I would fall in love with Killer if he wasn’t madly in love with the most genius girl ever, a nineteen-year-old porn starlet named Judy who is working on a french translation of my book Valencia even though publishers keep telling her they have no money and can’t pay her. It’s a labor of love, just the like original ethos of her porn career, when she decided she wanted to make dirty movies that starred her and made money for no one, not even herself, and were distributed under her control. This plan went belly up when Judy realized she didn’t have the equipment or connections to start a one-woman porn empire. She checked the internet for porn companies that seemed to share her queer, pro-BDSM, sex-radical, feminist philosophy, and was most impressed by Kink.com, the smut peddlers who had set up shop in a crumbling Armory in San Francisco’s mission district, previously used as a shooting gallery for adventurous junkies and a great place for skaters to practice tricks.
Judy came to San Francisco, with the intention of working for Kink. She was seventeen years old but would turn eighteen during the course of her trip; she thought Kink would be wild to shoot some barely-legal scenarios at the moment the clock struck midnight on the day of her birth. And they probably would have, for Judy is truly lovely—teeny, with a gleeful red smile that swallows her face, and giant brown eyes fringed with curling eyelashes—but Judy didn’t have a Green Card, and so Judy could not celebrate official adulthood with the filming of her first porn.
Instead, she befriended a crack addict hanging out by the Cable Car turn around who was holding a sign that said I NEED A GIRLFRIEND. Judy had enough money for a hotel room, but she spent her three weeks in San Francisco sleeping in a tent with the crack addict beneath the freeway overpass down on 2nd Street. Her previous vacation included fishing for piranha with homemade fishing poles in the Amazon alongside her brother, a war photojournalist, so Judy’ vacation expectations are different from, say, mine. She got totally caught up in the insulated culture of the homeless encampment, charmed by the camaraderie of the addicts and mentally compromised folks who lived there. She heard one man ask another who sang the pop song he was crooning. I do, the singer said. Yeah, said the first guy, not missing a beat, but who does the really famous cover of it, the one they play on the radio? Judy loved this, how the one guy took care of the other, letting him hold onto his delusion. I thought the dude sounded like a classic enabler, that such enabling probably helped the singer acquire his lean-to lifestyle beneath a San Francisco bridge, but my analysis struck me as hopelessly American—canned, limited, reactionary, even.
I’m spending three weeks in Paris, away from the tyranny of American mental health and self-improvement. My companions are a tight-knit, incestuous gang of young femmes, butches and trans guys who call each other the queer family and spend all day every day together, making out, smoking, talking politics and theory, occasionally doing something excellent like dropping a banner off the side of the Centre Pompidou in support of a queer liberation group persecuted by the Turkish government. They make porn together and throw parties and write essays about feminism and BDSM. Riding the Metro with the queer family is like an old-fashioned Queer Nation visibility action, the train car charged as the larger Parisian society takes in this troupe of indeterminately gendered tranny butches in mohawks and leather jackets and glued-on facial hair that sprinkles off one drag king’s chin like confetti. And then Judy, who wears only teeny-tiny miniskirts, heels, and ornaments in her glossy hair. I’m not a woman, I’m a Femme, she says, a proclamation perhaps assisted by the fact that the English word for femme the identity is the French word for femme the sex, woman. In France Femme is Fem, so Judy n’est pas une femme, elle est un fem. Also, she has a copy of Oliver Twist jammed into the front pocket of her winter coat, because in addition to being a porn actress she is a student of English Literature.
Judy talked to me as we waited for the free nighttime bus at the Place d’Italie, her feet for once not in heels or sparkly flats but, like mine, soaked inside rainboots after trespassing in the catacombs. She was high and chatty on MDMA; I was bleary from sleep deprivation. Across the street was a fuss. Someone had fallen off one of the free Vilbe bikes and cracked their head. The cops had arrived, then an ambulance, then a fire truck. Soon a bus would come, open it’s doors briefly, and drive off as we approached. Apparently this was business as usual in Paris, land of impossibly cruel bus drivers. Judy resumed the story of her life, which was epic and utterly charming, told as it was through her face, stunning and colorful as something in a patisserie window. Last night, having sex with her boyfriend, Killer, and Antoine, who led us through the catacombs — and also Judy, I suppose, as she was there, and our hands did lay on each other occasionally, and we did kiss each other, though not in the French way—I found myself so moved by her raw loveliness it was as if I standing in front of a monument. If You Were Any Prettier It Would Be Impossible To Look At You, I told her, because there is something about the way in which Judy is beautiful that makes me think of light, the way her white teeth flash inside her frequent smile, her total joy at life, her passion for crazy living that could be written off as being nineteen years old except it’s not. Judy is electric, and the caliber of her beauty is influenced by her extreme good cheer and near-mystical openness to the world around her, and this is how she will always be, I promise. Looking At Your Face Is Like Watching Fireworks, I told her, and she clamped her hand to her mouth to contain a squeal. I’m going to cry! she said, then translated to Killer and Antoine, whom we were heaped upon, lounging on a mattress covered with Persian tapestries in a room in Pigalle beneath a window that looked out onto the lunar dome of Sacre Coeur.
