Before Shirley could resume her playboy tirade, I reached over to fire up the bike. I was feeling the need of some wind in my face. Even being a block from the ocean the ho-stroll can start to feel somewhat claustrophobic after awhile. Before I could take off, a couple of the other girls wandered over and started talking of ghosts and sinister apparitions that appear along the street. My attention hijacked again, I cut the motor again and continued sitting there on the bike listening to their macabre recollections. I contemplated the dark side of Copacabana as they all chattered about the man who appeared in a window above them one night threatening to throw himself out from the 6th floor.

“We’re cold blooded down here, Cigano,” one of the newcomers, a smiling bleached-blond mulatta in a sparkly mini-skirt and fuck boots announced proudly. “… So then we all started shouting JUMP ASSHOLE, JUMP!”

“And he did…” the other one chimed grimly. “It sounded like a gunshot from down on the corner when his head hit the fucking pavement. We hear a lot of gunplay down here, ya know, so I didn’t think nothing of it… until I saw this big crowd gathering around, and there was a big puddle of blood creeping out on the sidewalk under people’s feet, so I went over to see what the fuck… Porra! The crash had tore his face right off his head like a broken doll or something…”

She scrunched up her nose and the first girl cut in excitedly, “yeah, and his shoe ended up a block away, remember? That shit shot off him like a bullet!”

“Yeah. It was pretty disgusting.” the other one conceded. “He shit his pants and everything… the works…”

“That didn’t stop all those bums hanging around on the corner from going though his pockets before the cops came though, remember?” somebody else said.

“Cops, ha!” Shirley guffawed, her hand playing up and down my leg like a pianist. A penisist, I thought, smiling to myself as she talked on, sparks flying out of her skinny pink lips, “…them fucking pigs just came and threw some newspaper over all the fucking hamburger and left it all sitting there rotting away for hours! Useless. But when they want their ‘protection’ money, then they’re right here, hein? Protect us from the smell? Ha! Those fucking bums are gone!”

“Yeah, and that was a burning hot summer too. 45 degrees at midnight… and the fucking humidity. Ugh! The whole street stunk to hell’s waiting room for days. I had to go all the way up by the other corner to work. Couldn’t stand the fucking stink…”

Just as I was about to ride off again, along comes Maria, strutting up out of the shadows. Her razor sharp antennas always fine-tuned to pick up the slightest off-color static, Maria eased right into the topic like a languid gator slipping into a warm swamp with her battle scarred gaunt white-trash pirate face and cool manner.

To be continued on Thursday, August 26th.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010.

Brenda, oblivious to Shirley’s curbside irony, just perches her bony ass back down on the car hood where she was sitting when I pulled up. She smiles seductively at a car full of rich boys out cruising with daddy’s car while casually reaching out her hand for another one of my smokes. The carload of leering young eyes slows down and Brenda slides down off the hood like a drunken salamander and slithers over to where they’ve stopped at the curb. She leans in the window, flirting with the driver. Shirley pounds down her glass of rum in one go and continues with bitter wit, leaning crookedly against my motorcycle with her hand resting on my knee.

“Playboys!” she spits. “I wouldn’t waste my fucking spit to get up and talk to those punks. Condescending little daddy’s boys, never worked a day in their useless lives, hah, they roll up here with their load of shit, talking about, hey ‘little kitten’,” she squeaks, hilariously imitating the stiff-ass accents of the idle upper-class Brazilians, “…and all this ‘you wanna come up to a party at my place, we got whiskey and weed and a nice kitchen full of food’… Food? Party? Hah!

“Shit!” she snorts, “…only if you’re having a money distributing party over there! You think I’m out here peddling my fucking ass for a drink of whiskey or a puff on some rich kid’s joint? Fala serio! If you wanna party, baby, you’re in the wrong fucking place…. THIS PLACE,” she announced proudly in a haughty tone befitting royalty, “is a place of professional prostitution. If you’re not down with the programa, better you haul your sorry little asses back to Ipanema and find some some other kind of fucking ‘party’ Hah! And then…” she continues with a self-purposeful disgust-building momentum, “then they give you that hurt little whipped dog offended look and roll away, oh, maybe 20 yards down the road to try the same line of crap with the NEXT group of hookers… like they never even heard a word I said! Unbelievable stupidity. Agh! No no no. And you think I’m gonna get up and waste good shoe leather to stand there talking to a carload of arrogant little slugs like that? No way! Nope. But there goes Brenda. God! Only her…”

Shirley’s getting really riled up now. Rolling on her own steam and the shot of rum I just bought her, she rants on hilariously. “Yeah. Playboys! Condescending punks. Roll up here and think they gonna pull out a fifty and wave it under our noses like that shit was even money and they’re doing some poor little whore a big fucking favor. Arrogant little limp-dick faggots! No thanks! Odeo esta raça! I hate that race! Gimme anything but the playboys. Anybody down here looking for a little slap and grunt’s all good with me. Crippled hairlip midget, cross-eyed Chinamen, whatever ya got down here, okay, let’s go! Fat smelly French guy, no problem! Just keep those fucking goddamn Ipanema playboys away from Shirley.”

