Swimming
with the Sharks in Rio
I
was down in Rio on business and since our last meeting was on a Friday
afternoon, my colleague Richard and I decided to extend our trip to stay for
the weekend. At our last meeting with some
brokers, we asked them about Rio’s nightlife.
They told us about some trendy restaurants and then strongly recommended
a particular nightclub. The club was
close to our hotel and was the “best in the city”. We were also told “there is always a line to
get in, but just walk to the front and ask if you can go in. If you speak English, they won’t make you
wait.”
Richard
and I went to dinner and walked over to the club at around 10:15pm. The place was already bursting and we could
hear the music thumping all the way out on the street. There was a good size line of beautiful
people standing in front of the place, so we did what the broker told us and
walked up to the front and spoke with one of the bouncers.
“Hey,
how you doing? Is it ok if we go into
the club?” I said to the main guy.
He
looked us over. “Of course you can go
in, but you have to wait in line.” He
answered and motioned to the line as if we didn’t see it.
“Oh,
ok, thanks.” We walked to the back of
the queue and took our place.
Two
girls immediately joined the line after us.
They were young, good looking ladies in their early-to-mid twenties. One of them was a thin girl with braces and the
other was a dyed blond with a curvaceous Brazilian physique. The latter was the looker of the two and also
the one that was staring at me as they came up.
It was clear that they had seen us get rejected by the bouncer. After a moment, she said, “they usually let
people into the club ahead of the line if they are couples. If you would like, we can all go up together.”
“Oh,
really. That sounds good, let’s try
it.” I replied and looked at Richard. He shrugged his shoulders and we all walked
back up to the bouncer.
“Hey
man, we met our friends. Is it ok to go
in now?” I said.
“As
I told you- it’s ok, but you have to wait your turn just like everyone
else.” He was clearly annoyed now. We humbly retreated back to the end of the
line.
The
club was already at capacity, so they were only letting people in as people left
so the queue was moving like molasses.
After ten minutes of waiting we only moved up a couple spots. It wasn’t so bad though, as we now had these
young Brazilian ladies talking to us. The
conversation seemed to be going somewhere and the girls were laughing and
smiling a lot. Richard, an overweight,
pale New Yorker with gold-rimmed glasses and a proclivity for perspiration was
loving it. I soon noticed that there was
a bar next to the club that was mostly empty.
“Hey,
why don’t we go into that bar for a little while, grab some drinks and then
come back once the line dies down?” I
said to the group. The girls immediately
agreed and we went into the bar.
Once
there, Richard and I pulled out all the stops.
We were buying rounds of cocktails, B52 shots and telling all kinds of
stories one after the other. We were
doing our best to hook these girls and they kept laughing at our tales and jokes. That being said, Richard kept saying “Hi
Five! Hi Five!” and putting his fat sweaty
palm up to the girls after every joke or one-liner that was thrown out. He must’ve done it at least ten times over
the first hour and it was driving me nuts.
I could only think to myself that the guy was such a douchebag- a real
schmuck, but he worked in the same company and I knew I was stuck with him.
Despite
my wingman, we kept drinking and entertaining our young beauties with gusto. It was going so well that we ended up losing
track of time. By the time I realized
that it was going on 2am and the bar would be closing soon, we were totally
soused. As Richard was in the middle of
a story to his girl, I quietly asked mine if she would like to come back to the
hotel with me to have a nightcap from my mini-bar. She smiled coquettishly and agreed.
I
was riding high on all the booze and the fact that I managed to pick up a
beautiful Brazilian my first night out on the town. We did another round of shots, finished our
cocktails and got the bill. It was obscenely
expensive. The place was clearly ripping
us off. The bill had something like 31
shots on it, which didn’t seem realistic or even possible, but the girls were
happy and we didn’t want to make a scene, so we paid it. As we walked out, I told Richard that I was
going to try to get my girl to come back with me and he should do the
same. I then put my arm around my girl
and we started walking toward my hotel. Richard
and his girl started talking and were soon falling behind us.
Once
some space opened up between us and the others, my girl looked at me with her
big brown eyes and said, “Michael, you know I really like you, but if I am
going to hotel with you, I need a, a gift.”
“A
gift? What? What’re talking about?”
“You
understand, a gift. Money. Dollars.”
“What?!? Oh my god- are you a prostitute?!?” I said, as she recoiled back at my
statement.
“Please
don’t say such a word. That is a very bad
word here. I am not!” She protested, before adding, “I just need a nice
gift if I am going to come with you.”
“I’m
sorry about the word, but you’re asking for money to come back with me. We don’t have to use that word, but it’s the
same thing, no? You’re working now?”
She
quietly agreed that she was indeed working.
I
couldn’t believe it. I was flabbergasted
at the hours and hours of deception. “You
know, I wish you’d said something earlier,” I told her heavy with
disappointment. “We wasted the whole
night in that crappy bar and spent so much money on drinks.” We just stood there for a moment as I
digested my Rio world falling apart around me.
I then added, “You know, it’s just bad business. We could have avoided all that wasted time
and money if you just let me know the situation up front.” I had to accept that it was now too late to do
anything else. I had squandered my first
Brazilian night on the town wooing a pro with all the charm, attention and
effort I could muster. I had thought I
was crushing it and having the pick-up of a lifetime, but all the while, I was just
an ignorant Yank swimming with the sharks in Rio, like pretty much every other
putz visiting from the States. High
Five!
###
What
to read about another bad move I made?
Check out The Pitfalls of Doing Laundry at a Dinner Party:
Thanks!
###
