Tommy arrives and the women's shoulder shoot up around their ears until the moment he reveals he will indeed share his thumb-sized bag of booty. They cut quick uneven lines on the Patti Smith autobiography of her youth with Robert Mapplethorpe and pass it around, but all I take is a picture.
The conversation turns then because I alienate myself by not partaking. They want to know just who I am and when I tell them I am not gay nor straight nor bi the thick confusion in the room leads me to confess that I’m trans. I have the choice not to say it anymore, and yet, as the questions flow with indiscrete curiosity from these Parisians who make even the bawdiest jokes a secret in the telling, I begin to wonder what we would talk about anyway, had I left the confusion to grow into mystery - perhaps just the next subject, perhaps excluding me? And so I cement my place in belonging to this evening by stripping off my clothes with words that do nothing to describe all that I am all that I feel all that I want. They do more lines, sip a surprisingly good rosé, smoke half a pack of communal cigarettes, and then it’s time for le depart.
Tommy told me he knows all of gay paree, but I called him a liar in my head jusqu’a le moment when we arrive at La Machine Moulin Rouge and bypass 200 people thronging the building to the end of the block. Tommy smiles and counts us in a silence rendered by a synthetic bass beating like a devil’s heart from somewhere through the doors. We file inside, double kissing cheeks of Very Important People we will not see again that night.
Or rather, that morning. The party started at 11pm and we arrive at 1am, just enough time for the 5 different DJs on 3 gigantic floors to get into their groove. I ask Tommy what time the metro closes but this is a fait accompli. I have no way back but a 30 euro taxi until 6am and, he reveals, we are here for free for the way we look the way we are we are invited decorations expected to stay until nobody else comes in.
At this point, I make a choice.
The night turns fast and neon and I order champagne for all of us, feeling full in my head and fast with my money. Cut to me talking work with a publishing director cut to me holding the breasts of the fascinated queer girl who sleeps with gay men that tell her she’s everything they want and even more cut to her eyes wet and she doesn’t know why but I do - it’s powerful, the first encounter with a person who’s already become the kind of person you most want to be, life changing to be touched above the heart by one cut to me lighting the cigarette of a devastating femme in 1960s vintage, pouring out my heart because she’s listening and suddenly I can speak and be understood; she tells me that I have to appropriate my own body “approprié toi même” and suddenly all the sex I haven’t had and all the lovers who just didn’t work out on this side of the gate - everything comes clear like the air around the streetlamps that burns just as brightly as the bulb within: I must love myself in a more radial way that ever before, since never before has my body been so radical.
I begin to feel old, “so much older than I can take” the further we swim through the pool of sweaty bodies to the banks of speakers on which we are expected to dance, to raise our hands like Christians with the rising volume and the ascending vibrations of whatever modern mix of techno-dub-house-rave-pop currently marketed to the youth of today. The youth of today I said, not the thirty-somethings, which nobody but me knows I am, because I want disco I want soul, hell, I want pop from 1982, not this crashing pulsing with no chorus and no end in sight.
And soon all we’re doing is smoking outside because it’s too hot within, and the sky has turned that deep shade of blue I saw when I washed up on the concrete banks of Barbes-Rauchachourt. It takes forever to leave, all the cheeks to be kissed and security to pass through, and still the metro has not started so they tell me to “Profit de la cartier Montmartre” and I do, breathing in the dawn that colors the dome of the massive cathedral as we climb the hills of buildings with shuttered windows and land at the base of la Basilique du Sacre Coeur.
By we I mean the devastating femme, myself, and Tommy. She takes us to her studio and feeds us pasta with tuna and creme fraiche which tastes like manna from heaven because I did not eat dinner and forgot how hungry I am until the steaming bowl arrives at 7am, as the sky turns from pre-dawn gray to sun-arriving cerulean. She too owns a library of culture that holds everything I know and would like to learn, but I start to fall asleep en train de parler about some aspect of the social construction of femininity, so I go.
Down into the metro with everyone dressed up for a fête, laughing and swerving with the rocking of the train, swerving too on the platform I swerve up the stairs and down le Boulevard Magenta - the pink boulevard, pink as in queer, pink as my cheeks with the morning cold, up the five flights of antique wooden stairs, ornate banisters swerving under my hand, into my bed in the apartment of Neeecolaaahhh, where I manage to fall asleep at once, aware the entire time that I am dreaming.