As if to underscore her last words, she took a last deep drag on her cigarette and flicked the butt in a wide arch, bouncing it off the car’s door and sending a shower of sparks onto Brenda’s shoe. Brenda looked over at Shirley, her brows arching over her stupid bovine face sadly like a pair of confused caterpillars. Shirley, laughing riotously, gave her an aloof disgusted look of such regal disdain it nearly moved me to tears on the spot. Poetry in a glance.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010

To be continued on Tuesday, August 24th.

End of the day. Copacabana. Chilly summer Sunday’s end. Sitting at my regular seaside table at the end of the beach, observing the crazy moving beehive hieroglyphic puzzle of early night’s activity, people walking past the bar here. People, disjointed illegible figures. They’re all out tonight; a weird mix of lost dog gringos, fuzzy-looking mulatta whores, faceless locals and bitter-faced street beggars with distilled cachaça livers and deathly shit-brown botiquim patinas; all sharing the dirty sidewalk with crummy piss-picker pigeons — nature’s answer to rats in this place.

And I sit here at the end of Copacabana, looking out over world’s edge, a green coconut descending into my hand, my stomach full of beans and rice. The good life; watching the waves roll in peopled by the colorful ant-dots of surfers praying to the last waves of dusk. A white white cruise ship disappears over the green to gray post-sunset horizon. I reflect on the ho-stroll conversations raging around my ears here, conjuring up a fond memory of last night… the warm feeling of homecoming as I flew through the night air on the growling black wasp, leaning into the familiar curve of Prado Junior.

Sugar Loaf Mountain to my back and the green blur of the Aterro de Flamingo still bouncing around in my nostrils, I pulled up to the curb and ground the bike to a stop to greet my little group of curbside hookers. They were all out on the street, lounging on parked cars like cynical scrawny crows on a ghetto fence. Prada Junior whores… hipster legends of the lost spirit nights of Copacabana. My raggedy pirate-eyed friends. I get along well with these streetwise coked up old alkie whores. Better than I ever did with straight chicks. I especially love their ribald mortuary humor. Their off-color stories are as dark and raucous and irreverent as the redlight hallways they patrol from town to town like a tribe of gypsy crabs, peddling pussy and personality with that timeless tough-luck courage that gives them more balls than the average guy whose tired grunts they fondly tolerate with their legendary quickwitted cool. Man, if the average woman had a thimbleful of these bitch’s class and courage, I think as I hand a sweaty banknote to Brenda.

Brenda struts off to buy her and her partner a couple of doses of cheap white rum. As soon as she’s out of earshot, my friend Shirley, Brenda’s longtime neighbor on their curbside perch here, eases up and leans into the crook of my elbow, talking out the side of her mouth through crowded teeth, all flashing black eyes and skinny hair and pointy angles.

“I’m sick of her shit, Cigano,” Shirley drawls. “Yeh… there goes one useless old ho… lissen to this: I get us a class trick last night with a high rollin’ gringo. Fancy hotel, jacuzzi bath, panoramic view, got the whiskey and the cashew nuts, room service, the fucking works, hein? The gringo’s gonna give us 200 each. Sweet deal, right? So soon as we get up to the room, off comes my clothes and splish splash, rub a dub, right into the tub. Sure baby. Cash in the hand, panties on the land. Whaddya think? Shirley’s gonna get paid! Fat City gringo trick…”

She cocks a razor-sharp sneer towards the corner bar where Brenda’s disappeared with my money to get their booze. “That one, hah, all she’s good for, gimme a buck here, gimme a buck there, no, fuck no… go go go— nada! She’s just along for the ride again while I do all the fucking work and then she wants her half. Her half!?! Some fucking balls! Fucking boozy old freeloading chicken! Hah! Me and the gringo in the tub playing hide the salami and ya think she’d even take her fucking clothes off? Hah! Shit, not even one shoe came off while she’s hitting the frigo-bar, and she’s drinking the gringo’s hotel bill into orbit, munch munch, cashew nuts gone… at 10 bucks a can! Two cans! Down the hatch! Whiskey? Gone. Beer? Not a drop left, and it’s glug glug munch munch chomp while the gringo’s wearing my fucking pussy out, and he don’t even get to see the color of her fucking toenail polish…

