Gostusura Maxima no transporte publico

Maximum Yumminess on public transport? Well that's what you get when a little 5"2' ball of goodsiness can curl up in a lap and fit sideways on the bus seat, and nap the whole ride from town back to city.

It's also a translation problem when gostosa, Queen of Positiveadjectivium, presides over all that is good (as food is good), nice (as a day is nice), and the whole underling slangang i.e. tasty, yummy, pleasant etc. But this Queenie, when incarnated, got a nasty side. Because gustosa ain't a good person, ain't a nice person. When gostosa is applied to a lady, it means, I got to say, b-b-b-bangin', and for a gent, 'buff'.

But forget all that.

Ya'll don't know how strictly I speak when I say Gostosura Maxima, way we use it, is in its own world: t-to-the-r-o-p-i-cali- us. For us, it's a state, achieved in mutuality (please say that word as if you were will.i.am before you were behind the front on all that is tasteful) a state where the yumminess of bodies at rest, bangingness of being, is maximized.

This particular session, or invocation, beautiful as it was achived on the Brown Bird coach bus pictured above, reportedly was marred by some rumblings about a left arm flexed for an hour in support of a head, an elbow going sore where bone met armrest under said head's weight. There was also some mention of a shoulder wedged into a stomach, bringing up a steady sucession of burps, but these were silent cries heard by none in the forest of seatbacks, and especially not by the log-sawer lying horizontal. Such imperfections effectively did not exist, and the obvious achievement of G.M. was celebrated when both participants were again awake.

part two, shoot, fish

The first thing one does when fishing, logically, is to throw fish food into the water. This is especially the case when fishing, as I mentioned in part 1, here, for fish of the size caught by that mermaid. My initial hopes were high, because I could actually see fish in the water.

“No teacher, those are carps, they don’t eat raçoes. If you want to catch carp you need to bring somethings like banana, mel... mel?”

“Honey.”

“Yes, things like Honey with aveia, (oats) banana, and I didn’t bring that stuff.”

It was too bad that we didn’t have that stuff because I was annoying to watch them swim by so close, opening their mouths methodically and swallowing nothing visible. I had fun by hitting them on the head with my bobber as I reeled it past them.

You might ask, ‘if you are throwing fish food into the water, what are you going to use for bait?
A brown bead on a hook, obviously.

Then Silvio grabbed the metal stakes that we’d hauled from the car. I didn’t really know what they were, but as soon as I saw Silvio driving them into the ground a few inches from the water I knew. They were holders for our rods.

It then became immediately apparent why fishing is about drinking.

We had been there a fishless half hour when a Japanese-brazilian son and father came, and started hauling them in immediately. The most interesting thing that had happened to us was that I had spotted a monsterous catfish lolling about on the surface of the water, seemingly dying. And one time when I went to the bathroom I came back walking past a pond nobody was fishing and its pan-flat waters reflected the clouds in the sky that themselves were spread thin yet separated like overly floured dough, and it reminded me of all the drugs I have taken to stare at things.

Also, some monkeys had a fit in the trees behind us, though not visibly. I looked back at the trees and mentioned that I really wanted to see some monkeys in Brazil.

“Go to the zoo if you want to see monkeys” said Silvio, surprisingly serious.

What?

“I don’t know about these monkeys. They might be nice, maybe no.”

Ok..... Later…

"I think I know vovozinho’s secret, teacher."

"Vovozinho?"

"You know vovovzinho?"

"Um.."

"Vovozinho is little grandpa over there, the Japanese guy. " To his face he calls him 'San.'

"What's his secret?"

"Yeeeesssss, teacher, vovozinho uses cheese."

So we abandoned the brown beads and went for the mozzarella. A little while later, Silvio got that one in the picture.

Then I got a catfish.

A little while later I had just lost my bait and was reeling in when I saw the monster half dead catfish at the edge of the water right before me. I dangled my empty hook in front of him, thinking of the carp, but he bit. The hook went through his upper lip quite visibly. I started laughing with some horrid teenage laughter and Silvio came over to put the clamp on his mouth. The old fish was real ugly, grey and full of growths.

