Senhors, senhoras, Petty Petty Petty Caaaaaash!
Petty Cash had been the perfect alibi-quiet, no gang connections, deeply deeply devoted to the beats trilling out of his headphones. In Total Surveillance Sampa even the most respectable man of business needs an alibi to swap identities with sometime: many were the afternoons Edson had gone abour Cidade de Luz and even up to the favela with Petty Cash’s identity loaded on his I-shades while Petty Cash sat missing beats as Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. Then one day Edson, as he switched identities back, actually listened to the choons dancing across Petty Cash’s I-shades, and for the first time the words crossed his lips: I might be able to do something with that. On that tin-roofed verandah De Freitas Global Talent was born. Now the world will see him shake mass booty.
Straight up Petty Cash catches PJ Suleiman’s hip-swaying samba paulistano, hauls a mangue bass out of his sample array, and brings in a beat that has the bass drivers bowing and booming in their cabs. The crowd reels back all at once, whoa! Then in midbeat everyone is up in the air, coming down on the counterpoint, and the bloco is bouncing. Suleiman tries something clever clever with a classic black-metal guitar solo and an old drum-bass rinse, and it’s itchy and scratchy but you can’t dance to that. Petty Cash takes the guitar solo, rips off the bass section and bolts on funk in industrial quantities: an old gringo bass line from another century and a so-fresh-they-haven’t-taken-the-plastic-off pau-rhythm. Efrim can see the track lines on Petty Cash’s I-shades as his eyeballs sample and mix in real time. The audience are living it loving it slapping it sucking it: no question who wins this face-off.
Then God says, Tonight, Efrim/Edson/everyone else you ever were or might be, I smile down from beyond satellite and balloons and Angels of Perpetual Surveillance on you.
Her. At the bar with a caipiroshka in a plastic cup in her hand and a gang of girlfriends. Pink jacare boots (what is this she has with endangering the cayman population?) and a little silver snake-scale A-line so short it skims her panties but moves magnificently, heavily, richly. Korr I-shades that go halfway around her head. Space-baby. Her hair is pink tonight. Pink and silver: perfect match for the seasonal must-have Giorelli Habbajabba bag on her arm. She came.
PJ de Peeeeeepoooooo! Kid DJ announces the next challenger as Efrim moves through the crowd toward the bar.
“Efrim Efrim Efrim!” The cries in his ear are like pistol shots. When Edson was in the Penas, Treats followed him like a dog around a bitch. Treats’s eyes and manic insistence betray a load of drugs. “Trampo’s dead, man. He’s dead!”
Trampo is — was — a dirty little favelado stupid enough to want to look mean who presumably took Edson’s place as the sunshine in Treats’s life when Edson walked out of the gang. Some are born with bullet marks on their bodies, like stigmata. Even in semi respectable Cidade de Luz murder is the most common death for young males. You properly come of age if you make thirty.
“They cut him in half, man; they fucking cut him in half. They left him at the side of the rodovia. There was the sign cut into the road.”
It would be a slope-sided rectangle with a domed top, a stylized garbage can. Take out the trash. Cut with one of those same weapons that the Penas played with so casually in the back of José’s Garage. That’s how everyone knows the Q-blade. It’s the real star on what has for the last six seasons been São Paulo’s top-rated TV show. No network could sanction a reality program where José Publics compete to join the resident team of bandeirantes to hunt down street hoods. But this is the time of total media, of universal content provision, wiki-vision. A bespoke pirate production house casts it payview to twelve million pairs of I-shades. Reformers, evangelical Christians, liberation priests, campaigning lawyers, and socialists demand something be done, we know where these people are, close them down out of great São Paulo. The police turn a blind eye. Someone has to take out the trash. Efrim would never filthy his retinas with such a thing, but he admires their business plan. And now they’ve come to Cidade de Luz. This is not a conversation for now. Frightening people at a wedding gafieira, and Efrim on the hunt. She is still there, at the impromptu bar made from trestle tables borrrowed from the parish center. The priest has more sense than to come to see what is being done with his tables; but the crentes, with their infallible noses for the unsaved, are handing out hell-is-scary-and-real tracts, all of which have been trodden underfoot into alcohol-soaked papier-mache. Women scoop caipiroshkas into plastic glasses from washing-up basins. Two guys in muscle tops pound limes in big wooden mortars. Get rid of this fool quick. Efrim rolls a little foil-wrapped ball of maconha out of his bag.
“Here, querida, for you, have this.” The kid is wasted already, but Edson wants him so far away that he can’t scare anyone else. How rude. “Go on, it’s yours, run on there.”
Senhors, Senhoras, PJ Raul Glor — ee — aaaaaah! G-g-g-gloriiiiai Another win for Petty Cash.
“Hooo honeys!” Efrim cruises in, hips waggling samba-time, looking their style up and down, down and up. “My, what shocking bad shoes.” Fia and her girlfriends whoop and cheer. Efrim lets the TalkTalk roll, swaggers up and down in a mock military inspection of each in turn. “Honey, has no one told you pterodactyl toes are no no no? Oh my sweet Jesus and Mary. Pink and orange? Efrim shall pray for you, for only Our Lady of Killer Shooz can save you now. Now you, you need a workout. Make an effort. Efrim is the one has to look at you. Telenovela arms, darling. Yours sag like an old priest’s dick. And as for you, honey, the only thing can save you is plastic. I’ll have a little whip round. I know a couple of cheap guys — don’t we all wish?” He stops in front of Fia. The Habbajabba is crooked over her arm, comfortable as a sleeping cat. You don’t know who I am. But I know who you are. Efrim loves the anonymity of the mask.
“Bur for you, I do some travesti magic. You don’t believe me? We all have the magic, the power, all us girls. You give me that bag and I will tell you magic things.” Laughing at the damn effrontery of Efrim, Fia hands over the Habbajabba. Efrim rubs his hands all over it, sniffs it, licks it. “Ah now: this bag says to me that it was given to you, not bought with money. A man gave this to you: wait, the bag tells me he is a businessman, he is a man with contacts and connections and people.” Efrim puts the bag up to his ear, pouts, eyes wide in mock shock. “The bag says the man gave it to you because you did him a big favor. You saved his dumb-ass brother from the seguranças.”
Efrim has been carefully steering Fia away from her girlfriends. They think it is funny — they wave, they kissy-kiss — and she is willing to be steered on this gafieira night. Edson holds the bag up and whispers to it, nods his head, rolls his big big eyes.
“The bag says, the man of business still owes you. After all, it was his brother, and he may be useless but he is still worth more than a bag. Even this bag.”
Fia laughs. It is like falling coins bouncing from a sidewalk.
“And how does this big businessman want to treat me?”
“He is about to do a deal on an Arabic lanchonete. Their kibes just slay you. He would like you to be the first to try what will surely be Sampa’s hottest food franchise and make him a rich rich man with an apartment on Ilhabela.”
That has always been Edson’s great dream: a house by the sea. Someday, before he is too middle-aged lazy to enjoy it, he will have a place down on Ilhabela where he can wake every morning and see the ocean. He will never visit it until it is built, but when it is he will arrive by night so all he can sense is the sound and the ocean will be the first thing he sees when he wakes. Santos is half an hour away by the fast train, but Edson has never seen the sea.