Seven Days in Rio (14 page)

I decided that I would find a fresh Tiffany even before I got to The Gringo and I promised myself to practice some form of
coitus interruptus
, which would whet my appetite for the pleasures that awaited me later in the night.

Memories flashed through my mind as I staved off another fainting spell. There had been an episode in high school, soon after the Beatles became famous, when I’d wanted to be like the other kids and had secretly gone out to buy a pair of tight white Levi’s, which fit much like the pants I was wearing now. My penis hadn’t grown to its full adult size, so the pants were not nearly as constrictive, and I was easily able to walk around with or without an erection. I was totally embarrassed when my mother discovered them hidden behind a pair of slacks in my closet, but when I asked her if she was mad, she just shrugged and said that she was disappointed in me. I would actually have preferred it if she had gotten angry, because the disconsolate look on her face made it seem as if I had inflicted a mortal wound in my attempt to look sexy and hip.

One of the things that can happen in an intense analysis like the one I was undertaking is that the patient introjects the analyst’s persona into his consciousness. So even though there was no China at the present moment, I felt her questioning presence in my mind. Consequently, I began to realize that the trouble I was having with my new pants was partially psychosomatic. The feelings of constriction, I began to understand, were largely in my head. And the faintness came from reliving the trauma of my mother’s discovery of my adolescent fashion transgression. It wasn’t the pants that were making me feel lightheaded; it was the guilt I felt toward my mother!

Whenever a therapist interviews me for the first time, I make a point of the fact that I’ve never had any transcendent experiences. I’ve never seen a great white light. Instead, I endorse a pragmatic spiritualism that is simply a reiteration of the Golden Rule. But now, for the first time, a genuine lightness came over me and I almost felt as if I was levitating. The tightness of the pants no longer seemed to matter. My crotch was no longer locked within the denim that encased it, and I knew I could have as many erections as I wanted regardless of the restricted circumstances in which my penis was operating. I realized at that moment that there are many people who have to make do with extremely meager resources. If whole families with eight or nine children lived in one solitary room, then my cock and balls could certainly survive a cramped walk to The Gringo.

I didn’t know if I was hallucinating, but every street sign seemed to be
Revolução
this or
Revolução
that, differentiated only by an appended date. I figured Brazil must have had many revolutions, not the least of which had to do with sex. How did Brazilian society ever get to be such an idyll, a place where women who would have been considered unattainable in other countries freely sold their bodies to a marketplace of men who qualified for their affections only in their willingness to pay? It was truly a wonderful form of commerce, and an example of how free market capitalism can spur the growth of individual initiative.

Suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks, having spotted one of the most beautiful Tiffanys I had ever seen. She was tall and muscular, almost a parody of feminine beauty in the perfection of her features. Her lips were painted bright red and her cleavage was almost bucolic, soothing the eyes with a vision of rolling splendor. I was about to call out to her when I noticed a protruding Adam’s apple and realized that the “she” I was about to proposition was really a “he.” Besides my earlier encounter with a girl who turned out to be a man, I’d never actually been with a transvestite — though I had heard they could be rather exquisite when you accepted the notion that a vagina wasn’t the be-all and end-all.

“Tiffany.” I heard the words come out of my mouth breathlessly and involuntarily, as if someone else were actually saying them. She was tall with kinky hair and she seemed to get the idea that I was a foreigner, despite my newly Latinized appearance. “Going out?” she said, in a basso profundo that mocked her otherwise feminine features. I knew the lingo, the shorthand by which hookers communicated their availability to strangers. It was like the universal grammar that Noam Chomsky talks about; it was something that belied the actual words. “Looking for a date?” “Going out?” How many times had I heard the magic words?

Tiffany was light-skinned, a male Naomi Campbell. If there were fashion magazines that used transsexuals as models, I would have recommended that she apply, but I could see how such a career would have been severely compromised by the male genitalia, which would have been difficult to hide in a tight-fitting skirt.

“My name is Ken and I’m an accountant from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I have a peculiar request and maybe you can help me. You are very beautiful and I would very much like to sleep with you, but I have other plans this evening. However, I would be very happy if you would let me see your breasts so I could take off my pants and liberate my erection. It’s a long story, too boring to go into. Just tell me yes with your eyes and I will come forth with the necessary
reality
.”

She actually looked like one of the Tahitian women in a Gauguin painting, strong and impassive with a stony expression. She beckoned me to follow her, and as I walked behind her on yet another street named after an uprising, I noticed that she had long, sinewy legs like Kobe Bryant. Still, she walked with a distinctly feminine carriage, moving her hips provocatively, and I had to keep reminding myself that she was a he, and that in all likelihood more surprises lay in store. While I never would have solicited such a creature if I weren’t looking to discharge sexual tensions in extraordinary circumstances, I have to confess to a certain curiosity about the strange buffet of organs I was about to see. Trannies are a little like centaurs — some of them have great tits while still being hung like horses.

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.

I should have been working through my issues with China instead of dallying with a mutant creature whose attributes were better consigned to the x-rated exhibits at the Museum of Sex. I had justified my little deviation as an attempt to deal with one of my psychosexual idiosyncrasies, and also as research into an unfamiliar realm, the ignorance of which I felt was an ellipsis in my sexual education. But it was now clear to me that it was time to return to my primary objective.