Seven Days in Rio. Francis Levy

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