1. SILVANA
Rio is the most beautiful city in the world (just edging out New York and Steubenville, Ohio—no I’m not biased), but when you’re expecting scorching inexorable summer sunshine and instead getting a gray block of clouds interrupted occasionally by chilly drizzles, it can make you wanna drink.
The bar (that I described in my last post) on Santa Clara is called Casa Suzanna. The lady who serves drinks from 8AM until 3PM is Silvana. My dad was going there for years, religiously, around lunchtime. He would stack one plastic chair on top of another (so the chair didn’t splay out, burst from underneath him: he is a man who learns from experience, some of them at least), and Silvana would come over and serve him one Antarctica after another until the cows came home, —reader the cows would not come home until my dad was s*******d.
The whole extent of their interaction was that, —and sometimes she would just laugh at him. And it’s true that he must cut quite a comic figure around here cause everyone’s always laughing at him and he don’t say nothing. I think he could’ve been a brasilian silent film star.
Anyway, one thing you oughta know about my mom is she gets profoundly involved in peoples’ lives almost immediately.
My mom comes to the bar once, and now she knows all about Silvana’s life, —she’s from São Luis de Maranhão, she lives in Rocinha, —and now they’re exchanging whatsapps. And she finds out Silvana can’t read, but it’s her dream to learn how to read. So my mom finds a teacher in the neighborhood that teaches adults how to read, and suddenly she’s paying for Silvana’s literacy classes.
Silvana’s like a f*****g pig in s**t over the whole thing, —she’s pumped. She wants to show my mom her workbooks, look I can write my name now!, blah blah blah.
So now my mom don’t wanna walk by the bar cause she thinks it’s gonna be a whole thing.
I said, Mom it don’t gotta be a whole thing. When I see her I just wave, that’s all you gotta do. But if my mom seen her she’d be like, “SILVANA!!!” and embrace her like she was lost at sea and just washed up.
And then we’d walk away and my mom would go, “that was a lot huh?”
My mom could probably use a drink too, cause early week she was beefing hard with my grandma. My mom and my grandma are basically the same person with slight variations. So what you frequently hear coming out of their mouths is, “I am nothing like that woman.”
Like me and my mom were in the kitchen and my grandma was in a different room and she was talking to us as if we were right in front of her and we obviously couldn’t hear her cause there’s walls in the way, and my mom dons a flabbergasted expression and goes, “who talks to you from another room like that?!”
I said, “you do mom, everyday.”
“No I don’t,” she said.
“Yeah you’re right mom, I’m full of s**t.”
Me and my mom ended up walking over to Ipanema, usufructing all we could of the gloomy day, and she didn’t talk about any of the swirling conflicts which makes for a very pleasant time with my mom. And we walked by a flower shop and she was bewildered by this bromelia and bought it immediately.
2. FRANKLIN
I’ve been friends with Franklin since I was eight. We played on this beach soccer team called Geração. It was a good team. And I was the worst player by a country mile. To say I was last on the bench is an understatement. The games were on Copacabana beach and they had to make a whole new bench for me out in Barra, —that’s metaphorically how far away I was from contributing.
One day I got a chance to get some real minutes against our rival Liverpool. I was in the number 9 spot up top. The goalie made a mistake and the ball came rolling right toward me in front of goal, wide open. I whiffed and fell over. Those f*****s laughed at me.
It’s hard to make friends when your worthlessness is so obviously evident. My grandma was worried about me. Without my knowledge she told our coach, Almir, to ask the team if anyone wanted to be my friend.
So we were gathered around after practice one day, everyone assplunked in the sand listening to coach’s instructions. And he goes,
“Ok galera, one more order of business. Harold doesn’t have any friends. So if one of you guys would like wanna go over to his house or something? Play some video games? Just hang out? Anyone wanna be his friend?”
Silence.
“Ok. Good practice!”
Though the next week, Franklin, who was not much farther up than me on the team totem pole came over to me and said, “what’s your team?”
“Vasco,” I said.
“Me too!”
That’s all it took.
Now you may be wondering: his name is Franklin? Yes, and his brother’s name is Jefferson. His mom wanted to name the boys after American presidents, so she chose Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—our greatest presidents.
