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.