George Saunders’ essays on writing are so cool and true I’ve been teaching them to my writing students. And his pieces about Dubai, and the young Buddha meditating forever in Nepal, are soaked in his own personality, the kind of journalism I really love, where the writer is right there in the story, and it works especially because this writer is so funny and compassionate and inquisitive and revealing. I think I would maybe like to be George Saunders. He also wrote my favorite short story, “CommComm.”

SECTION 11

When Antoine sits beside me I want to grab his scruffy hair but feel shy. I’m embarrassed by my American psyche, which partly feels that because we fucked he is now my boyfriend and we’re going to get married.

Judy is concerned for her brother, who wants to try MDMA for the first time but not until we leave, so he can get high outside and not have a bad trip underground. She doesn’t want him to be peaking on his way home alone on a bus. I think if he’s afraid he might not enjoy it he shouldn’t do it, as nothing guarantees a freak out like worrying you might freak out. Beside me, Killer says, You are clean, so I trust you. If I become mad or sad, I will listen to what you tell me. If I can understand your English. Five minutes later he is hunched over crying.

The MDMA hits Judy like a bullet, and soon she’s screaming the French word for Fuck!, again and again, holding her head in her hands and then lifting her face to the ceiling, smiling, the candlelight pinballing off her teeth and glasses. She’s having an excellent time but needs to puke. She wanders off to the side to vomit, then returns, walking the lurchy lurch of a zombie. She feels great, but she’s so worried about Killer, and hurt that he won’t let her comfort him. When she tries he brushes her away, allowing only Kay to console him. It’s Okay, I tell her. It’ll Pass. You Can Talk About It All Later. I’m so glad you’re here, She wraps her arms around me and I pet her head. The queer family is so affectionate with one another, and I relish the moments I get in on the tender pats and quick embraces, I like them all so much. I wonder why I don’t hug and kiss my friends all the time, and vow to bring this souvenir back to San Francisco, with the attitudinal pfff and my equestrian boots.You are so — quiet? — no, calm, Judy observes. It’s Just Because I Can’t Speak French, I tell her. In America All I Do Is Talk. No, it’s your energy. You have a calm presence. It’s good. Really? How amazing. I used to be such a spazz, one of my old girlfriends didn’t want to date me because she thought I was a speed freak. This was back before I was actually a speed freak. I like that my energy has changed so much and I didn’t even know it.

It’s time to leave the catacombs, the trip cut short by Killer’s bad trip but that’s fine with me. I’m cold and wet and we’ve been down here for hours. The next closest area to explore requires another hour-long hike and no one is capable of that on the MDMA. As we gather our things I notice that people have left seashells, oyster mostly, along the wall beneath the wave mural. There’s even a tiny plastic crab. I feel like this whole place is an altar to human sweetness, the urge to sneak presents to one another, to delight a stranger, to leave an anonymous, humble mark upon the world. Not to tag so-and-so-was-here, nothing so self-centric, but to think instead of the other people who will come and go for years, affected in a small, significant way by the bit of color you left for them to shine their lamps onto. Everything I notice in the catacombs seems like a treasure left for me by someone kind and playful; the way the random swing of my lamp illuminates some things and leaves the rest in the darkness makes it feel like I’m seeing only what the catacombs means for me to see, a sort of coded message I could decipher if I had the mind for it. If I was on MDMA , maybe. I let me psyche soak it in.

You try leading us out, Antoine dares me. Oh God You Don’t Want Me To Do That, I say, looking at my potential charges, all doped up. Butches take turns consoling Killer, who looks small and scared and heartbreaking. Every single day in Paris I’ve gotten lost. Looking for the Concierge, where Marie Antoinette was locked up for a year before they lopped her head off, I found the Eiffel Tower swaddled in clouds. Looking for the Jardin des Luxemborg, I found the Seine, lined with the stalls where Jean Genet got busted stealing paperbacks and was tossed in jail to write Our Lady of the Flowers on paper bags. When his jailers threw the manuscript away he wrote it again. I lead the small circus of us around in a dumb circle, and with Antoine’s coaxing find the hall we came in through. That’s it I’m done. Antoine has a map of the place, he carries it folded in squares, routes he’s familiar with traced in highlighter pens, and marked with ink where he has added halls and passageways not charted. One of Antoine’s projects is mapping the labyrinth. How cool is Antoine? Many different maps exist of the catacombs, and much more existent are the number of undocumented trails and pockets. The map begins to flutter from his hand and he catches it, slapping it against his thigh. Oh My God Antoine Please Don’t Lose The Map, I say. I imagine it falling into the water, ruined. He is stoned, after all. Please Don’t Drop It In The Water. I know, he laughs, agreeable. It Would Be Like Blair Witch Project, I suggest. Oh no, don’t say that! Judy cries. I have to remember that everyone is on drugs and severely vulnerable to suggestion.

SECTION 12

We begin our exit. Antoine has me go before him. The sight of the long, half-submerged hallway stretching into darkness is goth and gorgeous, and I appreciate his thoughtfulness, having me see it. We turn off the lamps and our shadows bob crazily in the liquid. Soon we crawl on our knees through the tightest passage, and Antoine reaches out and grabs me between the legs. Perhaps that was why he wanted me to go before him? Either way I’m happy. We take the same route back but there is more to see, things I’d missed. Baby stalactites, frozen droplets speckling the limestone ceilings above our head. I rub my fingers over them. Antoine tells me of a movie night someone does down here, and how once he stumbled across a concert, a man had brought a generator down to power his electric bass. There are dance parties, like the ones Charles X threw. How Do You Find Out About Them? People leave them here, he runs his hand along the wall, dipping his fingertips into the cracks. They make papers, and they fold them and put them here, and that’s how you know. It’s a truly underground underground culture. There are cataphile groups that hold meetings, to discuss different routes, share maps, plan arts and events to bring to the grottos. How Do You Learn About Them? I ask. Sometime on the web, but not really, mostly here, Antoine taps the ruptures in the wall again.

As we kick through the water Judy, still blissed-out high, sings the American National Anthem. She doesn’t know why she loves it so much, she just does. Her voice is beautiful, strong and brassy but with the hint of a tremulous warble, Judy Garland meets Edith Piaf. The group behind us begin to sing old French Communist songs. Judy, who was raised by French Communists, explodes with excited nostalgia and backtracks to loop her arms with her comrades and sign along. By the time we crawl above ground she is cuddling Killer, who looks much better. The distracting wonder of the passages, the thrill of the water, the rousing song. He asks me for a piece of gum. Did you like it? I widen my eyes, clutch my heart and nod vigorously. C’est Magnifique! Killer asks me often if I am enjoying myself in Paris, it is very sweet. He did the same during sex. Ca va? he’d inquire gently, then whack me in the face. On the walk to the night bus stop, I learn from him that, though I never stop smiling, I am very serious while having sex. Really? I ask, disturbed to be reminded that people actually look at you when they’re fucking you. Grave, Killer reports, and makes an intense expression while pulling his fingers over his face, as if is drawing out gravity. Is it good or bad to make grave faces during sex? It doesn’t sound good. What if I think I’m making sexy faces but really I’m looking grief-stricken! Maybe that was what all the Ca va? was about? I often mistakenly think I’m smiling only to learn it’s more of a grimace. Judy soon shares that Killer would like to have another sex party, after Antoine’s girlfriend, in town for one week, departs. What a dog Antoine is! I decide to not worry too much about my grave sex faces, but resolve to look more carefree next time we all get it on. Also, I am informed by Killer, during the course of my visit, that I am blond. I thought I was brunette, but no. In Paris I am blond! I guess I think his hair is blond, and our hair is a similar color. A calm demeanor, grave sex faces and blond hair. It’s like I don’t know myself at all.

