The Vampire Henry

by Michael S. Walker

  Just another body in a box.

  I remembered, as I stood there staring at it, expecting it to sit up and yell at me about dandelions or something, the last beating he had given me. It was the summer I graduated from high school, and I had gone to a party where I proceeded to get rip-roaring, deliciously drunk. The next thing I remember, cops were bringing me home in a cruiser and my father was beating me with a stick in our front yard, really laying into me, as I tried to stand up and fight him. “He’s drunk, he’s drunk, he’s drunk,” he kept saying over and over again, as he broke the stick against my body.

  The next day, early, I left home.

  As I stood there in the funeral home, looking at my father’s body, I tried as hard as I could to see if there was something still there: a ghost, his soul, maybe the rage that had animated him for all those years. I burrowed down into the very pores of his skin with my vampire eyes. I wandered through the jungle strands of hair on his head. I looked hard for some sign at his mouth, at his nostrils. Nothing. Just stillness. I could smell the embalming fluid in his veins. The make-up they had applied to his cheeks. But it really wasn’t my father anymore. It was an object. A flesh dummy. I could hear the people in the room sobbing. I could hear them in corners whispering catty remarks about me, the prodigal son. It did not matter in the least.

  I turned around and walked out of there.

  But from time to time, I seem to keep coming back.

  Chapter Nine

  My next-door neighbor is over, talking his shit again. I’m seriously thinking of getting out of my chair and draining him just to shut him up. But I really do not have to feed just yet. That mugger I took had a lot of blood in him and I am holding. Besides, if I did feed on my neighbor, I’m sure all I would be able to taste is more bullshit.

  My neighbor’s name is Juan. He told me his last name once, but I’ve forgotten what it is. He’s from Washington, D.C. by way of some shit hole in Mexico, I gather. He’s stocky, olive-skinned, with a neatly trimmed black beard that he is constantly rubbing and petting. He always seems to be wearing the same white hoodie and black cargo shorts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear anything else. And everything that comes out of his mouth seems to be a lie.

  “So there I was, Henry…are you listening? I had one girl on the bed and I was fucking her. And the other girl was in back of me tonguing my asshole, like she was rooting around in there for a gumdrop.”

  He takes a swig on his Bud Light and gleams at me, waiting for me to envy his Superman sexual exploits. I study his face. The vampire close reading. And I can tell by the way he’s blinking, by his body language, that he’s lying through his teeth. He probably stayed in all last night and beat off to porn. Christ. I thought I was supposed to be the writer here.

  “I always get lucky when I go to that bar. Always get laid. But THAT? THAT was something else,” he says. He starts peeling away at the label on his beer bottle. A moment of silence for a moment that never happened. And then he adds, like he always does: “You need to get laid, Henry.”

  “I do all right,” I counter. I really wish that he would leave soon. There’s a lot of writing I need to do.

  “Shit,” Juan says, softly. “You never seem to leave the house. Always typing.”

  “Well, you gotta pay the bills, Juan.”

  “You should write for the movies, Henry, instead of them magazines. Then you’d really get fucked for sure.”

  I think of Faulkner and Fante and all the other writers who bent over, so they could take it up the ass for steady Hollywood money. Yes, Juan. You MAY have a point there.

  “I’m doing OK, Juan,” I say. Christ, I wish he would leave now.

  “If you call this OK,” he says, looking around my living room. “I lived better in Juarez.”

  We sit there in silence for a few minutes.

  “Speaking of movies,” Juan says. “I watched a good one last night. The Waiting Mortuary with Ben Afleck? You seen that yet?”

  “No.”

  Juan is always asking me if I have seen some cinematic extravaganza or other. And I always say no. I don’t go to movies. Another huge waste of time. Sitting in the dark watching testosterone-addled figures smash things up, fly spaceships, when real life is so much more interesting? I’ll pass.

  “Was this before or after your threesome?” I say, smiling slyly. Gotcha.

