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Avenida Atlantica Vice

Every customer comes with those bulging, moist, expectant eyes of a man who has escaped from his prison for a week or two. It may be the puritanical monotony of the working week that drives the men to seek relief: not raging bulls, exactly, more like cows waiting to be milked.

John Burdett
Bangkok Tattoo

On night four we went in search of dinner and ended up in Copacabana. We’d had some great adventures so far, only some of which I've described. In short: three allnighters, an excellent street party, two meltdowns, a near-death experience, and a gas-filled apartment that—in a building full of smokers—did not explode. All typical vacation fun. But on Copacabana’s Avenida Atlantica on Sunday night, near a disco called Help, we walked into ground zero of a citywide vice explosion. There were scores of outrageously dressed women. I’m talking bikinis and high heels, red capes and devil horns, negligees and fairy wings, and countless miniskirts that revealed more ass than they covered. Professional girls, these? Indeed. In fact, we had wandered unknowingly into one of the most famous hubs of the global sex trade.

There was an outdoor restaurant called Sobre as Ondas right next to this scene—we snagged four chairs and rubbernecked while eating dinner. The Avenida was the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and Bartertown rolled into one. The whores were magnificent, and came in more varieties than simply the nearly naked. For instance, see that girl riding a skateboard and wearing baggy camo fatigues? Yes, she’s a prostitute. See that perfectly coiffed woman wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase? Yes, she’s a prostitute too. The meter maid? Her too. The Brazilians had taken the oldest profession, added a dash of niche marketing theory, and frappéd them into a moneymaking miracle.

Music, singing, and drumming were constant. The street crackled with the energy of a high-tension line. There were hard and fast negotiations going on everywhere—I mean serious business, with frowns and demands and counteroffers. The men involved were mainly of a certain type—those so steeped in sexual ineptitude that people could almost see it stamped on their foreheads. But the rules of the sex trade gave them control. Female free will had been abolished. Two-hunded bucks in pocket now equated to superheroic virility. These men whistled, shouted vulgar come-ons, and generally behaved exactly like losers given carte blanche in a sexual Disneyland.

Amongst this throng Doug, Ari, Steve and I were clearly non-participatory—other than the fact that we were having a great time just watching. I’d say twenty percent of the men were chill and seemed to have their shit together. The rest were problem children from north of the equator somewhere, and just like the Brazilian water supposedly went backwards down the drain, Brazilian hookers were going to reverse every failure and blow-off they had ever suffered. For their part, the girls made their preferences clear—they flocked to the non-predatory guys, including us. It made sense—if you’re going to fuck for money, first try the guys whose eyes aren’t spinning like the reels on a slot machine. No need to service some overwrought social misfit if you can avoid it.

We made it clear we didn’t want to partake in the wares, but that we didn’t mind the company. Several girls joined us after Doug gathered some chairs (he may have been browsing at this point, but I’ll get to that in the next post). There were two types of girls on the stroll—year-round pros, and opportunists. The pros had no time for nonsense, no time for socializing. One of them might pretend for a minute to be friendly, but soon she’d segue into her pitch: “Serious now, handsome, you wanna party with me or what?” When we said no she’d leave fast enough to burn rubber. The girls who sat with us and stayed were the second breed—opportunists. They had plenty of time to shoot the breeze because they didn’t consider themselves hookers. One of them laid it out for me: “I work all year up north in a store and make like three-thousand dollars. I come here for carnival and make three thousand in a week. What would you do?”

We bought pitchers of sangria. Girls rotated from our table and others replaced them. There would be a few whispers traded as our companions presumably informed the newcomers: “These guys? No, they’re not buying pussy—just drinks. But they don’t mind if you join them.” Occasionally one of the girls might doublecheck our intentions: “Have you changed your mind yet, baby?” But generally they didn’t pressure us. Why would they? Why would they waste their time when the street was jammed with men eager to ransack their bodies? The ones who decided it was time to sell simply left. The ones who wanted to socialize stayed. And we all laughed like we were at a frat party as the ancient spectacle of sex-as-commerce pulsated wildly around us. We spoke Spanish and Ari had a little Portuguese and we were communicating fine.

Rio’s year-round pros are into volume, while the opportunists are about quality. They don’t want to have sex with twenty men during carnival then go back to their secretary or hostess jobs up north with what they perceive as a lie in their hearts. They’re hoping for the most benign of johns—the Canadian who would never cheat on his wife but wants dinner with a beautiful woman and is willing to pay for the company. Or the German who will buy her for ten days straight—twenty fucks from one stranger translating to something more forgivable than the alternative. Forgiveness is an important part of the milieu, keep in mind, because every one of these girls is at least nominally Catholic—which means they’re expertly schooled in the art of burdensome guilt. To avoid that guilt, they will stiff you in a second. They’d rather run off with your money than go through with the sinful deed. How much money they can make without actually ending up on their backs in a hotel room is another of the many games played during carnival. And yes, free drinks are part of it too, so perhaps they were working us as well.

Just a few doors south stood Help, which Ari mentioned last post. Travel guides explicitly warn to stay out of the place. It's the largest disco in South America. It was closed at the moment, but many of the people on the Avenida seemed to be waiting for it to open. We asked our girls about it. They said the place was great—wonderful music, strong drinks, all night dancing. We filed that away. Quarter after midnight or so Help opened and half the people on the street poured inside. Our girls said farewell and we were alone. We took a survey—continue to relax and enjoy the spectacle on the street, now considerably diminished, or go to club Help?

Labels: brasil, brazil, copacabana, prostitution, rio, travel

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 1:15 PM