Eventually another night bus comes and we all climb on, sodden and fatigued. Paris at night flies by; I feel like I’m on an expensive tourist bus, gazing out at the rippling Canal St. Martin, the grandiose Opera, lit til it glows. I can’t believe it’s free public transit. It’s not free, Judy tells me. We just didn’t pay, and the bus drivers aren’t authorized to do anything about it. It’s why everyone is always sneaking on all the time. None of the Metro workers can stop you, only the Metro cops, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single one since I’ve been here. Even if you get caught, the fine is cheaper than having to buy a pass, Alice reasons. I get off at Place de Clichy, smashing kisses on all their cheeks, having total separation anxiety. I’ve been invited back to Killer’s to crash — just for sleep, everyone’s exhausted — but I feel like I ought to sleep where I’m staying, clear the debris of the orgy away. I know there is a soiled condom just lying on my bedroom floor, and dirty coffee cups and piles of croissant crumbs all over the rest of the house. My thong, Antoine had kindly reminded me, was on the living room carpet, and I knew the rest of my outfit had been cast off there, too.

I take a cab home from Clichy, not wanting to walk past the dreaded Moulin Rouge. At home, it takes twenty minutes to pull off my equestrian boots. They were snug to start, and the water and mud has created a suction that glues them to my feet. I almost cry. I almost take a knife from the kitchen and saw them off my calves. I almost sleep with them on and hope someone calls me in the morning and have them come over to yank them off. My Parisian cell phone is out of credit and I can’t deal with the language hurdles of getting more, so I can receive calls and texts, but can’t make any, which is actually totally amazing and so not capitalist. I love Paris. I love Paris I love Paris I love Paris. I heave with all my strength and my boot comes off. The cell phone rings and it’s Killer making sure I got home okay. The lousy little European shower where you have to crouch in the tub and hose yourself down, it has never felt so good. Nor has the bed, still vibrating with dirty cuddly sex vibes the way my body still rings with all the stone and water, the flashing lamplight and graffiti and screams and splashes of the catacombs.

Download the full Letter From Paris by Michelle Tea (pdf)

SECTION 10

Our room becomes invaded by another party! There are only four of them, three men and a woman. Catacomb aficionados are 85% male and 70% under the age of twenty-five, a demographic Antoine fits into neatly. This group is older. Jade begins harassing them immediately for hashish and, I’m told, for sex. Actually she demands that one of the gentlemen rape her. Jade is so aggressive in the pursuit of her desires she scandalizes even these kids, which is not easy. At her house a long bamboo stick dangles from the ceiling, and sketches of bound women hang on the walls. At Christmas dinner she warns me that she intends to be obnoxious with me, and I worry about what this means, but she drinks too much and falls asleep on a futon before anything occurs. Generally she is sweet, and sort of maternal, cooking pots beef and carrots for everyone and making numerous bowls of chocolate mousse during my stay.
These people have ruined our ambiance. I like thinking that we are the only people in the entire catacombs, and even if it’s not true I don’t want to cross paths with the others. It suggests that the maze is not so very big, our trespasses less transgressive. We’ll encounter two more groups before leaving, both mostly males with one or two females, and pattern that annoys Judy. I remind her that it’s essentially the same ratio as our own gang. Yeah, but everyone here is female-bodied, she says.

We pass by a small cave that has plastic flowers jammed into every nook and cranny, plus patches of astro turf sprouting more fake blossoms carpeting the ground. The Hall of Femmes! Judy announces proudly, like she made it. Judy did sculpt a goddess onto the wall in a nearby room, where the mud becomes so thick your feet sink into it and give you a little slide, like you could tip over and find yourself face down in the muck. Visitors enjoy taking handfuls of the mud, piling it on the walls, and making sculptures with it. I’ll show you mine, Antoine says. His smile is so fucking cute I want to slam his face into the mud. His sculpture is perhaps a demon, perhaps the devil himself or also maybe just a goat. It has a long bony face and curving horns and is cool and sinister. The mud seems to have blackened along some parts of it, as if its been charred. In other spots moisture formed a gauzy gray beard that looks like mold. Judy’s goddess has mostly tumbled from the stone, though an abstract vagina remains. There are other forms clotting the walls, and in the center, a giant man fashioned from wire and plaster. It’s body, circled with strips of stiff gauze, makes me think of a trans chest wrapped in an ace bandage. There’s a little winter hat plopped on its head. A cheerful skull and crossbones mural adorns one wall, the stone beneath it gilded and marked with a big diamond. There’s a surprising lack of base or offensive images down here — no giant cocks or pussies or boobs, the sort of stuff humans tend to draw on walls when no one’s looking. Judy’s vagina comes closest, but it’s a sacred goddess pussy, so it’s different. The one slur we spot is a word for faggot, etched into a hallway ceiling. We would have overlooked it completely if Judy hadn’t glanced up and caught it. What does it mean? Someone who gets fucked in the ass, she says, then gets academic. A passive sodomite.

We retire to an area known as The Beach, so those who partake can partake of some MDMA. The Beach is the widest chamber we visit on this trip, large and gratified, like someone’s basement rec room. There is a pile of rocks dotted with candles in the center, and the far end is lined with a wide sitting area and painted with a giant copy of Hokusai’s Great Wave, the wooden boat caught in the frothing curl. Antoine arranges lines atop his French passport, hunched by the rock pile so he can see. Killer rips a check from his checkbook. A Drug Deal In The Catacombs, I title the moment. But no, he begins tearing it into strips and handing out the shreds, so that everyone can have their own paper straws to snort with. It’s more hygienic. Most everyone is doing the MDMA. Now that the moment has arrived, I’m relieved to find myself uninterested. Antoine is concerned that I will be bored to death, hanging out in the dark with a bunch of drugged-out people whose language I don’t speak, but he underestimates the exotic appeal of the entire environment. I’m in the catacombs! I’m in Paris! I like hanging out listening to the lilt and sway of everyone speaking, especially the French pfffff, the stylish shot of air sent through the top lip to demonstrate an annoyance spectrum ranging from resigned irritation to disgusted fury, depending on the curl of the lip and the fierceness of the pfffff. It’s oddly relaxing to not be able to participate in conversation, to just space out to the sound. At home I can’t shut up, I exhaust myself.

