Читать книгу Seven Days in Rio - Francis Levy - Страница 8

I went down to the Copacabana on my first night in Rio. I was told that most of the women were prostitutes who would gladly sleep with me for a hundred American dollars. I saw a sexy woman wearing high heels and an abbreviated bikini and decided that there was no sense in hesitating, since from what I’d heard about the lovemaking habits of Brazilians, one would be as talented as the next. I pursed my lips and made purring sounds like a pussycat to get the idea across, but the woman didn’t seem to notice me, even though I was wearing a seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 1818 Collection. There aren’t too many men wearing Brooks Brothers suits (or any suits for that matter) down by the Copacabana, and I would have thought I stood out from the crowd.

I have always found communication between myself and other human beings to be a problem, and often worry that I haven’t succeeded with women where I otherwise might because my words get caught between my teeth. So I just held out my hand to her as she waited for the traffic light to change. “I’m Kenny,” I said. “Do you understand anglais ? I am new to your country and I wanted to introduce myself while also initiating myself into your highly permissive sexual culture. I will put my cards on the table: I’d be glad to engage you to perform sexual acts on me for a fee.”

I don’t speak a word of Portuguese, so for a moment I entertained the idea of simply squeezing her breasts and spanking her very ample and exposed buttocks. But common sense prevailed. I intuitively knew that it wasn’t a good idea to touch the merchandise until we had worked out our fiduciary arrangement.

Even as she walked away from me I was convinced that if I had been more outspoken or demonstrative we might be on our way to a hotel room. Fuck, for instance, is one of those words that crosses cultural and class boundaries. I have said “fuck you” in hundreds of cities around the world, and everyone seems to know what I mean. Whether you’re in Bangkok’s famed Soi Cowboy, San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, or Amsterdam’s Rossebuurt, fuck is as easily understood as the skull and bones. Fuck can be an expression of disgust or of longing. I should have simply asked, “Do you want to fuck?” and then we could have dealt with the logistics.

I had checked into my hotel room at the Copacabana only a few hours earlier. Both the young ladies at the reservations desk were absolutely astonishing. In fact, with their shiny, dark hair pulled tightly back and their ample cleavage adding just the right contrast to the formality of their blue uniforms, I could barely tell one from the other—though I did take note of a nameplate reading “Suzanne” on one of them, pledging to myself that by the end of my stay I would get up enough courage to offer her remuneration for her body. Upon arrival in Brazil, I immediately wanted to have sex with everyone, and by now I was already feeling nostalgic for that first flush of Brazilian pulchritude. I had carefully read the sex blogs, which described the easy familiarity of Brazilian women and the murky line that exists between prostitution and ordinary human interchanges.

I refused to allow the sting of my first encounter to deter me, so I lit off for an establishment called Café Brazil, which I had noticed when I drove up to the hotel. What better place to get into the spirit of a country than a bar named after it? Later on, I told myself, I would seek out the more exotic spots, like Café Erotique. For all I knew, there might be a Café Whore, perhaps even a Café Nympho.

I had heard that although Rio was a paradise teeming with available women, you did have to look out for pickpockets and petty criminals. There were even some rumors about kidnappings by gangs of sexy women who titillated you even as they held you for ransom. But I hadn’t reckoned with the simpler notion of being overcharged. In the great European capitals, American tourists are routinely handed menus with higher prices than what the locals pay. It was only after I had left Café Brazil, having made several clumsy and abortive attempts to wrangle a female escort, that I realized I had paid over $5 for my Diet Coke.

Returning to the hotel empty handed, I decided that it might be easier to simply go to the concierge desk and ask for sex. Come to think of it, it was probably included in my package deal.

“Sim, Senhor Cantor, I can arrange your girl,” the concierge said after I very un-surreptitiously placed a pile of reals in his hand. “And what kind of girl are you looking for?”

“I want a sexy girl. Can you make sure she’s sexy? I want someone with all the best features.” It reminded me of the way my mother ordered fish over the phone: “I want a nice big piece of salmon, not too fatty.”

I congratulated myself on my resourcefulness and headed back to my room to prepare for my first encounter with a Rio whore. I was so overwrought with anticipation that I practically jumped out of my shoes when I heard her knock on my door. She was darkly beautiful, with hair that hung almost to her waist, wearing a tight red cocktail dress. But she was like a New York City cab driver, chattering on her cell phone even as she lifted her skirt to show me her goods, whispering that she wanted the equivalent of $l00. It felt so much like being in a New York cab that I accidentally blurted out “Forty-third and Fifth!” instead of telling her to dance a sexy merengue in the nude. As it turned out, this activity was not on the menu that she had handed me, with its numbered items printed in English and Portuguese. It was a rumpled sheet of paper that was divided into two columns, “Subversive” and “Dominican.” The items under the “Subversive” heading were “shrimping,” “rimming,” “bandage,” and “spanky.” The “Dominican” list was more traditional, and included “fuck,” “blowjob,” “sixty-nine,” “around the world,” “half and half,” and “caning”—this last item seeming rather anomalous and harsh.

I had a beautiful room that overlooked two ten-ton air conditioning units, whose vibration I could feel when I tried to pry open one of the sealed windows to let in some fresh air. I didn’t want to lose the Carnival-like mood that was beginning to infect me, even if I had my doubts about the prospect of making love to somebody who was on the telephone. She was talking loudly and animatedly, all while trying to demonstrate her lovely private parts, and seemed like the kind of person who was perfectly capable of doing two things at once. I gave her a handful of reals.

“Look, Tiffany,” I said, using my pet name for prostitutes, which I’d always thought should be mandated by the UN as an identifier in travel documents for international sex workers. “You’re a gorgeous, wonderful, and special woman. I wanted to pay you a little extra for taking the trouble to perform your services while multi-tasking. But instead, I’m just going to pay you a kill fee so you can get on with your conversation and I can form a more focused relationship with another puta.” I surprised even myself with this about-face, but Tiffany didn’t seem to miss a beat. She continued with her conversation in rapid-fire Portuguese, picked up her things, and walked out as if she had rejected me and not the other way around.

Night was falling and there was an ambitious selection of adult films on pay-per-view. But I was in the sex capital of the world and I didn’t want to resort to experiencing Brazilian life vicariously—at least not yet. I realized that Rio had a rich cultural history and that there were other things to do besides look for prostitutes, but I knew in my heart that I was only interested in sex.

There were probably as many Tiffanys on the beach outside the Copacabana as there were rats in the New York subway system. I just had to locate one who didn’t insist on being plugged into a headset while she was administering fellatio. As I came to the bank of elevators on my floor, I noticed two middle-aged women who I assumed were retired prostitutes. I had imagined that aging whores retired to other cities like São Paulo, which is noted for its efficient mass transit system, so I was sure they were back in Rio for some recreational sex. Their skin was lined and leathery and they looked like they had been ravaged by age, but now they could use what was left of their looks to enjoy sex without having to worry about where the next real was coming from.

