I have never been more nervous in my life. I wish I was a human being again so I could be rip-roaring drunk for this. I had a stiff drink of blood from my thermos before we left Dawes’s house (he has me set up on a folding cot in his basement) but it’s not the same. I’ve not done anything at all like this since I was in a speech class back in high school. I keep leafing through the sheaf of papers I have with me--most of it poetry, most of it recent. I’m supposed to read for an hour or so. Then there’s a Q and A. And then a party after, back at Dawes’s house.
“Nervous Henry?” Dawes asks me. He’s just come back from checking the house for the umpteenth time. He tells me there isn’t a seat left. More hand rubbing. This does nothing to assuage my jitters.
“Where’s the head?” I say. There’s nothing to do about it. I am going to be sick.
“The what?”
“The head. The john. I’m going to be sick, Eric,” I say. Some tough writer. What the hell would Hemingway say?
“It’s down that hallway, turn right. And then you have to go down in the cellar.”
“Don’t think I can make…make that,” I say. And then I start coughing like I have the plague. Yeah. Some tough writer.
“Hold on. Don’t vomit all over the floor, sir.”
He finds a metal trash can propped up against the costume cage, slides it across the cement floor to me.
I lose my earlier quota of blood.
“Jesus Christ, Henry. Are you OK?” Dawes says. It looks like you’re vomiting up blood.”
“I’ll be all right…I’ll be all right…I’ll be all right…” I say. I clutch my sheath of poems and stories as if they were sacred texts sent down by God. Stage fright or no, I’m stepping into the ring. I am doing this.
“Are you…are you sure you’re OK?” Dawes says, greatly concerned. He’s looking down into the trash can now, wondering, I can tell, if he should just call this thing off. Get a squad or something. No.
“I’ll be all right,” I say again. “Do you have my check?”
“Yes,” he says, shaking his head in wonderment. He looks at his watch. “You’ve got five minutes before I introduce you.”
I think I’m going to be sick again.
I don’t know what happens, but as soon as I hit the stage, as soon as I step into the harsh glare of the spotlight, all the fear just seems to fall away from me like a dead skin and I feel energized. In control, like I do when I’m scoping out a victim. Maybe it’s the sound of applause because the crowd really gets into it when they see me, like they were welcoming some rock star to the stage. When you are all alone in a little room, typing up poems, it’s just a solitary battle between you and the machine. Sending the stuff out is almost an afterthought. You don’t even think about who might be out there reading. You’re just on to the next bout.
But apparently, I do have fans. At least here in California. It’s good to know. Encourages me.
I stride to this wooden lectern they have set up for me in the middle of the stage, grinning from ear to ear. I train my vampire eyes on the crowd out there, looking for the beautiful women. I put my papers down on the lectern. There’s a microphone connected to the top of it and I pull it closer to my lips. Grace the masses with my words of wisdom.
“Obviously you fuckers know quality when you see it…”
Everyone cracks up. I grin a little more. I’m the Cheshire vampire. All grin.
“I’d like to thank Eric Dawes for getting me out here. Well actually, it was the promise of money and getting laid that got me this far, but that’s another story.”
More laughter. I’m a regular stand-up comic. Forget the damn poems. I’ll just keep them rolling in the aisles with one liners all night.
“I’d like to read you some stuff now. A lot of these have not been published yet, so all I can say about that is…you lucky people. And before I begin…I’d like to dedicate this reading to a very special person who was supposed to be here tonight but…well, shit happens.”
And with that I’m off. The first poem I read is the one that Dawes told me over the phone his class really dug. I managed to dig it up. It’s called “Death Walk”
I play a game with myself
As I walk home
The graveyard shift over.
With each tired step
I recite the name
Of some famous someone
Who is no longer
Living…
Who is dead?
Beethoven is dead
I whisper
Walking past the bakery/factory
Where they are already
Baking the bread
The warm smell everywhere
Its center rumbles
In my empty stomach
Plato is dead
Socrates is dead
Aristotle is dead
And I reach the bus stop.
A black man
In an army jacket
Tries to sell me
Tickets to everything
No thank you, I say
The Marx Brothers
Are dead
Mary Pickford
Is dead
Harold Lloyd
Is dead
And sirens somewhere
Ring the funeral bells
And I cross the railroad tracks
Where I have never witnessed
A train
Patsy Cline
Is dead
Li Po
Is dead
Marco Polo
Is dead
The Wright Bros
Are dead
And the answer
Is the timpani of a garbage truck
Coming my way
And I’m so tired of working
I would just as soon
Fall down here
At the 6th Street community garden
With its naked tomato stakes and
Broken stones
No
Dean Martin
Friedrich Nietzsche
Boss Tweed
They could be buried here
For all I know
And the wild geese honk
Over the stinking river
And the day sneaks in
Like a gray mouse
I soldier home
John Wayne
Is dead
Alice Hargreaves
Is dead
Who else?
Who else
Has died?
Applause. Whistles. The audience knows this one of course. Dawes teaches it in his class. A lot of his students are in the house I hear. They get extra credit for attending.
