The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [92]
A pack of girls surrounded me, singing a traditional song, then devolved into a chant, in English: “GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY! GIVE ME MONEY!”
Dozens of women in white dresses surrounded a church; they were walking up and kissing its doorway.
An old man approached me; he wore a woozily chromatic checkered shirt with a butterfly collar. “Give me 1 birr,” he said.
You’re going to give me 1 birr? I said. Wow! That’s great! Thank you! Give me 1 birr!
An old woman behind him got the joke and cracked up. He persisted.
“I want a drink,” he said. “Give me 1 birr.”
Wow, that’s so nice of you, I said. 1 birr for me?
The old woman guffawed.
I sat down beside the Queen of Sheba’s reservoir. A group of teenage boys surrounded me. I was suspicious and grumpy, and I didn’t want to be nagged for more dough; they asked me questions and I grunted monosyllables.
But they really just wanted to talk. I felt ashamed.
They were draped all over each other, hugging, holding hands. We talked about their school, the English soccer team Arsenal, 50 Cent, New York, playing music for a living, the difference between Tigrinyan culture and Amharic culture.
“I like George Bush,” one said. I assumed he was misguidedly trying to be nice. I don’t like George Bush, I told him.
“I also like George Bush,” said another boy. “He is tough on terrorists.”
I went back to Bahir Dar. I met a guy named Genanew, who gave up a job as a high school history teacher for a more profitable career as a tourists’ guide.
He asked me about “the sisterly buildings.” The sisterly buildings ? Oh. He meant the World Trade Center.
I asked him about the war with Eritrea. “Eritrea think you can make a country with blood and iron,” Genanew says, “but Ethiopia know you can make a country only with loving.”
I met an Ethiopian guy staying at the Ghion named Hunachew, a man in his sixties who lived in Sweden for years. He moved back to Ethiopia because of an old injury that flared up in the Scandinavian cold. He was living a rich man’s life—for Ethiopia—on his Swedish pension. He told me about the time he saw Jimi Hendrix play, in Malmö. I met his wife—his third; two Swedes divorced him—a young woman with traditional Ethiopian cross tattoos on her cheek and forehead. He talked about Aretha Franklin, the certainty of life on other planets, cyclical famine, his job as a clerk in the Physics Department of a Swedish university.
“My life today is nothing but reading, smoking, having coffee,” he said. There was a paperback in front of him; an Amharic translation of Chekhov’s short stories. Fat Amharic letters outlined a cartoon dandy with an undulating mustache and a pocket watch. “I’ve read them in Swedish and English already.”
I went back to the Azmari bar with the guys I knew. There were two beautiful African American girls who had just come to Bahir Dar to teach English. They were from Brooklyn; they wore groovy-Brooklynite-asymmetrical-sexy clothes and hairstyles. Lul and Genanew were transfixed by them.
Lul held my hand. I tried to be OK with it. I failed. I reached across the table, feigning the need to pickup a glass.
We went to a bar crowded entirely with men, except one tetchy woman who came in to bus the bar and then disappeared again. Daniel the driver ordered a wine—it came in a beer bottle—and a Coke. He mixed them in a glass, laughing at my expression of alarm.
I imitated Daniel Coke-and-Wine’s boxing-cabbage-patch dance. Everybody laughed. I pointed to Daniel, saying, “Coke and wine!” and then the two of us would do the boxing-cabbage-patch together.
Being the rich man, I bought the drinks. Everybody got shit-faced except me and Genanew. The dancing got wilder. Lul twirled and reeled. A robust and tacky European disco version of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” came on. The packed bar exploded.
I turned to Genanew and sang the bridge:
I hear her voice, in the morning hour, she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home, far away,
Driving down the road I get a