Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (26 page)

I got a gig to cover a huge agricultural fair in Paris and went back alone in the spring. The paper was the
Louisville Courier-Journal.
I thought it was hilarious my byline would read “columnist for
Gay City News
in New York.” Yes, Missus Cogswell’s daughter is a big fucking dyke. Ana was supposed to follow almost immediately. When she got delayed, our swap fell through, and I spent the next couple of months in déjà vu mode, changing neighborhoods as often as I did fresh off the bus in New York. First, Harriet and Marie put me up in their new place in back of Père Lachaise Cemetery. We visited Oscar Wilde’s kiss-covered monument, and the bullet holes in the wall where the last rebels of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot. Then I watered plants for three or four weeks at Mathilde’s while she went off in a ship to dig up oceanic rocks. She was Marie’s cousin, and a dyke, too.

She lived in a high-rise in Belleville with these big drafty windows showing enormous apartment buildings stuffed with immigrants, remnants of the old city, and some pointy church. Clouds would get stuck in the spires and break free in a rage of double and triple rainbows. A block away was an enormous market filled with women from Morocco and Algeria and Senegal. The nearby rue de Belleville changed from West African to Chinese and South Asian, with pockets of white working-class French in between.

To get anywhere, I had to run the gauntlet of old Arab men. They stared at me. Sometimes with indifference. Sometimes hate. Maybe they hated everybody. They wanted to go home but were stuck in Paris. Maybe they just hated me. I wasn’t crazy about them either. Some of their sons were brutal assholes, knocking blonde Harriet off her rollerblades. “N’importe quoi!” She was an affront, a high-flying woman. I went to this one Moroccan bakery where the men were unusually nice to me. But then I figured out that they figured I was a guy. They seemed pissed off when they realized the mistake. I went back anyway when I had the nerve because they had these great cheap fried buns full of tuna and olives and boiled eggs. Also, I thought it did them good to see me, with my polite-dyke “Bonjour” and parting “Bon journée” on the way to the Salon de l’Agriculture.

God, I like my fairs, especially ones with wine. Not long after my grandmother died, I dragged Ana and her brother Pablo to a fair in upstate New York and made them look at chickens and eat corndogs and go to a demolition derby. The crowd rose to their feet and covered their hearts as a canned soprano wailed “The Star Spangled Banner,” and the waiting cars below shot flames from things that looked like organ pipes. Then Pablo and I rode something that bucked and curved and screwed so thoroughly with my equilibrium I was still nauseated the next day. That’s Amurrica.

Chirac opened the fair as current president, nostalgic that this was his last time to kiss old Bessy between her well-groomed bovine ears before somebody else took over. I pressed through the scrum of journalists and bodyguards who all pretended that it was perfectly normal to see this power-suited politico surrounded by hay and manure, and the ruddy white faces of farmers who spent all their days outdoors. This was the message: that at heart, France was still some rural idyll where even the most sophisticated Parisian is only one step from a farm where milkmaids frolic and grandpa distills his own fruit spirits. No matter that ninety percent of the French shop in supermarkets and kids in the
banlieues
speak only the language of burning cars.

All the presidential candidates came afterwards. Nicolas Sarkozy was a law-and-order guy, like Giuliani, and about as bad tempered. When he got heckled from the crowd about his handling of the 2005 riots, he shot back, “Shut up, you stupid asshole.” It made headlines for days. Ségolène Royale was there, too, after squeaking through the primaries to be the Socialist candidate. And I stood in line with the other journalists for a chance to video her chewing steak with the beef lobby.

I got pulled into her campaign when Mathilde came back and I stayed with Harriet and Marie again. It had taken them a while to get onboard, even if Ségo was gay friendly. Maybe because the whole stiletto heel thing doesn’t go over well with dykes. Or because she spoke out against crime, which always horrifies the bourgie Left, and got painted as a provincial mother of four sure to drag the Party to the Right. Ségo did grow up in a right-wing Catholic family with a father who kept his sons in military buzz cuts, but I grew up Southern Baptist in Kentucky, so what does that prove? I liked her message that France was for everybody.

The misogynist hacks in her own Socialist Party were even more skeptical than the dykes. Former PM Lionel Jospin was such a dick that when he withdrew from the primaries, he declared he’d support anybody but “la candidate,” the female candidate. Ségo’s only chance was to reach out to ordinary people, taking a page from Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign with “listening tours” and town hall–style meetings. “I’ve become convinced that citizens . . . are the only real legitimate ‘experts’ on any of the questions facing us.”

