I woke up with a start, like when you are still mostly asleep but in your subconscious you notice that you’re not where you expect to be. Sometimes it’s the feel of the sheets, the mattress, the sounds outside, the light; if you’re lucky it’s some long, soft hair. But I knew I wasn’t where I last was, not that I could remember where that was anyway. It was the sheets. They were that tough clinical white cotton that are designed only to get soft after a few hundred washings.

The room was dark. A few streetlights glowed through the thick curtains. I heard a cough and sat up. To my left, slumped in some metal chairs with just a bit of padding, were my parents. I hadn’t seen them in almost a year, although we talked regularly enough. Still, I couldn’t figure out under what circumstances we’d have been reunited. It’s not like I’d ever drank myself into a blackout and boarded international flights before.

“Mom? Dad? Are you guys asleep? What’s going on?” I tried to ask them quietly so as not to surprise them, but I realized they had already woken.

“Tim? Did you say something?” my dad asked plaintively.

“Yeah, I’m up. What’s going on?”

“Oh, God, he’s speaking,” my mom said. She broke down and started crying. I noticed that Dad was crying as well. I hadn’t seen Mom cry since the time I’d gotten caught for some petty vandal stuff in tenth grade, and even then it was mostly with anger. Dad… well, I know I’d seen him tear up once, but I can’t remember when or why. It was a strange occurrence to say the least. He also had his arm around her, which had been even more strange since my sister and I leaving for school left them with no more reasons not to get divorced.

“Yeah, I’m speaking. Should I not be? What in the world is going on? How did you guys get here?” I asked, pretending I knew where ‘here’ was.

“Well, Timothy…” Mom rarely used my full name, definitely never with her voice cracking as she struggled to lift her face from her hands. “It’s just that, that… you’ve just been very sick.” She could barely get that much out. Dad patted her on the back.

I, for one, felt perfectly fine. I sat up on the bed to demonstrate. “Sick? What are you talking about? I’m great. Confused, sure, but not sick. Now what are you guys talking about? At least tell me where I am before you keep on worrying so much. I can’t bear to see you guys like this.”

“It’s good you feel good, son,” Dad said distractedly. “Where to begin… I guess I’ll try to explain it as best as I can. There was some sort of sickness going around in São Paulo, it made all of the international news. No one was sure at first exactly what it was, but they figured it was something to do with dengue, being a warm year with plenty of mosquitoes and whatnot. The first time we talked it didn’t seem to be a big deal, only old folks and babies were really getting sick, and you said it was just fodder for slow news days. But by the time it became apparent that it was, in fact, a big deal, whatever it was was spreading too quickly. Now there’s plenty of argument that it was terrorism, or some sort of undercover experiment like they’ve done in Argentina and Peru, but that’s unimportant I suppose.” He took a deep breath, wiped his eyes one last time, and gave me a sad smile. “At least now you’re back with us.”

It was a lot of digest, and I didn’t really try to understand. “Fine, fine, but where are we now?”

“We’re back in California, a couple hours south of the Oregon border, in a motel.”

“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to know. Now, about this sickness or whatever, what happened? How did I get home?”

Mom, who’d been staring at me with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling more than I remembered, just put her head back in her hands. The look she’d given me, with an attempt of a smile at what must have been happy memories in glaring contrast to the tight pinch of hopelessness at the sides of her eyes, was enough to snap me out of what was left of the sleepy daze and seriously begin to worry.

I turned to Dad, who was looking at his hands like he’d never seen them before. “Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”

After a bus ticket sellout, a breakdown, a lot of traffic, and some shitty directions – whoever had the idea of naming one portion of a street after a husband and the other after the wife but using only the last name on the street signs is a fucking idiot – Sam and I showed up to our hostel a day late. We’d told Victor, a friend who’d stayed with us the week prior in São Paulo, to grab us a couple spots. Something had gotten lost in translation with the Kenyan owners, and they said they’d given the bed we’d paid for away. It took a half-hour of arguing in broken English and Portuguese before they found us space in a tiny six person room.

