What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (15 page)

But I would. You just can’t plan these things.

“Brazilians Skip Second and Steal Third”

I have taken a lot of trips that changed me, that taught me things about myself or the world.
Profound
things.

Nothing profound happened in Brazil.

Brazil was just freaking
fun.
All id, as deep as a puddle. A (married) friend recently described his trip to Brazil thusly:

“You’d be sitting on the beach, and you’d spot the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen. But because the beach was crowded, she’d keep getting blocked … 
by the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen.
”

I’m struggling with whether or not to tell some of the
tales from Brazil. I’ve got images of fathers-in-law and future children reading them, people I would not normally tell. But you know what? If I were a man, I would tell these tales without fear of slut-shaming. These escapades would be laughed off as good old-fashioned oat sowing were I not of the fairer sex, and so I’m going to plow ahead and tell the story of my two Brazilian boyfriends.

They were two of the most beautiful men I have ever seen.

I
went to Brazil with my cousin Emma, and we met up with one of the expats from Buenos Aires—the American named Kate. Now, let’s talk about Argentina for a moment. It’s very close to Brazil. Adjacent, in fact. And after my first trip to Argentina, I had thought of buying an apartment in Buenos Aires (for less than the cost of my car) and going annually. I was dreaming up an idea for a TV show that I hoped I could shoot in Argentina. I had been ready to move there, at least for a while. And, maybe, re-fall in love with Father Juan once his relationship failed, then make beautiful bilingual babies who said
“Hola, mami
” over
medialunas
every morning before I went off to run a hit show in South America. In my fantasy I also started looking a lot like Penélope Cruz.

And yet I wasn’t even dropping by Argentina this time. It had been so awkward with Juan the year before, and I had learned my lesson about trying to re-create magic. I was afraid to go back. What if it kept getting worse and worse? Maybe the Argentina magic happened as a result
of throwing myself with abandon into a place that was unknown, and I could find the magic again somewhere new.

Brazil.

We started in Rio. You know how all great cities have their important sight-seeing spot? Big Ben in London, the Sydney Opera House? Places of architectural or historic significance that must be seen to have properly “done” the place? Well, in Rio, that must-see spot is Posto Nove, a lifeguard tower on Ipanema Beach. Why is a lifeguard tower the place to see? One reason: the hotness of the people who gather there. Really. This is mentioned in guidebooks.

On Ipanema, different lifeguard towers draw different crowds who gather around them—there are towers for families, gays, dogs, volleyball players, the elderly. Posto Nove—Tower Nine—draws the spectacularly beautiful. And one must remember that the largest percentage of supermodels in the world comes from this region, so a collection of the most spectacularly beautiful of Rio? That’s as extreme a category as a gathering of the most diabetic at the Alabama State Fair.

Apparently Posto Nove became the place to be in 1980 because of a man named Fernando Gabeira. As of this writing, he is the current deputy of Rio and was a former socialist activist/guerilla who, in 1969, helped some fellow revolutionaries kidnap the American ambassador to Brazil. In 1980, he returned to Rio from exile in France and was photographed at Posto Nove in the smallest thong you can imagine. He was a political celebrity and outspoken bisexual, but, more important, he looked great in butt floss, and so thereafter Posto Nove became the place to be for
revolutionaries (which today means bongo players and pot smokers) and hot people.

The ass is king (or queen) of every beach in Brazil, and, regardless of the size or shape, every woman’s swimsuit at Posto Nove was playing hide-and-go-seek up inside its respective tanned, glorious booty. Many of the men were wearing
tsungas
, which are basically man bikini bottoms, and which Brazilians will just go ahead and wear while jogging nearly naked through the city’s business district, their phones and keys shoved in next to their parts. Some men played footvolley, an impossible-looking version of beach volleyball using only one’s feet, which creates the most impressive physiques we have seen anywhere on the planet.

