What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (16 page)

I came up with a new and improved system of bases after a conversation with a gay friend, who had told me that the gay base system is dramatically different from the straight. In his world, first base was a blow job, second was anal, third involved a third, and a home run was pretty complicated but probably involved a swing and a go-go dancer. Obviously these definitions don’t apply to every gay man, but the takeaway is certainly that things get very advanced very quickly when women are not involved. Much like with other male-on-male activities, like, say, war, the escalation is fast and furious and often involves bleeding.

(Lesbian bases, I’ve been told, involve a lot of baths and toys at first and second bases, and buying a house and building a compost garden together as you round third. A home run is when you’ve stopped having sex altogether and start a book club.)

The gay bases gave me the idea for a new set of bases for grown-up ladies who are struggling with being sexually evolved adults but do not want to become the village bicycle. My new bases involved not which part of your body was being touched with what, but where
geographically
the physical intimacy was taking place. So anything that happened in public, say in a car or on a front porch,
was first base, anything that happened inside one’s house, on one’s couch/kitchen counter/dining-room floor, was second, move into the bedroom and you’re at third, sleep over and that’s a home run. The system is meaningful, I think, because instead of giving away parts of your body like oranges at mile markers in a marathon, intimacy progresses based on how far into your house and life you want to let your partner get. That seemed like an important distinction.

So, yes, if you want to screw on the front porch, you can still say you stopped at first base. Good, right?

Anyway, Cristiano skipped high school second and went straight to high school third that first night, right there in that beachfront bar. (Which, in Grown-up-Lady Bases, is still just first!) I glanced around, embarrassed, at the hundreds of other people, but they were so focused on getting their own hands down each other’s pants that they weren’t giving us a second look. Emma and Kate were learning all of the same lessons about base stealing elsewhere in the bar, and it was a small miracle that we ultimately made it back to our hotel without any ballplayers in tow.

I told Cristiano we would be going to another island in the morning if he wanted to come with and maybe fall in love for a few days. He couldn’t afford the boat trip, though, and so we said good-bye twenty or thirty times, and then I took his hands out of my pants and went home to my eco resort, like a lady.

T
he next day, the girls and I hopped a little speedboat for Boipeba, an even tinier island nearby. It was off-season, and so when we arrived at the pretty little beach with a few restaurants and inns, we were among only a handful of tourists on the island. We wandered around looking at our housing options, and chose a pretty, brightly painted little set of
pousadas
—cabins—right on the sand.

We spent the day on the beach with many
caipiriñhas
, and then, that night, wandered into “town,” which was made up of one main square with four churches around a park. There was a “café” on the square that consisted of four plastic tables and a folding table “bar” in front of someone’s house. We stopped for a drink with the three locals who sat out front, and ended up getting a little samba lesson on the quiet square. At one point, I went inside to use the bathroom, and I had to walk through the living room, where a little girl and her grandmother slept on couches in front of the TV.

Relaxed and moving at island speed, we made our way home through the quiet village. And the next morning, I emerged from my mosquito net, walked outside, and found Cristiano in a hammock in front of our room, grinning as he waited for me.

I
t turns out that Cristiano had a friend with a boat. He hitched a ride to our island, asked the first local where the American girls were staying, and they pointed him in our direction. Apparently even with our bikinis pulled up
our butts, we were not blending. For Cristiano’s excursion across the ocean to find me, he brought the following items:

We used the first condom forty-five minutes after I found him in the hammock that morning, on a rock down the beach, in the shade of the trees, as the turquoise waves crashed around us. Like in freaking
From Here to Eternity
, but with better tans and bloodier knees.
Bases? What bases?

We used the next two condoms after lunch, very aerobically, under the mosquito net in my
pousada.
But we were now faced with our first crisis as a couple: we were out of condoms, which were arguably the glue that was holding our relationship together. Cristiano had no money. And, since for some reason my ATM card was rarely working in Brazil, I didn’t either. I had been borrowing cash from my cousin, which meant that Cristiano and I found ourselves knocking on her door, and asking sheepishly:

“Heeeeey. Could we borrow some money for condoms?”

(To be fair, I think I was the only sheepish one. Cristiano was looking pretty proud.)

Emma happily did her part to keep her cousin Bahian-baby-free, and lent me the money for everything Cristiano and I needed that week. As a result, I called her “Sugar
Mama.” Cristiano adorably got it wrong, and called her “Mama Sugar,” which is what I still call her to this day.

During the day, the girls and I would go on excursions, on horses through the mangroves to even prettier beaches, in canoes through marshes into the interior of the island, and then I’d come back to my island boyfriend, whose manhood wouldn’t allow us to pay for him to come along (he was only comfortable with us paying for everything else). He’d spend the day playing soccer on the sand with the local restaurant staffs, and would be waiting on the beach for us to return, smiling and waving as he ran alongside our boat, sort of like a super-sexy golden retriever.

I found out that he was a real estate agent … on a fairly uninhabited island. Which might have explained the lack of any money. In bed he was more enthusiasm than skill, but he looked great. And often he would literally throw me over his shoulder and take me into the jungle to have his way with me, which bought him an awful, awful lot.

You may remember that Cristiano did not speak any English, and wonder how we were communicating as we fell more and more deeply in love. Well, we made our way through the week with a sort of Spantuguese we invented, combining our broken Spanish with Portuguese and a dash of charades in a way that worked well enough to do what we needed. He did speak a few words of English, but they were limited to a couple of impressions, like the 007 he did for us one night at dinner:

“The name is James Bond. Bond.”

