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O’Connor, whose unforgiving face still decorated some of the Irish pubs along Second Avenue.
    I had to pull myself together. Finding Tiffanys was now a job, a mission like the Green Berets ferreting out the Taliban in the mountains of Pakistan. But I was hopelessly adrift in a sea of thought. Lost in my reverie, I had wandered far from my hotel into a strange neighborhood with dangerous-looking, toothless Tiffanys. I had heard about the toothless Tiffanys, who were world-famous for their prodigious talents in the art of oral sex. According to my sex guides, there were all kinds of Tiffanys lurking in Rio’s barrios, catering to every imaginable desire, but perhaps it was the danger factor that was causing my procrastination. Many hapless sex tourists had had their wallets snatched from their back pockets on Rio’s infamous “Street of Spankings.” I had to find my way back to the main drag of sex clubs and bars, where the high-class Tiffanys performed the usual gamut of perversions.
    My head was spinning from all the alcohol and I had lost my sense of direction. I thought of the French poet Rimbaud, who welcomed disorientation and looked at the “derangement of the senses” as a higher state of mind, a form of transcendence that he urged upon his readers. But I wasn’t looking for poetic inspiration. I didn’t need to expand my consciousness. I had to get back down to earth and get laid.
    Maybe if I went back into The Club House, the old salt-of-the-earth types, the Finneys, Flahertys, Kennedys, Kilkennys, and Muldoons, might help me to find my way. Even though their revered Catholic church preached abstention and opposed birth control and pre-marital sex, they surely could understand that I was a man with urges that sometimes resulted in sin. I’m sure my friends at the bar would give me an understanding look and simply tell me to go confess my sins to Father Flynn. I could say a hundred Hail Marys and that would be the end of it. I hadn’t told any of the guys at the bar I was Jewish, and that was obviously the next step in our relationship. I could just see the faces of the Irish doormen of Rio when I confessed that I represented the Judeo in our Judeo-Christian alliance. From what I could glean, they had ambivalent feelings about Arthur Rosenbaum, the Jewish developer who had imported them from New York. Many blamed him for separating them from their friends and families back in Yorkville, so I had no guarantee they would take a kindly attitude toward me when they found out who I really was. Racial profiling might be frowned upon in the States, but it was par for the course in Rio. And in a place like The Club House, the patrons proudly lived by their own rules, honor-bound by an unspoken code of conduct that stretched back to the bogs of Ireland.
    Scuba diving had been a passion of mine in the days before I devoted myself to the pastime of pursuing beautiful Tiffanys, and I was even PADI certified. Once, diving with an instructor off the beautiful Bahamian island of Eleuthera, I wasn’t able to adjust to the depth to which we had plunged, and became completely disorientated. My vision started playing tricks on me, and I saw all manner of fantastical hallucinatory sea creatures. This was precisely the sensation I was now experiencing in this strange part of Rio, where I suddenly came upon species of Tiffany I had never seen before. It’s axiomatic that in Rio there are Tiffanys on every corner, but now I was finding wall-eyed Tiffanys, Tiffanys whose bodies were festooned with prosthetic devices, Tiffanys in wheelchairs, blind Tiffanys, Tiffanys who used sign language to bargain. Only this time I couldn’t blame it on nitrogen narcosis.
    It all reminded me of a very wealthy friend I once knew who couldn’t tell the difference between his prostitutes and his wives. His wives had married him for his money, and naturally he lavished money on his prostitutes, but generally the whores ended up costing him less