smoothly over a bumpy dirt road make me spill my third Bloody Mary, “if the tigers hail from China, then I guess I’ll never see one.” I had known Rex for a total of two days, so there was no way I had told him anything several times—except that I believed the vitamins from the Bloody Marys were acting as human growth hormones in helping my knee to heal.

Not much later we saw actual leopard prints that made me think of my dog, Chunk, and how quickly he would be eaten if Air Emirates had allowed him to fly to Africa. I imagined him in his own first-class cabin, sitting upright with a cloth napkin tucked into his own bandana, which he chooses to wear as a kerchief around his neck, wearing earbuds as he watches Eat Pray Love and orders a second helping of baba ghanoush.

“I wish Chunk was here to see this.”

“If Chunk was here, he would be dead by now,” Hannah declared.

“Who’s Chuck?” Rex asked. As if I would name my dog Chuck. Sometimes I found Rex to be so stupid.

“It’s Chunk, like chunky peanut butter. Chunk. He’s my dog. He’s amazing and he’s dignified. He’s got more dignity in one of his paws than Shakira does in her entire left hip.”

“Yeah, he’d be dead out here,” Rex confirmed.

“Then again,” Hannah said, her tone heavily dripping with sarcasm, “if you were here to keep an eye on him, Chelsea, I’m sure he would be safe.” Then she laughed hysterically, which sounded like the sound that comes over the intercom in grade school right before a fire drill. She turned to Rex. “Chelsea has lost her dog on every trip she’s ever taken him on.” This was a lie.

Even if this was true, why this would be an opportune moment to bring up the way I’ve raised Chunk is beyond my comprehension. Losing dogs is like losing children; it’s not ideal but it happens—on an almost daily basis. I don’t think of losing a child or dog as bad parenting or neglect so much as “taking a break.” The important thing to remember is if the pet or child in question happens to materialize in a reasonable amount of time, then what is the point of reliving such a painful memory?

“I don’t bring up your mother’s death, Hannah. Do I?”

“My mother isn’t dead,” she calmly retorted.

“Well, mine is, and I don’t bring that up,” I replied.

“Chelsea,” Simone interrupted. “Shut it down.” Then she turned to Rex. “Rex, can you name all the animals we saw today?” she prodded him, while nodding at us with her own stamp of self-approval.

“ImPAHla, jarAFF, vildabeast,” he repeated.

“Can you please repeat the last one again, slowly?” Simone requested, smiling devilishly, while we continued to spill alcohol all over each other.

This was only our second day of safari, and our drinking had taken a turn none of us had expected or been prepared for. We would start off with Bloody Marys, work our way through mimosas, and then move on to champagne midafternoon, until we came back to our lodges for what turned into group massages where I would end up with one eye glued shut while the baboons raped each other outside our villas and then stole my Ace bandages.

During my massage, Sue announced that one of the baboons had wrapped my Ace bandage around his leg. “Look, Chelsea. One of the baboons also tore his ACL.”

We then threw our underwear and bras onto the deck in the hopes of the baboons putting on a Victoria’s Secret fashion show for all of us. This did not happen, and instead we ended up with even fewer undergarments than we arrived with because instead of returning our wares with the respect I would imagine a baboon to have, they tore them to pieces with their mouths and then spit them out.

I, personally, was left with a single pair of safari underwear that guaranteed survival in seventeen countries for a total of six weeks. Shelly had purchased these for me for my real life before leaving for safari, and in my last-minute packing, my assistant found them amusing enough to throw them in my bag.

The instructions were to air-dry them each night, allowing the mesh they were made out of to breathe before reapplying them to your body each morning. How any underwear could sustain six weeks in any country, never mind South Africa, was a little over the top—in my professional opinion.

The massages lasted every day from the time our lunch ended around one until four p.m., when we would need to prepare for our afternoon ride. I, of course, insisted all massages take place in Shelly’s and my room, because I am a true codependent and I like to hear voices around me at all times. By the time we were able to assemble ourselves into any sort of respectable posse and make it to our afternoon ride, I usually had one eye half closed and had failed to take what Molly had suggested to me many times over: a “whore’s bath.”

Showering was pretty much out of the question with my leg and inability to maneuver it in and out of a shower without getting wet the kinesiology tape that bound my knee. Plus, the cuisine they served us on safari had a strong enough aroma to overlay any sort of lotion or soap Africa had to offer me.

On our afternoon ride that day, Simone proudly showed off once again her pants that unzip into shorts, revealing to us why she will forever be single.

Not long into the ride, Life saw potential lion tracks, so Rex dropped him off without a walkie-talkie and Life took off on foot. We all expressed serious concern for Life’s safety, but Rex explained to us that Life grew up on this reserve, was well versed on every hectare, and could smell a wild animal hundreds of yards away, which was probably what he was sensing when he hopped off his jump seat and disappeared into the bush. Within minutes we all forgot about Life’s safety.

While Shelly, Molly, and Sue brought out their 35 mm professional cameras with serious zoom lenses in anticipation of the onslaught of wildlife, Hannah decided it was time to bring out the big guns. She attached a mini-zoom to her iPhone, then propped it up on a tripod the size of a salad fork.

Since I am the world’s worst photographer, I instead decided to grill Rex about the interpersonal affairs at the camp and inquire whether he was sleeping with any of the other staff members who worked there.

Instead of responding to my inquisition, Rex instead started to track what he believed was a male lion. This was when we went off road for the first time and discovered Rex’s love of killing trees. He tracked the lion through about one hundred yards of bush, while five of us ducked underneath the seats in order to avoid being decapitated. Hannah decided not to and instead complained about getting whipped in the face with branches. “Well, then put your fucking head down, Hannah,” Shelly yelled.

We finally came upon the lion. He got up and circled our jeep more slowly and more menacingly than Betty White on roller skates.

“Be very still and very quiet [quah-ett],” Rex whispered as he turned the engine off.

Being that close to a three-hundred-pound male lion that was looking at all of us directly in our eyes was absolutely mesmerizing. I found it nearly impossible not to reach out and pet him or to break out into whatever the theme song from The Lion King is. I had never seen that movie, but at that point, I felt like not only had I seen it but also directed and scored it.

“Are you sure I can’t get out of the jeep for just a second?” I asked Rex. “If he doesn’t want to cuddle, I promise to come right back. Animals like me. You’d be surprised.”

“Do not get out of the jeep, Chelsea. This isn’t Universal Studios,” Rex replied.

After our victorious outing of spotting a lion and his eyeing us like prey for over an hour, it was time to go back to the lodge for our eighth meal.

“What will we be dining on tonight?” Molly asked.

“Kudo,” Rex replied. “They are the equivalent of tacos in Los Angeles.”

“You’re sure making a lot of references to California. Sounds like someone is looking to get a free ride to Los Angeles,” Sue murmured under her breath.

I decided to celebrate back at the lodge by ordering seven different drinks in less then ten minutes. It’s always been hard for me to decide what to drink, so I like to sample as much as possible, but I reason with myself that it’s not obnoxious since I always insist on paying for all of the drinks, whether I drink them or not.

I announced at this juncture that my relationship with Rex was going so well that I believed a realistic outcome would be for him to move to Los Angeles. “He’s obviously dropping hints.”

“That sounds reasonable, Chelsea,” Simone said. “I’m sure Rex will fit in nicely as one of the comedians on the roundtable, and then after he’s done taping he can go back to your house and do some landscaping, or shoot at all the water moccasins in your pool.”

At a group dinner with other safarigoers, we spied an older couple with sixteen-year-old triplets at a table near us. Reliably, Sue immediately accosted them to get their story. She ended up sitting at their table for a full one-hour interrogation. One of the triplets was a solid six feet tall and healthy while the other two were toddlerlike with voices that could have shattered glass. Clearly, the big one had stolen all of the food in the womb.

I spent my time questioning Ryan, the gay lodge manager, about the staff and who was sleeping together. “I worked in a restaurant for seven years—I know how this works,” I told him.

In his profound naiveté and innocence, Ryan informed me that Rex slept with Lilly, but they were not in a “formal relationship.” Ryan pointed her out to me, and I spent the rest of the night observing her and what she had to offer Rex.

June 25, Monday

By the third day of safari, each of us had gained between seven and fifteen pounds. Rex and Life started packing Bloody Marys and champagne in the jeep for our morning rides. “We’ve realized it’s better for you girls to have a little buzz,” Rex announced.

I surveyed my body and made a note in my BlackBerry to advise my assistants in the future to pack up to five different sizes of clothing depending on my length of travel. Sizes four, six, eight, ten, and twelve. Shopping for maternity wear prior to trips shouldn’t be ruled out either. There’s a great shop for expecting mothers in Los Angeles called A Pea in the Pod. “Start there,” I’d tell them.

The first thing we saw that morning was an elephant mother and her baby. I recommended rushing the elephants, because I had always wanted to have an elephant charge me. Rex pointed out that this would be disastrous and even in a jeep, we would be unable to outrun a mother elephant protecting her baby.

“Whatever,” I moaned. “This isn’t what I expected from you guys.” Quietly I wondered if the elephant would confuse me as one of her own, considering my recent weight gain. Then the mama elephant’s ears began to flop and she started toward us and made a loud trumpeting noise.

Rex put the car in reverse and announced it was time to move on. This was the quickest I had seen him move.

“Speaking of disappointment, Rex,” I said, “you lied to me yesterday when I asked you if you were sleeping with anyone in camp. I know about Lilly.” Rex responded by telling me it was because he didn’t tell guests personal information. I responded by informing Rex that we were not regular guests and any and all personal information should be disclosed ASAP.

In perfect timing for Rex to avoid answering personal sexual questions, we next came upon a mother hyena with her den of babies. We decided as a group that hyenas were quite possibly the most disgusting animals we had seen on safari so far, and that was including baboons.

“Jeepers,” Rex responded. “You girls are flippin’ hard to please.”

Molly, Simone, and I exchanged disappointed squints at each other. This marked the first time I was embarrassed for Rex and his vocabulary.

“Do you still want to take him back to LA to be your pool boy?” Molly murmured. “Jeepers, Chelsea, we seem to have run out of AAAhced tea and vodka. Where’s the flippin’ store?”

“Where’s the lip balm?” I asked the group, ignoring Molly.

Later that afternoon they drove us over to a ridge covered in boulders and that overlooked a river, and we had drinks at sunset with Rex, Ryan, and another safari guide named Luke.

It was very romantic… or it would have been very romantic had we been there with our boyfriends, had any of us actually had boyfriends, with the exception of Sue. Although until Chuck agreed to change his name to something more reasonable, he didn’t really count in my mind. Luke wasn’t attractive in any way, shape, or form, but he was well versed in what was in the sky.

Me and Ryan.

We all sat under the stars while he identified every constellation, its location in relation to us, and what parts of the world they were most visible in. He showed us the Southern Cross and its pointers, teaching us how to determine in the dark of night if you were headed north or south just by looking at the sky and making a triangle out of the Southern Cross pointers. I had heard about this sort of Boy Scout nonsense before, but I didn’t believe people really paid attention to this kind of thing unless they were members of some program that was trying to launch a rocket into space. After our tutorial, we all attempted to identify the Southern Cross night after night with a success rate of zero.

I watched Rex down one glass of champagne after another and chase each one with a shot of Jameson, and it dawned on me then that we might not be the only ones with drinking problems.

On the ride home we heard over the walkie-talkies from other safari guides about three lionesses that were found roaming on the airstrip where we had landed. One was injured. As we tried to track them we heard the three lionesses making calls trying to find each other.

“That’s sweet. What kind of calls would we make under the same circumstances?” I asked the group.

We decided collectively right there and then that we had no system in place whatsoever to locate one another if we were in a bind and forced to separate or, even worse, if Simone was injured and had to blood-let again. Molly and I took turns howling at each other before were told to shut the fuck up by Rex. He didn’t use the word fuck, but he was grabbing at his disheveled hair the way a man would if he were trying hard not to hit a woman.

That night we had dinner in a circular wine cellar and were separated from the rest of the guests. Molly attributed this to Sue’s interrogation the night before of the triplets and their parents about the health issues the two small siblings had to endure due to the biggest of the three hogging all the nutrients in the womb. Simone attributed our isolation to our behavior in general, and Hannah attributed it to the camp having to keep me from sexually assaulting Rex.

“I’m not the one that was upset the bag you were allowed to bring wasn’t big enough to house your black vibrator,” I told her.

“I have extra condoms if anyone hooks up,” Sue announced as she helped herself to some curry. “Did you girls know that South Africa has one of the highest HIV-infected populations in the world? It’s a great place to hook up.”

There was enough food to feed sixty-five people, and none of it was worth taking a second bite of. Multiple dishes consisted of multiple unidentifiable meats on multiple sticks. Molly posited that if we simply cut down on the amount of alcohol, the quality of food might improve.

“It’s safe to assume they think we eat as much as we drink,” Simone commented.

“I’ve thought a lot about my life today,” I proclaimed, “and I no longer believe marriage is in the cards for me.”