Since they were plainly over the hill, I thought they might be able to offer an objective view about where the best hookers could be found in Rio. I was sure they could give me a few tips on how to enjoy the rest of my stay. “Excuse me, ladies, my name is Kenny Cantor and I’m a tourist from Manhattan.”

“Ah, Manhattan,” they both sighed with deep Brazilian accents.

“I take it you are natives of Rio, real Brazilians. Carnival, the Copacabana…”

“Carnival is funny,” the shorter one said. “Samba!” She started to dance with me, pushing me toward the elevator door just as it was opening, so that I lost my balance and almost careened into several hookers who were already in the elevator. The old whores were still laughing as the door shut without our even having had a chance to say goodbye.

I could have propositioned the girls coming down from their assignations, but I employ the same attitude toward prostitutes that I do toward baked goods—get ’em while they’re hot. I had wanted to get to know the two old pros because I was sure they could tell me where all the fresh, young women congregated, where the supply was greater than the demand. I wanted to start my visit with a woman who hadn’t become jaded and stale from overuse. I sincerely hoped that my first experience had been an anomaly and that the prostitutes of Rio were not like New York cabbies, constantly speaking to people in other countries.

With the advent of the Blackberry and the iPhone, it was going to become very difficult to find prostitutes who were free of the multi-tasking that had become a fixture of modern life. The old-fashioned streetwalker was obsolete. Paying for sex was becoming more like a promotional transaction, with the constant incentive to purchase a host of related services. Who knows what would have happened had I asked Tiffany if I could use her phone?

Just as I was beginning to put these thoughts to rest, the concierge of the hotel waved me over to his desk. He was dressed in a tuxedo, high-collared shirt, and bowtie, although his five o’clock shadow made him look like he had recently been making wanton love.

“Sir, it’s the girl you were with. She says she likes you and asks if she can come back up to your room. She is sorry that she had to be on the phone so much, but she promises that if she comes back she won’t take any long-distance calls.”

I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh, of course. Tiffany.” He was nonplussed. He plainly wasn’t familiar with my pet name for prostitutes. I wanted to explain to him that it was a little like the euro, that having a universal name for all sex workers was a form of globalism that facilitated commerce.

“Is she for real?” I asked.

“Yes, for reals,” he misinterpreted. “She’s a working girl, but I can tell she really likes you. I know that girl and she wouldn’t give up her long-distance calls for just anyone.”

I knew there were a million girls who would love to have my reals. Brazil is a land where flesh is cheap, but I was afraid that despite all the possibilities available, I could end up emptyhanded after my first day in Rio, waking up in the morning to an empty bed. I would be like the Buridan’s ass of medieval philosophy, which ended up starving or dying of thirst because it couldn’t decide whether it wanted hay or water. “Send her up,” I told the concierge.

Before I knew it, Tiffany was back in my room guaranteeing in broken English that she only had three more phone calls to make. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and with all my waiting I was now ready for a hot night of lovemaking. I called down to the concierge and told him that I would need Tiffany for the whole night, no matter what the cost. I figured that despite the language barrier, I couldn’t get bored with all the activities—fellatio, nude dancing, doggy style, missionary—I had picked from the menu. I didn’t count on the fact that Tiffany would treat my room like it was her office.

In fact, by the end of the evening Tiffany had so many calls coming in, and was carrying on so much business with swarthy teenaged boys who dropped off packages that looked like everything from stock certificates to hard drugs, that I seriously thought of taking another room just so I could get some sleep. The most interesting part of our evening together was that it was very much like a real relationship. I wanted sex and Tiffany was continually too busy for it. The one time we actually did try to have sexual intercourse in the doggy style that I prefer, she was, from what I could tell, on the phone with a Chinese pharmaceutical company in which she apparently owned a small interest. She shook free of me during a particularly heated exchange with her Chinese counterparts, before I had time to finish. I couldn’t help remarking how the circumstances reflected our new global economy. The only word of Chinese that Tiffany knew was something that sounded like “gong,” and from what I could tell, her counterparts weren’t fluent in Portuguese, so both sides were forced to speak broken English. There had been several news reports about contaminated shipments of the blood thinner Heparin, which was produced in China, and I hoped for Tiffany’s sake that the company she had invested in was not one of those involved.

Besides sex, one of my obsessions is clean air, and I try to engage in sexual acts that don’t release any toxins into the atmosphere. So I was a little bit upset when, amidst all the telephoning, Tiffany pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Never mind that it was a non-smoking room, Tiffany was violating environmental standards that I frankly supported. This was the only moment during our night of thwarted passion that I felt serious tension, despite our differing ideas about the quid pro quo of the hooker/client transaction. It was just a night, but who’s to say that what we were experiencing was not a relationship? Like many couples, we were having a conflict over values, and I didn’t want to tell her (and couldn’t, since I didn’t speak Portuguese) that I was glad the extent of our issues was limited to smoking. Larger questions of religious affiliation or belief in God trip up so many couples. In fact, this is the benefit of the so-called one-night stand (especially when the sex is for hire): you get all the intimacy of a relationship without the side effects.

Tiffany’s negotiations with the Chinese pharmaceutical company continued late into the night, and even though she was kind enough to conduct most of her affairs while sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door closed, I could hear her scream out “O-la!” in disgust at what I supposed was some piece of bad news. The gorgeous sunrise over the Copa was, of course, not visible from my hotel room window, which, beyond the two ten-ton condensing units, faced another bank of hotel rooms whose occupants were also fated to miss the ocean view. I sometimes think that there should be a support group for people who, like myself, are always missing something.

I awakened to find Tiffany snoring softly next to me. We hadn’t negotiated how much of the night would be allotted to torrid sex and how much to sleep. In any case, we didn’t have a chance to complete the one sex act we had begun thanks to the distractions of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. In the morning she slept late, and by the time she got up, I was already coming back from the gym. I returned to find her sitting in front of an enormous breakfast from room service, switching channels between Portuguese versions of the VH1 series “I Love New York” and HBO’s “In Treatment.”

I could have left Tiffany in the room all day. I’m sure she would have been happy to watch television while fielding calls from China, or wherever else she had invested her money. Tiffany was essentially offering phone sex, in that she was always on the phone and didn’t mind occasionally performing sexual acts while she was talking, as long as they didn’t interrupt her conversation. I was actually developing an affection for Tiffany, but knew there were other women to meet in Rio. I wanted to play the field, so I told her she had to leave. I didn’t want to be rude or hurt her feelings, so I just said, “Meine Mutter kommt,” and she got the idea.

Tiffany quickly packed up her things and, as she grabbed the money from my hands, I realized that she was probably annoyed with me because she wouldn’t be leaving the room with her phone fully charged.

