“You’re always picking up new words and using them too much. I think it is the effect of television.”
“What do you know about television?”
“I know that between the ages of five and fifteen—or perhaps it was sixteen—the average American child will witness, on this television you love so much, the killing of thirteen thousand persons.”
“Where did you get that BS?”
He put his may-I-bite-you love letter carefully aside, walked on his knees in front of his bowed-in-the-middle bookshelf full of egghead books over to one of his stacks of papers, and shuffled in them until he pulled out a mimeographed copy of something. He held it up for me to squint at.
HEALTH POLICY 1976:
VIOLENCE, TELEVISION, AND AMERICAN YOUTH
“Oooo, that’s fun. What are you doing reading stuff like that?”
“I read about such things because I am concerned about your habits.”
“What, are you afraid I’ll turn violent? Guess what? I already am violent. And so are you.”
“You’re going to have your brain for a long, long time. I do not think you should rot it with unhealthy habits.”
I looked out the door to his room: a big metal door on a wheeled track. I wanted to go get dressed up for the hunt. Actually, I wanted to shut his door real hard and stomp off to show him how boring he was. But I wasn’t quite that crappy. And he wasn’t done yet.
“You are addicted to the television.”
“Bullshit, Cvetko.”
“You watch it every night.”
“So what?”
“So don’t watch it tonight.”
“I’ll watch if I want to. And I want to.”
“It controls you.”
“No, I just want to.”
“You have no choice.”
I really hated it when he started dad-talking me. He was a little older than me—he was born in like 1890-something, turned when Ike was in office, when he was as old as I should have been this particular Valentine’s Day. But I had been a vampire longer. Doesn’t that count for something?
“Fine. I won’t watch television tonight.”
“Do you promise?”
“Sure. If you let me read one of these.”
I snatched his letter off the floor.
It made him uncomfortable, but he didn’t try to stop me.
I held it up and read from it like a beatnik poet.
“‘Dear Mrs. Greengrass.’”
(Really?)
“‘Although you do not know me, I hope that you will forgive me for saying that I have for some time now been impressed from afar by your charm and bearing. It is evident to me that you emigrated here from the British Isles; I gather this less from your accent (Buckinghamshire?) than from the old-world discipline you show in taking your nightly walks and the grace with which you . . .’”
He just blinked at me, smiling nervously. I could see the tip of one fang.
“So when do you get to the ‘would it bother you ever so much, Mrs. Greengrass, if I poked holes in your jugular vein and sucked black heart’s blood out?’ part? And what is she, like ninety?”
“Eighty-five. And I will not admit to vampirism in the letter; I will only hint at it. I will tell her that if she wants an early-morning visitor, she need only close a handkerchief in her window so it is visible from the sidewalk. We will talk about the world outside her neighborhood, and about times others are too young to remember. The specific language in the letter will make her understand on a subconscious level that this is a supernatural opportunity.”
“This is really creepy stuff, Cvets. Like heavy-breather-on-the-telephone stuff. I don’t see why any of them do it.”
“There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.”
“Well, that’s depressing.”
He nodded.
“Which is why sometimes they let me finish it.”
“Even more depressing.”
“They ask me to.”
Now I nodded. I had had that happen, too.
A kid. Just a sick Greek girl in Astoria whose parents were going to the poorhouse taking care of her. Polio. Wouldn’t let me pull my face away from her neck. Held her weak hands on the back of my head, saying, “Take me away, take me out of here.”
I took the part of her I could.
Joseph Hiram Peacock, angel of Passover.
We don’t kill often. Vampires that do kill we call “peelers.” If you peel somebody and it gets in the paper, you get a talking-to. If you do it again, Margaret gets some of us together and comes for your head, or farms it out to the Latin Hearts under Alphabet City. They’re all pretty new; Margaret turned one like ten years ago, then he turned his friends and family. The Hearts were a gang before and they stayed a gang. Smart of Margaret; you weren’t supposed to go turning more than one every ten years or so, but her one multiplied. Now their leader, Mapache, was loyal to Margaret and they were all loyal to him. Instant muscle. There were less of them than us, like five, but they were good at offing vampires, they had machetes just for that. I think they liked it. But even they didn’t fuck with Margaret. She used a shovel. And she had Old Boy. More about him soon.
Peeling was stupid anyway, though. It was better for everybody if we just took what we needed and made them forget. They were cattle, but you took milk, not meat, or the herd might stampede.
Cvetko hated when we did a peeler, which had only been twice for us, and once for the Latins. No, twice for them, too. Killing bothered Cvetko in general, though.