June 26, Tuesday

On the morning of our fourth day, I decided sleeping was more imperative than seeing more lions lick themselves. I blamed my knee injury on my passiveness, but the truth was when I woke up for the fourth time that week at five a.m., I wanted to cry. Why are babies allowed to cry when they wake up, but adults crying when they wake is frowned upon? Babies are permitted to act like assholes whenever they feel like it and no one blinks, but if an adult throws a temper tantrum, all of a sudden it’s on YouTube. It was just too fucking early too many days in a row. I mean, realistically, how many more animals were there to see?

There was also a side story: I can’t begin to describe how much I loved the twin bed I was sleeping in. It was like a marshmallow surrounded in mosquito netting, and it made me feel like a princess. It was just the right size for me and reminded me of a childhood I never had. The only thing better than a twin bed with a mosquito net would be a twin waterbed. The decision was made. Once back at my house, I would keep the king-sized, custom-made leather headboard, but replace the king mattress with a twin-sized waterbed. I would center it in the middle of the headboard, in order to make clear to any visitors that this was an intentional design choice. I would run the water hose through the electrical system in my closet and straight through my ice machine (also in my closet). I love everything to be cold, and this was just one more thing I hadn’t thought of: an iced waterbed.

While the girls were gone I arranged a massage for myself in my villa. The ninety minutes were up before I was ready, so I walked right over to Simone and Molly’s villa and called the spa from there, pretending I was one of them. Unfortunately for me, the same masseuse who had massaged me moments earlier showed up and looked at me quizzically, even though I had put on a baseball hat and sunglasses as a disguise. I pretended my sister had ordered the massage but that she had changed her mind at the last minute and I volunteered to take her place, so as to not waste any money. Getting two massages back to back from the same person wasn’t optimal, but the management at Londolozi left me with no other option.

Of course upon return, the girls informed me that they saw sixteen elephants—mostly mamas and babies—on the horizon waiting for the sun to rise while breast-feeding. I could have kicked myself if I could have moved my leg in any direction but straight. They also told me about the herd of zebras (ZEH-bras) they came upon while a herd of rhinos stood closely by bathing themselves in mud and then licking it off each other.

We then went shopping at the camp’s small store. Everyone proceeded to buy clothing they would never wear, useless knickknacks they would never unpack, and jewelry they would lose before the end of the trip. Sue bought a set of salad tongs for everyone she knew. She then kissed the manager of the store on the mouth as a thank-you for ringing up said items.

I purchased a gray shirt with the continent of Africa front and center, only because none of the clothes I had brought still fit me. I was now wearing a women’s large. I decided to go back to my room and take a pain pill for my leg, something I was proud that I had avoided in the ninety-six hours I had been abroad. After the girls were done shopping they found me on the main deck stuffing my face with breakfast items at two in the afternoon.

A small, blond nine-year-old boy walked in and sat himself at the table where the girls had joined me. He was fully equipped with binoculars around his neck and an animal-logging journal in his hands. His name was Westin and he had no guardian in sight, and it very quickly became apparent why. He never shut the fuck up. The only thing more annoying than underweight cats are kids who don’t know when to zip it.

His family came here every year for vacation, so we agreed to let him give us a tour of his lodge, which happened to abut our lodge, and a look at his very detailed journal of every animal you will find at Londolozi, scientific names included. One by one, we slowly made excuses to go, leaving Sue alone with him.

The five of us decided to bar-hop and investigate the other lodges that we hadn’t seen yet. Afterward, we deduced that everyone who worked at this resort was too good-looking. Simone questioned the ability of people this good-looking being able to effectively do their jobs while also protecting us from wild animals.

Being that it was our last day at the camp, I decided to participate in the afternoon ride. By this point, I had put on so much weight that after I walked back to my room, I got dressed by just throwing my bathrobe over my naked body. I had developed a diaperlike rash, which I believed was from wearing jeans that were cutting off my circulation. None of my safari clothes fit me. Every morning, I would try on all three pairs of pants I had brought hoping that somehow my weight had shifted while I slept, but to no avail. I borrowed a pair of Shelly’s jeans, which barely fit, but I ended up sending them to the laundry because they reeked of vodka and tomato juice. Why SkyMall hasn’t developed a proper safari thermos is an insult to animals, jeeps, Africa, and alcohol.

I started our afternoon safari ride by asking Rex what he would do if an animal were to attack us. Who would he protect first? This was my very indiscreet way of giving him room to make his intentions known. He promptly informed me that he would protect himself first.

Rex found and picked up impala poop (looks like little black blueberries), and ate it. Life told us how the Shangaan play a game where they see who can spit impala poop the farthest. Without any prompting, Sue put a couple of pellets in her mouth and started spitting them at us. Shelly then spent the next half hour dry-heaving at the thought of putting poop in your mouth.

We ended up watching two male giraffes fight with their necks for thirty minutes over a female giraffe. As boring as the battle was, we were shockingly excited. Hannah asked if giraffes ate meat. Molly rolled her eyes at me as if I knew how ridiculous a question that was.

Rex responded with great annoyance, “No!” He was on the verge of a mental breakdown, and Simone and I surmised that he was grumpiest in the afternoons because he was going through DTs from not being able to drink and drive. In the mornings he was more pleasant, because he was still drunk.

Life pointed out a kudu, which, compared to the animals we had already seen, was not that interesting. You would think after running safari camps for years and years, they would know to introduce you to the most boring animals first and then slowly introduce the Big Five—lions, tigers, and bears.

Out of sympathy for Rex, we told him we had seen enough animals and that we should all blow off some steam and get drunk. He didn’t take much convincing, and even Life seemed to perk up at the prospect of Rex letting loose.

Shelly seized this moment to whip out her satellite phone, which was the size of a small uterus, so she could patch herself in to a work conference call in Dallas. Shelly had taken things in the opposite direction from me by getting more serious each day with her safari garb, adding a belt, a broad-brimmed safari hat, binoculars, and a satellite phone to roll calls while we watched impala eat their own shit.

Rex claimed this was the first time he had ever seen someone on a conference call during safari. Life claimed this was the first time he had seen a phone.

Sue was sitting alone in the backseat of the jeep, pontificating out loud that she was consistently sitting alone in the backseat. Safari jeeps have three passenger benches that get higher the farther back the bench is. Sue claimed she was being treated like a ninety-year-old grandma with dementia who was taken for drives to keep her happy. She started to sing a hymn: “Grandma in the back, sunroof top, digging the scene with the gangster lean…”

We pulled over and had what had become our sunset “bush happy hour” complete with champagne, vodka, and African hors d’oeuvres. Everyone sat and lay their heads on each other’s laps. I propped my leg above a picnic basket and iced it while simultaneously grilling Rex about the seriousness of his relationship with Lilly and the possibility of seeing a snake. Being that it was our last night at their camp, Life joined us, and we were able to ask him questions about being a true Shangaan.

Hannah asked Rex if we were his favorite guests ever. He responded no, but my sexual instincts told me a different story.

Hannah then asked Life if he planned on taking on any more wives. He said no, citing expense as the reason. I took this opportunity to offer Hannah up for free. Life giggled, which was quite adorable, and looked away awkwardly in a way I took to mean, She isn’t my type. Hannah looked appropriately disappointed and then made an under-the-breath comment about him raping her later on that night.

“Oh, dear,” Molly said. “I think it’s time to go.”

Rex regaled us with his training to become a safari guide at Londolozi. How every day for eight days he would follow a new path on the grounds with just a walkie-talkie, a sandwich, and a water bottle. He had no weapon to protect himself with. On one of the days, he got stuck in the middle of a herd of elephants and tried to camouflage himself underneath a bush. He walkied the other rangers at the camp to rescue him because he truly believed he was going to die. They told him they wouldn’t make it in time and he was on his own. Rex stood up in the middle of the herd and ran as fast as he could out of there.

“Are you going to be okay?” Molly leaned in to ask me. “Or will you need a new pair of safari underwear after that story?”

Life smelled something and suggested we get moving only to find a female leopard carrying a dead baby steenbok in its mouth. While following it, Sue lost her beanie in a tree and expressed her hope that one day someone would see an impala or a zebra wearing it.

Next, we came across thirty or so baboons ass-raping the females as they walked across a field. By this point, we were all nonplussed at the male baboon’s tendencies. “These animals are behaving like musicians,” Sue announced.

Life told Rex in Afrikaans that he had found male lion tracks. We followed the tracks for forty-five minutes, working with other trackers on the reserve via walkie-talkie. Then Rex and Life both got out of the car to track on foot.

This was when I got up, pulled my pants down, and placed my ass over the side of the jeep.

Molly turned her camera toward me. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“Tell me if they turn around,” I implored everyone.

“Why?” Simone asked. “Would that really matter?”

Life came back to the truck and wrinkled his nose as he passed the part of the jeep where my urine had splattered. He said something in Shangaan to Rex, and Rex started laughing and looked in my direction. I looked straight into the sky. There’s a difference between being a class act and being classy. Peeing off the side of a jeep doesn’t mean you’re not classy, it just means you’re a free spirit with a small bladder.

Laying my scent across the continent of Africa is what I now realized I was born to do, and it worked. The next thing we found were four male lions spread-eagle sunbathing. We were actually able to be quiet and got as close as possible. As we were moving in, Hannah dropped her sunglasses outside of the jeep. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But can we please go back and get them? They were a hundred and eighty dollars.”

We all turned around and looked at her to see if she was serious. “I’ll buy you another pair,” I told her.

“That’s really not going to help me for the next ten days.”

Without saying anything, Life jumped out of the car with four lions surrounding us to get Hannah’s glasses. I still didn’t understand why Life was allowed to mingle with the lions, yet I wasn’t.

After we clearly disturbed them with this little kerfuffle, the lions decided to move down to the water, where a bush was blocking our view. So Hannah, wanting to see better, asked Rex if she could get on her knees.

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Molly asked. “Maybe that’s what’s got you so agro.”

“Fuck you, Chelsea. We’re on safari. Relax.”

No one bothered telling her that Molly was the one who had spoken, because Hannah had stopped making any sense days earlier.

On the way home Rex was speeding to get us back in time for our last night’s festivities and almost crashed into hippos congregating in the middle of a river we were crossing. Those safari jeeps are pretty powerful, and so was the champagne we had coerced Rex to drink. He was eighteen sheets to the wind, and I had officially lost my lip balm.

We got back to Londolozi earlier than usual and headed to the local Shangaan village so that Shelly and Sue could give the toys and candy they brought to the local children. Imagine a local village or orphanage and the euphoria illuminating everyone’s faces as they saw Americans pulling up. There was none of that. Clearly these children had grown weary of white people bringing them gifts, and by the looks of things, they were already pretty well set up. Each child had a Mac laptop or a iPad mini, and there was French writing all over their chalkboard.

“Wow, Chelsea. These kids are all better educated than you. Maybe one day they’ll all get a TV show on E!, too,” Hannah announced.

Next we met with the head village woman, Lena, a stumpy woman who spoke slowly enough to make us all feel as stupid as possible. Lena told us the history of the Shangaan tribe and how the Shangaan men take multiple wives, all of whom must pay a dowry. If a woman dies before her dowry is paid, her children will have to pay their father for their mother’s dowry.

“That sounds like a sweet deal,” Molly said, fist-bumping me.

Then Lena brought us over to the hut she slept in, which was the size of a pencil sharpener. We went in one at a time and avoided any eye contact with each other. After this humbling episode, we rode back to camp in silence and went to our separate villas after canceling our massages.

Me with the Head Hut Nugget.

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’t mess around,” he guffawed, as spit shot out of one of the crevices in his lip onto the steering wheel.

“Ugh,” Hannah groaned. “GROSS!”

“Speaking of deer, Chelsea, why don’t you tell Corbin about the time you hit a deer?” Molly suggested, trying to lighten things up.

“Ugh, I hate talking about that, but I will.” I tapped Corbin on the shoulder. “Do you guys have Rollerblades in South Africa?” Before he had time to answer, I told him, “It was a foggy Tuesday night in May, and I was into my own rhythm and feeling the beat of the drum, and before I knew it, a deer popped right out of the woods and struck me down.”

“Did you not see it coming?” Corbin asked, whipping his lips into profile.

“I did not. On blades, I can get up to sixty-five miles an hour. I ended up with just a couple of scratches, and I was lucky enough to be wearing a helmet. The deer, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. He passed later that night.”

“When she Rollerblades, it’s like she’s in another world,” Sue told him. “By the way, Corbin, we met triplets at Camp Londolozi who said they just came from here. Did you pick them up as well?”

“Ahhh! Yes. Yes, I did. Those girls were a riot—I really loved them.”

“A riot?” I asked. “How so?”

“They were just so funny, they had me laughing and laughing!”

“We didn’t find them funny at all,” Sue interrupted.

“Well,” he said, ignoring her comment and changing the subject, “I’m going to drop you off at your villa so you can freshen up and relax, and we’ll be by at half past four to pick you up for the elephants.”

“What makes you think we need to freshen up?” I inquired, well aware that I was on my sixth day of not-showering.

