Seven Days in Rio (7 page)

My new pair of pants was definitely a double-edged sword. If I made it as far as The Catwalk, I would very likely meet more prostitutes, but I began to doubt that I would be able to do anything about it if circulation to my crotch was cut off. All through childhood I had heard stories about men losing their testicles due to untreated hernias. Risky as it was, I decided it made more sense to jettison the pants and just show up at The Catwalk in my new bikini briefs. In this case, my mother’s instruction to always wear a tie came to the rescue. No one could accuse me of being inappropriately dressed. Even without pants, I wasn’t going to be turned away from a nightclub if I was wearing a jacket and tie. Besides, this was a tropical climate where it wasn’t unusual to wear shorts even for the most formal get-togethers. If anyone asked about my thong, I’d tell them I was on my way to a midnight shark hunt and that it was just a bathing suit.

Finally, in the distance, I saw what looked like a totally naked woman standing under a canopy. The only items of clothing she seemed to be wearing were a baseball cap and stiletto heels. As I watched her take a set of keys from the driver of a cherry-red Porsche and execute a flawless three-point turn into a tight spot further down the street, I realized she was the valet. I wouldn’t need to ask her if I could see her vagina, since even from a distance it was plainly visible. I could also see that she was an old-school girl who didn’t shave her thick muff. I’d heard about Brazilian hot waxing, and it was the one thing that had almost made me decide to change my vacation plans, as the trend toward clean shaving struck me as a form of collective pedophilia.

I licked my lips as I approached the little velvet rope that was presided over by a trio of imposing bouncers. I noticed that neither the bouncers nor the nude valet seemed to pay the least attention to me.

Figuring that I didn’t know the customs, I proceeded to unlatch the velvet rope myself. Suddenly I felt a hand clamping down on my shoulder. “It’s closed for a private party,” one of the bouncers said. As before, I wondered how so many of the natives knew to address me in English, but it was neither the time nor the place to linger on such details. Other men, whose cars were parked by the naked valet, walked right past me and were ushered to the gates of heaven unimpeded. When I tried to point out this inconsistency in the admissions policy, I was simply told, “We cannot accommodate your party tonight.” I didn’t understand. This was Rio, where everything was supposed to be free and open. Yet I was blocked by a velvet rope like I was at Studio 54 in its ’70s heyday.

During a slight lull in the traffic, the naked valet came over to me. She rubbed her thumb and fingers together to remind me that a little
reality
was more persuasive than words. Obviously, I was thinking too analytically about something that required a simple solution. I waved one of the bouncers over and, just as he was about to shoo me off with another “I can’t accommodate your party,” reached out my hand, proffering a 100
real
note. The change in his attitude was dramatic. Suddenly, I was treated like a long-lost friend and ushered into the club, where a bevy of beautiful Tiffanys with gigantic breasts and uncharacteristically big bushes sat me down at a VIP table and started asking challenging questions like, “Can I blow you?” and “Do you want to fuck?” They were all so alluring I didn’t know what to do, or with whom. I decided that since I’d waited this long, I was going to savor the moment and delay gratification. I didn’t want to use up all my juice before the evening ended. If the girls at The Catwalk were this enticing and willing, there was no telling what bounty The Gringo would hold.

Where all doors had seemed closed to me, in an instant the world was my oyster. The Catwalk was designed like a theater in the round. There was a stage about which phalanxes of naked girls, whose faces were made up to look like pussy cats and whose vaginas looked like beavers lolling in a pond, paraded wantonly every half-hour or so. The atmosphere had the flavor of a disco, circa 1977, which may have explained the marked absence amongst the denizens of waxing or shaving. The grooming, as I would later learn, reflected the segment of Brazilian society that still held on to the all-natural fashion sensibility of a bygone era.

The entire seating area was in shadow, with lots of private crannies, where I noticed figures engaging in a variety of sexual acts. I’d once been in a restaurant in Hong Kong where the room seemed to be swaying like the car on a Ferris wheel, and when I sat down at my table I realized the floor was covered with snakes, which were cooked in little pots in front of the diners. The floor of The Catwalk reminded me of that restaurant, except the snakes were replaced by writhing, naked bodies. I felt dizzy until I realized there was an orgy taking place at my feet. Girls whose heads weren’t bobbing up and down in acts of fellatio were on the floor performing sixty-nine with each other, or with anyone who was interested and could afford to pay for it.

