The air oppresses you in Rio like the corrupt policemen that walk it's streets. The only thing that could ease the suffering was the always available bottles of cheap beer. Slipping into the loving grip of their plastic bottle holders. Five bottles now? Ten? Somewhere around 9pm you stop counting bottles and start counting trips to the stinking pit in the back of the bar. It was a hole in the fucking ground, and it was no shame to leave the stall weeping. The smell attacked the nerves, it attacked the eyes.
"Two more beers!" I yelled at the sullen, disinterested waiter and he disappeared into the back of the building. His eyes said, 'I'd like nothing more than to stick this knife into your ribs," but he liked my green money more than thoughts of revenge. Still I eyed him carefully, there was no knowing when the heat would snap a man's brain in this place, snap it like a twig and hurl him into the street yelling and screaming. This was no place to be drunk and off your head. I took a long swig from my bottle as a dirty 10 year old crawled onto the shoulders of his twin. They flipped and danced in the streets as tourists tossed them change from moving taxis. A band somewhere was playing 80's rock covers. They were playing it loudly and they were playing it poorly.
Next to me sat a juggler who had introduced himself hours ago and proceeded to talk non stop about everything that had ever happened to him. He was talking into his glass, alternately frenzied and subdued, railing about God and aliens and the dirty locals who were always trying to rob him. Seems he and his buddies got drunk one night with a drunk girl. He denied everything of course, swears they didn't touch her. Left her on the side of the road and went back to their hotel. "It was the 70's man," he pleaded with me, "everyone slept with everyone. But I swear we didn't touch her!" He was obviously lying but I didn't care. 'Get out of here you leering hobo', I wanted to tell him but I just nodded my head. His eyes were tearing now. Just left her on the side of the road. He juggled 3, then 4 balls with one hand while he drank his cheap rum with the other. The night was getting ugly fast, but nothing to be done for it in this dirty place. Always trouble creeping right underneath your skin.
I was here with an American friend of some repute. He kept us in drinks and he kept us out of the trouble that our skin would normally draw. "You dress like a tourist and you get killed like a tourist." We're all tourists in this fucking place I wanted to tell him. The knife is hiding in the humid air, and sooner or later they're going to plant it right between your shoulders. We walked down the dirty streets like champs. Reckless and young, two gringos in the eye of the storm. Right here, we're right in the centre, we're right here where everything happens. Each night like the last, the promise of violence and the cheap booze and the clinging women.
If New York was the big apple, Rio was the drunk worm in the centre. Lush and corrupt and dirty and alive. Pulsing with an energy that could only come from the understanding that there was nothing but despair, and the compulsion for excess that such knowledge brings.
- Written by Tim at "For Whom the Blog Tolls"
11:33:52 AM 
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