“… and just when he’s finally popping his nut and it’s time for me to get paid, then this lazy old ho nearly breaks an elbow sticking her hand out. Hah, well, the gringo ain’t having none of that shit. No no no. He hands me my 200 sweet as can be, then he just puts his wallet back in his pants, doesn’t even look at her and that’s where she starts in. You get me up here and now you won’t pay me blah blah blah … now the gringo’s getting pissed, I can see it coming. And I’m getting pissed off too. Sure, I’m gonna get clobbered by some fucking gringo on account of that bitch?! Then what am I supposed to do? Run to the cops? Sure, that’d be the deal. All the gringo’s gotta do is tell em whatever the fuck he wants to tell em in gringo talk, whatever, like we tried to rob him or whatever. What am I gonna say? I don’t even speak a word of gringo! So then I’m off to the pokey for the cops to pluck my 200 off me and give me the back of their hand if I talk back? No thanks, Brenda.

“…last time I ever go out on a call with that lazy old bitch. Let her ass collect cobwebs sitting on this fucking car hood waiting for some sucker who’s too drunk to fuck, cause that’s the only kind she goes out with, just a hand job, quick half a blow job in the car maybe and then she’s out the door with his money before he peels the fucking rubber off. Can you believe it? Fucking useless parasite. The rest of us down here, we get customers. That bitch gets victims…”

Then, without missing a beat as Brenda slides up with their drinks, Shirley starts cooing like a horny pigeon”…oiiiii, Brenda dear” with a big cheery smile. “We were just talking about you, baby. I was just telling the Gypsy here what a good friend you are. Best partner a girl could ever have in the zona… right, Cigano?” she says, nudging me with a jagged elbow. I nod like a cab driver’s little doggie dashboard ornament.

To be continued on Sunday, August 22, 2010.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010.

I spotted Fernanda just as her face lit up in fond recognition.

She slid up beside me like a shaggy little cartoon ghost in a light cotton denim mini skirt and knee-high brown leather fuck boots. She gave me a quick hug and a humid little kiss on either cheek.

“E aí, Ignácio, tudo tranquílo?” she breathed in my ear.

Fernanda was always a pretty good egg, one of the cooler ones. She knew the score. She was down. And she sure knew how to dress. Not like these other silly dog-faced Carioca bitches. She was a thin attractive aging alcoholic Paulistana, a pretty little cokehead with a quick cynical wit and a mouthful of razor-sharp doomsday humor.

We’d spent some good nights together while Narcisa was away. We’d had some good times and good sex. Good long bullshit sessions too sitting out there on the pre-dawn pista on slow winter nights when there was nothing to do but hang out and talk shit and wait for the dawn.

Fernanda usually stayed at some cheap rooming house over in Lapa, not far from where I lived. Sometimes I’d give her a ride home on the bike at the end of the night if she didn’t score a trick. More often than not she’d reach over and give my crotch an affectionate grope halfway there and then I’d take her back to my place and shag her free of charge. She’d usually stay over like that for a few drinks and some friendly company rather than just going home alone in defeat.

Fernanda liked my little crib. She called it ‘the doll’s house.’ She liked me and I liked her well enough too — but that’s as far as it went for either of us. We were friends. And she knew all about my hopeless love for some apocalyptic phantom named Narcisa.

Sometimes I’d sit out there with Fernanda after midnight. I would buy her a few shots of cheap cachaça and feed her cigarettes, keeping her company while she leaned on my bike and entertained me with the local whorehouse gossip in her hilariously cynical paulista drawl. Fernanda had a few regular gringo clients, and she knew the comings and goings of the endless rotating cycle of gringos and whores out on the pista. She always had her ear to the ground in Copacabana. She had a pointy nose for the glittery white powder too, but usually only did it up when she got invited to party with a coke-holding trick. Otherwise she just drank the long boring nights away out there on the street corner.

Fernanda wasn’t much of a pro when it came to drugs though, so whenever a John wanted to score, I remembered, she always just tossed the business to one of the many roving alcoholic coke-running cabbies who patrolled the night shift like trolling sharks — a friendly gesture to the friendly drivers who sometimes set her up with high-rolling tricks at the expensive luxury beachfront hotels.

I took Fernanda by the arm and led her over to the nearest street vendor where I bought her a double shot of pinga. She powered it down in one quick professional go. She gave me a grateful smile that lit up the night.

