June, in Paris
It all started to feel like too much again. Everything is allegorical and couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve told the Parisians I can see the future.
This city has never been quiet. Construction, open air preschools, recycling trucks, a harp glissando, disapproving stares from the elderly on the street, out of time clarinet solos, doors slamming, people yelling.
I could make it all about me. I usually do. Last night I drank a bottle of wine at the house, I didn’t share and didn’t ask. I walked around for hours and I complained, to no one, to the wind, to myself, to the men on the street asking for change and my phone number. I called my friends, I called my lovers, I called my enemies. Who knew a month of respite could feel so taxing.
They talk very negatively about the sex tourism industry in Thailand and southern Asia but not enough about the girls who come to Europe for fetish parties. Is that not the same? I’ve felt like Henry Miller since I’ve been here. Dead broke, a baguette a day, and accidental voyeurism in the basement of clubs. I’ve never blindly walked into an orgy in Los Angeles but I guess I’ve been frequenting different markets as of late.
I’m living in the fourth arrondissement by the Seine and La Marais with my friend Annie who I see maybe twice a year in LA but wake up to every morning here on a pull out couch in a 400 square meter room of a fourth floor walk up pre-revolution building. I would say it’s an honest living but I’ve been anything but since I’ve been here.
The second day, while climbing the roof with a group of men from the south of France that made their way to the city some years ago for more creative pursuits, I got unceremoniously fired from my restaurant job that declined my use of “emergency leave” for a last minute field trip to re-up my mental health in a foreign country. I could have lied more to save face but I don’t know if I even want to return to California.
Today here I am, in Paris, no money, high hopes still. The thing about self immolation is that no one notices until you’re already covered in third degree burns and in need of multiple skin grafts.
Lies I’ve told myself today, buttered noodles are nutritious, dancing to jazz in the kitchen is enough exercise to burn off the buttered noodles, god is not mad at me, these noodles are al dente, Vincent only tells me that he misses me and no one else. Since being here, I’ve taken up sleeping with an actor. I’ve also taken up the emotional burden of sleeping with an actor. Promises of tomorrow and leaving to the south for a sudden premiere. Unplanned he says, just as all life goes. C’est la vie.
He’s beautiful and kind and we communicate with touch and laughs rather than words. I speak no French, and his English is trying and sweet. After dinner in Montmartre he walks us back to his one bedroom apartment with beautiful crown molding to read our oracle cards and spout hopeful promises that life can only go up from here. Then we kiss goodnight and journey back to le Marais and he leaves Paris yet again.
On the days he doesn’t see me he’s on a film set or in a darkened room where he watches dancers' feet tap around on a slotted stage for capitalistic gains under the guise of another "exclusive party”. They want you to buy their clothes, they want you to post the party, the dancers have on branded shoes and cover their bodies in silk Hermes scarves.
I don’t get emotional anymore as I used to, I don’t attach myself too easily. I like to think of my life as non-linear, not everything is reactive because if it is - I’ll go crazy. I like to think of my life like sex, a song and dance tongue and cheek kind of tango. I’ll tell you I love you then kiss another, I’ll fight for a job then get myself fired the same day. Some call my avenue through life “mania” but I like to think of it as a performance. As sex. A kiss, a rake of nails down his back, a whimper and plea, your mind somewhere else, a coital unraveling even if its mostly interpretive, a realization that it’s all nothing.
And sometimes I get drunk off of a six euro glass of champagne at the sushi restaurant underneath my apartment and I look at God in the eyes and beg him to let me join the likes of Jim Morrison. Sometimes I realize all of my plans were thwarted and that sometimes living is in fact in vain and there’s nothing you can do but drink six euro glasses of champagne at sushi restaurants under your Parisian apartment until you die. Or get deported, whichever comes first.
June in Paris means limited air conditioning and thinking that everyone around you smells bad whilst being nose blind to your own body odor following you down the street.
And then July.