I soon realized I had made a mistake in jettisoning my tight jeans, since I had a tremendous hard-on that wouldn’t go away, no matter what profoundly asexual thoughts I tried to conjure. Though Manhattan isn’t Rio, the first days of spring usually bring an onslaught of women in revealing attire, and when I get hard in a crowded subway or bus after unavoidably rubbing up against a woman, I think about the Holocaust. I’m Jewish, so I feel little guilt about appropriating images from the concentration camps for my own dubious purposes. But in my present straits, none of the usual tricks seemed to be working, and there was nothing I could do to camouflage my condition. I realized I was in danger of being raped. All a Tiffany would have to do is sit on me. I decided that the best thing I could do was to keep in motion until I found the Tiffany I was looking for. So I took to the dance floor, where the blaring classic ’70s disco beats of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees had given way to the soft merengue of “Push Push in the Bush.” I have never had any problem dancing by myself. In fact I frequently dance in front of the full-length mirror on my closet door at home, pretending I’m a rock star should a song like Rod Stewart’s “Baby Jane” come on the radio. In this case I just had to be sure to keep a substantial distance between myself and anyone else, and above all avoid poking the other dancers with my stiff prick.

The mix of naked, pheromone-producing bodies must have acted like a drug, because I wound up doing the macarena with a small dark-haired woman. She had big almond-shaped eyes that looked like they were constantly welling up with tears. I thought she was crying because she didn’t like being paraded around in front of a group of men whose collective horniness had been provoked to the point of histrionic frenzy. Perhaps she was one of those women who had been lured into a sub-prime mortgage and now had to sell her body to avoid foreclosure.

Later I would learn that the name of the girl I was dancing with was, in fact, Tiffany. She had hypnotized me, and when I came out of my trance I realized that she had inordinately huge, perfect breasts and a virtual forest between her legs. I was eager to explore my newfound friend with both my fingers and my tongue, but something was holding me back. Tiffany seemed like relationship material, one of those complex hookers who brought a lot of emotional baggage along with her sexual allure, and I didn’t want to get emotionally involved with someone at The Catwalk before I’d even made it to The Gringo. I had gotten into a serious relationship with a hooker during my first year at Columbia and ended up regretting the loss of my youthful opportunity to play the field.

As I felt her furry vagina rubbing up against my hardened penis, I let my hands wander over her velvety folds, finally letting my fingers crawl inside of her like little snakes ferreting out their prey. She was impassive in the face of my prying, which was now taking on the quality of an exuberant gynecological exam. I love touching vaginas so much that I had once toyed around with the notion of becoming a gynecologist. However, my mother’s own excitement about the prospects of my being a doctor blunted my ambitions. Every time I thought about a woman in stirrups, I saw my mother’s face. She was understandably disappointed when I dropped the idea. In her inimitable way she would ask, “You’re going to make your own mother pay to have some stranger examine her?” I dropped organic biology and majored in economics precisely to avoid such potentially embarrassing Oedipal scenes.

Tiffany kept staring at me like a long-lost lover, and I began to wonder if indeed I’d met her somewhere else, even in another life. I’m a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, and it seemed reasonable that I could purchase her services even if her body was occupied by another spirit. When she looked at me with those doe eyes and asked if I wanted a blowjob, I told her we’d better talk first. I knew that acknowledging the depths of Tiffany’s feelings was a potential rabbit hole. The question of emotional intimacy was in fact a point that I wanted to bring up with my psychoanalyst friends at the hotel, because I was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that free will might be playing a greater role in human affairs than Freud had accounted for. For instance, I had the choice to behave like an animal and accept the blowjob, or, like Hamlet, to deliberate before doing anything rash. I readily accepted the fact that it might turn out that behaving like an animal with Tiffany was the humane thing to do. On the other hand, getting involved with her complex problems and psychohistory as an excuse for getting into her pants set up expectations I could never fulfill.

Still, the side of me that leans toward relationship-building with whores was winning out again. I led Tiffany over to the quietest little nook I could find, where another couple was already engaged in an unclassifiable sex act, and asked her if she wanted to talk about anything. I ordered a couple of margaritas.