He ignored my question, too, and informed us he’d be dropping us off with Norman, our “escort” at Camp Dumbo.

He pulled up to our villa where we met Norman, a shorter, grosser version of Corbin, if that was possible. Norman had beyond-seven-layer-dip lips. He looked like a warthog, and in what was becoming typical South African style, he also had one dead tooth. Perhaps he and Rex were distant cousins. He wore safari shorts that stopped a foot and a half above his knee, and he had the handshake of a warthog after being assaulted by a water balloon.

“Do those shorts hurt?” Hannah asked as she picked her ear and walked inside. I felt sorry for Norman, and I felt bad for him having to meet us. I also felt bad for myself, realizing I had completely forgotten to pack my clothes when we left Londolozi. I remember seeing my clothes, deciding I’d rather not deal with them, and secretly hoping Molly or Shelly would mistake them for their own and pack them. This is my usual operating procedure, and I’ve had over a 90 percent success rate.

Our villa was covered in mounted elephant heads, antelope tusks, and stuffed hyenas, with elephant dung on the walls doubling as wallpaper. It was spacious, with a wraparound balcony and two bedrooms connected by a living and dining area. This allowed the six of us to sleep in the same quarters for the first time on this trip. We were supposed to stay there for four days, but after meeting Corbin and Norman, I knew four days would be a long shot.

Norman gave us walking directions to the main lodge if we wanted to grab a bite to eat before our elephant ride. We were to make a hard right out of our villa and follow a stone path that would lead to signs to the main lodge. In doing so, we crossed a gangplank that was suspended over ten feet of dirt and led to a lodge shaped like a pirate ship. It felt like we were on a ropes course, and I decided to be the first one to acknowledge it.

“This camp is like the Best Western version of Arabian Nights. All we’re missing are some gorilla rings and a balance beam.”

“I feel like we’re going to need 3-D glasses,” Molly added.

Norman was waiting for us in the dining room when we entered the main lodge. Why he made us walk a quarter of a mile in ninety-degree heat when he was going to the same place made no sense at all. It dawned on me that Norman was under the impression that the gangplank/drawbridge was one of their main attractions. If that was the case, we were in big trouble.

Once we were seated, Norman explained to us that later we would all be riding the elephants with a trainer. “The trainers are very careful not to develop any relationship with the elephants,” he told us enthusiastically. “They use rods to get them to move.”

We thought Norman was joking, but Norman being Norman was too naive to realize how horrible that sounded.

Our chef, Frederic, sauntered over to our table and I decided to rename him Siegfried, based on the fact that he was a white European with a bizarre dye job and, in my professional opinion, a raging queen. I understand that a chef takes pride in his cuisine, but I had more sympathy for the fact that none of us had been able to digest anything we had eaten in five days and needed to take the food down a notch. It was obvious Frederic had been warned about us when he asked us in a slightly irritated tone if we had any specific requests for dinner that night, and then rolled one colored contact. Feeling ashamed, we told him no in unison. He went over menu items, which were kudu, squirrel, and roasted cauliflower soup. After hearing this, we decided that we did indeed have specific requests; specifically, that he not make anything he originally planned and just bring us a couple of salads.

“You can throw in the soup,” I added, thinking of cauliflower being an accomplice to a bowel movement.

Hannah used this opportunity to piss off Frederic even more by asking for some plain penne pasta with butter, like a five-year-old. We all agreed and asked for the same. Frederic blanched at this request, and later Sue suspected he actually urinated in our pasta, or at least the butter.

A black man named Hunam presented himself, dressed absurdly in clothes from the late 1800s that made him look like he belonged on the set of Django Unchained. He started taking drink orders and giggled with a little glint in his eye when Shelly gave him instructions on how to make the perfect margarita. He had a sweet disposition, and I imagined he also hated Frederic, Corbin, and Norman as much as we did. Perhaps we would kidnap Hunam and take him back to the States, where he would take up work as a camera operator on my show.

“Do you think we’re being kept away from the other campers… again?” Sue asked the group, looking around at the empty dining deck. “We just got here.”

After Frederic was out of hearing range and Shelly had finished the margarita instructions, she uncorked her napkin from the chandelier-sized elephant tusk it had been stuffed in and told Hunam, “If you could just get us some weed, that would be great.” Then she turned to us and posited, “Should we only drink and skip the food? I feel pretty backed up.”

“I should go home,” Simone said, looking at the sky. Simone was preoccupied with her impending house move and was starting to feel guilty about being away from the kids during such a time. She had planned on coming only on the first leg of the trip, but after the success of Londolozi, she agreed to continue on. None of us wanted her to leave, and we were in top-secret discussions at all times figuring out how to extend her trip to match ours. I had told her it would be fine to leave after the second camp, but never intended to actually let that happen. I had been in contact with her ex-husband and was facilitating the move with him, but these were iotas of information I didn’t feel were necessary to share with her until plans were solidified. I want my sister with me at all times, and it’s of no concern to me whether she feels the same way.

The soup, pasta, and margaritas came. I placed my margarita on my knee and grimaced in pain in order to garner some sympathy from Simone and get her mind off leaving and back onto me. Then I took a bite of pasta and spit out what tasted like a pinecone.

“Rosemary,” I moaned. “I hate rosemary. If I wanted to eat a Christmas tree, I have the resources to do that.”

“Why did no one mention that the food in Africa is so horrible?” Shelly asked. “And that there are no single women anywhere.”

“That’s pretty insulting, Shelly,” I told her. “Simone is sitting right there.”

“It is surprising,” Sue chimed in. “Safaris are known for their orgies.”

“You’re very sexual, Shelly,” Molly told her. “There should be an iPhone app for when you’re on the move, like an Amber Alert. ‘Shelly’s in South Africa, she’s been drinking for eight days straight, and she’s on the move. Anyone can be a victim! Men, women, dogs.’ There should be a flashing red dot on maps like Google maps that warn people where Shelly is and to get inside their homes and lock their doors. ‘There’s a sexual twister headed in your direction. She could hit ground at any time. Anyone can be a victim! Men, women, dogs.’ ”

“And giraffes,” Sue added.

Shelly’s response to our harassment always involves a sssttt sound and no other defense, because she knows that she is a sick, sick woman who happens to have an incredibly high IQ, practice law, and be physically able to do anything I’ve ever seen any man do. I wouldn’t describe her as butch, but she does own a Harley and a boxer dog, and she walks the way real lesbians walk—with her vagina thrust forward, allowing it to always enter a room before she does. I call it the “pussy out” walk.

“Do you guys think I may have tripolar disorder?” I asked, staring at the fake rocks that enclosed our outdoor dining area. “I lost my luggage, this soup tastes like cocaine, and I left my Invisalign at Camp Londolozi.”

“You and your Invisalign,” Sue said, exhausted. “How many of those have you lost?”

“On this trip or in life?” Shelly asked.

“Why do you even take it out?” Sue asked. “Aren’t you supposed to wear it all the time?”

“No, I just wear it when I sleep. Otherwise, you have to take it out when you eat, and then I have to try to discreetly place it on the dining table or in my bra. “

“Don’t you have to clean it?” Molly asked.

“Yes, and that’s why I use Polident,” I told her. “People think they’re just for dentures and those people are wrong—and quite honestly, they’re the ones who need to get a grip.”

“Well, you’ll need dentures soon enough,” Hannah chimed in.

“Should we only drink?” Shelly posited to the group again.

“Ugh,” Hannah moaned. “The heat is so hot.”

We left a tip and told one of the staffers to forget lunch and let Hunam know to meet us back at our villa with two more pitchers of margaritas. When he reappeared, he not only had the two pitchers of margaritas, but he also had close to ten pounds of marijuana and a pack of American Spirits. Our instincts about Hunam were right. Sue began rummaging through our fruit basket in search of an apple.

Here are the margaritas.

“Do you guys think there’s a movie theater anywhere nearby?” Hannah asked, reading from her computer. “The Great Gatsby was just released, and it’s getting totally mixed reviews. It would be nice to see a movie, no?”

“Not really, Hannah… because… we’re on safari,” Sue told her. “I didn’t come all the way to Africa to go to the movies, no offense to Baz Luhrmann or Tobey Maguire.”

“Well, I thought it might be a good idea to break up the animal stuff. I mean, this place is annoying. What about you, Molly?” she said without looking up. “I bet you’re up for a movie.”

“I would rather learn a wind instrument,” Molly replied.

“I would stick my head in the oven if I could figure out how to turn it on,” I announced.

“Or we could go to a pop-up hospital,” Sue suggested, as she cut the core out of the apple with a butter knife, and then emptied the tobacco out of one of the cigarettes. “Hannah, can you check online to see if there are any pop-up hospitals? I’d love to see if any of us have caught anything yet. Who’s got a light?”

And here is the marijuana. Also known as the highlight of Camp Dumbo.

I decided to e-mail my doctor and make sure it was okay for me to ride an elephant three weeks out of surgery. His response was, “Please, Chelsea, no.”

I leaned back in the leopard-print dining room chair I was stationed in and felt it buckle. “Is there an adult camp for obesity?” I asked. “I am going to need to pick up a parasite. Or an African girdle.”

“Yes, somewhere with trust falls and zip lines,” Sue responded.

I got up, took some raw macaroni out of the kitchen pantry, and when I couldn’t find a bowl, I poured some into a martini glass and popped it in the microwave. I looked quizzically at my dish as I was putting it in the microwave, wondering if I was missing an ingredient. But in the hopes of appearing like a conscientious chef prepared for all things culinary, I soldiered on. After standing directly in front of the microwave for what felt like an eternity, I heard glass shattering, and hopped backward on my good leg. I now know that the key ingredient I was missing was water, and I regret not knowing this when it mattered the most.

“Well,” I announced as I hobbled back into the living room with the girls, “another signature dish gone awry.”

Simone looked up from her phone and asked me what I had e-mailed her soon-to-be ex-husband.

Hannah was typing and mumbled without looking up, “How are you getting service, Simone?”

Simone ignored Hannah and kept her eyes set on me.

“Well, you can’t leave on a note like this,” I told Simone. “We need to reunite with Rex. He said he had time off. Don’t think he’s not coming to join us.”

“Chelsea, I have to move houses. Are you proposing that I force three children to pack up and move themselves? What did you write to him?”

“First of all, it’s not like they’re toddlers. Seneca is almost ten. There are child labor camps all over the world with kids much younger than that. Third of all, Shana, Roy, and Mike are all around to help out. The movers are going to do everything anyway.”

“You can’t hold me hostage,” Simone mumbled.

“I simply told him that I need you here for physical and emotional support, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and that he should set a good example for his children by allowing you to celebrate your divorce on a seventeen-star safari.”

“She’s right, you know,” Shelly chimed in.

Simone looked at Shelly like a mother protecting her chihuahas. “You are an enabler, Shelly, and you, Chelsea, are a bully.”

Hannah looked around and jammed her finger in her ear. “Does anyone have Internet service?”

“Yes!” the five of us responded together.

“You are an enabler,” Sue agreed.

Shelly then turned to Simone. “Seriously, what are the chances you are ever going to come back to Africa? Chelsea does have a point, bullying as it may be. It’s like a bully with money.”

“It’s like two bullies with money,” Simone said, eyeballing Shelly.

“Like Laverne and Shirley with money,” Sue added.

“Then who’s Squiggy?” I shot back at Sue. “Because it feels like I’m looking at him.” I went back in the kitchen to check on my pasta and remembered halfway there that it had already exploded in the martini glass.

After Sue had prepared the apple properly, we got extremely high, which turned out to be a welcome respite from all the alcohol we had been drinking.

By the time Norman—the South African version of Leave it to Beaver—picked us up for our 4:30 elephant ride, we were supremely out of sorts. Every time I get stoned, I always write a note to myself to do it more often, and then I always forget where I put the note.

Before our scheduled elephant romp, we stopped by a man-made pond to watch the sunset and stare romantically at the wind. This gathering spot was comprised of two picnic tables covered with the African equivalent of saltines, some sort of processed cheese cubes, and an array of wet meat. We tried to make small talk with another couple there but became dispirited when we found out they were headed to Londolozi in the morning. “We wish we were going with you,” I told them with tears in my eyes.

We sucked down champagne out of plastic flutes and gnawed on beef jerky in silence while watching the sunset from lawn chairs. “I bet that sunset isn’t even real,” Sue garbled while she tried to remove the hair whipping around inside her mouth like a spin cycle. This place was like a microclimate. One minute the sun was burning down on your face and the next minute you were in a Saharan sandstorm.

After stepping away from our group to take a phone call on his cell, Norman returned and revealed to us that the elephant ride had been canceled and it would now be in the morning.

“Did the elephants make other plans?” Sue asked.

Norman nervously laughed, then explained that one of the elephants was sick, which would prevent her from leaving her shed, which would prevent her four sisters and all their baby elephants from leaving their barracks. “They travel in herds,” he reminded us, as if we had not just come from a fucking safari the week before.

“None of the elephants get sick at Londolozi,” I assured the couple who were headed there.

