I was in Sao Paulo on business. I’d just sold an eighteen page cover story to Trip Magazine, the pulse of Brazilian pop culture. I’d just gotten paid, so I’d called my cousin Theo who lived in Sao Paulo to join me for a night on the town before going back to Rio.
The night had started out strangely enough, I remembered, with a blind date. Cousin Theo had set me up with one of his upper-class Paulista girl aquaintences. She was some kind of a soft-porn popular writer and really wanted to meet me, he said. Fair enough. We were sitting at the little dirty restaurant, the one that used to be called Bar das Putas; the ‘whore’s bar,’ though I realized suddenly I’d never seen a single whore in there, even back in the day. That pretty much summed up Sao Paulo for me. Whore bars without any whores. Bor-ring!
So whatever, this chick came down there to the whoreless whore bar and met us. Theo made the introduction, then he split. She wasn’t too bad looking, I supposed, and she seemed open and friendly enough, so I decided to just roll with the whole ‘blind date’ concept, even though she wouldn’t have turned my head if I passed her the street. Whatever. I should have taken that shit as a sign, an omen, an invitation to just cut my losses and bolt. After all, the night was still young and I was all alone in Sao Paulo for the first time in years with a pocket full of cash!
But after years of regular sex with whores, and being a greedy and somewhat curious bastard, the promise of a free fuck seemed almost like an exotic notion to me. We sat there and talked and flirted for hours. If time was money, I was quickly going broke, I knew, but I was also warming up to the novel idea of having sex just for the sake of simple mutual attraction, or just about anything other than the usual predictable old whorehouse exchange. Why not try something new for a change? A little romantic adventure in Sao Paulo, I told myself, wouldn’t fucking kill me.
In the course of an ‘intimate’ literary conversation, she let it be known that she hadn’t been fucked for quite a while. A year or something. Well, things were looking more promising now, I thought. But then she followed up by adding that, for her, there had to be ‘love’ or at least admiration for anything to go down in the sack. Sounded like a load of bullshit to me, but I just figured, what the fuck? I’m a writer she ‘admires’, that’s what Theo said, so that oughta do the trick. Anyway, I mused, I’ve already hung out this long, so as long as I’m going to hell here, I may as well shake hands with the fucking devil. I looked into her slightly crazy eyes as she talked on and on. I didn’t get much of what she said, I realized, as I was mostly just drooling with lust, trying to picture the texture of her unfucked pink nipples in my hungry mouth.
But then she began to cross the line, claiming presumptuously that she spoke for women in general with the whole ‘love’ and ‘admiration’ thing. That was a bit much for me to swallow. This bitch, I realized, like most overeducated upper-class intellectual cunts, obviously liked to listen to herself talk. That’s why I honestly preferred the company of whores, I mused, the only honest women left. But since we were supposed to be having a nice upper-class open-minded lively intellectual table conversation, and she was such an open minded modern girl, a downright intellectual and a fucking ‘writer’ to boot, I figured fuck it. I opted to offer her my opinion on the matter.
“Fags like men, darlin'” I laughed, repeating the good old stock phrase I’d heard a hundred times from whores I hung out with. Somehow it seemed especially sparkly and original in this strange upper-class intellectual setting.
“… most women, I think, are really more attracted to money and power than they are to sex,” I went on, “at best some sorta emotional and material security thing tied together with the sex act. I’m not judging it, darlin’, so don’t get me wrong here. It’s just human nature. It’s what you call ‘love’ that fronts for what I call simple attraction, I believe. And, while ‘attraction’ manifests in other forms of passion with women, the bottom line is that chicks are really just looking for security, money, property, prestige, whatever.”
I realized that what I was saying was just a fancy way of saying all women were whores. And while I didn’t have a real problem with that concept, I wasn’t sure how well it was going down with this one. I noticed she was looking at me like she’d just bit into a cat turd. But there was no turning back now, I realized. I went on.