Once she was gone, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and returned to the lobby. My concierge friend was no longer there, so I decided I would just go out onto the Copa and try my luck again. I saw several pretty senhoras in the signature swimwear I had come to expect in Rio. From a rational standpoint, the thongs that barely cover Brazilian women’s private parts make complete economic sense—if you want to sell goods, you have to display them. I walked out onto the beach, taking in a deep whiff of the early morning smells of garbage, diesel oil, and sewage that were blowing in from the city. Surely this was paradise.

I felt a little overdressed in my Brooks Brothers seersucker suit and bowtie, but I was hoping I might run into some old-fashioned hookers, the kind who didn’t go in for Brazilian waxing. I like prostitutes with hairy bushes and quaint values, and I was hoping that my formal attire might attract the kind of passionate, fulsome whores who were fixtures in Cuba during the Batista era, when Havana was a wide open city and the renowned Superman was displaying his outsized genitals in the nightclubs.

I passed a tall buxom woman with bleached blond hair who didn’t look like one of the natives at all. “Hi, Tiffany,” I said. She swung around in one quick, brutal movement. From the moment I saw her face, I could see that everything about her was fake. She had huge Botoxed lips that looked like they might explode. Even her nose, and in particular her nostrils, which flared like those of a horse, looked like they had been injected with some substance designed to counteract the sagging of age. She was the female version of Dorian Gray.

I don’t know what I expected. I’m aware there are some Latin women with fair complexions who have the look of tawdry Vegas showgirls, but I was totally taken aback by her accent, which placed her as a native of one of New York’s outer boroughs. If we hadn’t been in Rio, and she hadn’t camouflaged her age with Botox, I would have sworn that she was the grown-up version of a girl I made out with in Kew Gardens twenty-five years back. “How did you know my name?” she said with a nasal twang. “Are you a cop?”

“I thought you were someone else. You look like Tiffany Spears.” As I watched Tiffany walk away, I was going to call out to her. She was walking onto the beach, having forgotten to take off her stiletto heels, and before I could say anything she had gotten stuck in the sand. I noticed her kneeling down to pull her feet out of her shoes and then trying to extricate the shoes themselves, whose heels might as well have been nails.

When I returned to the lobby of the hotel to get my bearings, the concierge waved me over to tell me about a sexy promotional offer. If I changed my return ticket so that I flew back to New York on TAM, the airline of Brazil, I could upgrade the status of my hotel room.

“But I had a roundtrip ticket on Continental.”

“I know, Mr. Cantor.”

“Call me Ken.”

“Okay, Ken. If you change to the TAM flight, you get the room upgrade and you are still saving money. It’s a terrific promotion.”

This concierge’s name was Victor, and we were beginning to have the kind of relationship in which I grow close to someone because they are saving me money.

“Oh my God, there’s the French art critic who fucks everybody!” Victor yelped suddenly.

Victor’s eyes were like radar, helping me to hone in on a sexy woman in platform shoes and gold lamé skirt walking toward one of the elevator banks. I recognized her as the author of several sexually charged memoirs about her life in art. She would have looked just like a hooker if it weren’t for her peasant blouse. I was sure she wasn’t wearing a bra; it was the one thing that beatniks and whores from Rio had in common.

“Go run after her, Ken. She’s very hot. Sometimes she can’t even make it up to her room. If you’re lucky, she might even fuck you in the elevator on the way up. The other day we had to kick her out of the men’s room when she was reaching into the urinals for men’s penises. She’s very hot.”

I dutifully followed her, but I was hesitant because I tend to be more discriminating about my art criticism than I am about my whores, and I was afraid I might find myself in flagrante delicto with someone whose opinions I didn’t cotton to. While I covet the female figure, I don’t care for champions of figuration.

I managed to jump into the elevator right behind her. She was wearing sunglasses, and for a moment I thought she didn’t even notice me, though we had the elevator entirely to ourselves. One of her books was a bestseller about her experiences taking on truckloads of men in the parking lots of museums. Maybe seeing art put her into a heightened state—what some psychoanalysts have termed the Stendhal Syndrome or hyperkulturemia. Apparently she needed to get gangbanged every time she reviewed a show. After five or six floors of her seeming indifference, I began to fear I was the exception, the one man she didn’t feel compelled to use for sexual relief. It was only after we zoomed past the fifteenth floor and my eardrums began to pop that she pulled up her skirt and asked, “Do you want to play with my twat?” in a heavy French accent.

“Oh, you speak English!”

“Yes. So you’ll understand what I mean when I say I want your balls in my mouth.”

I felt embarrassed to say no, but I suddenly realized I had come to Brazil for the prostitution, not to have free sex with a French intellectual. I wanted a Rio whore. When she saw that I was not interested, she hiked her skirt up even higher and started to jerk herself off, which created the requisite degree of excitement in me. For a moment I toyed with the notion of a circle jerk, but I was committed to enjoying the manners and mores of the country I was visiting, and I didn’t want to do in the heart of Rio what I could readily accomplish in an elevator in New York. Before I could make any decisions about how to proceed, the elevator reached my floor and I decided to leave her to her own devices.

I’d fucked street whores all over the world, and whether in Paris, London, Prague, or Dublin, I’d only been with whores who were in it for the money. Only Rio had a reputation for having prostitutes who really enjoyed making love to their customers, and who were capable of forming true relationships, in which money, albeit important, was not the only part of the picture. They often say women marry men for money, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t love them. Of course the prostitutes in Rio wanted to be paid, just like anywhere else, but this wasn’t proof that at some point along the way they couldn’t create a loving relationship, however brief. For every Tiffany there was a john, and, hopefully, a Ken. Now that I was on the verge of being upgraded to more sumptuous digs, I could get down to the real purpose of my visit, which was to find a satisfactory, even ecstatic form of love for hire.

On my way back into the hotel from one of my earlier excursions out to the Copa, I’d noticed busloads of scholarly looking men wearing horn-rimmed glasses, unloading outside the lobby. I later learned that the hotel was hosting an international convention of psychoanalysts, and that many of the events, which were to be held in English, would be open to the public. I have always been interested in psychoanalysis because it deals with two of the things I tend to obsess about: love and work. Maybe attending some of the lectures might be of help as I struggled to find the perfect Tiffany. My interest in psychoanalysis dated from my days as a Scout. I wanted to be an analyst the way some kids want to be rock stars, and I even stood in front of the mirror and had fantasies of being cheered on by the huge crowds that accompanied Freud’s first and only trip to the US, when he gave lectures at Clark University. Even after I became an accountant, I toyed with the idea of being a lay analyst, that is, someone who practices without an MD degree. I was young, and it seemed like a great way to get laid.

Now, as I walked through the lobby, I noticed a chef splitting coconuts with a large machete in front of one of the auditoriums, where a poster advertised that morning’s lecture, “Ego Splitting, Homeopathy and Psychopathy in Adolescent and mid-life Peyronie’s Patients.” The abstract beneath read simply, “The effect of a crooked penis on the male psyche will be explored.” I decided to give it a try.

