Just Drink the Lion’s Blood Trevor
It started with the trip to the ‘native village’ in Botswana. Of course we went in joking about the old guy telling our future with a handful of chicken bones, pebbles and what looked like a jack from the game I used to play as a kid. But the silence was real. On entering we felt embarrassed to be giggling, disrespectful of an ancient tradition. In the end though, for most of them, all of the others, it was a simple blah blah wealth is coming, blah, blah, she’ll say yes, and so on. His trance seemed fake and he definitely did nothing to cover up the fact that the sound of drums was coming from a tape recorder on his left hand side.
Our arses and legs were hurting and swollen by the time he got to the last person; to me. Westerners used to sitting on soft chairs, not cross legged on a dirt floor, actually a wipe-clean lino floor to comply with the Health and Safety regulations the locals had needed to set themselves up as a tourist attraction. Covered in itchy hay. He just quivered a bit at first, shaking one leg in that really fucking annoying way, especially when it’s a stranger during a film and you want to tap them on the shoulder and ask them to stop but instead you try and inch away and the stranger takes it as a signal they can spread their non-stopping vibrating leg even nearer to you. What is that? Can they really not control it? Then his eyes rolled back and his finger pointed at me.
“You. You can make it happen if you want.” He sounded like an ad for the Lottery, or maybe the Army, or some Tech College exalted by a badly auto-cue-reading graduate saying “my life was going nowhere until I discovered BS Tech and now my life is going somewhere.” But then he got specific. “Natalie’s parents do know about you two and actually do approve, but you need that promotion and you’re not going to get it because everyone thinks Larry is better.” “Oh very funny guys, how much did you pay him.” Various “it wasn’t me’s” and “I don’t even know who Larry is’s” flung back, and I realized it was true. These were my real friends, not the work buddies I put up with as an excuse to drink on a Wednesday, and because they were so close I hadn’t told them about the future proposal or the possible promotion because as every true atheist does I thought it would jinx them happening.
“You are not a lucky man Trevor.” “I don’t believe in luck, I’m an atheist.” “You are stupid then.” “Whoa, well you know, I love a good science versus religion argument so let’s look at the facts before you judge me with your supposed mystical ways of …” “Shut up.” The close friends glared at me in a “not now moron” way. What was he going to do, fucking turn us into frogs or eat us or set the dogs on us? Actually the last shouldn’t have been put in the category of magical realism but actual might happen if I didn’t shut up in the just this fucking once keep your dumb big mouth closed Trevor type way. And maybe the second. Blamed on a crocodile, or do they have alligators here? What is the difference anyway, something to do with snout length isn’t it, like elephants ears? But the first was definitely not a possibility. Shut up Trevor, shut the fuck up inside and outside your brain, listen to the scary voodoo man with his jacks game and last nights dinner bones and ... Shut up!
“You can make it happen if you want to, but you must get the blood of the lion and drink it down in one gulp.” “You are fucking shitting me.” “No. I am not furkeing shirting you,” he said, attempting rather badly to imitate my broad Boston accent, coming out more Texas I thought. “Bye-bye, go now, shou, get out, furke off.” Oh how we laughed the rest of the trip. Pointing out any lion we saw and pretending to go after it so I could sink my teeth into the juicy jugular and take it all down into my throat oh baby that’s the way it should be done. Oh how we laughed.
It ended when I didn’t get the promotion. I lost the girl.