it. I decided that before I got to The Gringo I would stop in the first reasonablelooking bar and have a few drinks to loosen up.
The first place I found was an American bar called The New York Yankees Club House, which broadcast Yankees games on cable. It was midwinter in America and not the time for a Yankees game, but the place looked just like one of those classic Irish taverns, with old men sitting cross-legged on benches, staring up at a television and not saying a word to each other.
“What’ll ya have, Mack,” the bartender said as I sat down. This place was the real McCoy. They sold “crisps,” cheap bags of Planters Peanuts, and hard-boiled eggs, and they had Harp and Guinness on tap. The whole place smelled of urine. I noticed that even though all the regulars looked like Irish doormen out of central casting, the bartender himself, despite his thick Bronx accent, appeared to be a Rio native—dark, slim, and handsome—and not the kind of sallow-faced, beer-bellied creature I was likely to find at a similar establishment in Manhattan.
When I got closer to the television, I noticed that everyone in the bar was watching Bob Hope perform for troops on some aircraft carrier. I quickly surmised that they were watching a tape of one of Hope’s overseas performances during the Vietnam War. Bob Hope alternated on the television with some equally musty broadcasts of Yankees games, featuring the sportscaster Phil Rizzuto. I knew this was one place where I wasn’t likely to run into any head-turning Tiffanys, but I experienced a moment of homesickness. Back in New York, when I wasn’t seeing prostitutes, I enjoyed getting inebriated all by myself, and this was just the kind of place, with cold, inexpensive beer, that I liked to frequent. In fact, I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I might end up spending the rest of my time in Rio in this nostalgic dump.
One of the predictable things about Irish bars for someone like me is that the bartender and the patrons always glare suspiciously at newcomers, and I knew that whenever I got up from my stool to take a piss, someone would say perceptive things about me like, “Who the bloody feck is that?” There were a couple of portly fellows with reddened cheeks who looked like retired New York City cops. I figured most of the Irish-doorman types must have been employed in a section of Rio where there were the same kind of elegant pre-war high-rises you find along Park Avenue. This was just the sort of place that you could find in what was left of old Yorkville, with its tenements and momand-pop grocery stores.
As I would later learn, most of the Irish doormen at The Club House had been brought down by a Jewish developer who had built several high-rises to cater to the needs of the growing American expatriate community in Rio. He’d felt that the extra New York touch would make his buildings competitive with the towers that had been constructed by Brazilian developers going after the same market.
I’m the kind of guy who can’t stop thinking about the one woman who won’t talk to him at a party. Instead of moving on when I feel I’m not wanted, I go back for more. So instead of having a beer or two and proceeding on to The Gringo, I set out to win acceptance at The Club House. I was on my third boilermaker when I noticed the other men at the bar swigging down rye with beer 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
