Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (11 page)

Okay, so maybe I told Ana a little of what I felt.

Maybe after a couple days of gray stones and tidied gardens I ranted and raved and threw myself on the slippery cobblestones and foamed at the mouth. Until we went to that demo.

America had its David Duke; France had Jean-Marie Le Pen, lawyer, legislator, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant Holocaust denier, ex-foreign legionnaire, and maybe a torturer. His rallying cry was “France for the French,” and traditional values. Some lefty group was holding a protest against the racism he incited. Ana and I picked up a tube of white acrylic paint, a brush, and a dry black umbrella. Riding the metro, I painted a bomb in the center and lettered in French around it, Lesbian Avengers [Les Justicières Lesbiennes] Against Racism. It was the first thing that made me really happy in France, painting that umbrella on the subway while the riders looked on. At the demo, one or two nodded in acknowledgment, but nobody said anything. They’re polite, those French people. So discreet.

Go to something about racism in New York, it’s mostly people of color with a few whites tossed in. In Paris, there were black people, Asians, North Africans, plenty of whites. All speaking French like they owned the language. And I realized, like Le Pen, I’d thought of France as a white place, though it hadn’t been since the Gauls painted their faces blue and greased their hair. It rained, of course. I held the umbrella high.

Afterwards, Ana took pity on me and booked two places to the Côte d’Azur, which was my first trip ever on a real train if you don’t count those commuter things to Philly. There were bunk beds, like in the movies. Porters. Heading south, we shot through the damp countryside arriving in Nice after dark. Greeted by an enormous and terrifying dog, we slept that night in a small hotel, with thick moldy curtains, and the sound of waves crashing on an invisible beach. When we woke in the morning, and Ana pulled open the windows, we were blinded with light and ran outside like two mental patients. What an incredible and strange blue the sky was. What a strange green the sea. They were the colors of Matisse. Colors I thought were made up. How come no one had told me? Ana laughed when I grabbed her hand and didn’t let go.

We moved to a hotel on the Promenade des Anglais that had a cut-rate Christmas special. Our new room had a balcony overlooking the bay, and a minibar, which I’d never seen before. Below, there was a fisherman among the enormous rocks in the crook of the bay. The waves would hit him and spray shoot up fifteen feet. A couple of people actually swam. There were others in chairs on a beach made only of pebbles, which I’d never seen before, either. We went down and slid around on the stones. Later, we walked up a path to a park where they had all these strange desert plants. Some had the smooth, thick leaves of aloe. Others were cactusy and prickly.

We stumbled over an old cemetery up there filled with Americans who’d come from Cincinnati when it was an important center of American culture, and San Francisco just a dirty little port town. There were worse places to die, I thought. Later, we found an enormous eternal market with fifty stalls selling masses of cut flowers, and dozens others with olives that were flavored with orange or garlic or burning peppers. At an outdoor restaurant, we ate
soupe au pistou,
which was full of vegetables and no meat. I could understand some of the French because they pronounced it more like Italian or Spanish. They also had their own Niçard dialect, which had outlasted the Genoese, Saracens, Sardinians, even the French kings.

I decided it was small-minded of me to despise a whole country and told Ana I wouldn’t mind retiring there. She laughed, but I meant it, imagining a tiny room with a balcony, staring out at that sea and that sky. Reassured by my insignificance and yours. Christmas Eve we went to the fancy shopping street and bought a bottle of champagne and a little Cuban cigar, which I smoked, pretending to be Janet Flanner chatting with Gertrude Stein about her latest article in the
New Yorker.
At a bakery with an enormous line we got a
bûche de Noël,
a Christmas cake in the shape of a log and decorated with funny meringue mushrooms and a little sleigh. We took it all back to the hotel where the champagne went into the little minibar, and we squabbled over the mushrooms on the
bûche
because I had picked up some intestinal bug (wasn’t it kind and generous of Ana to offer to eat them all, so I wouldn’t have to?). And near midnight, we walked back into town where the cathedral was having a mass. It was too packed to go in, but you could hear the chants and carols in the square.

Afterwards at the hotel, I stood on the balcony for a long time, listening to the waves crash against the rocks, and trying to make out the line between the black sky and black sea.

