14:30 The Musulman boucherie

The Musulman  boucherie (Muslim butcher) in Barbes had placed a tin bucket full of goat heads out front, on the sidewalk, in the sun.

“You think they’re for sale?”

“I dunno. But, hey, you countin’ your Zizi hormone enchantress as a fuck?” Guy, who always walked in a manner that revealed how pained he was by the world.

“I’m not counting.” Uprightness was unbecoming and nauseating to my kind.

“You know what I mean. I mean, I gotta know what counts as conjugal, like where and when does wooing become the legal definition of intercourse.” Guy was serious. “There are legal precedents being set. Yer drawing the guidelines. And I might be benefacting if you say the right things.”

“D’you think they’re just out here for effect?” We were not walking. We had stopped walking. We were staring at the pile of goat heads. “It’s like we’re walking into an old Rolling Stones album cover.”

“No, come on! Fess up. Does this count?” He needed to know how far was too far. Marriage gave you boundaries that were open to interpretation. And his marriage gave him impetus to find the furthest borders of what could still be termed fidelity.

“Yeah, well, it depends on the context. With Sophie I would say no. To you I would say yes. I mean ... Hey, you think they’re roasted? Or smoked? Do Algerians cook’m?”

“I mean if you consider her sexual contact...”

“Zizi?”

“Si-si. Like you’re tellin’ me there was petting and eventual insertion of the hand into her mink stole. I mean, a hand is hardly a sexual appendage. I mean, is that sexual penetration? And then there’s the issue of the milk. Is milk a sexual excretion, I mean this is what I wanna KNOW! ...” Guy had done some things and had had some things done to him...

“No, it was more than that. It was like she aroused the dick inside my soul ... You think the goats were dreaming at the moment of their beheading?”

“I consider it not sex. It is contact, maybe sexual contact but not really sex.” Guy was always full of pain when he was sober. Sobriety = pain for Guy. “A hand job and a blow job are NOT sex.”

“Fine. We all draw the line where we need to. Some would say anal sex is not really sex. You are one of the many who don’t consider a blow job definitely not sex.”

“OK. Yeah, do they have some sorta support group? I mean, it’s those kinda people I can get behind.”

“Maybe you should start a lobby group. Agitate for sympathy, for changes in the law, maybe get the Larousse to change their definition of what constitutes sexual intercourse.”

“For me, there’s definitely gotta be an insertion of the male organ into the female. It’s gotta be face to face with me on top – or her. There’s gotta be a mess of spilled bodily fluids, insertion, friction. If there’s squeals and cries, yeah, OK, then I think there’s been sex.”

“What if she’s totally silent and what if she swallows or you shoot up her so far it doesn’t drip out? That’s clean, no fuss, no muss. What about nipples inserted? ...”

“I dunno. I’m waiting for your advice and guidance.”

“What if she tells you she really enjoyed it, or that she had an orgasm? What if you don’t realize she had one? Can we then safely assume it is not really sex? What if you can tell she wasn’t satisfied?”

“EX-fuckin’-zactly! Absolve me your holiness.”

“And then, what about doggie style? What about rubbing between the buttocks but no insertion into orifice? Is orgasm necessary to qualify as sex? Is tit-fucking really fucking?”

“Tit-fucking is to fucking what Velveeta is to real cheese.”

“Tell that to her cum-smeared face, that you didn’t have sex. Have you ever had hypothetical what-if conversations with Catherine about this kinda thing?”

“No. If I say ‘what-if you were a guy and you...’ she will smell my deception from here to Versailles. Shit, now you really, as in REALLY, got me worried. If I been this far, as far as you say, for argument’s sake, I don’t wanna be a liar to Catherine.” Catherine, as a nurse, was a quadruple whammy kind of wife – jealous, intuitive, suspicious, and so clean and hygienic that you could sterilize a syringe by wiping it between her pussy lips. If you believed Guy. The marriage, in any case, was not going well.

“I mean, I wanna be able to get a blow job and say I didn’t have sex with anybody.”

“Yeah, you and me and everybody else. Well, I guess in terms of sex or whatever being a two-way circuit, OK, I could see it. But what if the blower has an orgasm? And what if she has it simultaneously as you’re shooting your wad? What if she really gets off this way?

“Sounds like a dream girl to me. Does she have a trousseau?”

“ I don’t think she wears one. And so, what if she asks whether someone has had sex with you? And what about same-sex sex? Does a gay encounter constitute a threat? Is that infidelity?”

“Well, it looks like I’m gonna have to lie, which basically means tossed to the lions ... What about condoms? What if I wear a condom? And if I get a hand job, what if she wears rubber gloves?” 

“D’you think they’re meant to be eaten by humans?”

“Don’t change the subject! My lie – I mean LIFE – depends on this.”

“Why do you even bother to stay married?” Meanwhile, I was thinking he might come back with the same line.

“And you?”

“I think part of what I need is the dramatic action between incarceration and freedom, between commitment and flouting it, between yeas and no, between danger and security.” I was suddenly wondering why I was attracted to young mothers with babies – Sonja, Zizi, and a year earlier a fling with Dutch filmmaker, Saskia, baby carriage in the café toilet, while we did it voraciously in the stall.

“Flogging it. For me it’s a dull pain I can live with. It’s like do I prefer to have kidney stones in my kidney or have no kidney at all. Besides, we still have good sex. Although she don’t like to get eaten. D’ju notice that about French women, Mr. Paramour?”

“Maybe its more about nurses. I went out with a nurse and she used to clean her labia with a citrus astrigent and Q-tips!” Did part of the erotic element of mothers have to do with their need to again be considered sexual beings, to disprove the notion that childbearing function forever negates sexual arousal again. And so was I just a stepping stone or functional collaborator on their self-rehabilitation courses? Do I have to think about this now? “I need une grand biere, contemplating eroticism, staring into the empty eye socket of a beheaded goat.”

“Me and myself both. Since we’re up here, let’s just go to Sartre’s. but anyway – I mean, I’m payin’ for this session right? –  it’s easier now with Catherine, there’s no cuddling after, there’s no excuses to go all gooey and cosmic, no staring at the ceiling, no bad poems. Maybe emotional attachment would be a good boundary. If you have sex and there is no emotion exchange, then maybe that could qualify as not really having sex.”

“You think you can scoop out the meat with plastic spoons? Make a flowerpot out of the hollowed-out skull?”

“I’m so horny I could just stick my dick in the mouth of that ole goat.”

“The smiling one?”

“She’s not smiling at you! She’s smiling at me! I saw her first! I mean, I could get off that way. Really! Would that constitute fucking infidelity? Having done it with the head of a dead goat?”

“No, dead heads don’t count. Hey, do you think the butchers close the eyes of the goats after they behead’m?”

“I dunno, but look, that one was me in a previous life.” The same scruffy-bearded scowl, the same bewildered look. “So, if like, femme A just lays there, plays dead – I’m not sayin’ I’m into that – what if she just lies there like she’s dead ...?” We had contemplated and talked ourselves into an early evening session of multiple beers. We had earned them. We deserved them.