He needs to get to bed early tonight. One more line, one last drink and then beddy-byes. Albert King. “Breaking up Somebody’s Home”. Vernon is shit hot. Kiko yells D.J. REVOLVER IN DA HOUSE. He knows it’s lame but he doesn’t give a shit, this is his place he’ll trip how he likes. It’s wild, the guy’s got like a sixth sense. He’s at the controls and the spaceship is about to lift off. It’s tight, the people the bodies the lights the sounds – it’s too tight. He goes over and grabs Vernon’s shoulder. Fuck dude, props on the set, it’s awesome, the sound is banging. You’re a badass motherfucker. The baddest. You got everything you need in your room? Just ask, yeah? Want me to hook you up with a babe? I’ve had, like, a million D.J.s here and maybe they’ve got a style but you . . . you’re one savage mofo. Look at them bitches, look what you’re doing to them, any minute now the whole room will be one big fucking orgy. Actually, Kiko decides he likes the guy’s face. He’s not shy, he’s mysterious. At first sight, he assumed Vernon was a loner. He hates that. Motherfuckers are savage or at the very least they’re loudmouths. They’re up for anything. Shyness is a sign of subterfuge. Of middle-class hipsters. The fucktards who think they’re someone. Timidity is the sign of neurosis, neurosis is the sign of treachery. You’ve got to be careful who you let in if you want the atmosphere to stay fluid. You have to filter. An apartment is like a country. You’ve got to keep out the undesirables, you’ve got to be ruthless, only let in people who know how to party. I’m paying so I get to choose. This Vernon guy is brooding and mysterious, ever since he started spinning the tunes he’s been transfigured. An artist. He’s an artist. It’s always useful to have a couple around. Tonight, for example, he’s short of actresses. They always add a little something. Not actresses of the telly. They’re boring. They’re depressing. They drag you down. Like stand-up comedians. “So weit wie noch nie” – old school techno. Everyone’s up, everybody’s pumping, it’s like trance. Truly, this guy’s got mad skills. It’s something you can’t put your finger on, but when a D.J. brings a little soul, everyone senses it. Just when Kiko was about to hit the sack, the perfect tune. There’s been a dark-haired girl circling him for a while now, she thinks he hasn’t seen her as she gets more and more obvious. Give it a few minutes, she’ll be dancing naked in front of him, desperately trying to make eye contact. Her nose is so skinny he wonders how she can get coke up there without it disintegrating on the spot. Maybe it’s a prosthesis, maybe before she sucks him off, she’ll take off the nose and show him her zombie face. Shake that body, baby, shake it. I’ll take care of you. Tonight I’m not going to fuck you, I’m too shattered, but I’ll take you to bed. We’ll fall asleep next to each other. Biancha is dancing with her eyes closed, Marcia is pressed against her back. A little lesbian performance, go on give us some girl-on-girl action, set this room ablaze. It’s hell in here. Tribal, tribal. I love it. He takes the dark-haired girl by the hand. She looks like she’s sixteen. I’m going to fall asleep with two fingers in that shaved little pussy of yours, but I’m not going to fuck you, I don’t have the energy, maybe you could blow me, but I don’t think I can even manage to come. In his apartment, porn is what happens in the bed. He’s a god. His bedroom is far enough from the living room that he can leave the others to amuse themselves. He is a prince. He doesn’t say goodnight, he beckons for the girl to come with him and she complies. They’re all the same, and the ones who think they’re too good to come when he whistles can go fuck themselves, there’s always some girl shrewd enough to want to keep him warm. Because tomorrow, who knows, maybe I’ll remember you, maybe well enough to give you a little present. It all depends on you, on how good you are.
