Photo note: I found a roll of film in a pea coat that I shot during December in New York and Washington D.C. The developer I took it to in São Paulo has an incredibly terrible film scanner, so I apologize for the weird digital grain.

Jon wanted to play cards, but none of us had enough money to buy a new deck. However, Reggie had a couple thousand outdated business cards lying around for reasons unexplained. We ended up passing them around to draw our own up. Flipping through the finished deck, I noted two things: the majority of young men have unfathomably shitty writing, and said young men when asked to draw a queen will almost always involve a splayed pussy in their art.

We were waiting to go out to a dirty bar with a guy named Caue. I had met him a few days prior. Caue looked and acted like James Franco after a long night of shoveling coke into his nose. At one point, Reggie asked him who he had fucked recently.

“Shit, you should have seen!” Caue said, hair falling down with sweat as he bounced around the room. “I fucked the hottest fucking girl! Oh man! Figure eight! Figure eight!” He grabbed a table and started grinding his hips on it to demonstrate.

“Who was she?”

“Oh man, it was my cousin! She’s so hot!?”

“Your cousin?” I shot out, believing it was just a translation error.

“Yeah, you know. Your cousin, right? My sister’s brother, his daughter. That’s a cousin right?”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah! It’s like the sister you can fuck!” He then proceeded to pull out his cell phone and show all of us a video he surreptitiously took of him fucking a girl in a friend’s bathroom. Meanwhile, he shouted out their conversation, alternating between a man’s and woman’s voices

“Who’s ass is this? It’s yours Caue! I SAID WHO’S ASS IS THIS!? It’s YOURS Caue!”

After that display, we all expected an intriguing evening. In preparation we took shots of some random cheap liquor procured in the ghetto that had a picture of a crayfish on the bottle. The card game passed the Jone for a while, but their glossy backs weren’t kind to the ballpoint pen someone had found on the ground. The cards got so smudged that we ended up spending most of our Jone arguing over what each one was worth. During one of these dust-ups I knocked over a glass. All of the ink washed off the cards. We gave up.

I walked over to the grocery store across the street to pick up more beer. Three gay homeless guys were usually posted up in front, spouting lewd compliments drunk as hell at passerby. In their place were two transvestite hookers passed out across the sidewalk on a piece of cardboard. One had a crack pipe in her hand. Parents and their children just stepped over them on their way to buy bread.

There were three guys in front of me in line, all holding a pair of pint cans. It seemed like a small purchase, but I wasn’t in a position to comment. One guy with a lawyer’s version of an emo-cut was wearing a pink dress shirt, fully unbuttoned and tucked into white jeans. He kept leaving the line and going back to the beer aisle to switch his beers for new, presumably colder ones. He looked at me once with pupils that blacked out both of his irises.

When I got back to the apartment they told me that Caue had canceled on us. I felt bad calling him a pussy when they told me he had taken his mom to the hospital. At least she was supposed to be fine. Instead, we decided to head to Rua Augusta, the city’s hipster Mecca. Fortunately for us, the street was walking distance, and its bars are famously cheap.

We stopped at a deli that had a bunch of people drinking on the sidewalk to try and figure out where the best bar was for the night. I went inside to order a pair of beers and got into a small argument with the guy at the counter over the price. A prostitute stopped hustling a falling-down drunk businessman to spin in her stool and sort things out. I was impressed with her English, and ended up walking out thanking everyone profusely. Back on the sidewalk Jon and Reggie were talking to a small group that was leaning up against a fence and competing to see who could smoke more nonchalantly. One guy had a big pointy black beard and skin tight neon red pants. I avoided him. A girl with bad tattoos and an off-camber haircut stood next to him. She had Reggie stuck in the middle of what, by the looks of Reggie’s face, was an uncomfortable conversation. He later told me that she was a hardcore Evangelical and spent half an hour trying to get him to come to church with her. I think her proud straight-edge values turned him off. Jon was talking to a guy who had a pot-dealing girlfriend in Vancouver. Separate hemispheres seems kind of distant for a relationship, but I wasn’t going to judge.