Don't Just Stand There, Buster, Move

I picked the book up off my face, realizing I must have fallen asleep around 9pm, and decided I probably wasn’t going out. Maybe one beer, and only if somebody calls me with a plan. It’s Halloween, after all, the king of Holidays, I should say I tried.

The party was across the river, at Jamie’s house, a bumbly man in his mid-thirties that works in some capacity for the US government. When I met him, it occurred to me that he looked exactly like Tony Hale, the man who rose to fame as Buster in the famous video series “Luchas des Hermanos”, whose meteoric success spawned a short-lived spinoff, Arrested Development. Jamie is the kind of guy who tries to make up for his inherent awkwardness by pouring out Patron Reposado and inviting you into his “hizzy”, beckoning with his big red Hulk-hand. Unbeknownst to him, the Universe had spent thirty years dressing him as Buster Bluth, and the only thing he can think to wear as a costume is a fake hand. Thanks, Universe.

About half the partygoers were in costume, from Greek goddesses to Malian taxis. I opted to be a bottle of the locally ubiquitous “Flag” beer, which drawing the logo on a towel and wrapping it around myself, and bundling up a t-shirt on my head in an attempt at a bottlecap that looked more like a chef’s turban. The party, full of various young USAID workers, Peace Corps volunteers and their government ilk, was a sleeve of red cups away from a down-home frat party. The afterparty, however, was another animal entirely.

Mali is a sober Muslim country, where long pants are all but mandatory for men, and women's skirts must always be below the knee. Exposed shoulders are risqué. As we entered the “Ibiza” nightclub, I half-expected to be met with a low-key cigar and guitar lounge, I immediately discovered a few things about Mali:

1. Malians don’t celebrate Halloween.

2. Boobies!

3. Malians Party Extremely Hard

There are still rules, of course. Traditional garb is frowned upon. Gucci and Diesel are ok, Ed Hardy stays outside. Ladies may draw on the exposed part of their breasts, but it can only be in UV ink, only to be seen under the blacklight. Men may only poke the cleavage-glyphs once, and only after the woman points them out to him. Glitter is still too slutty.

I wandered through a sea of skimpy dresses, lasers, smoke, and stripper poles, assuming the looks from various hotties were alluring looks of desire, rather than incredulous gawking at a a man that appears to be wearing not one, but two towels in a nightclub, until I found a very small group of similarly ridiculous-looking people. Jamie/Buster had since changed out of his costume into something that included a panama hat and matching pants that he insisted was not a Halloween getup. His dancing was a bit off-kilter, in my mind I chalked this up to his being asymmetrical or physically imbalanced. The five or ten costumed toubabu, in the middle of a sea of about two hundred locals, attempted to dance to the phenomenal mix of Afro-hop and American (and Canadian – Drake was a big hit) music, having a ball. The club was also outfitted with a few large TVs that played low-res music videos, but not videos that were at all connected to the song being played at the time. So I was often in a position when my eyes said “X-tina Aguilera” and my ears said “Sean-a-Paul”( my heart, as always, said “Ja Rule”). To make matters worse, the songs were often remixed with a complicated polyrhythmic West African drum track, with a three-count and two-count and a few other rhythms folded over each other, so you could conceivably dance to three or four different simultaneous rhythms, each of which was equally correct. The locals did not find this problematic, but the foreign spaz dressed as a beer had problems.

An ill-fated attempt at a bottlecap 

A man I vaguely recognized from the Jamie's party grabbed me and brought me and a few costumed revelers up the stairs and right into the VIP section. I eventually found out that many of the “miscellaneous US government workers”, Jamie included, were not actually with the Peace Corps, but with various War Corps, mostly the Army. This was awesome because:

- They’re highly paid. To the American taxpayers reading this, thank you for the Johnny Walker. How did you know I prefer Black Label?

- It turns out that real-life Buster Bluth is actually, in real life, in Army.

- The VIP gets visitors. These included a group of very popular Malian rappers, a large cohort of gorgeous women, and the DJ. 


An explanatory note on Mali’s rich musical tradition is helpful here. For hundreds or even thousands of years, jeli, also known as griots, were the professional musicians as well as historians of the Sahel. They would pass down stories through the generations – family histories, tales of intrigue and fame, lyric African equivalents of Homeric epics. Accompanied by the Kora, a wonderful plucky instrument that bears resemblance to the bowl-harp ancestors of the guitar, they were the keepers of culture. This musically saturated culture has spawned some truly great musicians – Ali Farka Touré is a legend. His son, Vieux Farka Touré, shreds blues guitar with a bit of a Stevie Ray Vaughn kick. There is also the incomparable Kora work of Toumani Diabeté, and the semi-Western folk of Amadou and Mariam (If you think you like Manu Chao, what you actually like is Amadou and Mariam). Exemplary by any other standard but here relegated to the middle of the top ten, Habib Koite and Selif Keita are phenomenal. I would strongly advise looking up any and all of these. That musical verve continues to this day, and it was present on Halloween, embodied by that modern-day jeli, the club DJ/MC. He came and visited us in the VIP area, at first as more of a hypeman, getting people to dance to the frenetic drum track. He was, in short, a crazy motherfucker, his tiger-stripe hairdye and general outfit not too far from Chris Tucker's poofy-haired diva MC in the Fifth Element.

After enough hype had been built, he began to freestyle sing, in perfect pitch an a wild, adventurous melody, a few verses in French and Bambara about some of the people in the VIP booth. Something about Big Zouma, the giant, as well as Zach the kid in the banana costume. He thoroughly rocked, and after each verse he was presented with a crisp 10 000 CFA (22 dollar) bill. He made 200 bucks in 20 minutes. And they say Africa lacks entrepreneurs.

At 3am, somebody found out that it was possible – and then decided that it was advisable - to buy as much Chivas Regal as possible. The bottle that arrived was comically large, a Stanley Cup of whiskey, at least a gallon. It came in its own pouring contraption, which itself was something like a half of a birdcage on a swivel that would allow a drunk person to maneuver half a metric ton of liquor. I suspect that’s the kind of bottle you lease, rather than buy, that you can leave in a cubby behind the bar and come back to periodically over the course of several months of heavy revelry.

As I walked home at 4:30 am down the familiar dusty moonscape of a road that brings me home, away from the disco balls and back in the land of goats and bats with two-foot wingspans, I was thrilled that this is a Muslim country. I shuddered at the memory of partying in New York until 5am on a Sunday Morning last summer, hauling my haggard self onto the hour-long subway ride up to 125th street, exiting the station to in the full judgment of daylight and rounding the corner to come face to face with a well-dressed family on their way to church. I was left to assume they felt obligated to say a brief prayer for the disheveled, wayward soul enslaved by earthly vice, and that prayer is not a burden I wish to put on any respectable family in Bamako this morning, so it was a relief that Sunday is not a day of worship, and at least one indignity would be spared.

This was a pretty spectacular Halloween. Perhaps not up to par with last year, when 7 of us dressed as 6 characters from Sesame Street (Snuffie, of course, was a two-person operation, outstandingly executed), but still wildly entertaining. But this was only a holiday for about a tenth of the people in that club, and only half of that number cared to dress up. For the rest, it was just a regular old Saturday. And then realized I owe an apology. I recently disparaged a good friend’s business instinct, saying that contrary to his suggestion, Malian society is too reserved for something so hedonistic as FourLoko, that caffeinated 11% ABV shitshow in a can, to be marketable. I have been wrong about many things in my life, but never, ever, ever so egregiously. I apologize to you sir, and I hope that you find great success selling a caffienated version of your eponymous lemony drink.