Paris was okay after that, even if I was on a diet of Imodium. We got a dry day and saw other parts of the city where the architect Haussmann hadn’t left his stamp. Montmartre was still villagey with steep winding streets and little human-sized buildings. In a different neighborhood we found African bazaars, Moroccan souks. With working-class people! Immigrants! We went to the Gobelin tapestry factory, and to the catacombs of Denfert-Rochereau where underground avenues were laid out in more straight lines, with bones neatly stacked along the walls mingling together millions of exhumed Parisians, tibias crossing each other, skulls aligned. I got the idea that the obsessive order of the formal French gardens must have been a sophisticated joke.

A day or two before we left, Ana’s brother came up from the Loire Valley where he lives. They had a coffee at the café downstairs. He stuck his head in. I didn’t do much but say hello before I had to go puke. Afterwards, Ana went to the pharmacy and described all my horrifying symptoms and came back with a bunch of drugs a pharmacist gave her, just like that.

I was sad to go. The place grows on you. Like a fungus, maybe. At the airport, I confessed France wasn’t so bad. I wouldn’t mind coming back. “We could stay for a year. Why not?” Ana bought chocolate truffles. On the plane, I stretched out on two empty seats and slept.

14.

Back in New York, I scrambled to pick up some cash to pay back Ana for our trip to Paris. I wasn’t much good at it. I bussed for Kathryn sometimes when she worked the room upstairs at the restaurant, even though I was a total jinx for business, and all I did was refill two or three water glasses. I also cocktail-
waitressed a couple times at Crazy Nannies, where one Avenger bartended on the top floor and another was go-go dancing. Later, I stuffed envelopes for Jennifer Monson about some dance thing, and for Eileen Myles about a poetry event, and typed a manuscript by Abe, this old ex-boxer guy who was sleeping with my former Bengali roommate. It was full of Rocky-like stories of pounding meat carcasses and old brick walls, and bloody sagas of the murderous Jewish mob, which he swore were true, and a love interest in the form of an Indian princess, not South Asian at all, but Native American. I charged too much, but he didn’t care. It was going to be a best-seller.

And almost every Tuesday I was still off to the Avengers, who were in a state of perpetual fury at our new mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who had messed-up ideas about law and order. As a candidate he joined this enormous mob of rioting cops protesting Dinkins’ plan to improve the civilian complaint review board. And as mayor he quickly unleashed the Street Crime Unit, which seemed largely reserved for harassing African American and Latino kids and nailing squeegee men who swirled dirty water on car windows to scrounge a few tips.

It was a war zone around Tompkins Square Park, with banners hanging from windows. And cops in riot gear dragging away skinny white kids with dreads from their decaying squats. They shouted “Power to the People” and other retro slogans. If two activists got together over beers, they’d spit and curse Antonio Pagán, this gay Latino councilmember who used to be all about low-income housing and queer rights but had decided it was time to let the developers in. Besides the squatters under attack, you’d see clubs and bars shuttered for breaking obscure laws. And fences would appear overnight around public parks that would then get locked after dark, so there was nowhere free to sit.

On the West Side, where Ana and I had our first kiss, the crumbling piers were posted with warnings and barred off. Fags and drag queens were the casualties of plans to turn the place into a nice waterside park for the pricey neighbors. Only money talked. Giuliani dumped the liaison to the LGBT community, slashed AIDS funding and the budget for Housing Works, and installed notorious Rainbow Curriculum foe Ninfa Segarra not only as head of the Department of Education but also of Health and Human Services. Which meant the woman who told
New York
magazine that the Rainbow Curriculum made her want to throw up could torture queers from preschool straight to the grave, controlling half of the city’s multibillion-dollar budget.

The Avengers tracked her down and serenaded her on Valentine’s Day, but in that shabby room in the center we did more bitching than planning. I ranted with the best of them. That homophobe, Giuliani! That racist!

Ana and I were practically living together by then. The word
love
had been mentioned, but we weren’t counting our chickens. What could be more unlikely than a dyke from Cuba, another from Kentucky? Though I’d joke sometimes we were both Southerners after all, both born below the Mason-Dixon line.