“… a man, on the other hand, basically just wants to fuck. A guy can have great sex with a complete stranger, ya know, a store mannequin, a sheep, a fucking hole in the wall, whatever. Doesn’t matter. That’s just normal, at least if a guy is honest about it. Most guys aren’t, of course. All the same, most men can just go out and get their nut off and be on their merry fucking way without a backward glance. At least a lot more easily than women, who are still a lot more hung up on ‘love’ and ‘romance’ and shit like that. Social programming is what it all boils down to, if ya ask me…”
She didn’t agree. Go figure. I found it highly ironic, however, as her ideas staggered on challengingly, how she kept wondering out loud why the last guy Theo had introduced her to a year ago had fucked her once, then never come back for seconds or even called her again. The nerve! I could’ve told her why, of course, but I decided to just let it pass. Whatever. I still had my sights set on the free liberal intellectual writer pussy, I guess.
So the night wore on and we wound up at some faddy trendy dance club over on Rua Agusta, the kind of place that normally makes me want to go home and take a dump. It was packed with a bunch beautiful trendy people. The kind of unfathomable freaks who drink and sniff coke all night long, and then all go home alone. Ugh! Rich people. Nobody gets laid! Well, after awhile, she grabbed me by the arm and we started dancing and it was all getting pretty flirty and sexy there, I thought, and there I was thinking this could maybe work out alright after all, at least for tonight.
Then, just when it was getting good there on the dance-floor, suddenly she tells me, ‘hey let’s go upstairs’, and off we went. We sat down on a sofa in one of those cozy little ‘chill-out’ areas where you always see people groping each other in the dark in these trendy places, and I’m thinking ‘ok, now’s my fucking chance, go for it’, so I put my hand on her shoulder, getting ready to give her a kiss. That’s one good thing about ‘normal’ girls, I’m thinking. Most whores won’t even kiss you these days, at least not the cheap ones I’m used to back in Rio.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, she pushes my hand away and tells me not to touch her. Okay. She’s mad about something now apparently. Whatever. Even though I know it can’t possibly have anything to do with me, I ask her what’s the problem.
“It’s my goddamn problem so just lay off it okay?” she whines drunkenly. “I’m sick of this place. I’m going home. Just don’t touch me, leave me alone, I don’t wanna be with you.”
Here we go! Nice. No wonder this fucking cunt hasn’t been laid in a year, I think. But she didn’t move, I noticed. So I put my hand on her shoulder again, this time just to piss her off, I think. It sure did the trick. She yelped like I’d jabbed her with a hot branding iron or something.
“I don’t wanna be involved with you!” she screeched over the pounding disco music.
That did it. After wasting several hours listening to her intellectual double talk, I guess I was fed up. Impulsively, I spun her round and looked right in her crazy half-drunk eyes.
“What the fuck makes you think you’re worthy of being invited to get ‘involved’ with me? Don’t flatter yourself, bitch. The closest thing to ‘involved’ you’d ever get with me is the tip of my fucking dick, and you should count yourself lucky if you got that much attention, shit for brains!”
She stared at me as if I’d just sprouted a cock from the middle of my forehead. Fuck it. I expounded further.
“This kinda shit is exactly why I don’t get ‘involved’ with you spoiled high-class neurotic cunts! This is why most guys with any sense only go out with fucking whores anymore. Fala serio! The more I see of you uptight sexually-repressed neurotic old crazies, the more I prefer my own fucking company to that of the average person. And you, my dear, are sickeningly average at best.”
The soft-porn fiction writer gave me an offended look. That did it. I was done.
“Now take yer game-playing psycho mood swings and get the fuck out of my fuggin’ sight, cuntface! And don’t look back.”
Say no more. She got out the door like she was shot out of a cannon and that was fucking that. I took a turn around the club and saw a room full of brainless wonders, more of the same ego-driven sexually confused drunk chicks. I was out.