SECTION 9

We pass a well, a perfectly round mouth in the stone where all this blue water spills out. There is a rusted banister around it. Very deep, Antoine smiles. Fifteen meters? Don’t fall in! We’re already fifteen meters beneath the earth. It didn’t even feel like we were descending, but while crouch-hiking through one of the low-ceilinged halls Antoine pulls me to the side, where the ceiling opens up to vertical tunnel rising far above our head. Shining my light on it I can see a manhole cover at the top. We are very far below Paris. And really truly in the catacombs. The halls have opened up into heavily decorated chambers. This is new, someone says about a replica of Munch’s The Scream painted onto a wall. There is all sorts of art down here, mostly graffiti, but larger murals also. We pass a space that looks like an altar, the way the stones are so round and stacked so precisely. Chubby gargoyle faces watch from either end, and shards of colorful pottery spill into the cracks. This was Babylonia! Judy says, bothered. Someone broke it! It had been an installation with many vases, but now it was wrecked.

Antoine kept saying we would stop at the Castle, and Voila, we turn into a low-ceilinged chamber with a stone table ringed by curving benches, and at the far end a castle rises against the wall, cut from the rock, detailed with windows and even a rusty grate propped in the doorway like a gate. Someone has left plastic figurines in front of it, and everywhere are tiny candles in aluminum dishes, so many that when our lamps entered the place glittered with the reflection, as if they were already burning. A wrought iron candelabra dangles from a chain on the ceiling and people go about lighting the candles, filling the room with an orange glow. There are gargoyles in here as well; someone has draped them in Christmas tinsel. Handy Antoine grabs an empty beer can from the ground and with his knife slices it into a lantern. He sticks a candle in it. I’m impressed. Antoine is a good person to know if the apocalypse comes. I tell him I admire his lantern and he informs me that he is an artist, and I should see the frying pans he made out of a blow-up doll. His apartment, he promises, is actually very cool, and he invites me to visit. I will, and it is cool. One wall is completely collaged — I spot queer propaganda and pictures of the band Alien Sex Fiend. There are accordioned tubes looped from the ceiling as if we are in a wacky laboratory or a miniature, hodgepodge Centre Pompidou. There are many folk art chickens, which his father likes to give him, and a portrait of David Lynch his mother painted. There is a cross-eyed boy cat named Brigitte whose long, fluffy white fur flies into my mouth, and there is a curtain of long fringe that ensnares you when you pass from the hallway — where pot is grown and dried behind African tapestries — into his bedroom. It’s for catching girls, he says.

At the Castle room we settle in. People pull out food, and Antoine dredges from his backpack a camp stove and proceeds to brew grog, which is rum, honey, water and lemon. People pretty much accept that I don’t drink, but every now and then there will be something like the grog, or a really great beer, that they seem confused I won’t at least taste. Non, Merci. I pull off my boots with horrible difficulty and dump the water out. I even wring my socks, but when I pull the boots back on there is still water inside, rushing back and forth between my heel and toes. Everyone is smoking in the catacombs. Sasha began when we were still in the halls, bent beneath the squat ceilings. I smoke too, and eat my sandwich and learn that everyone knows about the sex party that happened the previous night. Jade wonders how to translate Ooooooh! Oooooooh! from French to English, or English to French, and everyone laughs. Kay tells me about how the feminists at the feminist conference were upset by a queer porn that was shown; they needed to know whether the couple fucking in it were in love or not. Apparently, if they were in love, then the porn was not offensive. San Francisco was the center of the famed Lesbian Sex Wars of the late 80s-early 90s, when sex-radical lesbians went head to head with vanilla lesbians about whether it was okay for dykes to enjoy porn, BDSM and even penetration. Again I feel like I’m being given the opportunity to experience a sexed-up queer moment I was too young and overwhelmed to really indulge in at the time. When I first hit San Francisco in 1993, I was approached by a woman at a club who asked if I would like to pay five dollars to be publicly whipped for the benefit of an AIDs organization. Not only did I say No, I was scornful, upset and confused. I’d always longed to be beaten up by sexy people, but I’d also been influenced by feminist theory suspicious of such pleasures, and by the time I’d come around the larger moment had pretty much passed. Now, here was Paris.

**

See Also: Letter From Paris by Michelle Tea

SECTION 8

Antoine tells me things as we walk the tracks and I swing my flashlight around, catching explosions of dense, bright hip hop tags painted by actual artists and crappier, punk rock Anarchy symbols in gusty trails of spray paint. He tells me that sometimes trains come down these tracks, which is a lie. You’re Lying, I say, and he smiles. I believed him! Judy smacks her head. I’m such a gullible girl! I Just Think I Would Have Been Warned Before Now, I shrugged.

Things that are true that Antoine tells me include a story of being menaced by Nazis as he was leaving the catacombs one night. Two thugs with chains and sticks jumped out from a minor hallway, blocking the path to the exit. Antoine, who was stoned of course, on what he can’t remember, just started laughing and asked if he could take their picture. The hooligans had already beaten up an earlier party and stolen their victims’ lamps and wallets, but Antoine managed to talk his way out of it and crawl back to the world above unscathed. Another time he met a girl, a junkie who lives here on the tracks. There are wide niches cut into the tunnel, heaped with random junk that might actually be someone’s belongings; random pallets cast onto the tracks are possible hobo beds. She’s really nice, Antoine said of the girl. She’s young. I think it’s better for her to be here than on the streets. Safer. It makes me think of the mole people who live in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York City, or the thousands of people in Manila who have turned the North Cemetery into a functioning city of dead and undead. Antoine tells me how he has slept in the catacombs, once in an bunker from the resistance, another time in a sleeping bag on the stone floor, a bad idea because the rock gets so cold he was frozen to the bone and his chilled chattering kept him awake. The best way to sleep in the catacombs is to bring a hammock and stretch it out in one of the grottos that have iron work jutting from the walls; many do. Then you sleep a perfect sleep, as the catacombs are so deeply dark and so fantastically quiet.

Are you tired? Antoine asks hesitantly. Last time I was in Paris the one phrase I mastered was Je suis fatigue, and I say it now. Antoine bursts with delight and approval when I managed to say something French. He and Judy also cackle with glee when I ruin certain words, like parapluie, or grenouille. I love making my new friends happy. I am so tired, Antoine says, No sex party in the catacombs tonight. Oh, well. I shouldn’t be so greedy. The French are moderate with their decadence, which is how so many dine on fatty cheese and abused goose livers and gâteaux and buttery croissants and remain scrawny as runway models. Everything is indulged, but you take a night off. Unlike the American tradition of diving headlong into your vice until it almost kills you, then going into recovery and writing a memoir about it.

We exit the train tunnel and the earth is damp and carpeted with wet leaves and lichen. Above us on the sidewalk are trees, and everything smells lush and wet and clean and pretty. We are passing through a park, Antoine tells me the English name for it would be My Mouse Park. Incidentally, there will be no mice making appearances in this story, or rats or spiders or cockroaches or any other creatures you might associate with life underground. The catacombs are vermin-free. We pass into a second tunnel and stop at what looks like a crack in the wall. A wide, jagged crack that leads down, the ground sloped from so many feet, the air around it stinking of piss and littered with shards of glass. This is our portal. People tell me to watch my hand as I grip the chunky ground for balance and slide through the busted bricks and voila. I am in the catacombs.