Walking into the auditorium, I could see a lot of empty seats. The few people in attendance looked more like curious hotel staff than professionals, and I realized that most of the analysts had probably gone to the beach in search of sun and fun. While the presenter, Dr. Arnold Sunshine, was setting up his PowerPoint presentation, a short woman in what looked like a blond wig sat down next to me. She was wearing polka-dot hot pants, a tight halter-top, and heels so high they were feats of structural engineering. Most of the female analysts I had met back in Manhattan had severe-looking cropped hair and wore smock dresses. This being an international conference, I knew that many cultures would be represented, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that the distaff members of the Brazilian analytic establishment dressed like whores. I also wouldn’t have been the least surprised if they had names like Tiffany. The woman in the polka-dot hot pants leaned over and blew in my ear, murmuring something that I didn’t understand. Figuring that it was an important analytic issue having to do with the conference, I motioned her to follow me out to my concierge friend, who would be able to translate.

She repeated to him what she had said to me.

“Uh, the translation is: ‘Getting fucked in my hot cunt drives me crazy,’ ” Victor whispered slyly. I figured she must be a working girl, so I responded politely by saying, “Thank you, Tiffany, but I’m otherwise occupied.”

When I got back to the ballroom, the lights had been turned down and Sunshine’s PowerPoint presentation had begun. On the screen was a picture of a crooked penis.

I noticed that the audience, though small, seemed intent on Sunshine’s lecture. Did they allow themselves to feel any stimulation or to entertain any prurient thoughts of their own, even if as analysts they were supposed to be objective?

After Sunshine had concluded his presentation, there was a little break in which the analysts gathered around a table to have schnecken and coffee. It was just like being in New York. Many stragglers must have come in during the slide show, because I noticed that the crowd had thickened and that there was even some degree of competition for the pastries, which seemed to be one of the main attractions for the hungry analysts.

As I bit into a tasty cinnamon schnecken with raisins, I found myself staring into the eyes of a petite Asian woman whose breasts spilled out of her tight blouse. She was wearing highheeled platform shoes and a short skirt.

“Hi, Tiffany,” I blurted. “I’m Kenny Cantor from New York.” I knew that Brazilians were a mixed race, made up of Portuguese, Spanish, Indian, and sometimes even Asian blood, so it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that she might be a Rio whore, even though she looked Chinese or Japanese.

“Perhaps you are mistaking me for someone else. I’m Dr. Dentata. What institute are you with?”

“Well I’m certifiable, if that’s any help.” Dr. Dentata didn’t seem to get the joke. “I’m a CPA.”

“Oh, a CPA with analytic training, I find that very interesting. I think that more analysts need to take courses in accountancy. I remember that song that Pete Seeger used to sing: “Well, Doctor Freud, oh Doctor Freud/ How we wish you had been differently employed/ But the set of circumstances/ Still enhances the finances/ Of the followers of Doctor Sigmund Freud.”

I don’t think Dr. Dentata realized how loudly she was singing, because a crowd had gathered around her, several of them humming along to the tune. I half expected one of them to pull out a Fender and start playing the bass line.

After her impromptu concert, Dr. Dentata held out her hand. “Well it was nice talking to you,” she said.

“You too, Dr. Dentata.”

“Just call me China.”

“China Dentata, that sounds like Vagina Dentata, a syndrome in which the vagina is deemed to have teeth, which then turn it into an agent of castration.”

“Yes, everyone says that. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. My grandparents were among the Japanese who were put in internment camps during the war, but that doesn’t explain why my parents didn’t name me something more common, like Yoko. They were ’60s hippies who took acid and practiced free love, and they were into giving their children unusual names. My father was Dick and they named my brother Moby.”

“Well, it was nice to meet you. Goodbye, China.” I realized that she was an analyst, and that analysts usually don’t have sex with their patients unless they are suffering from very severe counter-transference. But I wasn’t her patient—yet.

Despite my childhood fantasies, it may seem odd that a CPA would know so much about psychoanalysis, but I’m from New York, and all educated New Yorkers are experts in psychoanalysis, whether they undergo treatment or not. H. Rap Brown once said violence is as American as cherry pie. Well psychoanalysis is as New York as Pakistani cab drivers. Many German and Viennese analysts who had been refugees from the Nazis settled in Manhattan, which sports as many psychoanalytic institutes as England has soccer teams. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute is the Manchester United of the lot. Growing up in Manhattan in a family with aspirations to be culturally au courant , I amassed statistics about psychoanalytic stars like A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernst Kris, and Phyllis Greenacre the way some kids memorized the batting averages of Joe Dimaggio, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. My favorite was the French analyst Janine Chasseguet-smirgel, author of the tome Creativity and Perversion. She was the equivalent of an excellent minor league player, to the extent that her work was only known to the relatively small coterie who collected psychoanalytic memorabilia.

China was carrying one of those quart bottles of Volvic water, which she gulped lasciviously as she entered the central atrium of the hotel. I almost followed her, thinking I might find her turning tricks like so many of the other inhabitants of Rio. I was sure that China was a very good therapist. She was attentive and empathetic, but I was also certain that she could equal if not better her reputation by changing her name to Tiffany and adopting the life of a whore. She had the looks, and every bone in my body told me she had the talent.

Our parting had felt a little like the last scene of Casablanca. There was no plane waiting to take her away from me, there was no heroic resistance leader standing between us, no war, and I wasn’t a hardened American expatriate named Rick. Yet I felt I could hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” playing on the piano in some beat-up North African café. China—the very name created a frisson.

When would I ever see my China again? It didn’t take long to answer the question, as she walked right back into the auditorium, swigging from an even larger bottle of water. I still hadn’t decided what my approach was going to be. If I took it for free, we would be in a real relationship, where raw emotion was the currency. And if I became China’s patient, I would have to put her in the position of employing the transference in an unethical manner. I felt I needed a therapist just to work out the mess I’d gotten myself into.

Unfortunately, I was again deviating from my plan. I was well into my second day in Rio without having enjoyed the abundance that was supposed to be everywhere, if I was to believe the sex tourism guides and online reviews of Rio nightlife. When I had first considered taking my vacation in Rio, I had simply Googled “Rio + prostitution.” The sheer number of results, along with the four-star ratings and exuberant descriptions, had played a large role in my booking a flight.

But all was not lost. Even though I hadn’t yet gotten what I came for, the psychoanalytic conference being held at the hotel was a welcome, frequently titillating diversion. I had a lump in my throat as I read the notices for the afternoon panels: “The Oldest Profession: the Neuro-Anatomy of Streetwalking” and “Working Girls: Parallels in Phone Sex and Telephone Analysis.”