That’s when I fell in love—with that word
citizen.
In the United States, we don’t use it much unless we’re talking about immigration. National politicians usually stick to “My fellow Americans,” implying a kind of geographical craps game you just happened to be a part of. In France, politicians all said, “My fellow citizens,” draping us with obligations, and making me feel like a part of this enormous human project whose goal still is to construct a state aiming toward Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

It worked for Ségo, anyway. She packed whole stadiums. People from the
banlieues
cheered next to formerly cynical French dykes. Even the jocks got involved, like Chris and Giang, and their friend Valérie, a book restorer that I’d started to hang out with sometimes. I’d meet her at her workshop full of old paper and glue pots and weights, then we’d pick up sandwiches and play boules at the Roman Arena nearby.

I joined them when they went flyering at the Gare de Lyon. I felt like a citizen myself, at least of Paris. I’d earned my papers walking the streets, arguing in cafés, marching for Ilan Halimi. Hell, I patted cows at the fair. Knew where dozens of public libraries were and all the Monoprix supermarkets. I even asked Véronique’s mom to ask St. Geneviève—who watches over the city—to bring Ana back safe and sound. This was my fight, too. Even if I hoped nobody would hear my accent and accuse me of interfering where I didn’t belong.

Luckily, people just took the damn pamphlets and didn’t bother me, though Chris got harangued a couple times by a certain kind of white man who would get all red-faced when he saw Ségo’s face on the brochure. Or maybe it was Marie who got called “Dirty cunt,” “filthy whore.” It was around then that I woke up one night to howling from the other room. Harriet was out of town, and Marie had been out with a fag friend. They went to a gay bar where they just had time to order a drink before this big brutal bouncer said Marie had to go, and when she asked why, just grabbed her and tossed her out. They didn’t want any females in there. His fat fingers left incredible bruises. Distracted, she had an accident on her rollerblades and broke her wrist—hence the howling. She had to have surgery and a couple of pins. I harassed the nurses in my bad French, “Be careful. She has trouble with anesthesia. Almost died once. Understand?” After that, Marie worked harder than ever for Ségolène.

On election night, we all went to a party at Chris and Giang’s. We were hopeful at first, drinking wine, making jokes, then the depressing results poured in. Tears rolled down Giang’s face as Ségo gave her concession speech on a balcony outside her headquarters, promising she wouldn’t disappear. Was in it for the long haul. And she did hold more public meetings trying to find a new direction, but she was trapped by the Socialist ball and chain. All that misogyny.

Heading to the train to go home after the party, I got caught in a demo at the Bastille, yanked my camera out of its case, and started to film. The cops were heaving tear gas at protesters, lanky white boys mostly, a few girls. The thin column with the gold figure on top disappeared in smoke, along with the cops moving around behind it. The gas wasn’t so close at first, just a faint burning of lungs and eyes. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth. Then one canister hit almost at my feet and I was blinded, stumbling around like I had conjunctivitis again and could only open my eyes for a fraction of a second at a time. I’d get a glimpse of things, then dash away with my eyes shut tight. Life is like that, I thought.

32.

My eyes were still tearing when I got back to our two-room duplex on rue Cadet. “What happened to you?” Ana had just arrived a day or two before, underwhelmed at our new dump that had wires dangling in the hallways. I’d only grabbed it because the decent, cheap places had lines around the block of clean-cut white kids with dossiers proving they had good job contracts or that their parents were stinking rich. Landlords didn’t want foreigners, even white ones, without fat assets in France.

A couple of days later, when an enormous storm left a bunch of puddles all over our stuff upstairs, our friend Valérie lent us a temporary place in the fifth arrondissement. School kids shrieked in the schoolyard behind and kicked a soccer ball against our wall. We’d sit drinking at the cheapest neighborhood place, L’Inévitable. The Institut du Monde Arabe was nearby, and we’d see young Muslim women in headscarves and expensive shoes sailing down the street with their fists clenched. I figured some were true believers; others just used their headscarves to flip the bird at French society. Many had voted for Ségo, dragging their mothers and grandmothers to rallies, willing to be citizens of a France that included them, not just demanding obligations but sharing rights.