Emma and I quickly yanked our swimsuits up our rears (important to adhere to local customs) and set up chairs with our cameras and our conspicuously white American asses. We took turns sticking our faces in front of each other’s cameras at odd angles, trying to get in photos with these otherworldly-looking people.

“Holy Jesus, get one with him behind me. Quick, he’s turning, he’s turning!”

“Oh my God, look at that one on the other one’s shoulders! Quick! Did you get it?!”

In the same way we’d photographed the giant Christ statue on the hill above town the day before, we snapped shots of the booties, backs, legs, and arms of these frolicking, beautiful people.

“This makes me believe in God way more than that big Christo,” my tiny Catholic cousin proclaimed. We lifted our
caipiriñhas
to the Big Man Upstairs.

After a few days of this highbrow cultural tour of Rio, we flew up to Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and met up with my expat friend Kate. Kate had been living in Buenos Aires for about seven years, and was a smart, quiet girl whose greatest love in life was her dog, Daisy. Daisy had once eaten several of my personal items during a stay with them, and was generally a wild and unpleasant animal who drove everyone besides Kate insane. Daisy’s only redeeming quality came years later, when Kate hired Marco, a very young, very hot
passeaperro
, or dogwalker. He was the only other human in the world who loved Daisy like Kate did, and he eventually became Kate’s much-younger boyfriend. Over the years, he tamed Daisy and Kate tamed him, and eventually she moved Marco in, like an old-timey British gentleman might raise and then marry his ward. The three of them have now been together for years, and Kate is four months pregnant. So she basically nailed it.

Anyway, our trip to Brazil happened before Marco came along, and Daisy the dog was still Kate’s only true love. Leaving Daisy behind was torture for Kate. She pined for Daisy the way you would pine for a lover or a child. She would come back from checking her e-mail in tears because “Daisy” had written her a note about how much she missed her “mommy.” This would upset Kate for an hour or so.

“Daisy said she just stares at my bed all day, wishing I was there,” Kate would say, sniffling about the e-mail her well-meaning dogsitter had not realized would decimate her day. “She sounds really upset. I told her that I miss her, too, but I don’t think it’s going to make her feel any better!”

Emma and I grew to hate that doggy–e-mail–writing dogsitter.

But back to Salvador. The three of us spent a few days in the old city, which is a colorful, crumbling beauty that used to be the capital of Brazil. It was also the port during the slave-trade era, and so Salvador and its environs have the most African influence of any part of Brazil. The food, the way people dance in clubs … it all feels African in the richest, spiciest, and sexiest of ways. There are drums in the street, and half-naked people dancing like it’s Carnival year-round. Big Mamas in white turbans and long, white dresses serve incredible
moquecas
—spicy coconut curried stews—out of pots over open fires, while impossibly muscled men play capoeira on the cobbled stones. We did it all—sambaed, made new friends, received several offers from Bahian men eager to send us home with Bahian babies in our bellies, got some jewelry ripped off our necks at a
favela
street party—and then Kate sent one last e-mail to her dog and we got on a boat to Tinharé Island.

T
inharé is part of a spectacular archipelago in the state of Bahia. The ocean around the islands is sprinkled with floating oyster cafés, and there are far more palm trees on the white sand beaches than people. The islands prohibit cars, so you’ll still see donkeys pulling carts down the beach. When you arrive in Morro de São Paolo, the main town, there are a dozen men in matching golf shirts, all with wheelbarrows painted with the word
TAXI
. You load your bags or groceries or children into these “taxis,”
and the men push them behind you as you hike up the hill, down Main Street (a sandy path between two rows of beachfront restaurants and shops), and across the beach to your
pousada.
You don’t really ever wear shoes. When it’s time for lunch, you walk down the beach until you find a guy with some fish and coconuts, and lie on the sand drinking coconut water while he grills you up some lunch. When it’s time for dinner, you just hike your bikini farther up your ass, and go find a restaurant.

