Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

As these thoughts streamed through my mind, my eyes alighted on what I thought was an apparition. I blinked several times to make sure my vision wasn’t blurred. Sure enough, it was my old pal John Joneszzzz, a severely delayed kid I had hung out with in elementary school. John was one of those kids who made up with willpower what he lacked in brains. I always knew he was going places, and I was right — here he was in Rio. John Jones is a very common name, so his parents, wanting to add some excitement to his life, had added the z’s, naming him after a comic book character who was a little different because he was from outer space. While legend had it that Schmucker had been one of the smartest kids in Yorkville, graduating from PS 6 and going on to do what most super-smart kids did in those days, which is to become a high priced psychoanalyst, Joneszzzz went into real estate sales, which is what all the dumb kids did.

He went on to make more money selling condos during the gentrification of his old Yorkville neighborhood than the stuckup Schmucker would see in a lifetime of dozing while his patients complained about their miserable childhoods.

“Hey, old buddy! You haven’t changed a bit,” I said, as I girded myself for his simian embrace. It was the same old enthusiastic John. I was sure he would displace one of my vertebrae as he clamped me in his vice-like arms. He had piercing blue eyes and a face as flat as a frying pan. “Great to see you, bud,” I wheezed, as he nearly squeezed the life out of me.

“The name’s John. John Joneszzzz with four z’s!” he hollered jovially. John was still a little slow.

“How could I ever forget John Joneszzzz with four z’s! I meant bud as an endearment.”

“A what? You always did use big words. I heard you went to Columbia. They use a lot of big words up there I bet.”

“Forget it. It’s just great to see you. How long are you here for?”

“I don’t know. My wife takes care of that kind of stuff.” John was always a happy-go-lucky guy who didn’t bother with anything he couldn’t understand, which was just about everything.

John’s wife was a breed apart from the girls who wandered along the Copa in string bikinis. She was walking through the lobby of the hotel with a kerchief around her head and her hair still in curlers, in a style still popular in certain parts of Yorkville.

“John, where the hell have you been?” she bellowed. “You were supposed to pick the kids up by the pool at five so I could get my nails done!” She didn’t pay any attention to me, and she didn’t seem to care that her husband had run into an old friend in the middle of Rio. John tried to interrupt her to explain the chance circumstances of our encounter, but she refused to listen. As she dragged him away by the sleeve, he whispered, “Have you seen any of the hookers?”

I felt that getting John a hooker was the least I could do. It was like sending a care package to Myanmar. Considering the irrational phobia I had developed about the concierge’s desk, and the fact that John’s wife would likely watch over him vigilantly, I had my work cut out for me. But my grandfather, an immigrant who had fled the pogroms in Russia and made his way to America by way of South Africa when he was only 14, always said, “Where there’s a vill , there’s a vay !” Those words have never left me, even in the most difficult situations I’ve confronted in life. I decided to go down to the Copa. Once I had located the merchandise, I would come back to the lobby, call up to John Joneszzzz’s room, and tell him there was a little business venture I needed to discuss with him. When he came down, I would hand over the girl and my own room key. I felt strongly that as alumni of PS 6, we needed to stick together, and I was actually feeling bad for the fact that Joneszzzz was pussy-whipped by his petty tyrant of a wife, despite all his hard work and success.

My own will was flagging because of the incident with Suzanne, and I was beginning to consider going home early. All in all, I’d had an active vacation. I’d seen Rio and had gotten to know some of its people. Rio had more than lived up to its reputation, and I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. But I started to think that despite the chain of events that led to Suzanne storming out of my room and calling me a pig, I wanted to leave on a positive note, preserving at least my good memories of The Catwalk, Uva, and my first sessions with China, which had left an indelible impression on me.

I succeeded in getting Joneszzzz set up with a real floozie. This Tiffany even had puta , the Portuguese word for whore, tattooed on her back, in case anyone needed to identify the item they were purchasing. Like the medieval scholastics, who weighed questions like how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, I often find myself adjudicating ridiculous questions. So I asked myself, if I wanted to import a Tiffany like the one I had purchased for Joneszzzz, would I have to declare her at customs, like a watch or a piece of jewelry? As I gnawed idly on this intellectual cud, it struck me that I had completely lost touch with reality , both in the literal and figurative senses of the word. If I kept buying expensive hookers, I was going to go broke. I had a nice accountancy practice, but most of my net worth was invested in hedge funds, which had been experiencing some alarming fluctuations in value. You can invest and hope for the best, but no matter how big a commission or advisory fee you pay, there is no way of predicting whether the market is heading up or plunging into a nose-dive. Money could buy sex, and even love, but money itself offered no guarantees for its own future. Yet seeing the look of gratitude on Joneszzzz’s face when he emerged from the elevator and returned my room key after a good lay would have been worth all of my money, or at the very least a million dollars.

Joneszzzz turned out to be even more grateful for my generosity than I could have ever expected. “Just between you and me, I haven’t been able to get it up with my old lady lately,” he said, shaking my hand in his enthusiastic, salesman-like way. “Now I feel like a man again.” He actually puffed out his chest in such a way that for a moment he looked like Popeye. After meeting his wife, I wasn’t surprised he couldn’t get it up. Her personality alone could have wilted a titanium dildo.

“If you ever need a condo in Yorkville, lemme know. I’m known as the Condo King,” he said as he left, then leaned in to whisper, “It’s a license to print money, believe me. But you don’t look like you’re doing so bad yourself. Hey, I like those jeans. Don’t show them to your mother.”

For a moment I considered Joneszzzz’s offer of a Yorkville condo. I’d heard that elegant Tiffanys regularly frequented the East Side high-rises, and that most of the new buildings had health clubs that were filled with whores. My Upper West Side building, with its clanging radiators, was filled with old Jewish widows who tenaciously held onto the rent-controlled apartments they had occupied for millennia. Of course, a few of these Yiddishe mamas had been Tiffanys when they were young. You find Tiffanys in all walks of life. For instance, I heard that one of the librarians at my local public library, a scholarly-looking young lady who talked softy and wore bifocals, gave hand jobs behind the checkout desk on Saturday afternoons.

However, I preferred the idea of going home to a place that was close to my intellectual roots. I was only blocks from my alma mater and from the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer (another great whoremonger), Hannah Arendt (Martin Heidegger’s whore), and the spawning ground of the Partisan Review and the other great intellectual journals of the ’50s, with their coteries of whoremongers (Edmund Wilson) and sluts (Mary McCarthy). I could also hop on the Broadway local, change at 72nd Street and find myself with a scholarly prostitute in a matter of minutes.