by: Eskedar

All the wooden booths at Bar X (name changed) in Manhattan had carvings cut into them - deep gouges confessing that “so-and-so loves so-and-so,” or “I love so-and-so.” Some screwball philosophy major, obviously a newly converted Deist, had even carved a whole paragraph from A Treatise on Toleration in one particular booth. I got acquainted with Voltaire in Bar X reading those carvings.

Bar X was the typical college watering hole: cheap beer, loud music and intolerably (even by the squalid clientele’s standards) filthy unisex bathrooms. On Saturday nights, a group of Ethiopian students would meet at the “Kasanjis Booth.” Our booth was in the far left corner of Bar X, shielded from the rowdiness of the long bar, and close to where the waiters huddled at 3 a.m. to close out their money and count their tips. Kasanjis Booth was the only one that had padding, electric-green padding that had seen better days.

The tradition of Ethiopian graduate students huddling at Bar X, I believe, started in the 70s when the inimitable Ethiopian student movement was strategizing ways to rule the country. Beer must have been really cheap in those days. Really, really cheap.

One group would graduate and almost naturally another would take its place, bringing with it it’s own baggage and idiosyncrasies. In the late 80s, I was a Kasanjis Boother. I would sweat school all week, but on Saturdays, I would be the first one at KB. For the ten or so of us who would gather to take comfort in each other’s meager sanity, The Booth all at once served as a classroom, confessional, shrink couch, bully pulpit, intellectual dais, and, most of all, a comedy club.

Whoever had money would buy whatever pitcher was on special, and we would sit back and sometimes talk, and sometimes just contemplate silence.

I was initiated into The Booth by a guy I’ll call Tessema, a Columbia U. student who had to drop out because he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He kept writing to the Ethiopian Community dirigit in NY that the FBI and the CIA were after him. His classmates, he told me once, were all wearing hearing devices in their dental work and spying on him.

Tessema could never remember my name. He always called me “you lady” or just “lady.” On occasions, he would just give me a name... Abeba, Aida, Mimi. People would correct him with my name, and almost always he would pull his head back in surprise, look at me intently and then a flash of recognition would thunder his gnarled face. “Of course, of course...” he’d murmur absentmindedly, right before he called me Mimi again.

When Tessema talked, everybody listened - intently. He’d go off on tangents and meanders like every brilliant thinker, but after every Tessema encounter, you would either go away thinking you were the stupidest person in the whole world, or just the luckiest.

At Bar X, Tessema was a popular boothmate, both with the Ethiopian and non-Ethiopian crowd. One moment he was clinking highballs with the business major crowd, and the next, he was fishing out a squeezed lemon from a shot glass with the literary types. But always, he would swim his way through to Kasanjis and squeeze himself in at the table. “Ethiopians! My country people,” he’d announce with animation. “I love my Ethiopia.”

Sometimes, being Ethiopian seemed to be the only thing that held our group together. Intellectually, I always believed that connecting to people via what I thought was a pretty flimsy coincidence (place of origin) was a little superficial. I was, after all, a child of globalized parents. Yes, I happened to be born in Addis, but I wanted to think I could relate equally with my dorm mate from Malawi, my classmate from Hungary, my RA from Mississippi… and so on, and so on…

But there was no denying that I was at my most peaceful at the Kasanjis Booth. All the intellectalization of an expensive education could not elucidate why sitting around a group of virtual strangers made me feel so at home.

And that was why, I suppose, Tessema always found himself back at our booth. For him, it only mattered that we were all Ethiopian, and that, by some code somewhere, was enough. It was, after all, the only constant in all our lives. Despite myself, I liked the identity analogue. So many miles away from home, and so many niches we could fit in (scientists, lawyers, young, old, immigrants, sefers, high schools), the one that was safest for us was that we were all Ethiopians. Intellect and provincialism be damned, we found a little piece of Ethiopia right in the heart of Gotham.

I often contemplate if the booth friendships we forged were genuine. They were certainly unorthodox. Some of us spilled our guts to non-judgmental ears. Some of us guarded our real life with fierce abesha obstinacy. We were on rocky territory: between group therapy and inkia selamta. It was grand in its simplicity, and maybe that was the beauty of the Booth. It never asked more of you than you could give.

Like the generation before us, ours faded and new Boothers followed. There were no formal goodbyes when you left the Booth, as there were no rites to initiate you. People just assumed you went your way, and when and if you ever came back, you needn’t explain. Tessema would disappear for months sometimes. But when he came back with his usual flourish, he would pick up the beat as if he had only taken a minor pause to clear his throat. But he knew he was always welcomed back with the same old enthusiasm and all of us would listen to him intently as he told us of the latest series of tests they were running on him.

“Abeba,” he said to me one night. “You look like you had electricity run through you. Just like me.” He showed us a burnt patch on his forehand and on the inside of his arm. There was pain in his voice that had never been there previously. I cried that night for him. I didn’t know what protocol I would be breaking if I had a heart-to-heart with Tessema, but I knew instinctively not to because there was an imaginary line we all wouldn’t cross with him. A few months later, he disappeared, and this time he never came back.

I graduated and left Manhattan, and eased off into real life. But in every city I traveled, I wondered if there was a booth for ex-boothers. Maybe, in retrospect, Kasanjis boothers did have a temporary and shallow relationship, and the reason we left was because we grew up to seek deeper meanings in relationships with our own selves and others. It might have been a temporary respite, but a much-needed one where we just learnt to accept and tolerate each other. And maybe we were protecting each other from the disappointments we might each deliver eventually. But the lesson in recognizing that at a fundamental level, I am first and foremost Ethiopian is one I learnt from people I never truly knew.

Umpteen and one years later, Bar X still stands, except now, the booths are called banquettes. The frequenters wear bow ties, and the waiters aprons. Now they serve food at Bar X- the “poached salmon” kind of food, and the cheapest beer on tap is $18.50 a pitcher. But the walls still talk at Bar X, and they keep secrets at the same time. I couldn’t help smiling when I walked into Bar X again. Even with all the changes, I smiled because I got comforted by memories.

Tessema, wherever you are, thank you, and I hope you are well. I am sorry I missed your prompting that you needed to talk.