Our roommates were a pair of Brits that had just finished college, a 27 year old Finn who spent all his time playing online poker, and a cute Brazilian photographer. The three guys were already drinking some beers they’d been forced to smuggle in due to the hostel’s strange no beer (but anything else) rule. Victor stopped by to introduce us to a German named Ingo that he’d been traveling with. Ingo was wearing a shiny black shirt and white linen pants. He was ready to party, and a few lukewarm beers weren’t going to cut it.

On the way to the liquor store I tried calling an old student who was in Rio filming a movie. I hadn’t talked to her since she had trick dosed me with acid and taken me into the favela to shoot photos a few months earlier, but she said she wanted to take us to a club where her friend was djing. She also mentioned that she had a bunch of acid again, which I wasn’t the least bit interested in.

Sam explained who I was talking with to the other guys. After I got off the phone Ingo grabbed me. “So man, you got LSD?”

“Well, not exactly…” I started.

“Let’s drop it right now! Come on, it’s been a few months for me! Let’s take it and go find some place that plays some fucking house. I need some bass. Victor, you in or what?”

“Um, no. I don’t think so.” Ingo was a tall, quite excitable dude, and although Victor was probably bigger he just shied away as the German did some Ibiza dance in his face. Ingo bounced back over to me acting like I’d shove a tab in his face right then and there, so I pushed him away with a noncommittal lie that I’d see what I could do.

At the store Ingo ran off to buy fruit, sugar and fancy cachaça to give making caipirinhas a shot. Sam and I bought gutrot and a packet of Tang powder to make sucão, the ‘big juice’ that some high schoolers had introduced us to months earlier. Back at the hostel, Sam spent all of twenty seconds whipping up a neon orange bottle of death while Ingo gathered a couple of the Evangelical girls who were staying there to show off his drinking making technique. They weren’t impressed.

Neither were a couple of guys from São Paulo who were drinking beers in a corner of the hostel’s patio. I offered them some sucão, which they rejected with a laugh. Pointing at Ingo trying to mash two halves of lime with a soup ladle, Marcello said he’d drink whatever shit I was holding before messing with Ingo’s cocktail. Ingo covered the gently battered fruit with a half-cup of sugar and a quarter bottle of cachaça before passing it off to the Brits.

Andy, the more talkative one, grimaced a bit. “Shit, that’s bloody strong.” Ingo looked earnestly for a fuller review, so Andy took another slow swallow. “Not bad though, I suppose it gets the job done.” He passed it to Charlie, who took a tiny sip and sent the cup on its way.

“I’m going to have to show this guy how to really make one before he makes the whole room sick,” Marcello said in Portuguese. “These Germans never do understand how one works.” I assumed he was talking about South Brazil, whose population is mostly descended from Germany, but he continued on. “You ever hear of this bar Ze Presidente in Vila Madalena. There’s always a bunch of damn German tourists there ordering ‘kaprinnas’ and complaining.”

It was Stan’s cousin Joan’s going away party, and as such we found ourselves drinking on a crowded mid-evening commuter bus headed to her house on the opposite end of the city. It was the first time she’d been able to head home in two years. My visa had been expired for months and any travel outside of the country would at best end in hefty fines. Returning to California seemed a particularly distant and final desination, and we were determined to send her off with as much fanfare as possible. Thankfully the small trashcans on the bus had openings large enough to fit a bottle and no one paid us much attention as we sloshed and clinked about while the driver did his best Ayrton Senna impression, probably egged on by the desire to partake in the same activity we were so flauntingly doing in his workplace.

By the time we got to her neighborhood we’d run out of the bottles we’d brought for the party. We stopped into a little grocery store to pick up another case of mid-range beer and one overpriced energy drink. The Red Bull had an RFID alarm tag, like what you’d expect used to prevent theft on electronics, crudely attached with an excessive amount of packing tape. The can wouldn’t scan properly, so the middle-aged checker wandered off to the impulse-purchase cooler to pick out a few more cans to try. They all had tags and wouldn’t scan either, so she resorted to hacking at the thick layers of tape with her long chipped nails. The line behind us continued to grow, and all the older women buying store-brand basics looked impatient with the half-drunk foreigners wasting everyone’s time trying to buy conspicuously fancy drinks. The checker finally got the tape off, and we rushed off.

