The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [90]
“Mike, when do you sleep?” one asked.
Lul, waiting tables that night, came by. “Mike! Are you fine?”
We walked through the puddled streets of the town, Amharic pop blasting from the doors of the bars, to a place called the John Bar. A sardonic guy named Mulgeta and a minibus driver named Daniel were dancing. Daniel was a very sweet maniac. He had a dance move something like a boxer’s version of the cabbage patch. He kept reaching out to me, dancing with me, shaking my hand, grabbing my arms.
In Ethiopia, you see male friends walking down the street, hand in hand, or draped around each other like only lovers do in the West.
Lul asked me if I played guitar for a living. Yes.
“Mike!” he said. “You are a great man!”
A chubby whore in tight white jeans and white jean jacket vied for my attention. She was grotesquely alluring: big-faced, her eyes circled too many times with dark makeup. She had long blonde extensions tied up on top of her head, sort of a superheroine’s hairdo. The low-cut jeans and high-cut jacket exposed an appealing muffin top of hip flesh. I was transfixed.
I looked at her, and she raised her eyes, smiling and touching her mouth to signal that she wanted to me to buy her a drink. My heart beat faster. She motioned for me to come over, but I jerked my head away, talking to the guys from the Ghion. I was ashamed to want a whore in the first place, but moreover, ashamed to want this quasi-ugly whore. I headed to the bathroom; she followed, and cornered me. “What your name?”
Mike, I said.
“I, Hannah.” she said, offering a very formal handshake.
It’s nice to meet you, Hannah, I said, shaking her hand, but I have to go.
She seemed at a loss. “You want short?” she asked.
Back at the Ghion, I got in bed, lowering the mosquito netting around the mattress. There was a knock. In my boxer shorts, I opened the door to find one of the girls from the veranda.
“Do you sleep now?”
A plain implication.
Yes.
“Give me 20 birr for a taxi?” she said.
Sorry, baby, I can’t do that, I said, Sinatra-circa-1962 suave. I gave her a peck on the cheek and shut the door.
I went back to the John Bar the next night. It was just me, my Ghion friends, the bartender, and Hannah there.
“Do you want to dance?” one of the guys said. “Dance with this one, she is known for dancing.” He nodded to Hannah.
So I danced with her. Standing right in front of the couch on which my three friends awkwardly sat. She wasn’t a great dancer, but she was sexy, and I was looking at her ass and into her huge made-up eyes. My heart galloped.
The sound system played 50 Cent’s “In Da Club,” the bass fuzzing in the bad woofer. Its most outstanding lyric: “Come give me a hug if you’re into getting rubbed.”
I took her back to the Ghion.
I asked if I could kiss her. I always thought the whores’ code forbade kissing. She seemed perplexed that I would feel the need to ask.
I kissed her; she was missing a stretch of teeth on one side. Somehow this made her sexier to me. I took out my iPod and my headphones and dialed up “In Da Club,” and turned up the volume loud enough that we could sort of hear the tinny buzz of the track.
We danced. I took off her clothes. I danced behind her, holding her hips. I leaned her towards the bed. My hand was on her pussy. “What do you want?” she said, mildly. Just to dance, I said, I just want to dance.
My cock got hard against her ass, and I rubbed it against her as she was dancing, and eventually I was sort of grasping at her back muscles, looking at her glossy flesh, and I slowed down because I didn’t want to come so fast. I kissed her back and ran my hands down her sides. Then I came on her back.
We lay down. She was talkative, smiling. I asked her about where she was from—Addis—what she did there—she worked at, as it happened,