transvestite crackhead hooker
Brief Post Preface: My apologies to my readers (both of you) for not posting for the past few days. I've just gotten over a bout of particularly severe laziness and I think I'm back on the wagon (or off, I can't remember which is which) with the regular posts, hopefully. On the bright side I haven't been completely idle - I've managed to not get promoted to the next level of Portuguese class on account of my lack of vocabulary, social skills, and all around ineptitude (I fit in just fine here). Additionally, I have actually moved on to what you would call a job, if your definition of a job is showing up at a sweltering hot office with no AC to try (with the same ineptitude demonstrated in my class) to help out, for no pay and speaking the local language like a caveman, a non-governmental organization (no government here is good) that tries to help out kids and unemployed parents in poor neighborhooods.
So, without further stalling / throat-clearing / cliche-strewn verbal masturbation, here's what I got:
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Imagine this: you're sitting across from a young woman (a friend - chill) in an outdoor cafe on a cool summer night. The street is lined with old cobblestones, some of which could have been there for up to 5 centuries. Plastic tables and chairs, like the ones people put on their back lawns, are set up alongside the buildings that rise up on all sides of the narrow streets. There's music playing from a few streets over, and there's an air of festivity keep afloat by the constant chatter and outrageous bursts of laughter of men and women over some bottles of cheap beer.
The tables are strewn with unwrapped and half-smoked packs of also very cheap, noname brand cigarettes.
Sounds pretty nice, huh? But it can't be nice because this is real life and real life, at least when it's mine, has to be weird, and if it's not weird then I'll make it weird. So there's more.
IYou're speaking to your (relatively new) companion in a foreign language, the first one you've been able to speak with anything near fluency other than your native language. This alone is something you would never have seen yourself doing only 5 years ago. And you're around 5000 miles away from home, in a country that up until a year or two ago would have been unfathomable for you to visit, let alone live in for any length of time over a week. It's South America, for crying out loud – the connotation of those words makes it seem farther away than Europe (well, at least some of it is, actually).
While you're talking in this quasi-gibberish, which, somehow, you've been able to understand and learn enough of to have a relatively coherent conversation with a native speaker, you see a couple of tables down that there's a very thin (drug-addict thin) street person dancing in the front of the table to attempt to elicit a reaction (or more likely, money) from the table's occupants. Meanwhile you're trying to keep the conversation at your table afloat and not sound like a caveman when you talk, even though you know this is probably unavoidable (the caveman part). In between bites of your food and trying to concentrate on what your friend says, you say to yourself, 'Please let that person not come over to this table.' At that moment you realize that although the person is wearing a dress it is in actuality a man dancing in women's clothing. And to be more accurate it is a transvestite male hooker with a high voice, a lisp which you can detect even in Portuguese, and a very flat chest (don't they have duct tape here?). (S)he's not one of those transvestites who wants everyone to know that he's a transvestite, he's probably just an addict who doesn't have the time or desire to make himself look very womanly, or like anything other than a skinny man wearing a cheap dress.
And of course he does come over, and he's apparently selling copies of the local theatre schedule and guide in order to buy some crack. So before you can decide how the hell to get rid of this guy, your friend is like “Oh yeah, I'll take one” and starts poking around her purse for the R$2.50 the guy wants. While you were praying to the god of yuppie expatriates that the guy wouldn't come over, you'd failed to pay attention to the fact that your friend had been talking about how much she loves local theatre. But to get back to the moment, of course she doesn't have change. No one does in this country – there's some kind of taboo over giving money back after getting money, but everyone goes through the hassle anyway. It's like there's more effort generated in getting aggravated over having to give change than would actually have been spent if the parties involved had just dealt with the change in a sane manner and been done with it. But that's the subject of another post.
So she gets up from the table, after arguing with the transvestite prostitute, to get change from a food stand across the street. OK, no problem. It is noteworthy, though, that during the arguing over the change the transvestite finds it necessary to take of his wig, revealing what looks like a newly-cropped head of hair, cut in such a way that it looks as if some animal had chewed it off. After the haggling, however, she absentmindedly and for no apparent reason plops her huge purse on the table and FREAKING LEAVES IT THERE. This would not seem so strange to you in certain places in your own country, but in this particular place and time, you can be assured it is complete insanity. The purse is huge and pink, and made of what is probably fake leather, which to you is indiscernible from real leather except it's pink. And it weighs probably about half as much as your friend, who has a very slight build and would probably blow away in a heavy wind.
So even though you really don't know your new woman-friend (the one at the table, not the cross-dresser) terribly well, you swing your left hand over the top of the table and put it on the purse, fully expecting to have to flex your arm hard within the next 10 seconds to keep whomever grabs it from the table from stealing it. Meanwhile the transvestite is now dancing in front of your table, but has graciously sensed that you are not at all interested in even idle banter while your companion retrieves the aforementioned change. He just wants his crack money. Which sort of makes the rest of it make sense because now you realize that his street dance was more of a crackhead inability to stop moving rather than an artistic kind of thing.
