Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

She stopped in front of a narrow building that looked like a squat or a crack house back in Manhattan. I watched her as she made her way up a narrow, winding staircase that ascended into total darkness. For a moment I asked myself why I was doing this. Was this seemingly reckless behavior just another symptom following on the heels of my recent vertigo? During flu season, a high temperature and fatigue are usually followed by diarrhea. Was my flirtation with danger just another way of acting out against the guilt I felt about wearing forbidden attire?

We ascended two flights in darkness and then Tiffany scampered up to a landing that was lit by a dim bulb hanging from a frayed wire. My curiosity about why she had run so quickly ahead of me despite her high heels was quickly answered when I arrived at the top of the stairs. Tiffany had picked up her skirt and lowered her gaffe, which is the jockstrap-like device that transvestites use to hold their penises between their legs. She had also pulled off her top, and the prominent exemplars of both male and female genitalia made me think I might be dreaming. Tiffany had an exceptionally large penis for someone who wanted to be girl.

I felt a little like Paul Bunyan. Someday that big old penis was going to be chopped down, and I was filled with the irrational fear that I might be the one designated to do it. In my feverish state, my mind was making brilliant but outsized associations. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. “My doctor, whose first name happens to be China, could help you with your vaginal reconstructive surgery,” I blurted out.

I noticed that one of Tiffany’s hands was behind her back. As she pulled out a knife I realized with terror that it was she who might be playing the part of Paul Bunyan. I’d read about cases of men who had been castrated by angry transvestites. I was hanging out with the wrong person in the wrong place. What was I doing in this squalid atmosphere when I was supposed to be experiencing the exquisite pleasures of The Gringo?

“You see, my friend, this is my trusty shiv,” Tiffany growled, dropping all pretense of seduction.

“Oh it’s very nice, congratulations,” I said nervously. “Shiv, huh, that’s such a nice word.”

“Yes, it’s a term that’s very popular among pre-op transsexuals the world over.”

“You have a very good vocabulary.”

“You mean for someone who is on the lowest rung of the social order?” Tiffany barked back. “I bet you’d be surprised if I told you I have a PhD in anthropology from Stanford.”

“Yes, I would. I mean, no, I’m not surprised at all. You seem to have great control of your faculties, and many faculties to control, which would make you a wonderful faculty member anywhere.”

Suddenly I remembered the case of a transgender academic at a university in the Midwest who had gone completely crazy right before the final stages of her sex change, just as her penis was to be converted into a vagina. In fact, she had never gone through with her vaginoplasty. Instead, she used a twelve-gauge shotgun to murder her male lover, who had waited years for her to complete the final passage into womanhood. To top it off, she also blew away two army officers who had been recruiting female students to join the Army National Reserve. The whole incident made the front pages of tabloids like The National Inquirer , and the murder of the boyfriend was declared a crime of passion, the perpetrator suffering from temporary insanity and receiving consecutive acquittals for the murder of the two recruiters. Still, as I recalled, the murders had caused her to lose her tenure, and what better place for a defrocked pre-op transsexual anthropology professor to find gainful employment than as a hooker on the streets of Rio?

I realized that the shiv was probably not an offer for some new form of S&M sex play involving cutting and piercing. My little adventure in priming the pump might end up initiating a new spree of killings in which I would be the first victim. As if to confirm my worst fears, I suddenly remembered that the killer had gone AWOL from the court-mandated anger management program she had attended in the wake of the attacks.

“Oh China!” I exclaimed, invoking the image of my therapist in a last ditch attempt to regain my composure. China was the wrong word to mention to a transsexual filled with ambivalence about not having either a set of china or a vagina to go along with it, and I stepped backward in horror as she pointed the knife at my throat.

“You’re totally immersed in Eurocentric traditions, with their emphasis on gender and the legacy of domination and submission that accompanies the hegemony of the male or female zygote in the matrilineal and patrilineal traditions. Legendary figures like Margaret Mead and Franz Boas created the mythology of modern sexuality, which found its roots in books like Frazier’s The Golden Bough , a work of great genius, albeit totally wrong-headed, but which showed the growth of the primitive mind to the point where it was able to master figures of speech like synecdoche and metonymy, and thereby enjoy the fruits of an incipient symbolism and even proto-religiosity.” I had the feeling Tiffany was just getting warmed up.

“But there are whole other traditions that received little documentation because they run counter to the accepted creeds of chromosomal sexuality, by which XY genes describe a creature defined as being male, with XX being the significant component in directing the formation of so-called female gonads, in particular the ovaries, to which you recently surreptitiously and slyly alluded by crying out the seemingly innocuous “china.” I know you think I’m crazy and dangerous and frightening, but you are going to hear me out.” In fact, I had no intention of interrupting. Tiffany clearly was in no mood for stichomythic dialogue.

“The fact is that there are cultures and primitive tribes that still exist in the furthest reaches of the Amazonian rain forest, in Sumatra, and to some extent in Borneo, where the dichotomy between males and females has never emerged, and where many so-called men have well-developed mammary glands and have even given birth, in some cases through their anuses. Similarly, there are women with chest hair and large penises, which are really overripe clitorises that hang provocatively from their vaginas. When you tell one of these boys or girls to go fuck themselves, they are literally capable of doing it.”

As she finished her rant, she pulled the knife away from my face. I was no longer having any problems with the painful erection in my tight jeans. When I reached down, I was shocked to discover that my penis was nowhere to be found. My prick had made a hasty retreat, squeezing itself up inside of me like a guerilla fighter camouflaging himself in the brush to avoid becoming a target. I checked in my pocket for some reality , which I knew I was going to need if I wanted to emerge from this situation in one piece.

For someone like Tiffany, the penis holds no captive value, and I’m sure she would have thought nothing of performing an emergency penectomy if I didn’t show proper appreciation for her services. I have come to regard almost everything that happens in human life as a form of therapy, and the present encounter with Tiffany was no exception. Tiffany was helping me work through a deep fear of castration, so when I left her at the top of the stairs, I gave her a nice tip in addition to the tidy sum—$100 worth of reality —that was her standard rate. For a transgender PhD anthropologist, Tiffany had a natural entrepreneurial sense of the value of her unique services.

I had gone through a painful process of awareness that was also fraught with a great deal of physical danger, but the evolution of human consciousness always comes at a cost. The paleontologist Stephen J. Gould had shown that fossil records did not show a rational, steady process leading from quadrupeds to bipeds to prehensility and tool making. For a while, I was dating a Tiffany who had acquired post-graduate credits in anthropology at the New School, and besides the boners she gave me, she had also inspired me to bone up on the latest developments in evolution.