The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [93]
I should have been home yesterday,
Yesterday
Genanew tried to smile as I gazed into his eyes and sang the longing lyrics, but he looked alarmed.
A kid I didn’t know, sitting near me, tapped me on the shoulder. “I HATE MOTHERFUCKING WHITES,” he said. “But, I think I like you.” It sounded like he’d heard somebody say that in a movie.
I got a lift back to the hotel. Everyone in the minivan held hands. Again, I tried hard to be OK with it. I opened the door to get out and received a tender kiss on the neck.
Daniel drove me to the airport. “Coke and wine!” I said. We danced the boxing-cabbage-patch together, me on the curb, he behind the wheel.
I had a day’s stopover in London. I spent $700 there, on a hotel room, two cab rides, food, a day pass on the Tube, a ticket to a Luc Tuymans show at the Tate Modern, and a shirt. I spent about the same amount in almost a month in Ethiopia.
I was in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, the next Christmas Eve. Christmas carols, in English, played over loudspeakers in the tumult of the tight streets around the cathedral. Elegant old men in sunglasses—Asmara teems with them—in natty hats, threadbare suits, fat ties, leaning on canes, hung out on the corners and slouched on bus stop benches. I’d spent most of the last three weeks walking around Asmara, taking pictures of the fountains, the gas stations, and the houses—some curved, austere, Fascistic; some ostentatiously floral—that the Italians built. Excuse me, that the Italians designed, and the Eritreans built.
I hung out watching my friend Menges paint a fat red candle and “Felice Anno Nuovo” on a storefront window; pervasive holiday decorating makes Christmas the busy season for a sign painter in Asmara. I tried to get him to come to a Christmas service at the cathedral with me, but he had to go back to the suburbs, where he lived with his wife and three kids in a one-room concrete house.
I don’t usually do Christmas things, but I was lonely. The cathedral was homely, and filled mostly with Westerners, people from the NGOs and the embassies. A choir of Eritreans sang “Silent Night” torpidly. I left.
It was now dark. I got in a taxi sitting at the curb; the backseat was already occupied by a woman in full Islamic-propriety cover-up : black hijab, black abaya, black veil. I didn’t see her till I sat down. “Yekanyeley,” I said—skittery about offending a Muslim woman—realizing as I said it that it means thank you, not excuse me. I reached for the door handle, but she grabbed my arm. “Wait! Where do you go?”
“Just somewhere I can hear some music.”
“You want to go to Expo?”
I looked at her eyes, the only part of her face visible above the veil. They were copiously mascaraed. She told the cab driver something in Tigrinya, and he started the car.
She pulled the veil off, revealing a pretty smile and orange lipstick. “Where are you from?”
America. New York. Questions about America and New York; was I working at the embassy? No. Are you a peacekeeper? Just a tourist. Do you go to Massawa? Yes, probably, soon. You like music? Yes, I’m a musician. What kind of music? Rock music. Like 50 Cent? Kind of.
She uncovered her hair: cornrows, tinted reddish. She kept asking questions. She pulled off the black robe. Her shoulders were bare; she wore tight charcoal acid-wash jeans. Acknowledging the stunned look on my face, she told a story about a man she said she didn’t know, who had a knife and was inexplicably angry at her. It was confusing, except that, in her shoes, I’d veil my face and cover my body, too.
We reached the club, where we were the only customers. We sat in a sea of café tables and chairs; onstage was a Korg keyboard that nobody was playing, washed in dramatic blue light. A waiter came with a beer; I turned it down. She clung to my arm possessively.
I invented an excuse. She frowned, confounded, as I walked out.
The next week, I was in the dusty town of Keren, north of Asmara. I stayed in a steel cabin built on the top of a concrete-block hotel—the tallest building there, and entirely empty.