“You’re totally immersed in Eurocentric traditions, with their emphasis on gender and the legacy of domination and submission that accompanies the hegemony of the male or female zygote in the matrilineal and patrilineal traditions. Legendary figures like Margaret Mead and Franz Boas created the mythology of modern sexuality, which found its roots in books like Frazier’s The Golden Bough, a work of great genius, albeit totally wrong-headed, but which showed the growth of the primitive mind to the point where it was able to master figures of speech like synecdoche and metonymy, and thereby enjoy the fruits of an incipient symbolism and even proto-religiosity.” I had the feeling Tiffany was just getting warmed up.
“But there are whole other traditions that received little documentation because they run counter to the accepted creeds of chromosomal sexuality, by which XY genes describe a creature defined as being male, with XX being the significant component in directing the formation of so-called female gonads, in particular the ovaries, to which you recently surreptitiously and slyly alluded by crying out the seemingly innocuous “china.” I know you think I’m crazy and dangerous and frightening, but you are going to hear me out.” In fact, I had no intention of interrupting. Tiffany clearly was in no mood for stichomythic dialogue.
“The fact is that there are cultures and primitive tribes that still exist in the furthest reaches of the Amazonian rain forest, in Sumatra, and to some extent in Borneo, where the dichotomy between males and females has never emerged, and where many so-called men have well-developed mammary glands and have even given birth, in some cases through their anuses. Similarly, there are women with chest hair and large penises, which are really overripe clitorises that hang provocatively from their vaginas. When you tell one of these boys or girls to go fuck themselves, they are literally capable of doing it.”
As she finished her rant, she pulled the knife away from my face. I was no longer having any problems with the painful erection in my tight jeans. When I reached down, I was shocked to discover that my penis was nowhere to be found. My prick had made a hasty retreat, squeezing itself up inside of me like a guerilla fighter camouflaging himself in the brush to avoid becoming a target. I checked in my pocket for some reality, which I knew I was going to need if I wanted to emerge from this situation in one piece.
For someone like Tiffany, the penis holds no captive value, and I’m sure she would have thought nothing of performing an emergency penectomy if I didn’t show proper appreciation for her services. I have come to regard almost everything that happens in human life as a form of therapy, and the present encounter with Tiffany was no exception. Tiffany was helping me work through a deep fear of castration, so when I left her at the top of the stairs, I gave her a nice tip in addition to the tidy sum—$100 worth of reality—that was her standard rate. For a transgender PhD anthropologist, Tiffany had a natural entrepreneurial sense of the value of her unique services.
I had gone through a painful process of awareness that was also fraught with a great deal of physical danger, but the evolution of human consciousness always comes at a cost. The paleontologist Stephen J. Gould had shown that fossil records did not show a rational, steady process leading from quadrupeds to bipeds to prehensility and tool making. For a while, I was dating a Tiffany who had acquired post-graduate credits in anthropology at the New School, and besides the boners she gave me, she had also inspired me to bone up on the latest developments in evolution.
I should have been working through my issues with China instead of dallying with a mutant creature whose attributes were better consigned to the x-rated exhibits at the Museum of Sex. I had justified my little deviation as an attempt to deal with one of my psychosexual idiosyncrasies, and also as research into an unfamiliar realm, the ignorance of which I felt was an ellipsis in my sexual education. But it was now clear to me that it was time to return to my primary objective.
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.