Seven Days in Rio (13 page)

“But I’m not six inches,” I said, looking at the shriveled carrot that was left in the wake of my unconsummated foreplay with China.

“Fully extended it’s an easy six,” she said. She even measured my balls and wrote down a two on her pad, indicating, I suppose, that they were both accounted for.

The speed with which my jeans arrived made me wonder if this wasn’t some kind of racket. I imagined a sweatshop in the basement of the hotel filled with illegal immigrants toiling day and night to fit the made-to-order desires of American guys who wanted to accentuate their penis size. In America I might not have wanted to broadcast the fact that I had a substantial package, since many of the girls who work the streets will do anything to avoid the kind of stud who is going to leave them hobbling in their platform shoes.

One of the toothless Brazilian cleaning women brought up the pants. No sooner was I holding them against my waist to check the length than Tiffany had hooked her fingers over the bottom edge of her tiny skirt and was threatening to pull it up. I closed my eyes and begged her not to tempt me again, as it would ruin my meal. I’m referring of course to the constant warning I used to get from my parents about not eating too many hot buns when we went out for dinner, lest they spoil my appetite. I have a different attitude about buns now that I’m a grown man — I believe that if you want to gorge yourself on buns, you should go right ahead. True, I had come to Brazil to have a good time with as many girls as possible. But as charming and professional as Tiffany was, I really had to start playing the field. It’s like people who go to France to see the sites. The Eiffel Tower is nice, but you also want to go to Chartres, Mont St. Michel, the Louvre, Versailles, Aix en Provence, and naturally, Pigalle, which is still filled with clubs populated by decrepit, overpriced hookers

If it’s not your habitual attire, pulling on a pair of tight jeans can be a problem. I’d already had one go-around with jeans on this trip, but the pair Tiffany had ordered for me were no comparison. They were more like a leotard than Levi’s, and just getting the legs on took every ounce of strength I had. I had no idea how I was going to actually pull them up over my thighs, buttocks and, most importantly, my crotch. Because I am someone with an extreme aversion to physical pain, mixed with a rather acute case of castration anxiety, I toyed with the notion of actually wearing the jeans around my thighs like someone who had just gotten up from the toilet and has forgotten to pull his pants up. Once, when I was hunting Tiffanys in Tijuana, I actually saw a group of vacationers who had been suffering from Montezuma’s revenge for days and had stopped bothering to pull up their pants at all. But I realized that I wasn’t going to accomplish my purpose if I didn’t bite the bullet and try to get the pants up as best I could.

There is an old expression that is popular in the recovery movement — One Day at a Time. I decided to apply this philosophy to my jeans, which I began to pull up one centimeter at a time, even though I was afraid my circulation could be cut off, possibly resulting in the loss of a testicle.

Most Latin American men are adept at situating their testicles in tight pants to optimize their crotch appeal. It’s a mating custom that has evolutionary roots, and as vivid an illustration of Darwinian natural selection as a peacock’s feathers. But while it is a distinctly biological matter, it is something that is reinforced through education. Brazilian boys are taught how to climb into extremely tight jeans when their penises and testicles are still small. Gradually, as they develop, they are able to accommodate an ever-larger package, making concessions to morphology by buying larger sizes without compromising their crotch display.

In North American society, where brainpower plays a larger role in the survival and propagation of the species, far less importance is accorded to exhibiting the male genitalia. American boys attend SAT prep classes while their Latin American counterparts are learning to display their penises. So while I was busy cramming for my college entrance exams, my Brazilian and Latin American peers were busy cramming their packages into skin-tight dungarees.

Tiffany was certainly deserving of some kind of award for concierges who go beyond the call of duty to make sure their guests have a comfortable stay. She earned my vote when she pulled her skirt up to her waist so that she could kneel down to massage and lick my balls while easing them into the snug confines of my jeans. In the process, I got another view of her vagina, which unfortunately made me even more homesick for China than I already was. And while she was trying to be of help, she ended up exacerbating the problem by giving me a hard-on.

