At first, it’s surprising. The lift door opens on each floor before you get to the lounge of the big hotel in Tacoma. And with each new arrival, you wonder if you’re really awake. The first one looks like an ordinary American in beige shorts, a baseball cap screwed on his head. But when he turns around, a big brown furry tail hangs from the back. And as the doors open and close, the nightmare only gets worse. Blue foxes with white bellies surround us, walkie-talkies in their front paws, followed by a giant lizard in a gi suit. And then a horse in Victorian dress. And a horrible squirrel wagging its whiskers. Its tail rises to the ceiling of the cabin and sizzles under the halogens. The atmosphere quickly becomes unbreathable. There’s no point in trying to strike up a conversation. That’s the number one rule of furries: animals don’t talk, even if these ones are a bit special. They just nod, or fall into each other’s arms. Or scratch their backs for hours on end: it’s one of their most remarkable rituals, called ‘skritching’. It draws long sighs of ecstasy from them, accompanied by purring and grunting of all kinds. A brown bear in a Hawaiian shirt will say that he «sees it as a holiday». A temporary zoo where the residents would volunteer for a weekend to forget all about their miserable human existence. «Furries’: like fur. They were born in the mid-1980s from a split with the «Trekkies», the Star Trek fans who organise huge costume parties throughout the United States where everyone has to play one of the characters from the series. The furries, on the other hand, have chosen other models. They like all animals, furry, feathered and otherwise. The real ones, like lions or bears, but also those that populated the cartoons of their childhood: Mickey, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Rox and Rouki. Even the Ninja Turtles. Also all those that their overflowing imagination could invent: unicorns with huge breasts, well-hung wolves and panthers languishing like pinups. A bestial love that makes them get under the skin of one of these animals.
