Only You

Yesterday, at 10pm, I had an Albanian weapons trafficker serenading me from my parking lot.

Indeed, it is a bit of an odd thing to happen on a Tuesday night in Uganda but, as I have come to realize about my life, if something bizarre is going to occur, it is definitely going to happen to me.

Four years ago, on a bitterly cold and snowy night in Georgia (the country of, not the American state of) I was almost killed in a thirteenth century bathhouse after a night out at the bar with a bunch of Georgian gangsters and their Russian girlfriends. In Georgia, people basically go right from the baby bottle to the vodka bottle and everyone getting drunk and naked together in the bathhouse is a pretty standard Friday night activity. Why I was involved in this whole scene is too complicated to explain here but, suffice it to say, I am extremely familiar with Georgian culture and their, um, cultural relics, by now. However, since almost every male in Georgia over the age of 12 owns a pistol or an AK-47, so carrying guns is about as common there as, say, wearing shoes would be in the U.S. But after drinking copious amounts of vodka and partying in a medieval bathhouse until 5am, guns become rather dangerous things and have a way of being knocked from slippery ledges and going off. Luckily, no one was hurt in that particular incident although some damage was sustained to the beautiful old marble walls, but no one seemed very upset about the whole thing.

Except me, of course, I was beside myself.

So yesterday started off as a relatively normal day and I could never have anticipated how the evening would end...but with me, it's usually like that.

One of my supervisors from DC had been in town for the past week and, although she is normally very easy to deal with, someone switched her "tormentor" button on before she boarded the flight to Uganda. For the past week, I have endured some of the most intense professional scrutiny of my entire existence. This was coupled with fairly liberal doses of personal attacks. She questioned my accounting, she questioned my reports, she questioned my relationship with our clients, she questioned my choice of local staff. She yelled at them, she yelled a me, she yelled at my favorite server at my favorite restaurant. It was relentless. I was so tired and demoralized by Monday night that it might has well have been a Friday after a week from hell. She also managed to upset or insult not only my local Ugandan staff, but also my American lawyer colleague, Liz, who is basically out here working for free to help me on the project.

When my supervisor finally got in the car yesterday afternoon at 4pm to leave for the airport, Liz, and I looked at our watches and said in unison: "I need a drink!"

Although it was certainly much earlier than I prefer to drink, I think if my supervisor hadn't left when she did, Liz and I were going to start pouring gin into our water bottles in order to get through the day. We were both, utterly and completely, undone.

So we rolled into my favorite restaurant at 4:30pm and contemplated the menu. After debating various choices in getting ourselves a glass of wine, we decided to be realistic and just order the bottle. We kidded ourselves that it really wasn't THAT much wine, as our friend Kay was supposed to be joining us later, but, in reality, that bottle was all for us. We definitely needed it.

An hour later, halfway through the bottle, we had started to relax.

"That very well may have been the worst week of my entire life as a lawyer," Liz related, "And I have gone up against some really mean judges."

"She's normally not like that," I said, "She is normally quite nice...I'm not sure what was wrong with her this time..."

Liz, not one to mince words, told me, "Patti, either she needs a man or she needs a sedative. In either case, when she's back out here in January, I plan on arriving with BOTH in the backseat of the car when she arrives at the airport. I simply cannot go through that ever, ever again."

We agreed and finished the bottle of wine. By now it was 6pm.

"Are you feeling it at all?" I asked Liz, referring to the wine.

"Not really, let's get another bottle," she said.

Before I could protest or try to reason why, exactly, that drinking two bottles of wine on a weeknight was probably not the best idea, the waiter zipped off to fetch it for us.

"We have a meeting with a Supreme Court justice at 11am tomorrow, you think we'll be OK?" I asked her.

"Sure, it's only 6pm and we probably won't finish the whole thing anyway," she replied.

Yeah, right.

