Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

Where all doors had seemed closed to me, in an instant the world was my oyster. The Catwalk was designed like a theater in the round. There was a stage about which phalanxes of naked girls, whose faces were made up to look like pussy cats and whose vaginas looked like beavers lolling in a pond, paraded wantonly every half-hour or so. The atmosphere had the flavor of a disco, circa 1977, which may have explained the marked absence amongst the denizens of waxing or shaving. The grooming, as I would later learn, reflected the segment of Brazilian society that still held on to the all-natural fashion sensibility of a bygone era.

The entire seating area was in shadow, with lots of private crannies, where I noticed figures engaging in a variety of sexual acts. I’d once been in a restaurant in Hong Kong where the room seemed to be swaying like the car on a Ferris wheel, and when I sat down at my table I realized the floor was covered with snakes, which were cooked in little pots in front of the diners. The floor of The Catwalk reminded me of that restaurant, except the snakes were replaced by writhing, naked bodies. I felt dizzy until I realized there was an orgy taking place at my feet. Girls whose heads weren’t bobbing up and down in acts of fellatio were on the floor performing sixty-nine with each other, or with anyone who was interested and could afford to pay for it.

I soon realized I had made a mistake in jettisoning my tight jeans, since I had a tremendous hard-on that wouldn’t go away, no matter what profoundly asexual thoughts I tried to conjure. Though Manhattan isn’t Rio, the first days of spring usually bring an onslaught of women in revealing attire, and when I get hard in a crowded subway or bus after unavoidably rubbing up against a woman, I think about the Holocaust. I’m Jewish, so I feel little guilt about appropriating images from the concentration camps for my own dubious purposes. But in my present straits, none of the usual tricks seemed to be working, and there was nothing I could do to camouflage my condition. I realized I was in danger of being raped. All a Tiffany would have to do is sit on me. I decided that the best thing I could do was to keep in motion until I found the Tiffany I was looking for. So I took to the dance floor, where the blaring classic ’70s disco beats of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees had given way to the soft merengue of “Push Push in the Bush.” I have never had any problem dancing by myself. In fact I frequently dance in front of the full-length mirror on my closet door at home, pretending I’m a rock star should a song like Rod Stewart’s “Baby Jane” come on the radio. In this case I just had to be sure to keep a substantial distance between myself and anyone else, and above all avoid poking the other dancers with my stiff prick.

The mix of naked, pheromone-producing bodies must have acted like a drug, because I wound up doing the macarena with a small dark-haired woman. She had big almond-shaped eyes that looked like they were constantly welling up with tears. I thought she was crying because she didn’t like being paraded around in front of a group of men whose collective horniness had been provoked to the point of histrionic frenzy. Perhaps she was one of those women who had been lured into a sub-prime mortgage and now had to sell her body to avoid foreclosure.

Later I would learn that the name of the girl I was dancing with was, in fact, Tiffany. She had hypnotized me, and when I came out of my trance I realized that she had inordinately huge, perfect breasts and a virtual forest between her legs. I was eager to explore my newfound friend with both my fingers and my tongue, but something was holding me back. Tiffany seemed like relationship material, one of those complex hookers who brought a lot of emotional baggage along with her sexual allure, and I didn’t want to get emotionally involved with someone at The Catwalk before I’d even made it to The Gringo. I had gotten into a serious relationship with a hooker during my first year at Columbia and ended up regretting the loss of my youthful opportunity to play the field.

As I felt her furry vagina rubbing up against my hardened penis, I let my hands wander over her velvety folds, finally letting my fingers crawl inside of her like little snakes ferreting out their prey. She was impassive in the face of my prying, which was now taking on the quality of an exuberant gynecological exam. I love touching vaginas so much that I had once toyed around with the notion of becoming a gynecologist. However, my mother’s own excitement about the prospects of my being a doctor blunted my ambitions. Every time I thought about a woman in stirrups, I saw my mother’s face. She was understandably disappointed when I dropped the idea. In her inimitable way she would ask, “You’re going to make your own mother pay to have some stranger examine her?” I dropped organic biology and majored in economics precisely to avoid such potentially embarrassing Oedipal scenes.

Tiffany kept staring at me like a long-lost lover, and I began to wonder if indeed I’d met her somewhere else, even in another life. I’m a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, and it seemed reasonable that I could purchase her services even if her body was occupied by another spirit. When she looked at me with those doe eyes and asked if I wanted a blowjob, I told her we’d better talk first. I knew that acknowledging the depths of Tiffany’s feelings was a potential rabbit hole. The question of emotional intimacy was in fact a point that I wanted to bring up with my psychoanalyst friends at the hotel, because I was beginning to get the sneaking suspicion that free will might be playing a greater role in human affairs than Freud had accounted for. For instance, I had the choice to behave like an animal and accept the blowjob, or, like Hamlet, to deliberate before doing anything rash. I readily accepted the fact that it might turn out that behaving like an animal with Tiffany was the humane thing to do. On the other hand, getting involved with her complex problems and psychohistory as an excuse for getting into her pants set up expectations I could never fulfill.

Still, the side of me that leans toward relationship-building with whores was winning out again. I led Tiffany over to the quietest little nook I could find, where another couple was already engaged in an unclassifiable sex act, and asked her if she wanted to talk about anything. I ordered a couple of margaritas.

The old expression “you can’t see the forest for the trees” certainly proved true in our case, since my ability to listen to what Tiffany was actually saying was impeded by the fact that I couldn’t take my eyes off the extraordinary flora and fauna between her legs. Tiffany spoke excellent English and, from what I could tell, American intellectuals like Susan Sontag must have been quite a craze among the prostitutes of Brazil, because Tiffany, like her older predecessor, turned out to be extremely knowledgeable about Sontag’s work. In fact, she owned an autographed copy of the Portuguese version of Against Interpretation.

As it happened, her slide into a life of prostitution had nothing to do with poverty or lack of education, but rather an over-immersion in the work of the French deconstructionists, particularly Derrida, whose writing she had interpreted in an overly literal way. She had initially gone into therapy to palliate her inability to think metaphorically, but over the years, as she moved into regular, four-day-a-week analysis, the work concentrated more on her idealization of the French intellectuals. She didn’t turn tricks for the money, since her father was a wealthy industrialist, but more as a constant reminder that she was part of a barter economy in which sex was a commodity like anything else. Besides, she enjoyed taking her clothes off in front of strange men.