It doesn’t matter where we met. In a backroom, a sauna, a park, a dark tunnel… Michel (not yet entered in the chart) took me home with him and we made love for 24 hours.
He wanted to swallow because he felt it was more intime. He showed me his HIV test results—printed on a certificate. Negative. “Uh, thanks for showing me. What is that supposed to mean?” He wanted to come (with a condom) inside me. I don’t like people coming inside me. First it means I don’t get to see it, and then there’s the added risk of breaking condoms. Mostly I want to see it.
But for him, that was just another example of American prudishness. Nevertheless, after tons of negotiating, I managed to convince him that he could last inside me longer if he forgot about his preconceived notions of enter-come-pull off. We had a couple great sessions before he threw himself on my dick to lap up the semen right after I’d come. I was like, “How do you know I’m not HIV positive, anyway?”
He gaped at me in shock.
“I’m not, but what if I was?”
“Oh, but you’re not.”
During our post-coital pause, we discussed literature. “There are 8 writers one must read before one can become a writer,” he said.
“Oh, really?”
“Proust, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dante,…”
“Gee, I don’t share your opinion there, but if they work for you…”
“No, those are The Base. You must read them, or you will never be any good.”
He mentioned something he was Catholic. Croyant.
“We’d better save that one for another night,” I said. But no, he wanted it out there and then. I’d told him my impressions of Lourdes where I’d spent a day. Having been raised Catholic myself, I could hardly resist the morbid curiosity my religious formation had inspired, but it had been even more repulsive than I’d imagined, with its glow in the dark rosaries and soul-sucking ceremonies catering to third world tourists who spent their life savings in expectation of a miracle.
He’d worked as a volunteer there and believed that God was truly present among the stones of the grotto, beneath the thin veil of unfortunate commercial surface the town had adopted. I told him I found that unimaginably stupid. He said I had the right to be an atheist but that he could be Catholic. I said sure, but the Church was perhaps the single most dangerous institution on the face of the earth. He said I was intolerant. I said that was true because tolerating an intolerant organization verged on fascism for me. He said I had “no nuance” and that I was an “adolescent.”
His final words: “You fill me with despair.”
I still love France and French people. And yes, I hate them too, as I hate and love Americans. I’ve been told I talk more about my hatred. I believe it makes for better reading material. Besides, it’s not the people I hate so much as the references that weigh them down—the things they take for granted, be they American, French, British, or Chinese.
Why must we have red wine with dinner, and why must stores be closed on Sunday? That’s the kind of innocent question concerning one’s culture that one might pose, the kind that leads directly to questions about the nature of what is right and wrong and true. I’m often bored by people who are so rooted in their cultural baggage they can’t even pose such minimal questions—they’ve deeply disappointed me.
Se branler is a reflexive verb, but it can also be used without the reflexive mode. In fact, it’s quite common to say “J’ai branlé.” There are many ” branleurs ” in Paris. In English, we tend to say “I jacked off” rather than “I jacked myself off,” though the latter is often, however unfortunately, more exact. When you say, “J’ai branlé,” you can also imply that you were busy with more than one piece of meat without having to be bothered telling the sad truth.
Il m’a branlé. He jacked me off. I tell myself that when I want to forget about the moments we lost together when we fought about the stupid things we’d been taught all our lives to think.
Je m’en branle. I don’t give a shit.
But that’s not true. His little hands were blunt and tender. They were too excited, and they trembled when they passed over my skin. He told me I was beautiful, and he told me in French. It could have been in any language except English and it would have been just as beautiful. He spilled his intimate words right into my ears in his mother tongue, without stopping to think if it made sense to me, and I understood everything. “Oh, que c’est bon, Don, d’être en toi avec ton chair tout autour. L’humidité, la chaleur!” Those language classes had finally paid off at the highest level of communication possible.
We lost our languages together and breathed each other’s breath. He looked into my eyes with that confused urgency—at once so desperately serious yet childish, even careless—so fluent among the French. It was the first time I’d had the entire force of these culturally specific expressions of emotion directed right at me. Oh there’d been the occasional backroom branlette, but now I was making love à la française. It wasn’t necessarily any better. Or rather it was so much better and so much worse all at once—all the mounting expectations—with those beautiful words stifled in the black sadness of his frowning eyes—that I found myself desperately pressing against him to go somewhere deeper. To get to the center of wherever we were going together. To hell or to heaven.
Hell as it turned out. But I was expecting that. I’d read enough French literature to know better than hope for a happy ending. I danced my way through the end of August to forget him. In forgetting him, I’d forget France.
• • •
Language Line:
This could be as simple as a list of all the languages spoken by me and the people around me during my life:
English
A whirl of other langauges
French
German
The “other languages” wouldn’t be specified since my contact with them was abstract. In other words, their sounds had been present in the body of music around me, though I hadn’t had enough of a base in any of them to understand even the first thing about what they “meant.”
A more complete Language Line would handle language as the word “langage” in French understands it: different dialects, levels, accents, and classes of spoken and written forms of communication. The exact importance of each step on the line would be indicated by font size, shape, and placement on the page.
As details are added to the Language Line, it will become book-length, demonstrating the exact importance of each “language” with graphic exactness…
• • •
I put these letters together on this computer screen as if in a dream. Paragraphs accumulate, almost by themselves. These black characters, printed on rectangular white pages, are part of an emotionless experiment that unfolds on an empty white surgical space inside a complex and expensive machine. I manipulate them until I grow tired, then I abandon them like so many children’s building blocks.
In the street below me, a man in bright green pants sweeps dog shit with a green broom into a green dust pan which he dumps into a green garbage can that rolls away on green wheels. I write about him until I can recall…