Standing on the sidewalk, just above a slope leading to Lac Supérieur in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris at ten o’clock at night at the end of September in 1986, I had an unforgettable experience. It was all I could do to shake my head in disbelief. At that moment, in the damp air, it felt like I was transported to a different planet.

The evening was memorable, but let me provide some background for how I wound up in a Parisian park on Saturday evening in late September for “wildlife viewing” that was cinematic.

I had moved to Paris and experienced a great sensual rebirth. The odors of the Metro air, the damp springtime, the water in the Trocadero fountains on a hot July day, and lying on the grass in a park taking in the passing pedestrians all still bring endearing memories.

Being in Paris was a major change, a cultural shock, from living in the Midwest of the US and, more recently in a medium-sized city in the US South. Paris was cosmopolitan and not like anywhere else I had lived—but I could have said that about most places I had lived. They all had their particularities, but Paris had more of them.

After a few months, I moved from the Foundation Etats-Unis on Boulevard Jourdan with its stone floors resembling a modified prison, to an apartment in the burbs. Outside the belt of Paris was not the place to be, but I lived close, and with Metro access, the whole city was accessible. At the end of September, as the first slight chills of autumn came, my most recent US boss had visited Paris and the place where I was working. He was staying with me and had a Saturday free.

My old boss, Richard, was well known, but I had never been alone with him outside of our professional interactions. We discussed what he would like to do in Paris. Three activities were on his list. He wanted to see Versailles and to dine at a creperie. Those were straightforward things that were possible in a day of tourism.

The third activity was not generally found in family guidebooks. His request was a fantasy to view “ladies of the night” in Paris. I was a little taken aback by that.

I had some idea of how to organize the day, but for the evening I was a little less clear. First, we took the train from Paris to Versailles, saw the main palace building, but kept our visit relatively brief because spending the whole day there would have been easy. Returning to Paris in the late afternoon, early evening, we went to a creperie, where Richard could sample a classic meal from Britanny, with a main course crepe containing meat, followed by a dessert crepe accompanied by hard cider.

As for the third activity, well-known places in the city were Rue St. Denis and the Bois de Boulogne. There is a certain fascination for people to think about prostitution like “Pretty Woman,” but the reality is that most of them will never meet Richard Gere in his better moments, and their lives are hard. But Julia Roberts's life in that story is fantasyland.

The night was falling as we left the creperie, and rue St. Denis was not too far away. I used my Paris street guide. In the late 1980s, there were no GPS navigation systems to find your way. We located the street and walked down it as the night covered the city. There were a couple of women hovering in doorways as we passed, but there was not the bustling activity that you see in films.

My old boss was a little dispirited at seeing only a couple of women who could be considered streetwalkers. I wasn't sure why, but I decided that we could investigate the Bois de Boulogne.

The Bois de Boulogne is on the western edge of Paris and was a family-friendly area during the day. The Bois was a beautiful park. It had trees everywhere with two large “lakes,” more like ponds. Children and their parents were all over the Bois during the day. Dog walking and stroller-pushing were major activities. On Saturdays and Sundays in warm weather, parking was atrocious. The only easy access was by Metro. Because I didn’t have a car, the Metro was our only option.

It was getting late, and just a little chilly when we exited the Metro that Saturday evening and oriented ourselves to enter the Bois. I had chosen a Metro stop close to one of the entrances. The Bois was never closed, but the clientele changed. I was a little nervous because the reputation at night was infamous.

We approached the park by a slight incline, and numerous people, mainly men, were walking along the sidewalk.

My attire fit in with the general public; jeans, a shirt, and a sweater, but Richard had a bright red jacket. His identity could only have been more obvious if it had American Tourist written in large white block letters with a target on his back.

As we entered the park, an attractive woman sporting short blond hair and attire more like a one-piece bathing suit approached us. Walking next to Richard, she slid her hand into his pants pocket and seemed to rummage around, asking if he would like to come with her.

My French was not very good at that point, but thankfully, his response was, “No Thank you.”