Now is probably as good a time as any to talk about how a nice Jewish boy like me came to spend most of his adult life with prostitutes. It was really very simple. From an early age, I knew there was something wrong with me. I didn’t have any friends, and no girls seemed to like me. But the sluttiest girl in my high school class, Janet Borges, agreed to go to the senior prom with me. With thick lips, smudged from countless make-out sessions, and huge tits, she was crudely sexy. She always wore a short cheerleader skirt with no underpants, even though she wasn’t a cheerleader. Most of the members of the school’s varsity football team had fucked her, and no one considered her respectable prom material. I purchased the usual corsage, which was the price I had to pay for my first fuck in life.

We started to see each other the summer of my senior year, before I started college, and one night I jokingly offered her money for sex, which she unjokingly took, saying, “I never thought you would ask.” Besides the fact that our sex, which had been tentative up until then, took off into a whole new stratosphere, it was the beginning of her career as whore and mine as a john.

By my freshman year in college, Janet was fully set up in the business, and so successful that I realized my heart would be broken unless I started to play the field and see other whores. My first analysis in my twenties had enabled me to break with my mother. My father was a business type, and my mother and I had a confidant relationship in which she talked to me about things that my father wasn’t interested in, like emotions and art. The analysis had gotten me to the point of addressing my early inclination to pay for sex. Had I continued, I might have been able to form a relationship with a woman that wasn’t a monetary transaction. I had made the transition from the mother/confidant to the mother/whore figure, which was a great leap, but I was aware there were other feelings toward women that had yet to be added to the palette.

I was an ambitious young man, and shortly after I graduated from college I had already drummed up enough business to support a Midtown accountancy office manned by a staff of loyal employees. Who had the time or the money to see an analyst four days a week? But in the end, this is precisely what I would do, as I returned to analysis repeatedly over the years. However, the Rio conference was enabling me to view analysis from a different perspective. I had always been limited to the patient’s point of view, which is mostly prone. But here I was seeing analysts eye-to-eye, watching them as they exchanged valuable insights with each other. I was seeing the kind of people they really were.

If I had met China in a professional situation, in which she demonstrated analytic neutrality, she would simply have been a very good-looking Asian piece of ass. At worst, I might have tried to look up her skirt during my initial intake. I would have stared at her platform heels and wondered to myself what kind of an analyst wears shoes like that? I probably would have thought something like I bet she’s a really good fuck. I might even have communicated these thoughts to her in the course of a session, and we would have dealt with it as part of the transference.

My last analyst, Sam Johnson, was a short man who had such thick stubble that he always looked unshaven, though he was very proper. He wore industrial grade, rubber-soled shoes, blue blazers and gray pants, and rarely said anything. I frequently communicated to him my perception that he was a virgin whom no woman would ever go near. I discovered on the Internet that he was married and had children, but I still had fantasies about his private life. My previous analytic work had gotten me used to indulging in fantasy and free-association, even when I wasn’t in treatment. For instance, I was sure that even if Victor the concierge seemed like a normal male, he was a secret cross-dresser who hid his penis between his legs when he was putting on women’s panties.

But getting back to China, I had gone so far as to imagine the moment in our first consultation when she would suggest I move to the couch. Was I to take this as an invitation to classic Freudian analysis, or to sex? Maybe her chaise longue was little more than a proverbial casting couch.

My reverie about China was interrupted when I saw Dr. Sunshine return to the auditorium. He was surrounded by a coterie of followers, bearded men in wool suits who looked like they had stepped out of turn-of-the-century Vienna and could easily have been members of Freud’s inner circle. I even overheard some conversations in what sounded like German, though many New York analysts talk so quickly and enigmatically that it is often difficult to tell what language they’re speaking. I wanted to introduce myself to Sunshine, but as he walked by I had a Tourettic moment, emitting a muffled, involuntary cry of “Daddy!”

It turned out that Sunshine was a charismatic and controversial figure whose attempts to broaden the audience for Freud’s insights had included showing ’70s porn films, with famous stars like John Holmes, Harry Reems, and Linda Lovelace, as illustrations of his theories of narcissism and idealization. Sunshine had been brought up in an orthodox Jewish family in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. His parents had actually been members of the Satmar sect, led by Moses Teitelbaum and his feuding sons, Aaron and Zalman. Sunshine was not a practicing Jew, but he was no stranger to feuds. The once close relationship with his student David Moldauer had fractured over the fundamental aim and purpose of using pornographic films to illustrate his theories, mirroring the famous split between Freud and his Aryan disciple, Jung. (Sunshine’s famous maxim, “We aim to please, will you aim too, please?” displayed above the toilet in his office bathroom, was another bone of contention between the two men).

The position once occupied by Moldauer had been taken over by someone named Herbert Schmucker. Schmucker had a whole theory of Oedipal rivalry that argued it was best to be as blatant about it as possible. This explained the fact that he named his institute after himself instead of after his esteemed mentor, Sunshine, and favored a porn film entitled Three Some, in which a physically appealing couple invite their sad-sack friend to watch them having sex, while never allowing him to join in. Schmucker had argued on more than one occasion that sexual satisfaction derives from a feeling of superiority in getting something that someone else doesn’t have. The guilt from such feelings of rivalry, he believed, is what any good analysis should attempt to alleviate. There were all kinds of paradoxes in analysis. For instance, one of the most famous centers for the study of analysis in Manhattan is the Karen Horney Clinic, but what kind of inducement is a name like that? How could Karen Horney help me? Why wouldn’t I go to a place honoring someone named Karen Un-Horney, where the name at least held out a hope?

Sunshine and Schmucker were like an argumentative married couple. Over the remainder of my stay in Rio, I would frequently find them sniping at each other in the halls, and in one case overheard a furious battle in which Sunshine actually brought up the naming of Schmucker’s institute, telling Schmucker in a petulant voice that could be heard throughout the hotel lobby, “You’re behaving like you just got off the boat. You’re behaving just like a schmuck!” Indeed, I learned from Wikipedia that Schmucker’s parents had been humble German immigrants, and that Schmucker had grown up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Schmucker’s parents had occupied a tenement on 86th Street above the Old Heidelberg restaurant. But the old German neighborhood was in the same district as the silk-stocking PS 6 (which I would attend years later) and Schmucker was able to get an education that allowed him to rise out of his immigrant roots, attend medical school at NYU, and eventually become a prominent psychoanalyst.

China had been close-lipped when Sunshine had come up in our conversation, but she spoke with great reverence about Schmucker, whom she plainly regarded as one of the gods of Olympus. It was clear from her attitude that Sunshine had become a mere footnote in the arc of Schmucker’s career.

I returned to the lobby to look for Victor the concierge. He hadn’t been much help, but it has always been my philosophy that it’s good to do the same thing again and again even if it fails to produce results. I remember my analyst telling me that there are people who in fact unconsciously want to bring about the outcomes they so often complain about. There is even a word for it in the psychoanalytic literature: parapraxis.