This is all much better than I expected it would be. I’m having a good time.
I read more poems. I read a short story, recently written, about a vampire with Alzheimer’s who forgets where he has placed his coffin and subsequently expires when dawn comes round. I read and read. I grin and grin. I really feel like I am part of something--a community.
And I’m now 500 dollars richer.
It would be nice if I had a tumbler of blood here on the stage with me--to drink, to toast the audience with.
And it would be nice if Sara was out there listening.
The Q and A session is a bit of a bore. But I am still on a high from reading, so it doesn’t matter that much.
The inevitable question comes first: “Why do you write so much about vampires?”
“I don’t know. They interest me. Better than writing about people who work at the post office, yes?”
“How’s your sex life?”
“Fair to middlin’. How’s yours?”
It goes on like that. To tell you the truth, I’m only half paying attention. There’s a woman in the front row who has my eye. She’s very tall, with long, jet-black hair. She has a gamine, elfin face. Dark, vulnerable eyes. She’s dressed in a tight, sleeveless black top. Lots of tattoo work on her skinny arms. She could be anywhere between thirty and fifty. It looks like she h
as seen a lot, whatever the allotment of years. And she looks awfully familiar to me. I go on auto-pilot during the absurd questioning, trying to figure out where I know this ravaged beauty from.
She meets my steady gaze. She seems as fascinated by me as I am by her. “We are two kindred souls,” she seems to be telling me with her eyes.
And still the audience comes and goes. Talking of Michelangelo.
The party at Dawes’ house might be a bore too if it weren’t for the fact that the woman is there, sitting in a blue chair, drinking down Miller High Life’s. My fans swarm around me like annoying mosquitoes as I try, unsuccessfully, to connect a name to that fragile/tough-looking face.
Dawes comes over to me. If he rubs his hands together any more they are going to burst into flames. I pull a cigarette out of my shirt pocket. just in case.
“That was magic, Henry. That’s the only word for it. Magic.”
“It worked out OK,” I say, deciding that his hands are not going to burst into flames after all and I’m going to have to resort to using a lighter.
“OK? I think we can do better than OK. It was magic,” he says, touching my arm.
“OK. Magic. Can I have my check now, please?”
Dawes laughs, reaches into a jacket pocket, and with a flourish delivers the money to me. “There you go, sir. You earned it, Henry. Oh by the way, there’s someone I want you to meet. Walter…?”
A stocky man wearing a brown t. shirt and jeans comes over from the dining table, where he has been lingering most of the night by the Merlot-in-a-box. He’s in his late 40s or so, with a bushy rust-colored moustache clinging to his upper lip. Like our host, he seems perpetually amused by everything. He beams at me. Another fan.
“Henry, this is Walter Kellar from Oakland. Walter has just started up a small publishing firm, umm…”
“Swan Song Publishing,” Kellar says, grabbing my hand and pumping it furiously several times. The coldness of my flesh doesn’t even seem to register with him.
“Hello.” I’m looking past him, still scoping out my thin, tattooed angel.
“Walter loves you work and…” Dawes says.
“I do. It’s great,” Kellar continues for him. He moves directly in front of me, obscuring the view of my mystery lady. Annoying. “What I’d like to do is publish some chapbooks of your poetry in the future. Say something in the range of 30 or 40 pages to start?”
This does pique my interest a bit. I’ve never had my stuff published in book form before. Lo and behold, things seem to be looking up in my world.
“Maybe,” I say, as coolly as I can. “Depends on how much you plan on paying me…”
Dawes laughs. “That’s our Henry,” he says. “A mercenary soldier if ever there was one. Don’t you ever do anything without attaching a price tag to it, Henry?”
No. And neither does anyone else, I think. I just don’t go around bullshitting about it.
“Hey, it’s the rest of the fucking world that attaches price tags to things,” I shoot back. “I just write. And drink.” For the first time, in the course of the evening, I’m slightly annoyed.
“We will see what we can do,” Kellar says, pinching his moustache thoughtfully. “I’m starting up with my own money, so I don’t expect to see a profit for a while. Here’s a thought…have you ever considered writing a novel?”
Sure. I’ve thought about it thousands of times. I’ve started writing hundreds of times. And I’ve never made it through the first ten pages of such a tome without losing interest, running out of steam. It seems if I don’t deliver something in one glorious sitting, I don’t deliver at all. Like a bowel movement or something.
“Yeah. Just never got too far,” I confess.
“Well…I definitely want to publish your poetry…” Kellar says, reaching into his jean pocket and bringing out a cream-colored card. “Call me and we will work out the details. But if…if you could ever write a novel, that would be fantastic. Because I could probably sell a novel a lot easier than I could sell a book of poetry.”
“Ok,” I say, taking the card and glancing at it. There’s a small, detailed picture of a winged man in the left-hand corner and Kellar’s contact info in elegant red script. Swan Song Publishing huh? Sounds perfect for me.
I look up and suddenly realize that the blue chair is empty. My woman has gone.
Damnit. I wanted her more than I wanted my name on a chapbook.