Those young Muslim women were a world away from the figures covered head to toe in black who would pass by sometimes when we finally found a place in the nineteenth. These were fat and ravaged and mute. Teeth were missing. They looked a million years old but were probably my age. They’d been worked like mules, used as breeders. They hadn’t chosen anything. And their daughters behind them, already in scarves, looked warily at brothers half their age but already with sharp little fists. These were the girls glad to go to French public schools where they could skip the head schmatta only because it was banned, be like everybody else. It’s never them you see in riots. Though maybe you should.

I tried not to see them. Had my own problems. I’d get harassed by the guards at the Monoprix up at Place des Fêtes. They’d take one look at my German army fatigues and spiky dyke hair and stop me at the door. “You have to check your backpack.” And my French was good enough to scream at them, “Why pick on me when you just let that other woman go by? She had a backpack, too, only hers was leather, and she was dressed nicer. Is that it? And what about that handbag there that just slipped by as you hassle me? Hers is three times bigger than my tiny sac. Why didn’t you stop her?”

Sometimes people would pause in my defense, though that had its own pitfalls because sometimes they’d start to imply the guards were wrong because they were black. Not because they were assholes. I got tired of the show and walked an extra couple of blocks to the grubby little Monoprix in the other direction where nobody cared if I had one backpack or ten.

Often the nineteenth seemed like Cuba, a neighborhood of men, and I had no business there. There were a lot of West African guys who lived in single rooms. I’d see them in the laundromat doing their own wash for the first time ever, struggling with the machines. There were transgendered women, too, speaking Latin American Spanish. North African guys, both Muslims and Jews, would walk back and forth on the sidewalk, trying to get glimpses of them. Sometimes we’d hear about bloody fights between rival gangs. All that testosterone put to bad use under that ascending star Sarkozy, who got his own rocks off setting quotas for deporting undocumented immigrants, twenty-five thousand by the end of the year, and they were behind schedule.

By then I wasn’t a visitor anymore, no matter what my visa said. I got interested in immigrant issues, like the danger of open windows. There was that Russian kid who cracked his head open falling from one while trying to elude police. The North African man slipping from a window ledge and fracturing his leg. A Chinese woman ended up in a coma after plunging from a window. She got spooked, thinking they were coming for her when the cops started knocking on the door of a neighboring apartment. At least Parisians were a little like us East Village types who used to scream at cops and take badge numbers when they were rousting young men in the neighborhood. And in Paris, passersby would gather spontaneously to stop cops as they moved in for raids. Passengers on planes would throw fits when deportees were on them and sometimes ground flights for hours.

Ana and I went to a couple of marches. I’d take my video camera, and once a woman gave me a teary, “Thanks for coming. No one is paying attention.” Looking around, I thought about a doctor who told me his usual gig was working with poor immigrants. “You never know what you’re going to see when they undress. Old bullet wounds. Scars from machetes. Others scars you can’t see. You should write about that.” Harriet and Marie went, too. Marie was an AIDS activist with Sidaction and did a lot of work in Africa. She saw the effect of Sarko’s policies. But she and Harriet were just as angry at the Socialists. All the misogyny the election had uncovered—it poisoned everything.

Marie finally circulated an e-mail asking if any other women out there were just as pissed off and got enough responses to form La Barbe, which means the Beard, but also Enough. Marie had been in ACT UP Paris. Harriet in the Avengers and Dyke TV, and a million feminist groups. They were also fans of Billionaires for Bush, who had punked the Republicans. La Barbe was based on an equally simple idea: invading men’s spaces like board meetings, slapping on beards, then “congratulating” the assholes for keeping out girls.

Before the first action, Harriet and Marie came over and squeezed themselves around our tiny table to eat. “You guys should participate.” I felt guilty but declined. I had all the confrontation I could handle every time I left the house, and my papers weren’t quite in order. I was suddenly the cautious immigrant. I also wanted to think about other means of resistance that cost me less. Writing, thinking, art maybe. My brain as a laboratory. Ana might have been interested in the group if it were for dykes, but it wasn’t. She also didn’t want to be the one immigrant. The one person of color. Besides, she’d already done her bit for France the first time she’d lived there, working in women’s and gay groups, Les Gouines Rouges, the Red Dykes. She also didn’t want to lose focus on her book. She’d finally let me take a look, six or seven drafts on. It was as strange and angry as
The Invisible Man.
And hilarious in a bitter Rabelaisian sort of way.