Carnival
all stories and essays by Avram Klein
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Re: Avram
Olinda, Recife, Olinda, Recife
There were clowns, ninjas, witches, vampires, men dressed like women, African tribes, demons, babies, brides, and schoolgirls. There were guys fishing for women with car keys, credit cards, giant penises, and fake used tampons.
There was a paper machier middle finger I could have bought, but it didn't go on your head. There were all kinds of giant paper machier heads, Chinese dragons, bulls, topless women, monsters, horses, penguins, hippies, priests, and Bin Ladens being carried through the crowd.
The crowd itself was diverse with liberal-minded adults, out-of-control college kids, and locals. The local Pernambuko custom is to dress as a clown or a demon. The little kids wear these mesh hoods with a zip whistle in them so you can't see their faces.
The older kids are like 6'3" and wear huge, flowing, open-chested orange, yellow, and blue clown outfits, like the real Insane Clown Posse.
On the news we saw that even kids from rural traditional towns were wearing cardboard Chucky masks from Child's Play Three: Bride of Chucky.
There were some guys dressed as synchronized swimmers who were all connected by a blue pool of stretched plastic.
Olinda is a beautiful, historic district on the outskirts of Recife with a famous extended Carnival. The theme of their Carnival is a celebration of freedom of the mind within a repressive, government-run culture.
Attractions include local frevo and maracatu bands, which play their beat slowly, pushing their way up and down the historic streets. The bands are lead by dancers and are then followed by the huge crowds all dancing and singing along with the music. Each group has a different theme and exotic costumes. One of the bands was dressed as North African warriors, while another was dressed like they were from Southeast Asia.
From a distance the maracatu beat kind of sounds like the "Night Rider" theme, with a loud "Du-doomp Du-doomp Du-doomp Du..." It's an incredible beat and incredibly loud and awesome for dancing and marching.
Frevo dancing, which is indigenous to Recife, is a wild style of dancing where the dancers wear multicolored outfits and then toss a multicolored miniature beach umbrella through their legs as they fly in the air landing in squats and leg kicks.
We smoked a roach found in a pack of matches on Boipeba and found an abandoned church in which to chill out and check out the crowd. We were in an area claimed by mostly locals, and I got a nice view of some spirited elderly ladies walking around in lingerie.
Karen was a little overwhelmed by the intensity of the Carnival and the contrast with the local favela, but it didn't hold us back.
That evening the band on the main stage in Olinda played Chico Science covers and the crowd was completely ecstatic. Every single person, even 12-year-old kids, knew every word and were jumping up and down, dancing and rocking out in beat with the chorus.
Recife's most famous band, Chico Science, is an old-school hip-hop Brazilian fusion band. The albums are incredibly popular. As the albums were first being released, the leader of the group died in a car accident while traveling from Recife to Olinda during Carnival.
We took off for Recife during the concert. Recife has a giant Carnival set in a historic Amsterdam waterfront district. There were huge stages with famous Brazilian rock bands playing on them.
The next day most of us who were over 21 were exhausted. The majority of the people in Olinda, however, were college kids who had the ability to get completely drunk for more than three days in a row.
There were guys grabbing girls and kissing them on the mouth. There were girls trying to pull their friends out of the arms of groups of guys kissing them. There were girls running to get away from guys, crashing into people in the crowd. There were people spraying each other with water guns and shaving cream. There were also 40-year-old drunk guys feeling on my camera.
It was so crowded in some places that people would begin to fall on each other and there was nobody pushing them. They would just all lose their balance together. We were somewhat defeated by the 40-degree Celsius temperatures form the night before, and it was going to be good and hot again for another night, but we had heard about a big rave.
At the rave, we bumped into some guys from Karen's neighborhood who looked pretty righteous. They were wearing some Indian-designed t-shirts and said that they had just visited an uncharted neighborhood beyond the Recife favela for a Condumble ceremony.
They had done some kind of psychedelics to help them transcend the spirits. They said that when the women at the ceremony began to dance and the drummers began to drum that it became incredibly intense real fast.
They said that someone opened a Champagne bottle and the cork shot through a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and that the glass spread on the floor and the women continued to dance, cutting their feet and spreading blood across the floor. From the intensity, the skin of the atobaque drum eventually broke along with the trance.
After the ceremony, they had no way of getting back to Recife because there were no buses and no taxis, so they had to sleep there. They said that they saw Karen's girlfriend there.
Karen had mentioned that she had made friends with a girl who she had hooked up with a few times. She said the girl was really pretty and it all sounded exciting, but the girl was only 18 or 19. I would meet the girl the next night.