One day, after a meeting full of more Giuliani phobia, she started wondering aloud why none of the Avengers ever asked how New York ended up with the guy in the first place. Plenty of black and Hispanic voters pulled the lever for him. Others didn’t bother to vote. Maybe it had something to do with the corrupt Democratic machine. Or their perpetual fear of taking on problems like crime, especially in minority neighborhoods. Were they afraid of getting called racist? Or was it because they preferred to see people of color always and only as victims, as clients of the Democratic Party and never agents of their own lives? She was fed up with white people defending drug dealers just because they were Hispanic—as if that made a difference. It was a disaster, the whole lefty tendency to make a cult of the victims of bigotry, exempting them from normal rules, keeping them not quite adult, not fully responsible. Still not equal.

The next time I launched into an anti-Giuliani diatribe, I heard the sound of my own smug voice and started to wonder at what was behind it. A privilege I didn’t know I had. A self-indulgence.

I think it was around then that the Avengers got a call from the
Montel Williams Show,
and imagining it was cool to be on national TV, a bunch of us piled into the limo they sent and made spectacles of ourselves. Most of us were on stage. I ceded my place to Chanelle because she looked way better than me in her shades, and we needed a little diversity. Several years later, Ana and I were in a hotel room somewhere, Kentucky maybe, flipping through the cable, and I screamed. “Oh my god, look at that.”

“What? Is that you?”

“Turn it off. Turn it off.”

There I was, that worked-up dyke in the audience. That peculiar self. That ranting activist whom Ana knew and loved anyway.

On St. Paddy’s Day, I crawled out of Ana’s bed and met up with Cindra and Boy Kelly to take the train up to midtown. It was nice and sunny, but the crowd of queers was still smaller than the year before. ILGO was suffering from the activist curse of internal disputes that would soon strike the Avengers. And the rest of the community was already tired of fighting to be included in the cheesy het parade, even if other minority queers like South Asians and Poles were trying to get into their own. Al Sharpton was there, though, with his rock-star hair and retinue, courting the gay vote for the next mayoral election. There were also a few queer notables like Tom Duane, Tony Kushner, and the up-and-coming Christine Quinn. The Church Ladies For Choice serenaded us with the old standard “God Is A Lesbian,” which was perfect, considering that the city’s excuse to exclude us that year wasn’t our personal safety but that the beer-swigging, step-dancing, baton-twirling St. Patrick’s Day Parade was religious in nature, so organizers could ban whomever they wished.

A hundred and two got arrested that year after shouting, “We’re Irish, we’re queer, we’ll be here every year.” Increasingly, it looked as if we’d have to be. New Yorkers showed no signs of rising up to protest how stupid it was to define the beer-swigging, step-dancing parade as religious, especially when queers were marching in parades all over Ireland. So somebody had to protest. Somebody had to stand on their rights. Even if the parade
was
idiotic. Even if you didn’t really want to go. Somebody had to remember who the streets belonged to. Especially when they were being tidied up. All the squeegee men gone. The homeless not housed, but shoved out of sight. The parks closed. And the music dimmed.

It was so depressing. It must have been a dream, lesbians on the covers of magazines. Twenty thousand dykes in the street in D.C. It all suddenly seemed like a hopeless fight, but so what? I told myself. What does it cost you to pretend that the world can change (for the better)? That history is an arc and it bends toward justice, even if it is long?

15.

A few weeks later, I was back on Fifth Avenue, this time with a genuine smile on my face, a silly hat on my head, and over a little black frock I borrowed from Ana a leather jacket I’d ripped off at a fancy
Out
magazine party that I’d decided was such a repulsive display of queer money it couldn’t pass undisturbed. I was at the tail end of my Jean Genet phase that included appropriating Rennes’ book
Journal du voleur
(The Thief’s Journal), which gave me a lot of satisfaction when we found out that Rennes wasn’t his real name. Neither was the moniker
Sontag
that he gave to Ingrid Roettele when he worked at her eponymous restaurant, or any of the other aliases we’d seen on his fistful of credit cards. Later on, though, I felt guilty about the jacket, mostly because it turned out to be from Sears, so probably the guy I stole it from wasn’t much better off than me. When my experiment in class warfare was over, shame kicked in and I gave it away.