Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (7 page)

The capitalism I’d encountered on Wall Street was, said its proponents, all about freedom. Albania has lots of freedom. Everyone admires freedom. And, indeed, one of the best places in the world from which to admire freedom of every kind is the Hotel Tirana’s balcony bar overlooking Skenderbeg Square in the center of Albania’s capital city.

Sheshi Skenderbej is an all-concrete piazza the size of a nine-hole golf course. A dozen streets empty into it. From each street come multitudes of drivers going as fast as they can in any direction they want. Cars head everywhere. Cars box the compass. They pull U-ies, hang Louies, make Roscoes, do doughnuts. Tires peel and skid. Bicycles scatter. Pushcarts jump the curbs. Pedestrians run for their lives. No horn goes unhonked. Brakes scream. Bumpers whallop. Fenders munch. Headlight glass tinkles merrily on the pavement. There’s lots of yelling.

Until 1990, Albanians were forbidden to own motor vehicles. They didn’t know how to drive. They still don’t. Every fourth or fifth car seems to have an
AUTOSHKOLLE
sign on the roof, and not a moment too soon. Now there are 150,000 automobiles in Albania. If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t see beaters and jalopies on Western European streets, why there are no EU junkyards, it’s because the junk is in Albania. Elmaz said, “When we were first open to Europe, we bought used cars. Very used cars. After one year…” He pursed his lips and made the Mediterranean “kaput” noise.

The bad cars of Europe are in Albania. And the hot cars. An unwashed Porsche 928 lurching inexpertly through the square just out of range of my highball ice cubes seemed a probable example. Its huge V-8 was being gunned to piston-tossing, valve-shattering rpms. Even a mid-1980s model 928 would cost an average Albanian sixteen years’ of salary.

An American wire-service reporter was teasing Elmaz about used-car shopping: “I’d like to get a Renault Twingo, maybe. A ’95 or ’96. For about a thousand dollars? One that hasn’t been rolled.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” said Elmaz in the kind of laugh that indicates nobody’s kidding. “I know someplace.”

The wire-service reporter, who seemed to be rather too well-informed on various matters, said that pot cost thirty dollars a kilo in Albania. And
The Economist
magazine’s business report on Albania said that in March 1997, a fully automatic Kalashnikov assault rifle could be bought on the streets of Tirana for as little as three dollars.

“
Everyone
is surreptitiously armed,” said the wire-service reporter. Or not so surreptitiously. I saw a middle-aged man in civilian clothes walking along what used to be Boulevard Stalin, holding his five-year-old son by one hand and an AK-47 in the other.

Such are Second Amendment freedoms in Albania. And First Amendment freedoms lag not far behind in their extravagance. Each evening during the first weeks of July 1997, a couple hundred royalists would march into the chaos of Skenderbeg Square, bringing traffic to a new pitch of swerve and collision.

I watched the royalists set up podium and loudspeakers on the steps of a Soviet-designed cement blunder that used to be the Palace of Culture. They unfurled the heart-surgery-colored Albanian flag, bearing the image of what’s either a two-headed eagle or a very angry freak-show chicken. The royalists shouted into the microphone such things as, “We will get our votes, even by blood!” The volume was enough to drown out the loudest car crashes. Then, at greater volume yet, they played the Albanian national anthem, which is as long as a Wagner opera and sounds like the Marine Corps band performing the
Ring
cycle while falling down all the stairs in the Washington Monument.

The royalists were demonstrating on behalf of one Leka Zogu, who thinks he’s the king of Albania. He’d just gotten his butt whipped (80 percent of the voters said, “
jo
”) in a national referendum on restoring the monarchy. Not that Albania ever had a monarchy. The country wasn’t even a country until the twentieth century. It was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire from the 1400s on and a back-further-water of the Byzantine Empire before that.

Leka Zogu’s father, Ahmed Zogu, was a putsch artist from the sticks who overthrew what passed for the government in 1924, crowned himself King Zog I in 1928, pimped the country to Mussolini, and Airedaled it into exile one step ahead of Axis occupation in 1939. Leka was two days old at the time. Since then the younger Zogu has sojourned in Rhodesia and South Africa, been thrown out of Spain over an arms-dealing scandal, and spent a brief jail stint in Thailand for gunrunning—at least as good a preparation for the throne as having your ex-wife martyred by paparazzi.

