So there I was, standing on my tiptoes, naked, as some hairy caveman guy clenched my hair in his fist and yelled complete gibberish in my face with his stinky caveman breath.
I didn't know if these people were actually cavemen, since I still wasn't one hundred percent certain where I was, but the guy made me think of the psycho ex boyfriend of a teenaged Flintstones character, so I assumed he was a caveman. Whether or not I was still inside the blue box, this was no funhouse robot, and neither was the woman I probably shouldn't have slept with.
I know my science, so I know that dinosaurs don't exist in the same layer of rock that man did, but this man was by definition a man in a cave.
Anyways, back to the hair pulling. For roughly five minutes, this guy did nothing but growl and blurt nonsense syllables, coating my face with spittle, and I didn't know whether to smile, nod or fart. I put on my most apologetic face, nearly peeing myself.
The man gave up, hurling me against the cave wall.
After he'd punched and backhanded me a couple times, the woman stepped in the way, and the two started arguing.
All this time, I thought the giant man was her boyfriend, but as I read the awkward body language, it became clear their argument was more along the lines of "No, daddy, don't hurt him, he's my boyfriend."
The big man was trying to convince her that I was wrong for her, and he was probably right. She, on the other hand, seemed to think I was the world's greatest gift to women.
He took her aside in sort of a concerned fatherly manner, massive arm wrapped around her shoulder, and I heard the two muttering to each other, the father sort of resignedly giving her up to her wild notions (whatever they were), the girl thanking him for being so understanding, and then he slaps her naked butt and I see the guy towering over me again.
Out of his mouth comes this unbelievable spew of gibberish like I've never heard before, and then he's hugging me and pounding me on the back, practically crushing my rib cage in the process.
I flashed him a grin, but he seemed shocked at my semi flawless dental hygiene, so I quickly closed my mouth again. I was relieved when he let go.
Embarrassed at my nudity, I snatched up one of the skins I had sex upon and wrapped it around myself like a towel. A big fat hairy towel that refused to stay put. I kept one hand ever poised in the event of it falling off. My woman (I guess I can call her that because I slept with her) had something better laying on a rock shelf, another one of those stitched together rags like the one I'd been sticking my hands beneath. She didn't have a spare for me, but she did oblige me with a piece of bone to hold my "towel" together. Sadly, it still tended to creep down my narrow body.
The moment we were dressed (and I use the term loosely), the big man was leading us down a narrow tunnel, through a cavern, and up a rough hewn stairwell set in the rock.
Since the stairway went on for some time in the dark, I began pondering my situation, and what I had just done.
If the blue phone booth had actually sent me back in time, and I had just slept with a real cavewoman, whose family tree did I mess up? My own? Am I really my own grandpa? Or did I ensure that myself, The Queen, and Henry Ford all had the same bloodline? I didn't have an answer for that. I was still hoping against hope that I'd somehow been transported to the Amazon, and there just happened to be giant carnivorous lizards there.
A few kilometers later, the cave opened up, and I began to see rows of green cubes along the boulders, grass huts with thatched roofs, with half naked people going about their ordinary stone age business like I'd seen in National Geographic illustrations.
They cured and cooked stuff over fires, they made spears and dug holes, and the women were busy revolutionizing the fashion industry with their pitiful sewing.
Unsurprisingly, the children ran around naked, or wore nasty looking vine g-strings like some of the adults. If I had been wearing pants or underwear, I would have stared indiscriminately at these people, remarking how barbaric and simple they all were (not to mention unlawful!), but I myself was half naked, and had just deflowered someone's daughter, so I was the furthest thing from a detached observer.
I felt all their eyes on me as I passed, and in their faces I detected a whole range of emotions. To some I must have appeared the devil incarnate, for they stared at me with looks of fear and dread, attempting to wave the white demon away with the sign of the evil eye.
Others seemed to be awed by the pale white god, and had to be dissuaded from throwing themselves at my feet with their faces to the ground.
The smarter, calmer ones, I hoped, were correctly assuming I was just an odd looking stranger from a different tribe.
