Evenings at Anton’s
New College Review
 
July 2001  
     Damn, the gates are chained. The maintenance crew remembered the padlock. Sometimes they forget. Maybe they’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe they’ll forget tomorrow. Sometimes they do.
     Still, there are scarier looking houses on Alamo Square. Hard to believe this place’ foundations reach all the way to hell. It’s tiny, not even real, a faux Victorian trailer tipped on its side.
     Someone skinny might be able to slip between the gates, maybe some cute, anorexic Goth girl who used to lounge in the basement, on the threshold with its stygian pall as the e-brochure likes to say.
     Penitentiary barbwire blossoms off the top of the barricade. No apparent way in...(at least not for me.)
     Perhaps it was much more imposing in the days when it stood alone. Perhaps it was more imposing in Monroe’s day than in Manson’s; looking more like a purported church with its single A-Frame attic; the whole spectacle painted completely in black and purple.
     Perhaps it was more evil when it rose over smaller buildings or even empty lots.
     Perhaps when it was a glamorous boarding home for Bell House refugees and transients and a N’awlins hoodoo outlaw, ruling the depraved goings on here with an iron fist, wanting only to seed a little paradise for her tribe. Perhaps before it was squeezed on either side by mid-seventies apartment buildings, dwarfing it at three stories and three times the market value. Perhaps San Francisco real estate knows something the Devil doesn’t.
     One night there was a light on inside the attic, but the gates were still padlocked. Probably a squatter who snuck between the gates, found a way through the back, or ... the scaffolding, yes, if someone could get up on the scaffolding fronting the apartments next door, and then find a way to scale down into the yard, and it looks like someone thin enough could squeeze their way toward a back door or storm cellar...
     What would I see there?
     Upside down crosses?
     The sigel of Baphomet…Set on the walls?
     Demonic visions? A bed of nails?
     A goat’s carcass? Gnawed human bone? Stale lion and leopard turds?
     Dried blood in the shape of a pentagram full of cum stains?
     Perhaps ompromising photos of celebrities? Linda Blair’s career? Perhaps Sammy Davis Jr.wearing a red cape and red horns?
     Graffiti tags from Christian vandals? “Jesus Rulz”... maybe?
     Perhaps a diary in which Anton confesses all his lies and sloth?
     Nah...probably just a squatter in there.
 
         “conversant with the dead for a living
         holding hands in floral print dresses
         the mannequins of materialism
         pose questions only a masochist would ask.”

          - Christina Fisher, Window Shopping, 2001
 
 
October 2001
     It finally disappeared, Wednesday the 16th; another fabulous temple of the secular world demolished.
     I peer through the barbwire, which now protects a patch of brown dirt. Maybe Osama bin Laden did it…maybe something more evil.
     Why couldn’t Blanche Barton have just charged five dollars at the door? A bargain, like back in the days of the Magic Circle, with cost of living adjustments, of course. Lots of Goth kids would love to be exploited at low wages to maintain a monument like this one. Get a plaque to sit outside on the sidewalk commemorating the site as a city park dedicated in the name of religous tolerance, just to make sure we keep pissing off the Christians.
     I peer through the barbwire hoping for a hint of the roots of hell thrusting out of the ground.
     But there is just an empty lot. So thoroughly empty that it’s an insult, really, in its purity of emptiness. Everyone knows Hell is overpopulated. Everyone knows Hell is hard on the eyes, and long on the skin. Everyone knows that Hell isn’t barren, only death is.
     They say Anton died a long time ago. He said his heart was one with the Church, said that both of them were one with the house, and that those three were one with Mary Ellen and Mammy both.
     Mystery is the presence of mutilated facts. History is the presence of both of these things, indistinguishable.
     I think about the night I saw incandescent light within this grotto chief among grottos. I think about how I won’t get a chance to ever see that again.