The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [87]
This was a little after the 2000 election, when the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. He hadn’t been inaugurated yet.
The moto driver was gassing up. I bought him a Pepsi.
“So,” he said. “George Bush is president now?”
No, next month, he’ll be president.
“My friend say that when George Bush is president, Al Gore leave?”
Yeah, that’s right.
“But now he is second?”
He’s the vice president.
“Second?”
Yes.
“He is second,” said the driver, “and he just leave?”
I went to Ethiopia in August 2004.
I saw an Olsen twin deplaning as I sat in the departure lounge. She was tiny, and wore chic, frayed clothes, and big sunglasses; she was flanked by matronly handlers. The airport newsstand was wallpapered with new issues of In Touch magazine that happened to have an Olsen twin on the cover, and the headline, “Is She Out Of Control?”
People sat in the lounge reading that issue. I think I was the only one who saw her.
Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is sprawling, dusty, chaotic; there are big neighborhoods of tin and mud shanties next to high-rises ; haughty urbanites in Western suits-and-ties passing guys in shawls, with head wraps and walking staffs. Children yelped “Faranji! Faranji!”—Amharic for “foreigner,” actually a mangled version of the word “French”—at me. Donkeys and goats jostled with taxis on the streets; a guy in an Eminem t-shirt herded sheep. Amharic music was everywhere, a warped-sounding, cheesily orchestrated, careening, fascinating sound, in stuttered waltz-time.
There was an Ethiopian Airlines billboard over Meskel Square—a vast intersection of multilane roads, without traffic lights, with minibuses and old Soviet Lada sedans battling for lane changes and turns—that advertised “Stockholm: Savour the Old World Charm.” This, in Ethiopia, where the skeleton of one of the world’s most ancient hominids—called Lucy by the anthropologists who dug her up—was found.
I went to a cathedral, where the throne of Haile Selassie was strewn with plastic coffee cups. There was a ferocious hailstorm. The roof sounded like it was being assailed with gunfire.
Singing came through a loudspeaker at a church by the hotel all night. Ululating melodies unspooled as I lay trying to sleep. I got out of bed and turned on Ethiopian national television, which was broadcasting the Brendan Fraser vehicle Blast from the Past. It cut inexplicably to Olympic footage for fifteen minutes, then back to where we left off in the Brendan Fraser movie.
In the morning, there were rhythmic chants in the hotel gardens. From my balcony, I saw no less than five wedding parties: brides in Western-style white, bridesmaids in matching pastel prom dresses, relatives singing and chanting, stepping in circles. Pictures were taken: a trio of Japanese tourists with cameras and fanny packs were pulled into a shot by a fountain.
They sang their way to the limousines. The bride got in. The party danced its way around the limousine a few times, circling, switching direction. Then the limo pulled away, to cheers and applause, and the wedding party dispersed to waiting minibuses. Then another minibus would pull in and a new wedding party would disembark.
An Ethiopian guy sidled up. He told me it was the rainy season—the lucky time to get married—and that the wedding parties were chanting, “Teff, teff!”—a grain that’s the primary ingredient in injera, the spongy-bread staple of the Ethiopian diet.
The guy invited me to a party up the hill from the hotel. We walked to a concrete house, where we sat alone in a room with white couches and a coffee table. A stream of college-age girls filed in, each shaking my hand as they passed. They filled the couches, sitting on the arms of the furniture.
“We will show you traditional Ethiopian dancing.” They turned on a boom box and danced uninspiredly, arrhythmically. They grabbed my arms, trying