Neither of us knew exactly where Joan’s house was, so Stan ambled up to a guy selling hundreds of pirated DVDs in the dim light spilling out of an open air bar on the corner. He pointed us toward a dark street that wound up the side of a lightly forested hill. All of the houses were surrounded by large walls topped with razor wire or broken bottles sunk in the concrete. A guard dog showed up to do his job, barking at us from the roof of a house we’d already passed.

Joan lived near the top of the hill, and the small entrance to her property opened up into a big sloping backyard with a small garden and a fire pit on the lower level. A few dogs and a chicken wandered about while most of the crowd hovered around either a large spread of home-cooked food at the back of the house or the bonfire below. The whole scene gave me one of those occasional flashbacks – one where you can’t remember specifics, just the feeling – that made me think of my parents and friends barbecuing in the middle of our backyard corn crop when I was about four or five in L.A.’s South Bay.

After saying hi to Joan, I started talking to a blond girl that looked clever enough to deal with the dumb things I’m always bound to do. When you’re learning a new language, some speaking days are good and others bad, and unfortunately I was feeling more towards the latter that evening. At least the drinking helped a bit with selling her on the fact that I knew what I was talking about. She told me something about visiting Santa Monica and that she’d spent the last year making her way down to São Paulo from California by whatever means possible. It was helpful to have her tell such a wild story simply because if I had no idea what was going on I felt I could still get away with responses like “wow”, “really?” and the like. Joan’s boyfriend Paulo, a good guy who always knew cool things to do and on this evening happened to be wearing no less than three XXXL flannels (buttoned only at the top, I’m not sure where he picked that up), came and stole me away to try out some hillbilly drink that amounted to a giant pot of boiling gutrot cane liquor with fruit and cinnamon tossed in, but I promised Bel that I’d be back to bother her later.

Hip-hop has always been a genre highly susceptible to gimmicks. I wouldn’t go as far as to blaspheme Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, because it did make rap palatable to the major labels (and helped usher out the God-awful overproduced R&B of the early ’80s), but there’s also no denying that the success of that particular track was partially due to its benign oddity holding sway with the less-conservative label execs of the time. Of course, now we’ve got specific styles for every major region, numerous sub-genres including a growing LGBT scene, and even geriatric WASPs doing their best head nods while delivering flows on tax reform. Hip-hop is highly individualized, with a low cost of entry and without most of the limiting factors of, say, a four-piece rock band, and success in that environment can be found simply by being different.

Professional athletes fit the bill quite nicely, and of them all, NBA players have the best combination of street cred and innate showman to pull it off – with the help of ghostwriters, ready-made production and auto-tune if need be. The top of the heap is Shaq, surely the greatest crossover in the history of sports. His five albums blow away the output of any other athlete rapper, and his first two efforts, Shaq Diesel (1993) and Shaq Fu: Da Return (1994), both went platinum. Hell, he already had a greatest hits album out in 1996.

After him, the field thins dramatically. There’s 1994′s seminal – at least in terms of NBA rap – compilation Basketball’s Best Kept Secret, featuring the usual boasting and bad puns from the likes of Cedric Ceballos, Brian Shaw, and Dana Barros, with the highlight being Gary Payton’s D.A.R.E. friendly “Living Legal and Large”, which surprisingly sounds like it was produced by a lazy E-40 in his early days. That aside, we’re stuck with a host of single attempts from Kobe’s painfully generic “K.O.B.E.” and Chris Webber’s anemic and emo “Too Much Drama”, the video of which starts with a weird minute and a half long church sequence. Oddly enough, Allen Iverson’s “40 Bars” has enjoyed a bit of success with collectors after the supposedly homophobic lyrics pissed off David Stern enough to derail its release.

