The Book of Drugs (27 page)

We ate pizza, then hoagies, then Mexican food. Every indulgent thing we did, we joked, “It's for the war effort!”

I actually
saw
the collapses, for the first time, on a small TV in a gas-station convenience store. Before that, having no idea what it looked like when massive buildings came down—or how long 110 stories actually was, measured in city blocks—I wondered if they'd fallen on my building.

I slept at her place for a few days, then drove back to the city. I was somewhat surprised to find that Avis charged me a penalty for the extra rental time.

Every lamppost, every door, nearly every flat surface, was covered with MISSING flyers: photocopied images of a smiling relative at a BBQ or a graduation. Hundreds of them, rippling in store windows, coming loose from their Scotch tape and floating gently to the street. As if these people had wandered out of the towers just before they'd fallen and were wandering around Manhattan in states of half sleep.

There were papers strewn on my roof, memorandums and printed e-mails and other business-type communications. They had fluttered out of the towers and were collecting on every roof within a half mile.

I knew that the unsingable girl worked serving drinks at a private club down by where the towers were. It was up in an office building, a place for alcoholic day traders who came to drink all day and watch the numbers ticking past on the monitors above the bar. I wondered if she'd been caught up in it. I finished that new chord progression as a song about her. “Call me back when the war is over,” went one line. “Call me back when your boyfriend's gone.”

I went to a meeting. I buttonholed a guy and started to babble the tale of my September 11th, but his face went slack, and it was clear that the notion of hearing yet another's person story made him weary. I met a kid with a pair of drumsticks in his pocket who'd just gotten out of a detox center on Long Island; he caught the last train into Penn Station and was wandering around in that newly clean shaky state, looking for a meeting, when he saw the towers come down. He's still clean.

We, the addicts, were lucky to have the meetings. We had someplace to talk. We had people to be with. We had a tenuous defense
against an overwhelming urge to blot it out—it seemed like everyone in the city was getting wasted. I heard a guy talk about how, upon realizing New York was under attack, he bolted from work, resolving to immediately smoke some crack—if he was going to die, what the hell, right? He'd been clean for years; he had no idea where to cop. He found a homeless dude and offered him $20 if he'd lead him to a spot. The homeless dude talked him out of it.

After a meeting, a friend and I—the friend from the fashion show—bought miniature flags on the street. Conspicuous patriotism was mostly unfamiliar to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We kept holding our flags up to each other and saying “America” in bad redneck accents. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh. Uh-murr-kuh.

 

I did get back to Southeast Asia when I had a year clean. I got to the last page on the travel site and clicked “purchase” instead of “cancel.”

I was alone in Phnom Penh. All I did was go to the riverside, eat Khmer pizza, read, journal, drink coffee. Normalcy was somehow easier, transposed on an exotic city.

I went to an English-speaking meeting in an internet café on a shabby lane. I walked up to a bearded white guy. “Are you a friend of Bill's?” A code for somebody in the rooms.

He looked surprised. “I
am
Bill,” he said.

 

I got on the back of a moto-cab.

“So,” the driver said, “you like
girl?
”

No thanks.

“Ohhhh,” he said, “you like
boy.
”

I'm afraid not.

“You like
dreenk?
”

No.

“You like
smoke opium?
”

No, no.

“You like
shoot gun?
”

I paused.

Yeah! Yeah, I can do that!

He drove me to a place at the city's edge. There were some Brits hanging out, drinking beer and shooting every pistol on offer. For $20, the proprietor handed me an AK-47, and I unloaded the whole clip on an archery target. He tried to show me how to aim, but I was content just to feel the metal shuddering against my shoulder.

 

This was a little after the 2000 election, when the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. He hadn't been inaugurated yet.

The moto driver was gassing up. I bought him a Pepsi.

“So,” he said. “George Bush is president now?”

No, next month, he'll be president.

“My friend say that when George Bush is president, Al Gore leave?”

Yeah, that's right.

“But now he is second?”

He's the vice president.

“Second?”

Yes.

“He is
second,
” said the driver, “and he just
leave?
”

 

I went to Ethiopia in August 2004.

I saw an Olsen twin deplaning as I sat in the departure lounge. She was tiny, and wore chic, frayed clothes, and big sunglasses; she
was flanked by matronly handlers. The airport newsstand was wallpapered with new issues of
In Touch
magazine that happened to have an Olsen twin on the cover, and the headline, “Is She Out Of Control?”

People sat in the lounge reading that issue. I think I was the only one who saw her.

 

Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, is sprawling, dusty, chaotic; there are big neighborhoods of tin and mud shanties next to high-rises ; haughty urbanites in Western suits-and-ties passing guys in shawls, with head wraps and walking staffs. Children yelped
“Faranji! Faranji!”
—Amharic for “foreigner,” actually a mangled version of the word “French”—at me. Donkeys and goats jostled with taxis on the streets; a guy in an Eminem t-shirt herded sheep. Amharic music was everywhere, a warped-sounding, cheesily orchestrated, careening, fascinating sound, in stuttered waltz-time.

