Uganda Be Kidding Me

by Chelsea Handler

  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.