“I gotta start making some fast cash around here, ‘Nanda… you know any gringos that wanna score some blow?”

She cocked a weary eyebrow at me.

“Já ‘tá nessa, Ignácio? Now you running the brizola? Wha’ happen to all you clean and sober thing, gato? You fallen off the wagon?”

“No way, baby! Nothing like that, don’t worry. I can’t fuck around with that shit no more! I just need a little temporary gig. Strictly business…”

“’Tá bom, gatinho! Pagando uma de avião agora, hein? Tst tst… you always surprising me, Ignácio!” she scolded, clicking her tongue with mock reproach.

After an awkward little pause, I gave her the punch line.

“Narcisa’s back. Got it?” I said.

“Pobre gatinho!” she grinned. “Poor baby!”

She got it.

“Tá legal, gato. Me presta seu cellular aí!” she winked.

I reached in my pocket and handed her the phone. I watched as she dialed, then expertly pushed the speaker button so I could listen in.

“Copacabana Palace Hotel, boa noite,” the voice crackled.

“Boa noite. Por gentileza. O Senhor John Johnson, por favor,” she said.

“John Johnson?!?” I said laughing out loud. “Ya gotta be fucking shittin’ me here, ‘Nanda!”

She smirked and winked, holding a warning finger to her lips. Then a voice with a distinctly American accent came on the line.

“Hello?”

“Hel-oo Johnny!! Is Fernanda, bay-bee!” she cooed in the most adorable English.

“Hi there, Fer-naaan-duh!” the gringo said.

“Hey, Johnny… remember the little white thing we talkin’ ‘bout the night before? I got somebody here I wan’ you meet, bay-bee…”

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010.

Journal entry — Carnaval — Fat Tuesday. After Midnight.

Shit. It looks like they’ve cranked open the gates of hell down here at the Prado Júnior. The Pussy Arcade. Coked up gangs of funny faced whores standing ready to face the ashy dawn like grim determined warrior ants of the apocalypse. A hot wind is blowing in over the water from Mother Africa, the full moon is lighting up my mind like an old time pinball machine and it’s on…
They’re all out here tonight, last fucking night of Carnaval. Some standing in pairs or threesomes, others huddled in larger protective gaggles. All talking wild shit, waiting for the next car to roll up, the next boring exchange of futile ho-stroll banalities. Bored and boring creatures of the night. Creatures of habit with their easy come and go grabby mentalities. So dumbly predictable. Same cheap synthetic gaudy colored outfits, same worn out plastic heels, crappy tattoos and saggy flapjack baby-sucked breasts.
I cruise up slowly and park — taking it all in again.
Same old dejected faces of eternal disappointment and mental slavery… and that odd ghostly glimmer of innocent heroic optimism. All eyes alive down here tonight, flashing like searchlights, looking for the big last-minute score, the legendary Hundred Dollar Gringo Trick. But the competition is thick tonight, ten or twenty young girls for every swinging dick out here. And more where they come from — packed like showroom dummies into their cramped little one-room Copacabana back street flats that reek of garlic and howling babies, transvestite piss, stale beer, pot smoke, geriatric pussy farts, poverty, loud music, angry shouts and the occasional gunshot from down the hall.
The lucky ones emerge from the Disco Club hand in hand with their gringos; muscular well tanned Italian boys in tight jeans and crisp designer shirts or balding sloppy sunburned Americanos. Walking out of the boite, I watch as they’re all dutifully bombarded by the usual army of beggars and pushers, hollow-faced flower peddlers, strong arm taxi drivers, pimps, killers, low level hustlers, shakedown cops, thugs and glassy-eyed glue-sniffing eight-year-old wallet snatchers.
I sit curbside on the bike waiting for a break, watching the whole depressing freak show parade of lost souls and demons and dregs again from my invisible crow’s nest perch here. Another idea pops into my brain like a cartoon light bulb above my head. I fire up the motor and blast off, cruising down the twinkling yellow Avenida Atlantica.
I roll up to the next crowded ho-stroll in front of the Holiday bar. The same sleazy old Copacabana whorehouse where I found Narcisa just a few months before. Now it all seems like another lifetime. I park the bike and get off, looking around at these familiar old surroundings. I walk through the crowd feeling slightly disgusted by the whole tired scene. The same stale old loveless mating rituals I’ve walked through a thousand times before. Gringos and whores. Whores and gringos. Sex tourists, lonesome horny refugees from the frigid Puritan wastelands of the North where sex is a virtual video game played by lonely white men on glowing computer screens. A pathetic perversion of the real world. But this is the real world here. Another kind of perversion. Little Ignácio’s familiar old world in living color. Sight, sound, smell, touch, memory. Gringos, cab drivers, cops and muggers and pushers and whores. Whores. Whores. Whores. All sizes, shapes, heights and colors. But mostly just the same old common nondescript dusky brown misshapen Mulattas and Caboclas all clustering in the shadows like so many hungry rats. The odd lonely Brazilian playboy and a few local businessmen hopping the conjugal fence for one last boozy Carnaval night out. Bo-ring!
And the girls are all out here too, milling around in hungry giggling rodent droves. Packs of faceless, graceless loud-mouthed fast-talking razor-sharp bitches straight out of the teeming dirt-poor whore-factories, the dusty slums of the Baixada. Predatory pussy eyeing the nervous little groups of snappy gringos like so many slobbering jackals watching a hen house. The tricks are all dressed up in their white linen suit jackets and straw hats and other typical gringo party wear for their big Copacabana Carnaval Adventure. The same fucking gringos who kept little Ignácio in food and clothing and drugs and lodging and whores way back in another time, another life, another dream.
Shit. Easy enough to spot the cokeheads here. Always was. Easy to pick out as donkeys at a horse race. I shoulda been a shakedown cop. Just keep an eye on the men’s room and watch for the gringo coming out rubbing his nose with that ‘just did a bump’ look on his guilty little pink gringo mug. Easy pickings down here, as always.
And all the girls are wearing the same tasteless frilly short skirts and cheap high-heel shoes, same old poorly tailored gaudily colored low-cut blouses. The Uniform. They look like they all just popped out of the same fucking cookie-cutter hooker mold! Ruthless ghetto girls out on the prowl for that fabled Magic Gringo Short-time Carnaval Dollar-dispenser, or maybe even a whole week shacked up in some fancy beachfront hotel with trips to the shopping mall and a nice bonus at the end of the programa… if they get lucky.
Same old Whores. Same old Gringos. Same old hustle. Same old shit.
Some things never change.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010.