I looked at Shelly, who had her eyes fixed on Norman. “What are you talking about? Isn’t this the whole point of the camp… to ride a goddamned elephant?” Shelly’s testosterone was kicking in. She lashes out to protect me so that I don’t have to complain and then have people talk about what a bitch I am in person. Instead, they talk about what a bitch she is, and wonder what someone as sweet as me is doing traveling with someone as cunty as her.

Simone put her arm around my shoulder. “This place is what you would call a ‘hot mess.’ It’s off. Way off. I think you should call Rex and see if he can put his money where his mouth is. It’s just not the same without him.”

I felt bad for Norman, because clearly he wasn’t in charge of this camp or, for that matter, anything in his life. He offered to take us on a night ride and we decided, against our better judgment, to assuage his insecurity and our disappointment by obliging. Also, there was nothing better to do. We had the sunset-picnic bartender make us some dry martinis to go, because we were all getting heartburn from the fake lime juice in the margaritas.

During this night ride we learned that in place of a tracker, Norman used binoculars and a flashlight. When Shelly asked him why he didn’t have a tracker like Rex, he said he didn’t need one. Hannah began cross-examining Norman—what kind of training program had he taken, where had he gone to school, and what his real experience with animals was. “Have you ever even seen a lion?”

When he disclosed to us that the only prerequisite to working here had been a three-week training course online—which would be equivalent to me getting an archaeological degree from the University of Phoenix—I tossed my martini glass over my sister’s head and into the woods. Somehow, a giant rock moved itself into the same place as the bush I was aiming at, causing a rather loud crashing sound. Norman hit the brakes and asked if we had dropped something.

“Simone!” I yelled. “What is your problem? You were supposed to catch that.” Simone was sitting three seats behind me.

Norman stopped the car and got out. As he retrieved the broken glass, he pointed out a rabbit running across the road.

“I didn’t fly twenty hours to see a fucking rabbit, Norman,” Sue snapped.

Sue is never mean to people, but we were at our wits’ end and Norman was exceptionally stupid. What kind of safari features rabbits and flashlights? If I wanted to go on a Cub Scout trip, I would have become a Scout leader. That was actually exactly what Norman should have been doing. Leading Scouts. Girl Scouts.

“Actually, it’s a squirrel,” he responded. I couldn’t see the squirrel, but I knew that I was jealous of the squirrel’s body.

After being at Londolozi, it was impossible not to be disappointed with Camp Dumbo. Going from a thousand-hectare natural reserve with rhinos, hippos, lions, and cheetahs for miles, to what was essentially a Six Flags with nothing but rabbits and Cheez Whiz, was not something we were prepared for.

We told Norman we wanted to go home, so he made a left and drove down a dry riverbed for over thirty minutes, only to land us in a rock-enclosed dead end. It was also pitch-black, and his flashlight’s battery had drained. He then made a twenty-seven-point turn to get us out.

“This reminds me of your driving, Hannah,” I told her. “Like the time my driveway hit your car.”

Hannah, buried under the blankets they provided in the jeep, held a squishy hot water bottle over her eyes. “Why are we stopped? Did we get a flat tire?”

Once we got home I asked the girls how the hell my travel agent, Barb, could have sent us to a place like this after our first camp. “It’s like we’re at a petting zoo, but with no animals.”

“If this had been our first camp, it would have been fine, but after being at Londolozi, which is the cream of the crop, it is impossible to have a good attitude,” Molly reasoned. “The next camp is supposed to be amazing. It’s probably going to be better than Londolozi.”

“I pray to god you’re right, Molly,” I said as I stripped down to my bra and underwear and got into bed. “I pray to the Lord Jesus Christ that you’re right.”

“There’s a Bible on your nightstand, Chels. Make sure you use that while you pray.”

“The Bible is just another book of horoscopes!” Sue yelled from the other bed in the same room and then moaned.

That night, when I popped my Xanax, I decided to chew it in order for it to affect me in a timelier manner.

“Didn’t you already take a Xanax?” Molly asked me.

“Probably,” I said, and pulled down my eyeshades. Shelly was already snoring in her pajamas.

“Rex!” I wailed, waking myself up in the middle of the night. “Where are you, Rex? I need Rex!”

Shelly awoke. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and rolled over into fetal position.

June 28, Thursday

I woke up the next morning and Shelly was nowhere to be found. As codependents, we usually wake up at the same time, so I was irritated when I woke up alone. I found her in the kitchen making coffee. “We’ve decided to have more positive attitudes, today,” Shelly informed me. “Even Hannah.”

“Good,” I said, and returned to my room to put on the only outfit I had left that fit me. It wasn’t so much an outfit as it was draping: cargo shorts and hiking sneakers, both of which I had stolen from Shelly. I got some ice for my knee and walked back into the living room to get some Excedrin and make an announcement.

“We’re going to have to move on earlier than expected.” I took the map I had stolen from Sue’s office at work and laid it out on the dining room table. “Let’s get some Bloody Marys and figure out what our game plan is.”

“Chelsea, this is a map of San Francisco,” Sue said, refilling the apple bong with more marijuana. “The map that Chuck made for me for the weekend we never took. Did you steal this?”

“Well, perhaps we should think about going there,” I told her, avoiding her accusation. “More importantly, what did cavemen do before Excedrin? Can you imagine the hangovers they woke up with? All they did was hit each other in the head with bones.”

“Should I call Rex?” Hannah asked.

“Yes!”

There was a knock on the door and I feared it was Norman. It was.

“Are you girls ready to r-a-a-a-a-h-d elephant?” he asked, rubbing his hands together excitedly.

“I guess,” I said, rolling my eyes at Simone. “Hannah just needs to make a phone call.”

Hannah was taking control. “Hi, this is Hannah,” she said into the phone, “and I was just there with Chelsea Handler’s party. Would it be possible to speak with Rex, our safari guide?” She got up and walked out of the room and then walked right back in when she lost her cell signal.

“Stay in one place!” Molly yelled.

“Just go ahead without me.” Hannah motioned to us, waving her hand. “I also have to call Barb and the next camp to make sure we can come early. I don’t need to ride an elephant. I’m good.”

“We have baby elephants,” Norman assured her.

“Hannah doesn’t need to ride an elephant,” Molly reassured him. “Her legs aren’t big enough to spread around something that size.”

“She can get a massage,” Simone offered. “Hannah, get a massage!” she yelled to her as the door closed.

Once we got to the actual elephant stable, each elephant was taken out one by one and paraded before us like limp biscuits. We were informed that we would be riding each elephant in pairs and with a trainer. So three of us in total would be on each elephant, but with Hannah missing, one person had to ride alone.

“I don’t mind riding alone,” Molly volunteered. “It would be the same weight as Hannah and I riding together.” I asked Simone if she would be my elephant partner, and she reluctantly acquiesced.

It’s not lost on me that the people I respect the most are the people who want to hang out with me the least. Simone has never shown an interest in being anything other than my sister, and looks at it as more of a duty than a pleasure.

There were baby elephants along with their mama elephant and then a male elephant and one pregnant elephant. The pregnant elephant was the size of a house. “If I ever got pregnant, I would just get lipo throughout the whole pregnancy,” I declared, glaring at the elephant. “Talk about a fat fuck.”

Andrew was the name of the trainer in charge of the herd. He wore similar shorts to Norman and had a woman’s ass. Andrew was German and was very strict at the stables; he told us repeatedly that we needed to stand back from the elephants when none of us were anywhere near them. I wanted to tell Andrew that he had a secretary spread for an ass and that he was a fucking asshole and by that point, I didn’t even want to ride a fucking elephant, but I had lost my edge.

“Do not lean back on the elephant,” he repeated for the seventeenth time as we each climbed up an African stepladder. Our feet ended up at the same level as the elephant’s tits.

Simone and I were the last ones to mount our elephant, and once we had set sail down the riverbed following the others, I brought up something that had troubled me for days. “Simone, I have to ask you a question, and I need you to keep this between us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is the moon… not the sun?”

I was sitting behind Simone, who was spooning the elephant trainer in front of her. He audibly giggled at my question.

“You mean are they the same thing?” Simone wanted to clarify.

“That’s right,” I replied confidently.

“No, Chelsea. The moon is a satellite of the earth and the sun is a star.”

“Come again?”

“The earth revolves around the sun, and the moon is a satellite to the earth that is illuminated at night.”

“By who?”

“Huh?”

“Who is illuminating the moon?”

“The sun.”

“Well, then why is it sometimes full and sometimes not?”

“Chelsea.” She turned around.

“Simone!” I begged. “Come on. You think I’m happy about asking these questions?”

“The sun illuminates the moon, and its position as it rotates around the earth determines its fullness.”

“I can’t believe I bleached my asshole for this trip.”

“Don’t try and change the subject, Chelsea.”

“I’m not. I really can’t believe I bleached my asshole. I don’t even know what the original color was and I don’t know what color it is now. Who did I bleach it for? Please do not tell anyone about this conversation, Simone.”

“Which part?”

“You know which part.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t. You not knowing that the moon and the sun are two different things is a poor reflection on me, too.”

It was very quiet other than the distant laughter from the other girls who were far ahead of us. As disappointing as this camp had been, it was pretty majestic to be riding an elephant in Africa, especially now that I knew the difference between the sun and the moon. Our elephant’s name was Lucy, and when she walked, her body undulated up and down and side to side. It felt very safe and calm traveling at less than one mile per hour and seeing the elephant in front of us urinate with more water pressure than a hose at Guantanamo Bay. I loved the feel of Lucy’s thick, leathery skin. Every few minutes she would stop and pull up some grass or leaves with her trunk until our trainer would make a sound or kick her in the gut. Africa was just plain beautiful. And if I could feel that way when I knew Norman and Corbin were both in a five-mile radius, I knew I was evolving. I asked the trainer if there was any way to make Lucy stampede while we were riding her, and he told us he didn’t think we would enjoy that, or survive it.

I looked up and pointed out the Southern Cross. “Look, Simone. I did learn something on this trip. Those are the Southern pointers!”

“That’s the sun.”

Once we had dismounted from our elephant and were reunited with our group, Simone took it upon herself to announce, “Chelsea just asked me if the sun and the moon were the same thing.”

“What the fuck, Simone?”

“Oh, Chels,” Molly said, rubbing my head. “It’s amazing how much you’ve accomplished without really knowing anything. It’s like you have Asperger’s.”

“Thank you, Molly,” I said, snuggling into her. “What I have is Ass-burger’s. It is related to Asperger’s but is harder to diagnose.”

Andrew came over and shut down our love fest. He sternly instructed us to walk back over to our elephants and escort them to their stables, where we would put them down for their afternoon nap. Apparently, they were exhausted from their one-hour outing. Putting them to bed meant they were stored behind steel bars with a watering trough and a feed shoot at the bottom of their cage.

“As you can see, the elephants are free to come and go as they please,” Andrew assured us, as we all looked on, appalled. In my opinion, Andrew had Nazi leanings.

“Is that right?” Sue asked him. “So they are all able to just open the locks on these steel gates and walk right out? That’s pretty sophisticated.”

Andrew hated us and so did everyone else at the camp.

“So, what’s on tap for tonight, Andrew?” Shelly asked with her last shred of positivity.

“A nighttime elephant ride,” he said. “Totally different route.”

“There’s no fucking way I can sit through another elephant ride. That was the worst,” Shelly whispered to me. “And, it’s definitely not something anyone needs to do twice.”

When we got back to our villa, Hannah told us she had been in contact with Rex and that he was on leave as of that morning. He was ready and willing to come straight to Camp Dumbo, or he could meet us at the airport to go to Botswana.

“Airport!” I screamed. “And call our travel agent and tell her to get us the fuck out of this racket.”

“I already did. There is a daily plane that arrives here at one p.m. to drop off new guests—the same one we came in on. We can hop on that, which will transfer us to the airport in Botswana, where can meet Rex and take another plane from there. There is room for us at Mombo Camp, but since we’re coming two days early, they don’t have an extra room for Rex.”

“No problem!” Simone and I blurted at the same time.

“Sounds like there’s a little Sisterhood of the Traveling Coslopus happening,” Molly gurgled, and then rolled her tongue trying to make a sexual rhumba sound that I didn’t like.

“You guys can have him. I’m out,” Hannah stated, apparently referring to Rex.

“We should really get some sort of refund,” Molly insisted.

“At this point, I would pay double to leave early,” I told her.

“The plane is picking us up in ninety minutes. I already told Corbin that we are leaving early. And Rex is bringing all the clothes you left there, Chelsea. Not that any of them will even fit.”

“Wow, Hannah. Way to go. You really pull through in the clutch,” Simone said.

“Yes, Hannah. This is what I would refer to as a job very well done,” I confirmed, and offered her my fist to bump.

“Oh by the way, Chels, I just told Corbin that you had a double herpes outbreak on both sets of lips and the dry heat and all the white people were making it worse. That’s our reason for leaving.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “Thank you.”

“I also got a massage from a guy named 7Up,” she told me. “Even the massages suck here. It felt like I was being attacked by a Navy Seal.”