Meanwhile, with much less of the exposure given the much bigger names above, Ron Artest has been chugging along with this own attempts. He’s surely the only athlete crazy or savvy enough to shout out a already-recorded championship single after winning it all. “Champion” is surprisingly well put-together, with the requisite auto-tune hook and a beat that sounds influenced by his time in Houston. In contrast to Kobe’s distant, listless delivery or Webber’s glacial codeine drawl, Artest knows how to actually rap a little bit. The single is apparently an attempt to resurrect what Artest started with 2006′s My World. The album has a fair amount of Dirty South influence, and while it largely fits under the umbrella of club rap, Artest – who is listed as a producer on every track – put it together with a lot of polish, especially with the help of then club mainstays Mike Jones and Juvenile. The top single “Fever” is an uptempo New York stripper jam that utilizes an impressively throwback break, but I’d pick the soulful “Haterz” as the top track on the record, if only for the fact that Artest’s hook openly wonders why people don’t like him with a vulnerability that your average lunatic NBA player turned rapper couldn’t muster.

Everything highlighted in Artest’s background – Queensbridge, the Palace, the MSG camera, halftime Hennessy – suggests that Artest would put out an aggressive, frenetic NYC battle record, and yet instead he tends to focus on the polar opposites of playboy partying or musing about what he’s done to deserve his reputation. Artest the rapper is never going to be a top rapper, largely because he lacks the superstar name that guarantees him a gimmick hit, but at the same time it’s obvious that he cares enough to spend the time and money to put out something respectable. In light of his peers’ work, Artest’s music is impressively multifaceted, something that for a long time many had assumed he was incapable of. It makes more sense lately as we’ve gotten a clearer picture of who Artest is. We’ve never really seen a deep Artest aside from a few excellent glances at the people around him, and combined with his controversies, he’s been plagued by the assumption that he’s simply a snarling dog in need of a cage. Now we’ve got a post-game interview where he alternately invites the whole media room to the club and is frankly honest about his own shortcomings. There’s no denying, even from him, that he is a tad bit crazy. It’s just that now it seems he’s finally getting the credit of being a complex subject as well.

The São Paulo gay pride parade is the biggest of its kind on the planet. With 3.5 million people shutting down Avenida Paulista, SP’s most famous street and probably the financial epicenter of South America, it’s also the biggest party I’ve ever seen. Semi-trucks pulling trailers stacked with speakers 15 feet high – with stages on top to boot – motored down the street blasting electronica that could be heard from a few kilometers away. High school kids wandered about drinking Brazilian bum wine, vendors cruised around selling shots of Red Label, every drug you could imagine was in blatant use, sexual activity of all kinds was everywhere, transvestites ruled queen, and a tiny police force sat back and watched it all go by. Words can’t explain it. I’ll try with the photos.

Mike and I were sitting in the kitchen. Again. Splitting a three dollar liter of pinga. Again. Complaining about our lack of friends in our adopted city and languidly looking at our cell phones as if they’d come up with something. Again.

We were only working twelve or so hours a week and had gotten back into starting the weekend on Thursday. It wasn’t particularly successful. The night before we had sat around the table until we ran out of hobo swill. We gave up on actually meeting anyone and ordered takeout from Habibs, an Arabian fast food chain. Headed back up in the elevator after picking up the delivery we started arguing about who ordered what. This shouting spilled out into our hallway. One of the pair of undeniably attractive lesbians who lived in the apartment outside the elevators stuck her head out and yelled at us. We ran.

Waking up with a hangover the only evidence of having already started the weekend, I suggested buying the girls a potted plant and writing them a letter. We stumbled about the nearest grocery store for awhile, arguing loudly over the merits of flowering plants versus normal houseplants, ending up with a mostly-intact sunflower. Mike managed to cobble together a half-English, half-Portuguese letter, and we called the day a success.

The night, however, found us in our familiar position. “We are a waste,” Mike said. “A city of 11 million and we don’t have any friends to call.”

