Rio De Janeiro, 1973.
I suddenly felt myself becoming perceptive to the unseen wave lengths around me, like a baby cockroach testing its antenna. It wasn’t a sense of immediate danger or even subtle menace that struck me, so much as a sense of a new kind of awareness that had suddenly sprung up inside me. I sensed my surroundings and the sudden knowing that I was in a place here where life was very cheap.
But I felt comfortable, even slightly elated as I casually slid onto a battered stool in a sordid little shack of a bar where a bunch of men sat openly snorting cocaine at a folding tin table littered with glasses of rum and playing cards. A couple of skinny black guys stood against a back wall and I noticed the telltale bulges of rusty revolvers tucked in their waistbands. They gave me an easy, knowing nod as I sat, downing my cheap rum and that was that. Bandits or not, it was obvious from their easy confident stance that one of the unwritten codes was not to shit where they lived. When I ordered a bottle of beer to chases what was left of my cheap rum, feeling a pleasant buzz now and deciding to splurge, the pock-faced barman casually offered me a small cellophane packet of white powder to go with it. I politely refused and the man sitting next to me, a light skinned shirtless flat-faced mulatto casually produced a rumpled bill and handed it to the barman who wordlessly slid the packet to him across the bar.
As easily as that he tore open the packet and emptied the contents, about a gram I guessed, into his glass of rum, stirred it with his finger and then downed the lot in one gulp, cool as a cat. That was a new one, I thought to myself as he slid off the barstool and dropped a coin into a battered jukebox that responded with a scratchy distortion of some otherworldy ancient Brazilian rock and roll. He smiled dreamily, eyes glazed over now as he swayed back and forth.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.