Just after 10 p.m. and we're ready for bed. The Gandamack's bar is filling up with expats perspiringly eager to celebrate NYE in one of what I'm told are only two remaining legal-ish bars in Kabul. The thumping music -- think Bow Wow Wow's 'I Want Candy,' Tina Turner's 'What's Love Got to Do With It,' Cuban-flavored rap from Pitbull and wailing Hindi dance numbers -- puts the whole thing over the top for old, tired Americans who've walked their fat arses off all day. And Emily, too.
Plus, there's gin and tonic but no lime, and just when this city had me fooled into thinking it had been civilized.
Superb pizza in the busy but muted hotel restaurant (a change in both characteristics from our first night, in which we were the only family eating to the blasted -- that's a double entendre, folks - stylings of the BeeGees and Geri Halliwell).
The expat-night-out thing reeks of, well, in the term of a once-popular book over here, emergency sex. The laughter's too loud, the drinks seem to take immediate effect, and everyone tries to dance, even when sitting on a barstool. Alas, with fewer social outlets for even fewer westerners (and many of those living in compounds, not out on the economy as Back In The Day), it can only get worse for those still stuck here for work, praying for a US decision not to withdraw in 2014, the talibs' ongoing forbearance, and the government's continued permission to take a dram or two behind high stone walls, barbed wire and AK-toting private security.
Before the bar got too-too, I knocked down a few with Jem Kelly, the Times of London correspondent here and an pal from ISAF days. Asked him an ragged array of jetlagged questions to which he patiently responded, and we batted around the future of Afghanistan in an aura of smoke and conspiracy. God bless 'im -- been here 3,000 days, he noted, and counting. He's a wonderful goddamn storyteller, in print and in person, and here's hoping he winds up somewhere warmer soon with a rapt, tab-covering audience. He dashed off to a prior engagement but urged me: stay sober, write about the New Year's Eve expat scene and its tragic undercurrents.
I stayed as long as I could, mate, but I have limits.
From across the courtyard, through closed door and heavy curtains, I can still hear the thumping bass lines. Good God. I was younger once, and even lived here full-time, but I'd like to think I never had such bad taste in music. (There are those who will disagree, citing my admiration for Wayne Newton's 'Danke Schoen' played at volume in a house in Kart-e Parwan. They are wrong and wrong-headed, and probably working for the Haqqani Network besides.)
Happy 2014. There are signs of hope here among actual Afghans, if by hope you mean an absence of loud, perpetual crying; more on that tomorrow, inshallah.
"Danke Schoen" and Irish lullabies sung very loudly on the streets late at night, when you could have gone for (silver chain-mail) "Bikini Girls in Machine Guns." Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteWrong and wrong-headed. My version of 'Molly Malone' was responsible for more peacekeeping than most Euro military contingents.
ReplyDeleteAlas - or not - all the Chinese joy-houses that once fueled such late-night street crooning have been shut down, per Kelly, thanks to official response to Afghan public opinion: as above, one of the signs of hope, a government that occasionally listens to its people.