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tap. The whole place smelled of urine. I noticed that even though all the regulars looked like Irish doormen out of central casting, the bartender himself, despite his thick Bronx accent, appeared to be a Rio native — dark, slim, and handsome — and not the kind of sallow-faced, beer-bellied creature I was likely to find at a similar establishment in Manhattan.
    When I got closer to the television, I noticed that everyone in the bar was watching Bob Hope perform for troops on some aircraft carrier. I quickly surmised that they were watching a tape of one of Hope’s overseas performances during the Vietnam War. Bob Hope alternated on the television with some equally musty broadcasts of Yankees games, featuring the sportscaster Phil Rizzuto. I knew this was one place where I wasn’t likely to run into any head-turning Tiffanys, but I experienced a moment of homesickness. Back in New York, when I wasn’t seeing prostitutes, I enjoyed getting inebriated all by myself, and this was just the kind of place, with cold, inexpensive beer, that I liked to frequent. In fact, I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I might end up spending the rest of my time in Rio in this nostalgic dump.
    One of the predictable things about Irish bars for someone like me is that the bartender and the patrons always glare suspiciously at newcomers, and I knew that whenever I got up from my stool to take a piss, someone would say perceptive things about me like, “Who the bloody feck is that?” There were a couple of portly fellows with reddened cheeks who looked like retired New York City cops. I figured most of the Irish-doorman types must have been employed in a section of Rio where there were the same kind of elegant pre-war high-rises you find along Park Avenue. This was just the sort of place that you could find in what was left of old Yorkville, with its tenements and momand-pop grocery stores.
    As I would later learn, most of the Irish doormen at The Club House had been brought down by a Jewish developer who had built several high-rises to cater to the needs of the growing American expatriate community in Rio. He’d felt that the extra New York touch would make his buildings competitive with the towers that had been constructed by Brazilian developers going after the same market.
    I’m the kind of guy who can’t stop thinking about the one woman who won’t talk to him at a party. Instead of moving on when I feel I’m not wanted, I go back for more. So instead of having a beer or two and proceeding on to The Gringo, I set out to win acceptance at The Club House. I was on my third boilermaker when I noticed the other men at the bar swigging down rye with beer chasers. Figuring it would boost my status in the bar, I bought everybody a round. As I started to get inebriated, I began waxing about midnight mass at St Patrick’s, even though I’m Jewish. I couldn’t stop myself from dropping the name of every Irish-sounding person I knew — O‘Kelly, O’Reilly, O’Rourke — while using words like “communion” and “christening” whenever I bought someone a round. My favorite line was, “I’ll never forget the time Kennedy went to mass three sheets to the wind. He took the wine with the wafer, but he was wobbling like a ship in a storm…”
    In place of Tiffanys, there were just a few pasty-faced sluts with the albinism that comes from the kind of inbreeding that went on in the tight-knit building-services community in Rio. No one can afford a decent Tiffany on a doorman’s salary.
    I was surprised when I stumbled out into the warm Rio night and heard people speaking Portuguese. During my time in The Club House, I was transported back to New York, and with all the blarney and Killarney and blessed virgin this and that, I imagined I would find myself facing a typical Manhattan street scene, with Bangladeshi cabbies honking at each other. In my inebriated state, I thought I might even run into the ghost of the dearly departed Cardinal