Emma, Kate, and I were having dinner on the beach when my first Brazilian boyfriend walked by. The restaurant featured a band of glistening, fat-free men in
tsungas
playing horns and drums, and they were holding a lot of our attention. The Morro restaurants almost never feature drummers wearing pants or shirts, which really should be in any visitor-outreach literature the region produces.

But despite the drum-beating distractions, I still noticed Cristiano. Appearance-wise he fell directly in my sweet spot, with a white-toothed, naughty smile and the coloring of a conquistador. So when he walked by, he caught my eye, he caught me being caught, and he walked right over. This is an almost exclusively foreign phenomenon for me, this summoning strange men with my eyes. Back at home, I’m shy and sort of terrible at
come-hither
eye contact. One time I was walking through a bar in Los Angeles thinking I was shooting some pretty sexy looks all around, and a woman stopped me with a hand on my shoulder:

“Are you all right?” the stranger asked. “You look like you’re going to cry.”

So I’m not so good at sexy face. Kristin-Adjacent, however, is pretty great at it.

So back to Cristiano. A couple of years earlier, my old crush Ferris Bueller took a posse of people to Rio for New Year’s. He told me that a mysterious phenomenon kept happening: he and our equally charismatic male friends would enter a bar, and quickly round up several gorgeous Brazilian women. Having seen this happen all over the world, I feel confident this is how it went. But in Brazil, something strange would occur. After about twenty minutes of happy drinking and flirting, the women would wander off, meet other men, and, within minutes, make out with them. Night after night my American friends would watch this happen, then finally asked a Brazilian woman why she thought they kept striking out.

“Well, had you kissed the girls before they wandered off?” she asked.

“No, we’d only been talking for a few minutes,” they said.

The Brazilian girl laughed. In Brazil, if a guy hasn’t grabbed you and kissed you within a few minutes, he isn’t interested. That’s why the girls all moved on.

I could not tell this story to Cristiano, because he didn’t speak English. But he still managed to wordlessly confirm that this is indeed how Brazilian men operate. With one addendum: they don’t just kiss you. They run the bases right there in public, minutes after meeting you. And another surprise: they don’t go in order.

Brazilians are not into boobs. That is the conclusion that my travel partners and I came to after several experiences
over the course of our three weeks. As a girl whose boobs have arguably been the star of her physical life, this was a truly foreign experience. Maybe when you live in the country that invented the thong, you spend enough time staring at asses that you forget to look anywhere else. And, as I’ve said, Brazilian asses, and the confidence with which they are paraded, are indeed glorious. How this comes into play for, say, an American girl making out with a Brazilian conquistador in a beach bar is that within about five minutes, his hands leave her face, bypass the next universally accepted playground, and go straight down her pants. Which is just surprising enough to work.

A brief digression into the notion of “bases.” I found being single in my thirties very confusing on a few fronts. How to pace things physically was one of the most perplexing. My mother first introduced me to this conundrum when I was fifteen, and came home unexpectedly to find her and her Mexican-Hungarian boyfriend mid-tussle. After pulling on some clothes, she told me that while I should be waiting until I was older and in love to get physical with boys, she was a grown woman, and so would be exploring some new and exciting things with some new and exciting people. “Grown-ups don’t just hold hands,” is how she summed it up, which went into the pilot I wrote about her. And she was right—grown-ups don’t.

So the dilemma as I saw it was this: as I said earlier, I am not a slut in the United States of America. While Kristin-Adjacent didn’t worry much about curtailing home runs, at home I didn’t want to sleep with everyone I kissed. Maybe I wanted to get to know the guy better first. Maybe
I was dating multiple people, and I find it too emotionally confusing to sleep with more than one person at a time. So I needed to sometimes say no. And yet it felt ridiculous to be a grown woman drawing lines in the sand of her body. “You can touch me here, but not here” felt just too high school. Not what grown-ups do. So, how to balance these two conflicting needs?