Novel Treatments / Chapter 3--Way South (Analysis)
Chapter 3
I returned to Troy’s place to find Mishka hung over and mixing trance music on a DJ set up he had in the tiny lounge of the shoebox apartment he shared with my cousin. “Troy, look for you. Very worried. Look for me last night. More worried, ha!”
“Do you know when he’s coming back?” I asked, imagining Troy barreling through the apartment door, like an angry parent scolding a pair of wayward children.
“Maybe, huk up with girl. I think will be back to go Twilo tonight.”
Mishka mentioned some DJ, with a Latin sounding name. “You coming?”
I listened to the spastic-jerk beats coming out of Mishka’s speakers and felt the hangover fully closing around my head. “I’m going to be down most of the day.”
I stared at Mishka for a few moments, hoping to telegraph to him that wall-shaking trance and restorative sleep didn’t go together, but I knew everything was falling on deaf, or at least, head-phoned ears.
I stumbled into Troy’s room and slept on Troy’s makeshift loft. Though with the Mishka mix sessions continuing on through the late afternoon I might as well have been at Twilo Nightclub. When I awoke from the sheet-clawing, pillow-squeezing of half sleep, the sky was already dark and Troy still hadn’t returned home. Mishka, meanwhile, had received some company. Two slender models, who looked of Eastern European descent, were cutting cocaine on the living room table, a glass affair on wobbly metal legs that seemed to wobble even more with each hit the girls took.
“Yo, dog, you want some?” Mishka, who’d donned pink tinted sunglasses, while incongruously affecting an Ebonics accent, asked me from across the room, thumping his head to the same beat that had greeted me in the morning.
“No, not right now.”
I didn’t want to say I’d never tried coke before, as though saying so I would be like a college freshman at pledge week confessing he didn’t like the taste of beer. Anyways, the girls both looked like models plucked straight off of a Moscow catwalk, and I didn’t want to come off looking uncool. (With both of their legs wrapped around me in Troy’s bed, this whole idea of leaving south could dissipate, at least for a few weeks.)
The prettier of the two looked up at me. “This is good stuff. Come on.”
“Fuck, yeah,” the other one said to no one in particular.
They both had American accents and suddenly didn’t seem nearly as sexy. “Actually I’m going to step outside and grab some food for a moment.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could sense the girls rolling their eyes and creasing their brows. Misha, behind pink sunglasses, remained inscrutable.
“If Troy comes back, tell him I went to the deli,” I said looking at Mishka.
I didn’t come straight back. I walked north on 2nd Ave, stopped into a bar and ordered a beer with a long German-sounding name. As I sat on the stool, hoping the Bavarian brew would cure my hangover, my thoughts began to veer to Bean and Brazil.
I had never thought of going to Brazil before, and didn’t really have too much a conception of the country. There was a Carneval, lots of beaches (and crime) and soccer in the streets. Without vivid images of a place, though, it’s hard to be swayed in jumping on a plane for a two-week vacation, let alone an indefinite expatriation. I also asked myself if what I’d said to Bean earlier was true—that I was going to quit work in two weeks. If I didn’t have someone pushing me, a DUI-less Salvador, say, I found it much harder to just quit my job and jump on a bus. In that case, the idea of south seemed more like a form of condemnation, a self-banishing stripped of any romantic illusions. With a travel partner, I’d have someone else to bitch to when flat broke at a bus stop on the Panamanian border. Yeah, we fucked up. Maybe we work on a coffee plantation for a ticket back.
I reached into my pocket and took out the creased strip of paper with Bean’s cell number on it. I imagined that if I just let the paper drop into my half-finished pint of German ale, I could go back to Troy’s, hang out at some club with coked out models till 4 A.M. wake up at noon and then catch up with Troy watching football. Or, I looked at the hasty scribble, and thought of Bean clutching his head yelling he is Bean, I could end up in Rio sitting next to Bean in a fancy restaurant, a bevy of beautiful Brazilian girls flanking his muscular neck and toasting his “conquest” with a bottle of champagne.
At least that’s where it seemed all this was going—that if I saw Bean again, we’d drink too much, sealing promises over toasts of rum (or whatever was the popular Brazilian choice of drink) to live in Rio. Not that such a decision would in any way be rational. While I’d seen Bean was actually a nice guy—taking me in, instead of leaving me to the mean streets of Manhattan—words like narcissism, delusion, and instability flashed across my mind. I took one long final sip of the beer. Those words, could maybe apply to myself, and even if not to the same degree as they did to Bean, there was something far more adventurous in jumping on a plane with someone of questionable mental stability than with a person who was balanced and predictable. If I was going to do something completely irrational, might as well go all the way.
On the other hand, I knew that if I dropped the paper in the beer I’d never find out. I’d also never probably quit my job and travel. I’d be in my 30’s and married always telling myself, if only. That seems amazingly clichéd in retrospect, but as I picked myself off the bar stool and headed to a pay phone that’s exactly what I was thinking—it’s now or never.
