Addis by night

So I’ve been living for a week now in the heart of Addis’s red light district.  Once the sun goes down, every other building reveals itself to be a bar, pumping out music at mind-erasing volume.  These are mostly old Italian wrecks, their crumbling plaster painted bright colors and their rusting ironwork swagged with half-expired strings of Christmas lights.  Their doorways reveal little about the dark drinking caves inside.  Inbetween their thirty-cent beers, revelers return to the streets for crackling ears of corn, roasted in tiny clay braziers and in wok-like metal bowls, prepared by the same poor women who spend their days serving taxi men tea out of thermoses.

“Red light district” seems sort of exciting and daring, until you see the bird-girls hanging around the front of these dives, too tight clothes and too-young faces.  Then it’s just sad and intractable.  I walk fast through here at night; the only women out aren’t exactly up to any good.

Mostly, the midst of this night carnival, I’ve been a hermit, laid flat by jetlag by eight or nine every night, strangely soothed to sleep by the jazz club blaring nearly under my window.

Last night though, I decided it was time to see a bit of things.

At 10:30 I wrapped up “work” (really just making my fourth or fifth panicked list of all the stories I want to do here and freaking out at the reality that fewer than half of them are really possible, not to mention salable) and took off my headphones to realize that the same 1960s Ethio-jazz I’d been listening to on my computer was now bouncing its way up from down below.  I couldn’t resist (check out that link and listen to some; you wouldn’t have been able to either.)

The club, reportedly the best jazz spot in Addis, was packed.  A mix of sleek, upper-class Ethiopians out for a night on the town, grubby backpackers from the hotel, and Western ex-pats, falling somewhere between the two on the fashion scale.  A beer cost as much as some lunches I’ve had here, although still less than a dollar.

After a few minutes, the young man at the mic wrapped up his Amharic stylings, the horns set themselves down for a moment and a cute young woman came out to perform old school American funk hits.  It because rapidly apparent that what I had assumed was an introduction to the evolving world of Ethiopian jazz … was actually just a fairly talented Wednesday night cover band going through their Golden Oldies routine.

Stayed for one more Amharic jazz set and left after the woman returned for round of Tracy Chapman hits.

Left, in fact, because, A., the unfailingly cool son of some Ethiopian family friends, was DJing reggae night at a club across town and had promised to help me meet some rastas for a story if I came.

Getting there was an adventure of its own — it started out with haggling over the price of a cab with a man whose entire job is to negotiate in his passable English with hotel guests, continued in the front seat of a taxi as the negotiator helped push it to a start, and proceeded in a screwball drive at midnight across half of Addis.  My driver kept up a steady pilgrimage into the baggie of dried tchat leaves in his lap and his Soviet-era taxi handled like it was suspended on rubberbands.  It probably would have had more pick-up if he’d just operated it Flintstones style.  When we arrived at the club, he managed to hit a puddle and spray god-only-knows-what on a man in an expensive-for-Addis-looking suit.  I barely had time to pay before my driver made his getaway.

Club Jubilee was decorated in a style I think of as ‘Tacky Arabia’ — lots of pastel shades, rotund shapes, and a vibe of harem-light (usually there’s a fair amount of gold-colored chrome too, but this was a toned-down version.)  The crowd, young clubbers all dressed up, dredy kids ruling the scene, and smattering of white girls who looked to be either young aid workers or the aimless children of diplomats, filled the air with gaggingly sweet smoke from shared waterpipes and downed thimble-sized shots of vodka.  My favorite part of the decor were the barstools — the seats shaped like bottletops with the Castel Beer logo plastered on them.  I ordered my second St Georges of the night, a very nondescript Ethiopian ‘light lager’ as my beer snob friend calls such things when he’s trying to be nice about it, and waited fora set break.

DJ A. rocked the crowd while his lyricist for the night dredged up memories of Britain’s rude boys, mixed with the generic pacing of today’s hiphop.  Good enough stuff to bounce up and down to while trying not to look too out of place, and so bounce up and down I did, feeling thankful that I’m almost old enough, at 33, not to care when I’m alone in a club surrounded by happy groups much better dressed and much better dancers than myself.

By the time A. was done, I was feeling sick from the smoke and sour from the beer and didn’t have it in me to stay too much longer.  Despite a room crowded with dreadlocks, the connection A’d promised to introduce me to hadn’t showed.  I got a number of a guy who might be helpful and a few minutes chat with the club owner about what it’s like to come back from the US with an engineering degree and open a club in Addis (mainly it seems to involve literally building things yourself).   Then it was back in another of Addis’ inevitable blue-and-white taxis (this time the driver was tchat-less, but had to hand his unlabeled bottle to the negotiator before starting the car) for another Mr-Toad’s-wild-ride across the capitol’s almost deserted streets, wondering at how far a person can come in a week from sober DC professionalism to sitting tipsy and apple-tobacco-reeking in the back of an Ethiopian cab.

I find sometimes it’s a bit hard to remember that just living, microphone off, does not actually count as productive work while I’m here.  Every time I open my eyes it feels like material of some sort…

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