THERE’S NO COKE IN THIS COKE; WHEN YOU RUB IT ON YOUR gums, you feel nothing. Her head is aching and a vicious come-down is already sending twinges through her back despite the fact she’s still flying, so tomorrow morning is not going to be pretty. Marcia has a photo shoot at three p.m., leaving her enough time to get some rest. The party was nothing special, she would have been better off going to bed. The same faces as always. The same conversations played over and over. She opened her pack of cigarettes when she got home and it is already empty. More than the booze and the drugs, it’s the nicotine that wears her out, in the morning, she can hardly breathe. She needs to quit. Her complexion was being ruined by smoking too much, so she switched to tobacco that contained no texturising agents, Gaëlle told her she could really feel the difference, but Marcia feels nothing. This headache. She has been rooted to the same spot for more than an hour, sitting next to Framboise who is chain-rolling pure grass blunts. An hour that she has been promising herself she will go to bed. White noise in her gums, super gross, it is all too familiar. Tomorrow, she needs to get some rest.
With the first notes, her mind splits in two: Construcción. Viglietti’s Spanish cover version, a series of shifting images, of smells and sounds, what his body felt in that precise moment. Like flicking through a book at random, she cannot choose what will happen. Amó aquella vez como si fuese última. Back then she was Leo, with a hairstyle copied from Isabella Rossellini. Belo Horizonte. Trees towered over the city, luxuriant, that vivid green of countries in the south where life pushes up even through concrete and in a single movement climbs towards the heavens. Bairro Foresta, a low-roofed house, a record player in the Silvio’s house – his parents were away – and this song, played over and over for days on end like an obsession. They went to see “Betty Blue” at the cinema. They went several times that day and came back again the next. They drank beer in the streets, breathed in the heady perfumes of the damas da noite. Leo in a favourite pair of Radley sneakers. The city was jammed with Volkswagens; they had no car. Always the same gang, just the five of them. They wore faded blue jeans. Besó a su mujer como si fuese última. Not one of them had stayed in Belo Horizonte. The dawn was so dazzling it hurt your eyes, gorging on pão de queijo, the taste of cassava, their boyish bodies, tireless. The blue Sony Walkman she was so proud of. Listening over and over to Cazuza’s “O tempo não para”, the horror of AIDS that was yet to come. Lula being defeated in the elections, she had been too young to vote, she was barely sixteen. Her country’s first direct elections. And already, Europe was beckoning. It had to be Europe – not the U.S.A., Europe. She was in love with a teacher who taught literature at the most exclusive school in the city. “Sus ojos embotados de cement y lágrimas.” She was crazy about this song. Listening to it in Spanish was pretentious. The gang would hang out together on Broaday (no “w”), go to hip-hop gigs, Racionais MC’s, not a white person in sight, the excitement of being there, the bodies of the boys, the bad boys. There were “Free” cigarettes, the elegant white pack criss-crossed with two waves, red and blue. All the accessories that made them who they were, the props in their game. No-one in this room with its vast terrace in this eight-floor apartment in the triangle d’or of Paris, no-one here experienced being fifteen the way she did. She split herself in two. She wanted to leave for Europe. If someone had told her then, if someone had told her how wonderful everything would be – would it have made the slightest difference to the impatience gnawing away at her. “Por esa arpía que un día nos va a adular y escupir. Y por las moscas y besos que nos vendrán a cubrir.” She had been spellbound by this song – its tragic spiral. Her whole country – striving towards tragedy and swaying.