The plastic end of a pay phone crooked under my ear, I dialed Bean’s number.
“Is this Steven?”
“Yeah!” a voice shouted back at me.
“It’s Matt.”
“Who?”
“The guy who woke up on your parent’s couch this morning.”
“Where are you?”
“Well, not on your parent’s couch.”
Bean didn’t laugh at my joke. “I’m heading to Joe’s right now. Pick up a six pack and meet us there.”
I made a mental note off the address and within half-an-hour I stood outside an apartment in the upper east, a six-pack of Stella in my hand.
“Hey, come on in. And mind the muggers in the alley,” Joe slapped my back as I walked down the long, dark corridor of his apartment. “I know, it’s not much, but it’s Upper East Side. Only a few blocks from the bars!”
When I entered the main living area, I saw Bean sitting at a computer, fixated on the screen. He didn’t turn around when I said Hello. I walked closer and looked at the screen. A full-blown picture of Bean and two girls, clutching both of his shoulders, stared up at me. Neither was beautiful in a conventional sense, but there was a bottle of champagne in front of them. Bean smiled through ruddy cheeks, looking even more like the real Mr. Bean.
“Matt, this is why I’ve got to leave this place. Check this site out.”
He stood up and let me sit down. “Rules of Engagement” written in large yellow letters, was the first thing I read. Beneath that, written in red letters, “How to get laid with Carioca girls.”
“This is the site that I put up in Rio.”
“What are Cariocas?”
“Girls who live in Rio.”
I clicked on another link that showed a picture of Bean with a heavy-set blond guy. Two chilled bottles of champagne lay in front of them. “That’s my friend Bobby. We pulled chicks every time we went out.”
As I went through the site, proudly gave me a screen-by-screen commentary, sometimes lingering on a picture of a girl and tracing her lips with his finger. “She was such a little hottie.”
“But the key, guys,” Bean turned to both of us, to make sure we were getting every bit of as impromptu orientation, “is the rules of engagement.”
Bean scrolled back up the screen, everywhere pictures of him in a variety of poses (and shiny vinyl shirts), his arms wrapped around girls in a variety of drunken states.
“Here it is guys…”
I leaned over to better read.
THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
1. Never ask Carioca girls their names. They don’t want to know your name. Why should you need to know theirs?
2. Only buy them a drink if you’ve already made out with them on the dance floor.
3. Say this simple phrase to seal the deal. “Eu quero dormir com voce.”
(I want to sleep with you.)
4. The cheapest love motels are in Copacabana. Pay, get laid, get out. They will charge you for bogus extra minutes so insist on paying after for the agreed time.
5. Never call the girls back! This is Rio. The biggest pond in the world. And if you’re an American, you’re the big fish!!
The “guide” continued on in this vein, with Bean opining about the ins and outs of what really didn’t seem like a complicated system. To the left of the page, an omnipresent mug of Bean grinned out at whoever was viewing the page.
“So what do you think, Phillips?” Joe asked behind me.
I couldn’t help be amused, as well as slightly repulsed. Yes, I was a typical guy, horny for hot girls. But this approach to women—engagement, like some sort of sport (ju-jitsu, perhaps)—was, well, a little adolescent. “Pretty interesting stuff,” I offered.
“Ha! That’s all you think?” Bean looked at me accusingly. “You think Steven Berkovitz would stop there?” Bean turned to Joe. “Joe, I create outrage. Outrage.”
Bean’s face turned red, and he spilled his beer as he shook Joe like a beleaguered ju-jitsu opponent. He then quickly jiggled the chair I was on. “Okay, Phillips, (I can call you that, right?), let me take control here.”
I stood up and he plopped down in front of the computer and with a burst of virtuoso typing brought up three new web pages. “El Globo. Rio’s largest daily newspaper!”
On the front page was a photo of Bean with his blond haired buddy. Next “El Dia!” At the top of the page, in large bold-type were the letters—“The Yankee Seducer.”
Another Rio newspaper, El Dia displayed angry Rio-ans, or Cariocas as Bean called them, opining on Bean’s website. Bean translated loosely.
“American’s website says, ‘Rio women are easy. Who is this Yankee seducer?”’
A shirtless guy with a beach backdrop: “’Most of the Rio women I know don’t even like American men.”
A female college student: “I think he’s cute.”
And then a young, attractive girl, “Who does this guy think he is? He can’t come here and get any girl. Like some Yankee Seducer.”
“Yankee Seducer. I’m the Yankee Seducer. The Yankee Seducer,” Bean turned around, gave Joe a high-five, and then stomped about the apartment, like some emperor proclaiming the liberation of an oppressed people.
“We can all be famous. What do you think, Phillips?” Bean turned back around, and descended upon me, his face steadily reddening, his neck muscles swelling. “You want to go to Rio or not!”
Joe laughed, and I too found myself getting buzzed off of Bean’s drunkenness over his short-lived, albeit suspect fame.
“Okay, when were you thinking of leaving?”
“I don’t know, didn’t you say you were going to Panama or something?”