“Yeah, we pretty much are a disaster.” I looked at my phone again. I’d sent texts whomever I could, including the former student who I’d fingerbanged in a bar empty except for a jazz band after she’d trick-dosed me with acid and taken me into the favela to shoot photos of graffiti. She didn’t care for texts.

“You know what? Fuck this.” He rose out of his chair. “I don’t give a fuck if none of our friends are willing to go anywhere that doesn’t involve maids cooking and bootleg porn. Let’s hit the street. We can meet our own people. Shit, that’s what I had to do every night when I was living in Thailand, and that worked out fine.” He regularly ranted about how much he hated living in Thailand. “Let’s go up to Augusta, wade our way through the hipster fucks, and meet some folks. It worked last time with those tattoo girls, right?”

We stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few warm beers, all that anyone ever has, for the thirty block trek. Nearly every corner held an open diner, with the crowds of nicotine-scarred old men sharing beers slowing fading into crowds of young professionals the farther up the hill towards the main financial street we got. We got plenty of confused looks from both groups. Halfway to our destination we climbed through some bushes to pee.

The bushes were only ankle high and next to a popular thoroughfare. Plenty of cars honked at us as we stood there, pouring in warm beer to replace the hot stuff coming out.

“You know, this has gotta be one of the more awesome spots I’ve taken a pee,” I said, waving at traffic.

“Are you kidding me?” Mike disdainfully responded. “This ain’t that tight. Probably not even in my top five all-time. It’s not even a thing.” He was sometimes into binary rating of situations: it’s either something or it’s nothing.

“It’s definitely a thing,” I said defensively. “But okay, whatever. Maybe not the greatest spot on Earth.”

“Not even. Not even close. This is shit spot to pee.”

“Fine, fine, fuck it. Let it go. Let’s get out of here.”

We made it up to the metro station that marks the entrance to Augusta, the small street filled with bars, clubs and cheap whorehouses. The metro is always surrounded by packs of younger high schools kids that look like caricatures of MySpace goths, emo kids and punks of both the gutter and skate varieties. I’d laugh, but they usually look pretty menacing, like little packs of purse-sized coyotes.

A couple weeks ago I got a call from a smoky voiced woman interested in taking English classes. She had gotten my number from a friend, and after we set up a meeting, I called the friend to find out who she was. He laughingly explained that she was a prostitute. Her clientele was almost exclusively foreigners. Learning English was good business.

My personal experience with hookers is relatively limited. I went to a whore house a few months ago for a friend’s birthday, and on the surface it’s just a rowdy strip club with the added bonuses that the cover charge magically turns into a bar tab and the simple fact that you can have sex with whomever you like. There was one girl who I thought was pretty cute – and didn’t have an ass the size of two beach balls, which Brazilians love so much – but she wasn’t buying my story about being a big-time American doctor despite the slacks and tie I had worn to support such a lie (in contrast, the friend who drove me there was wearing track pants and a white t-shirt). Laughing at my failure, another friend set me up with a girl and told me to go get wild.

Now, paying for sex is a surprisingly stressful thing. At least for me. Seeing dollar signs spin around the girl’s otherwise glazed eyes as she led me off to some room wasn’t exactly enticing. In any case, after already having worked through much of the expensive cover/tab, I didn’t see the point in trying to give her the soft serve anyway. It’s not like I wanted to pay a couple hundred bones to poke my comatose penis in her with a finger and call it a night. Instead, we ended up in the shower and chain-smoked soggy Virginia Slims while I yelled obscenities at the couples I could see through the shower windows.

That adventure over around four in the morning, I found the rest of my friends within the rapidly-thinning ranks of the club and suggested we leave. Unfortunately, a friend who I only know as “Cousin” had just picked up another girl. Cousin, a hillbilly who was missing most of his teeth at the time after getting shot in the face during a carjacking a few months prior and thus spoke utterly incoherently, had a magical way with the girls, and ended up raw-dogging some poor girl in the ass for two hours.

