The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [91]
I told her I needed to sleep. She got up and dressed. How much do I pay you? She said, very casually, “What you think.” This is a ploy to make a tourist overpay. I gave her an excessive roll of Ethiopian birr anyway.
At the door she looked at me sadly. “You don’t like me,” she said. “But I like you.”
In Gondar, I splurged, and stayed at the Goha, the most expensive hotel in town: $37 a night. On a porch overlooking the town, two girls in t-shirts shivered in the mountain air. They pestered me with questions about my girlfriend—“Can we see her picture?”—and Dallas. Dallas? One of them had a relative there. She said she fantasized about winning the American embassy’s visa lottery, so she could go live in Dallas. I told them that Dallas is the plastic-surgery capital of America. They didn’t understand.
There was the sound of Amharic pop music in the distance, and dogs. Dozens of dogs, barking in the dusk.
A guide took me around the sights: the castles built by King Fasil-das, and a pool built by a king who converted to Catholicism, to baptize his people en masse. We stopped at the Falasha village: the Falashas are the Ethiopian Jews, who were airlifted to Israel in 1991. “There is nothing to see here,” said the guide. He motioned to my Lonely Planet. “We only come here because it’s in the book.”
I flew to Lalibela. At the luggage carousel an Ethiopian guy wore a t-shirt saying GEISHA PERFUMED FAMILY JELLY.
The town was ancient; half the houses in the town were tukuls, cylindrical thatch-roofed huts. Robed farmers who had walked miles from the countryside to get to the weekly market sold bricks of salt, red honey glopped in clay jars, and the teff grain in numerous grades: brown, red, beige, the lighter-colored grain being more expensive.
A guy named Abaye took me to the rock-hewn churches. “The book says it took 40,000 people to build these, but it’s not so,” he said, in the same tone he used for dates, heights, widths, the symbolism of the number of points on the crosses. “These churches were built by angels.”
A priest sat in each church: each blessed Abaye with a golden cross, touching his head with each point. Abaye kissed it, then pointed to it, and said, “This cross was made in the fourteenth century.”
The churches are set in trenches lined with cubbyholes that were once the graves of aristocrats. Monks sit in the empty cubbyholes now, reading, praying, contemplating. One asked me to change US$1 into birr; he was tipped that by a tourist who took his picture. Children were begging. “1 birr,” each said.
“Not 2 birr,” said Abaye. “10 birr no good. Only 1 birr.”
I gave out a lot of 1-birr notes. An eyeless man came up. “Hello. I am blind,” he said. I was out of the notes. He kept staggering towards me. Terrifying. “Hello. I am blind. Hello. I am blind. Hello. I am blind.”
At a restaurant, a kid named Andalam came and sat with me. He pulled out a sheaf of foreign notes—Eritrean, Kenyan, Ugandan. He said there was a foreign-currency-collecting contest at his school. “I need US$10 and $20 to win,” he said, quite sweetly. Nice try.
I give him $1. “Who is this?” he asked. George Washington. “Father of George Bush?” he asks.
He asked me about 50 Cent. “Black American English is difficult for us to understand,” Andalam said. “He sings, ‘Gasharby, eezabirfay.’ What does it mean?”
What?
“‘Gasharby, eezabirfay.’”
Oh, ‘Go shorty, it’s your birthday.’
At the airport in Axum, all the clocks were stopped at 4:41. Not just one or two clocks, but ten, fifteen, throughout the terminal. I arrived in Axum on a holiday: packs of preteen girls, in traditional Tigrinya white dresses, prettied up with hair braided and hands dyed red, took to the streets, not letting any man pass until he gave them a pittance. When I went to the bank to cash a traveler