The old expression “you can’t see the forest for the trees” certainly proved true in our case, since my ability to listen to what Tiffany was actually saying was impeded by the fact that I couldn’t take my eyes off the extraordinary flora and fauna between her legs. Tiffany spoke excellent English and, from what I could tell, American intellectuals like Susan Sontag must have been quite a craze among the prostitutes of Brazil, because Tiffany, like her older predecessor, turned out to be extremely knowledgeable about Sontag’s work. In fact, she owned an autographed copy of the Portuguese version of
Against Interpretation.

As it happened, her slide into a life of prostitution had nothing to do with poverty or lack of education, but rather an over-immersion in the work of the French deconstructionists, particularly Derrida, whose writing she had interpreted in an overly literal way. She had initially gone into therapy to palliate her inability to think metaphorically, but over the years, as she moved into regular, four-day-a-week analysis, the work concentrated more on her idealization of the French intellectuals. She didn’t turn tricks for the money, since her father was a wealthy industrialist, but more as a constant reminder that she was part of a barter economy in which sex was a commodity like anything else. Besides, she enjoyed taking her clothes off in front of strange men.

As she continued to unspool her life’s story, Tiffany’s left nipple nestled into the center of her margarita and floated there like an olive in a martini. She was getting very emotional and I realized that it might become increasingly difficult to segue into a sex act. I couldn’t imagine interrupting her tale to ask if she could take my penis in her mouth. How would she ever be able to get to the denouement?

My heart skipped a beat, however, and my fears were assuaged when Tiffany interrupted her own account by getting up from the table, standing in front of me with her big hairy pussy in my face, and announcing, “I have to pee. Why don’t we go back to my father’s place? He has a huge mansion in a small town on the coast just outside Rio.” I was about to admit to her that I hadn’t bothered to rent a car since the hotel provided free shuttle service when she announced, “We can zoom up there in my Alfa.”

I noticed that she still hadn’t put any clothes on as the valet pulled her car up to the door of the club. I did think it was odd, but I rationalized that perhaps in Rio it was common for the beautiful daughters of wealthy industrialists to drive their fancy sports cars in the nude. As we drove through downtown Rio with the top down and the windows open, I remarked that none of the other drivers even blinked at the sight of a nude Tiffany passing them in traffic. This would never go over on the Long Island Expressway, where she would certainly have caused one of the greatest pileups in transportation history.

I was beginning to notice that she remained curiously incurious about me. She just stared at the road with her dark, brooding eyes as she talked. It was apparent that she was a true narcissist whose seeming attention-giving was only a subterfuge by which she could call attention to herself.

As we swung out onto the majestic coastal road leading out of Rio, past the sparkling beaches crowded with Tiffanys plying their trade late into the night, Tiffany’s nipples hardened as she continued to tell me her saga.

Her father had wanted her older brother to take over the family empire, which included considerable real estate holdings. But the brother wanted to be a poet and had moved to Paris, where he tried his hand at writing while living off the earnings of his wife, a very successful prostitute in the Pigalle. They had two daughters who would undoubtedly follow in their mother’s footsteps. She told me that most of her brother’s poems were about his hatred for their father and that, with the French economy being in the state it was, it was likely that his teenage daughters would do much better selling their bodies than trying to sell the kind of poetry their father was churning out. The bitter irony was that both girls were artistically inclined and dreamt of being famous writers who could one day produce the same kind of hate-filled screeds as their dad.

As we drove along, with the moonlight shining over the cresting waves of the Atlantic, I began to panic. I was on my way to the auspicious residence of a major Brazilian industrialist, and though I was wearing a Brooks Brothers seersucker jacket, bowtie, and preppy white dress shirt, I still didn’t have any pants. Even though Tiffany was totally nude, I didn’t know the mores of the society I was entering. Perhaps before she walked into her childhood home, Tiffany would pull a shift out of the trunk, maybe a servant would come running out to her with a bathing suit and robe so she could jump into a topiary-surrounded pool for a midnight swim, while I stood around awkwardly trying to cover myself. I needed to achieve a level of comfort. I asked Tiffany if there was somewhere we could stop so that I could buy some pants. Tiffany laughed like one of the insouciant vamps in early Italian neorealist cinema. “Your pants are what I like to do without, baby,” Tiffany giggled. Then she let out a whoop and floored the accelerator around a blind curve leading up a mountain pass.