I was thrown into a tailspin when I arrived at the concierge desk to find that Victor wasn’t there. In his place was a small, dark, unshaven man with the face of a rodent. I immediately dubbed him Rat Man, after Freud’s famous patient. His nametag read, “Adolphe.” When I asked when Victor was coming back, Adolphe was evasive. He pulled the language card, pretending he didn’t understand what I was saying. As far as Adolphe was concerned, he was the concierge now and Victor didn’t exist anymore. I felt very much the way I did years before when my analyst got sick and set me up with a dentist named Dr. Klein, a good friend of his who had had analytic training, but for some reason had chosen to become a dentist instead. For months I went to Klein’s office on 57th Street, using his dental chair as an analytic couch. As then, I dreaded having to tell my story all over again, especially to someone like Adolphe, who didn’t seem to be the kind of person with whom I could be comfortable expressing my desires. In the middle of this awkwardness, Schmucker appeared. He seemed already to know Adolphe well.

“Ah yes, Dr. Schmucker, the patient is waiting in your room.” There was something oddly unsubtle about Adolphe. The way he addressed Schmucker made it apparent that the word “patient” was a euphemism for what in all likelihood was a Tiffany.

I have always been a kind of groupie when it comes to mental health professionals, so I impulsively put out my hand as Schmucker turned in my direction. When I said, “I’m Kenny Cantor from New York and I’ve really been enjoying your conference—especially the films,” he gave me a withering look that communicated exactly how irrelevant I was to him. I could see he was perspiring profusely, so I figured he was already somewhat worked up about the “patient” who was waiting for him in his room.

“So, Adolphe, give me the real run-down on what happened to Victor,” I said, after Schmucker had hustled off to his assignation. “Did they can him?”

“All major canning companies in Brazil are in the São Paulo area.”

“No, can is an American expression that means fire. You ‘fire’ someone when you remove him from his job and tell him he can’t work for you anymore. You can also say a senhora has a nice ‘can.’ ”

Adolphe responded with an expression that was equal parts confusion and bemusement. I pointed to a cream-colored Tiffany who looked like she was just coming on for her evening shift and seemed to have a condition, more common in Africa than Brazil, called steatopygia, which is a distended rear end. It was a deformity, but it illustrated my point.

“For instance that senhora with the tight pants has quite a can,” I said.

“One hundred dollars American,” Adolphe shot back.

“I admire her extension, which reminds me of a guest house attached to a larger estate. But I’m looking for your normal sexy Brazilian whore with a nice butt. I’m all for helping people with their troubles, but one thing I learned in my years of therapy is that you don’t have sex with someone because you feel sorry for them. Anyway, it’s a big world out there and there is always going to be some john who likes the chick with overly large this or that or none at all. I once heard of a prostitute who had a vagina with no hole, and she had plenty of customers, believe it or not. She’d had some kind of industrial accident before she became a working girl, and all her orifices had to be put in different places. I think she peed from her belly button and went to a gynecologist when she had a toothache. I know it sounds totally unbelievable, but apparently there was a harmonious logic to her whole body. So, Adolphe, tell me, where are all the good Tiffanys?”

I leaned over conspiratorially. Adolphe looked in both directions to see if anyone was listening and whispered, “Victor is now the bartender at The Café Gringo. It’s very dark in there, but he will get you nice girls.”

I was so happy that Victor had found gainful employment that I stopped feeling horny and frustrated for a moment, although when I thought of Herbert Schmucker making passionate love to a Tiffany in his room, I was filled with penis envy.

I was sure I saw the face of an Asian woman in a crowd of people waiting for the elevators at the end of the lobby, and my heart skipped a beat thinking it might be China. It was at that point that I understood something that neuroscientists have known for years: our emotions are often ahead of our thoughts. I was more involved with China than I could have possibly realized, and was already feeling troubled by the prospective complexities we would face. I have looked into the eyes of dogs and cats, and I know there is a tendency to anthropomorphize them, to believe that somehow they are thinking about you. China almost had the opposite effect on me. When I’d looked into her eyes I saw a hungry animal with only a veneer of culture, consciousness, and sensibility. I had the urge to dart across the lobby, if only to stand next to her in the elevator, if only to feel the warmth of her body close to mine. I seethed with jealousy when I imagined that the patient waiting for Schmucker in his room was not a Tiffany at all, but China Dentata. As it happened, the Asian woman I had spotted across the lobby was indeed China—en route, I assumed in my jealous delirium, to Schmucker’s room. Analysis was just like every other profession—good-looking women routinely fucked their way to the top.

But I stopped myself before I could go any further. If China and Schmucker were an item, standing next to her in the elevator and wishing her a nice afternoon would get me nowhere, unless I had some chloroform and a pair of handcuffs. Having neither, I elected to continue with my original plan and head off to The Gringo to consult with Victor. There was no sense in chasing windmills. I realized I was coming deathly close to having my seven days in Rio turn into nothing more than my other 358 days in New York, where all my interactions with Tiffanys were fraught with anxiety.

My heart was in my throat as the doors opening onto the Copa swished open. It was late afternoon. I imagined China in the arms of Schmucker, their writhing bodies in an almost perfect psychoanalytic embrace, in which love and work, like the stars in a John Donne poem, were “perfectly conjoined.” I started mentally undressing the women who now paraded themselves before me. I had been thinking I ought to get one of those sandwich boards they use to shill discount suits in Manhattan. Mine would say, “American with Reality Seeks Available Girls.” Not everyone would get it, but enough so that I would enhance my selection. As it was, I noticed so many Tiffanys in tiny thongs that I didn’t know which one to pick first.

I assumed that as an attractive, partially psychoanalyzed American with reals, every Tiffany would be after me. But it was no use even trying. It was a situation that is known in psychoanalytic literature as a double bind, in which the patient gets conflicting messages. If I wanted to get attention I had to advertise it, but if I advertised it I would get more propositions than I could handle. Besides, I had begun to develop an indifference toward the Rio girls, which, even if it was manufactured in my head, was becoming stronger by the minute. The fact that I couldn’t get my first Tiffany off the phone with her Chinese clients probably didn’t help matters. I have learned that experiences of this kind can traumatize a patient, or a john, and shape his view of the world.

I turned to a Tiffany standing to my right and asked, “Senhora, do you know a place called The Gringo?” She was gorgeous, and even though I knew her body was for sale, I figured she was like one of those Michelin five-star restaurants where you have to make a reservation years in advance. She had olive-colored skin, dark braided hair, and a perfect chin. She was a “10.” In fact she looked like a Latin version of the character Bo Derek played in the movie. Her breasts stood perfectly motionless, like soldiers at attention. I decided to take a businesslike attitude, holding out my hand and introducing myself.

“By the way, Tiffany, I’m Ken Cantor.” It turned out she spoke very good English, but I can’t remember what she said, since I was too flabbergasted by the fact that someone so spectacularly beautiful was talking to me. This Tiffany was no mere whore. She was a call girl, an escort, a courtesan. Whatever the highest rank one can give to someone who sells her body, she deserved it.