Being the last guy in the whore house, sitting in a dingy courtyard smoking slim menthols you bummed off a girl and shaking from a dozen Double Reds that were heavy on the Bull and light on the Label, watching forty prostitutes, tits and asses hanging out everywhere, wobble about on six inch heels as they wait in line for cracked bowls of grey stew and laugh excitedly about nothing like Barbies, all while watching the dirty sun slowly come up as you’re waiting for your engaged friend with half a mouth finish his attempt at getting some life-threatening disease, is not what I’d call a self-esteem booster.

I called Patricia, the new student, around noon on Friday to confirm our class. Her work phone is set up deflect incoming calls; I left a message and waited for her to call me back. She told me to swing by her place that afternoon. She sounded tired.

She lives in a hip building with staggered row of bright red balconies in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the city. A pair of girls dashed into the elevator as the doors were closing, and they started chatting about me being Patricia’s new teacher in Portuguese. They each were carrying four or five bags full of newly purchased clothing and tapped their large heels as they twittered excitedly. Both had impressive skill in applying their make-up in the style that looks amazing from twenty feet away or after a six-pack.

I started chatting them up, and after their initial surprise that I speak the language, the started bouncing all around me, asking me questions in between giggling and buffeting me with their bags. We tumbled out of the elevator and they dragged me into Patricia’s apartment, where I met another girl in a tiny skirt whose name I didn’t catch. Patricia was in the shower, so they had me wait on her little couch while they ran off into the bedroom area of the semi-divided studio and started ripping shoes and dresses out of the bags, each item shown off with its own shriek of excitement.

A friend, Luiz, had invited us to his father’s farm for the weekend to celebrate his brother’s birthday. Conscientious as he was, he also sent along a pair of friends to pick the four of us Americans up at our apartment. A base model Honda Fit costs US $40,000 in Brazil, and large cars are appropriately rare. Mike, a jovial guy with A-cups in his early thirties, and Vagner, his more muscular counterpart, helped us into Mike’s relatively roomy small sedan. With four people sitting legs stacked on top of each other in the back seat, Mike took off, driving in circles around the city trying to avoid traffic while chatting about the prerequisite survey that necessarily starts every man’s conversation: what soccer teams we rooted for, what video games we played, what we drank, where we liked to drink it. With everyone coming to a general agreement on Corinthians S.P., Playstation, beer in the morning, vodka in the afternoon and whiskey at night in any club populated by prostitutes, we finally exited the city for a freeway that cut a sharp line through green countryside and the brown crumbling brick of the miles of suburban favelas. No other direct routes and zero public transportation service the massive slums, and the side of the freeway was populated with people walking in groups to go to the market. We occasionally had to duck when we noticed parked police cars, but the officers mostly seemed concerned with reading magazines.

Luiz’ father, whom I was told was only referred to as the Captain, made his fortune in real estate, and was essentially a modern land baron. He owned property all over the state; this particular farm was located a couple hours outside of the city in a small rural city of 30,000 people called Jaguariuna. Luiz had previously told me that this farm was his father’s true love, and he spent every weekend there. I believe the Captain was in the late-60s, and I asked Luiz why he didn’t just move out there.

“That’s his goal, his dream,” Luiz said. “He plans on it, but he’s still got a bit of work to do in the city. I think he’s going to try and finish everything in the next three or four years and then go and live out there full time.” It’s tough to imagine a man with almost unlimited funds and a massive portfolio of property providing a healthy monthly stipend feeling that he still has a few years of work to finish before he can go off and do what he wants, but I suppose that’s the mentality that got him there in the first place.

Jaguariuna was a sleepy, clean city that seemed much smaller than the census would suggest. We blasted through in a few minutes, the overloaded car scraping menacingly on the town’s enormous speed bumps. The city’s smooth, new streets filtered into dusty rural roads that wound through fields of corn and were mostly traveled by packs of motorcycles. Mike yanked the car off the highway onto a gravel road at the last minute and we slid up to a halt at a giant blue gate with an attached guard house and living quarters. The barred windows of the guard hut were broken, and no one was around. “I hope the dogs don’t attack” was all Mike said and we entered the grounds.

