Joao's Party & Crazy CSers

Or: In Which A Brasilian Stripper Crashes Our Party

I'm not making this up.

There's a Brasilian stripper making her way on all fours across the tatty, waxy linoleum floor of the loft in the old district that we've rented for Joao's party. We're upstairs, all us CSers, foreign and Portugueuse alike, hands in pockets or folded across chests, sipping cautiously on Super Bock, water, mixed drinks. Some of us are still wearing the wigs we were instructed to bring: Ana's is a Cher-like straight, shiny black; Dea is Cruella De Ville, black with a white stripe. Cassandra and Andre sport long, curly, gaudy yellow and pink.

And we've all just gotten done giving poor, blindfolded Joao lap dances, the odd textures of wigs and hands making it impossible to tell how many of the bodies gyrating up against his chair are actually female.

Cameras are everywhere. Someone takes a picture of myself and Jaako, the seven-foot-tall Fin, his beer resting on my head. I don't even come up to his chest. This is what we do, pleasantly lost in a country where we don't speak the language. Find other expats. Speak English, because it's common between us. Drink beer. Laugh at what's funny anywhere you go, a giant of a Finnish guy using the short Indian girl as an end table.

One of the 'Portuguese' guys turns out to be a transplanted Dubliner. He meanders up. Amiably, I say, "Boa noite, meu amigo. Como estas?". He unleashes a stream of Portuguese against which I'm helpless, forced to admit that I don't speak the language all that well.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I just thought you were Brasilian."

Is this, too, the story of my lif? To always be mistaken for something I'm not? The stripper has a great body, but a mean, hars face; Joao is sitting with his hands thrust forcefully over his head. He will not touch her. Nao meu quero. He is not, he is saying, this kind of guy anymore. Everyone else hoots and whistles, rented strobe light and green tinsel streamers mixing the light crazily across their faces. The stripper kicks a leg out, hovering over Joao's face with her breasts. She cracks a long whip, pulled from nowhere, it seems.

I sit on the corner of a table, sharing another Super Bock with Jaako and talking to Sarah, a German girl who comes to me out of sheer relief at hearing me speak English. We are one in our need to rest just for a moment, to lapse back into the blessed partial-trance of the familiar. The conversation dies out and soon we are all just sitting, watching the dancers out on the floor. Joao leaps up and changes the song-he puts on 'Jeremy' by Pearl Jam and suddenly everyone is on their feet again, bellowing in the unselfconscious, unintelligible way that indicates no one knows the words.

Joao pulls us all out onto the floor with him and we form a rock concert huddle, jumping in place, all of us singing as loudly as we can, and although the music's loud and some sing in Portuguese, some in English, some nothing but the one or two words of the chorus they remember, in this instant, I am aware that we have understood each other perfectly. Pearl Jam ends and next is Nirvana, and we're all familiar with Kurt Cobain, too, so we keep right on jumping and huddling and singing, and in the middle of the floor, under a blue and green disco ball, Pavel and Agnes, wrapped up in each other, are dancing alone to a song no one else knows.