I stood 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.
Although still unsure if these people were actually cavemen, the guy made me think of the psycho ex boyfriend of a teenage Flintstones character, so I made the assumption. Inside the blue box or not, I knew these couldn't be funhouse robots. I mean, c'mon, caveman sex in a theme park?
Scientifically, I know dinosaurs didn't exist in the same layer of rock that man did, but heck, `Cave plus man.' I don't know, it happened.
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 argued.
All this time, I thought the giant man to be her boyfriend, but then the awkward body language conveyed a different story, more like, "No, daddy, don't hurt him, he's my boyfriend."
I guess the big man tried to convince her I was wrong for her. Although he probably had something there, Eve thought me the world's greatest gift to women.
The male took her aside in sort of a concerned fatherly manner, massive arm wrapped around her shoulder. The two muttered 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. He patted her on the back, then the guy towered over me again.
Out of his mouth came this unbelievable spew of gibberish like I've never heard before, then he hugged me and pounded 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 felt relieved when he let go.
Embarrassed at my nudity, I snatched up a skin I and Eev 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' had something better for herself 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.
Once more or less dressed (and I use the term loosely), the big man led us down a narrow tunnel, through a cavern, and up a rough hewn stairwell.
The stairway went on for some time in the dark. I frowned, pondering my situation, and what I had just done.
Obviously, I had traveled in time somehow. The question was, 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 could only hope I'd somehow been transported to the Amazon, and there just happened to be giant carnivorous lizards there.
Before this, I didn't believe in time travel, and now I really didn't want to.
A few kilometers later, the cave opened up on a plain, rows of square grass huts with thatched roofs standing along the boulders, 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, made spears and dug holes, women busily revolutionizing the fashion industry with their pitiful sewing.
Others ran around naked, or wore nasty looking vine g-strings. If I had been wearing pants or underwear, I would have stared indiscriminately at these people, remarking at their simple barbarism, but I myself stood around half naked, and had just deflowered someone's daughter.
We passed a miniature Stonehenge. I felt all the tribespeople's eyes on me, their faces showing a whole range of emotions. To some I must have appeared the devil incarnate, for they stared 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, correctly assumed I was just an odd looking stranger from a different tribe: The Tribe of Dumbass.
After meeting a few of their stares, I got embarrassed, trying not to make eye contact again.
How did I get here? I again wondered. Did I really travel through time, or had I stepped into one of those `center of the earth' stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne?...Or did I make an unscheduled detour into Jurassic Park? If the latter, where was the ice cream?
Did someone put me in a helicopter and drop me in the Amazon when I was unconscious? What about those green things? Had they really been dinosaurs? 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? 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 was she just weird...and kinky?
As I pondered these and a few other baffling mysteries, we got ushered into a large hut decorated from top to bottom with animal bones and arcane symbols.
We stood before some shaman-esque person behind a sweltering fire pit, cow skull for a hat, feathers, and a bone necklace.
Not the friendliest person in the world. His eyes got real big beneath his primitive grease paint when he saw me, but put on a show of being Oz the All Knowing.
After blowing smoke everywhere with a stone pipe, he spit and bled on a hammered copper plate, hung it over the fire and thew bones on it, pretending to read them. A very serious discussion with Eve's dad followed.
He blew an...animal horn, and we got led within the miniature Stonehenge, watching people lighting up a huge bonfire.
A huge crowd gathered around us, the bonfire swelling to the size of the one at Texas A&M that killed all those people.
I really didn't want to look back at the staring savages, certain they were all family members and friends of the woman. I knew I had to care about a whole lot of people I really didn't want to know.
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 it felt like one of those naked in public dreams.
The shaman threw chicken blood on everyone, including us, blabbering about something and singing like a Navajo.
Judging by the amount of times the girl squeezed my hand, and the way everything centered on us, I figured it had to be a wedding. Since I'd presumably stolen this woman's virginity (if she had someone before, she wasn't telling) I decided to be responsible and go through with it.
If I knew what would happen next, though, I would have ran away the moment I entered the village.
The guy had stuck a mystical stick, laden with smooth stones, into the fire. When he pulled it out, it glowed like a torch, and he carried the damn thing right up to my bare chest.
I tried to escape, but Eve's dad grabbed my neck, and the scalding thing scorched me right in the pec. I screamed like a girl, and everyone laughed at me.
And I thought coughing up a grand for a diamond was torture! I'd take that over scarification any day.
Eve got the marking too, but she barely made a sound at all.
As my scar burned itself cool, I found myself 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 forced wretched tasting liquids down our throats, slapping us on our feathered backs as they mouthed congratulations in their ridiculous language.
A feast 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.
I would have been fine with the merriment, the feast and the one sided conversations, and would have been content to take my new bride to the honeymoon hut, but at the precise moment I picked up my second horn of demon brew, the blue box suddenly popped into existence behind the shaman's hut with a loud grinding sound, scattering the crowd like a pissed off witch in Munchkinland.
My first thought: Wow, I didn't know the thing could do that.
As everyone around me trembled, cast the evil eye, or bowed before the box, a steady stream of olive colored saw toothed reptiles poured out its open doors.