NUMBER FOURTEEN: Back in Paris

Third day back in Paris. In an internet cafe, and although it is nifty that I am in Paris, in MONTMARTRE, blogging away in an internet cafe, I hate writing in public.

Today we decided not to go to the Louvre, and instead visit Pere Lachaise cemetary. Somehow, the fact that just about every celebrity ever is buried there did not tip us off that Pere Lachaise is fucking gigantic. I highlighted some graves I wanted to see-Chopin, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and of course Mr Morrison, and then Victoria took the map and said There are probably some you don't know. I tried not to take offense to that. She highlighted a bunch of names, and I developed a sneaking suspicion that perhaps she only had a vague idea of who some of the people on her list were. Colette? Just Colette. Not even a fucking last name.

We searched for Colette first, too. My suspicions were confirmed. Any grave in the area bearing the name Colette, followed by any last name, was a suspect grave. She asked me if they seemed too early or too late to be Colette herself (himself?). I said they were all too late, but fuck if I know.

The first grave we found was Chopin's. It took us about an hour, searching through narrow isles and past OPEN tombs, open, I kid you not. Some of those are just trashed, it's awful and disgusting and morbid. They probably clean out the graves that have been opened by like, growing trees, but who knows-the graves are so deep it's hard to see the bottom, and they're probably so old that any earthly remains (AP Comp, anyone?) have probably turned to just earth by now. So anyway, we finally find Chopin, and just in time; an entire group of stupid, fat, pastey foreigners speaking a language that could have been Russian or some eastern European language have arrived to pay their respects to the man. They line up to take their stupid, fat, pastey foreign pictures, one by one, and Victoria doesn't just want to take a picture and leave. I respected her wishes to wait out the entire gang of assholes so that she could have her moment alone. This takes a long time. Everyone in the group of thirty or more wants a picture. Why? I don't know. They probably don't give a shit about Chopin, they probably could not pick his face or his music out of a crowd, and yet they still want a picture. I hate people.

After Chopin, I was on a roll. I learned how to read the confusing and complicated map and succeeded in finding all the following graves on our list, including Chompollion and Jim Morrison. Asking for a moment alone with Jim would have been too much, especially when there was a slightly younger teenage girl staring at the grave forlornly. I already felt like Jim was the asshole of the cemetary because people had scratched his name and arrows towards his grave on other tombs, a totally asshole thing to do, and this was sealing the deal. I heard the girl say to her mother that she wanted to wait until everyone was gone, which to me meant game on. I was not going to leave until she did.

Or so I thought. I watched her, in her short skirt and high boots, watch Jim Morrison's lifeless grave. I watched her take pictures with a fancy high-tech camera. I watched her film the grave a bit. And then she took out an old, black, POLAROID camera, aimed the thing, and pulled the trigger. FUCK THAT. You win, bitch. I would never take a Polaroid of his grave after that. Victoria caught on to this, and I think the girl heard Victoria ask me if the reason I wasn't going to stay was because she had just taken a Polaroid. Yes, Victoria, yes. That is why I am not going to do that.

I was in a groove. I found our way through small, confusing little paths to the plot where Moliere and Lafontaine were hidden. I had learned, by that point, that the famous graves (with the exception of Jim's) are pretty easy to find. They're normally right along the path so that you don't have to hike through other people's graves to find them, and they're usually kind of big and flashy-Champollion had a big phallic obelisk, Chopin had a bust and a LOT of flowers, Balzac had phallic obelisk with a bust on top, etc. So Moliere and Lafontaine were not too hard to find. They're big, surrounded by a gate, and right next to each other. The only problem was that Victoria had not found them. So I waited for her to show, called her name a bit-nothing. I kissed a grave, thanked the occupant, apologized, and sat on their tomb for ten or fifteen minutes, then decided I could not do this any more. I left Pere Lachaise, bought a diet Coke (Coca light, sil vous plait) and got into a phone booth.

I called home collect twice, and the second time my brother answered. It was five in the morning California time, I knew that, but I also did not care. I spent a good twenty minutes or half hour in the phone booth and managed to get ahold of my brother, who told my mom had spent the night at someone's house, my father, who wasted my time, and no one else. I walked down the street and got in another phone booth, called the grandparents. Although panicked, they were probably happy to feel important and needed, so they were happy to call up the ENTIRE FAMILY in France trying to get ahold of Victoria. It is a well-known fact in the family that the grandparents are a HIGHWAY for information. If you tell a grandparent ANYTHING, within a day, the entire family will know. These are women who can speak for hours on the phone. Not one hour, or two-my grandfather once clocked six, six hours on the telephone. Alexandra tells me that her mother, the sister of my grandmother, calls daily (and ALWAYS during dinner, no matter at what time dinner is had, I have observed this firsthand) and speaks nonstop. She talks about every detail of her old, boring life. Old, boring life. Again: old, boring life. What color the neighbor's new dress is, how she should have gotten it in a different color because this color really doesn't suit her, how many centimeters the grass grew and how much they cut it so that it was only one centimeter high, how many flowers bloomed on the plants outside. I cannot make this shit up, my friends.

So my grandmother calls Yvonne. Line's busy. Of course. So she calls Yvonne's daughter Alexandra, no one answers. She calls Alexandra's brother, Jean-Louis, who is gay and lives in Brest with his life partner Pascal, and Jean-Louis is not home. I interrupted her here by calling her again. Had I not, she would have probably proceeded to call her other sister Suzanne, Suzanne's crazy daughter Catherine, Catherine's son Lenaike, our family friends the Gardets, etc etc. She tells me to take a taxi back to Montmartre and wait for Victoria there. I go to the cab station and FAIL at getting a cab. My fatal error? Using tu instead of vous to address him. Faux PAS. That is considered impolite, so I can only hope that he heard my accent and forgave me as he drove away. Thankfully, Victoria received a call from Yvonne, left the cemetary, and found me as I was standing on the street and failing at getting a taxi and taking the metro. So that was fun. And I didn't even get to see Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, or Oscar Wilde. Just Jim Morrison, what a dick.