The smell leaves immediately, it belongs the tracks, probably cataphiles taking one last chance to urinate before entering. The odor of the catacombs is cool, basement-y, wet, like certain water rides at amusement parks, actually. When everyone has climbed inside, Antoine leads us down a long hallway. The hall is stone, a honey color, and the ceiling is high enough to stand in, maybe six feet. It will get much lower as we walk, and a system is devised of people at the front of the procession hollering Ciel!, which means Sky, and is the word for the parts of the ceiling that jut down and could smash your head in if you don’t watch out. Antoine said it’s the most dangerous part of being in the catacombs, unless you’re claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks, which Antoine asked about before agreeing to take me down here. I like hollering Ciel! to my comrades in the back, because I like to be helpful, but I guess my timing is bad, and my pronunciation is bad as well, and as I’m not being very helpful, I stop.

Antoine pauses to show me things — years carved elegantly into the stone, dates from the 17 and 1800s. The same blue-tiled street signs that are fixed to the sides of buildings above ground in Paris mark the names of streets down here. This is a famous writer, Antoine tells me, pointing at the name of a guy I’ve never heard of. The walls down here are marked with graffiti, but sporadic, and it becomes less and less as we trudge deeper into the heart of the place. We pass a giant rusted hulk of machinery and Antoine brings points to a thick, chopped-off cable; the stump glitters with bits of copper wire. Apparently it used to run the phone system of Paris. The hall becomes smaller and I take off my backpack, which is scraping the roof as I walk my hunchbacked walk. It is like Alice in Wonderland, says Judy. One passage becomes so small we crawl on our knees. It’s very sandy here — according to Antoine, because it used to be the ocean, though that sounds impossible — and the sand coats my jeans and I suppose this is the beginning of the end of my outfit. Soon comes the water. Little puddles, then splashing around my ankles and then it is rising up my legs, slowing my pace, and when I hear Judy, a few steps ahead, scream a ricocheting slasher-film scream I know the water has risen above her boots. In two paces it rises above mine, pouring down into the rubber. My legs are completely soaked. I scream, too. It’s fun to scream in the catacombs. It’s fun to be so filthy, to have no choice but to submit to the mud caking your thighs, to splash and kick up sprays of the subterranean current. The water isn’t as cold as I’d imagined, and it isn’t dirty. It’s swirling with clay we’ve stirred, but the smaller hallways branching off this main one have stone floors, and the water there is crystalline, the cobblestones visible beneath the gentle shimmers of our lamps. Occasionally a beer bottle bobs there, looking ancient.

**

See Also: Letter From Paris by Michelle Tea

SECTION 7

Judy

We walk the Parisian streets until we reach Kay’s car, parked on a residential corner near the fence we’ll be climbing. We’re Climbing A Fence? I squeal with delight to Judy. I Love Climbing Fences! When I was a child I tried to start a fence-climbing club, I loved it so much I wanted to be organized about it.

At the car we leave behind everything we won’t bring down into the caves. Antoine hands me a navy blue fleece jacket emblazoned with the insignia of the non-profit he works for. I zip it up, saying goodbye to the prospect of sex in the catacombs. Not in a fleece zip-up.

Antoine looks amazing, in a pair of thick coveralls stained with clay from previous descents. He looks like le petit Mad Max. He’s wearing his tall boots and the front of the coveralls gape open toughly. Judy tells me I can keep all my things in her brother’s backpack but I have to carry it because he has scoliosis. Judy’s brother is even more silent than me, and he speaks French. He is very pretty, with curly black hair and a Palestinian scarf wrapped around his mouth. Earlier he gave everyone Kinder chocolates. Judy said he’s gay but asexual and believes that asexuality is a sexual orientation. This is hard for the wildly sexual Judy to comprehend, but she’s trying to be open minded. I too can only imagine he’s damaged from homophobia, but again try not to be such an American about everything. I tune into the quiet brother, trying to get a feel for what asexual vibes feel like. He’s just sort of shy and aloof.

Antoine says the plan is he will hop the fence, we hand him the bags, then we hop over, all of this very quickly because it is the moment where we run the biggest risk of getting busted. We are not to talk until he says it’s safe to. Trespassing is one of my most favorite things; I can’t believe I get to trespass and climb a fence, plus I engaged in a menage a quatre mere hours ago. This is the funnest group of people I have ever encountered. No one in San Francisco is having orgies and breaking into the sewer system. Everyone’s just gossiping and buying jeans. I feel like a fucking superhero hopping the fence, dropping down onto the ground. I snatch up two backpacks and follow Antoine into a giant, plowed lot. It looked like something stood there a long time ago but then was razed, perhaps an entire city block. The ground is loose dirt embossed with the tire tracks of monster trucks. I try to ask people what this place is, what happens here, but no one gets what I’m saying. We stop just outside the mouth of a giant train tunnel.
This is a good place to go to the bathroom, Antoine kindly suggests. Handy Sasha marches over to one end with his pee-gadget, a plastic thingie female-bodied people can place under their junk and let the pee roll out, so you don’t have to squat. Lots of trans guys have them. Killer forgot his, so he crouches around the corner, his back against the tunnel wall, and I do the same. I’d thought of brining toilet paper but then thought maybe that was too prissy so didn’t, but now I wished I had. Especially later, when Antoine trudges off to take a dump in a dark corner, clutching a pink roll I know he nicked from Wendy’s apartment that morning.
Before we start walking into the train tunnel, Antoine hands me a giant, heavy flashlight. At first I’m sort of bummed that I don’t get a head lamp like everyone else, but then I’m psyched to have a powerful beam of light to shoot around the cavernous arch. There is so much to look at. Graffiti everywhere, curving onto the bricks overhead. The ground is chunked with rocks that glows a pale gray color. It’s sort of the color of Paris, of the buildings, The quarries we’re hiking towards were formed in 60 BC, when Romans mined the depths for the stone to build the city. Since then the catacombs have served a multitude of purposes — quarries, religious hideouts, bunkers for the French resistance, beer cellars, subways. Charles X threw parties in them, and in 2004 police discovered a fully-functioning cinema/restaurant in one, with rigged electricity fueling a security system consisting of cameras, phone lines and an audio track of dogs barking. The films were1950s noir and contemporary horror films; the food included whiskey and couscous.

**

See Also: Michelle Tea’s Letter From Paris

SECTION 6

At Place d’Italie the square is all lit up for Noelle, with strings of lights cascading down the facade of the town hall, and covering the front of the Centre Commercial, where we are meeting for our into trip into the catacombs. Earlier I had met Killer at the Les Halles mall and followed him through the insane pre-Christmas hordes into the guts of the underground shopping center, to a multileveled sports emporium where we purchased rubber equestrian boots for me and Judy. I’ve got the boots on my feet now; they rise straight up my calves and feel stiff and hardy. Judy had warned me they were ugly but I think they possess a certain militaristic chic. I will rock them on rainy days when I’m back in San Francisco.