Fortunately, man is an adaptable creature, and even a North American male who is reliant on brainpower to attract the opposite sex is able to adopt the customs of a totally different culture. I don’t know how I would fare if I had my tongue stretched — part of the mating rituals of some Amazonian tribes — or how I would have accommodated having my feet bound like a Chinese girl living during the dynastic era. But I was certainly able to adjust to having my dick crowded into what seemed at first glance to be an uncomfortably restricted area. I simply equated it to the New Yorker forced to cram all his or her worldly possessions into a tiny studio apartment.

I grew up in the fifties, during the polio epidemic, and when Tiffany and I managed to finally get the jeans on and I took my first steps, I was reminded of the newsreels of little kids hobbled by polio. Unfortunately, I still had an erection, which was impeding my progress. My usual technique for getting rid of erections in addition to thinking about concentration camps, centered on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When that didn’t work, I’d think of earthquakes or floods or even serial killers. Conjuring up Richard Nixon’s face was always a sure bet if I wanted to lose an erection, and then there was his Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, a lock for eliminating erotic thoughts. More contemporary examples, like Donald Rumsfeld, didn’t work. The rage was too palpable and only strengthened my woody.

Tiffany was turning out to be the mother I never had — someone who encouraged my sexuality and dressed me in a way that made me attractive to other women. She packed my genitals into the jeans the way an attentive mother would pack her son’s lunch box. If I was going to have a lasting relationship with a prostitute, I could do worse than this exceptionally maternal, sexually motivated Tiffany.

When she finally managed to get my fly zipped and my jeans buttoned, Tiffany pushed me away from her and said, smiling broadly, “Let me look at you.” I was still wearing my Brooks Brothers seersucker jacket, my bowtie, and my classic button-down collar shirt, along with my Weejuns. I was starting to feel a bit like a fashionista. The mixture of styles was a style in itself, and I think that both Tiffany and I knew that I was going to make quite an impression when I entered The Gringo. Though I assumed that clothes were coming off in the club more than they were being put on, according to Adolphe The Gringo was a fashion Mecca, and it wasn’t surprising for prostitutes and their johns to make sartorial statements that impacted the larger populace, where whores and their customers accounted for such a large demographic.

Tiffany offered to blow me one last time, as a freebee, but I politely declined since I wanted to save up my load so I had something to offer when I made my big entrance at the club. I had a momentary desire to go back to room 1269 and show China my new outfit, but I was afraid that, in spite of all that had transpired between us, she might revert to analytic neutrality. For a moment I even thought I was going crazy and that nothing had in fact happened between China and me, that my desires had become so real that I’d crossed the line between fantasy and reality. This is why it’s dangerous to have an analyst of the opposite sex. While a normal relationship between two men generally entails an ample homoerotic subtext, adding a romantic dimension to the relationship between a heterosexual male and a female analyst who refuses to wear underpants can engender problems not only with neutrality, but also with the transference, which becomes contaminated.

I started out of the room, but I was forced to move slowly because my pants were chafing the inside of my thighs. Every time I passed women in the hallway they thought I was interested, and since most of them were Tiffanys, they propositioned me. In the short time it took me to get down to the main lobby and then to the ballroom where the sign for the erotomania lecture still stood on its easel, I had been flashed and groped numerous times by the bands of prostitutes who cruised the halls of the hotel. My penis was sore from being engorged and cramped in such a small space. I went over to the placard describing the lecture and lingered over it for a few moments. Erotomania was described on one of the photocopied leaflets piled next to the placard as a pathology that afflicted mostly females who suffered from delusions of being desired, and I found it somewhat anomalous in Rio, where everyone seemed to desire everyone else, with little delusion involved as far as I could see.