After an hour or so of royalist racket, Leka Zogu’s motorcade arrived, flashing the kind of suction-cup roof lights that people buy when they want you to think they belong to the volunteer fire department. This sloppy parade of Mercedes sedans shoved into the rumpus of Skenderbeg Square, and the royal himself popped out in one royal beauty of a leisure suit. Leka (in the Albanian language the definite article is a suffixed u or i so “Leka Zogu” translates as “Leka the Zog”) stood at the microphone like a big geek—six feet eight inches tall, chinless, and bubble-bellied. He mumbled a few words. (His unmajesty’s command of Albanian is reported to be sketchy.) Then he booked. Wide guys patted lumpy items under their clothes. All the Benzes tried to turn around at once, creating still worse traffic mayhem, if such a thing is possible.

And it is. A few days before I got to Albania some of Leka’s supporters became so enthusiastic that they started a gun battle with the police. The shooting went on for fifteen minutes. Although only one person was killed, because the two sides weren’t actually near each other. The police were in a soccer stadium several blocks from the demonstration.

Anyway, Albania is fairly pissabed with freedoms. Free enterprise not least among them. Capitalism is pursued in Albania with the same zest—not to mention the same order and self-restraint—as driving, politics, and gun control.

Hundreds of cafés and bars have opened, most of them whacked together from raw timber with the same carpentry skills used by Oregon Rasta-Sufis when converting old school buses for Lollapalooza excursions. The rude structures are built on any handy piece of open ground and “have occupied even school yards in the capital,” says
The Albanian Daily News,
old copies of which, along with every other form of litter, carpet the city streets in NYSE-floor profusion. Private garbage collection is not yet up and running in Tirana, but private garbage disposal is fully operational. Every public space is covered with bags, wrappers, bottles, cans—and the booze shacks and pizza sheds that sold them.

Gardens have been obliterated by jerry-building, monuments surrounded, paths straddled, soccer pitches filled from goal to goal. The Lana River is walled from view, not that you’d want to look. The squatter construction companies tossing up chew-and-chokes on its banks have used pickaxes to make haphazard connections with waste pipes and water mains. Hydrohygienic results are the predictable. The Lana has crossed the lexicological line between
river
and
open sewer.
And what used to be Youth Park, a huge area of downtown greenery, has become the world’s first dining and leisure shantytown, a brand-new cold-brewski slum with extra cheese.

But it’s gambling that’s the real meat and drink. It’s done on the same confounding electronic video-card-playing devices that the Pequot Indians are using to reconquer Connecticut. Albania is a country that, from 1986 to 1990, imported a total of sewing machines, electric stoves, and hot-water heaters numbering zero. And Tirana is a city with electricity as reliable as congressional-committee testimony on campaign contributions. But there they are: the very latest examples of wallet-vacuuming technology from America, available everywhere and, through some miracle of Mafia-to-Mafia efficiency, functioning smoothly all day.

Albania is also a country where the poverty line is $143 a month for a family of four. Eighty percent of Albanians are living below that line. And what looks like 80 percent of Albanians are standing in front of bleeping, blinking games of chance feeding 100-lek coins—fifty-cent pieces—into the maw. The most-common commercial sign in Tirana is
AMERICAN POKER
.

The second most common sign is
SHITET
. Appropriately. Although it actually means “for sale.” Appropriately. Or perhaps it should be “up for grabs,” whatever that is in Albanian. Maybe it’s “Amex.” I went to an American Express office to get some money, and they were completely taken aback. They would never have anything so grabbable as money right there in an office. For money you go to the Bank in the Middle of the Street. Here—everyone being surreptitiously armed—great wads of money are being waved around, some of it peculiar. I got a few greenbacks with the green on the backs more of a pants-at-a-Westport-cocktail-party shade than usual and a twenty with something dark and odd about the presidential portrait. Was Andrew Jackson in the Jackson 5?