The last pair of jeans Killer wore into the catacombs never got clean, so at Wendy’s I’d surveyed my vacation wardrobe, wondering what to sacrifice. Of course I only brought cute clothes to Paris for the holidays! I settle on a pair of purple skinny jeans, having recently read in a fashion magazine that colored skinny jeans are passé. I can’t wear my fancy puffer coat into the catacombs, and the only sweater I have is a clever Marc by Marc Jacobs cardigan I bought especially for this trip, and that is not going underground. Judy had said the catacombs are actually quite warm, so I figure I’ll just pile on some long sleeve shirts, San Francisco-style. I packed a little ziplock baggie with my ID, in case we get arrested. Since 1955 it has been a crime to go into the catacombs, punishable with a fine of about a hundred and thirty Euros, more if you’re caught in the burial crypts, as messing with remains is a different, more serious offense. According to Judy, there are gangs of French Nazis who like to sabotage Jewish cemeteries; perhaps the law was beefed up to deal with them. I bring my cigarettes, doubtful that the enclosed space of the catacombs will prevent anyone from smoking. I bring my house key, some Euros. I bring a bottle of lube. When the idea of the catacomb trip first arose some nights ago, the plan quickly grew to include a sex and MDMA party. I haven’t done drugs or drank in over five years and don’t miss it, but this was the first instance when I felt like sobriety was maybe preventing me from experiencing something awesome. Ecstasy in the catacombs! It’s not ecstasy, Antoine corrected me. Ecstasy is MDMA that’s been stepped on, cut with baby powder or ajax or heroin or speed. Antoine’s MDMA is pure.

I dropped my tiny plastic bag into a bigger plastic bag where I’d packed a sandwich, plus some chips and chocolate to share. It’s hard to get my head around the catacombs, what to expect. I need boots because I’ll be up to my knees in water, but we’re going to have a picnic? Killer’s jeans were ruined forever, but Antoine insists the water is clean? It’s filled with mud, but we’re going to have a sex party? I don’t think I’ll feel pretty enough, I had said at the dinner party, imagining myself covered in scummy scum of questionable origins. Antoine smiled his shy smile and said something French. Everyone is pretty covered in mud.

When I meet up with the group I feel proud and capable in my rubber boots, lugging my plastic bag. I don’t speak French, and therefore butt up against how totally incapable I am every day, causing the tiniest triumphs to resonate. But the crew regard me uneasily. Do you not have a backpack? Everyone has backpacks. But no one told me to bring a backpack! I don’t even own a backpack! I Just Thought I’d Carry This, I swung my plastic bag in front of me. I’d thought I was such a genius, packing everything into a grocery sack instead of my leather purse. You are going to need your hands, Antoine says carefully. He’s been promising that on Monday he’ll speak English to me, and it’s Monday, so he’s trying. Oh, I said. Hmmmm. Others arrive, terribly late — Alice, Jade, Sasha, Kay, Alec. Alec has a baby face and a baby blue mohawk and is currently homeless after cops closed down the squat he’d been living in in Lyon. Kay is recently back in Paris after travels to Berlin and San Francisco, where he stayed with a professional dominatrix in Fairfax. He also is currently homeless. Sasha is a genius, wearing one of those camelback-thingies, a cloth flask of water strapped to his back. Recently evicted from the same Lyon squat that gave Alec the boot, he too is homeless. Jade I have only seen wearing extreme fetish gear, so it’s sort of great to see her in a pair of mom jeans and a backpack. Alice, a butch-dating-butch, appreciates how the journey into the catacombs is forcing everyone to drop their intensely gendered wardrobes. Tonight we are not butch, or femme, or trans, we are all just queer people, she said, surveying the fashion. Killer appears to be wearing something like a fleece pullover. Even Judy, who lives in microscopic dresses and skirts, wears jeans, a pink pair she’d stolen from H+M and hadn’t yet had an occasion to wear. Alice looks nervously at my fancy puffer coat, pretty femme with its ruffled sleeves and golden buttons. You won’t wear that down there? No! Well, what will you wear? Um, I Have A Long Sleeved Shirt On? Oh no, Alice shakes her head and looks around for support. You will be cold! I Was Told It Was Hot! No, Alice shakes her head somberly. Oh well. C’est La Vie, I say brightly, always thrilled to remember something French.

Antoine was stressed at everyone showing up late. After a certain hour, a gang of people in backpacks and water boots are only up to one thing, and are easily nabbed by the cops who patrol the area. He in particular looks like an obvious cataphile, with his two giant rubber boots looped through the sides of his bulging backpack. DJ Wet, who has visited the catacombs, told me the police play a cat and mouse game with the trespassers, soldering shut loose manholes that lead down into the depths, only to have them pried back open by explorers. Wet talked about climbing out of one covered in mud, to the shock of a bunch of cafe dwellers dining alfresco feet away. Earlier in the week, strolling the Jardin de Luxemborg, I’d noted the manholes dotting the parkscape with excitement, knowing they led to the catacombs. Sometimes the cops lop the ladders off so you can’t climb down. But we won’t be entering via manholes tonight.

Antoine, Killer, Michelle, and Judy

SECTION 5

If anyone gets up to sleep in the other room, someone has to go with them. No one sleeps alone, okay? Judy declares.

Okay, I say, touched.

Her screams during sex were so intense, like she was getting murdered, but then they opened up into a tornado of laughter at the end, her phenomenal mouth stretched to the ceiling, where a couple of American dollar bills are taped with, $1,000,000.000 written on them in Sharpie. Wendy must have seen The Secret.

We fall asleep, or rather the French people do, because all three of them start snoring. Or maybe it was just Judy, she snores loud as a bed full of recently fucked drunks on MDMA. When Antoine gets up and leaves the bed I take note, but can’t bring myself to chase after him. Partly I’m paralyzed by some melatonin I’d taken earlier, partly I feel shy, like maybe he doesn’t want me to follow him. Maybe he wants to be alone in his MDMA haze. Eventually Killer goes with him, and I fall asleep and dream that the four of us are getting mani-pedis in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, all laid out on the sidewalk on towels, like we’re at the beach. Then I dream I’m in a grand hotel introducing my mother to Killer and Antoine and she keeps calling them ‘she’ and I’m so frustrated with her because I just got out of an eight-year relationship with a trans guy so it’s not like she doesn’t know about trans guys. Why is she being so dense? In my half-awake state I ponder Killer and Antoine and the awful medical binders they wear to smooth their chests, how it hurt them to climb the seven stories to Wendy’s apartment. I hate that there is a three-year wait in Paris for trans guys to get their top surgery, and then they are sent to contemptuous doctors who butcher them. Judy tells me of a trans guy who just had his top done and was flashing his new pecs at everyone for approval. Amazing! everyone cheered. What could we say? He’ll have that body for the rest of his life! Judy said sadly. His chest was a mess. Killer is attempting to save the thousands of dollars required for a pilgrimage to San Francisco to have his surgery done by the legendary Dr, Brownstein, artisan of the near-perfect trans male torso. I wonder how long it will take Killer, who is essentially a social worker, working with developmentally disabled senior citizens, to save up enough to get rid of the binder that’s crushing his body. I hate that trans surgeries aren’t recognized as urgent and necessary, not covered by insurance in the United States and managed so ignorantly here in France, whose health care system I’d so admired in Sicko.