It was immediately apparent that ‘farm’ was a term loosely applied to the property. While a few massive combines trundled their way through corn fields far off in the distance, the main dozens of acres we drove through were filled with well-manicured ponds and lakes with paths meandering through the numerous small structures scattered about. We came upon another massive blue gate, this one in far better repair and covered in ornate concrete work. Across one lake was a huge two-story red house that Luiz later told me had only been used as temporary accommodations when his father had first purchased the land. Crossing through the gate, we came upon a stucco-sided building with a bright tile roof and numerous intricately designed balconies. Beyond that, across a massive, perfect lawn, was a brick structure that housed a massive full bar, an extremely well-appointed kitchen, game room and a dance floor with a complete, permanent DJ booth. It sat next to a large pool and had seating enough for scores of people. Past the pool and through a few different gardens was a huge barbecue and covered outdoor banquet area with a brick pizza oven that Luiz said had only been used once.

“What are you doing tonight? Let’s drink.”

“I not sure… I thought to stay in house. The week next?”

“Come on. I haven’t been out of the house in weeks. Let’s go out.”

“ok. Meet meet at metro consolacão at 11h.”

Carol was one of my students. She was working as a creative director for an ad agency, the type of place that considers itself cutting edge because its employees had tattoos and they did street installations from time to time. She hated it, and spent most of our class time either talking shit or talking about her escapades. For example, one Monday she told me that she was “very tired because she had gone to bed at six.” Her English wasn’t the best, so I assumed that she meant she was tired the day before, and had gone to bed early. In actuality, she had been drinking until six a.m. that morning and had only quit because her friend fell face first into a pile of dog shit. She had done a little bit of blow in traffic and she was ready for the day. She was short with messy black hair and had a tattoo of a phonograph on one arm. She was also one of the hippest people I knew in São Paulo, and I had been itching to go out with her one night. The allure of the type of person who spends their Sunday drinking whiskey until work starts on Monday speaks for itself.

I met her on Rua Augusta, a street filled with brothels, gay bars and hipsters. We went to a rock bar with a vague country western theme that was one of the rare places in the city that sells beer other than the standard Brazilian beer that tastes like old Budweiser no matter the brand. It was filled with people near 30 wearing flannel and covered in tattoos like Carol and Droo-Droo, her boyfriend, or baby-faced college freshman in preppy clothes looking to be different. We were drinking an extremely mild national pale ale that was quite expensive at $6 a bottle. Another couple sat down with us, a tall, buxom old blonde done up like a pin-up model and a guy with cropped hair and a tight western shirt that looked like the original teenager. I never got their names, and they didn’t really speak to me, but they seemed nice enough.

Droo-Droo was less quiet. I really enjoyed talking to Carol because she always had interesting stories about DJing fashion shows in a part of the city called Crackland (It is even referred to as Cracolãndia on the news, which gives a surprising air of legitimacy to a neighborhood filled with hundred of crackheads passed out on the sidewalks), but she just sat politely as Droo chatted my ear off about he used to skateboard a bunch, how cool the U.S. Is, music (mostly radio punk) and how most of his friends were in jail. At one point, I got around to asking him why he got “DROO DROO” tattooed on his knuckles.

“When I was young, I hated school, I never went, I just drank and did drugs and skateboarded,” he said. “My dad kicked me out of the house when I was about to go to jail. He told me that I had to get my life together otherwise I’d be worth nothing. So I started working in design, making video clips and things, and eventually got an office and some money together. Then I got these tattoos to remind myself that I’m still Droo-Droo, but I have to work hard. My dad likes me again.”

During one of Carol and Droo’s trips to the bathroom to top up on some “coke-ay-een”, as Carol put it, I grabbed a waitress to order more beers.

“You’re speaking English right? You’re American?”

“Yeah, I’m from California.”

“How long are you visiting for?”

