Seven Days in Rio (15 page)

I had written the exact address of The Gringo down on a torn piece of hotel stationary—32A Via Revolução Outubro 13. When I came out of the Brazilian equivalent of a SRO that Tiffany had led me to, I was on Via Revolução Março 5. Soon, I spotted another small alley, Via Revolução Abril 15, where a number of beautiful Tiffanys were rhythmically beckoning. I figured this must be the right place to turn, since April was closer to October and, of course, being an accountant, April 15 has mystical associations for me. I could have engaged the services of any of the Tiffanys on Via Revolução Abril 15—one was more beautiful than the next, and as I walked by they all picked up their skirts. After my most recent experience, I began to realize why the whores in Rio were so free about displaying their merchandise. This way there was no doubt about their gender.

As the red light turned to green on the crosswalk of the large thoroughfare marked Boulevard Revolução, the frenzied traffic came to a reluctant stop. I couldn’t believe my eyes when, off of another small street in the distance, I saw a huge sign with a pulsating neon arrow and a silhouette of a shapely woman that read “The Café Gringo.” I wondered what had happened to the Vias de la Revolução May, June, July, August, and September, but on the whole I was just glad to be there.

But what was I looking for? Did I want to see naked bodies, did I want to achieve orgasm, or was I looking for some sort of love, and hopefully companionship, in my older years? Was I going to The Gringo to find a prostitute I could spend my life with? Was I looking for a true partner, a true relationship? Or was I simply hoping to achieve an explosive, mind-blowing fuck, a fuck of such intensity that it would elevate my consciousness, like an acid trip?

What is pleasure? It’s a question I had never addressed during my analysis with China. But I knew there was plenty of time left, by Lacanian standards. If nothing else, I’d learned from China that a lot could be accomplished in a minute, and this observation extended to lovemaking. There is no such thing as premature ejaculation in Lacanian analysis. In fact, what some people call premature ejaculation would be for the average Lacanian analyst a long, intense session of lovemaking.

As I approached The Gringo, I saw Klieg lights and trucks, and could hear the sound of a jackhammer. It reminded me of Manhattan, where Con Ed is always opening up the street to fix steam pipes, although in this case I presumed all the jacking and hammering had to do with intense sexual activity. I’d heard there were all kinds of strange happenings at the club, and that many of the evenings took on the raucous, Dionysian qualities characteristic of radical theater in the ’60s, when actors in groups like the Living Theater actually ran naked in the streets, shattering taboos and eventually initiating group sex on a mass scale. In fact, Rio’s Carnival, in which thousands of people caroused in the streets for days, had something in common with some of the revolutionary performances I had seen as a student at Columbia, including some memorable experiments in free love. Unfortunately, when I got closer to the club, I saw that all the noise was connected to a far more mundane purpose. It looked like a water main had broken. When I tried to ask what was going on, I encountered the same sphinx-like glare that was popular among Con Ed workers in Manhattan. I went so far as to think that in our cross-cultural era there might even be some sort of exchange program between utility workers from New York and Rio in an attempt to foster mutual understanding. Perhaps I was receiving a bona fide Con Ed brush-off in the middle of Rio.

My heart sunk as I looked through the opened doors of the club to see electrical wires dangling over puddles of water. The lighting system, replete with a classic disco ball, had been disconnected. The only inkling of the club’s former splendor was a number of Tiffanys wearing overalls and hardhats who had obviously been hired to help out with the utility work. Their ample bosoms were hanging outside the straps of their overalls, and several were sporting work boots with high heels.

I wasn’t sure which way to turn. I could have simply gone back to the Copacabana, but something told me that a whole swath of Rio’s sexual life couldn’t be short-circuited by a few plumbing and electrical problems. As I prepared to walk back to the Boulevard Revolução, I noticed a short white-haired gentleman in a grubby tee shirt, the stub of a cigar hanging out of the side of his mouth. He looked like the kind of guy who had spent his life as a night watchman and now, in retirement, just watched over things on a recreational basis.

“Do you know if The Gringo moved to temporary quarters?” I bellowed.

He made a sign that he didn’t understand what I was talking about, but he also held out a palm to indicate that he would try harder if I gave him money. I placed some
reality
in his palm.