His mom’s name is Socorro. She sells tapioca in a cart on the beach. His dad Severino, is a doorman in a building on Belfort Roxo. They live on the 13th floor of the building, in the free apartment most of the buildings in Copacabana have for the head doorman.
(I stole many of those likenesses for my book. NO FRANKLIN, I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANY MONEY.)
Socorro’s name translates literally to “help!” —, my family’s joke was that that was an appropriate name cause that’s what Franklin would be yelling when she chased him with a belt to whip him.
Unfortunately that is a real scenario. She’s a tough, stern lady. Her husband cheated on her once and she beat the s**t out of him. Maybe there’s something to be said about all that physical castigation though: Franklin is absurdly sweet and polite and never gets into any mischief.
(He had a little fling with both my sister and my cousin way back in the day. Not at the same time, I don’t think. [REDACT LATER: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABT RHIANNON])
We went to the Vasco game on Wednesday. There was no rigamarole this time. We got right the f**k in. The atmosphere was livelier than on Saturday afternoon, it seemed. This was a night game, and it was a beautiful clear night.
There were no visiting fans last game, so I didn’t know that for the visitors section, they literally put a metal wall up blocking off one section of the bleachers. You literally cannot interact with fans of the other team. Even thought they might really have to be making walls in between the Vasco fans.
—These two guys got into a pretty uncreative screaming match next to us:
“Vai tomá no cu!”
“Você vai tomá no cu!”
“Não você vai tomá no cu!”
Ad infinitum. —
—I think ideally, one day, everyone will be in their own little cone of silence where you never have to interact with any other human fan at all, and you can just watch the game in silence and in peace. Like on TV! YES LIKE WATCHING IT ON TV AT HOME! That’s how we’ll keep everyone safe!—
I was probably too desperate to see a goal. I kept telling Franklin that was my only wish: to see Vasco score. So of course for 87 minutes the game was deadlocked 0-0. In the 87th minute, Vasco earned a penalty kick. The crowd rose to attention like a collective boner. We wanted it. We wanted it bad. Jair (rotten name) took the penalty. He kicked it! And of course the goalie saved it. The game ended 0-0.
I was so mad I kicked Franklin’s ass—Socorro-style.
3. ARNALDO
My dad has been a stick in the mud cause he’s writing his memoirs from his bookmaking days. So everything is, “I can’t do that, I have to write.”
Now I can finally see how obnoxious that is. My mom’s going, “he’s such a narcissistic with this book.”
He’s writing it all by hand, and I’m the one who has to type it. Cause he don’t know how to use a computer? I’m still not sure why.
I heard somewhere Tolstoy’s wife had to type up War and Peace 7 times. So I feel like that b***h Mrs. Tolstoy. When I see my dad now, I say, “what’s up Tolstoy?”
And everytime he’ll say, “who?” or “what the f**k did you call me?”
But I’m the lucky one, I get to type brilliant up sentences like, “what was to do go back drive truck?”
Anyway I convince him to come down to the bar; so—we been in this building 20 years: and you know, again, I have a fracas-forward family; there’s s**t like, when me and my unmentionable sibling were children we were making so much noise in the apartment (us running around, my grandparents screaming at eachother), that we were sued by the unit below us; therefore, now there are people we aren’t allowed to speak to via my mother and grandmother’s orders. My dad calls it Red Lights and Green Lights.
He’ll see someone and be like, “red light?”
We were at the elevator and we seen a massive Red Light coming out of her apartment: Arnaldo’s mom.
Arnaldo lives basically right across from us on the 12th floor. He lived with his mom and his dad. His dad was all demented, pissing in the plants by the elevator. My mom said she used to hear Arnaldo screaming at his parents and then “sounds of someone getting beat up.”
So we been saying he kicks his parents’ ass. Arnaldo, —my dad meanly, I think, calls him Bozo, cause he’s bald on top and the rest of his hair flows out long and crazy. Honestly his whole aspect does give Bozo the Clown. Usually he spends most of his day downstairs b**********g with the doormen, or furtively shifting around the block with a creepy look in his eye.
If he’s down there and my mom’s going up the elevator, she flips off the camera cause she swears he’s looking.
