I know he’ll be here. Every Thursday afternoon at four, for the past three weeks, I have come to this Metro latrine in the Gare de l’Est station to meet my new lover, Francois.

It’s always the same routine. I arrive to greet his uncut cock standing straight up at the urinal. I take my own out and begin to gently stroke my lengthening shaft. Then we move quietly to a stall to finish off our compulsion for each other’s skin: the soft biting and gentle nibbles of earlobes and lips, and our fetish for sucking each other’s dirty fingers that have been riding steadily up our asses.

After four months of living in Paris, I have yet to visit the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, or make a pilgrimage to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But I know the section in Pere LaChaise Cemetery where half clothed men linger in mausoleums to get quickie blowjobs. I know the promenade of horny strangers in the Tuilleries Garden, just like the back of my Plan du Paris. I’m all too acquainted with the cruisy park at the east of the Ile St. Louis by the Seine, where you can kiss another guy amid the festive colored lights of the Bateau Mouche. I even know the little bridge at the Rue de la Mare where you can hook a trick in a matter of minutes, even when it’s raining.

But it’s Francois I breathe for now. His soft brown eyes and full lips framed by a well-trimmed goatee. The tufts of brown chest hair that curl out from over the top of his thick Shetland wool sweaters. The tiny blue star tattooed on his wrist that moves gently over his hanging balls.

At exactly four o’clock, I hand my centimes over to the white-haired attendant sitting at a little booth. She is fumbling with a cassette of old Jane Birkin tunes. She snaps the antique plastic into a small player and when the slow music begins I become invisible to her. The turnstile cranks and I walk up to a row of men, mostly middle-aged moustaches, all standing with their zippers down at the latrine. Their eyes scrape my painted leather jacket, the flag patch on my worn jeans, my Marine crew cut.

“Allemange,” someone whispers and leers towards my direction, my soft dick barely out past the edge of my buttonhole crotch.

I move towards the stalls in the back of the latrine but there is a herd waiting to get inside an empty one. So I stand with my hand on my cock at the urinal, covering my rising shaft, while everyone becomes somewhat agitated. There are craning necks and mutual hand jobs resuming all around me, but I remain focused on Francois.

He has just arrived and stepped up to the row of jerking Frenchmen. His foreskin is the color of burnt copper. Around his swelling shaft is a yellow suede cock ring with spindly metal studs. The acrid smell of amyl nitrate emanates from the other side of the latrine and meshes with the odor of stale piss and cum. I watch my cohort as his nostrils flare and we both begin to grin.

“I hoped you would come.” His accent is thick and for a moment and drowns out the chanteuse on the tinny boom box.

“I haven’t come yet, but I’m planning on it.” I whisper delicately across the corroded urinals. “Mon cher.”

His eyes roll back for a moment as he rolls the tip of his thumb across the giant head of his uncut cock. I can smell the sweat and stale urine at the tip and I feel my knees beginning to give. The crowd has finally dispersed from around the toilets and I follow him into an open pen. The scarred metal door closes behind us and I watch as he drops his dark corduroy trousers and sits down on the toilet seat.

I have quickly straddled myself over his dark, hairless legs. His lips are thick and rough and the color of freshly iced salmon. He wears a knotted kerchief around his neck, which smells like lemony vervain, and he takes it off and wraps it around the back of my head and pulls me up to his wet tongue as though his parted mouth were an oxygen mask. Breathing him in, I can almost forget that I am in a dank toilet near the Metro.

The mournful chords of “Ne Quitte Te Pas” float over the stench and our rhythmic jostle. Jane Birkin keeps mixing in American words with her French and as Francois begins to thrust, I can’t help but focus on an open page in his open journal. There is a tightly knit ceiling of cursive French words and tornado scribbles surrounding the elegant swirls of a trained artist’s hand: profiles of young men, the curves of an ancient streetlamp, then, a perfectly drawn angel, something you would see pestering a nativity scene or the mantle of cathedral altar, writhing in ecstatic terror. The body is placid but the head is askew, the mouth agape as though a horrific scream were passing through it.

