And in early 1948 Charles Maddox, yours truly, went out to Ethiopia.
I spent a couple of days in Addis Ababa – filthy hole – and the first thing that hit me was the altitude. I’d been in Mexico and so I knew you had to take it easy for a while when you first go to a place that’s more than 6,000 feet high. But it was much higher in Ethiopia. One of the TWA engineers had a heart attack the second night he arrived when he picked up some fancy whore in Addis. He conked out right in the middle of humping her. You don’t do much humping at 9,000 feet, not even in the best of circumstances, unless you’ve been doing it all your life and know how to pace yourself. You need a heart of oak, lungs like leather, and a pecker of steel.
Did you…?
For God’s sake, no. They had every venereal disease known to man. It was out of the question in Ethiopia.
I headed inland. That was some of the hairiest flying I’ve ever done in my life. The downdrafts knocked you down a thousand feet before you could get control of the ship again. Murderous. They lost at least one or two planes that way.
Sometimes I was the pilot, sometimes a passenger. I don’t know which was worse. I got there just before the rains. The rainy season lasts from the middle of June to September, and it pours rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock. I was there a little before the rains hit, and the flying looked possible.
The first time I flew it was up to a strip near a place called Dobi. I landed, and had a terrible scare. I saw several hundred people gathered on the edge of the strip, like a crowd at a drag race. ‘Christ,’ I said to myself, ‘they’re not giving me much room, but I suppose they’ll head for the hills when I drop my landing gear and put the nose up.’
But they didn’t. They just stayed there and watched. Orderly; they didn’t mill around or anything, but they didn’t give an inch of ground. They had more dumb faith than I’ve ever seen in my life. They were in awe of the planes, like those people in New Guinea who have the cargo cult, only not quite so maniac about it. They didn’t think the planes were gods who would one day drop down to provide bounty everlasting, but still they were in awe. You could see it in their faces. And it never occurred to them that if a crosswind hit you, you could veer and sheer off a few fuzzy heads with a wingtip.
The whole time the plane was there on the strip, which was a matter of some six or seven hours, from early morning until the middle of the afternoon, they just sat there, formed a big circle around the plane, a DC-3, got down on their haunches the way peasants do, and watched it. Men, women and children, just squatting there and watching that ship sitting in the dust. They had brought their lunches along too; it was a family affair. I thought this was wonderful. How simple people’s needs are, when their minds aren’t cluttered with all the garbage of modern-day life. I’m sure those people enjoyed staring at that DC-3, were moved by it – and it just sat there, completely inert – were more touched and thrilled than the average American is who sits like a chuckling moron in front of the boob tube and watches his favorite sitcom. They were certainly more at peace. And the Ethiopians didn’t have to watch any commercials.
I didn’t spend all the time out there working as an engineer. I did my share of that work, but for the first time in my life I took a good look at how other people, I mean people besides Americans, live – and you can go a long way before you find people as other as Ethiopians. They’re a warrior people, old Christians, and they had an innate dignity which you don’t find many places.
I don’t mean I got friendly with them. I tried, but they’re touchy, arrogant people – hard to talk to. And there was the problem of their hospitality. I’m a bit finicky about my food. I’m not talking about Ethiopia, I mean in the United States. I had a little silver rake, which I carried into restaurants and banquets – especially banquets, with their limp salad and fat green peas. If there’s anything I hate in the food world, it’s a fat green pea. So I’d take out my little rake and rake through the green peas, and the ones that slipped through the tines were edible. The rest was just trash to throw out with the salad, for the hogs. These days it’s different. Now you can get tiny peas. But I don’t like peas anymore.
What do you eat now?
I eat figs and fresh raspberries and other fruit – all organically grown. No artificial fertilizers for me. I’m under a doctor’s care and he prescribes rare beef for me, but I can’t take it. He’d like me to take it bloody, but I can’t get it down, so I have it well done. Boiled, cut into small pieces.
This was one of the troubles I had out in Ethiopia, in 1948, when I met this tribal chieftain. It was in the southern part of the country, and the tribal chieftain invited a few of us to have a meal with him. The first dish was all right, except that the spice they put over it, called wot, could burn the roof of your mouth off. But I got through that part. Then four men came out carrying a skinned cow. I wouldn’t call it a steer – it was a cow, raw – and they stopped in front of me, and I saw that I was supposed to choose a piece. I had the idea they were going to cook it. I pointed to a nice filet mignon. They whacked it off and dropped it down in front of me, plop, on the plate in front of me. I was supposed to eat it.
That was the end of any social contact, you might say. I said, as politely as I could, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
I was concerned that this might offend the chieftain, but I didn’t think it would offend him as much as if I’d eaten the raw meat and then vomited it all over his lap.
When I was out there I lived in the tin huts that were scattered all over the country, where our TWA men were living. They lived separately from the natives, and didn’t have much contact with them. I managed some contact because I went out to find it. I had nobody to report to. I was a free agent, so I could take off whenever I wanted to, which suited my purpose. l would be a passenger going down to Desi or Kobbo or some even more remote place, and I would disembark and spend two or three days there, living in whatever accommodations were available. Once I slept in a place that was the equivalent of a flophouse for the poor people of the town. And poor in Ethiopia means poor in a sense that’s hard to understand if you’ve never been out there. That’s poor at the low end of the poverty scale – utterly destitute.
Of course I couldn’t speak the language, but I could get by. It’s amazing how, in situations like these, men understand one another. I made it known that I wanted a bed, but there was no hotel in this town. I had my own bottled water with me, and some dried fruit. That was enough for me. I didn’t eat much, and I didn’t need much sleep, but I’d been up for a day and a half before this trip, and I had to get some sleep.
I was taken to a little shack with maybe half a dozen men sleeping in it. It was cold, a few degrees above freezing, so I couldn’t sleep outside. I came in late, just as it was getting dark. I was shown to a pallet on the floor.
One look at the men sleeping there and any sane man would have thought, ‘I won’t last the night, I’ll get my throat cut.’ The man in charge had a scar, looked like a knife wound, running down one side of his face. The scar was almost white, and in that black face it made him look positively evil. But the whole point of what I’m trying to tell you is: I wasn’t really worried. If my throat had been cut during the night, I would have accepted it. I wouldn’t have known, of course. What I mean is, for the first time in my life I was on my own, in strange circumstances, where the fact that I was Big Howard’s son, the billionaire Howard Hughes, wasn’t going to help me a bit. Nothing could help me. I had nobody I could turn to. If I had got in trouble and said to one of these TWA men, ‘Get me out of this, I’m Howard Hughes,’ he would have laughed in my face. And I couldn’t very well say it to the natives, could I?