I found a guy selling caipirinhas for two bucks and ordered five. He was using some painfully cheap booze I’d never seen before – no mean feat for someone with homeless tastes – and whipped them up with a flourish. Sam showed up with some tall cans he’d managed to get the magic three-for-five deal on, and we did our best to get all of the visitors as drunk as possible. Andy almost barfed when he tried the rubbing alcohol I’d handed him, so I convinced him to order capeta, a chocolate milk, cinnamon and vodka drink that smokes and bubbles from dry ice and has the consistency of a melted milkshake.

Adriana wasn’t really drinking, and Victor told me she wanted to get to a club before we wasted the whole night standing around watching homeless folk suck down the ass-ends of discarded cans. Ingo came storming up, roaring drunk with one drink in each hand and a giggling Welsh girl in both arms, to proclaim the same desire. We wandered through a park to have a communal piss on some wall and let Adriana lead us across an aqueduct into a worn-down neighborhood had lines pouring out of every building. The first club was blasting uptempo electronica and the line was full of embroidery-covered polo shirts. The next was playing generic rap with a hood rich dudes and girls in tube tops waiting. The road split into two and we saw people dancing in the windows of the triangle-shaped building in the middle. Funk carioca, the evolution of booty bass from the favela, was pouring out of the second story. That was my pick, and when no one objected, we paid the small cover and went in.

The club was probably an old apartment that only been partly gutted. The bar was squeezed into one little room, the DJ was in another, and partial walls divided the main floor into niches with balconies. The building shook with the bass from the most filthily awesome songs I’ve heard in a long time, including one whose chorus was simply “suck me” repeated over and over at high speed. The place was packed with people doing every manner of butt-pounds, pelvic thrusts and daggering I could hope for. We got a few looks like that one R&B club scene in Animal House from some angry looking wallflowers but for the most part people couldn’t have given a fuck less.

I lost everyone but Sam and the Brits. Andy left for the bar and by some ludicrous coincidence came back with a pair of English girls who had gone to Charlie’s and his rival university. Andy handed me a drink and started dancing with the girls in the window. Charlie got involved, and Sam found another girl to talk to, so I started doing my best Ol’ Dirty Bastard shimmy. I must have been doing a good job, because a girl with straining jeans, blonde cornrows and a pretty face rushed over and started grinding on me. Someone kept shoving new drinks into both of my hands, then she shoved me into a corner, and soon she shoved her tongue down my throat. And repeat.

Somehow our group had assembled outside. I thought it was still early until Ingo mumbled around a cigarette about it being almost five.

We started looking for a cab but paused to watch a wild-eyed woman tried to fight an old man in the middle of the street. He was scurrying about with a tilted wobble as she flailed her fists and shrieked. Almost immediately her top burst off, but she kept going, large breasts flopping about wildly. A huge man with pupils like a great white shark’s showed up and knocked the girl out of the way to chase the old man down the street. She wandered over to grab her top and dropped down in traffic to slam her butt her the ground and furiously rub her vagina while a group of dirty young children sitting around a stroller on the sidewalk cheered her on.