Tiffany looked me up and down like she was inspecting a new car. Deep inside I maintained the hope that she would say, “You don’t need to go to The Gringo. Why don’t you come back to my apartment?” Though there are lots of Tiffanys in Rio, the kind of Tiffany I was looking at was a rarity, and could surely command top dollar, or real, as was the case. For her it was always a seller’s market. I was sure that she occupied a lavish condo with a balcony overlooking the Copacabana. She was not a whore who worked out of one of those dingy hotel rooms with hourly rates.

“Oh yes, I am quite familiar with The Gringo,” she said with a smile. It was only when I noticed her voice was a little lower than I expected, and saw that she had an Adam’s apple, that I realized she was a man, one of the legion of beautiful pre-op transsexuals who are a famous feature of Rio nightlife.

Even though Tiffany was more beautiful than any woman I had ever encountered, I didn’t need something stiff and hard when that’s what I already had. It’s like meeting someone who thinks just the way you do. At first you get excited about finding a like mind, then boredom sets in as you anticipate every word they say. It’s what’s known as prolepsis in the world of rhetoric, and I hadn’t flown five thousand miles to experience an evening of it in phallic form.

It turned out The Gringo was located across the road that ran along the Copacabana, in a warren of side streets that were plastered with flashing neon signs shaped in the forms of palm trees and half-naked females. The streets were lined with old hotels whose doorways were filled with bored-looking Tiffanys. For a moment, like Orpheus, I had the desire to turn back for my Eurydice. Looking around, I was suddenly filled with premonitions of disaster, and this last Tiffany’s Adam’s apple had a reassuring appeal. She was just one of the guys, after all. I imagined what it would be like to massage her breasts. At the same time, I had disturbing thoughts about her penis. People solicited pre-ops because they presented a buffet of sexual pleasures. If you had homosexual inclinations or were AC/DC, you got the pleasure of being able to indulge all of your desires at the same time. Taking a democratic point of view, I asked myself, “Why not?” Before long I was imagining what it would be like to put Tiffany’s big cock in my mouth or to have her hardened nipples gently tickle my back as I felt something hard nudging my ass.

I quickly silenced my deviant thoughts and proceeded into what was apparently one of Rio’s most vice-infested areas, an area where, I was told, everything was permitted, making the old Havana of the ’50s, with its cock-wielding Superman and naked sex clubs, look like Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. In short, I was headed into an area into which only the most intrepid sex traveler dared to venture.

I’d been so busy dealing with the analytic convention and dismantling the business office that the first Tiffany had set up in my hotel room (in fact I was still fielding calls from China and a number of so-called “emerging markets” where she’d been involved in venture capital deals, including a sub-prime mortgage situation in Uzbekistan), I hadn’t had time to lie back and sip on a caipirinha. Everywhere I went I saw waiters carrying around exotic drinks with colorful little umbrellas. I knew that if I got a little tipsy I could relax, and in all likelihood find myself surrounded by beautiful Tiffanys before I knew it. I decided that before I got to The Gringo I would stop in the first reasonablelooking bar and have a few drinks to loosen up.

The first place I found was an American bar called The New York Yankees Club House, which broadcast Yankees games on cable. It was midwinter in America and not the time for a Yankees game, but the place looked just like one of those classic Irish taverns, with old men sitting cross-legged on benches, staring up at a television and not saying a word to each other.

“What’ll ya have, Mack,” the bartender said as I sat down. This place was the real McCoy. They sold “crisps,” cheap bags of Planters Peanuts, and hard-boiled eggs, and they had Harp and Guinness on tap. The whole place smelled of urine. I noticed that even though all the regulars looked like Irish doormen out of central casting, the bartender himself, despite his thick Bronx accent, appeared to be a Rio native—dark, slim, and handsome—and not the kind of sallow-faced, beer-bellied creature I was likely to find at a similar establishment in Manhattan.

When I got closer to the television, I noticed that everyone in the bar was watching Bob Hope perform for troops on some aircraft carrier. I quickly surmised that they were watching a tape of one of Hope’s overseas performances during the Vietnam War. Bob Hope alternated on the television with some equally musty broadcasts of Yankees games, featuring the sportscaster Phil Rizzuto. I knew this was one place where I wasn’t likely to run into any head-turning Tiffanys, but I experienced a moment of homesickness. Back in New York, when I wasn’t seeing prostitutes, I enjoyed getting inebriated all by myself, and this was just the kind of place, with cold, inexpensive beer, that I liked to frequent. In fact, I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I might end up spending the rest of my time in Rio in this nostalgic dump.

One of the predictable things about Irish bars for someone like me is that the bartender and the patrons always glare suspiciously at newcomers, and I knew that whenever I got up from my stool to take a piss, someone would say perceptive things about me like, “Who the bloody feck is that?” There were a couple of portly fellows with reddened cheeks who looked like retired New York City cops. I figured most of the Irish-doorman types must have been employed in a section of Rio where there were the same kind of elegant pre-war high-rises you find along Park Avenue. This was just the sort of place that you could find in what was left of old Yorkville, with its tenements and momand-pop grocery stores.

As I would later learn, most of the Irish doormen at The Club House had been brought down by a Jewish developer who had built several high-rises to cater to the needs of the growing American expatriate community in Rio. He’d felt that the extra New York touch would make his buildings competitive with the towers that had been constructed by Brazilian developers going after the same market.

I’m the kind of guy who can’t stop thinking about the one woman who won’t talk to him at a party. Instead of moving on when I feel I’m not wanted, I go back for more. So instead of having a beer or two and proceeding on to The Gringo, I set out to win acceptance at The Club House. I was on my third boilermaker when I noticed the other men at the bar swigging down rye with beer chasers. Figuring it would boost my status in the bar, I bought everybody a round. As I started to get inebriated, I began waxing about midnight mass at St Patrick’s, even though I’m Jewish. I couldn’t stop myself from dropping the name of every Irish-sounding person I knew—O‘Kelly, O’Reilly, O’Rourke—while using words like “communion” and “christening” whenever I bought someone a round. My favorite line was, “I’ll never forget the time Kennedy went to mass three sheets to the wind. He took the wine with the wafer, but he was wobbling like a ship in a storm…”

In place of Tiffanys, there were just a few pasty-faced sluts with the albinism that comes from the kind of inbreeding that went on in the tight-knit building-services community in Rio. No one can afford a decent Tiffany on a doorman’s salary.

I was surprised when I stumbled out into the warm Rio night and heard people speaking Portuguese. During my time in The Club House, I was transported back to New York, and with all the blarney and Killarney and blessed virgin this and that, I imagined I would find myself facing a typical Manhattan street scene, with Bangladeshi cabbies honking at each other. In my inebriated state, I thought I might even run into the ghost of the dearly departed Cardinal O’Connor, whose unforgiving face still decorated some of the Irish pubs along Second Avenue.

