Valentine for Dead Dreamers
We puffed on black hardwood pipes, drawing in puffs of soft pink smoke from a homemade tobacco garnished with rose petals that gave out a slight scent of strawberry.
In bed with my dear companion, Marcel Proust, old friend and courage-teacher, in his quiet cork-lined room deep in fine silk sheets discoloured over time by disease and tobacco, like a once young and proud British sea captain slowing succumbing to malaria.
And there we lay, like gentlemen, Marcel waxing his moustache with the aid of a small folding mirror and I filing my nails with a Chinese emery board, which I’d unwrapped from a green silk handkerchief with my initials embroidered in gold thread. With each nail finished I briefly imagined myself some sort of minor ancient deity, my nail dust falling in a snowy maelstrom that the teeming multitudes of microbes and dust mites would sing to their children for generations to come.
We lay in bed and scoffed at Valentine, old eunuch-saint, draping himself in red velvet and lace, tarted up for a night on the town with Cupid. That couple had nothing ennobling about them. They were a pair of trashy whores who would part their skirts for a dare and a handful of francs. Which is all well and good, but has nothing to do with that strange myth we call love.
Marcel and I prefer Sebastian as the saintly embodiment of the human heart–which is not a plump and plush symbol found in a deck of cards, but something tangible, a quiver of holes, throbbing in a bath of blood and air, pulling tight like a fist, there to squeeze you another moment, prepared at any second to drag you screaming and torn through life like a bandit tied to a pack of wild horses.
We spoke of valentines, trivial paper nothings and tongues bruised and burned by garish amounts of chocolate.
“If by a valentine” he says, lip nearly frozen under stiff waxy prison bars, “we are to imagine a token of love, then these ephemera are not sufficient means… a sentimental postcard provides none of the thrust of a young lovers tryst, the sweat and anticipation of a salty swollen kiss. The anticipation alone should be akin to the general mood of a bank robbery and the touch itself should hit your head like a jackhammer and crush your skull into a thousand spinning meteors. Your senses should flood and adrenaline run through your body like a wave of thunder and a spark run between your two bodies like a Jacob’s ladder powered by a small sun.”
I thought of every valentine I’ve ever received, and their candy-coloured perfumed lies. No time had I ever loved like the cooing of a baby, like the delightful yap of a puppy running in circles and soiling itself, like the crimson sheets of a revolving bed in a “romantic” suite. I could only think of love like a cold hard fuck on a thick layer of moss, when my every pore opened and breathed and when I came I was lit up like an electric chair and my entire mind turned into a floating cloud of multicolored bubbles and when I withdrew I felt like my body had attained some minor level of Buddhahood. As a greater man than me once wrote I felt “worthy and lyric and pure.”
Proust knew. He could see. He could look into a snow globe and see the whole universe and christen you with words so you felt like you’d always seen it that way yourself. He’d place you there in that glassed-in world so your nail dust was the snow.
His eyes hardened for a moment and I knew the bad times too, my shoulders aching as my hands were tied behind my back with coarse rope, wrapped around a rough wood pole and my chest and legs a quiver for the arrows of pain and forsaken providence. Each puncture wound a little bloodfall and an altogether different sort of ecstasy. Perhaps with the right pose, just the right use of chiaroscuro, my pose would look poetic, charged, defiant, and over the years as much come would be spurted over my look and my shed blood. But no matter how burnished, how worn and smoothed by the many sands of time, my pain would still be my own, and those filthy Christians would spout “love” again, and once again draw back their bows.
I wonder if I’ll die like Proust, a lonely invalid in a sick bed, my mind filled with ever moment of every wonder I’ve ever lived, or bleeding and broken in a fine position like St. Sebastian. I know that I’d rather get a drunken blowjob in a rat-infested back alley or a casual attempt at sodomy in the rusty mildewed corpse of a crashed car in a junkyard, lit only by the occasional blast of fireworks, than I ever would want a card in a red ribbon, or a chocolate heart, or a stupid dewy-eyed dream.
Adam Jones is a filmmaker and Montreal-based gadabout. He’s met Leonard Cohen, and you haven’t.
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