He held his finger to his lips and then said something in Portuguese that I gathered meant that I should follow him. We walked away from the utility trucks and lights and into a warren of side streets, each one seemingly smaller than the last. None of these streets, which were hardly more than cobblestoned footpaths, was large enough to accommodate a car, and I started to notice piles of droppings that I supposed were from horses or donkeys. Rio is an odd series of contrasts; it is an ultra-modern city that at the same time is filled with areas that resonate with the poverty and backwardness of the country’s interior. It is a place of hope for rural peasants who come to seek their fortunes. But the ever-present poverty is a reminder of the fact that, for some, the promise of a new life is not that easily attainable.

To be a Tiffany requires a certain degree of sophistication, and many of the women from the small backwaters of the Amazon know little about how to please a man in the way that is necessary to become a real Tiffany. Many of them have never seen a garter belt, black stockings, or a sexy French brassiere. For these peasant women, sex is simply a matter of child bearing. They often have large broods of children who become street urchins and beggars. If only they knew how, these women could be using their bodies to make the kind of big bucks that could get their kids into decent private schools.

Some of the streets were becoming so narrow that the buildings on either side practically touched, so that someone could almost reach out a window to shake the hand of his neighbor across the way. Yes, the hardscrabble existence of the poor had some benefits, not the least of which was a sense of community forged by forced proximity. But I was starting to wonder where my tight-lipped friend was leading me. This didn’t look like the kind of area where I was going to find a sex club, although the narrow alleyway reminded me of the crack between a woman’s legs. I couldn’t help noting that Rio’s ubiquitous sexuality was reflected not only in its sleek, shiny hotels and phallic skyscrapers, but also in the architecture of its most impoverished neighborhoods.

As we walked along, I noticed what looked like a hurricane cellar up ahead. My aunt had had one of those at the back of her house on Long Island, and I used to love to sneak down into the basement, which was filled with canned goods and bottled water. She kept these goods in store for the end of the summer season, when storms periodically made their way up the coast, hitting her little town of Long Beach with great fury. I didn’t think much of it, nor of the little
Revolução
decal that I noticed affixed to the cellar door as we approached. With all the streets named for one revolution or another, it didn’t strike me as unusual to see generic advertisements for revolution on a door. Then I noticed the steady flow of beautiful Tiffanys and tanned Brazilian men in tight, crotch-hugging slacks and open shirts disappearing through the narrow, unlit space into which my friend was now urging me.

I was apprehensive. On the plane I’d read an article about the international slave trade, and while I didn’t see myself as a likely candidate for sexual slavery, I was concerned that I might suddenly be drawn into an illegal activity for which I could conceivably be viewed as an accomplice. I have an active imagination, and my free-floating guilt, which was a constant subject of discussion with China, always makes me feel that I am in danger of facing some sort of retribution for imagined crimes. There had been periodic sweeps of Rio’s underworld traffic in sex slaves. I had no idea what sights lay before me as I crossed the river Styx into my fantasy Hades.

As it turned out, I was simply wafted along on a wave of uncontrollable lust. As I approached the stairs leading down to the basement of the club, I spotted one of the most beautiful Tiffanys I’d ever seen. She looked like a Cherokee Indian, with straight black hair that hung to the waist of her backless dress. When I got a closer look, she turned out to be even more beautiful than my initial impression — turquoise eyes, pouting lips, and a spectacular ass that made Jennifer Lopez’s prodigious fundament look like a ham hock. Following her, I instinctively called out “Tiffany!”

“It’s actually Brittany, darling, like the rocky province in France.”

“But doesn’t that break the Geneva conventions, wherein the UN established Tiffany as the name used for all sex workers?”

She immediately put her finger to her lips and whispered, “Not in Uva. Everyone here is either Brittany or Crystal.” It turned out that Uva was a renegade club in many ways, not only because of its Brittanys and Crystals, but also in the unusual practices that were commonplace on the dance floor and in the warren of private back rooms, which were called “Les Caves.” As I carefully made my way down the steps into the darkness, using only the glowing flesh of Brittany’s ass as a beacon, all I could think of was Britney Spears, another conflicted person who, while she might have made a great Tiffany, was also in need of psychoanalysis.