Silvo said, "we won´t take a picture of this" and I was afraid he despised me.

But it is also possible that catching him was like asking an aged dame now using a walker to dance one last dance of the waltz she always loved.

But, our karma used up, we didn’t catch anything the rest of the day. Some guys came with a mix of shrimp and flour and a bunch of stuff and heaved lumps of it on hooks and caught nothing. Pedro came out with some live bait and caught four of the Dourado, fish that silvio had previously described as every fisherman's dream. He did get pretty excited though.

We stopped at a corn house on the way home, drank corn juice, ate sweet corn jelly wrapped in a corn leaf. While we were there huge thunder started sounding, and as we came back over the mountain the rain started pouring. Then I saw why the Fernão Dias is a dangerous road. The trucks in the inside lane of the opposite direction threw huge waves of water over the concrete barrier and on to our windshield, staggering the eco sport. Mud came coursing down off the mountains and rivers ran salmon beside us.

When we made it back down to Guarulhos the rain stopped, revealing several accidents, many involving trucks. Death is everywhere in Brazil. Then there started appearing shacks every 20 feet advertising a ‘chapa’ and I asked what that was. After a while I understood that the guys in those shacks are offering themselves to help unload the trucks passing on their way into the city. Then Silvio dropped me off at the bus stop, and I took a bus to inlaw’s house!

Like shootin' fish.... Part I

The proverbial barrel is a pond about the size of a goalie box. The fish are fish, albeit with names that I forget as soon as I hear them, being the usual vowels evenly spaced between the usual consonants, the m, the n, the l, t, and c. The ammunition in our cooler sounds more like the fodder for a picnic- hotdogs, cheese, corn in a glass jar, and of course a plastic bag of raw liver. No worms.

Today I woke up at 4:45 in the morning and waited for my friend and student, O Japonesão, (big jap) Silvio, on the balcony watching the cars speed and people walk by, all deep inside their long nights of drinking. He called 15 minutes later and intoned in his Ed McMahon voice, “Hey teacher, you ready for the fish?” Beautiful this phrase, because I think fish was meant as a verb.

When he arrived in his ecco sport, I noticed his hair was freshly gelled, and I felt guilty about not having bathed. He even cracked the window in the first moments we were inside the car together, though I think it was more to let sound into the silent car than air. He shared with me some cookies as we found the highway, a new one for me, the Fernão Dias.

“This is a public highway, it’s not so good.”
“The Dutra (highway that leads to Her parents) is private?”
“Yes, teacher” Of all my students, Silvio is one of the most basic, but he’s a joy to talk to because he turns his grammatical weakness into a lumbering cordial dominance, a grownup fratboy kingliness through which he administrates his monosyllables benevolently. Now, returning to the highway,

“Before, when I worked in Paulinha… everyday. Ishi Maria”.

We left the city by Guarulhos, huge industrial suburb of Sao Paulo. We passed through in the half-dawn, the orange light of the city still dominant, gray pollution-filled mist low over everything and at the far back of the sky a white gold at the horizon, color of a flashbulb. ‘What world is this?’ was a pertinent question, the streets below lined as they were with streetlights and the blotches of trees as they cut through the three-story buildings uphill until leaving a hole in the horizon, seemed like tunnels that we were also somehow inside.

Silvio and I had had dinner the night before, beer and meat brought out on a grill beside the table, and we talked easily about things that never came up in class, mainly about the ragers he used to throw out in the country cities around São Paulo. I could imagine the equivalent of the golf course invasions of my own youth, though with significant adjustments made for the fact that this was a metropolis not a college town hamlet, thus additions had to be made of cocaine and I guess, prostitutes. I think of Paris, I think of the New York of the twenties, times when prostitutes were invited to parties.