  “Oh, way before,” Juan says, blinking. Fucking liar. He probably watched the damn movie three times last night, sitting in his house in his shorts.

  “Sure,” I say, lighting up my xth cigarette of the night. My typer is upstairs, in the spare room opposite where I sleep, and I can literally hear it calling to me.

  “Yeah. That was a good one. Best vampire movie I ever saw.”

  “Vampire, huh? Oh, vampires are pretty scary,” I say, smiling at him.

  “Yeah, this was a good one. I guess the deal was, back in the olden days people were really afraid of being buried alive. I mean they were freaked out about it. And they had these things called waiting mortuaries where they would put the dead for a week or so before burial. Just to see if they might walk off or something.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “And they had these bodies in the mortuary hooked up, like ropes tied to their fingers or whatever, and then the ropes leading to bells. And the deal was, say a person came back to life, the bell would ring. And there was an attendant in another room in the mortuary; it was his job to come in and bring that person up to speed. Anyway, Ben Afleck plays like this medical student and he gets the attendant job in one of these mortuaries. And one night, he’s in the next room reading and one of the damn bells goes off. Scares the fuck out of him. And he runs into where all the bodies are and there’s this hot babe there, getting up off her slab or whatever. And she’s a vampire and she makes Ben Afleck a vampire too.”

  “Yeah?” Jesus, the things they come up with. Maybe I should write a screenplay one of these days. Or a novel that they could turn into a screenplay. The real deal.

  “Yeah. It was pretty good. Not as good as Paranormal 2 but still pretty good. I’ll burn a copy of it, if you want Henry. Only cost you five bucks.”

  Juan is always offering to “burn” off some DVD for me for five bucks. It’s one of the things he does to make extra dollars. He sells t-bone steaks too. Don’t know where he gets them. And MP3 players. His steady gig is running a floor buffer overnight in a Wal-Mart. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

  “That’s OK Juan,” I say. Not only do I have no desire to watch something like that, I have nothing to watch it on. No DVD player. No television even. Just two portable radios that I listen to classical music on. One in here, and one in the spare room with the typer.

  “Are you sure? It’s a good one,” Juan says, taking a swig of his beer.

  What’s he think I’m gonna do? Hold the disk to my forehead and read the 0s and 1s with my mind? I’m a vampire, but I’m not that good.

  “No Juan. Listen, Juan? I got some work to do so…I’m gonna have to call it a night. OK?”

  “Shit,” Juan says. “Have a beer. Let’s go the strip club or something. I got money.”

  “No Juan. I really need to get at it. Got a few ideas for stories. Stuff that’s happened recently.”

  Juan has no idea what it is I write about. I’ve never told him, and he’s never expressed more than a cursory interest.

  “You should write about vampires, Henry,” he says, laughing.

  “Hmmmm…Maybe I will, Juan. Someday maybe I will.”

  “You know anything about vampires?”

  “A little. They seem to be all around me.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Juan looks at me curiously, with hooded eyes. It always looks as if he is about to fall asleep.

  “Nothing…Listen…”

  “Yeah, I know. You gotta work,” Juan says defensively, getting out of his chair. The loneliness coming from him is palpable. I don’t think he has a friend in the world outside of me. A
nd I’m not much of a friend. I do feel sorry for him. He’s just going to leave now, go over to his house, which is probably just as crappy as my own, dial up porn on the Internet, or watch another of his endless movies. No threesomes tonight. Or any night. Maybe I should just…But no. Not tonight, Juan.

  “Sure you don’t wanna go to the strip club?” he says, slowly heading toward the door.

  “I’m sure Juan.”

  “Yeah, well fuck you, Henry. You are no fun at all.”

  “O.K. Juan,” I say, softly.

