Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (25 page)

In the afternoon, we’d stop for a beer or glass of wine and sit at a café watching the French go by. They seemed so serene, done with their guillotines and massacres and prayer breakfasts. All they had left were a few client states and the dirty linen of old men. We saw women riding bikes in high heels, pedestrians with their closed, impassive, but interested faces. Up at the bar, where it was cheapest, men with red noses stood arguing mildly over soccer or politics, or reading the paper, and sending up putrid smoke. We took refuge outside, even in winter, so we could breathe.

Sometimes in the subway we’d see a black kid, like the ones in Havana, uncomfortable in his new baggy jeans and bling. The white people on the platform would move away, not understanding he was just trying it on, like a young poet from Kentucky might sometimes sound like John Donne, sometimes Allen Ginsberg. Véronique’s mom got this girl Babette to take us around at night in her enormous British checkered cab. Drunk from a picnic basket with wine and snacks, I stared at all the blazing palaces and cathedrals and hotels of the City of Light that were too beautiful to bear, and I started to bellow the one phrase I’d learned in case I was attacked as a Yank, “Je suis la bête américaine” (I’m the American beast), which Babette thought was hilarious and got me to say over and over.

Despite myself, little thready roots probed the soil. There was this skyscraper everybody hated for its ugly box-like shape rising out of nowhere, the Tower of Montparnasse. I imprinted on it like a baby bird. If I looked through our bedroom window at night, I could catch a glimpse of its lights. I imagined its twins.

Sundays were slow and empty when almost everything shut down. We’d get croissants. Maybe in the afternoon we’d turn on some music, some Al Green, and slow-dance together. Like we were nearly human. Like we loved each other and had permission for just a minute to let the world go to hell while we kissed.

We got library cards, and I took out mysteries and books on cheese and wine, learning a vocabulary of bullets, casings, autopsies, fog, vintages, varietals, mold, and molds. I listened to the radio half-heartedly picking out words. I didn’t really want to understand French and mess up the pure, pure music of the human voice. Still, it happened. The people at the
épicerie
recognized me. Then the woman at the vegetable stand. And a neighbor who knew who I was but ignored me. Eventually, I registered with the prefecture, got X-rays made of my lungs, was duly interviewed (hoarse from screaming at a soccer game), produced proof of (borrowed) financial resources, swore up and down that I wouldn’t look for a job, and was awarded a visa.

Ana called her friend Harriet Hirshorn, who had hooked up with a French girl, Marie de Cenival, and moved there before us. They were living near the Gare de l’Est along with Marie’s teenage kid, Léa. I’d met Harriet once or twice at the Avengers and Dyke TV. She was this short, thin video maker with long blonde curly hair. We celebrated the Fourth of July together at the Luxembourg, where they gave a free showing of
Broken Blossoms,
the silent film with Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess as Cheng Huan, who saves her from her abusive alcoholic father and redeems the Asian race. I offered a profession of my fading American faith in the form of potato salad and hotdogs, which we gobbled as we waited. Surely, the truth would become self-evident again.

On the Fourteenth of July, we celebrated France’s national day with liberty, equality, and fraternity, and bloody rage. “To arms, citizens! Let’s march.” We went to see the fireworks that night. Waiting, I had the impulse to reach out, participate. “The mosquitoes are awful,” I said to an older lady near us in my halting French. “That’s true,” she agreed.

A week or two later, we all ate dinner at Chris and Giang’s. I’d forgotten they had lent us their old apartment ten, twelve years before on our first trip to Paris. Since then they’d moved to a place near the Bastille with the Scientology headquarters across the street. We stared at it for a while but didn’t see anything secret. Their hall was full of golf clubs and tennis racquets. We mostly spoke English, but they encouraged me to try my French. I’d blurt something out, then feel like an asshole making those strange sounds. Giang, a Vietnamese American brainiac, tortured me about my pronunciation of the vowels in
moules
(mussels). But I teased her back about her haircut, and just like that we became friends.

I started to work again, revising a book on Cuba, writing for
The Gully,
looking for grants. Words began to return to Ana, too, after we clocked enough miles circling the city. I pretended not to notice that she disappeared sometimes with a notebook. The days shortened. It started to rain. We had drafty windows.

