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.