  Chapter Ten

  Thoughts From A Dirty Old Vampire (The Dirty Jobs)

  I have had some dirty jobs in my life, let me tell you. Bricklayer, security guard, warehouse clerk, bell boy, call-center operator, dishwasher, stocker. If it’s at the bottom of the food chain, I’ve probably done it. And I believe, after all those years of sweating and breaking my back, there really isn’t much to say in praise of money. The pursuit of it warps and perverts people. Brings out the worst in the beast.

  But it’s much easier to have it then not. That is for certain.

  My last job was in a retail store, about two months ago, working graveyard. Now THAT was a dirty job. Not physically really, because I am beyond that. At first, when I started there, I had to unload trucks full of merchandise, put that stuff out on the sales floor. Some of that junk was pretty heavy, but with my vampire strength there were few worries. A few of those sorry fuckers had been there for a long time and they had all sorts of physical problems: bad backs, bad knees, carpal tunnel, etc…

  And at night, they turned off the AC in the place, turned the lighting down to a quarter of what it was in the daytime, just to save the suits a couple of million every year. Again, no worries for me really because I am impervious to changes in temperature. I suppose if you set me on fire I might have a problem, but everything else is comfortable. The rest of the crew there would be working in shorts and t. shirts, sweat dripping from their heads, stinging their eyes; I would be as dry as a cucumber. I remember this one night, they had to send this girl home because she got sick while we were stocking the sporting goods section. Because it was so hot in there.

  The same goes for the diminished lighting. I can see in the dark, no problem. I often keep the lights off at home when I am up to save on the electric bill. Only turn them on when I’m “entertaining.” Some of the other workers there had real problems with their eyesight, straining night after night to read tiny numbers on boxes of merchandise and then match that up with the same numbers on shelves. If I was in their shoes, I would have been reaching for the Yellow Pages, looking for a lawyer to sue the asses off those people.

  No, the thing that really did me in was the sameness of the work, the tedium of doing the same thing over and over for eight hours. There was little talking among the members of the overnight team as they went about their duties and if they did talk it was always the same subjects: the job, the heat, sports, movies (sometimes), music. I’m not really a people person, but I would have liked to have engaged in some sort of conversation when I was working there, just to get my mind off the mindlessness of the tasks. But it never really happened.

  Speaking of music. People on the sales floor were allowed to listen to music when they stocked, and while most listened to MP3 players through ear buds, a few blasted tunes from portable radios that they carted around with them from aisle to aisle. I’m mostly a classical man, but I like all sorts of music, really. Rock, jazz, soul, country. If it has a pulse, I dig it. But I don’t know. The stuff they listened to, as we worked our way toward dawn, always seemed as mind-numbing and monotonous as the work. Bare bones bass and drums. Someone rapping over that about how many bitches he had killed or cops he had fucked. It would bore into my skull like the Chinese Water Torture and, a lot of times, I would just have to get away from it, slip into the restroom for a smoke and some peace and quiet.

  And the bosses there always tried to make that job seem like it was something more than taking stuff out of boxes and putting it on shelves. Like it was rocket science or something. That always got to me too. The head boss was this young guy, about twenty-five or so, fresh out of business school, first “real job” probably. He walked around in his knit sports shirt and freshly pressed khakis, making sure everything there was done the “company” way: that we weren’t overstocking shelves, that we were keeping the talking to a minimum, that we were remembering to replenish end caps. He had a little plastic walkie-talkie and it seemed like he was always on the damn thing: talking to the other bosses in the store, talking to the backroom where they stored excess merchandise, talking to the Retail Gods for all I know. There was many a morning I would fall asleep with the static from that walkie ringing in my vamp ears, his strident voice barking out some stupid command.

  And like many bosses before, he seemed to have a problem with the way I did things.

  The first thing was my hygiene. There’s a reason I call these entries “Thoughts From A Dirty Old Vampire.” Well two, actually. The first is I think about sex a lot. Almost as much as drinking blood. The second is, I bathe only when I remember to. Maybe two times a week if that. And I have been known to wear the same pair of jeans and t-shirt for days on end. Now I don’t perspire any more, thankfully, but dirt and grime collect, especially in a place like that. And clothes buy it too.

