Things to do in Rio when you're dead THE RIPOFF The luxury penthouse we had been promised looked like a place you would film a 1970´s vampire movie. I had dreams of white tiles and a big screen TV by the deck pool where you waited for the bikini girls to bring you fruit salads. Instead it was a 10 roomed, four story, rambling mess filled with fruit flies and cracked plaster. Broken windows and mirrors with moldy ancient furniture. A gold and fake leather bar. There were photo albums rotting on shelves filled with pictures of the previous dead owner and her family. Every room was full of witch figurines, Jesus paintings, and creepy statues. The kitchen cabinets were full of unwashed dishes and ants were everywhere marching like Nazis from floor to ceiling. The promise of a house-wide stereo hookup was a 1992 ghettoblasta tape-deck machine. There was another one on the third floor. Some closets were overflowing with old mail and documents. Some held pillows or smelled like a prisoner had been held inside for months. I pictured drunkards flinging the closet door open and pissing in their dreams as if they were at an airport urinal. From one of the three decks you could see Copacabana beach a few hundred yards away, and on the other side of the building you could flick cigarettes at pedestrians into a busy disgusting street. The smell of urine and human waste could not reach up from the parades to the 11th floor and that was nice. On day two we began to routinely call the landlord and make ridiculous requests. When we asked if I could paint a mural on the wall, he said that this was a "difficult question". We drew on a 30 year old marble table instead. THE PREQUEL Upon my arrival to Rio I stayed in a hippie hotel and was to sit tight and learn the bus system and enough Portuguese to be able to order drinks and negotiate call girl prices. Five Camaro dudes I knew from Leon County, Florida were coming down to come undone in Rio for Carnival. I was already in Argentina by this point and it seemed like a logical next step. It was a ridiculous hotel full of maniacs and nice people as well. I was exhausted from three months in the void of dirt streets, giant beers on patios and being dragged by adventure people from one ruin to the other across America Latina entire. I was also suspiciously fucked up from a yellow fever vaccine I had to get in Argentina before crossing into Brazil. The flophouse was nestled up in the Santa Tereza favela and full of traveller cliches. The wild Australian, the Israeli soldier, the scared lesbian tourists who wore their backpacks on their fronts with Nalgene bottles attached by rainbow lanyards. There was one scary-ass gringo from Alabama. He wore long sleeve shirts in the 300 degree weather and the end of his nose was gone. It looked as though someone had lopped off the tip with a pair of rose pruning shears. I taught him and one of the Israeli soldiers how to build a gravity bong out of a Fanta bottle and some foil. THE BURNED UP MAN I was invited to go to Impanema with a Brazilian crew of playboys and their entourage that included the Israeli soldier, El Gringo Bravo missing his nose and some Norwegian women. I accepted. the Norwegian dames were as pretty as a mind could make up. So pretty that they became ugly. Their names were unpronounceable. Four syllables that sounded like scientific names for crystals from Mars. By the time the clock struck eight that night my feet looked microwaved. By the next day they were rotisseried. Day three: blistered and bubbled. Day five was the hospital with an infected sunburn and getting bitched out in Portuguese by a marble mouthed Brazilian doctor. Avoid hospitals in downtown Rio. During my stay there I never saw any equipment that was electronic. White and green painted metal. It was like traveling in time to a 1950´s TB clinic. I spent a week shuffling through the streets in flip-flops with 3rd degree burns and bandaged-wrapped feet waiting to get robbed. It never happened. The guy missing the tip of his nose had his camera taken which surprised the hell outta me. The thieves took pity upon me limping like Frankenstein. Things got real silly at the hotel when a French chap and an Austrian got into a fight over some nonsense. The Frenchman was mildly schizophrenic and the Austrian was one of those latently violent beast types whose brain was swiss cheesed from too much ecstasy. I never knew what the fight was about but the hysterical part was that they used English to argue, each of them being unfamiliar with the other´s mother tongue.
DEATH BRIDGE When Carnival got going I left the hotel for The Rotting Penthouse and my newly arrived amigos. We were getting swept up in street parades and trying not to step in puddles of unknown matter. Luke warm beers and gringo attempts at the samba. Since the place was already trashed when we got there, no attempt was made to keep appearances up. When someone finished a cocktail they usually just smashed the glass against the wall. The roaches carried away the fruit and the ants licked the sheetrock clean of the sugar cane rum. It was cheaper than hiring a maid. One night, we got into the big SAMBODROMO party when we gave beer to a bum and he introduced us a scalper who cut one hundred and fifty dollars off the ticket price. I stood in amazement for three and half hours while giant rolling werewolf puppets sped by full of people wearing ice costumes. Aztec floats five stories tall with 300 people on them. Broken Clocks, people dressed as cavemen. Monsters. I forgot my camera and cursed myself. The next night we tried to return to the same place but the driver got ticked off when I asked him to stop so I could buy some smokes. He left us on a closed down highway overpass, pointed to the stadium lights glowing a mile and a half away and drove off. We were the only six gringo idiots making our way down the bridge. People were selling silly string stuff and hotdogs, luke warm slime beers were spilled all over us and people were dancing in Superman costumes. We were the only people sweating, aliens in human suits unable to cope with earth´s environment. LAST MAN STANDING I was the only one left going down with ship. The sketchbag driver guy (I can get you ANYTHING in Rio type) came and picked everybody else on the last morning. I was left to wander the four stories of the penthouse for 36 hours before catching a busted up TAM jet for Buenos Aires. I wandered the rooms like an security guard at a circus museum. Grapes smashed into the floor. Wet oil paintings done on cardboard. Crumpled cowboy hats in the corner. Broken glass. Cigarette burns on the couches and and Brazilian talk radio blaring thru the sprawling trash. Naked goat figures in pencil on the table. The word "HELP" spelled out in bottle caps on the bar. I walked from room to to room looking for psychic clues as to what the fuck had just gone on here. In the loft I picked out a couple of paperbacks for the plane ride and put a small witch figurine in my pocket. xxx
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