There was an Ethiopian Airlines billboard over Meskel Square—a vast intersection of multilane roads, without traffic lights, with minibuses and old Soviet Lada sedans battling for lane changes and turns—that advertised “Stockholm: Savour the Old World Charm.” This, in Ethiopia, where the skeleton of one of the world's most ancient hominids—called Lucy by the anthropologists who dug her up—was found.

I went to a cathedral, where the throne of Haile Selassie was strewn with plastic coffee cups. There was a ferocious hailstorm. The roof sounded like it was being assailed with gunfire.

 

Singing came through a loudspeaker at a church by the hotel all night. Ululating melodies unspooled as I lay trying to sleep. I got out of bed and turned on Ethiopian national television, which was
broadcasting the Brendan Fraser vehicle
Blast from the Past
. It cut inexplicably to Olympic footage for fifteen minutes, then back to where we left off in the Brendan Fraser movie.

In the morning, there were rhythmic chants in the hotel gardens. From my balcony, I saw no less than five wedding parties: brides in Western-style white, bridesmaids in matching pastel prom dresses, relatives singing and chanting, stepping in circles. Pictures were taken: a trio of Japanese tourists with cameras and fanny packs were pulled into a shot by a fountain.

They sang their way to the limousines. The bride got in. The party danced its way around the limousine a few times, circling, switching direction. Then the limo pulled away, to cheers and applause, and the wedding party dispersed to waiting minibuses. Then another minibus would pull in and a new wedding party would disembark.

An Ethiopian guy sidled up. He told me it was the rainy season—the lucky time to get married—and that the wedding parties were chanting, “Teff, teff!”—a grain that's the primary ingredient in
injera,
the spongy-bread staple of the Ethiopian diet.

The guy invited me to a party up the hill from the hotel. We walked to a concrete house, where we sat alone in a room with white couches and a coffee table. A stream of college-age girls filed in, each shaking my hand as they passed. They filled the couches, sitting on the arms of the furniture.

“We will show you traditional Ethiopian dancing.” They turned on a boom box and danced uninspiredly, arrhythmically. They grabbed my arms, trying pull me up to dance with them. Four bottles of honey wine were plopped on the table. “Drink some with us!” I'm sorry, I don't drink alcohol. “There's no alcohol in this!” I sniffed. Lies.

There was a Bob Marley poster. Something about the presence of a Bob Marley poster made me certain I was being scammed. But I wanted to be polite. I ordered a Coke.

A lab-coated waitress brought a bill on a silver plate: 453 Ethiopian birr. That's $50. My overpriced dinner at the hotel cost 50 birr. I stood up, making a show of outrage. I wasn't angry, but I thought it was the only thing that would get me out of there. I pulled a 10-birr note out and threw it on the silver plate. That's for my Coke. I'm leaving.

A stout, older guy with a mean look came in. “Is there a problem here?” The problem is I'm not paying you 453 birr.

“Don't worry, that's Ethiopian, not U.S. dollars!” one of the girls chirped. “Don't worry!”

I strode out. One of the girls followed me, looking genuinely baffled. The lab-coated waitress followed, too, pointing to the figure on the bill and holding up the 10-birr note like she didn't understand.

I realized I'd left my umbrella on the white couch; I turned, probably quite foolishly, and walked back in. One of the girls handed me the umbrella, her left hand supporting her right elbow as she handed it to me—the polite way to hand something to somebody in Ethiopia.

 

(453 birr, $50, I thought, days later. I've spent more money on a shirt I ended up never wearing; what difference would it have made if I had just cheerfully let them bilk me?)

 

An Ethiopian band and dancers played in the hotel restaurant: a drummer, a guy playing a one-stringed fiddle, and two guys playing these lute-looking, guitar-sounding instruments called
krar
s.
The tone of the bass
krar
sounded for all the world like the bass on the Jackson 5's “I Want You Back.”

They were out of tune; after every song there was a long, only partially successful tuning pause. Then they played. Fantastic. Potent, fevered jams, the energy intensifying. They switched between waltz time and four-on-the-floor in the middle of tunes, suddenly switching the beat's accent. The transitions felt like loop-the-loops.

Two white tourists picked tentatively at their
shiro
and
injera;
stoic waitresses in bow ties, with nameplates reading “TRAINEE No. 35” or “TRAINEE No. 8” solemnly took their empty glasses away.

 

I wanted to hear more. I got into a taxi and told the guy I was looking to hear some Ethiopian music; he took me to a dim bar where a guy in a suit crooned into a wireless mic in front of a guy playing a Yamaha keyboard, with drum machine and automated bass line.

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.”