Avram Nomad
all stories and essays by Avram Klein
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Re: Avram
Keep Surfing
A policeman had started to walk along with me on the opposite side of the street. I ducked into a pizzeria, bought an agua con gise, hailed a moto taxi back to my place, and went to sleep.
On Wednesday morning, I decided to head to the airport to get vaccinated for yellow fever. I asked the moto taxi driver how many minutes it was to the airport. He said seven or eight. We flew down the freeway in the rain for a half hour. I was wearing only shorts and a t-shirt.
The rain bit at my arms as I gripped the seat of the motorcycle, petrified. When we reached the airport, I was drenched and the airport was freezing.
The girl at the Posada had given me a mean look when I left, and I thought it was because I was wearing my flag shirt. The next day I found out that she was mean because she doesn't know which gringos are normal tourists and which are disgusting johns. I found this out because when I took out my laundry, she looked at the pile of clothes as if she might die if they touched her. The motorcyle in the rain, the look on her face, the chill of my wet t-shirt, and the damn SARS warning on the door to the yellow fever clinique saying I should see a doctor if I've been to the U.S. all caused me to fumble the nurse's visit.
I had also been sick for a week and was afraid that the nurse was going to see that I had stayed in Brazil for more than six months, so when she asked me if I was allergic to egg, I told the truth and said yes. Then the doctor visit was over because she wouldn't give me the shot.
An hour later, I was in the giant mall where I had met Inga and Thalles the day before to buy some contact lenses and a raincoat, neither of which they seemed to sell. At the bus stop outside the mall, the street was filled with a giant puddle of black mud. The buses had been racing by and much to the chagrin of the elderly ladies trying to get home, the entire sidewalk and wall behind it were completly black.
As a smart traveler, I quickly jumped into a cab to find that it was also completley soaked with black mud and was being driven by the craziest cab driver in the whole city. I had the address of where I could buy some contact lenses. He didn't have a clue where I wanted to go and swore at every vehicle that pulled in front of us. We eventually made it to another mall.
They didn't sell contacts either, but I did buy some board shorts. They cost as much as a travel drum I had looked at earlier that day, but board shorts that don't look like they belong on a middle school kid are hard to find.
The glasses shop at mall #2 gave me an address of a place downtown that could help me.
Centro in Fortaleza is a maze of small historic streets that trail off for a mile in every direction. You can buy anything—contacts, conga drums, plumbing needs, speaker parts, dentist work, what have you.
The eye doctor didn't speak a lick of English. He tried to examine my eyes, sell me new glasses, and all kinds of other shit. After an hour, he finally realized that I just needed to buy some disposable contacts, but he said he had to get them from another shop. It turns out the reason I was all over town was perhaps because I had been asking for lens-ses and not con-tac-es.
It rained Wednesday night. Hailing a cab, I tried to go out again. There seemed to be a lot of people out, dressed up to go dancing, waiting at the bus stops and crosswalks. The clubs were all closed though. The cab had taken me to the super clubs down at the beach and the lights were off everywhere.
On the way back, I wondered where all these nice people were going but then realized that most of the women were still standing at the bus stations while the rest of the people had left. The driver filled me in that there were hundreds of prostitutes out there on the avenues of Praia Irecema.
The clerk at my Posada wouldn't give me change for the cab, and I just fucking yelled at him. There was no way I was going to walk around that place looking for change. Regardless of the anarchy at Praia Iracema, Fortaleza is the home of a lot of incredible images.
The people of the Cerrae desert are vastly different from the Dutch and African coast of Recife and Salvadore. The children especially, are very beautiful, with distinct characteristics. Their mannerisms are docile, while their features almost cannot be described. They have straight, sunbeaten, soft hair, and some of their noses are slightly flattened.
There are a lot of pigments in northern Brazil, which can't really adequately be described. The green water in the natural pools of southern Pernambuko are one of these images, while the brown of the people of Cerrae is another.
The culture here is based on the cowboys of the far north, and walking through the neighborhood across from Praia Iracema, I found a samba school practicing in the street for Carnivale. The guys had on cowboy hats and were twisting in the air, landing on their feet like cats.
The women were wearing antique ruffled skirts which they all twirled with a separate and specific style. The women would spin down the center of the street throwing their skirt like crazy while the other dancers shouted and danced and sang.
The city was full of local images like this. At Praia Futuro I watched a group of Indian and Afro-Brazilian kids play together. The girls all had on bandanas with knee-high blue jeans. They were saying all this tough crap to each other trying to figure out which girls were cool and which weren't while the boys flew down the street on their bikes with the chains flying off.
It was an image you might see in any urban setting, except burning hot, at the beach, and with no buildings taller than 15 feet. At the mall with Thalles, Inga's gay friend, three guys got Thalles's attention as if to motion that they thought he was attractive. He stared back at them, unfooled, and one of them punched his hand a few times as if to suggest that they wanted to kick his ass for being gay. The three of them laughed and kept walking, looking into the shops.
Down at the surfing pier near Praia Iracema, a guy dropped in on another surfer. The surfer who had been on the wave went up the wave and shot his board through the air straight for the other surfer's head. After the wave had passed, they exchanged words but there was no punch, just some nervous and hesitant surfboard paddeling—possibly some surf gang activity. I respect a guy who almost gets his ass kicked but keeps surfing.
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