WHEN ASKED why they entered journalism, pretentious reporters will say they did so to expose injustice. But honest ones will admit that half the fun is confirming your own prejudices. One of my deepest-held is that 80 percent of the world, outside these United States, is a dreary, dysfunctional hole. In that spirit, I couldn’t pass up a friend’s recent invitation to observe parliamentary elections in Adjara.
I became an overnight expert on Adjara, picking up indispensable tips such as where it is located on a map (it’s an autonomous region inside Georgia, abutting the Black Sea). The tour books claim Adjara once was a “Soviet playground,” even though “playful Soviets” is an oxymoron on a par with “British delicacy” or “Iraqi hospitality.” My delegation flew to London, where we were met by the plane of Adjaran president Aslan Abashidze, who was kind enough to send his belching YAK 42, complete with gash in the fuselage and crack in the windshield. The pilots showed off modified versions of The Barrel Roll and The Death Spiral, when one wasn’t groping a stewardess who shared his jump seat.
When we landed in the dark on a pothole-filled runway, Abashidze himself was there to greet us. Five-foot-four, and a dead ringer for the actor Richard Harris, he and a fleet of men in black leather jackets holding automatic weapons gave us a warm Adjaran welcome. He’s a friendly sort, but extremely security-conscious, having survived at least 14 assassination attempts, some more credible than others (after suffering a heart attack, he claimed it had been caused by a camera that emitted electromagnetic waves).
We were deposited at our “resort hotel”–a model of post-Soviet architecture and efficiency. What wasn’t peeling, was crumbling. What wasn’t crumbling, was broken. The elevator couldn’t fit both you and your bags. The phone couldn’t make long distance calls, or short distance calls, or even room-to-room. The radiators were just for show, so I slept in a down puffer and a ski hat. The tennis court had no net, the pool table no balls or cues. The “diving center” had no scuba gear, though it did have a live chicken. And the beach was fenced off, which was probably for the best, since a sunbather could get trampled by a grazing cow or, worse, need a tetanus shot from all the waste washing in from the Black Sea.
In the lobby, fierce-looking militia types in black pants, black shirts, and black leather jackets sat on leather furniture, smoking cigarettes and watching Fashion TV. “Wonder what they talk about?” pondered one journalist. “They’re probably giving their friend s– for wearing gray,” said another. As my wingman, Buckley Carlson, scaled the low wall of the closed bar to rescue some Georgian longnecks, the Black Jackets stirred. We promised to pay for them in the morning, but they didn’t seem mollified. So I tried to defuse the situation by offering to arm-wrestle one. He obliged, and quickly drilled my arm into the ball-less pool table on three successive turns. My pride injured, I gave him a hug–a gesture universally understood as “please don’t shoot us in the face.”
The next day in the capital of Batumi, we had our revenge, as a group of us fell into a pick-up basketball game in a tenement slum. In the midst of all the flapping laundry and crumbling concrete, my delegation-mate Elliot Zweig missed a shot from the outside. “Sorry,” he said, “the poverty got in my eyes.” But we dominated the lane, clearing boards and setting bone-crushing picks. Sure, our opposition was a group of 9-year-old kids. But the sooner they learn about American hegemony, the better.
We didn’t do much good in Adjara, but we made memories. There was one where Abashidze took us for a harrowing, white-knuckle ride in his Hummer. He drove, slaloming around potholes while relating how his chief political rival is a bisexual whom he has captured on videotape pleasuring himself while talking to his mistress. Then there was Election Day, when we clocked out early (it was hard to detect fraud since all the ballots were in Cyrillic), and our translator Nadia took us to her home, where all 11 members of her family lived. They fed us plum liqueur and pastries, while showing off their living room poster of Swedish super group ABBA. Her uncle came out with a boombox, and put on Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”
Words cannot convey the sweet sadness of parachuting into people’s lives, having them touch you, then having to leave. Thankfully, ABBA has expressed it better than I ever could, in their song “Another Town, Another Train”: You and I had a groovy time / But I told you somewhere down the line / You would have to find me gone / I just have to move along.
–Matt Labash