I opened up the doors to the ballroom, which was now darkened, its banks of seats totally empty except for a woman’s bobbing head. It looked like one of the analysts I had seen at the conference was giving a blowjob to a colleague, and for a moment I experienced a shot of jealousy, thinking it might be China. In any case, the atmosphere in Rio was obviously infectious even for analysts, who generally tend to keep a professional demeanor. I was beginning to understand how Rio could liberate the unconscious desires of practically anyone, including the most intransigent mental health professional. What if it was China giving the blowjob? So what? She was a free agent and so was I. We had no commitments to each other, beyond that of doctor and patient. I had no right to make any demands of her at all. As painful as it all was, China was actually doing me a favor by keeping her distance. My unfulfilled love for her only fueled my lust.

I decided to head out to the Copacabana. It was early evening and I knew that I was at a turning point in the trip. I was no longer waltzing around Rio in my underpants, and in fact had progressed to the point where I was both desirable and plainly eager to make my desires known. Sometimes analytic patients have sessions over the phone, and as I proceeded out onto the Copa, I thought momentarily about calling China in order to air a few lingering anxieties. I just wanted to let China know I was still thinking about our work together, even as I made my way toward the crowds of whores at The Gringo. If I was still thinking about her even as I was dressed to kill and about to get my rocks off, then she must mean something to me. But just as I was about to reach into my jacket pocket for my rented cell phone, it occurred to me that if she was indeed the woman I had spotted in the darkened ballroom, she obviously wouldn’t be able to talk. So I returned the phone to my pocket.

Being a New Yorker, I always jaywalk. But with the tight pants I had trouble estimating the time it would take me to get from one side of the street to the other, and a taxicab swerved dramatically to avoid hitting me, nearly sideswiping another car. The driver pulled over, plainly annoyed and cursing loudly, but I couldn’t understand the Portuguese. When I screamed back, “Could you express your feelings in English? I’m an American,” he simply slammed his car door, gunned his engine, and sped off.

At that moment, standing in the island between two streams of traffic, I was reminded of the fragility of life. I knew that I had to give myself extra time to make it from the traffic island to the other side of the busy avenue. I was hyperventilating, and now that I had finally decided this was the night I would test the depths of human pleasure, I was eager to get to my destination. I would have run or at least picked up my pace if I could, but I had to wait until there was no traffic in sight to finally cross a street, encumbered as I was by my skin-tight jeans. I had never been bow-legged, but now I noticed I was walking around with my knees pointed outward, like a cowpuncher who spends the day in the saddle rustling up his herd.

Despite being an urban dweller, and more particularly a denizen of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I have become totally dependent on Global Positioning Systems. All the car and cab services use them, and my car is equipped with one. As a result I have lost the ability to follow directions. One of the harbingers of modern life is an attrition of abilities in areas that have been taken over by technology. For instance, even though I’m an accountant by profession, I can barely add or subtract, and have totally lost the ability to multiply and divide. So, as I negotiated the warrens of Tiffany-filled streets that led to The Gringo, I was in a continual state of confusion, not knowing which way I was going. My body was trapped in the contemporary version of a medieval suit of armor, but I was driven on by images of a magnificent world filled with impossibly beautiful prostitutes, like a palace in one of those Disney animations I loved as a kid.

At the very least I can usually rely on my dick as the equivalent of an electronic device leading me toward a scent — specifically the pheromones given off by women whose bodies are for hire — but now I was in a state of total confusion, frequently finding myself turning in circles, growing dizzy and light-headed in the process.

I was actually reminded of the scenes in
Vertigo
when Jimmy Stewart’s character experiences the sensations of falling as he relives his traumatic memories. But what was the trauma I was responding to? Was I suffering from a totally experiential problem having to do with the loss of circulation to my genitalia, which could be addressed by an analyst of the so-called existential school, or was my vertigo the result of factors pertaining to depth psychology and the instinctual drives that it addresses? In addition to the constriction of my blood vessels, I was also sweating profusely, and I wanted to find a Tiffany as quickly as possible, if for no other reason than the fact that I needed to get my pants off. It might have been a superficial solution, but I was convinced that as soon as my dick was free to get as hard as it needed to, I would at least be able to retrieve some sense of direction. This is what is known by those seeking spiritual enlightenment as a “limited objective,” but I needed to do something before I fainted right in the middle of one of the many boulevards scattered around Rio.