27 July 2004
Moulin Rouge/Six Feet Under
Billy Chenowith/Toulouse-Lautrec
R

for The Pairing List That Ate Fandom, round 8

Title nicked from The Cure's "Just Like Heaven".




Billy's looking for something.  He's not sure what it is yet.

He hasn't seen Brenda in months, and now when he pictures her she's coated in a dripping green mixture of every poison either of them's ever taken.  And then sex pours over her -- sticky-white where the poisons are green, and he has to let the image of her go.  Part of him thinks they'd have been better off if they'd fucked as teenagers, when they were desperate for each other and more than happy to let the family-wrongness of it slide.

Until he can clean that image up, he can't go back to L.A..

So he takes off.  East through the California interior, taking pictures and hitch-hiking.  His credit card would stretch to motel rooms, but he thinks it's better if he doesn't slow down.  In the evenings, he hits truck-stops and picks up truck drivers, swaps them blowjobs for a ride in the sleeper.  A few of them are willing to let Billy take their pictures.  His bag's full of film, exposed and un.  By the time he reaches the eastern seaboard, he has three rolls of American truckers, mostly naked, all taken at very close range.

Young and middle-aged and old men, staring back at him with this defensiveness he loves.

A travel agent in Newark books him a cheap flight, New York to London.  He sleeps on the plane.  Wakes up in the English night and the colours are all wrong.  His meds are in his bag, and he's still taking most of them, but sometimes the edges of the world bleed anyway.  He could take off all his clothes and walk naked through Heathrow, photograph the faces pretending not to look at him.

Guards at Customs look him over, take him away, and strip-search him.  Billy laughs at them.  All they find are his meds, labelled in their pharmacy bottles, but what they really want is some sort of tag on him.  A med-alert chained to his skin declaring him a poor, maladjusted freak who needs so many pills.  Without it, no one's convinced he's not just high as a kite and smuggling nasty drugs for the English kiddies.  Billy sits on the table in the cell they put him in, cross-legged and naked, and stares at the uniformed man who won't look directly at him.  They gave his clothes back an hour ago, but he didn't put them on.

Finally, the guard says, "What the fuck're you on, mate?"

Billy snorts.  Recites his meds for him, then the chemicals in his poor, wrong-headed brain.  The guard, who's black and nervous-looking, walks around him, looking at the scars on Billy's back and at Billy's grin.

It's morning when they turn him loose.  Someone tries to apologize to him, but he isn't interested.  This is London.  He turns American money into pound-coins and skids through the Underground to the east.  Picks up a highway and hitches all the way to France.

Underground and underwater.  The tunnel lights burn the back of his eyes.

Paris makes him think his retinas are bleeding.  Colours and lights and girls and boys and assholes, but he doesn't understand what they're saying well enough to hate them.  He's friendly and intense, and eventually someone takes him home.

Billy decides he's looking for freaks.  It's a good place to find some.  There are drifters and crazy people and prostitutes everywhere.  Some of the girls are carrying diseases he doesn't have names for, and the damage is carved all over their skin.  In clubs and brothels, he meets dykes who fuck men all day and in the evenings dance together.  Girls with tattoos and bruised eyes.  He has to pay them, but most will let him take their pictures.

He meets Elise that way, and she adopts him.  He moves his bag from his borrowed sofa to her flat, and takes her picture while she sleeps.

He comes home in the afternoon and finds Elise naked on the couch, posing for a dwarf.  She looks tired, and she's actually reading, the top half of her hidden behind the newspaper and only her bare cunt and legs showing.  The dwarf's hunched over a sketchbook.

"What the fuck?"

"Salut, Billy.  Ignore him, it's only Toulouse."

"'k."  What the fuck, it's her business.  He makes himself a sandwich.  Comes back and Elise is gone.  The dwarf's looking at him.

"Elise is right.  You are a strange one.  Passionate?"

Billy eyes him.  Bad legs, high energy.  He's bouncing in his chair.  "Sure.  Sometimes."

"She says you have a sordid past."

"Yep."

"Do you believe in love?"

"With you?  No."

"In art."

"Yes."

"Good."  The dwarf leaps up.  He only reaches Billy's ribcage, but he jumps and pushes him back against the couch.  "You should model for me."  He opens a case and costumes fly out.  Metallic colours and feathers, like the world's greatest drag act. 

So, sure.  What the fuck.  He strips down, pulls green scratchy cloth over his head.  Evening gown: it won't zip up the sides but it covers him.  The boa the dwarf hands him catches on Billy's stubble.  Sequins in his messy hair.  Lipstick.

The result is this portrait of him in pastels, fast and loose and dead sexy in a way Billy hasn't seen in ages.  Better than any of his photos.  In spite of the dress-up glamour, it still looks like Billy: tired and strung out and shadowed by everything he left behind in L.A..

Toulouse says, "You should come out with me like this."

So he does.  Glittering sandals and kiddie-dress-up drag, on the arm of a dwarf in a tux.  Billy puts his feet up in the bar, drinks and watches Toulouse skid through the crowd.  Upscale businessmen pick up tired hookers and fuck them in the back room.  There are flashes of skin when the dancers' skirts move.

A man-sized hand slides up Billy's leg.  Toulouse grins at him, holding a green bottle and a silver spoon in one hand.

"Absinthe.  Very goth of you."

"You will like it."

"I've had it."

"Not in Paris, you haven't."

So he tries it again.  Sugar and wormwood and alcohol, that chemical green.  And it's not ecstasy, but everything slides loose after he swallows.  The combination of absinthe with a half-dozen antipsychotics and antidepressants is vivid and beautiful.  Explosions go off in his brain.

Later, he remembers a flying dance, bending over to wrap his arms around Toulouse.  Kicking his legs up and showing off red boxers while businessmen hooted at him.

When he slides back down into his body, he's on his back in some filthy room with his legs wrapped around Toulouse's waist.  Close up, Toulouse is as tall as Billy is, just short in the leg.  He fucks like a champion, hard and fast and clever.

In the morning, bent out the window with Toulouse holding his waist, he yells something hysterically Titanic-like.  The fact that he's a naked American in harlot makeup makes it better.

Toulouse sings him Cure songs and narrates every instant of Billy-and-Brenda that Billy's willing to share with him.  They sketch out a story, a musical, of Billy's whole life.  Later, Toulouse stages it with china dolls and old curtains.  The L.A. ambience is all wrong, but the sticky need of his childhood is exactly right.

That night, costumed in sequined shorts and a hawaiian shirt, Billy gets up on stage and belts out their first number.




jane
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