Luckily she comes back and the purse is safe without incident. The crackhead transvestite prostitute gives her an air-cheek-kiss and dances back into the night, to the beat of the drum music which could be the soundtrack to Heart of Darkness.
If someone had asked you years ago where you thought you'd be, it was probably anything but the situation just described. And if you'd been told you'd be here by your own choice, and be OK with it, you would have said the person was crazy.
So, without further stalling / throat-clearing / cliche-strewn verbal masturbation, here's what I got:
--- begin actual post ---
Imagine this: you're sitting across from a young woman (a friend - chill) in an outdoor cafe on a cool summer night. The street is lined with old cobblestones, some of which could have been there for up to 5 centuries. Plastic tables and chairs, like the ones people put on their back lawns, are set up alongside the buildings that rise up on all sides of the narrow streets. There's music playing from a few streets over, and there's an air of festivity keep afloat by the constant chatter and outrageous bursts of laughter of men and women over some bottles of cheap beer.
The tables are strewn with unwrapped and half-smoked packs of also very cheap, noname brand cigarettes.
Sounds pretty nice, huh? But it can't be nice because this is real life and real life, at least when it's mine, has to be weird, and if it's not weird then I'll make it weird. So there's more.
IYou're speaking to your (relatively new) companion in a foreign language, the first one you've been able to speak with anything near fluency other than your native language. This alone is something you would never have seen yourself doing only 5 years ago. And you're around 5000 miles away from home, in a country that up until a year or two ago would have been unfathomable for you to visit, let alone live in for any length of time over a week. It's South America, for crying out loud – the connotation of those words makes it seem farther away than Europe (well, at least some of it is, actually).
While you're talking in this quasi-gibberish, which, somehow, you've been able to understand and learn enough of to have a relatively coherent conversation with a native speaker, you see a couple of tables down that there's a very thin (drug-addict thin) street person dancing in the front of the table to attempt to elicit a reaction (or more likely, money) from the table's occupants. Meanwhile you're trying to keep the conversation at your table afloat and not sound like a caveman when you talk, even though you know this is probably unavoidable (the caveman part). In between bites of your food and trying to concentrate on what your friend says, you say to yourself, 'Please let that person not come over to this table.' At that moment you realize that although the person is wearing a dress it is in actuality a man dancing in women's clothing. And to be more accurate it is a transvestite male hooker with a high voice, a lisp which you can detect even in Portuguese, and a very flat chest (don't they have duct tape here?). (S)he's not one of those transvestites who wants everyone to know that he's a transvestite, he's probably just an addict who doesn't have the time or desire to make himself look very womanly, or like anything other than a skinny man wearing a cheap dress.
And of course he does come over, and he's apparently selling copies of the local theatre schedule and guide in order to buy some crack. So before you can decide how the hell to get rid of this guy, your friend is like “Oh yeah, I'll take one” and starts poking around her purse for the R$2.50 the guy wants. While you were praying to the god of yuppie expatriates that the guy wouldn't come over, you'd failed to pay attention to the fact that your friend had been talking about how much she loves local theatre. But to get back to the moment, of course she doesn't have change. No one does in this country – there's some kind of taboo over giving money back after getting money, but everyone goes through the hassle anyway. It's like there's more effort generated in getting aggravated over having to give change than would actually have been spent if the parties involved had just dealt with the change in a sane manner and been done with it. But that's the subject of another post.
So she gets up from the table, after arguing with the transvestite prostitute, to get change from a food stand across the street. OK, no problem. It is noteworthy, though, that during the arguing over the change the transvestite finds it necessary to take of his wig, revealing what looks like a newly-cropped head of hair, cut in such a way that it looks as if some animal had chewed it off. After the haggling, however, she absentmindedly and for no apparent reason plops her huge purse on the table and FREAKING LEAVES IT THERE. This would not seem so strange to you in certain places in your own country, but in this particular place and time, you can be assured it is complete insanity. The purse is huge and pink, and made of what is probably fake leather, which to you is indiscernible from real leather except it's pink. And it weighs probably about half as much as your friend, who has a very slight build and would probably blow away in a heavy wind.
So even though you really don't know your new woman-friend (the one at the table, not the cross-dresser) terribly well, you swing your left hand over the top of the table and put it on the purse, fully expecting to have to flex your arm hard within the next 10 seconds to keep whomever grabs it from the table from stealing it. Meanwhile the transvestite is now dancing in front of your table, but has graciously sensed that you are not at all interested in even idle banter while your companion retrieves the aforementioned change. He just wants his crack money. Which sort of makes the rest of it make sense because now you realize that his street dance was more of a crackhead inability to stop moving rather than an artistic kind of thing.
Luckily she comes back and the purse is safe without incident. The crackhead transvestite prostitute gives her an air-cheek-kiss and dances back into the night, to the beat of the drum music which could be the soundtrack to Heart of Darkness.
If someone had asked you years ago where you thought you'd be, it was probably anything but the situation just described. And if you'd been told you'd be here by your own choice, and be OK with it, you would have said the person was crazy.
posted by n10471 at 6:02 PM
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