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.