“It was a tentative plan…but I’d be down to go to Brazil, or at least meet you there.”
“What do you have in Panama?” Joe entered the conversation.
“Nothing really. I was actually thinking of going through Mexico by bus… but that was just a plan.”
“Aren’t Mexican girls hot?” Bean had seized upon a topic of more interest to him.
“Like on the soap operas you see,” Joe’s eyes became almost as wide as Bean’s.
“I guess. Yeah.” I remembered watching Spanish T.V. to help improve my Spanish and even my eyes became a little glazed over.
“Well, we got to get to Rio as soon as possible. El Dia wrote about the Yankee Seducer two months ago. I don’t want that to die out.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Bean paused for a moment, his eyes spinning out some stratagems as though he were our general leading us into battle. “Video cameras, beach, the rules of engagement in action. Every step of the way. I’m going to be notorious. We’re going to send the footage to El Globo and El Dia. When we walk into the best clubs in Rio, girls will no who we are. They will want to screw us, so they can be part of the outrage.”
Definitely deluded, I thought to myself. But this was going to be interesting. The worst that could happen was I didn’t like Rio. With the money from my company’s recently surging stock, I’d at least be able to travel to other parts of Brazil or South America. The main thing was I’d be south. Way south.
“So, you in Phillips? Do you want to be part of the outrage?”
“When do we leave?”
“I know a good agent in Chinatown. She can get me a good rate if we give ourselves about three weeks till we leave. Right around Christmas, basically.”
“What about you Joe? You not going to quit work?” I asked.
“I wish. Well, personally I think you guys are a bit crazy. But please write a lot of Emails. I’m going to need to live through your adventures.”
“Come on, Joe. That’s the brainwashed, corporate America in you talking. How much money do you have saved up?”
“Come on Steven. We’ve talked about this.” Joe was visibly nonplussed. “You know, you guys have the fun.”
Bean let it go and within a few moments we were making a series of ridiculous toasts to all the possibilities that awaited in Brazil. “We’ll give other Americans “Rules of Engagement” tours for 2,000 a piece” I remembered Bean saying as I began mixing Red Bull with the odds and ends liquor Joe had stashed in his place.
The rest of the night was spent dancing in clubs, where I’d either strategize with Bean, or watch him try out some rules of engagement with New York women (though unsuccessfully—I guess he forgot to ask their names.) Mostly, I simply got intoxicated off of the idea that I was finally turning a vague yearning into a specific plan. Although in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
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This 48 word review has not been unlocked.
The chapter opens with an interesting scene. I wish I could wake up to two coked-up models in a foreign country.
The sentence about “beaches (and crime)”- I get the connection, but it could do with being rewritten and maybe elaborated on.
I was surprised by the phrase “pulled” in relation to girls. I’ve used it on Urbis a few times (I’m English) and a lot of Americans haven’t understood it. Good to see our dialect is taking over…
It’s well written- the grammar and detail are spot-on. The problem is that there is a lot of talk and not enough action. I’m eager to see the South-American adventurer take an actual “adventure” and do things that really stand out. If it’s based on reality I see the problem with that- we only fit so much into our lives. But if it’s not, up the ante and get him into some real mischief.
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Your voice continues strong and clear all the way through and the characters are being revealed slowly but surely. There is a little confusion at times on who is speaking in the long piece of dialogue between the central character and the russian. Otherwise great. Few points below.
Page 1
First sentence is very long. Might read better split into two.
‘sheet-clawing, pillow-squeezing of half sleep,’ brill picture but should it read ‘sheet-clawing pillow-squeeze of half sleep’ or even the ‘a sheet-clawing, pillow-squeezing half sleep’?
Page 2
‘leaving south’ is something missing here?
‘popular Brazilian choice of drink’ or ‘popular Brazilian drink of choice.’?
Page 8 – girls will no who we are – girls will know who we are.
Hope this helps.
This 117 word review has not been unlocked.
I’m liking this novel so far. Interesting fringe-type characters abound and that’s always a plus in my book.
A few notes to give something for your credits. On page one, during the dialogue, you broke away from Misha actually mentioning a dj to Matt noting that Misha mentioned a “latin” sounding dj? I wondered why the distancing? Why not just have Misha say it? The bit of his voice we have so far is very interesting.
On page two, the models with “both” legs wrapped around Matt? Careful, sounds like they only have one leg each. On page six no need to use the () for dialogue. Page eight, “girls will no who we are” [know]. I don’t know if you really need the final line in the chapter. To me, it’s a bit overeplanatory.
All negatives aside, I think you’re onto something. Interesting characters doing interesting things makes for fun reading and sometimes (especially when we’re looking for things to critique) we forget that stories are very much about entertainment. I’m entertained and I find myself smiling, chuckling actually, at Bean as the Yankee seducer. When you re-write, you might want to look at the balance between narrative and dialogue which is a little uneven in spots (really that’s more in chapter two) and the running comments Matt has with himself is pretty effective.
Keep at it. Hope you have a quick sale.
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