A couple had come over to hang out a bit, play some cards and have a couple beers. Real adult stuff. Danielle, a French transplant to Brazil by way of Cincinnati, played with me on a weekend volleyball team that was otherwise solely Japanese. Rachael, his Korean-Brazilian fiance, played on a women’s squad, but her true passion as far as I could tell laid in playing a Brazilian card game that’s like a fast-paced bridge.

There were five of us in the tiny studio apartment that’d be considered a medium-sized bedroom otherwise. We only had two chairs and a love seat, so I rummaged through the flotsam left by previous tenants in the hall and found a chair with no seat and a piece of plywood. The type of place that rents with no questions asked tends to accumulate a lot of broken furniture. I was told that our old neighbors used to be a married couple of prostitutes – before the husband was murdered – and that the guy who lived in our apartment before we did was fond of sitting on the couch rubbing the genitalia of stray cats. A couple of them did hang around our window quite often, so I was in no position to refute the claims.

“Alright, amor, we can’t let these gringoes win, right?” Rachael was dead serious to my right, staring across the table.

“You kidding me? You think these guys even know how to play? Somebody get me a little bit more beer, I’m going to get bored over here.” Danielle was jiving as hard as he could.

Dan, across from me, scoffed. “These guys are idiots. They have no idea what’s coming. Am I right? We gotta kick some ass.” The shit talking wasn’t necessarily impressive, but the game was pretty intense. Dan and Rachael weren’t drinking, but Danielle, Kevin (who was on the sidelines) and I made up for them. Danielle seemed to be refilling his glass more aggressively than the rest of us, and I asked him if we were making him nervous.

“You fucking kidding me? Nervous? Fuck no! WHO DEY! WHO DEY!” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him rep his Cincinnati past, but it sounded a little more drunk than usual. Rachael didn’t seem amused, and just gave him a stare until he focused back on the game.

They took the first game, we took the second. It took awhile to finish both, and in that time the three of us drinking had run out of beer and switched to some kind of whiskey that had a pair of depressed terriers on the label. The third game ended in a tie, which meant we had to play a no-look round for the win.

“Alright you sonsabitches! I’m motherfucking Mel Gibson in Maverick up in this bitch! Motherfucking lightning round!” I said.

“Bullshit! You can’t even read the damn cards! You’re about to get your ass HANDED to you! Dumbass Americans!” The pooch whiskey had loosened up the table banter, at least on Danielle and my ends. Dan and I ended up winning in a phenomenally lucky fashion. Danielle and I started yelling at each other. Rachael just stood up to leave.

“I’ve, we’ve,” she said, looking at Danielle, “have to get up early tomorrow morning. Thanks for having us over.” She brusquely dragged him out the door.

Kevin, Dan and I just stared at each other until we realized we should probably find something to do. Both Kevin and Dan wanted to go out to the new house we were moving into. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend 40 minutes on three trains to sleep in a half-painted house filled with roaches and broken windows only to be serenaded to sleep by the sound of gunshots.

“You guys go ahead, I think I’m going to stay here so I can try to get some work done with a little bit of peace. Sorry to be lame.”

Kevin was not amused. “You fucking kidding me? You’re definitely coming. We’re going to the pizza place, fool.” Dan had met the owner of a pizza place a week before and proceeded to get shitcanned with him. Kevin swung by a few days later and also got blitzkrieged with the owner, who apparently mentioned that he drank two to three liters of vodka a day while talking about his failed marriage. Seemed like a party, so I followed them out the door.

When I’d tell friends I was moving out to a neighborhood on the east side of the city, they generally responded with either a simple, dumbfounded “Why?” or some expression of legitimate concern. At night, walking the ignored cobblestone streets, looking at the houses – each with a massive fence topped with either barbed wire, electrified wires, broken bottles or a combination of the three – and listening to dog barking and the occasional expletive or moan, it’s a place that isn’t particularly inviting. But no one was ever there. Compared to the rest of the city, where people drank in the streets into the early morning every day, it was completely barren. Not even the trash-filled little park in the middle of the neighborhood had anyone lying about.