I am bouncing on the legs of my lover. I am reaching for a coat hanger to balance myself. The turnstile is cranking and Jane Birkin begins to sound more and more like Marlene Dietrich. If I close my eyes I can imagine a cabaret, just like the one in Blonde Venus, and there are swooning legionaries and a stream of smoke from my clove cigarette billowing through my nostrils and I am the vision of love, just like the key lit icon, in a sequined gown with blue star earrings in the shape of Francois’ tattoo. No one can take their eyes off my neon skin, my smoky eyes, the perfect points of my fingernails. I keep my eyes shut, my lover keeps thrusting and the film just keeps rolling on.

In one scene I’m Ingrid Bergman in a black beret, waif-like in the movie Casablanca, throwing champagne glasses across a café table and clutching the shoulder of Humphrey Bogart. In the next frame, I’m Gene Kelly in a tight striped t-shirt, whirling under the sanitized bridges near the Seine. If I keep my eyes shut tightly I can see the invented Paris of my childhood, the Paris fed by Saturday afternoon movies, and encyclopedia articles, and collected travel guides. The Paris that is fully alive and in the moment, the city that actually breathes and exists somewhere out beyond this train station piss palace.

But where I am situated right now is a scene I have never imagined. Francois licks cooling riz au lait off my chest hair and lets his tongue wander down from my armpit to my pelvis. He’s sipping on a chilled Orangina then resumes his gentle nose nudge down to my groin and balls. Eyes peer through screw holes pierced through the sides of the stall as my French lover opens a second condom, preparing to make another entry into my anxious body.

He rides me, softly at first, then we crescendo into a sweaty fever. In the space between ecstasy and wiping the spilled cum from our rolled down pants and the concrete floor, I think to manage another rendezvous by exchanging phone numbers. As he pulls his sticky sweater over his head I motion with my hand as though writing with a pen, “Number . . telephone?”

Francois shrugs with a soft roll of his eyes, opens the stall door and with a tilt of his head, exits the toilette.

With a determined charge in my pulse, I buckle my jeans and make off towards the Metro, where I can see that my estranged lover has bolted through the gate towards the destination point, La Courneuve. I pass my ticket through the entrance and keep several paces behind Francois. When the crowded subway pulls in, I jump on the car behind and keep my head staring between the glass car doors so I can view him

Chateau Landon. Stalingrad. Riquet. The train stops at each Metro station, and still he doesn’t leave his seat. I’m imagining the pulsing world above ground. I’m imagining the tourists taking snapshots of the sun going down behind the Conciergerie, or the last hints of twilight off the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre, the children taking their boats out of the fountain at the Luxembourg Gardens, or the grey stones mute against the flashing neon of the Champs Elysees. Crimee. Coretin-Cariou. I’m riveted to his body and still he doesn’t move.

Porte de la Villette. Finally he moves towards the door. I step off the car then follow him down a narrow artery. There are drunken beggars singing some strangely familiar American pop tune and the faint smell of cherry infused tobacco from the trail of Francois’ lit cigarette tip. Stairs and more narrow tubular passageways. Again, I’m paces behind him and shadowed behind the heft of a backpacker’s overstuffed sack.

How do you make love to someone as though you were traversing a great city? How do you fornicate without inhibition as though you were encountering the foreign smells of an urban market for the first time? I can think only of my lover’s gentle thrusting, his thick lips on my eyelids, the smell of his sweet breath, the long trail of sweat running from his temples down his neck. I think of his insatiable kisses, the sucking of his lower lip, the electric pulse that seems to run through us, the humming connecting current, as I take all of him inside of me.

Finally, we reach the upper terminal. Francois pauses to rub out his cigarette with the tip of his brown boot. He tosses some euros into a vending machine which dispenses a small tin of some sort of candy, then enters what appears to be another latrine.

