After kissing on furniture I later learn from Wet is intensely germ-ridden, I followed Antoine up the curving, wrought-iron staircase and out into the street. It is a Parisian street which means it looks like a movie set, with blue and white Christmas lights hung in sky and a corner store with stands of fruit tumbling forth like bulbous jewels. The queers all sat on the sidewalk like a gang of degenerates. I gave them cigarettes. Since coming to Paris all I’ve done is smoke, my rationale being that since everyone is constantly smoking everywhere, I am basically smoking, too, like it or not, so I might as well indulge.
Antoine is speaking to Alice, a tall androgynous girl with a blonde mohawk who gets both prettier and more handsome every time I see her. She is leaving soon to do queer activism in Sweden, but for now she is Antoine’s lover and translator. Antoine has so many lovers he frequently gets amorous text messages from ladies he can’t quite remember, including one in Spanish that ends with Te amo. He also has a girlfriend attending art school in Geneva—not a primary lover, in the polyamorous tradition of having a main squeeze while you screw the masses, but a girlfriend in the traditional tradition of having a girlfriend whom you massively cheat on. I learn this far too late for it to be an ethical concern.
An would like to go home with you, but he has a friend staying at his house who is more than a friend, so he can not take you there, Alice explains.
We can go to my house, I problem-solve. My house belongs to the writer Wendy Delorme, whose recent novel Quatrieme Generation is emerging as bible and guide to a butch/femme culture straddling this Parisian community and the one I sort of occupy back in San Francisco. She lives on the seventh floor of a building in Pigalle, by a strip of red-lit bars where moody women in lingerie smoke cigarettes in the windows all night.
The other evening I had walked in the direction of the famous Moulin Rouge a block away, it’s red neon windmill blinking behind the sparse winter trees. A roaming pack of guys tried to block me on the sidewalk outside the imposing SEXODROME sex compound. Non comprends, I snapped, walking around them. Fucking bitch! They started yelling, quickening their pace behind me. Fucking bitch, won’t talk to us! Oh, great. I crossed the street and lost them, but now felt like a fool toddling over to gawk at the Moulin Rouge in what is a tawdry sex district frequented by choads. I dashed off to the safety of nearby Rue des Martyr, which has the air of a recently gentrified ghetto, replete with overpriced patisseries and cheese shops and hair salons selling American hair products. I got a five-Euro Coke and sat beneath a heat lamp reading the new Edmund White Rimbaud biography.
In the cab back to Pigalle after the club I’m like, why are Judy and Killer in the cab? Neither of them live near Pigalle. Judy lives with her family in the suburbs of Paris—where the broke people live while the moneyed occupy the city proper, a la Oakland and San Francisco. Judy’ mother thinks she’s on a bad path, that the porn business will drive her to suicide. They fight about it all the time. It’s a lot to expect a parent to approve their teenage daughter’s wish to have sex with strangers in front of rolling movie cameras, but Judy just isn’t the sort of person to be private about anything. She’s too exuberant. As a result of this tumult, she spends most of her time at Killer’s house. Killer has great hair, a fringy cascade of bangs that hang in his face and the rest is shaved or short. He sports suspenders and a coat made in the early 1900s and generally has the look of a charming nineteenth-century pickpocket. His cheeks get red when he drinks, his eyes are a crystalline green, his cheekbones are dramatic, and his nose turns up just the slightest. Killer is fucking hot, and even though everyone in this queer milieu is totally polyamorous with surprisingly little dramatic fallout, and even though I’ve watched Judy skip up to people and open her pretty mouth onto theirs as a bonjour, I still didn’t imagine I would get anywhere near Killer, because he and Judy are so deliriously love he proposed to her via Skype when she was last in San Francisco. The pair plan to get married after his chest surgery, in Paris for sure but maybe also in San Francisco and even Las Vegas.