“You don’t look like a Brittany,” I said, barely able to control a spontaneous outbreak of tardive dyskinesia, or uncontrollable licking of the lips. I had never wanted a Tiffany as much as I wanted Brittany. I didn’t even want my China in the same way, although, in retrospect, I must have realized that I had penetrated China’s veneer of professionalism in a way that I could never achieve with Brittany. I could tell that Brittany was what psychoanalysts would term “very well defended.” I knew I could never get truly close to Brittany, but nevertheless I plunged right into her both physically and mentally. We might have succeeded in having sexual intercourse within three minutes of meeting, but rather than leading me toward consummation, the sexuality only heightened my desire to be seduced. Three minutes were like an eternity. I removed her tight blouse, pulling it over her head and unsnapping her bra with a deftness that recalled the great lovers of the European cinema like Mastroianni, Giannini, Léaud, the Belmondo of
Breathless
, and Depardieu. I reached under her tight leather skirt to find nothing and everything at the same time. Even though she was Brittany, she was the kind of Tiffany whose very being released a Pandora’s box of emotions and sensations. I was both transported and in control. Was this the mental health I’d been searching for all these years with prostitutes and analysts — a state of heightened desire whose consummation ultimately eluded me?

After we got up from the floor, where we weren’t the only couple who had been expressing their uncontrollable passion, and where I’d had a chance to worship the perfection of Brittany’s bottom, I found myself following her in a daze like a lost lamb, not even realizing that I had forgotten to zip my fly. My still totally erect penis was jutting out of my pants like a missile about to leave its silo.

I hadn’t had a chance to really discover the world of Uva, but as I started getting my bearings again, I realized that the interior was designed to look like the inside of a uterus. I had once seen laparoscopic photos of the inside of the female procreative system, so there was no doubt as to the inspiration for the club’s décor, with its pinkish theme interrupted by striations of white. I realized the whole atmosphere was just like a gynecologist’s office, where women remove their underwear before climbing into the stirrups for an exam. It was the first time I’d been to a sex club with such a medical theme. If I’d been qualified, which I obviously wasn’t, I would have written a paper on it for
The New England Journal of Medicine
. There was even one area that I thought might actually be an on-premise gynecological practice. A woman with her legs spread and raised on something that looked very much like an examination table was attended to by a long line of men who performed cunnilingus on her after they had given her both vaginal and rectal exams, throwing their used rubber gloves in a huge recycling bin when they were finished. It reminded me of the old Mardi Gras Saturday mornings at the Harmony Burlesque in Times Square back in the ’70s, when New York was both literally and metaphorically a wide open city. I would have joined the long line of men who were treating Crystal’s pudenda as if it were an ice cream cone if I hadn’t been so in love with Brittany. My love was actually clouding my ability to take an objective view of my surroundings. What I saw was a succession of sated diners, relaxing together in a huge living room, as the men feasted on pussy and the women seemed to enjoy a spiritual experience that would eventually enable their souls to transcend the limitations of the flesh.

I knew I had to keep my wits about me, but every time I said to myself,
You almost had a fantastic lay and now it’s time to get back to your China
, I thought of Brittany’s magnificent ass. I wanted to kiss it and hold it. If Brittany had proposed an arrangement whereby she sat on my face indefinitely in exchange for a certain amount of
reality
, I might have agreed. At one point, wandering into one of the more infernal areas of “Les Caves,” which reminded me of Manhattan’s infamous Hellfire Club, I came across a whole room of men with beautiful Brittanys and Crystals sitting on their faces. These fellows were acting out what I only dreamt of, which was to seek oblivion in the perfect ass of an adored whore. In fact, many of these men looked like wastrels in an opium den, as though they had decided to take a life-altering voyage from which they had little interest in returning. I contemplated the strength of the dollar and wondered how much
reality
it would take to have Brittany sit on my face for the remainder of my stay in Rio. But for the moment, Uva had exceeded my wildest dreams and was far beyond anything I had hoped to find at The Gringo. If it weren’t for the ongoing repairs at The Gringo, I never would have discovered Uva, Brittany, and the whole world of renegade Tiffanys who, with their rebellious attitudes and untamed beards, reminded me of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, although in this case the beards were between their legs. But would I ever be able to extricate myself from the thrall of desire that had overwhelmed me and get back to my dream of building a healthy and loving relationship, either with my China or a real whore?