There were about 3,000 people at the rave to hear the DJ spin jungle music. Karen and I were next to the stage, pressed up against a building. The crowd was awesome and was mostly made up of all the bad kids from the traditional local neighborhoods showing off their schoolyard samba skills.
The military police suddenly burst into the dance area. They walked briskly passed me and exploded into violence, hitting some kids who were dancing on a ledge of the building behind us with their billy clubs.
There were about twelve cops in a single-file row and only about four of them had entered the dance area. I knew they were about to start hitting everybody.
I jumped into the crowd and was separated from Karen for a moment by the cops. One of the cops threw Karen against the building, and I had to wait for a chance to jump back across the line created by the police to grab her.
I put my arms around her and backed up through the dancers until we were in front of the speakers. The speakers were deafening, so I decided to get out of there. I circled back around the building and re-entered the crowd at its center. It started to rain.
We rocked out in the middle of the massive crowd under the lights and rain. The cops rushed the crowd one more time, but all it did was make people's smiles fade away into straight faces. Nobody stopped dancing.
Eventually, the rave was cut short and everybody was asked to go home at about 2 a.m. The cops waited only about 30 seconds for everybody to clear out before they rushed the crowd for a third time.
Karen and I got the hell out of there, but as we were leaving, we looked back and the crowd had formed a huge circle around the cops. I had a feeling someone was about to get hurt. We heard a loud "Oooooooo..." which went on for a few minutes. I guess they hit somebody pretty hard.
It was all completely unnecessary. The cops were hitting 17-year-old kids dancing as if they were 40-year-old drunks at a futbol game. The police had a look on their faces as though they intended to hurt.
I guess the cops are getting so bad that young people who don't have a lot going their way are starting to attack them. The next morning, I read in the newspaper that some kids had been stabbed in a gang fight two nights earlier at the site of the rave, which was maybe why the cops were so out of hand.
It rained in the morning, cooling off an entire city. But nobody had lost their energy from the heat, and Olinda was out of control. The rain put an eerie glow on the crowd, and everybody was spraying each other with water.
I bought a can of aerosol shaving cream and started tagging everybody in sight. I would spray people right in front of me and pretend like I didn't do it; we were cracking up.
I would go up to a kid holding a squirt gun and cover his entire head with shaving cream. There were guys spraying everybody who walked by with water, so without them being able to see because of the water, I would just tag them in the face.
There was a group of guys marching through the streets with a bed cheering, "The bed, the bed." They would corner chicks and then lift them up on the bed, cheering and marching them down the street. One chick did the booty dance which set the crowd on fire.
There was also a middle-aged woman giving people interviews with a dildo. I finished the evening with three 22s of Skoll, and I lost my sense of direction.
We went back to the rave in Recife later that night to hear a local DJ named DJ Dolorus. DJ Dolorus spins house music with a mixture of northeastern Brazilian rhythms.
The crowd was a little smaller and eclectic. I went to use the bathroom and there was a group of 16-year-olds stomping on somebody, just kicking the shit out of him or them.
The cops happened to be marching through and spotted them. The leader of the cops pointed them out to the other deputies and they went up and started knocking the kids to the ground with a single hit of their clubs. The cops marched them away and none of them seemed fazed.
The guy they were beating up had a huge cut across his hair line and he didn't seem to care. There were two hippies who followed them out who looked a little more worried.
Karen's girlfriend showed up and we had a nice meeting. She was really young though and the two of them kind of drifted off and danced together. Karen's friends from her neighborhood also joined us, and Karen decided to leave all of a sudden.
I went and watched the sunrise in Olinda, and I realized that I had misunderstood the shutter action on my camera and had messed up a lot of the open-shutter night shots I had taken in Recife.
I got a little bit of sleep before we met up with Karen's girlfriend the next day at the Posada. We had lunch, but there was now strain in our relationship, because Karen was planning on leaving that day after being with me for a month. She didn't really include me in the conversation.
I was a little bored and asked Karen's girlfriend what her name was because I had forgotten it. Karen got angry and decided she was going to leave. I got a little pissed at her jealousy and said I wasn't interested in hooking up with an 18-year-old kid. She said that if I wanted to be with her that I couldn't even think about any other girls and that if I asked about her girlfriend, that that meant I was thinking about her. She claimed that I hadn't asked the names of any of her guy friends.
So that was it. Soon after the altercation, I got my surfboard out of storage, she got her sunglasses from my bag and we went to the bus station, departing on different buses. I think she wanted for us both to sit at the station in silence, but I grabbed a taxi, leaving her to sit there alone. It was a completely empty and emotionless goodbye.
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