Everyone scattered to their different areas to pack their belongings, and Sue headed toward the kitchen.

Corbin, Norman, and Frederic all arrived at our villa to “see us off early.”

“Okay, guys, we’re out of lime juice, so I had to use chicken stock,” Sue announced, with a pitcher of fresh margaritas in her hand. “Oh, hello, Corbin, Norman, and Siegfried.”

Simone grabbed the pitcher out of Sue’s hand and went into the kitchen to remake the margaritas. Frederic followed closely behind to make sure we weren’t stealing the silverware. As she emptied two two-liter water bottles into the sink and filled them with straight tequila, he shook his head in disgust.

“Sorry, Frederic, but we need closed containers for the plane. It’s easier for everyone if we have closed containers. It’s just disrespectful otherwise, don’t you think, Frederic?” she asked. Simone’s frown had turned upside down; she had turned into a full-blown enabler, and I liked it.

Our moods had made a one-eighty from when we arrived. We were happy again, not only at the prospect of going to a new country and a new camp, but we were even more excited at the prospect of seeing Rex again. Sweet, sweet, dead-toothed Rex.

As we got out of the jeep onto the airstrip and bid our adieus to Corbin, Sue reassured him. “Please don’t take it personally that we’re leaving, Corbin. What you’ve done here is amazing. It’s just hard to go from seeing elephants living their lives in the wild and not being bothered by humans, to seeing them put in a bunker every night and then being forced to take assholes like us on rides. But we wish you the best of luck.”

The six-passenger daily plane that was retrieving us was landing, and it slowed to a stop to let out four new arrivals. Between it and Corbin’s jeep was a small, covered pergola-type structure with a bench in it. I realized the only outdoor urination that had taken place at this camp was by an elephant, so I decided to relieve myself. It would be a one-hour plane ride to meet Rex at the next airport in Botswana, and I wanted to be as light as possible. As the passengers disembarked and headed over to Corbin’s jeep, I politely waved.

“I’m an American,” I explained as my reason for urinating in public, and then waited for them to pass me before pulling up my cargo shorts and lightly jogging over to the plane. We were greeted by the same pilot who had dropped us there two days earlier.

“Did you girls have a good time?” he asked, smiling.

“What do you think?” Hannah replied.

“Oh, shit! What about Hunam?” Molly asked. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“I already tipped him. I gave him whatever was left in Chelsea’s wallet,” Hannah informed us.

“Hannah, you’ve really managed to pull your shit together,” Shelly told her. “That must have been a great massage.” Then she turned to Simone. “Will you pass me one of the margarita bottles?”

Simone told the pilot we were going to need some cups.

“There are paper ones in the back and plastic up here in the front. Plastic has less give and is generally better for urine.”

My head spun around at his directness. “Are you single?” Then I nudged Sue and asked, “Who comes to the AIDS capital of the world without condoms?”

“You have the weed, right?” Molly asked Sue.

“I do,” Hannah announced.

Notwithstanding Camp Dumbo, Africa was turning into a hotbed of sexual tension.

There are no other pictures from this trip for legal reasons.

CHAPTER 4

REJECTION IN BOTSWANA

Rex was standing outside the airport in khakis and a T-shirt, when we landed at yet another South African airport. He looked different out of his safari gear, which was neither here nor there, but he was wearing flip-flops, and I prefer that men don’t do that. He was standing next to our South African airport greeter, also wearing flip-flops.

“Look who’s here!” I screamed as we got off the plane. “Rexy!” the six of us yelled as we ran over and tackled him on the tarmac. We were elated and drunk on love. He was as happy as we were, and there was no denying it.

The airport in South Africa that was our waystation to Botswana was the size of an El Pollo Loco and had eight gates in total. There was a little shopping area and the airport’s most important feature—a full bar, which was where we all hightailed it to reload our drinks.

A single man was in charge of the security check, and when he saw our two thermoses, he told us we were not allowed to board the plane to Botswana with any liquids. The girls all looked to me.

“I have diabetes,” I told him, holding up my right wrist in a statement of Black Power, and also because I presumed a closed fist was the current symbol for diabetes. “Type two.” The girls and Rex kept their heads during this exchange.

“Okay,” the man said, with a confused look on his face. “Come on through.”

Once inside the gate, we gleaned that once again we would be the only ones on the plane. Sue reminded us that we had hogged all the alcohol and that she and Simone were dead sober. “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette,” she said, using air quotes.

Simone was the first one behind her, and we all followed suit. I informed the man at security that although we had already been through security, we needed some air. In order to avoid repeating our previous conversation, I told him, “We’ll leave our thermoses here and be back in time for the flight. Please make sure no one touches my juice.”

Our greeter led us outside to the front of the airport, which was on the opposite side of where we landed. There was a medium-sized parking lot in front of us. Sue took out two American Spirits, handed one to Molly, and motioned for her to go distract our airport assistant while we smoked the pure African ganja.

Somehow, on the plane ride Molly had become more intoxicated than I had seen her on the entire trip, and it was pretty fantastic. Being that she’s a bigger girl, it’s harder for her to get drunk, but when she does it is well worth the wait. Like an elephant trumpeting, her body will swing in several different directions, and if you are in her line of fire, there’s a chance you could lose your life.

Molly went over to divert the man’s attention, and this was what I overheard: “Oh my goodness, are all these cars here for flights?” She waved her hands around wildly, making one asinine observation after another about the air traffic control towers in South Africa as compared to the ones in Los Angeles.

After Sue took a hit off her cigarette, we realized we had the real cigarette and Molly had taken the marijuana cigarette. She was ten feet away and exhaling smoke into the man’s face while gesticulating like one of those guys with the glow sticks who direct planes where to park once they’ve landed.

Simone went over to Molly to retrieve the cigarette and had to struggle to get it out of her hands. Once she did, she glared at Molly and walked back over to us while taking a huge hit. “I’m too sober for this shit,” she exhaled.

We all shared the joint, then headed back into the airport, where Hannah bought some more souvenirs for her nephews—one clay elephant and one clay rhino. I mean, who really gives a shit? The rest of us went to our gate, where Rex revealed to us that he had brought each one of us extra ChapSticks.

“Oh, Rex!” we all cried and mounted him again. Our little plane had arrived and was loaded with ice and champagne. Things could not have gotten any better.

Camp Vurumba is located in the Okavango Delta. It was very different from Londolozai and Camp Dumbo, and in a great way. The camp was engulfed by the delta, which meant we had to drive through what was essentially a swamp, but it was exponentially more beautiful than a swamp and almost otherworldly. There were elephants and hippos in the distance sloshing through the water, and there were lily pads and papyri; everywhere.

Rex sat in the front of the jeep to bond with Z, who would be our guide in Botswana. Z was the best. He was happy and bald and had a great sense of humor—and he had only one wife, so I trusted him.

That’s Simone behind Rex and Hannah behind me, after shouting: “I don’t want to be in any pictures.”

We arrived at Vurumba at lunchtime, where the staff revealed to us that there was an open bar policy and we would be helping ourselves to our own drinks. They had gotten calls from both Londolozi and Camp Dumbo, and they were told that it was in everyone’s best interest for us to be overserved.

“Is that true?” Hannah asked, appalled.

“We’re like men,” I declared. “Gross Russian men who can’t even fit into regular clothes.”

“The only good thing about Russians is their salad dressing,” Hannah whispered to no one in particular.

“They give all the camps a VIP list,” Rex informed us, trying to allay our paranoia.

“Do you guys even get E! here?” Hannah inquired.

“I don’t know, I don’t watch much telly,” Rex replied. “But we knew we had a celebrity coming.”

“Are we worse than Russians?” I asked Z. “Be honest.”

“No, no, of course not,” he reassured us. “They just called and told us that all you ladies care about are lip balm and margaritas.”

“We also like champagne and Bloody Marys,” Sue corrected him.

“We all get a VIP list that describes the type of guest who is coming and what we can expect,” Rex explained.

“Did the list go something like this?” Sue asked in her singsong tone. “One VIP who needs a constant alcohol drip who travels with a power lesbian who also needs a constant alcohol drip. Both love to complain, but lesbian VIP complains more to make celebrity VIP look more reasonable.”

“It said there was a mixed group of affluent women who like to drink,” Z told us with a smile.

“Affluent?” Hannah asked.

“That’s a nice way of saying you have money,” Sue said, looking at me.

“Thanks for the hot tip, Sue, but why would they say ‘mixed’? It’s not like we’re multicultural, or… are they referring to Shelly’s lesbianism?”

“Your show is on the E! network,” Sue reminded me. “You’re sharing the spotlight with Coco, Ice T, and all the beautiful Kardashians. If that’s not multicultural, I don’t know what is.”

“I would call it more transcontinental,” Hannah weighed in, laughing at her own joke.

“Is it Ice T, or Iced T?” Molly asked.

“You’d have to ask Chelsea. Those are her brothers and sisters,” Sue told Molly. Then Sue grabbed both sides of my face and leaned her face close in to mine. “You’re an international-date-line crosser. Everyone knows you whether they want to or not.”

“I do love crossing date lines,” I pointed out. “You never know what time it’s going to be.”

The notion that someone had to read a bio to know about my disaffection for any room-temperature liquids, my allergy to any wheat-based products, or my lust for ice, vodka, and lemons, was embarrassing. I felt stupid, but not as stupid as I would feel later that night.

Hannah pointed out that I had a huge bug bite on my forehead. “Ugh, I hope that’s not malaria,” she said, pouring herself a glass of champagne and then sauntering over to the front of the main deck overlooking the delta. “This place is magnificent.”

Simone and Shelly both came over to check out my forehead. Once Simone saw Shelly tending to me, she decided to sit down and check out our new vista. Sue had already made herself comfortable.

I went behind the bar and made myself a vodka on the rocks with a splash of bug spray, thinking the bug spray would be more effective if it was ingested into my system rather than being applied topically, and with my amazing luck, might even work retroactively. “Can you guys imagine if we had been alive during Prohibition?”

“We’d all be shot at gunpoint,” Sue replied.

On the leg of this trip, we decided Molly and I would share a room, Hannah and Sue would stay together, and Simone and Shelly would pair up. Rex would crash wherever there was extra room, which was code for with me, while Molly got shafted to a sleeping bag in someone else’s room. She was the youngest, so it was the right thing to do. And this way she wouldn’t fall out of bed again, which she had done several times in the last week.

Camp Vurumba was filled with true Africans. All the women were swathed in boldly printed African sarongs and three-foot-high head wraps. After taking in the scenery, we were prompted by Z to check into our villas, so that we could prepare for an afternoon ride to catch the sunset.

“I’m going to go to the gift shop,” Molly announced with a wink in my direction.

“Rex, do you want to come with me to check out my villa?”

I exaggerated the fact that I couldn’t carry any heavy bags because of my knee, and in his chivalrous way, he jumped to his feet to help me. My room was amazing and had a huge wraparound deck outside with unbelievable views overlooking the delta.

I went into my bathroom, changed my underwear, put the dirty pair into the safe, and locked it. If Rex was staying with me, I didn’t want him to see what I was capable of. Then we sat on the big bed that was facing the delta and opened a bottle of champagne and Rex filled up one of my ice packs for my knee. He told me how nice it was of us to invite him on this trip and that he was so relieved to be able to enjoy a safari without being in charge of one. I had my chest on his head, and we were both facing the water and watching the light, which was borderline hypnotic. It was our first official cuddle.

Neither Rex nor myself made a move. I thought it more practical to wait until that evening, anyway, so as not to cause a kerfuffle in the middle of the day by both of us reappearing for our afternoon ride in various stages of undress.

At least that was the way I saw it in hindsight. In reality, we were interrupted by a knock on the door, and it was Z telling us it was time to go.

We went on a sunset ride through the delta to check out the landscape before dinner. We met Z’s tracker, whose name was Sparks, and we drove for a bit until we stopped the jeep in a pond of lilies. The water was so placid and clear, we could see all the way to the bottom. There were different species of birds doing the same thing we were doing—sitting still and taking in the surroundings. It was a beautiful moment in a beautiful part of the world that took everyone’s breath away, including my own. It was silent for a moment too long, so I decided to ask the question that was on all of our minds.

“Is this where we get raped?”

Rex took this as an opportune time to describe to Z what kind of women he was dealing with and what to be prepared for. Z said he already loved us and that he had dealt with our kind before.

“Well, then, I shall say no more,” Rex told him.

This puzzled me. “Rex, you said you had never met anyone like us.”

“I never have!” he defended himself. “I swear on my mother’s life, I never have.”

“No, no, no,” Z said with a smile. “I speak wrong. My English is not perfect. I have never dealt with this kind of women before, but I like it.”

“Like it or love it?” I asked.

“I love it!” He smiled again. Z’s tracker didn’t speak a word of English but knew when it was time to smile. This was when I tackled both of them in the front seat.

In Botswana we weren’t required to get up until seven a.m., so unlike the previous eight days, we really let it rip that night. Z had a harmonica, and Sparks played what I think was a sitar.

