Back in the late 1960s the biggest house in Quincy, Massachusetts was owned by a funeral director. His daughters were the most beautiful girls on the South Shore in 1967 and they introduced Cream to their admirers. I was one of them. So was an apprentice embalmer for their father. The other suitors joked that Adam made love to the still bodies in the basement of the funeral home. He played a strange style of guitar. The older daughter loved his licks. Like Ulysses he slayed his rivals with a secret weapon.
A Fender Stratocaster.
One night when we were high on LSD, Cherie confessed that her boyfriend liked for her to pretend that she was dead.
“I lie on a cold stone slab.”
I remembered a similar line from the film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, in which a cracker cop asked a young white trash girl why she made love in the cemetery.
“Well this man said, “Hey, little girl, you know what the coolest spot in town is?”
And I said “No, Sam. I guess I don’t.”
And he said, “The cemetery. That’s where.”
“Cos they got all of them big, cool tombstones to lie on naked.”
That was a real ‘huh’ moment for the movie viewers of the time.
Like what the fuck are they talking about.
I learned what later when I found the photocopied THE JOURNAL OF LUCIEN H. by Gabrielle Wittkop on the quai by the Seine selling books.
I read several passages and paid the seller fifty francs for LE NECROPHILE.
The prose brought to life the passion of a young man, who digs up bodies of the young and beautiful at the graveyards of Paris.
Gabrielle Wittkop wrote most eloquently, “She is not of the dead from whom I have grief in separating myself, the way one deplores having to leave a fiend. She certainly has a mean character, I would swear to it. From time to time she emits a deep gurgling that makes me suspicious.”
This lover is dead, but he assigns the young girl lifelike mannerisms. Her resistance to him lasts only as long as the rigor mortis.
Lucien’s range of lovers include young children.
He feels no guilt, since he feels as young as his lovers and he sees friend’s beauty in the bloom of death.
Their fine powerful odor is that of the bombyx. It seems to come from the heart of the earth, from an empire where musky larvae trudge between the roots, where blades of mica glean like frozen silver, there where the blood of the future chrysanthemums wells up, among the dusty peat, the sulphurous mire. The smell of the dead is that of a return to the cosmos, that of sublime alchemy.
Lucien is charming in his own way and when a house maid declares that he smells of vampires. He laughs inside for the common peoples’ confusion between a vampire and necrophiliac.
He sis curse by his desire for the dead.
“I can’t see pretty woman or handsome man without wising that they were dead.”
And he is capable of love.
“Suzanne, my beautiful Lily, joy of my soul had started to marbleize with violet patches. I multiply the use of ice., I want to keep her forever.”in their death
Only love and lust.
Lucien dumps her rotting body into the Seine and later remembers Suzanne with tenderness.
“Hardly a day doesn’t go by that I am not reminded of Suzanne. Her breasts with their large brown aureoles, her sunken in belly suspended like a tent between the two points of her hips, her sex whose memory stirs my own sex.Yet today the ivory of her bones, whit what marine life has it integrated?”
Lucien flees Paris for Naples.
The last lines are “November, which always brings me something unexpected, though it has always been prepared.”
Most incredible passage of someone who loves the dead.
Not a serial killer.
Only a man cursed with the desire for death cooled flesh.
I think I have the copy up in Boston.
Probably get arrested for zombie outlawism.
It’s probably on the books.
