The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [89]
It turned out I wasn’t on E. I don’t know what it was. Maybe something derived from chat, the local leaf that’s chewed for speed-like effects.
I flew from Addis to Bahir Dar. My taxi passed an Ethiopian cinema with slap-dash signs, hand painted on a mud wall, for BRITNEY SPEARS CROSSROADS and ROB SCHNEIDER THE HOT CHICK.
I stayed at the Ghion Hotel, on the shores of Lake Tana. I took a three-hour boat ride to the middle of the lake to see a monastery. Two men, in papyrus canoes, paddled slowly towards us. They were repeating something indistinctly, smiling.
They came closer. They were saying, “Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.”
In the monastery were paintings of Saints Gabriel and Mikael with Afros, lifting swords, and images of the damned, blue-skinned, swimming in the fires of Hell.
There was an old guy in robes, with a rifle that seemed to be vintage ’40s, leaning on a pillar. He said: “I am the guard. Give me money.” I gave him a few notes. He said again: “I am the guard. Give me money. I am the guard. Give me money.”
That night, I pulled a chair down to the lakefront and played guitar to the darkness. Suddenly I was surrounded by excited waiters in green coats. Immediately, everybody wanted to be friends with the weird guitar-playing white guy.
One guy, maybe eighteen, sang me, with his voice breaking and faltering, a gruesomely sappy song he wrote for an unrecip-rocating girl. “Mike, I love her! Tell me what do I do?”
Later, I stood outside the gate of the Ghion, looking down the empty streets. One of the waiters, a guy named Lul, came out, on his way home. “Mike, what are you doing? Do you not enjoy? Come with me!”
He took me through the streets of Bahir Dar to a club where an Azmari was playing. An Azmari is a guy who sings and plays a masinko, the one-stringed fiddle, improvising verses about the patrons hanging out drinking. It sounded like an Islamic James Brown playing square dance music. Everyone in the place was laughing.
Lul kept asking me, “Mike! Are you fine?” Yes, Lul, doing great.
A few more minutes. “Mike! Are you fine?”
The Azmari came over and asked Lul something.
“Mike,” Lul said.
The Azmari sang, “Blah blah blah Amharic blah Mike! Amharic blah blah Mike blah!”
The audience roared.
“Blah Amharic Mike blah Amharic blah!”
The audience roared again.
Lul, what’s he saying?
“He is saying words of praise for you,” Lul said.
I went to buy Ethiopian music with another guy, Sirage, from the Ghion. The shopkeeper would disappear into the back, bring out a few pirated CDs, and I’d listen to them on cheap headphones. A bunch of Ethiopian guys crowded around me, amused and perplexed by the white guy buying an insane number of Amharic CDs. They murmured every time I rejected something.
I bought an armload. “Sure, if nine is good, ten is better,” said Sirage, bewildered.
A copy of Jeff Buckley’s Grace sat on a shelf behind the counter. Obviously pirated: a photocopied cover. I told Sirage, That’s my friend. I explained how he drowned. Sirage bought the CD.
Sirage brought me back to his house for coffee and showed the CD to a neighbor. He told her a long story in Amharic, clearly the tale of Jeff’s death, as she clucked, dismayed.
“She says she is sorry about your friend,” Sirage said.
The next morning at breakfast Charlie Rich was playing.
Do you like this? I asked Sirage.
“Oh, I like country music for all my life,” he said.
A black-and-yellow bird hopped on the table between my coffee cup and my eggs, hopped tentatively towards the sugar bowl, and, upon finding I wasn’t a threat, dipped its beak in, snapped it back, munched the sugar furiously, then dipped its beak in again. I tore off toast fragments and put them on the edge of the table. Instantly, a tumult of twenty birds fluttered down onto the table, battling savagely.
That night it rained.