I decided to make my move on Rex. I got up from the table after several cocktails and in the middle of the entertainment, announced I was going to bed. “Rex, let’s go.”

I walked toward my room, and when I didn’t see him following me, I walked back to the fire everyone had moved over to and repeated myself. “Rex, let’s go to bed.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I’m not going to bed with you.”

I hadn’t even contemplated the idea that Rex might not be attracted to me: I was in shock, but I told myself to keep moving. When one of the African female staffers saw me walking, she joined me to escort me over the bridge to my villa.

“Will you be needing anything in your villa?” she asked me.

I looked at her and at the laundry basket on her head. “Do you guys have any thriller porn?”

June 29, Friday

I woke up to Molly staring at me, smiling. “Herro.”

“Herro.” We’ve been saying hello like Asian people since we were very young.

“Do you remember telling Rex last night that you were a gasoline heiress?”

“Why is my hair in a French braid?” I asked her.

“I did that before you made your big exit last night. And that you once taped a bar stool to a paddle board because you were crossing the Nile and didn’t want to overexert yourself?”

My mortification was unparalleled. I’ve had many mornings where I’ve woken up knowing that something had gone terribly wrong the night before, but this was an entirely different level of shame.

“Was it as bad as I think?”

“It was pretty bad. I’ve never seen you like that.”

“Why do you think he rejected me?”

“Does it really matter, Chelsea?” she said, tilting her head to the side.

“Oh god. How am I going to face him?”

“You can face him,” Molly reassured me. “It’s just going to be humiliating.”

“Thank god you’re here, Ricky,” I told Molly. I call her Ricky whenever we’re alone because it’s my safe word, and she knows when I use it, I need her to stick close by.

I got up and walked over to the mirror, where I discovered the mosquito bite on my forehead had tripled in size. “I look like that boy from that Cher movie Mask. What was his name?”

“Rocky Dennis.”

“What am I going to do?”

“Well, you need to apologize.”

“I’m so embarrassed.”

“Chelsea, it’s not like we haven’t all made asses out of ourselves on this trip. Just don’t make a bigger deal about it than it is.”

She was right. There was no point in beating myself up over trying to have sex with a safari guide who rejected me.

I wrapped a bandana around my mosquito bump and we got our things together, then joined the group on the main deck, where we were meeting to be taken to our bush breakfast.

I locked eyes with Shelly, who was still wearing her pajamas that I ordered for her online from the AutoZone.

“Hi!” she bellowed. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Great,” I said, and walked directly over to Rex. “I want to apologize to everyone for my behavior last night, and Rex, to you especially. That was really gross and I’m really sorry. I hope you don’t think that I think that you’re a male hooker.”

“No worries at all,” he told me and patted me on the back like we were soldiers fighting together in Afghanistan.

Everyone else reverted back to their conversations regarding the night before. Apparently, after I had gone to bed, everyone stayed up until 1 a.m. listening to someone play the guitar—a whole night had taken place after my performance, so no one was as concerned with my behavior as I was.

I kept my distance from Rex that morning. Vurumba was a three-day camp, which meant we had two more nights to go, and I didn’t want him to think I was going to act like that again.

We got in the jeep with Z and Sparks. I sat down next to Simone, who was sitting in the first row behind the driver’s seat. She had an ice pack for me and propped my leg on her knee. “Do you need any lip balm?” she asked me.

The morning after Rex rejected me.

Me, confiding about being sexually rejected.

I don’t know what I would do without my sister. She has always made me feel better when I am teetering on the edge. The night before her own wedding she had to calm me down, because I had a meltdown. I was scared that once she got married, she would start having sex, which would lead to her own family, followed shortly thereafter by her desertion of me. She stayed up with me until 2 a.m. convincing me that her marriage was never going to lead to her abandoning me. “I’ll always be your real mother,” she assured me. “It doesn’t matter how many kids I have. You will always be my firstborn.”

Simone wasn’t my mother, but my mother was so lazy, Simone had to step in and do the major disciplining. She knew how retarded my parents were. If “helicopter parenting” is the term to describe parents who are meddlesome and overprotective, “ceiling fan parenting” would be the term to describe mine.

Simone taking custody of me early on.

We arrived at our bush breakfast to find another happy African man smiling from ear to ear.

“Chelsea, Molly, do you want one?”

“No, I think I’m good.”

“No, Chelsea wants one,” Molly corrected me. I did want one, but in my shame spiral I didn’t think I deserved one. Step 1: After apologizing, proceed as usual.

The plan for the day was to eat breakfast, go for a morning ride, and then head back to the lodge. At 3 p.m. we would take a flat-bottom-boat ride through the delta.

After our morning ride, Molly and I went over to Sue and Hannah’s room so I could commiserate with them about being rejected. Sue is always able to see things objectively, and I was desperate for someone other than a family member to shed some light on the subject. Plus, Shelly and Simone’s villa was a long walk across the bridge, and my knee was hurting more than usual.

“Chelsea wants to know why Rex rejected her,” Molly announced when Hannah opened the door.

“How’s it feel, Chels?” Hannah asked. Hannah’s bloviating had dissipated once we got to Botswana, so I was ready to have an honest conversation with her.

“Not great.”

“Yeah, in all the years I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get sexually rejected.” This wasn’t true, but it wasn’t something I was going to contest.

“Thanks, Hannah,” I said sincerely. At least she was backing up my hubris. “I feel like I’ve hit my sexual nadir. What if this is it for me? What if I’ve peaked?”

“Rex got pretty wasted last night after you went to bed,” Molly said. “It wasn’t pretty for him, either. He may not even remember what happened.”

“Oh, he remembers,” Sue confirmed, sitting down on the twin bed across from the one I was sitting on. “I don’t think that’s something any of us will ever forget. Plus, I actually asked him this morning in the gift shop why he did in fact turn you down.”

“And?” I asked.

“He said he’s just not that type of guy,” she said, shrugging. “That he has a girlfriend and that he doesn’t cheat on her.”

“Do you see the irony here, Chels?” Molly pointed out. “The very thing you disdain most in a man is disloyalty, and then someone rejects you out of honor and loyalty, and you’re upset? You would never want to be with a guy that cheats on his girlfriend.”

Molly was right. I hate cheaters; I find infidelity cowardly and selfish, and I wasn’t proud of myself for making a move on someone with a bona fide girlfriend.

“If that’s the real reason, I’m fine with it,” I reassured the girls. “My fear is that it’s because I’ve put on so much weight and that he actually finds me unattractive.”

“Well, that’s a possibility, too,” Sue confirmed. “He actually said Simone was more of his type.”

Molly jumped in. “I knew it! Everyone has a crush on Simone!”

This made no sense at all. “Simone?”

“Oprah or NOprah?” Hannah bellowed, as she walked out of the bathroom she was sharing with Sue. “Can’t you just give your sister this one, Chels? I mean, compare both of your sex lives. Don’t you think you can throw her a bone? I don’t mean to sound like a pastor, but she just got divorced, for Christ’s sake.”

“You’re right. I just don’t want him to think that I think he’s a prostitute. Like I flew him out here to have sex with him.”

“But isn’t that what you did?” Sue asked.

“Well, yes, but he didn’t have sex with me.”

“Well, then I guess he’s not a prostitute. What Rex should really be doing with his life is working in Thailand teaching all those teenage prostitutes that their body is their choice and that the word No is an option to use with their johns.”

“He slept in Shelly and Simone’s room last night,” Hannah revealed.

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“Maybe he thought that’s where he’d be safest,” Sue said.

“Or maybe he wanted to be with Simone!” Hannah squealed.

“Shelly and Simone’s room has a little extra room that you can lock someone in like a caged animal.”

This was news to me. Hannah came over to the twin bed I was sitting on.

“Listen, tootsie roll. I don’t mean to sound like a pimp, but there are a lot of men who would die to sleep with you. Let’s focus on the fact that we are on a trip of a lifetime and you are responsible for bringing us all here.”

“Yeah,” Molly said.

“Yes,” Sue agreed. “If you hadn’t broken up with your fourth boyfriend in two years, we’d all be at a Dodgers game right now.”

I realized my bathos needed to end. It was time to change the subject.

“Don’t think I won’t be purchasing a twin bed for my bedroom in LA. I’ve already looked on Expedia, and there are tons for sale.”

“Do you mean Craigslist?” Molly asked.

“Why would you buy a used bed?” Sue asked.

“I’ve decided to start cutting corners. Gas has gone up, and so has the price of milk. We’re in a fiscal crisis.”

“Well, what happens when you bring a guy home?” Molly asked.

“We will just have to use one of the guest rooms.” I did a full-circle head motion, Queen Latifah style, trying to lighten the mood. “Or perhaps I’ll get two twin beds and we can push them together during our lovemaking.”

“I don’t mean to sound like a clock, but what fucking time is it?” Hannah asked. For once, Hannah was worried about time, and she was right.

“That’s impressive, Hannah,” I told her. “You’ve really stepped up your game since we got here.”

“Thanks, Chels. I’m trying to pull my own weight around here.”

“I can see that,” I reassured her.

“Me too,” Molly agreed.

Molly and I went back to our room and changed out of our sweaty clothes.

We all met in front of the lodge and hopped in the jeep with Z and Sparks. We drove around the reserve and through the delta and ended up at an ancient tree that Z told us was over five thousand years old. Z told us that in Setswana, which is the original language of Botswana, the tree was called the baobab tree, which meant “the tree of life,” and if we all touched the tree at the same time, our lives would be filled with love and happiness and we would be bound together forever. Upon hearing this, Simone opted out of the photo and offered to take it instead. “I don’t know if I want to be bonded with you guys for life.”

I continued to keep a healthy distance from Rex when we got to the boat and chose to sit at the front after I had seen him take a seat in the back. Again, the water was crystal clear. Z told us, “The ecosystem is so clean here you can drink the water,” so we all did. The water was filled with tall grass and lily pads and tons of different flowers.

Sue sighed gleefully, as people who love birds tend to do, and she asked Shelly to point out each species of bird we were seeing. Using a bird book they had bought at the first camp, the two of them had become fanatical about identifying everything they had seen. They reminded me of the couple on their honeymoon at Camp Londolozi who journaled every night. They would be the type of people to become mesmerized by birds, just like the type of people who go snorkeling and then want to sit around all day identifying the marine life they saw.

Speaking of marine life, I once traveled to Buenos Aires with an ex-boyfriend and a gay couple. The four of us spent an entire dinner conversation discussing the extinction of caviar until, in an attempt to end it, I proposed the notion of a marine gynecologist going in and harvesting sturgeon eggs so that the fish wouldn’t have to lose their lives so violently. “There’s no reason marine biology shouldn’t also include marine gynecology. What fish wouldn’t be willing to get into stirrups as an alternative to being killed for its ovarian production?” What I thought was a very astute proposition was met with looks of concern, which as always only made me talk even more to convince them I was actually smarter than I seemed. “Think about it,” I told them with an emphasis on it. “If the world, or rather the sea, was open to this kind of progressive underwater thinking, can you imagine how many fish could be saved from ovarian cancer?”

Back at the lily pond in Botswana, after everyone was done tasting the water we were floating in, I decided to add my two cents.

Hannah and Sparks had developed their own relationship and were at the back of the boat together, when she suggested we all smoke a joint, making it one of the nicest boat rides I’ve ever been on.

After dinner that night, we gathered around the fire and watched all the women who worked at the camp come out in traditional African garb and perform one African dance number after another. It was a beautiful thing to see, and Sue of course was the first one to join them on the sand dance floor. Rex was in bad shape and couldn’t form a sentence. He got up several times only to fall back into the seat he had tried to get up from.

“Maybe now’s the time to make your move, Chels,” Hannah said, observing him.

I asked Molly if I was that bad when I was drunk.

“No,” Molly reassured me. “You can at least walk. You slur and sometimes get cross-eyed, but you get from point A to point B.”

Shelly and Simone ended up carrying Rex back to their room and locking him in the little bedroom that was off theirs. Apparently, he kept trying to escape with loud grunts and banging on the door, but Simone and Shelly decided to leave him in there so he could pass out. That morning when they did open the door he was lying on the floor next to the bed, naked.

June 30, Saturday

This was the condition Rex was in on the morning of our third and final day at Vurumba.

“Rex, do you have diarrhea?” Sue asked him, touching his knee.

“I have some pills for that,” Molly offered. “I can go back to my room and get them.”

“I’ve got a tampon,” Sue offered him.

“Not to sound cocky,” I interjected as I lotioned myself up, “but I firmly believe that if I lived during a time when moisturizer hadn’t been introduced to society, I would invent it.”

“I’m so fat,” Hannah grumbled. “We should see if the next camp offers a juice cleanse.”

Hannah is not fat. In my professional opinion, she borders on malnutrition. It’s annoying to people who are actually struggling with their weight when a skinny girl loses weight on a juice cleanse. I have never once lost a pound on a juice cleanse. In fact, I have done two juice cleanses and both times gained three pounds. Not to sound like a nutritionist, but in my estimation there should be stricter instructions for detoxing. Not eating a half pound of prosciutto and a ball of fresh mozzarella would be helpful information to include in a pamphlet—that is, if these juice biologists are really serious about their clients losing weight.