CHETUMAL

NOVEMBER 1974

Dear Doris,

I’ve been here in Chetumal ever since my last letter, going on two weeks now, walking along the dock, sleeping in a hammock and reading ‘The Idiot’ which I finally finished this morning, laying in the park, eating shrimp cocktails by the sea wall and playing soccer every day after school lets out with the kids near my guest house. Better friends I never had, though they don’t know a word of English, except “fuck you mother” and to that I reply with a similar phrase in Spanish and we all laugh to bust our guts. I’ll be leaving here tomorrow morning to check out Central America, and if I can’t get on a ship there to Brazil, I’ll head back this way and hitch around the Yucatan Peninsula and north along the Gulf coast to the port of Veracruz to try my luck shipping out from there, since that’s where all the truck drivers say It’ll be most likely for me to find work on a ship to South America. Anyway, I’m almost looking forward to that trip and there’s bound to be some beautiful beaches and little fishing villages along the Gulf coast, just as there were on the Pacific. You can try to drop me a card to lista de correos, Veracruz, Veracruz, Mexico, as I plan to stay there eventually until I get a ship, but don’t send it till after the 7th, as I understand they only hold mail for a week. Please get in touch with Paul and tell him I said hello. You can let him read this letter too. I hope he’s keeping his nose clean, though I don’t wanna be worried about it if he’s not, cuz I’m too far away in body, mind and spirit to do anything about it. Give my love to Grandma and whomever’s still alive of my old friends, and read them some of this if you feel like it, as I’ve lost everybody’s adress.

Your son loves you. J.

10-12-74

Eyes, eyes. God damnit I can feel those dull staring incredulous bovine eyes on me every moment in this place, piercing probing dull idiot eyes like gaping mouths of surprise and there is no peace. I duck into the movies cringing in the midday sun to duck the maddening crowd of eyes. See two movies I never would have seen and come out to a swarm of eyes. Passing along the street two empty looking slugs give me a big stupid looking stare and silently enraged, I can’t help but to turn back and give them a long dirty look. As I pass them I hear an uproar of laughter behind me – assholes. Probably trying to guess how long my cock is and if it’s striped like a barber pole and rotates and glows in the dark. God I hate this place, I really do, but then I gotta know all the while that the only thing behind it all is just ignorant childlike curiosity and that these stupid folks are just kind of simple people who mean no harm by things they say or do, just like the Italian whose ship is already gone, off to some Mediterranean ports. Just simple people. Really very kind and true and I just feel bad out of loneliness and paranoia of being extraño, which I am in truth and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2010