When I wake up Killer has gone and fetched us croissants and juice. He had to devise a whole system to get back into the building as he didn’t know the code and didn’t want to wake anyone. He’s very proud of himself. He gets me breakfast every morning, Judy says proudly. Not just for one-night-stands. Judy has been working very hard at getting the butches to practice ‘butch service’, a sort of chivalry that includes femmes getting their cigarettes lit and I’m not sure what else. This post-orgy breakfast surely scores Killer big Butch Service points.
I’m in a sleepless fog, still muffled from the melatonin, and from the sex and the constant overwhelmingness of being in another country. Thank you, I gush to Killer. Just make me some coffee, he says. All I want to do in the whole world is make espresso for Killer, I swear, but we used it all last night so I toss my long puffer coat over my lingerie and run out into the streets, deranged. I can’t find the bodega I got the coffee at before so I wind up careening through a three-story supermarket way down on Rue des Martyrs, looking at people and bleating, Cafe? I can’t remember S’il vous plait, or even Merci. I’ve been gone for so long, and still have to walk up seven flights of stairs! I’m worried that my menage is worried. I’m worried that they’ll leave because I’m taking too long and they need caffeine. Both these things almost happen, but I swoop in in the nick of time and make the coffee. We’d thought you’d been raped in Pigalle! Judy gasps. I was going to go look for you! Killer and Antoine smoke. Antoine reads the newspaper. Judy dunks her croissant in her orange juice. Tonight we go to the catacombs.

**

More Michelle Tea

SECTION 4

Judy, who was in the front seat of the cab, turned around and said, We would like to have a sex party. I am amazed at my good fortune. Every time I wrap up an affair with someone I’m certain it is the last time I will ever have sex, and each time someone reveals that they’d like to get with me I’m astounded at my luck and flooded with gratitude. This could only seem desperate or insecure or otherwise unattractive, deadly to groovy sex vibes, so I play it cool.

Yeah, Sure, Totally.

You’re going to fuck a Christmas tree tonight! Judy cheers.

Judy at a rally

She played a Christmas tree in one of Louise de Ville’s earlier numbers. In a green strapless dress, wearing a plastic icicle as an earring, she was roped by the burlesque performer in garlands of tinsel and, once immobilized, left at the edge of the dance floor for the duration of the performance. For three songs she stood there, her hands tied in front of her, looking absurd and endearing.

Michelle Tea

The cab lets us off at Pigalle and we stumble into a bodega— I can’t remember the French word for it because I can’t remember any French words, but the first part of it is the word for spice, which my useless Rough Guide Phrase book doesn’t list, just like it doesn’t list the words for scandal or honor. Killer and Antoine get a giant bottle of beer and I get a pack of cigarettes. At the apartment I make coffee with the little stovetop espresso maker and Antoine pulls out a bindle of MDMA and arranges some lines on the counter. The first night I met Antoine he was on MDMA. I learned this the following night, at another party, when he seemed to be crying on the couch. He’s crashing from MDMA, someone said. Oh, totally. Later I ran into him snorting more in the kitchen when I was fetching French Diet Coke with lemon. Why don’t they put lemon in the Diet Coke in Estats Unis? This makes three nights in a row that Antoine is on MDMA, and he plans to do some in the catacombs tomorrow, so Antoine is just pretty much really really high all the time. When I comment on this he inquires, Can you tell the difference? and I honestly can’t, except maybe his English is a little better when he’s sober.

Killer eats the gooseberries in the cardboard boat that I bought at the quaint fruit stand around the corner. I offer him cheese as well but I only have camembert and he only eats chevre and I don’t know if this is because he is a cheese snob or is lactose intolerant. Then he informs me that my camembert is actually brie and tells me he will show me true, quality French cheese. I’m sort of delighted that the dirty broke Parisian queers who sneak onto the Metro and get kicked out of bars for using the bathrooms but not purchasing drinks have high taste in cheese. They also instruct me to choose juice over Diet Coke, for the vitamins, and urge me to eat salad, to ease the affects of my Parisian diet of chocolate and fromage.

Oh my god is this story ever going to get to the catacombs? Wait, I’m having sex with Antoine and Killer at the same time while Judy smiles on like a benevolent angel. No way, man. This is easily one of the best nights of my life. Like real French people, they barely stop smoking to fuck. Antoine is putting his cigarette in my mouth and exhaling in my face. It would be gross in any other city.

Afterwards we hang out and cuddle. I am told by Antoine that the rumor among the queers was that I didn’t fuck. I am aghast to have such a horrible rumor spread about me! Lies!

That’s Insane! I sputter. Everyone Fucks!

Soon I understand that they weren’t suggesting I don’t make sweet sweet love with my life partner d’jour, but that I don’t fuck in the sporting way they do, taking a lover here and there, this way and that, Monday Tuesday Wednesday with a night off Thursday and a new body on Friday. I am humbled. I guess I don’t fuck. I’m disappointed in myself, but play it off like there’s been a terrible misunderstanding, easily disproved with my presence at this very sex party. Judy has my back, anyway. I told them, have you read her books! Then we go into the bedroom and do it again. Killer’s cock is cotton-candy pink, because queers in Paris who prefer a phallus they can both wear in their pants all night and put to use in the boudoir have only two choices, pink and blue. This makes me sad for all the butches, and I resolve to send them a care package of dildos with more dignified hues. After we resume cuddling.

Oh my god I want to move to Paris and live here forever. I want to have a Henry and June and Anais relationship with Judy and Killer, I’m in love with both of them. I want to be able to mosey up to cute Antoine and just make out with him whenever I want, with the casual elan of Judy the nineteen year old French porn star.

**

See Also: Our Assistant Editor Can’t Pay Her Rent

See Also: Michelle Tea’s Letter From Paris Blog

See Also: Post Young, by Jerry Stahl

SECTION 3

After kissing on furniture I later learn from Wet is intensely germ-ridden, I followed Antoine up the curving, wrought-iron staircase and out into the street. It is a Parisian street which means it looks like a movie set, with blue and white Christmas lights hung in sky and a corner store with stands of fruit tumbling forth like bulbous jewels. The queers all sat on the sidewalk like a gang of degenerates. I gave them cigarettes. Since coming to Paris all I’ve done is smoke, my rationale being that since everyone is constantly smoking everywhere, I am basically smoking, too, like it or not, so I might as well indulge.