After meeting a few of their stares, I got embarrassed and stared at the ground and my girlfriend's derriere instead.
How did I get here? I again wondered. What was that blue shed thing I walked into? Am I still in the blue...whatever? Did someone put me in a helicopter and drop me in the Amazon when I was unconscious? And what were those green things? Were they really dinosaurs? And why didn't my girlfriend wear a vine g-string? What does that say about her as a woman? What did she see in me? Was she really that desperate? Was she damaged goods? And isn't it supposed to be the caveman that knocks the cavewoman out and drags her by the hair to the sleeping quarters? Did anthropologists have it wrong, or is she just weird?
None of these things had an answer, and I was turning over a few more baffling mysteries when we arrived at a large hut decorated from top to bottom with animal bones and arcane symbols.
A moment later, we were inside, standing in front of some shaman-esque person behind a sweltering fire pit. The guy had on a cow skull for a hat, feathers, and a bone necklace.
He wasn't the friendliest person in the world. His eyes got real big in his primitive grease paint when he saw me, but then he put on a show of being Oz the All Knowing.
After blowing smoke everywhere with a stone pipe, he spit, pissed, and bled on a hammered copper plate, then hung it over the fire and thew bones on it, pretending to read them. He then had a very serious discussion with Eve's dad.
A moment later, he was blowing a...animal horn, and we were standing out back in sort of a miniature Stonehenge, watching people lighting up a huge bonfire.
A huge crowd soon gathered around us, and the bonfire rivaled that of the one at Texas A&M that killed all those people.
I really didn't want to look back at the staring savages. I was pretty sure they were all family members and friends of the woman. As my mind processed that, I suddenly realized I had to care about a whole lot of people I really didn't want to know.
I focused my eyes on the circle of huts surrounding the fire pit.
Suddenly someone pulled off my bear skin and threw a feathered cape around my shoulders, doing the same for my partner. Eve squeezed my hand, but I felt like I was in one of those naked in public dreams.
Following this, the shaman threw chicken blood on everyone, including us, and he started blabbering about something and singing like a plains Indian.
Judging by the amount of times the girl squeezed my hand, and the way everything seemed to be centering on us, I could tell it had something to do with marriage. Since I had presumably stolen this woman's virginity (if she had someone before me, she wasn't telling) I was okay with it. Time traveler or not, I wasn't going to leave the mother of my illegitimate child to fend for herself in a shoddy dirt pile.
That being said, if I knew what came next, I would have ran away the moment I entered the village.
The guy had a mystical stick with smooth stones lashed to it, and this stick was in the fire. When he pulled it out, it looked like a torch, and he was carrying it right up to my naked chest.
I tried to escape, but Eve's dad grabbed my neck, and the scalding thing scorched me right above the nipple. I screamed like a girl, and everyone laughed at me. Then Eve got the marking.
And I thought coughing up a grand for a diamond was torture! I'd take that over scarification any day.
When I had calmed down and let the initiation scar burn itself cool, I noticed I was surrounded by quite a few married people. Before, it just seemed like a lot of tribal scarring, but now it made perfect sense.
After the traditional kiss, people were forcing wretched tasting liquids down our throats and slapping us on our feathered backs as they mouthed congratulations in their ridiculous language.
A feast then commenced, in which I ate quantities of undercooked bloody birds, one of which suspiciously resembled dodo, some gritty bread with teeth shattering chaff still in it, and corn. Lots and lots of corn.
I'm pretty sure maize and dodo birds didn't exist in the same region, but I figured Indians and cavemen could make boats.
The merriment, the feast and the one sided conversations were all very well and good, and I would have been content to take my new bride to the honeymoon hut, but at the precise moment I had picked up my second horn of demon brew, I heard this loud grinding sound and the blue box suddenly popped into existence behind the shaman's hut, scattering the crowd like a pissed off witch in Munchkinland.
My first thought was, wow, I didn't know it could do that.
As everyone around me trembled, cast the evil eye, or bowed before the thing, I suddenly became aware of two things: One, the doors were wide open, and two, a steady stream of olive colored saw toothed reptiles was pouring out.