Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics by P.J. O'Rourke Page B

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.