  One night, I was on the job, trying to extract a lamp from a box. I was muttering all sorts of shit, because not only was the lamp in a box, it was encased in Styrofoam and bubble plastic as well. I was slicing away at all this with a box cutter, thinking about the amount of petro-chemicals, the amount of energy that had been wasted, just putting this stupid ceramic lamp inside a box. I was also thinking about how many hours were left until 5 o’clock, when I could punch out, make my way home. maybe drink a little pint before bed. I was so careless. I kept slicing my fingers with the damn box cutter, watching as the wounds closed up rapidly, as if they were just water drops being sucked through a straw.

  That was when the boss walked into my aisle.

  “Henry, could I please see you in my office?”

  I have heard that tone of voice before, many many times, from many many bosses. I was about to be shit canned or reprimanded. I was actually hoping it was the former, because I had been with the job for a month now--three or four days a week--and that was already a sizeable chunk of my immortal existence. Maybe he would fire me and I could draw unemployment.

  “Sure, Carter,” I said, dropping the spoils of the lamp, putting my box cutter in my jean pocket, and following him out of the aisle. I walked about a foot behind him, like a dutiful slave, as we made our way to the front of the store. We didn’t talk. As we walked, I looked around the dimly lighted store, at the mountains and mountains of boxes that still needed to be opened by the overnight workers, at the mountains and mountains of shit already out there on shelves. Shit that no one needed. Yoga workout DVDS. Sweaters for dogs. Musical Halloween cards. All of it now made in China by kids who sweated it out for pennies a day.

  We made it to the office--a long walk through the mansions of capitalism.

  “Sit down please, Henry,” he said.

  He sat down behind his desk. I pulled up a small plastic chair on the other side of it, sat down, waiting for the axe to fall. I studied his face as I waited for him to begin: the sandy hair closely cropped to his skull, the eyes a dull milky blue, the pulpy chin. He looked like the perfect little Aryan soldier sitting there behind that desk, shifting papers, pursing his lips as he looked down on me.

  “How long have you been here now, Henry?” he asked.

  What the fuck was this? He knew how long I had been there. A month. The motherfucker had hired me. But OK. Let’s play the game.

  “A month,” I said.

  He nodded. “And you know you are still in your probationary period? It’s 90 days, right? We can terminate your employment without any warning?”

  Oh God. Was I going to be terminated? Could I draw unemploy
ment? Or did I have to be on a job for six months? I couldn’t remember. Anyway, it really didn’t matter to me. Terminate away. Just as long as you don’t do it with a wooden stake. Or a walkie-talkie.

  “OK,” I replied.

  “Well, I’m not going to terminate you over this. But I did need to talk to you about something.”

  What the hell was the problem? I came in. I did the work. I opened boxes night after night. What else did he expect from me?

  He took a deep breath.

  “Well, there’s been a few complaints about your hygiene, Henry.”

  My hygiene? Son of a bitch. It is always something.

  “Do you bathe and use deodorant on a regular basis, Henry?” he asked.

  Not really. More important things in life to do.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Behind his desk, hanging on the wall, was a print of some Wassily Kadinsky painting. I didn’t know the name of it. A grid with all these brightly painted circles in it. I wondered who had hung that print up there in that office. Certainly not this soldier. I sat there mute, counting those stupid circles over and over again, as he droned on about company standards, hygiene, and teamwork for fifteen minutes or so. There were thirteen circles in that print.

  “Soooo, promise me you will take care of this, Ok, Henry?” he said, getting up from his desk and coming around to shake my hand.

  He smelled like Dial soap and fear.

  The next thing the boss got me on was my efficiency.

  They had these little labels on the boxes we were supposed to stock, and on the labels were printed the aisle number, section number, shelf number, and position for each product in the store. It usually read something like this:

  A1-6-3-6