Broke Brando, the Whorehouse, and the Tranny

 

There's no Brando narrative this morning.  I got a phone call that kept me up late into the night and a plumber will be here early.  I am groggy and anxious, so I will not meet my "deadline."  Selavy, eh?  

Fuck all.  I will try.  

Whenever Brando had an adventure travel trip for which no one signed up, he'd ask me to go for the cost of the airline ticket and accommodations.  I'd spent a month in Peru with him one summer this way (and stayed even longer on my own) during the time that the Shining Path had made it, according to the State Department, the most dangerous country in the world.  Nothing much bad happened.  They blew up our train and stuff, but things were cheap.  

So when he asked me to go to Venuzuela, I said sure.  It wasn't until we got to the airport in Miami and took a cab to Calle Ocho to kill some time between flights that I learned there was a coup taking place.  

"What the fuck?!?" I said when I saw the Spanish speaking newspaper headlines.  

Brando shrugged.  "It's fine."

Once again, there was a reason hardly anyone was coming.  

When we got to Caracas that night, you could hear the gunfire in the streets.  There wasn't Marshall law, exactly, but nobody was going out.  When we took a cab to a restaurant for dinner, the cabbie wouldn't stop for red lights.  

"Putas de la noche," he said.  "You don't stop for them."  

If you stopped, apparently, there was a good chance of getting killed.  

"They used to come up and rob you at gunpoint, but it is easier for them now to just shoot you and take your things."  

When we pulled up to the restaurant, we were instructed to stay in the car.  Two men from inside the restaurant opened the two security doors and came out to escort us in.  Shit was real.  

Welcome to Venuzuela.  

The next day, we took a small airplane to the high Jungle of Canaima National Park and were driven to the banks of the Churun River where we met a boat that would transport us for the next several days to Angel Falls, the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world.  It was a grand trip, but that is another story. 

When we got back to Caracas, we had several days to kill before our flight home.  We went to the famous opera house, the Teatro Municipal of Caracas, and saw a Russian folk ballet.  That night, Brando had an idea.  He wanted to go to the Doral, "a world class whorehouse," he proclaimed.  I'd heard him talk about it before.  He portrayed it as a palace where the bouncers wore tuxedoes and the girls were international beauties.  I had no intentions of hiring a girl, but sure, I'd go.  I was curious to see the place I'd heard so much about.  

We took a cab to one of the neighborhoods outside the central city, a suburb of Caracas.  When we got out, we were indeed greeted by bouncers in tuxedoes, but they would never have been mistaken for men going to the Oscar Awards.  Their cheap tuxes had seen better days.  

Inside, we entered a half full barroom beyond which was a lounge.  We took a seat at the bar and watched the women come and go.  Brando was like a monkey on a chain jerking his head 'round and 'round to see the women while elbowing me in the ribs to get my attention.  The women were like hillbilly women everywhere, dressed up in whore outfits. . . gaudy dresses, high heels, red lipstick, too much makeup.  Perhaps some of them had good figures, and of course it was the younger ones who were most in demand.  I watched the drill.  A fellow would pick out a "date," and she would go to one of the men in tuxedoes and proceed up the grand staircase to the rooms above.  The man in the tuxedo would call the fellow over and hand him a towel and a wash cloth with a little bar of travel soap on top and he, then, would follow.  We sat at the bar long enough to watch some of the fellows and their "dates" go up and come back down.  The customers usually left quickly.  The women, hair and makeup redone, went back to work the floor.  

Eventually, two women approached us at the bar with big smiles.  Brando told me to buy them drinks and started chatting up his favorite.  The other one stood by me, grinned, and tried to make conversation.  My Spanish is very poor, so our conversation went something like this.  

"Do you want to go upstairs with me?" she asked in Spanish.  I didn't want to insult her and just say "no," so I tried to tell her I wasn't there for the women but was just there to watch my buddy.  That is how it must have come out, anyway, for she gave me a quizzical look.  

"No, no, no estoy aqui por las mujeres."  At lest that is what I think I said, but apparently it sounded as if I did not like women.  Again, I got the look.

"Mariposa?" she laughed.  

"No, no. . . ."

Whatever I said next convinced her that I was going to watch my buddy have sex with a prostitute, but at least, I thought, I was not insulting her.  

We continued to chat.  She was from Columbia, she said.  Many of the girls there had come to Venuzuela from Columbia to escape the violence, but now Venuzuela had become dangerous, too.  She asked me if we were staying in Caracas.  I told her yes, we were here a few more days.  Did I have a hotel, she asked.  Yes, I said, we were staying downtown.  Then she said she would come to see me at the hotel if I liked.  Not for money.  I turned to Brando and told him what she had just said.  For some reason, this pissed him off and he countered that this was not what she said at all.  It made no difference to me one way or another, but we had been hanging around the girls for a while now, and I asked him if he was going to take one of them upstairs.  He blustered a bit, then said no, let's go get something to eat.  I was surprised, but that was good with me.  I'd had my fill of the Doral for one evening.  

Back out on the street, we headed down a hill toward some distant string of white lights, an outdoor cafe of some kind with wooden picnic tables and a little structure that was a kitchen.  There was hardly anybody there and we sat at a table and were immediately greeted by a waitress.  I forget what we ordered, but as was typical for Brando, when he finished his first meal, he ordered a second.  The night was beginning to wear down and the cafe seemed to be ready to close.  It was long after midnight.  

As I sat waiting for Brando to finish, a trio walked past the table, two fellows with a girl latched on to each of their arms in the middle.  By now, Brando was "in his cups" and had been getting brutish for sometime. He seemed to be paying no attention at all, but as the trio passed close by, Brando reached out and smacked the woman on the ass.  Holy shit, holy shit. . . I knew this was going to be bad. What the fuck, Brando, what the fuck. . . .  But the woman didn't make a sound, and I saw her look back over her shoulder with a big grin.  

"O.K. buddy, I'm out of here," I said, getting up from the table to head back up the hill.  

"Wait a minute," Brando yelled, "sit down."  

"It's late," I said, "and I want to go to bed."

"Sit down, goddamnit. . . I don' have any money." 

Bingo!  That was the reason he had passed on the woman at the brothel.  I should have figured that out right away.  

I called the waitress over and settled up the check and once again headed up the hill.  Brando hailed some funky looking "cab," just a broken down clunker with a painted Campbell's soup can saying "Taxi" strung to the top.  I kept walking back to where the real taxis were.  

Once we were inside and headed back to the hotel, Brando began yelling at the cabbie to stop.   He pulled up next to a woman walking on the sidewalk.  Brando rolled down his window and began talking to her.  I noticed that the cabbie was chuckling.  

"Why are you laughing?" I asked him.  

"That is not a woman," he said.  

This was great!  I'd pay for Brando on this one without flinching. 

"Don't say anything, o.k.?  Don't tell him."

The cabbie continued to laugh as I silently prayed, "Do it, Brando, do it, please. . . ."

I'd like to say that the story ended well, but Brando wasn't able to convince the tranny to get into the cab much to my tremendous disappointment.  And so we made our way back through the abandoned streets, running red lights as the gunfire continued all around us through the dark night.  

This isn't the end of the tale, but it is all I can do this morning.  I'm surprised I got as much as I did written.  As I say, I am tired and still waiting on the plumber.