Since he did this with no shirt on, we all applauded wildly. And when we told him it was perfect, we meant it.

A
fter a week with Rich Little, we said
chau
, and the girls and I flew back to Rio for one last night in Brazil. Ferris Bueller had told us to go to Rìo Scenarium, a restaurant/​bar/​club that he claimed was the best he had ever been to anywhere in the world (I agree). We arrived to find that the line for the club was two blocks long. As we stood near the entrance trying to decide what to do next, a blue-eyed, square-jawed, golden-skinned, broad-shouldered young surfer who was somehow even better-looking than Cristiano looked over, and smiled. In response, I gasped. I might have even said,
“Jesus Christo.”
He smiled bigger, and waved us to the front of the line with him and his adorable friend.

This was Rodrigo.

My second Brazilian boyfriend was a big-wave surfer in his late twenties who was just a few days away from moving to Sydney to learn English. Now fluent in Spantuguese-charades after a week with Cristiano, I gave Rodrigo my drink order and he led me through the club, as Emma zeroed in on his curly-haired young friend. The club was a three-level converted antiques shop. There was still a huge array of old, cool stuff everywhere, and there were thousands of gorgeous people of all ages eating, drinking, and dancing. Several varieties of live music poured through every level, from traditional Brazilian music to clubby
DJs, and Rodrigo took me to the first floor, where couples danced to a slow, sexy samba band.

If there is anything more ridiculously sexy than a young, blue-eyed Brazilian surfer who knows how to samba, I just don’t know what it is. He pulled me close, and that’s when I felt his body. It kind of made my eyes water. Suddenly feeling like a frat boy, all I could think of was how badly I wanted to see him with his shirt off. I’ve never really understood men’s interest in feeling boobs (everywhere but Brazil)—there are no erogenous zones on the palms of one’s hands, after all. But all I wanted to do was Tune in Tokyo on Rodrigo’s chest, immediately.

As we swayed to the music, and I felt certain that things couldn’t ever be better for the rest of my days, Rodrigo leaned close, inhaled my hair, and tried to whisper his first English in my ear:

“You smell bad.”

I gasped, and Rodrigo immediately realized his mistake: “Oh, no, good! You smell so good! I make wrong word!” I had to take a minute while I bent over in the middle of the dance floor, holding my belly and laughing, and then, less than twenty-four hours after I said good-bye to my island boyfriend, Rodrigo took my face in his hands.

“I can kiss you?” he said, hopefully.

He got that one right.

R
egardless of how I smelled, our night continued on until dawn. Now, again, I had been naked with another
man less than twenty-four hours earlier. And, no, I’m not excited that my father is reading this right now. But, for all womankind, and to take a stand against slut-shaming, I’m going to continue. Yes, I was with two men in one day. But,
Dad
, I will say in my defense that there was a (domestic) flight in between them—nearly a thousand miles and close to twenty-four hours—which I feel effectively separates them in a way that feels less, you know, disgusting.

Although
less
disgusting is not the way the rest of this story goes.

Rodrigo took me back to the little two-bedroom apartment he shared with his grandfather, where his baby pictures hung in the hallway. His things were all in boxes for his move to Australia, and there was just a mattress on the floor of his bedroom. The sound of his grandfather’s snores drifted through the walls and over we young and not-so-young lovers.

Rodrigo and I took off each other’s clothes, and things were just as spectacular as I imagined they would be. All I wanted to do was rub my face on his chest and stomach, and all he wanted to do was flip me upside down so that we could nuzzle each other’s genitalia.
Sessenta e nove
is the sexier, Brazilian way to say it. Now, I was a guest in this country, and my mother taught me to eat what is being served, but I’ve always found this move to be in the “more-is-less” department. Do you focus on the giving or the receiving? In my opinion, both suffer.

But there I was, on top of Rodrigo in his grandpa’s house, exchanging pleasantries with the lights on (my idea,
due to my interest in seeing him, which I was now regretting given the view one has in this particular position). After a few minutes, I tried to flip around for the Main Act, but Rodrigo held me securely in place, still enjoying the overture, apparently. I’m sure Freud would have some things to say about Rodrigo, as from the feel of things he seemed to have a desire to crawl back into the womb, face-first. Which was not unpainful. A couple of “Ows” might have popped out of me as the young surfer tried to dive into me much like I imagine he dove into a wave. My repeated attempts to flip around were repeatedly rebuffed, so eventually I gave up and just let the guy attempt to split me in half.

Eventually, in not a small amount of pain, I righted my ship, and faced my new close friend. And that’s when I noticed what looked like a scratch mark on his nose, covered in a bit of blood.

“Oh, no, did I scratch you?!” I said, kissing his nose.

“No! Is from you!” Rodrigo chirped.

I gasped. I
bled
on his nose? It was not that week.

“Is your ass!” Rodrigo said, as cheerful as a Mouseketeer.

It was not my ass, but it was certainly Ass-Adjacent. The boy had torn me open, and I had bled on his face. And he was thrilled about it.

Oh, Brazil.

A
couple of weeks after we got home, I got an e-mail from my island boyfriend, Cristiano:

The man from the carless island without a dollar to his name had found the money to fly to Los Angeles. But the nice thing about not being twenty-one is that you know what happens if you ship them home. Inviting a penniless Brazilian into your house for food and parties is like inviting in a vampire, but with more drum circles. Once they’re in, you’re powerless and they’re not going anywhere. And, as was the case with my other Brazilian, they may very well draw blood.