I mentioned to Richard, a very straight man, that the Bois had a reputation for transvestites. He assured me that a woman had been sizing him up with her hand in his pants. How he knew that was a mystery to me.

We continued to walk a little. Unlike the rue St. Denis, there was activity all over. Cars would stop; women would walk up, show their breasts, and seem to discuss pricing. There were women all around. Then we turned into an alley that reminded me of a Fellini film.

The alley was a wide dirt road blocked off for vehicle entrance. Groups of people huddled together as shadows. They would appear to be a single entity. In an instant, a lighter flashed on, and a woman flashed her breasts to show her pedigree, and the single shape that appeared as one large blob in the dark became four people.

We continued in this dark area, and one of the Brazilians heralded us. I wasn't actually sure if he was Brazilian, but he was a transvestite and Brazilians transvestites had a reputation for frequenting the area. He opened his silk top that was flat and spoke.

“Bon soir, cheri,” he invited, with a voice like Darth Vader. He did not attempt a more feminine tone. If he said, "Luke I am your father," it was time to run.

Richard addressed me. “Do you want to? I’ll pay.”

“Richard, that is a guy,” I responded, and repeated it as the man realized he would not have either one of us as a client.

At least Richard was not prejudiced. I wasn’t either, but it wasn’t my predilection to be with a man.

The alley was intriguing in a voyeuristic sense. The fog in the alley was moist, punctuated with some cigarette smoke, which lent to the surreal atmosphere. No big deal, and there were groping and other activities that went on as we had our stroll through there. Such a family-friendly place had transformed into a nighttime orgy. For me, it was a sensory overload. The fog, the ground, the poor lighting, and the humidity had me a little intoxicated.

The alley was dark with shapes moving. It had a non-sinister but foreboding atmosphere. The scenes of people vanishing into the darkness to complete their own love and strife cycle, with only shadowed movements visible.

After an indeterminate time, we started to move out of the shadowland and towards the outside. All this was a voyeur’s desire. Even in the sheltered place in the ally women unveiled themselves, with an it ‘pays to publicize’ attitude. Some women we had witnessed advertising were coming back for another client. We worked our way out to where there were streetlamps and more people.

The street still had a stream of cars stopping to solicit the women who were soliciting. We moved close to the Lac Supérieur, and saw at least five women, who had what amounted to kiosks for men who wanted their services.

This was the first time that I had been in a situation where sex was going on all around me. The supermarket of sex was something I had never seen. My eyes were wide open and taking in everything around me. I was not really excited, because as a first-time voyeur, I was unable to know if I was aroused or just bombarded with all the actions around me.

Richard and I stood at the top of the slight incline leading to the pond. Richard, in a magnanimous mood, was almost as stupefied as I was.

Finally, he spoke. “If you want one, I’ll pay for it.”

The suggestion sounded like a way that the women were thought of by many. Knowing him, that was not his intention, but it was the way many people thought about them.

His offer was a modest dilemma for me. In some ways, long dry spells have punctuated my adult existence. But the thought of an encounter with a woman who was down on her luck (despite their being almost all attractive), without sentiment involved, made me reluctant. I would have felt better to just give them the money and walk away because they needed it.

My gaze was fixed on a woman who was beautiful. Dark auburn hair down to the middle of her back, a halter in suede with ample breasts, long legs in what looked like a denim bikini bottom, and dark brown eyes. Her look was soul-melting.

She would take a man to the edge of the water, open his pants, and proceed to take him in her mouth, sucking his reticence to perform in public with her. Her movements and the way she focused on him were not rapid, but erotic. Even though there were numerous other women, I was transfixed on her.

Her long hair moved as her hand stroked his shaft while her mouth moved in unison. Rapidly, she completed her care of one man as he bucked with her mouth, swallowing. He was now deflating, and she tenderly placed his cock back into his pants. Going behind a tree for a few moments, she reappeared ready to assist another man who searched for a woman willing to provide oral attention.

