Whale Time: Re: Avram

Re: Avram
Bahia - Part 3

all stories and essays by Avram Klein

Karen (Pronounced Kah-reen)

When I met Karen, I was on the street looking down on the beach. I spotted her trying to negotiate a chair from some guys who were slap boxing in a nonfriendly manner.

At first I thought I should go down and help her handle the beach workers who were a little out of control. But I hesitated, as I usually do, stunned. She had on a little cloth fishing hat which angled down over her face kind of like a little Kangol hip hop hat. Her defined nose angled down at the same degree as the hat, highlighting her incredibly dark eyelashes. She was wearing a little bikini that had the same cut as the dress from the She's All That movie.

I sat, sprung like a little ferret with its nose in the wind waiting to see if she was with a guy. She sat down with a girl and a guy, not next to the guy, but this means nothing at these beaches. Then she shook the guy's hand.

This meant that the girl was her friend and was introducing her to the guy. I only had a small window before I could grab her. I went and stood near her, put my feet in the water, and sat in a chair in front of the guy she was talking to because she kept looking in that direction. And that was it.

It turned out she didn't know either of them and she did yoga, so we were off. We stayed at the beach in Salvadore for two nights and then stayed on the island of Boipeba for a week.

She's pretty incredible. She just graduated from college, she's 26, and she has been training on the vibraphone at a music conservatory in Sao Paulo, where she's from. She is incredibly warm and is awesome to hang out with, but she has a lot of attitude being a Polistana, which basically just means she gives a lot of attitude to other Brazilians.

For instance, we allowed an elderly guy with a cart to transport our baggage from the bus to Salvadore onto the ferry that crosses the water to the city. The guy's cart didn't fit up the walkway, so he led us through the automobile entrance where we paid as if we were a car and then walked down the drive and onto the boat.

It was a little odd because we were in the ferry parking lot rather than the pedestrain section. I thought Karen was paying the guy, but it turned out what had happened was the guy had asked for five reals for the job. Then in front of the ship's crew, she yelled something, among other things, to the effect of, "Five bucks! I'll have your dick for five bucks! We're in the fucking parking lot!"

Another funny thing she did was we were at monkey island at the zoo and she began to jump up and down cheering. I guess these monkeys are called nail-monkeys because the end of their penis is shaped like the head of a nail and they're famous for working on their nails a lot. I guess she yelled something like, "Hey! Work on your nail for us, little nail-monkey!" And right after she said it, the monkey scratched at his crotch like he was rocking out on a little la-cook-a-racha and Karen began to jump with gay happiness.

Brazil and women is an incredible situation because Brazil has a lot of the things that girls like. Women like the beach. They also like the city, but not as much as they like the beach. And Brazil has more beach than you could imagine. No matter where you live in Brazil, the coastline is paradise. So then it just comes down to which Brazilian city the girl wants to live in, which is based on how much is going on in that city.

This is where it gets tricky, because, by a Brazilian girl's standards, the only two cities which have anything going on in them are Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rio has a beach, Sao Paulo doesn't. So women love Rio.

Women love the beach everywhere in Brazil, but often complain that they're not in Rio. And then of course once you get to Rio, almost none of the women wear more than five square inches of clothing, which is why I'm explaining this whole situation.

The reason why women in Rio wear small bikinis is because they're happy, they're in good moods. They live in a city where there's a lot going on and the beach is incredible. And this is not just for now, this has been a heritage for several generations.

These women are happy and, because they're happy, they have good relationships with other people, including men. They grow up with good relationships with men and then when they start dating, they have fun with the men they meet. This is a phenomenon that is rare outside of Brazil.

Karen is now saying that she may want to take off and do her own thing. This all started when she asked me if I had ever done ecstacy and I answered that I had with a shrug. She told me that I was an idiot for not thinking that doing ecstacy was the best thing that I have ever done in my life.

She then went to sleep without going out on a Friday night. The next morning, like clockwork, there was something on TV showing a computer graphic of drugs on the brain, and that touched off the disagreement we had had the night before and she told me I was an idiot again.

We went to the mall and she went into a department store to buy some extra clothes for the trip and told me to meet her in twenty minutes at a book store across the mall from the shop. I waited at the bookstore for almost two hours. I thought she ditched and then convinced myself that she hadn't ditched about three times before she showed up.

We went and picked up my pictures and she got doubles of all the ones she wanted. Then we went to the zoo and went to have dinner at the lighthouse where we ate the day we met. At dinner, she disappeared to make a phone call when she said she was going to the bathroom and then came back to the table and told me I was an idiot for liking the zoo. She said she hated the zoo and she hated Salvadore and she hated Sao Paulo.

Then we went home and she decided to go to sleep without going out again on a Saturday night. In the morning she told me she was going to do her own thing. She said she didn't like the way I was always giggling to myself. The truth is that a lot of times I giggle to myself like Tom Green on nitrus thinking of funny ways to describe and word things for my articles...

The zoo had elephants that looked like pigs and jungle deer with pig asses.

I'll think this shit to myself and just start laughing. Anyway, I hope she doesn't leave. Carnivale is in two weeks and I think she is getting cold feet because she needs to get back home.

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