I hadn’t had a chance to really discover the world of Uva, but as I started getting my bearings again, I realized that the interior was designed to look like the inside of a uterus. I had once seen laparoscopic photos of the inside of the female procreative system, so there was no doubt as to the inspiration for the club’s décor, with its pinkish theme interrupted by striations of white. I realized the whole atmosphere was just like a gynecologist’s office, where women remove their underwear before climbing into the stirrups for an exam. It was the first time I’d been to a sex club with such a medical theme. If I’d been qualified, which I obviously wasn’t, I would have written a paper on it for The New England Journal of Medicine. There was even one area that I thought might actually be an on-premise gynecological practice. A woman with her legs spread and raised on something that looked very much like an examination table was attended to by a long line of men who performed cunnilingus on her after they had given her both vaginal and rectal exams, throwing their used rubber gloves in a huge recycling bin when they were finished. It reminded me of the old Mardi Gras Saturday mornings at the Harmony Burlesque in Times Square back in the ’70s, when New York was both literally and metaphorically a wide open city. I would have joined the long line of men who were treating Crystal’s pudenda as if it were an ice cream cone if I hadn’t been so in love with Brittany. My love was actually clouding my ability to take an objective view of my surroundings. What I saw was a succession of sated diners, relaxing together in a huge living room, as the men feasted on pussy and the women seemed to enjoy a spiritual experience that would eventually enable their souls to transcend the limitations of the flesh.
I knew I had to keep my wits about me, but every time I said to myself, You almost had a fantastic lay and now it’s time to get back to your China, I thought of Brittany’s magnificent ass. I wanted to kiss it and hold it. If Brittany had proposed an arrangement whereby she sat on my face indefinitely in exchange for a certain amount of reality, I might have agreed. At one point, wandering into one of the more infernal areas of “Les Caves,” which reminded me of Manhattan’s infamous Hellfire Club, I came across a whole room of men with beautiful Brittanys and Crystals sitting on their faces. These fellows were acting out what I only dreamt of, which was to seek oblivion in the perfect ass of an adored whore. In fact, many of these men looked like wastrels in an opium den, as though they had decided to take a life-altering voyage from which they had little interest in returning. I contemplated the strength of the dollar and wondered how much reality it would take to have Brittany sit on my face for the remainder of my stay in Rio. But for the moment, Uva had exceeded my wildest dreams and was far beyond anything I had hoped to find at The Gringo. If it weren’t for the ongoing repairs at The Gringo, I never would have discovered Uva, Brittany, and the whole world of renegade Tiffanys who, with their rebellious attitudes and untamed beards, reminded me of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, although in this case the beards were between their legs. But would I ever be able to extricate myself from the thrall of desire that had overwhelmed me and get back to my dream of building a healthy and loving relationship, either with my China or a real whore?
Reluctantly, I decided it was time to take my leave of Uva. I had no illusion that Brittany would follow me, since I’d lost her long ago as I wandered “Les Caves,” where, in addition to face-sitting, vaginal examination, and intercourse, Uva’s many patrons were doused with urine, spanked, slapped, placed on the rack, and in one case fucked in the ass by a beautiful Crystal wearing a strap-on. As I came up the cellar steps, emerging from the darkness into the moonlight of the ancient streets, I again encountered the toothless old Charon who had led me to this inferno of desire.
The old man greeted me like a long-lost friend and made it plain that he had been waiting for me and expected compensation for all his efforts on my behalf.
“Where’s my thousand dollars?” He spoke the line, which he had undoubtedly lifted from some American gangster film, with an almost perfect Brooklyn accent.
Having paid the wages of sin, I started to walk away. But I questioned why I was even leaving. I had waited this long for pleasure, and now that I’d found it, I wondered if it was simply my childhood fear of asphyxiation that was forcing me to let it slip through my fingers. Nothing was making sense to me, and the prospect of returning to room 1269 to stare into China’s vagina while she watched her soccer championships, with the eventual goal of understanding my personality, didn’t seem half as enticing as lying in one of Uva’s caves with Brittany’s beautiful ass in my face. The one similarity with analysis, of course, would be the prone position, although the highly verbal nature of the analytic relationship makes face-smothering counterproductive.
Nevertheless, I began making my way back toward the Copacabana, where some sort of squall seemed to be brewing. The narrow streets gave way to large boulevards, and my obsessive desire turned into a feeling of relief. I had been to hell — a very nice part of hell, but hell nonetheless — and I’d returned to civilization from the infernal regions where sinners burned in the eternity of their unruly desires. Even though I still couldn’t shake the conviction that if I weren’t so afraid of death I would have given up my last ounce of reality to have Brittany sit on my face forever, I was now beginning to get a toehold on my old life of trying to create a real relationship with a prostitute. I couldn’t wait to tell China everything that had happened to me, though I was painfully aware that our first session would be over even before I had a chance to get through a fraction of my story. Part of the problem was that I was partial to the slow process of free-associating, abreacting, and describing my dreams. Even in a normal session, by the time I had done all of these things, I would have used up my time. With China, I’d had particular difficulty trying to discuss any of my adventures with the Tiffanys I’d met in Rio. I ended up trying to rehash what I hadn’t finished in the previous session, and it could take five or six sessions to get across a minor bit of biography, figuring in the awkward silences with which each session began. At the end of a session, China would inevitably cut me off by saying, “We’ll continue next time,” at which point I would pause awkwardly to savor a moment of humiliation at being interrupted in the act of expressing an emotion of earth-shattering import. By mutual agreement, I would get up to leave her suite, pause ten seconds, ring the bell, and start it all over again. Having so many sessions in close proximity, we both felt it was best to go through the formality of initiating a new session after a token intermission. It was the cross we had to bear, but it somehow made sense to both of us.
My past analyses were generally slow-going affairs that took place over many years, so the notion that I could have a complete analysis with China in three days, leaving time for the termination process, seemed at first impossible. But I began to look at the analysis with China as one of those life-changing experiences, like climbing Mount Everest or attempting an Iron Man triathlon, in which the human mind is radically altered in a short period of time. Not only would I henceforth look at life totally differently, my view of everything that had happened to me in the past would be shaped by the intense interaction that was taking place as I ogled China’s vagina while she shifted in her seat and cheered for her favorite soccer teams. What was essentially going on in the hotel room was a form of shock therapy, in which I came and went so many times that I eventually started to come to grips with my core issue — separation anxiety. Actually, I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with the therapeutic approach that China was practicing, since I had once employed it on my dog. Years before, I’d had a basset hound who started to howl every time I left the house. Due to the complaining of my neighbors, I was forced to hire a dog therapist, who diagnosed Hubert’s problem as separation anxiety, with the treatment involving the same coming and going that China was applying in my case. Of course, there was more to our analysis than the animal psychology used on my dog. B.F. Skinner notwithstanding, China was plainly interested in behavior modification only to the extent that it helped me to understand the deeper sources of my neurosis.