I had to pull myself together. Finding Tiffanys was now a job, a mission like the Green Berets ferreting out the Taliban in the mountains of Pakistan. But I was hopelessly adrift in a sea of thought. Lost in my reverie, I had wandered far from my hotel into a strange neighborhood with dangerous-looking, toothless Tiffanys. I had heard about the toothless Tiffanys, who were world-famous for their prodigious talents in the art of oral sex. According to my sex guides, there were all kinds of Tiffanys lurking in Rio’s barrios, catering to every imaginable desire, but perhaps it was the danger factor that was causing my procrastination. Many hapless sex tourists had had their wallets snatched from their back pockets on Rio’s infamous “Street of Spankings.” I had to find my way back to the main drag of sex clubs and bars, where the high-class Tiffanys performed the usual gamut of perversions.

My head was spinning from all the alcohol and I had lost my sense of direction. I thought of the French poet Rimbaud, who welcomed disorientation and looked at the “derangement of the senses” as a higher state of mind, a form of transcendence that he urged upon his readers. But I wasn’t looking for poetic inspiration. I didn’t need to expand my consciousness. I had to get back down to earth and get laid.

Maybe if I went back into The Club House, the old salt-of-the-earth types, the Finneys, Flahertys, Kennedys, Kilkennys, and Muldoons, might help me to find my way. Even though their revered Catholic church preached abstention and opposed birth control and pre-marital sex, they surely could understand that I was a man with urges that sometimes resulted in sin. I’m sure my friends at the bar would give me an understanding look and simply tell me to go confess my sins to Father Flynn. I could say a hundred Hail Marys and that would be the end of it. I hadn’t told any of the guys at the bar I was Jewish, and that was obviously the next step in our relationship. I could just see the faces of the Irish doormen of Rio when I confessed that I represented the Judeo in our Judeo-Christian alliance. From what I could glean, they had ambivalent feelings about Arthur Rosenbaum, the Jewish developer who had imported them from New York. Many blamed him for separating them from their friends and families back in Yorkville, so I had no guarantee they would take a kindly attitude toward me when they found out who I really was. Racial profiling might be frowned upon in the States, but it was par for the course in Rio. And in a place like The Club House, the patrons proudly lived by their own rules, honor-bound by an unspoken code of conduct that stretched back to the bogs of Ireland.

Scuba diving had been a passion of mine in the days before I devoted myself to the pastime of pursuing beautiful Tiffanys, and I was even PADI certified. Once, diving with an instructor off the beautiful Bahamian island of Eleuthera, I wasn’t able to adjust to the depth to which we had plunged, and became completely disorientated. My vision started playing tricks on me, and I saw all manner of fantastical hallucinatory sea creatures. This was precisely the sensation I was now experiencing in this strange part of Rio, where I suddenly came upon species of Tiffany I had never seen before. It’s axiomatic that in Rio there are Tiffanys on every corner, but now I was finding wall-eyed Tiffanys, Tiffanys whose bodies were festooned with prosthetic devices, Tiffanys in wheelchairs, blind Tiffanys, Tiffanys who used sign language to bargain. Only this time I couldn’t blame it on nitrogen narcosis.

It all reminded me of a very wealthy friend I once knew who couldn’t tell the difference between his prostitutes and his wives. His wives had married him for his money, and naturally he lavished money on his prostitutes, but generally the whores ended up costing him less than the wives, and were a lot easier to maintain. Eventually, like me, he began to experience some disorientation, mistaking his wives for hookers and his hookers for wives. It’s unclear whether this had any bearing on his tragic demise. He was a licensed flier and died in a freak accident when he lost his bearings during a routine non-instrument landing with a Piper. Apparently, like a dizzy diver, he couldn’t tell down from up.

“Puta, Puta,” came the cry of a woman with a high trembling voice. “Girls, Girls, Girls, Triple X,” she said in perfect English. I noticed an old lady in a chair who bore a striking resemblance to Susan Sontag, whose obituary I’d read shortly before leaving for Rio. She had Sontag’s striking good looks and the same streak of white in her otherwise jet black hair. I could see that she had once been an attractive Tiffany, just the kind of sexloving Rio girl I was after. I was thinking about how I could ask her where I could find a girl who looked like her, only younger, without insulting her sexuality. I had heard that Brazilian women remain sexually active until very late in life, and one of the sex-tourism sites even advertised that you could have sex with retired Tiffanys for free. The Guinness Book of World Records documents the oldest woman to have had sex as a Brazilian who remained sexually active until she died at 124. She was still having orgasms at 110. Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but Rio was home to the world’s oldest prostitutes.

An intimation of the moon was beginning to appear in the darkening sky, and a solitary street lamp created a scene of desolation that reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting. My mother always told me I was artistic, but she had forced me to choose a secure profession characterized by deadening and repetitive work (her favorite line was, “It’s rewarding to work for remuneration”). Apparently, she wanted me to have the kind of steady income that allowed me to take trips to Rio to run after prostitutes. If I had been a struggling artist, I would never have known as many Tiffanys as I had, and I probably would not have found myself staring up at a sign that read “31 Março Revolução.” With a start, I realized I was on a street that commemorated one of Rio’s most notorious uprisings. Perhaps out of fear, or a need to make a firmer connection with someone who could help me out of the morass I found myself in, I blurted out to the old whore, “Are you by any chance related to Susan Sontag.”

“You mean the one who wrote Against Interpretation?”

“Yes! And Styles of Radical Will, Illness as Metaphor, and Regarding the Pain of Others, not to mention the novel, The Death Kit, and also the movie, Duet for Cannibals. Did you know that she directed Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the bombings?” I knew I was just trying to show off my knowledge, which had never gotten me anywhere and often inspired resentment.

Just as she said, “I lived in the States for many years, but I never became a Sontag fan. I’m a simple woman. I like the kind of art that’s about life. I don’t buy her whole idea about the autonomy of art,” it hit me that I needed more reality. I asked her if there was a cash machine nearby. She told me there was one around the corner, but that I should be careful of the banditos, who kidnapped American tourists and held them for ransom. I had read a gruesome story about an American who had gotten drunk in a Rio brothel and had been kidnapped by a gang. Though he had finally been released, his penis had been cut off because his wife had refused to pay the ransom.

Though it had probably been a long time since she’d earned the name, I knew this old Tiffany was someone I could talk to. One of the tourist guides indicated that the older Tiffanys often gave good hand jobs when they experienced the kind of vaginal dryness that made repeated sexual intercourse too painful. I could ask her for a hand and even pay her for the trouble.

“I’m a traveler who’s become waylaid,” I said holding out a real. “I’m a little like Odysseus. I started out my journey looking for beautiful prostitutes, but I have been experiencing famine amongst plenty. Now I feel like Robinson Crusoe. Except I haven’t been washed up on an island, and consequently have found no Man Friday to show me the way.”