2AM in the Biggest F*ckin City in South America

It’s 2AM on Saturday morning and you leave the club early because you’ve had a long-ass week at work and you’re tired and you just want everybody to shut the hell up already and go to sleep. You work your way past the line of partiers, in various states of inebriation, waiting to go in while you’re going out. Your ears thump with the muffled beat of the pop and house music playing upstairs as you break through the sweaty brightness of the club entrance and into the smoky chill of the dark, damp downtown streets.

A haggard-looking woman sells packets of gum and the Halls throat lozenges popped like candy in Brazil and a bus passes by, the tires making a splashing sound on the pavement as it moves, all lights and noise and a pair of dozing passengers. You could use some IHOP right about now.

You head towards home, a twenty-minute walk away, down almost-empty streets that yawn emptily into the speckled darkness ahead. Six hours before, the streets buzzed with couriers and executives and touts and vagrants. Now, only the vagrants remain, bedded down under lumps of cardboard and rags, steeling themselves against the chill of night. One or two other tired souls pass by, staggering home like you, from work and/or play. The streetlights glow weakly against the black on smoke on slate on charcoal on gray tones of night, the cracked sidewalks undulating with the almost-imperceptible breath of the city and endless rows of towers standing sentry with thousands of dark, mute windows. It takes a few seconds before you realize that you’re holding your own breath.

Up ahead, laughs and music from the corner lanchonete pierce the solitude as weekday working stiffs treat their ladyfriends to pre- or post-club golden fried goodness. You inhale, then consider stopping for a quick coxinha and a Coke. But you keep walking instead, warmed by the thought of just how much you love this goddamned city.

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Ernest White II