One morning in late October the radio announced “disturbances” in a couple of
banlieues,
outlying neighborhoods where poor immigrants and their French descendants were shunted off. Two black teenagers running from ID-checking cops climbed a fence into an electrical substation and got electrocuted. Afterwards, there were a few large demos protesting racism and profiling and unemployment before the whole thing degenerated, and across the country young men of color started in on the French national sport of burning cars and breaking the shop windows of their own neighbors as a kind of autoimmune disease. It escalated for days until a group of youths in the Paris suburb of Sevran attacked a bus loaded with passengers. A disabled woman couldn’t get out, and one kid doused her with gas and then threw in a Molotov cocktail. She survived, but with horrible burns. Nothing happened in our fancy corner of Paris. If we hadn’t read the news online or listened to the radio, we wouldn’t have noticed the difference. There was just a little shattered glass around one or two bus stops.

Ana wanted to go out to Clichy-sous-Bois and report on the riots for
The Gully,
but I threw a small fit remembering the dust-covered sight of her after she ran from a falling World Trade Center. Later on, though, we went to a community meeting out in one of the
banlieues
to hear a speaker who had something to do with Muslims and women. They had a dinner first, and we ate a whole Vietnamese meal with soup, then rice noodles,
bo bun.
And wine of course. They collected ten euros each. And we talked to a skinny imam who declared he was a feminist and lectured us at length. “A secular state is so important,” he said, “especially for women. France already has a problem with misogyny. The last thing they need is conservative Muslims getting free reign. You heard about the woman in the suburb? Splashing acid on her for uncovering her face? Just terrible. Did you go to the march put on by
Ni putes, ni soumises
?” Neither whores nor doormats.

He was almost the only man there among the women of North African and East Asian descent. They were barely considered citizens by white French people but seemed unmistakably Gaulish to me. The way they organized things and argued and instructed. French people (like Cubans) are always explaining. That I even noticed was a sign I was becoming something more than a tourist, no matter how much I wanted to stay superfluous, let others agitate.

I liked being foreign. An undifferentiated American. Like James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein, I needed distance. I should have been warned when I began
The Gully
how painful it was to write as an American, an embattled queer
.
Every word you write about hate and violence will trace its own wound. I’d still double over with cramps in the street, practically crawl into a seat on the metro. Ana would haul me back home and up the narrow stairs past the glaring concierge and a puzzled, mossy statue of Neptune, god of the sea. Once, I woke up and couldn’t open my eyes. There was this incredible gunk shooting out my pink eyes. A doctor made a house call, diagnosed conjunctivitis, and gave me a prescription for a bunch of orange drops. He only charged about sixty bucks. I staggered around with my hands out like you do in the dark.

I should have gone back to grad school, I thought. Gotten a job like Amy, who’d made a tidy sum with her stock options before the tech bubble burst. Sometimes I blamed Ana. I’d never have started
The Gully
if not for her continual rants about Elián. It was futile, anyway. We published the same stories over and over. Black men dead at the hands of cops. Dead queers. Dead civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan with their arms and legs blown off. Should I name the dead? Daniel Pearl, Pim Fortuyn, Sakia Gunn, all killed because of who they were. Then there was Al, gone, too. In New York queers mobilized crowds against a white comedian doing blackface while ignoring a visit from Robert Mugabe, who incited violence against us, actually killed real black queers, slaughtered his opponents of all orientations. No gully in the rock. And for that I was broke in a world where, as Virgina Woolf wrote, only money dignifies work.

All I wanted to do was to walk, and sit, and swallow the beautiful sky. Even when Ana started spending her days at the library, we’d still stroll after dinner in the growing dark. Every shop window was as carefully composed as the Luxembourg Gardens. At the Seine, lights flickered across the black water. And the clouds were monstrously gray and white in the purple sky. You could imagine gods up there. They were doing Wagner that year at the Paris Opera, the whole Ring cycle with Robert Wilson directing. Ana splurged on tickets. And we saw every act of every opera from the forging of the ring to the Twilight of the Gods. Which seemed apropos of everything.