Two hours later, with half of the second bottle gone, I looked over my shoulder and noticed an extremely large white man sitting behind us staring intently at our table. Since Kampala is small, and all the ex-patriots know each other, I was curious because I had never seen this character before. He had an intense, frightening look about him and, standing at least 6'4" and easily weighing in at 300lbs of pure brawn, I would have remembered.

"That is one scary-looking dude," Liz opined. "He could snap your neck with one hand."

Because we were now staring at him, he mistook our curiosity and, within ten minutes, the waiter brought over yet another bottle of wine, courtesy of Mr. Big and Scary. Both Liz and I immediately refused (two bottles of wine is excessive, THREE bottles of wine is suicidal). He was taking none of it, however, and insisted that we keep the bottle...at least to take it home and drink it tomorrow.

"Now what do we do?" I asked Liz, "I am not in the mood for that sort of male attention at the moment but I am sure he is expecting us to at least invite him to join us."

Liz suggested we just ignore him but, naturally, that didn't work. Within a half hour we had a new drinking buddy.

After exchanging the normal pleasantries, we started talking work. When Liz asked him what he was doing in Kampala, he paused for the slightest moment and then said, "Opening a pizza restaurant. I am also opening one in South Sudan."

At this I burst out laughing. This dude, so beaten up from God-only-knows what kind of physical violence, had definitely not spent any significant amount of time making pizzas...unless he was really, really bad at it and kept burning his face in the oven.

Liz seemed to be buying the story, however, and asked him what other locations he had opened pizzas restaurants in...

He paused again and said, "Well, let's see...Afghanistan, Sudan, northern Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, well, now Uganda..."

Because I was definitely feeling the wine by this point, I had lost any sense of trying to be discrete. This man may have been opening pizza restaurants, but pizzas sure as hell weren't the only thing he was delivering.

"You're Albanian," I said to him.

He looked surprised.

"How the hell did you guess that?" he asked.

I related that I had spent a good deal of time in Kosovo and had been to Albania itself a few times and definitely knew the accent. I also knew, from time spent in those two countries and in other less-than-savory points around the globe, that Albanians did tend to run very successful "pizza restaurants."

He looked a little nervous but then settled himself back down. When he got up to go to the bathroom, Liz said,

"Why are you laughing at his story? Why is the pizza business so funny?"

"Liz, he is not a pizza maker, he is an weapons trafficker," I told her.

"No! That can't be true....and how would you know..." then she paused.

"Nevermind," she said, "given your former line of work and the places you have been, you're probably right."

Larry the Albanian returned and sized me up.

"So you know a lot about the pizza business, then? You have been to some of these Albanian pizza restaurants?" he asked with twinkle in his eye.

Liz, who is actually a practical person and not insane like I am, said, "It was nice to meet you, Larry, but it is getting late and we have to go."

At which point she stood up and walked into the wall.

I told her I would take care of the bill and, since the restaurant is right across the street from my flat, I could just walk home but that we should definitely get her a taxi.

"Are you nuts?! I am not leaving you alone here with an Albanian arms trafficker!! You could be....well, shit, I don't know...shot or something," she said.

I assured her that I was going to be just fine and put her in a taxi.

When I returned to the table, Larry was looking thoughtful.

"What did you say to her that made her leave so quickly? Did you tell her about the Albanian pizza making business?" he asked.

"Sort of," I said.

He laughed.

"I like you, Patricia, I like women who are experienced in well, what shall we call this? Setting up enterprises in difficult places...you must have many contacts" he said.

All of a sudden I got the distinct impression that he thought I was either involved in such an "enterprise" myself or at least knew a lot of people who were.

"Look, Larry, I am really just working for an NGO here and serving as a legal advisor to the government. I only know certain things because I have traveled a lot in my life..."

("And have spent too much time dining with war criminals in the Balkans and drinking vodka with gangsters in Georgia to know your type" I thought, but left that whole part out).

He smiled again.

"OK, whatever you say, Patricia. I do like talking to you though...and you are quite beautiful so that makes it even better..." he said.

Oh, shit.