Anyway, his 97 year old mom comes out of the apartment and he comes out right behind her. We’re on the far side elevator. There’s a short hallway between the elevators. Arnaldo sees her coming our way and literally yanks her away. Our elevator shows up first and my dad signals for Arnaldo and his mom to come with us. And they get in reluctantly without saying a word.
Arnaldo’s looking down at the ground the whole time. And his mother who is dressed up like she’s going to the ball with jewelry and red lipstick on, is smiling at me and my dad.
You could cut the sexual tension with a butter knife.
We get to the first floor, and his mom goes, “wow I never knew this elevator took so long.”
We went over to the bar, —it was after Silvana’s shift; there’s always a bartender and a waiter. The waiter is this severe-looking, tightlipped guy. He looks like a mean principal, so we call him The Principal.
He’s so stern, my dad told me to ask him to tell us a joke. He said he don’t know any. My dad said, “what if I give you 10 reals?”
Nope, no jokes from The Principal.
The bartender stays inside, and he don’t even know what’s going on, cause he’s caught up playing the machines. He sees people playing that all day and not winning so he thinks he’s due. That poor f****r is just working for free.
4. RENATO
Renato is my mom’s first cousin. They’re about the same age. I didn’t see him for a long time cause the rub was he hated everyone in the family. Now I didn’t know him too well as a kid, other than as a locus of mean talk.
My grandpa used to call him GBO, which is Grande, Bobo, e Otario. Which is basically Big, Stupid, and Moronic. And there were just endless stories of his idiocy. My mom put a bucket on his head when he was a kid. LOL, LOL, ETC.
I finally meet this dude forreal, as an adult, a few years ago. And it’s like, oh, he’s obviously a little off, a little goofy, you know. And this family put him thru the damn bullying ringer for years! You guys are just meanies! No wonder he hated you.
Now, Renato’s thing is wine. He f*****g loves wine. So we made plans to meet at this wine bar in the neighborhood. My mom, dad, grandma, me, and him. He starts drinking a little and he wants to show you his camera roll.
Every picture is of a bottle of wine, and then the next picture is of him holding the bottle with a glass of wine as in like a toast, and then we get the wine bottle again posed differently. He gets on the bus and takes a lot of day trips alone and so we’ll see him with a bottle of wine in Petropolis, or Teresopolis, or sometimes even like Chile or Peru. On Sundays though he drinks champagne.
All these pictures he asks strangers to take for him, —which stresses me out when I’m with him cause he’ll just bark at a passing stranger, no preamble, no niceties, he’ll go, “take our picture.”
If there’s nobody around he’ll take a selfie. His front facing camera is inexplicably set at a 10 second timer. So we sit there smiling waiting for the countdown, every time.
We got four bottles of wine deep and my dad wasn’t even drinking that much. So we were pretty cooked. Though you can’t tell when he’s drunk, he don’t show it. I said, “I don’t even think Renato’s drunk.”
We get him out on Nossa Senhora and he calls an uber. He sees a car on the otherside of the street and goes, “I think that’s it!” and doesn’t even look, walks right out into the street.
F*****g car barely missed him here, motorcycle missed him by an inch, f*****g bus tumbling through. And he didn’t even notice! He almost got f*****g creamed. We were going, “JESUS RENATO!”
And then he’s on the otherside of the street trying to open the door to every car until he finally, after about five tries, finds his uber.
I was like, “I guess he was drunk.”
The next day he wanted us to visit him at work. I thought he had a thumbtwiddling job, if you know what I mean. But we went downtown and he works at this legitimately cool old furniture store. Where they got like high end antique pieces in this three story old house on Rua do Senado.
We pulled up and he was drinking a beer.
I said, “they let you drink at work?”
“Yeah on Saturday.”
I really had to urinate. As he’s showing us around the place, on the third floor looks like there’s a bathroom. I say, “can I use that bathroom?”
He gives me a hesitant look. But then he says, “yeah.”
Oh my god. As I opened the toilet with flies assaulting my face, reader, I will not describe to you what I saw, but it was a big ugly pile of unflushed s**t. It was so gross. And I think Renato did it. And I pissed on the s**t.
I don’t wanna end gross, so I’ll end on a happy note. It turns out that bartender playing the machines was onto something. He won the jackpot! 10 million reals. Can you believe that? From a little machine at some rinkydink bar. I guess good things do happen.