Antoine is speaking to Alice, a tall androgynous girl with a blonde mohawk who gets both prettier and more handsome every time I see her. She is leaving soon to do queer activism in Sweden, but for now she is Antoine’s lover and translator. Antoine has so many lovers he frequently gets amorous text messages from ladies he can’t quite remember, including one in Spanish that ends with Te amo. He also has a girlfriend attending art school in Geneva — not a primary lover, in the polyamorous tradition of having a main squeeze while you screw the masses, but a girlfriend in the traditional tradition of having a girlfriend whom you massively cheat on. I learn this far too late for it to be an ethical concern.

An would like to go home with you, but he has a friend staying at his house who is more than a friend, so he can not take you there, Alice explains.

Wendy Delorme

We can go to my house, I problem-solve. My house belongs to the writer Wendy Delorme, whose recent novel Quatrieme Generation is emerging as bible and guide to a butch/femme culture straddling this Parisian community and the one I sort of occupy back in San Francisco. She lives on the seventh floor of a building in Pigalle, by a strip of red-lit bars where moody women in lingerie smoke cigarettes in the windows all night.

The other evening I had walked in the direction of the famous Moulin Rouge a block away, it’s red neon windmill blinking behind the sparse winter trees. A roaming pack of guys tried to block me on the sidewalk outside the imposing SEXODROME sex compound. Non comprends, I snapped, walking around them. Fucking bitch! They started yelling, quickening their pace behind me. Fucking bitch, won’t talk to us! Oh, great. I crossed the street and lost them, but now felt like a fool toddling over to gawk at the Moulin Rouge in what is a tawdry sex district frequented by choads. I dashed off to the safety of nearby Rue des Martyr, which has the air of a recently gentrified ghetto, replete with overpriced patisseries and cheese shops and hair salons selling American hair products. I got a five-Euro Coke and sat beneath a heat lamp reading the new Edmund White Rimbaud biography.

In the cab back to Pigalle after the club I’m like, why are Judy and Killer in the cab? Neither of them live near Pigalle. Judy lives with her family in the suburbs of Paris — where the broke people live while the moneyed occupy the city proper, a la Oakland and San Francisco. Judy’ mother thinks she’s on a bad path, that the porn business will drive her to suicide. They fight about it all the time. It’s a lot to expect a parent to approve their teenage daughter’s wish to have sex with strangers in front of rolling movie cameras, but Judy just isn’t the sort of person to be private about anything. She’s too exuberant. As a result of this tumult, she spends most of her time at Killer’s house. Killer has great hair, a fringy cascade of bangs that hang in his face and the rest is shaved or short. He sports suspenders and a coat made in the early 1900s and generally has the look of a charming nineteenth-century pickpocket. His cheeks get red when he drinks, his eyes are a crystalline green, his cheekbones are dramatic, and his nose turns up just the slightest. Killer is fucking hot, and even though everyone in this queer milieu is totally polyamorous with surprisingly little dramatic fallout, and even though I’ve watched Judy skip up to people and open her pretty mouth onto theirs as a bonjour, I still didn’t imagine I would get anywhere near Killer, because he and Judy are so deliriously love he proposed to her via Skype when she was last in San Francisco. The pair plan to get married after his chest surgery, in Paris for sure but maybe also in San Francisco and even Las Vegas.

**

See Also: Michelle Tea’s Letter From Paris Blog

See Also: Rick Moody’s Music Blog

Read Part 1

Part 2. All I wanted to do in Paris was have an affair, go to the Louvre, and see the catacombs — the underground labyrinth that snakes beneath the city and has served many purposes, most famously as a crypt containing the bones of over five million Parisians who’d been buried in the hideously overcrowded Les Halles cemetery in the eighteenth century.

Finally becoming a health hazard, the city disinterred the remains in 1785 and carted them through the city each night, a process which took fifteen months. I’ve seen pictures of the rooms, stacked floor to ceiling with the skulls and bones of peasants and aristocrats, commingling forevermore beneath the bustling streets of Paris. I can’t believe my good fortune that less than a week after arriving the affair part has already occurred, and the catacomb segment is looming, because Antoine, who I’d been wanting to make out with for days, and finally did, on the couch in the basement of a queer bar as the DJ played Bauhaus, is a cataphile, meaning an individual obsessed with Les Carrieres de Paris, the quarries of Paris, or the catacombs.

The famous, skeleton-packed tombs are only one small part of an intricate underground world that trails for miles beneath the city, and as the officially sanctioned and heavily touristed area, they’re fairly ignored by those whose true joy is the forbidden exploration of a subterranean maze that contains many clandestine activities, most of them benevolent, some not. Antoine is going to lead us all into the catacombs on Monday night, but first we have to get through Sunday night, where the queers in Paris are gathered at a monthly event called Butch is Beautiful.

A butch/femme revolution is shaking up Paris’ otherwise sedate gay and lesbian culture; during my visit the lesbian magazine Muse runs a cover story on the phenomenon, with interviews and photos with all my new friends. Apparently, the article is awful. They called me a sexy worker! moans Judy, outraged. I said I’m a sex worker! What is a ‘sexy worker’?! In San Francisco and probably throughout the United States, butch/femme culture — in which feminine queers girls dress like little drag queens and masculine queer girls are essentially boys — is no big whoop, but here in Paris it is provocative and new, and the queers involved in creating the artistic, philosophical and sexual space for it to flourish are totally revved up about it. The energy is similar to the San Francisco queer scene I moved to in 1993, everyone totally excited to have sex with each other and flaunt their newly understood genders

Tonight’s edition of Butch is Beautiful (which is the brother club to another party called Femme is Fabulous) is being called Buche is Beautiful, as in Buche du Noel, which is a log-shaped cake decorated with chocolate gnomes and marzipan mushrooms and is very popular at Christmas, just days from now. At Butch is Beautiful DJ Wet, handsome in a flannel shirt and yellow aviator glasses with scribbles and scrawls tattooed on his elbows, plays a great, weird collection of music — 96 Tears morphs into Kate Person shrieking Why don’t you dance with me! morphs into MIA letting you know what you can get for ten dollars, the Beastie Boys’ antifeminist anthem Girls, Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control and Beck’s Loser. No one in Paris knows what music is cool so people spin whatever they want, someone explains. Everyone goes wild when a song by Deborah Degout, who earlier warped the lyrics to traditional French holiday songs and set them to the music of her blues-punk guitar, is played. The chorus goes Je suis bonne! which people tell me is hard to translate into english. It’s sort of like, I’m hot, but also like, I’m good, like better than hot, like I’m the shit, I can’t fucking believe how amazing I am. Everyone in the basement of Le Soeffleurs nightclub — which is cramped, with a low curving ceiling and stone walls, a cave, really — is jumping up and down screaming Je suis bonne! Earlier there was a burlesque show, and an American expat named Louise de Ville did a Mrs. Claus routine, faux-sodomizing a butch in Santa Drag. They both had glass Christmas bulbs dangling from their strap-on dildos, like testes. Louise resembles a the burlesque star Dita von Teese, and makes money both teaching English and as an international jewelry model for Christian Dior. At their private parties across Europe she dons a black leotard, ballet shoes and a black mask and pantomimes stealing the diamonds off the unbearably rich clientele. Before she shook her rump to Madonna’s Santa Baby, I read from Valencia in English, alternating with Judy, who read from her French translation. When she translated the thump, thump, thump of a fisting scene into a bump, bump, bump, I couldn’t stop laughing. Later I’m on the couch making out with Antoine, who is tugging my shirt up to my collarbone. When I try to dig under his Sun Records t-shirt I encounter the impenetrable fortress of a medical binder, which most of the butches and trans guys wear to keep their chests in line.

