Oliver Benjamin
He then stumbled over to a trash can and violently threw up.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Roy and Bennie were sticking
flyers up and down Fairfax Avenue. They knew this area well, having
both grown up nearby. Roy couldn’t help but feel umbilically
connected to this place: There was a burgeoning Ethiopian
community there now, featuring Ethiopian restaurants, markets and
the like. When Roy was a child, he had been the only Ethiopian in the
area. At the time his father arrived there, many people still referred
to Ethiopia by its old medieval name, Abyssinia.
“There’s a reason our country was called Abyssinia,” his father
once told him. “Actually, there are many reasons.”
Like most Americans, Roy didn’t care much about where his
ancestors came from. They came from somewhere over the horizon—
not just the geographic horizon, but the horizon of a young boy’s
interest.
“First of all, an abyss is a deep hole in the ground,” his father
began, “and Abyssinia is home to one of the lowest places on earth.
The Afar Desert. That’s where the world is being ripped apart.
There’s a great valley there, now, so deep that the heat gets trapped.
The Afar Desert is the hottest place on earth, 150 degrees Fahrenheit
in parts, and the people that live there are so crazy that they run
around chopping off each other’s balls. They make necklaces out of
them.”
Young Roy gasped. His father patted him on the head and
pointed to a spot on a cheap globe he bought at a garage sale. “See
that? When people tell me to go to hell, I tell them I’ve already been
there. Abyssinia is where hell is.”
Later, when Roy was older, his father one day stood up in his
failing coffeeshop on Fairfax Avenue, stretched his arms out
dramatic and wide and said, “This, my son, is an abyss. You put
money into it, and it falls downwards to the center of the earth.” He
sat down again and said, “When I die, it will all be there waiting for
me. I will be a very rich man.” Roy’s father, a Jewish Ethiopian, didn’t
really believe in heaven and hell. He believed in sheol, the Jewish
Hades. He believed everyone originally came from the abyss and
ended up there some day.
That was 1964. Ten years later they would discover the bones of
man’s oldest ancestor in that selfsame Abyssinian hole. So to some
extent, he was right. Everyone originally came from Ethiopia. And
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