Ever since the party started, Kiko has not stopped raving about the guy spinning the set, “The guy’s amazing, isn’t he? He’s fucking awesome”, Kiko has his whims, he loves to love somebody. Now and then he is a loyal friend. Marcia has not had a good night. She found the atmosphere depressing – people sick to death of seeing each other compelled to corrode their sinuses so they can fake a half-hearted hilarity. It is not quite dawn, but that curious moment when darkness drains away before the sun has risen. In twenty minutes the sun will rise, the moment when the city smells most exhilarating. The song ends, her every bone trembles at the impact of this random access memory – she whirls around, rai
ses her arms in the air. “Hey! D.J. Revolver, you’ve just given me my first orgasm of the night.” She looks at him, she hasn’t noticed him until now. A subtle smile, he gives her a wink and puts on Prince – “Sexy Motherfucker”. Well played, Mister D.J. Other images flood back. By now she is in Paris, no-one here calls her Leo, she wears microshorts, glossy black Lycra leggings, cherry-red stilettos she buys at Chez Ernest near Château d’Eau – she has started training to be a hair stylist. Her life is like a vinyl disk, several tracks have already been cut. The images unfurl, she is back there. In Paris, in those early years, it rains every day, which is exactly how a South American girl pictured the city. Paris in the early nineties is bewitched by the sounds of Brazil, the French long to be able to dance, they sway as best they can to music they cannot understand. They move their feet, they move their shoulders, their hips are lifeless. When she first arrived in Paris and saw Johnny Hallyday on television, she realised there were a lot of things she would not understand. Things you had to be born here to appreciate. But Paris was besotted with Brazil, and the fashion world wanted girls like her, they wanted that accent, that sexy swagger, they wanted the exotic. Most dirt-poor Brazilian trans women headed directly to Nation, it was almost compulsory. It was not exactly signposted, but almost. When Marcia told the other girls she met “No, I didn’t come here to turn tricks”, they would shoot her a pitying look. The street was not an option, it was her place, it was written. H.I.V.+ Brazilians arrived en masse, they knew they would get better health care in France. But Marcia was obsessed with Scarlett O’Hara and decided that Scarlett would do things differently, she would go on the game. The fact that Scarlett was not poor cast a different light on things, but Marcia tried to ignore this fact. If she had no money, at least Marcia had luck on her side. One evening in Gibus, she made friends with a girl from Bogotá who, like her, was taking oestrogen. The girl was a hairdresser-cum-drug dealer, people were constantly traipsing in and out of her place for a hair cut and two or three grams. This was how Marcia learned. Hairdressing. In the beginning, she did the colour rinses in the bathroom. It was easy. She was sub-letting a room from Fabrizio, the only screaming queen she ever met who claimed to be in the mafia. And Fabrizio adored her – he used to say she was as beautiful as Dalida – and he introduced her to the scene. She was learning to style hair. And she had her first fashion shoots. She would make everyone laugh, it was what people expected of her. A sense of humour. The girls she had met when she first arrived began to die, some killed themselves before AIDS could utterly destroy their looks. The epidemic was also killing off the Parisian queers. For once, there was a sort of fairness. The disease treated everyone alike. It was a strange sensation, this feeling of belonging to the same caste. All of them. And life went on – all around death continued to strike without pause. And people didn’t give a shit. ACT UP Paris organised die-ins but people didn’t really start thinking about AIDS until they, too, were affected. When straights got sick, that’s when the disease became real. Marcia dodged between the raindrops. She had work, and she still did not have AIDS. There was a feeling of guilt that came with time, survivors’ guilt, and with it a fierce gratitude. Life was so good to her, and there was no end to it. Then came the lovers who pampered her. The trips, the palaces, the jet-set. In the fashion world, the nineties were utterly magical. Evangelista, Campbell, Crawford, Schiffer, Casta, Alek Wek, Herzigova, Banks . . . She grew accustomed to luxury, to being part of a world in which she would never belong. The little mermaid: the girl for whom each step is agony, who walks gracefully, who always smiles. She has never thought about going back to Brazil, even when she heard about the economic miracle. She loves Europe. The richness of the old world, the opulence of its lower classes, the heedless attitude of these people who were capable of forgetting the humiliation of poverty, dictatorships, convinced that they are safe because they are more deserving, more hardworking, more intelligent. She likes the fact that everywhere is heated, even the post offices are clean, anyone would love to be born French. The French are the only ones who do not realise it. Or perhaps this, like so many things that seemed immutable, will change eventually.
Vernon Subutex One Page 18