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I remember that first time he came too fast. I was 20 or 21, my junior year abroad. I suppose he was my age. He was from Tunisia. I remember thinking that he looked like a North African Elvis Presley, but in a good way. I remember tight white jeans, and white teeth, and my stopping on the street to yell at him in French: But I am very intelligent in English! I was explaining the theory of national character that I’d read the year before at Northwestern, and he thought that was stereotyping, or else I was making a case for a feminist view that the hierarchy of the family replicated the patriarchal system. I had joined the English-language Paris Organization for Women, and borrowed books by Kate Millett and Germaine Greer from a POW member. They were personally inscribed, and I assumed my friend had a deep friendship with the authors; I didn’t know then that authors inscribed books personally to strangers at readings. I didn’t know much then.
I thought I could stay on in Paris alone and make a living creating personalized collages (which I didn’t even attempt). I thought I could cut myself off from my family, nuclear and extended, because they were the source of my angoisse. I thought my allergist in Texas would be eager to get my ten years of medical records translated into French so he could send them to a doctor in Paris. Did I think I was in love? Maybe. His name, he said, was Fetty, the word for gros, in French, and it took me a second to realize he meant Fatty. His name was Fethi, and he lived in a room without a shower, and he would sneak into dorms at City Universitaire, a campus that provided housing and food, but no classrooms, for the city’s universities, to take a shower, and we also ate there and I remember one time he made lewd gestures with a banana.
Monica Ekks—Scott’s Cock
Richard Wilcose—My Bloody Valentine
Sofia Penelope Brown—555-Weed
Marisa Vlasak—The Girl With the Elephant Balloon
Jack Berger—Say It Again, Vince
