The Book of Drugs

by Mike Doughty

  I told the cab driver that I wanted to hear some more traditional music: he took me to a place called the Concorde Hotel. I walked into the bar—the uniformed security guards saluted me formally—to see a band and dancers, finishing up a tune to much applause.

  I went the bathroom. When I returned, the band was gone, the dancers were gone, R. Kelly’s “Step in the Name of Love” was playing, and the bar was filled with whores.

  One of the whores cornered me on a bar stool and asked me to buy her a drink. Yeah, OK, why not. Mistake. She stood guard over me for the next half hour, giving churlish looks to the other whores, lest they intrude.

  I think I was drugged. I was drinking a bottled water. My heartbeat accelerated; I started to feel shaky. I recognized the feeling: the Donald. The Donald is a feeling you get when you take Ecstasy, when the drug is coming on, but before the euphoric effects : an anxious, panicky feeling.

  Once, at a Dutch festival, a tech named Steak Sauce (an English guy nicknamed for his condiment of choice) had these E’s with imprints of Donald Duck’s face on them. I downed a pill, waited a while, started feeling agitated.

  Swaz called, and I described my state of being. She said, “Is it the Donald?” Yes, the Donald! Describes this feeling exactly. But she just meant Steak Sauce’s E’s with the Donald Ducks on them.

  So I was freaking out. I hadn’t been on any drug for just shy of five years. I almost hired a whore in a Kangol newsboy’s cap to give me a back rub while I waited all night for the E to wear off and I could call somebody from the rooms back home.

  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. In the restaurant, two girls in their late teens sat on the hotel veranda, looking out at the lake. They called me over to sit; we had a stilted conversation about their school and injera. I wondered if they were whores, but they were dressed conservatively, arms and knees covered.

  “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, the disco at the Concorde Hotel. She warmed up, in this unnervingly genuine way, to me. “You want to come to my sister house for coffee ceremony?” No, I said, I have to leave and go to Gondar. She kept talking, and saying nice, mild things, but I was agonizing, ashamed.

  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’s check, I got a bunch of 1-birr notes to give out.

  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 ab
out 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.