“I’m not joking about an adult obesity camp. Somewhere with adult dodgeball,” Sue announced.

“Fat camps usually have a lot of fat people, though,” Hannah noted.

“That’s the point, Hannah. Think about how easy it would be to hit a person at a fat camp. We’d be the thinnest ones there, and we’d become dodgeball champions.”

“A fat camp sounds awful,” Molly commented. “I’d rather have high tea and learn a wind instrument.”

We got to our bush breakfast that morning just in time for me to use the restroom.

Our discussion returned to the topic of twin beds.

“Twin beds with mosquito nets. Very lush,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to sleep in a twin. I love twin beds. I always wanted one when I was a child.”

Rex perked up once he was able to get a Bloody Mary into his system.

“I don’t understand this obsession you have with twin beds. Didn’t you have a twin bed growing up?” Molly asked.

“For a bit, but I mostly had a king. I stole my parents’ mattress off their bed frame and switched my twin out.”

“Without the bed frame?” Sue asked.

“I don’t think that’s really the point of this story,” Molly stated.

I answered what I thought was a valid question from Sue. “Yes, without the frame. It was after the third or fourth time my parents forgot to pick me up from Hebrew school. I had had it. It took me almost two hours to walk home, and when I got there, I marched straight upstairs and switched out my mattress with theirs.”

“How old were you?” asked Sue.

“You can be very strong when you’re determined,” I reassured her. “I was nine.”

“And what did your parents do?”

“Nothing,” Simone told them. “Everyone was scared of Chelsea. My mom just started sleeping on the twin, and my dad just slept on the couch. I don’t think anyone even mentioned it.”

“It’s not like it was a total convenience for me,” I added. “The king took up almost my entire bedroom. I couldn’t even open my door all the way before it hit the mattress.”

We went for another ride and saw a bunch of animals that we had already seen before but in another setting, so the morning trip was pleasant. We also saw a lion walking with a dead impala in his mouth, which prompted Shelly to remind Z that we still hadn’t seen a live kill.

“Hopefully, later tonight. It doesn’t look like anything’s happening right now,” Z told us.

“It doesn’t just happen when you want it to,” Rex chimed in.

When we got back to the lodge I got out of the jeep and was walking on the wooden ramp that led to the main deck when I saw it. “Sna-sna-sna-snake!!!” I yelled and ran as fast as I could up the bridge, grabbing Simone along with me to the closest wall. Once there, I smacked her across the face. Then I backed up against the wall and wrapped my arms around her body, pinning it against mine.

Simone is well versed in my histrionics and knows what happens when I see a snake. She barely flinched when I smacked her. Rex was looking at me cross-eyed. “This is coming from the same person who wanted to get stampeded by an elephant a week ago.”

“Sn-a-a-a-a-a-ke!” I yelled at the top of my lungs and lunged onto the ramp that led to the deck of the camp.

“You’re going to have to get rid of the snake,” Simone told everyone who had stopped in their tracks, wondering if I was serious.

“You’re in Africa!” one of the Africans working at the camp said with a big smile on his face. “He’s just a little guy sunbathing!”

“A little guy?” I shouted from behind Simone. “A little guy doesn’t keep moving once their head is chopped off.” Snakes are disgusting, and I wish they would all go die in a snowstorm. “I fucking hate snakes!” I told him.

“You don’t understand,” Simone told him. “She’ll go into anaphylactic shock.”

The man picked the snake up with a stick and threw him into the bushes, which sent me even more into a tizzy. Snakes in any form—big ones, little ones, thick or thin, in the air, on the ground—I don’t know which is worse. They all make me sick to my stomach. I’d sooner go through with a pregnancy than spend a night alone in my house knowing there was a snake in the yard.

Once we recovered from that, we all gathered on the deck for our afternoon cocktails. I went to my room to change, and when I came back I walked into this conversation:

“You have to understand my sister,” Simone said. “She’s the biggest fuckup of the family, but she’s also the most successful. That can be very conflicting, plus, she’s the baby.” This discussion held no interest for me, so I went over to Shelly and told her there was something stuck on the roof of my mouth.

“Well, do you think you burned it?” Shelly asked me. “Or do you think there’s really something stuck?”

“I feel like I there’s something lodged in there.” I opened my mouth so Shelly could give me an oral examination.

“I see it. It looks like you may have poked yourself in the mouth. There’s a little bump inside your mouth and it’s very red.”

“This conversation is riveting,” Hannah proclaimed.

“I think you need to start traveling with a physician,” Sue suggested.

“And a rabbi,” Hannah added.

“Do you think it was one of those pretzels from Camp Dumbo?” I queried.

“That was three days ago,” Hannah said.

“Yeah, but it’s been hurting ever since then.”

“There must be something wrong with those pretzels,” Shelly declared.

“I wish I could go to the bathroom,” I announced. “All I do is pee.”

“Have you thought about an enema?” Rex asked.

“No, because then I would have to get one, too,” Shelly replied.

“A dual enema,” Sue concurred.

“The last time I had an enema, I slept for three days. I was too weak to even report the incident.”

We didn’t end up going on our afternoon ride because we all needed to recover from the snake. I sat in my sister’s arms shivering like the girl in the movie Jaws after she saw the shark. The next morning Simone would be leaving, and the five of us and Rex would move on to Camp Mambo, which was also in Botswana. I needed to get as much snuggle time with her as possible.

Later that night, we all went over to Sue and Hannah’s room to lie on their twin beds before our last meal at Vurumba.

I looked at Sue, who was slathering on what appeared to be sunblock before dinner.

“Is that sunblock?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m putting some on in case I pass out outside tonight. Everyone else has made a mockery of themselves. I don’t see why I can’t take a turn.”

Dinner was pretty mellow, and when Molly and I got back to our room, we lay in bed discussing what an amazing trip we’d had. That was when we heard something outside trudging through water. Molly and I tiptoed over to the window, opened the glass door, and walked on to the deck. There was a hippo less than ten feet in front of us just taking a stroll in the middle of the night. It was amazing. For some reason I was in front of Molly; she was gripping my body and practically choking me.

“Don’t you think you should be in front?” I asked her.

“Probably,” and then we changed positions.

The next morning we had all packed our bags and were having our last breakfast at Camp Vurumba.

“Chels, there is an entire pile of folded clothing on your bed. Did you want me to pack that?” Molly asked, sitting down at the table.

“No. I was just going to leave it for the staff. It’s not like I’m ever going to wear cargo pants again.”

“What makes you think the staff wants your used clothing?” Molly asked me.

“Well, I don’t really know the answer to that, but let me try and think of one. Oh, here’s an idea. Maybe because they’re all walking around with baskets on their heads?”

“Well, we are in Africa,” Sue said.

“This is their lifestyle,” Rex added. “It’s not like they’re walking around in cargo shorts, either.”

“Okay!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry that I’m trying to do something nice for someone. Fine, Molly, we’ll take the clothes. Maybe Chunk will want to wear them. Fuck, can’t I do anything right?”

“Is there anything in the safe?” Molly asked me, going over my checklist.

“Just my underwear, but we should probably leave it here.”

“I’ll get it,” Molly told me. “And throw it in the garbage.”

We all got in our jeep and went to the airport. Shelly informed us that Rex had requested to stay with her at Mombo Camp.

“Of course he did,” Sue replied. “You’ll probably be the one to fuck him. Why have sex with any of the five straight women available when you can have sex with a lesbian?”

At the airport we had to say good-bye to Simone. We were all crying except Rex. He was more confused now than when he had first met us.

“Rex, while I’m gone, please explain to Chelsea one more time about the moon and the sun. She thinks they’re one unit. Bye!!!”

If you look closely, you can see Rex’s reflection in my sunglasses as he took this photo. He can reject me all he wants, but no one takes a picture like this unless he is (a) in love or (b) a really good photographer.

CHAPTER 5

MOMBO CAMP, BOTSWANA

July 1, 2012

On our very last day of safari at Mombo Camp, we finally got to see what we had been waiting for. The weight I had put on had become unmanageable, and I asked our safari guide, Doc, to drop me off at the gym so I could at least get on the bicycle and get my blood flowing. On the way to the gym we bumped into this little asshole.

As we all sat there in shock, Doc stopped the car to take a call on his walkie-talkie telling him that some lions had entered camp.

“Be very quiet, girls,” Doc told us.

“Do you think he just got off the elliptical?” Sue whispered. “Is that why he’s so tired?”

We were all standing up in the jeep taking pictures, Rex included.

“Has this ever happened before?” Rex asked Doc, who confirmed this was indeed a first. There was a little tiny gift shop to the right of the gym, and a woman opened the door quickly to hang a sign that said CLOSED. Then the lion woke up.

If you look closely, you can see the gym equipment in the background. The best excuse ever to blow off working out.

As it turns out, our picture taking wasn’t what woke the lion up. We heard loud squeals and roaring behind us, and when Doc spun the jeep around we saw two lions killing an impala. Before we could blink, eight more showed up, including our friend from the bridge.

Three other safari jeeps pulled up and shut their engines down. Everyone had their cameras out and were taking one shot after another of what none of us could believe we were all witnessing… while I tried to document the scene with my BlackBerry. Then we heard the trumpeting of an elephant and looked in the other direction to see this mama rounding the corner.

The lions started to scatter, and I finally saw what I had been longing to see since arriving in Africa: an elephant charging toward me.

When a few of the lions stuck around to finish off the impala, the elephant picked up speed and was in full stampede, waving its trunk around and knocking down a tree. It was fucking amazing.

This was a spectacular thing to see, and the fact that it happened on our very last day of safari made me feel like something was finally going right in my life. Even Rex’s jaw was on the floor. He told us this was only his third live kill in eight years. We sat there stunned for almost an hour after the elephant had roamed the area making sure she had cleared out all the lions from camp. Elephants truly are the kings of the jungle, and I had never felt closer to Aretha Franklin in my life, and I didn’t want to pay homage to her without paying my respects.

We left later that day. Sue and Hannah were headed back home to LA. Rex was headed to visit his family somewhere in South Africa, and Shelly and I were off to the Bahamas to visit some friends and reacclimate to life above the equator.

The only disappointing thing about Africa was that I did not have sex. I deal with the memory of that rejection every day. Well, every other day.

Respect.

A year later Rex came to Los Angeles and visited us, and this is him signing his rights away for me to use his real name in this book. He and Lilly are still together and very happy. Lilly, I apologize for throwing myself at your boyfriend.

If you’d like to go on an adventure with Rex, this is his business card. Don’t expect penetration.

TRAVEL ETIQUETTE

If you are traveling with a male companion for the first time, always bring your phone to the bathroom. If you go to the bathroom and happen to have an explosion, you can always blame it on a funny ringtone.

When renting a car from a public rental service, do not hit any other cars while still in the rental lot, even if you’re trying to be funny. It’s not worth it.

Listening to NPR does not make you smart. Mentioning that you listen to NPR actually makes you dumber.

When dealing with foreigners, pretend you are Canadian.

When dealing with Canadians, pretend you are Armenian.

When dealing with Armenians, run.

It’s impressive to know the difference between kilometers and miles, or Celsius and Fahrenheit, but it’s not necessary or really even helpful.

If you don’t know how to swim, don’t tell people.

It isn’t acceptable to paddleboard in a hotel pool when other guests are swimming.

Don’t talk to people about camping.

Don’t try to show off when you’re skiing.

Do not take ecstasy on a military transport to Guantanamo Bay, even if you are doing some charity work as part of a USO tour. It’s disrespectful to the troops and to the prisoners.

CHAPTER 6

THE BAHAMAS

I pride myself on having a lot of elderly friends. Two of the main liners who comprise that constituency are a Jewish couple called Shmirving and Shmelly Shmazoff. I became friends with Shmirving, because he found out through one of his subordinates that I was an asshole, and like any older Jew who relishes the abuse of a younger woman with large breasts, he wanted in on the action.

Shmirving is a big figure in the music industry and not a very big figure in person; he was an inch taller than Chuy, but that was prior to Chuy having his legs surgically extended. He is a white, sixty-something Jewish nugget who basically looks like a blond raisin. I’m not sure exactly what he does (I’m not sure exactly of what I even do) but he represents—in some capacity—everyone from the Eagles to Ryan Seacrest to Christina Aguilera.

Shmirving was a board member of Ticketmaster, which runs mostly everything involving live events, including Live Nation, the promoter that handles all of my stand-up tours.

There is a hairy gorilla in charge of the comedy division at Live Nation who goes by the name of Geof Wills. I make it my business to harass Geof on a fairly regular basis, either for having parents who spelled his name the wrong way, or by putting photos of his back on my television show to illustrate the benefits of electrolysis. In Geof ’s case, there were none; his hair grew back thicker and sadder. It’s unfair that men who have the hairiest backs and the weakest bodies have the least amount of hair on their head.

This is the nugget on his private plane inhaling deli meat, forcing his poor little enlarged heart into overdrive.