I asked Silvio if he brought his parties to Guarulhos, and said “No, no. Because Guarulhos hasn’t women. Women from Guarulhos- Ichi Maria.” And it was understandable, that the women from this place wouldn’t be the best. Soon the highway climbed up into the mountains and the orange was left behind. Now the white dawn was stripped with heavy gray mists on the tops of the tree filled peaks. The pavement wasn’t bad at all, five lanes and winding, and we stopped at a highway restaurant called Rota Norte. There in the parking lot I remembered that rota is also the word for burp, and the joke I made, in English, was hampered by the fact that Silvio didn’t know the word burp, and therefore I resorted to pantomime, after which he laughed so hard that his head rested on the steering wheel.

Bowing to my philosophy of leaving nothing out, I must admit that on getting out of the car I realized I had a problem common to all trips I make when mostly asleep- an erection. Walking into the restaurant I employed hands- in- pockets and stoop- to- bring- the t-shirt- over techniques honed in high school and blessed the emptiness of the place. My good luck was that in this country you often eat breakfast standing against a counter, a posture that seems somehow Italian. Coffee with milk, butter on roll-sized baguette here called french bread. The restaurant was staffed by 5 girls in yellow uniforms. All the customers were men, some seemed like other sao paolinos heading out to fish, others had some business to attend to. When we got outside the day was begun in full, no longer any trace of its beginning. Just a little later we were off of the highway and driving through a two block town, up and out of it, up a swath of pavement and to the fishery. One car was there before us, some nondescript guys, and the manger.

“Pedrão, Pedrão (big Pedro) what´s up man” said Silvio, and we shook hands. Pedro had wide eyes and overlapping teeth, a little like a fish himself, and he helped us bring our stuff to one of the ponds. The sun wasn´t yet above the mountaintop hills rising directly behind us but the air had cleared. As soon as we dumped the stuff Silvio went back to park the car and left me alone with Pedro. He was testing a rod that Silvio had asked him to look at, finding it a ‘little beauty’ without the slightest of problems. I was holding a rod but realized I didn´t remember how to cast it. Pedro started rummaging around our equipment and making some comments, none of which I understood. I liked the note of calm remark in his voice, picture some guy who’s voice cracks on the word ACTually as he starts a sentence, but in the pleasant way of a country fishery caretaker whose small laugh of remark a short woo-hoo also hits that note, and I was frightened and sad not to talk with him. I tried to make the right type of grunt in response what seemed to be comments, but then suddenly he asked me for something called rações. I racked the conversations I had had about fishing with Silvio, in which he often lapsed into Portuguese, and I finally remembered that raçoes is like rations, and means fish food. I opened the cooler and went through the catalogue of baits, but couldn´t find it.

Pedro looked to shout out to distant Silvio, and asked me “What´s his name ?” I was pleased to be able to answer a question and suprised that he didn´t know the answer- Silvio had showed so much intimacy when we were unloading. But now it was obvious, everybody knew Pedro.

He called out and got a thumbs up from Silvio. Pedro then called him a word that I will translate as “screwy.”

A Prize is Won

Cutting her hair in the bathroom, she used the scissors for a microphone and sang the song out. Next thing we know the phone rang, a final decision had been made. And so after a close finish in the Anna Karina sweeps, there has been a victory in the house. Millions concoursed, but the winner today comes from Brazil.

She had won the award for best cover of Karen O, the person.

A pause for the tears of those solid gals just receiving the news at this moment. You still sassy.

But the judges told us that what was missing in all those lipsyncs with friends and lovers was a full, yet fully individual incorporation of the singer. In their words, "was needed the same thing, but in no way crossing."

Spontaneity was also key. If, at any point during at least a week leading up to you performance thought, 'maybe I will win the Karen O cover concurrence while I take this shower' well, clearly you didn't.

But also, you wouldn't.

In our case the CD hadn't been played for a long while, and actually reminded us of our early romance in Canada, and so her performance was one of those clean re-embraces of a well known experience. After all, when something is like riding a bike, of course we refer specifically to the moment when, riding, you realize you can still ride a bike.

Also, what in retrospect seemed necessary to the win was a fundamental absurdity, one that ended, in a gesture of leisure, of lounging in the self, before the point where self-awareness becomes necessary (think: childhood). Thus and only thus is a stage placed in a livingroom with no labor whatsoever and then with no extra effort ultrapassed