Then in February (now 2006), Ilan Halimi died. He was a young Jewish man who worked in a cell phone store. His kidnappers, the Gang of Barbarians, were mostly young African immigrants or their descendants who figured one of
them
can come up with some dough. For twenty-four days, they hurt him every way they could think of. Then they set him on fire and dumped his ravaged body by some railroad tracks. He wasn’t quite dead yet. But almost. The cops tried to cover things up. And it took a while for journalists to break the story of the anti-Jewish rants the Barbarians made during ransom calls, the Muslim prayers they recited, and videos they made showing Ilan blindfolded with a gun to his head like the ones Iraqi kidnappers put out. The neighbors knew the whole time and did nothing. Some got in on the act.

We went to an SOS Racisme march on February 26. There were a lot of people. As many as fifty thousand. Most of the marchers seemed to be Jews, as if the rest of the city didn’t care, despite all the plaques in front of elementary schools about deported children. On the rue du Temple I used to pass a panel to Raoul Naudet, resistance member, next to a window full of handbags. He lived in the building before he got arrested and exterminated in Mauthausen in 1942. It was a peculiar experience, being in a march like that in Paris. Probably some of the other people on our right and left had parents, or aunts and uncles or grandparents, who had been rounded up by the Vichy government or ratted out by their French Christian neighbors and sent to the camps. Ana wore a tag with a big pink triangle that said in French “Enough hate.”

I had a sudden sense of the joint frailty of our human bodies, how easy it would be with a few guns to herd us all into cattle cars and kill us—that is, if you first reimagined us as animals. And if we continued to behave as humans, constrained by politeness, and respect, and our own optimism. We know we are humans like you, after all. Not beasts. You couldn’t possibly . . .

Some teenage boys started running through the crowd, shouting and shoving and waving Israeli flags and Jewish Defense League banners. They had handkerchiefs drawn up over their faces like guerillas. At first, they just seemed high-spirited, asserting some power after years of being harassed. Then we heard the sound of breaking store windows. Some of the older protesters were shaken. Later, a Muslim shopkeeper was roughed up and a couple of passersby. It’s so easy to become the thing you hate. Choose the opposite role for the moment that history repeats.

When spring rolled around, I decided to retire
The Gully.
Clear my head. Try to make some money for a change. I broke the news to Ana, then Amy, who was attending a music college in Sweden. We redesigned the thing and put it to bed on April 3, 2006, after more than six years. I shredded the book I’d been trying to write on Cuba, and the ridiculous mystery. I turned forty. For my birthday, Véronique’s mom arranged a boat trip around Paris at dusk. Lights shimmered on the water. The gold of my favorite, fantastical bridge glowed. We shivered and admired. Then drank hot chocolate. A couple of weeks later we headed back to New York, at least for a while.

31.

When I returned to Paris almost a year later, it was more homecoming than flight. A relief to be foreign in a place I actually was. In the East Village, the scraggly, weedy lots down the block had been pimped up to look like suburban office buildings but were actually luxury apartments for the horribly rich. Access to the river was blocked. Pissed-off people didn’t take to the streets: they went online and shrieked at anti-Bush sites, which had no discernible impact on his illegal wars, the torture, the domestic spying, the disastrous handling of Katrina.

In the fall, Democrats had finally taken a stand with the midterm message “Vote for us. We’re not Republicans.” They would have lost again except the GOP’s Mark Foley got caught drooling over boy pages. He and his Republican homoscandal turned the tide. Not the economy or Iraq or Halliburton or the Constitution lying at the bottom of the American birdcage. I didn’t know why queers were thrilled. Antigay marriage amendments passed in seven out of the eight states at issue, making it twenty-seven states where same-sex marriage was expressly banned.

I belonged back in France. Yearned for it when they threw another riot in the
banlieues,
smashing everything in their paths. So much blab from the elite, and the rest left with either silence or paving stones. Why not try to bash your way into their monologue, change an abstract discourse about jobs and racism and immigration into something a little more real? Maybe with your face on it. Read my lips. Except, except, except . . . the guys setting stuff on fire were almost always thugs, jumping onto busses with weapons, scaring the crap out of innocent people, their neighbors mostly, just so they could drive the thing a few yards away and set it on fire. It reeked of macho satisfaction. Look what I did. My fire’s bigger than yours. Which I guess is why Bush showed around that picture of Saddam, his face all bloated and dead after the execution.