And then, with a tinge of guilt, I think about Sara waiting for me back home.
“Dawes, can I use your cell? I need to make a phone call again.”
The party in my honor rages on as I try to call home from Dawes study. It’s a neat room, painted green, lined with bookshelves of course. I glance at some of the titles as the phone rings once twice three times. Joyce. Melville. Hardy. All members of the canon. All writers who put me in a coma. I wonder vaguely, as the phone goes to my machine again, if Dawes has any porn stashed anywhere.
“Hello…please leave a message at the sound of the tone,” robot voice burps, over two thousand miles away.
“Sara? Are you there? Hello? Pick up…Pick up, honey.” Nothing happens. Maybe she has gone out to hunt. “Ok. Well the reading went OK, Sara. I’ll tell you about it when I get home. Drink some for me, baby. I love you.”
I hit the end button. Stand there looking around the room. I’m really in no hurry to get back to the party, talk about all things literary. I’m ready to get in a jet again. Get back to Sara’s long legs. And my typer.
“Helloo…”
And there, once again, is the woman I have been making eye contact with all night. She slips into the study, closes the door. And then, smiling, she locks it. Well, what have we here?
“Hello,” I say, very casually. “I thought you had left.”
“No. I just had to get out of the room,” she says. “Fucking writers bore me to tears.”
“Me too.”
“I did think you read really well tonight though.”
“Thank you. Hey. this has been driving me kinda crazy. Do I…do I know you from somewhere?”
“Maybe. I’m Jill Porsino.”
Jill Porsino. Of course she is. I’ve seen her pictures on her books before. She’s one of the few poets on the planet I enjoy reading. I’ve read her book of poetry Ink Stains and Tongue Baths a couple of times at least. Jill Porsino. In the sweet flesh.
“I like your stuff,” I say, stupidly.
“Well I definitely like yours as well.” And without further preamble she comes to me. And we start to kiss.
We go back to her motel room, some Best Western on the edge of Lancaster. There’s a Wal-Mart across the road from it--a giant glowing hangar of a building. Everything looks small and dead compared to it. Like driftwood on the moon.
Of course Dawes is pissed off at me for running away from his thing, as is everyone else. He was supposed to drive me to the airport in the evening.
“Kind of ruins a party when the guest of honor slinks off in the middle of it,” he pouts, as we head for the front door.
“Sorry Eric. Thanks for everything.” And then Jill Porsino is pulling me toward her rental car.
“Did you…did you read here last spring?” I ask, as she drives.
“I did. I get so nervous when I do readings, but they pay the bills I guess.”
“You should have seen me. I threw up my lunch in a trash can before I came on.”
“I come out and play a little blues harp,” she says. “Breaks the ice. I shoulda’ been Sonny Boy Williamson.”
She tells me about her life as we drive. She’s living in San Diego. She used to do writers’ workshops, but the money wasn’t there. Now she works for a scientific publishing firm, abstracting documents.
Because poetry, her one love, pays nothing of course.
We get to her hotel room and we start kissing again, feverishly. She seems to have tattoos everywhere, and I kiss them. There’s one of an Ankh, the Egyptian cross, on her left bicep. And below th
at there’s a tattoo of a man, a black man in profile who is swallowing a harmonica. He looks like Cronus swallowing his children or something.
“Sonny Boy Williamson,” she sighs.
It isn’t long before we are out of our clothes and staggering toward the bed.
“I hope this room has heavy curtains,” I think as I pull her down. “Otherwise I am a goner…”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I knew Emily” Jill Posino says.
We are in bed smoking now, afterwards. She really looks like Lydia the Tattooed Lady or something. She has designs and portraits practically everywhere on her body. On her breasts. On her stomach. On her legs. A pattern of small colored stars close to her pubis. An elaborate rendering of Edgar Allan Poe on her back, looking as mad and dejected as he did in life.
“Who?” I say. I’m really kind of out of it. We’ve fucked about three times now. And now I’m worried about being out of my element here. Sleeping away the day in this vulnerable motel room. And then getting to my flight on time. And I’m thinking about Sara. What would she think about this little maneuver of mine? I’m such a complete shit. First time away from her and I jump into bed without even thinking. Shit.
“Emily Diller. I knew her.”
“OK. How’s Emily?” I say.
“She was your maker, wasn’t she?”
I cough on my smoke, stub it out in the glass ashtray she’s placed between us on the bed.
“She published my first poems if that’s what you mean,” I reply.
“Oh c’mon. Cut the crap, Henry. I’m not completely stupid. Emily Diller was a vampire. And she turned you into one too. She told me the story. About how you came to San Diego. How you found her one night feeding on some dog or something. How she turned you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m having a hard time thinking. The light from that goddamn Wal-Mart is in the room, permeating everything it seems, making everything almost bone white. It seems to be scrambling my thoughts.
“Oh c’mon. Allergic to sunlight? And you are as cold as the inside of a refrigerator. C’mon Henry. I’ve heard the story. I know.”
The Vampire Henry Page 17