I quickly put my hands under the table and switched the ring I normally wear on the middle finger of my right hand to the fourth finger, the wedding ring finger, on my left.

"Thank you Larry, that's very sweet. But I am married," I told him.

"You just did that under the table, I already looked so don't pretend now. I would like to get to know you better...shall we get a hotel?" he asked.

This was so blunt that I started to laugh again.

I told him that although he was a nice man and I wished him well with his, er, pizza business, I was leaving as it had gotten late and I needed to work early the next day.

He clamped his enormous paw of a hand over mine on the table, pinning me to the spot.

"Please, Patricia, I really do like you. You are very intelligent for a woman and I have lots of money and could treat you very well. Men like me need women like you...women who know the ways of the world, who aren't afraid to confront the dark side sometimes, who realizes that sometimes illegal solutions are the only ones in times of war and conflict, who..."

As I sat there listening to this, I thought, "Hmmm...where have a heard this whole line before? Oh, that's right...it was from a gangster in Georgia four years ago before I almost got hit by a stray bullet in a bathhouse in the middle of the night..."

I interrupted him.

"Larry, again, thank you. But I really am just a legal advisor and I really do need to be going now," I said.

Larry clearly wasn't accustomed to rejection.

As I walked out of the restaurant, he followed me, imploring me to reconsider, telling me I didn't know what, exactly, I was giving up.

I crossed the street to my apartment building quickly with him in staggering along behind me. At one point, he just missed getting run over by a car.

"Jesus, Larry! You're too drunk to be walking around like this, you're going to get killed! You don't want to die getting run over by a motorcycle after your other ventures where you certainly be killed much more easily!" I said.

Nevertheless, he didn't stop.

I walked up the three flights of stairs to my flat while he was trying to negotiate the first and shut the door to my apartment.

I called Liz immediately to report that I was home and safe.

"Thank God, I thought you were going to be kidnapped and mailed back to Albania in a pizza delivery box..." she said, "And, by the way, what is that awful noise in the background?"

I listened carefully to what I thought was a radio from a car downstairs and realized it wasn't a recording...it was live.

"Oh Jesus, that is Larry...he is singing to me in Albanian from the parking lot," I said "And he has no shirt on...he has taken off his shirt..." I said, looking out my window.

"Only you, Patti, only you," Liz sighed. "I used to think, when we first started hanging out, that some of the stories I had heard about you and your past adventures from other people couldn't possibly be true...but, in the past five months, I have realized that they most certainly must be. In all my thirty years and in all my own fifty countries traveled, I have never, EVER, been serenaded by a half-naked Albanian arms dealer in my parking lot...NEVER."

"I don't ask for this shit, Liz, I told him that I wasn't interested and I know I wasn't flirting with him...I don't know how this happened," I said.

At this point, Larry had decided to kick it up another notch and add my name to whatever Albanian love song he was singing, thereby ensuring that all of my neighbors would know exactly who the recipient of this late-night insanity was...

"Well, whatever the case may be, I hope you get some sleep tonight...he will get tired eventually," Liz said.

It was my turn to sigh.

Having spent a lot of time with Albanians (and Eastern European men, in general), I know they do not give up easily. Larry was no exception.

Finally, about two hours later, one of my neighbors decided to call the police and put an end to the torture the entire building was experiencing.

I was mortified...in this community, word travels fast and I knew by morning that everyone in Kampala's small ex-patriot population would have heard of this.

Indeed, when I got to the office this afternoon after my morning meetings, I stared down all of the white folks who work in the building who started giggling when they saw me and said, "Don't say a word, not a goddamn WORD!!"

My American friend, Jessica, who works in the office next door, came in and sat down.

"Jess, please, I have a pounding headache and I can do without the teasing," I said wearily.

"Oh I am not here to tease you, I am here to commiserate. Remember, I lived in Albania and Kosovo for three years and I know how those men are...but I actually found it flattering...you should look at it that way," she related.

Somehow, I just don't.

And to think...it's only Wednesday.