The thousands of tape cassettes being sold in the middle of the street are counterfeit, too. At least I hope they are. I’d hate to think anyone was paying royalties on Bulgarian disco and Turkish rap. The Marlboros are real, however, and cost less than they do when they fall off the back of a truck in Brooklyn. The clothes fell off a truck, too, I think, though not, unfortunately, a DKNY semi. Albanians have the Jersey Dirt Mall mode of dress figured out. Like everything else, these duds are sold intra-avenue, from racks mingled with car accidents, royalists, money, guns, and automated five-card draw.

Reading over what I have written, I fear I’ve made Albanians sound busy. They aren’t. Even their gambling is comparatively idle—exhibiting none of the industry shown by the old bats in Atlantic City with their neatly ordered Big Gulp cups of quarters and special slot-machine yanking gloves.

The Albanian concept of freedom approaches my own ideas on the subject, circa late adolescence. There’s a great deal of hanging out and a notable number of weekday, midafternoon drunk fellows.

There are lots of skulking young men in groups on Tirana’s corners and plenty more driving around in cars with no apparent errand or evident destination. It’s not a mellow indolence. I saw one guy cruising in his Mercedes, an elbow out the window, a wrist cocked over the steering wheel, riding cool and low. But his trunk lid was open, and chained in the boot was a barking, gnashing, furious 150-pound German shepherd.

Men in Albania hold each other’s hands too long in greeting, a gesture that seems to have less to do with affection than disarmament. They kiss each other on the cheeks, Italian style, but more Gotti than Gucci. Everybody stares. Nobody steps out of your way.

The Albanians have a Jolly Roger air. You could give an eye patch and a head hankie to most of the people on the street and cast them in
Captain Blood.
Not to demean a whole ethnic group or anything, but like most Americans, the only Albanians I’d ever heard of were Mother Teresa and John Belushi. A entire country full of Mother Teresas would be weird enough—everybody looking for lepers to wash. But imagine a John Belushi Nation—except they’re not fat, and they’re not funny.

“They’ll rob you,” said the wire-service reporter as we—pretty idle and indolent ourselves—ordered another round at the Balcony Bar. “Don’t carry your wallet.” Then a neophyte television producer walked up and announced that he’d gone out to tape some local color and hadn’t made it to the city limits before he lost a car, a TV camera, and $5,000 in cash.

A whole family lived in front of the Hotel Tirana, doing nothing. Between the hotel entrance and Skenderbeg Square was a quarter-acre patch of what used to be grass. Therein camped, from dawn to dark, a very big and fat woman; a very small and bedraggled woman; several skinny, greasy men; and approximately a dozen seriously unkempt children. The big woman spent all day spraddle-legged on a tablecloth, playing cards with the skinny men. The small woman spent all day wandering back and forth across the packed-dirt lot. Every time a hotel guest stepped outside, the children descended upon him or her, begging in a horde, or if begging was to no avail, thrusting little hands into pockets and purses, and grasping at whatever the hotel guest was carrying. Otherwise the children swatted and kicked each other. Sometimes the children would go over to the big woman, who’d also give them a swat. And if the tykes obtained money, they’d return to the big woman, and she’d snatch it.

The family had a puffy, sallow baby with the scorched blond hair that is a sign of malnutrition. The infant seemed to be eight or ten months old but didn’t appear to be able to hold its head up. It never cried. A ten- or eleven-year-old boy was the principal caretaker. He squeezed the baby to his chest with one arm while he chased the other children around, giving them karate chops and kung-fu kicks. Meanwhile, the baby’s appendages wagged and jiggled in all directions—a floppy tot.

Between martial-arts exhibitions, the baby was left alone on a sheet of cardboard on Skenderbeg Square’s tumultuous sidewalks. Passersby were supposed to leave coins. Occasionally they did.

“They are Gypsies,” said Elmaz. But
Gypsy
is the preferred local bigotry epithet, the N-word of the Balkans, with the added advantage that it can be used on anybody darker than Kate Moss.

The translator who worked for the wire-service reporter said he’d questioned the child-care boy about the baby. The boy had said, “His mother was going to throw him away. But she gave him to us. Now we’re taking care of him.”

There is not, so far as I was able to discover, an Albanian Child Abuse Hotline. “That’s because it would be jammed with how-to calls,” said the wire-service reporter.

“What the fuck is with this place?” said someone else at the bar. And I do not have an answer for that.