Despite my attention on one woman, we watched as the clients, perhaps patients, made their desires public for other therapists of sorts. They must have known we were tourists, but then these women would not take that as a negative. Women bent over with men pushing against them in an elemental link. Soon, the men would be sated.

Another unsolicited offer from my former boss arrived: “If you would like, I can pay for it. No problem.”

As we stood watching, mesmerized by the couplings and changes, we barely talked at all. Richard seemed as taken by the situation as I was. He admitted having seen some women plying their trade in other situations, but not trade plying in the open.

Maybe my gaze, more like creepy staring, toward the beautiful woman who was mainly offering oral satisfaction had an effect. She came over to where I was standing with Richard and took my hand, gesturing for me to come with her.

“Go ahead if you want to, and I will pay,” Richard proposed for actually the third time that night.

I couldn't go with her. I was not that much of an exhibitionist. Although her touch had made my heart flutter, I was not going to do that in the presence of Richard. He would have certainly been excited to see someone he knew receive a blow job in the great outdoors.

But it was more than that. I didn’t want to have her like that. It was my romantic side. She was beautiful, and I didn’t want her to see me as a commodity. Yes, stupid, and not rational. She was actually the commodity, which just didn’t seem right. There was the woman representing water, and I was fire.

Treating the situation as a transaction raised friction. She could attenuate my internal fire, but she struggled to offer herself without affection. My attraction to her was a spark that, in another context, could have awakened us to love. Her focus on the struggle for existence and receiving money would not have satisfied what my heart wanted.

I thanked her, gently released her hand, and resumed surveying the landscape as I looked still longingly into her eyes. That night, I was an observer, unwilling to pursue love amidst conflict. The conflict and affection were within me and not with her. She continued her work, and I realized that she was doing what she needed to do to exist without a choice.

We only stayed for a little while longer and then started the slow exit from the park, the spectacle continuing until early in the morning. These many years later, the woman’s look and gestures remained with me. That evening, I was only a voyeur along with Richard. We never talked about our tourist visit to the Bois de Boulogne, but I am sure that even now, he still remembers it.

The Bois was a place where people's imaginations and sometimes our actions could run free. It reminded me of our hidden lives with our kinks. Similar to Disneyland, it indulged needs that were uncoupled from reality. Upon reflection, my thoughts drifted back to Empedocles, the Greek philosopher, who had initially defined elements as Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Linked to those elements, he maintained that Strife and Love went together with the arrangement of those elements.

To follow up on Empedocles, Aristotle, in On Generation and Corruption, helped define the Empedoclean elements. Accordingly, Fire (hot and dry) and Air (hot and wet) are linked to men. In contrast, Water (cold and wet) and Earth (cold and dry) are associated with women. Men are wanderers like fire and air. In opposition, women are fixed like earth and water.

That visit to the Bois at night reminded me of Empedocles' elements. All the men with fire seeking to calm themselves with a woman (or man), and the women seeking to calm the men.

But Empedocles believed that Life exists when Love and Strife interact with the elements. He thought that Life requires the presence of both Love and Strife (a little lacking in modern psychobabble, but Empedocles was a Greek living in Sicily, so he was already a little messed up).

In this alternate reality, nighttime Bois de Boulogne, Love and Strife were found in arranging the elements. One group desired affection (Love?), whereas the other group struggled to survive to make a living (Strife). The mélange of the two competing struggles was not there, even though all the elements were present. Therefore, according to Empedocles, the Bois was devoid of Life.

That logic glosses over the nuances and the multitudes that frequent the Bois, maybe even people searching for Life that would be recognized as such by Empedocles.

That was my only voyeuristic trip to the Bois at nighttime. Voyeurs don’t participate in life; they only observe. Despite the sexual activity in the Bois, there was a lack of noticeable affection, but there was Strife. The existence of such strife, mainly for the women, made the scene much less erotic than in popular myths. Perhaps the visit to the Bois didn't help me feel more alive, but the woman kneeling and her face still inhabit my dreams. Besides, the nightlife in the Bois also made an interesting story.