“These? We’re gathering insects for the bug-eating challenge this afternoon.”
I shuddered. “Bug-eating? Really?”
“Yup. It’s one of our favourite contestant challenges. Unless team members eat a plate of live bugs, they don’t get to read letters from their loved ones back home—or some other prize equally stupid.”
I looked into the PA’s face, hard and sunburned, scoured clean by a lifetime of putting out. I figured this one’s done list must have been at least ten thousand blokes long.
Fiona cut into my reverie. “Raymond, stop ogling her tits and come along.”
I suddenly felt, of all things, married.
We entered one of the trailers and found a production team seated on stools staring at a wall covered with screens displaying multiple camera feeds. I felt like I was in a home away from home. Then I heard some familiar voices: “Ray! Welcome to paradise!”
It was Tony and Eli, two cameramen I’d last seen in Damascus when we set fire to cars because we were on deadline and badly needed footage.
“Tony! Eli! I hope you brought the petrol!”
“Ray! You’re just in time. It’s bug-eating day!” Eli exclaimed. He and Tony were delighted to see me.
“So I hear.”
Fiona seemed furious that I had actual acquaintances on set. Through the simmering mirage-like heat waves rising from her inflamed body, I could tell she was planning some sort of accidental-seeming death for both Tony and Eli. Poor fellows.
I said, “Tell me more about bug-eating day.”
Christmas morning glee shone from their eyes. Eli, the older one, filled me in. “Everyone on staff goes out with buckets and bottles and collects as many terrifying insects as they can. Anything will do: grubs, spiders, millipedes, mostly anything you find beneath a stump.”
Tony took it from there. “Stumps are actually the best place to find things, Ray. Things with five hundred legs, six eyes …” He picked up a blue plastic tub. “Think about it. If you saw a prawn walking across your living room floor, you’d shoot it with a handgun, but find one in a Pacific net? Bon appétit.” He removed the blue lid from the tub to show me a hairy black spider the size of a Sunday roast. “Look at the hair on this fucker.”
I cooed my approval.
“Not much protein in hair, though. Hair is a bran-like fibre. But in the legs and thoraxes of spiders lie pockets of protein not unlike those found in lobster claws. If this thing lived in the ocean, we’d be making chowder from it in ten minutes. People are dietary hypocrites. Land equals evil. Sea equals good.”
“Beats what you find in a Honolulu vending machine. Any of these things toxic?”
“Oh, probably,” Tony said. “We lost our entomology textbook in transit, and the Internet’s down, so we can’t look them up.”
“Do contestants eat them whole or smoothied?”
“Depends. We start out with live bugs, but if everyone balks, we smoothie a few handfuls and throw some live ones on top as a garnish. Whoever eats the least amount of bugs is kicked off the show and loses their chance to earn a million bucks.”
I was greatly impressed. “Pure genius.”
“Come along then, you two—we’re just about to leave for the big event.”
I could tell this suggestion came at the wrong moment for whatever Fiona had on her agenda for me. But watching a group of brain-dead Americans eating bird-sized insects trumped any plot against me she might have had in the works.
“Sure, let’s all go,” she said. “And Raymond, afterwards you and I can talk. I miss having someone intelligent to banter with.”
Moi?
Intelligent?
Here’s the thing about Fiona: when she’s nice to you, everyone else on earth vanishes and you feel like you’re melting under a beam of sweetness that erases your memory of, say, the time she used your Visa and PIN number to buy two dozen dildos and had them delivered to a daycare centre in your name.
In any event, earlier, while Fi was temporarily distracted searching for some clothes to put on after her massage, I did notice a plastic bag containing my Cure T-shirt peeking out from beneath a stack of modelling headshots in her tent. I pinched it and reached outside and slid it beneath the tent’s front corner. Tonight I planned to return and reclaim my treasure.
Raymond Gunt: 1; The Gods: 0
Florida Man Collapses and Dies After Winning a Friday Night “Midnight Madness” Insect-Eating Competition
October 12, 2012
Floridian Edward Archbold, 32, died after consuming 60 grams of meal worms, thirty-five 3-inch-long “super worms” and a bucket of 1-inch-long South American cockroaches in an effort to win a “Midnight Madness” insect-eating contest held at Ben Siegel Reptiles, 40 miles north of Miami in Deerfield Beach.