I went off in search of a decent young whore to play with. I still had a pocket full of cash. I walked up and down Rua Agusta for an hour to no avail. Just a bunch of ugly old hookers wiggling their chubby overpriced asses in front of car-loads of jeering leering playboys out for a spin in daddy’s car. Finally I gave up and took an expensive taxi tour of the deserted streets and ho strolls of Sao Paulo. I saw fist fights, car crashes and even a nice little police shoot out. I saw a sickening line up of 1/2 nude grotesque drag queens and fat old ugly creatures that might have once been girls, hideous specters of the cold concrete dreams of a mighty and hellish road trip around town. But not a decent whore in sight anywhere! Fuck!
I ended up back downtown, empty handed and more frustrated than ever. Walking those sleazy blocks of drunken pre-dawn faggotry, I could feel the sterile old shadow of unwanted solitude following me like a plague of beggars. Finally, I ended up in front of the Love Story club where the taxi driver had told me all the action was.
If there’s a whorehouse hell on earth, it’s called Love Story. Downtown in Sao Paulo’s cold futuristic globalist megalopolis of steel and concrete. As soon as you walk in the door of that famous Paulista whore-pit, you know you’ve entered some kind of lower realm. There should be a sign on the fucking door saying: “Abandon ye all hope here.”
Hot, frantic, crowded and loud, Love Story, I remembered, was a pounding coked up last-gasp after-hours hypno-disco zone. Thousands of lost souls jumping up and down at 8 in the morning. But that’s where I was now at the end of the night, after walking the mean streets of this hellish neon forest till my feet were bleeding. No decent pussy. No dice. The cab driver told me Love Story was the place to go, so there I was. It was already dawn now, I realized, standing out there in these cold urban shadows, nowhere else to go, so I paid my 20R and went in.
Sure enough, it was like Dante’s inferno in there, just the way I remembered it from my last trip to Sao Paulo. And it was loud. So crowded I wasn’t sure I could hang, but just as I was about to split, I saw a decent looking whore, so I went up. Before I could say anything though, she gave me a dirty little look and turned away. What the fuck? Nonplussed, I spotted another one. I approached, same thing. What kind of fucked up whorehouse is this? I wondered. Tried again with a third one. Shot down again. Shit. This shit was worse than trying to hit on those stuck-up cunts in the trendy club I’d left before.
Then it dawned on me, this is the place where Sao Paulo’s hard-working whores came to spend their money on liquor and drugs at the end of the night and enjoy the cheap thrill of just telling men to fuck off for fun. This is what it’s come to. This was the place where hookers came to pretend — even if for a fleeting drunken sunday morning moment — that they were virtuous puritanical prudes like their upper class intellectual counterparts, before going home to sleep off a weekend of strange dick and moral degradation. Fuck! I was in whroehouse hell!
I got the fuck out of there and staggered home to cousin Theo’s place. I could hear him snoring away on his pussyless sheetless bachelor mattress upstairs. Fuck it, I thought. Misery loves company here in Sao Paulo, I realized. I suddenly missed the snot-slick cobblestone alleys of Vila Mimosa. I made a mental note to get the fuck out of town first thing in the morning and just go back to Rio. I could wait another day to get laid. Then I lay down on Cousin Theo’s lumpy tattered haunted old sofa and fell into a restless and troubled sleep.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2010
I hear men say “all women are whores” and I’ve come to realize it’s true. The hookers ask for money up front but the stuck-up upper-class women you talk about are undercover whores…they exchange their goods for designer clothing, cars, jewelery and credit cards.
I’m not sure what was up with that bi-polar bitch though, weird story.
HILARIOUS read…especially the middle…
upper class women don´t need money . they have it. when they talk about love is because they don´t want to fuck you, especially. when they want sex they make sex . when they want love is a question of roberto piva dylan thomas and chet baker, just the beauty. intelectuals pussys love power. any kind.
POWER!
Ha ha ha ha ha
Funny as hell!
Nice short story. It was funny and made me feel like I was pulling for you to get some and thought you might until she did a sybil on you on the couch. Women are always dazed and confused. Say one thing but think another.You just have to out wit them. Maybe hookers are more fun and straight up business and a sure thing. But a good challenge might be worth the effort. Just go for somewhere in the middle. Vampiras~
This story would be perfect for O-Magazine!
Um…what Allessandra said