Everyone says Antoine can speak English but he won’t because he thinks his accent sucks. These people don’t understand that English sounds way better when it’s completely mangled by a hot French accent. I met Antoine a couple nights ago at a dinner party. He started the evening as Antoinette with a female pronoun but ended it as Antoine and male, though people seem to call him both. Everyone was excitedly discussing how earlier he’d passed for an eighteen-year-old boy, but the only real surprise was that he passed for eighteen. I would have guessed sixteen. His eyes are huge with the slightest droop and he’s got Snow White’s coloring — milky white skin that looks soft as a baby with pink cheeks, clumpy dark hair and a mischievous grin. He also has great style, sporting chunky sneakers and interesting tattoos, black squares on his thumbs that lock up when he brings his hands together. Since everyone was making out with everyone at that party, and then at another party the following night, I had my fingers crossed that it would only be a matter of time before someone made out with me, and was thrilled that it was Antoine.

1. I would fall in love with Killer if he wasn’t madly in love with the most genius girl ever, a nineteen-year old porn starlet named Judy who is working on a french translation of my book Valencia even though publishers keep telling her they have no money and can’t pay her. It’s a labor of love, just the like original ethos of her porn career, when she decided she wanted to make dirty movies that starred her and made money for no one, not even herself, and were distributed under her control. This plan went belly up when Judy realized she didn’t have the equipment or connections to start a one-woman porn empire. She checked the internet for porn companies that seemed to share her queer, pro-BDSM, sex-radical, feminist philosophy, and was most impressed by Kink.com, the smut peddlers who had set up shop in a crumbling Armory in San Francisco’s mission district, previously used as a shooting gallery for adventurous junkies and a great place for skaters to practice tricks.

Michelle Tea

Judy came to San Francisco, with the intention of working for Kink. She was seventeen years old but would turn eighteen during the course of her trip; she thought Kink would be wild to shoot some barely-legal scenarios at the moment the clock struck midnight on the day of her birth. And they probably would have, for Judy is truly lovely — teeny, with a gleeful red smile that swallows her face, and giant brown eyes fringed with curling eyelashes — but Judy didn’t have a Green Card, and so Judy could not celebrate official adulthood with the filming of her first porn.

Instead, she befriended a crack addict hanging out by the Cable Car turn around who was holding a sign that said I NEED A GIRLFRIEND. Judy had enough money for a hotel room, but she spent her three weeks in San Francisco sleeping in a tent with the crack addict beneath the freeway overpass down on 2nd Street. Her previous vacation included fishing for piranha with homemade fishing poles in the Amazon alongside her brother, a war photojournalist, so Judy’ vacation expectations are different from, say, mine. She got totally caught up in the insulated culture of the homeless encampment, charmed by the camaraderie of the addicts and mentally compromised folks who lived there. She heard one man ask another who sang the pop song he was crooning. I do, the singer said. Yeah, said the first guy, not missing a beat, but who does the really famous cover of it, the one they play on the radio? Judy loved this, how the one guy took care of the other, letting him hold onto his delusion. I thought the dude sounded like a classic enabler, that such enabling probably helped the singer acquire his lean-to lifestyle beneath a San Francisco bridge, but my analysis struck me as hopelessly American — canned, limited, reactionary, even.

I’m spending three weeks in Paris, away from the tyranny of American mental health and self-improvement. My companions are a tight-knit, incestuous gang of young femmes, butches and trans guys who call each other the queer family and spend all day every day together, making out, smoking, talking politics and theory, occasionally doing something excellent like dropping a banner off the side of the Centre Pompidou in support of a queer liberation group persecuted by the Turkish government. They make porn together and throw parties and write essays about feminism and BDSM. Riding the Metro with the queer family is like an old-fashioned Queer Nation visibility action, the train car charged as the larger Parisian society takes in this troupe of indeterminately gendered tranny butches in mohawks and leather jackets and glued-on facial hair that sprinkles off one drag king’s chin like confetti. And then Judy, who wears only teeny-tiny miniskirts, heels, and ornaments in her glossy hair. I’m not a woman, I’m a Femme, she says, a proclamation perhaps assisted by the fact that the English word for femme the identity is the French word for femme the sex, woman. In France Femme is Fem, so Judy n’est pas une femme, elle est un fem. Also, she has a copy of Oliver Twist jammed into the front pocket of her winter coat, because in addition to being a porn actress she is a student of English Literature.

Judy talked to me as we waited for the free nighttime bus at the Place d’Italie, her feet for once not in heels or sparkly flats but, like mine, soaked inside rainboots after trespassing in the catacombs. She was high and chatty on MDMA; I was bleary from sleep deprivation. Across the street was a fuss. Someone had fallen off one of the free Vilbe bikes and cracked their head. The cops had arrived, then an ambulance, then a fire truck. Soon a bus would come, open it’s doors briefly, and drive off as we approached. Apparently this was business as usual in Paris, land of impossibly cruel bus drivers. Judy resumed the story of her life, which was epic and utterly charming, told as it was through her face, stunning and colorful as something in a patisserie window. Last night, having sex with her boyfriend, Killer, and Antoine, who led us through the catacombs — and also Judy, I suppose, as she was there, and our hands did lay on each other occasionally, and we did kiss each other, though not in the French way — I found myself so moved by her raw loveliness it was as if I standing in front of a monument. If You Were Any Prettier It Would Be Impossible To Look At You, I told her, because there is something about the way in which Judy is beautiful that makes me think of light, the way her white teeth flash inside her frequent smile, her total joy at life, her passion for crazy living that could be written off as being nineteen years old except it’s not. Judy is electric, and the caliber of her beauty is influenced by her extreme good cheer and near-mystical openness to the world around her, and this is how she will always be, I promise. Looking At Your Face Is Like Watching Fireworks, I told her, and she clamped her hand to her mouth to contain a squeal. I’m going to cry! she said, then translated to Killer and Antoine, whom we were heaped upon, lounging on a mattress covered with Persian tapestries in a room in Pigalle beneath a window that looked out onto the lunar dome of Sacre Coeur.

**

See Also: Swinging Modern Sounds, a blog about music by Rick Moody

Michelle Tea is the author of four memoirs, a collection of poetry and the novel Rose of No Man’s Land. She runs Radar Productions, a literary non-profit that produces the monthly Radar Readung Series, the annual Sister Spit: The Next Generation all-girl performance tour, and other fun times.