Why transplanting back hair onto the top of a man’s head isn’t a commonly practiced procedure is mind-boggling. Why pubic hair transplants is not an additional option for those who lose their hair prematurely is even more mind-boggling. I’ve never met a man who didn’t have some pubic hair to spare, and there’s no reason obvious to me as to why it shouldn’t be used on a man’s head to give him back the confidence he lost when his hair fell out.

Geof and I in my office getting ready to put him on the show and reveal to the world that electrolysis doesn’t work for everyone.

Not to sound like a proctologist, but why shouldn’t I take the lead in informing the public about what can be not only an important innovation but a full-blown game changer. The only potential hiccup I can foresee is if one’s hair is straight or blond, forcing one to mix in tufts of dark pubic hair.

So maybe not everyone is a candidate, but redheads certainly are. The idea of a balding redhead finding any other hair match superior to the one surrounding his penis region is not only improbable, it’s unheard of.

Take, for example, a redhead who doesn’t have the typical curly, bright orangey-red hair on his head but the weaker, lighter orange instead, and is considered a redhead only because no one bothered to come up with the term “orange head.” Even the weakest of species deserves an identity. As if orange heads haven’t been through enough, they have to go through life with thinning hair from practically the time they’re born until they’re wiped clean by age thirty. Even these men are candidates because they can still take their curly pubic hair, flat-iron it, and install it into their head. There are keratin straightening procedures and Brazilian straightening procedures that can take down the coarseness and the curl from any pubic hair and make it look like head hair. And if the candidate’s pubic hair grows straight, which is fairly uncommon and also sorrowful, they get the added bonus of saving the money they had set aside for the hair-straightening keratin treatment. Bottom line: this is the kind of thing hair scientists should be exploring, and I’m not going to back down until I see some movement in the pubic community.

I met Geof Wills several years ago on my very first road gig doing stand-up at the Punch Line in San Francisco, where I assured him he’d want to stay in business with me because I saw myself “going places.” He laughed in my face and told me that Pizza Hut had just added wings to their menu and that I should fill out an application with them specifying that I was only qualified to deliver the wings and not the pizza.

Just about ten years later, I was on a sailing yacht I chartered to Croatia with Geof, his wife, and ten of our other friends. We were celebrating the fact that I had actually “gotten somewhere,” and I wanted to celebrate with the people who helped get me there. (Well, one I actually hadn’t ever met before, so she really had no business being on that trip.) I took it upon myself to make a toast in Geof’s honor, retell his heart-warming assessment of my talent, and remind him that with just one phone call, I could get him a job at Pizza Hut, and that wings would be a delicacy for him, considering where his career went.

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 and Shmelly assured him.

“Not at all, but I’ve heard you are PRETT-y outgoing, and I’m PRETT-y outgoing… You’ve got a sense of humor, and I know how to make a woman laugh.”

“I doubt that,” I replied. “Not on purpose, anyway.” I told Sargeant to keep his distance from me, that I wasn’t in the mood, nor would I ever be remotely attracted to him.

Shmirving and Shmelly loved the idea of me being harassed by Sargeant and invited him to dinner that very night along with eighteen of their other closest friends on the island, all of whom arrived in “summer whore,” which is another term I use for “hot pink.”

Sargeant arrived having switched into his dinner wear, which meant changing out of his pastel-blue golf shirt into a pastel-pink golf shirt and keeping on his khaki shorts and leather belt.

He planted himself in the seat next to me. “I have a question for you, Sargeant. Do you golf?”

“I most certainly do, Chelsea. I may even be able to teach you a thing or two on the back nine,” he said and then winked at me.

Lesbian Shelly bore witness to this whole transaction in her never-ending desire to egg things on—I would refer to her as a pusher, or an enabler. She will enable whatever it is you are trying to avoid and wave it around right in front of your face until you take a hit.

“It’s kind of perfect timing if you think about it,” Shelly announced to us both. “Chelsea’s been single for a while, and Sargeant, it seems as if you’ve been single forever.”

Sargeant wasn’t bad-looking, but looks don’t matter when you’re dealing with someone who thinks they’re a mover and a shaker when in fact that person has never moved or shaken.

As I threw back one vodka after another, he regaled me and Lesbian Shelly with tales of his drinking days and claimed that he once knew how to party with the best of them. “I used to pull all-nighters three times a week, minimum. You wouldn’t have even recognized me back then.”

“That’s amazing, Sargeant. You sound so fascinating.”

“But eventually the cat caught up with the canary, and I wanted to live a fuller life.”

“Is that why you’re drinking apple juice?” Lesbian Shelly asked him.

“This is sparkling apple juice, Shelly,” he told her. “I like a little kick.”

“Are you a Republican, Sargeant?” I asked him.

“Well, Chelsea, I wouldn’t use that word, but I am definitely open to tax breaks for the heavily invested.” Then he lowered his head. “Do you mind if I call you Chels?”

“I would mind that very much.”

He threw his head back and chortled. “It’s times like these when I appreciate being sober. I can see the beauty in everything.”

“Well, therein lies your answer,” I declared. “I would never date a sober person. While I have sober friends who are very much fun, I can tell that you are not. You may think you are, but you’re wrong.”

“I love your personality,” he said with a laugh. “You’re a real tough cookie. Everything I heard about you is spot-on.”

“Where did you hear all these things about me?”

“I did my research. You won’t be an easy nut to crack, but every nut is crackable.”

“You sound like you really know your way around the ladies. Do you mind if I call you Sarg?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t mind in the slightest,” he said, holding up his sparkling apple cider to clink glasses with my fourth vodka and Lesbian Shelly’s whiskey.

“You should see her in a bathing suit,” Lesbian Shelly chimed in, raising her glass to meet his and winking at me. “You won’t be able to get enough of her curves. Cheers.”

A bathing suit wasn’t a bad idea to get this character off my tail. In the meantime, I reassured Sargeant that he and I had nothing in common, and even if he fell off the wagon, we never would.

The next morning I found myself wide awake at 6 a.m. I decided to get up and take a good look at my body in the mirror while everyone else in the house was still asleep.

It was a mess. By far the most radical shape I had ever been in. My stomach was in the worst state of its life with no sign of ribs or abs. Pockets of cellulite circled my belly button, looking like a sprinkled doughnut. My injured leg was significantly smaller than my uninjured leg. I liked the size of my smaller leg better, and romanticized about how much smaller I’d be if I had just torn both ACLs at the same time—giving way for my whole body to atrophy.

I needed to get some exercise and get my juices flowing. Early morning was the time of day when a beach is always the most tranquil, and I figured I could have some me time and reflect on what I expected out of life and, more important, what life expected out of me.

I had just read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in Africa, and I thought if a man could survive the Holocaust just by fantasizing about his wife and children being united, I could survive four days in the Bahamas looking like a potbellied pig.

The ACL injury and surgery had done a real number on my self-confidence, my body image, and my lack of being able to participate in any sport except drinking. I was finally at the one-month mark, which, per my doctor, meant I could start incorporating biking, swimming, and/or rhino poaching into my routine.

I decided to take a walk along the beach. The beaches had about as much personality as Sargeant. They were flat and straight; from what I could tell, there weren’t even waves or a tide. The setting was eerily reminiscent of the movie The Truman Show. A man-made island created for wealthy white people in the Bahamas with not a black person in sight. Due to the lack of terrain, I was able to walk about thirty minutes just past the main beach club before my leg started to hurt.

A man was setting out all the beach equipment for the day, and another man was in the water wearing one of those synthetic water shirts worn by men who are ashamed of their bodies. I exchanged a brief hello with both of them, avoiding eye contact at all costs. I walked a little farther down the beach in order to keep from having any further conversation with the man swimming. I do not and have never liked when grown men wear T-shirts in the sea. A perfect candidate for a pubic transplant, I thought.

I got in the water and began my swim back to the house. My Pilates instructor, Andie, who is certifiably bat-shit crazy, told me if I could tread water for at least thirty minutes, I would burn a significant amount of calories and it would be fine on my knee.

I swam for a total of what I would guess to be three minutes and was just passing the beach club when I felt a sharp thunderbolt in my stomach. I thought maybe it was a swimming cramp, but after another painful jolt, I grasped that it was quite different. I needed to go to the bathroom—number two. It’s funny that adults—like babies—don’t always know that sometimes a stomachache means they have to make a deposit.

Interesting twist, I thought. It had been so long since I had gone to the bathroom that I had begun the process of accepting that I might never move my bowels again.

I picked up the pace a little faster in order to get back to the house in time for my explosion. This was a surprise, after all, and not an unwelcome one. I gracefully transitioned from doggy paddling to the fly to a full-on panicked free-style. When the thunderbolts started to become increasingly unbearable, I realized I didn’t have the ten to fifteen minutes it would take me to swim back to the house. Time was not on my side. I knew I couldn’t shadoobie in the ocean—even I wouldn’t do something like that—so I opted to swim to shore, go back to the beach club, and find the bathroom.

I hauled ass as quickly as one with a bum leg can effectively haul ass, and made it halfway up the beach before it became crystal clear that I had about thirty seconds to find a place to squat. Let me declare something: I am not a quitter. I will turn over every stone or grain of sand before I submit to the callings of Mother Nature.

My brain was weighing all options, but the only option that was not an option was shitting my pants while standing up. I found the nearest dune, hobbled over to it, and pulled down my bathing suit bottom just in time for me to detonate.

I could not believe this was happening to me. I felt the blades of grass from the dune gently caressing my backside as I scanned east to west to ensure no one could see what was happening. Meanwhile one fulmination after another ricocheted out of my asshole onto the sand and back onto my calves. “Dear Lord,” I muttered, looking up and trying to find any sign of God.

The man from the water and his onesie had somehow disappeared, either out to sea to continue his life as a male mermaid, or out of the water—but he was gone, and that was the most important thing.

There was a mega yacht parked a few hundred yards out to sea, but I deduced that since I couldn’t see anyone, no one without binoculars could see me. It was too late anyway. What happened had already happened, I had shat myself on a beach—like an animal.

Like any normal lady who hadn’t gone to the bathroom in eight days, I wanted to look at my excrement with pride and assess how much weight I had lost, but I was too appalled by the way the events had transpired. I grabbed a bunch of sand and covered my shame while rivulets of sweat dripped off my forehead. Forgetting that my hands were covered in sand, I swiped the sweat that was dripping down my face, and ended up wiping sand all over my forehead, giving myself an early-morning exfoliation.

I pulled my bikini bottoms up as loosely as possible and awkwardly sauntered back into the water, trying to avoid major contact between my ass and the hammock that was my bathing suit. Once submerged in the sea, I rinsed myself off—first down below, and then my face. Looking back on that moment with more mental acuity now, I realize what I had actually done was dive into my own feces.

“Well, this will make an interesting story,” I said aloud to myself. I remembered a dinner party at Shmelly Shmazoff’s house not long ago where a bunch of famous people went around the table telling their worst shit and diarrhea stories. By the time it came around to me, my friend Shmarlize Shmeron looked at me and said, “Well, Chelsea, we saved the best for last. Let it rip.”

“I know you may all find this hard to believe,” I announced to the table, “but I can honestly say I have never shit my pants. I know you probably think that’s something I would do, but sorry to disappoint. I am not a pig from HELL. I know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but I haven’t done it and I can’t say that I ever will.”

“Oh, come, on!” Shmarlize groaned. “Like any of us believe that.”

“Listen up, girls! I have not shit my pants. I have peed in my pants several times due to excessive laughter, and I have dated several men who have shit their pants in my presence—once even in the bed while we were sleeping, and I’m willing to tell you that story—but I will not make up a ‘shit in my pants’ story in order to make friends with famous people.”

As I swam back to the house, I reflected on the irony of that night and looked forward to the next dinner party where I would be able to add more to the conversation. Then the thunderbolt hit me again; my asshole wasn’t done with me. I had to go again and this time it wasn’t going to be nearly as graceful. I ran out of the water and managed enough wiggle room to make it all the way back to the beach club.

“Hello????” I wailed. “Someone!… Anyone! . . Sargeant!”

There were four small, tented buildings and I hobbled to each one but everything was closed as it was before 7 a.m. Where the hell did that onesie guy go when I needed him?

I had to make another executive decision. The dunes were too far behind me now, and the closest objects were three kayaks and two water tires.

I reached around and felt the back of my bathing suit bottoms, which were rapidly filling up with my own entrails. They had essentially turned into a diaper. Africa was coming out of me, and I could not stop it

“Oh my god. This is the worst. You are the worst,” I told myself as the culprits slid down my good leg.

I headed toward the kayak, leapt in just as my bikini bottoms were about to give, and emptied the rest into the kayak. I had never felt so defeated; I had no choice but to give up and let everything come out that was supposed to. “Good-bye, Africa,” I declared to the sea.

Simultaneously, I spotted the same yacht from a few minutes before, and my anxiety kicked back into full gear. In an effort to deflect attention from what I was actually doing, I picked up the oar that lay next to the kayak, and started rowing—in the sand.