I stand outside the toilette, brooding over whether or not to enter. My groin is still on fire from the stubble of his beard against my own chafed foreskin. I pass some coins onto the matron’s plate and enter the white-tiled public restroom. There are three stalls. Two of them with closed doors. I gingerly enter the unoccupied one and situate myself upon the porcelain bowl.

Peering through a wide bolt hole the size of a quarter, I begin to recognize Francois’ unshaven chin in the next stall. His full lips are moving up and around another man’s firm buttocks. I watch as he pushes open the dark hairy ass crack with his fingers and begins to pleasure the man’s hole with his extended tongue. A deep sigh permeates the warm enclosure next to me and Francois’ cohort begins to bend over more completely.

I open the buttons of my fly and my hardening cock pops out. I am the voyeur now, the blinking eye at the stained peephole, the stroking onlooker. I can hear inaudible words, moaning, a guttural laughter. Francois tears open a condom and begins to wrap on his second skin. Then I take it all in: the slow mount, the straddle around the toilet bowl, the athletic thrusting and pumping, torso to torso. I peer up to see the animal like flaring of Francois’ nostrils. I imagine his breath again, his slow drool dripping down my own neck, and in a matter of minutes, the three of us collapse into a storm of moans.

I try to swallow my gasps of breath. There is a sudden silence that takes over the latrine. I listen for the untangling of dropped trousers and belts. The wiping of sweat from brows with toilet paper. The shuffling apart.

I slowly open the stall door and watch the dark stranger emerge, a Moroccan gentlemen I think for a moment, though I’m not entirely sure. Then Francois steps out, emerging like a Napoleanonic swordsman, a stealthy warrior after meeting the challenge of his quest.

I somehow find the core within me to call out, “Francois, mon cher.”

He turns for a moment, as though startled by the shrill echo wending through the stark bathroom. In the fluorescent light, his skin looks somewhat sallow, his sunken eyes, less familiar, world-weary even.

I’m still gushing, “Francois, mon ami.” I know there are still pearls of drying cum on my hand as I extend it towards his frozen stance. “Sil vous plait.”

I suddenly recall a moment in Jean Luc Godard’s classic film Pierrot Le Fou, where the protagonist looks back for a moment at the fading background of Paris. It all seems to be washing away, crumpling in torn shreds behind his stony face. That is the moment that comes to mind as I watch the now familiar tilting of Francois head as he makes his way towards the exit.

I gather my things up and run out to see my Frenchman popping a small lozenge into his mouth as he turns the corner of a narrow walkway. I stand for a moment, unable to make sense of the last hour’s chase scene. From the corner of my eye I see a giant poster advertising a McDonald’s “Big Mac” and the discombobulating continues.

I head back towards the Metro station, but I don’t return to the subway. I walk up the stairs where my imagined city has been waiting for like a distant lover for so long. It’s a colorless neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondissement. I gaze around, still disoriented, and face a small fenced in park with a dog drinking out of a low fountain situated next to a low budget brasserie with two small tables in front.

It isn’t the Paris of old movie stars, or even the one fabricated in my childhood’s eye. But it’s the stop I got off at. There are men casually leaning on a railing, some who almost resemble the profiles of the guys caricatured in Francois’ journal. One of them draws me in with an almost half-smile, an almost sneer.

“Bonsoir,” the chap whispers under his breath to catch the rim of my silver earring.

I turn around for a moment and he’s suddenly gazing at some boy emerging from the Metro’ stairs. I near the street corner and far in the distance, if I stand on my toes a bit, I can almost manage to see what appears to be the top of the Eiffel Tower. So I take a deep breath, dislodge my Plan du Paris from my shoulder bag, and go towards something, maybe it’s Paris, maybe it’s just a myth in my head, but it lingers in the air like a ponderous, unanswered question.

 

© 2005 Gerard Wozek - Contributor's Bio