“Promise me you won’t watch television tonight.”
“Fine,” I said, “I promise.”
SOAP
I meant it when I said it, but not an hour later I broke my word.
“Took my time? I’m standing on a ledge in a rainstorm and I took my time. What was I supposed to do? Jump down thirty-eight floors on a messenger to stop him?”
That was Eunice.
Eunice was indeed standing on a ledge, Eunice and ledge contained in the frame of the luxurious console television that dominated this modern and well-appointed living room.
“My luck, you’d miss,” Walter said.
This was on Soap, which I love. Nine thirty P.M. every Tuesday, A and the B and the C. If I was really going to break myself from the tube, and I wasn’t, it would have to be on some weekday other than a Tuesday.
I was lying back on the couch, holding Mrs. Baker’s arm in my lap, a sort of ugly orange-and-brown knitted couch cover under her arm because her wrist was bleeding and I didn’t want to get it on my faded bell-bottoms. I held the wrist up every once in a while to drink from it, wiping my lips with a paper towel. I’d had quite a bit from her already; she was looking a little peaked, although everybody looks peaked with that blue television light washing over them. Her head was lolling a bit and she had the drool-strand you always saw on the chins of the heavily charmed. All three of the Bakers were in la-la land, hardly aware of my presence, completely unaware of the context, ready to forget me the second I slipped out their window. At the commercial I’d change seats and start working on Mr. Baker, and when he was good and sponged, I’d bite the fat, surly preteen boy with all the football posters in his room. Even charmed, he was a pain in the ass.
“I wanna go to bed, this show is dumb,” he said, even though Soap was off and a Fixodent commercial had taken its place.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Soap is the smartest thing on television right now; soap operas have been begging for satire since they were invented, and Soap knocks it out of the park. But that’s not good enough for Michael Kiss-My-Fat-Ass Baker, is it? You love, what, Happy Days?”
“Yeah,” he said thickly, staring at the white paste pouring out of the larger-than-life Fixodent tube on the screen.
“Did you watch it tonight? Happy Days?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what happened? Did Fonzie and Richie jerk each other off yet?”
“No. They were singin’ love songs. The Cunninghams.”
“Right. Valentine’s Day. But you love Fonzie, don’t you?”
“Heeeyyyyyy,” he said.
The hypnotized little dumpling actually said Heeeyyyy! I laughed so hard a little of his mom’s blood bubbled out of my nose.
“You know he’s a Jew, right?”
He wrinkled his brow; he didn’t like this. Oh, this was fun. I stuck a fresh paper towel on his mom’s wrist and went over to the kid, plucking his half-eaten Pringles can off his lap and tossing it across the room, then sitting on his lap where he lay poured on the recliner, crossing my legs, feeling like a big, naughty ventriloquist’s dummy. I was the same height as him, five foot five, but, he was a chunk and I’m like ninety pounds wet—we’re lighter than we look; I’d been slowly losing weight since I turned. Anyway, I know I wasn’t crushing his little nuts for him.
I had been about to drain his daddy, but then he had to go and badmouth Soap; besides, that doughy white neck looked like it needed biting. As soon as I was done fucking with him.
“That’s right. Arthur Fonzarelli likes matzoh balls and bagels.”
“Thought he was ’Talian. Like Rocky. The ’Talian Stallion.”
“Nope. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but Fonzie’s a big fat Jew, just like me. Well, half Jew on my mom’s side.”
“Are you gonna bite my neck now?”
“You’re a smart kid.”
I mussed his hair.
“Are you a vampire?”
Still staring at the tube, didn’t know what he was saying.
“What? Don’t talk crazy. I’m Cupid.”
“Oh. That’s okay, I guess. But . . . you still gonna bite me?”
“Oh, you know it.”
He made an I’m-gonna-cry face and squirmed.
“What’sa matter, Mikey? Does it hurt when I bite you?”
He nodded and made a little whimpering sound, which triggered something in his semisleeping dad. Mr. Baker got up, looking all Korea-vet tough in his tobaccoey Fruit of the Loom T-shirt, turned the corners of his mouth down, started to make a beefy fist.
“Sit down, Victor,” I said to him, pointing my index finger at him like a gun and letting a little menace into my voice.
He nodded, smoothed his pants, and sat down in a hurry, looking grateful I had reminded him he was supposed to be sitting down now. He even tilted his head so I could get at his neck when it was his turn. But now I spoke to Mikey.
“When I bite you, it only hurts a little, right?”
“I guess. Like a shot. Then it feels kinda good, but I don’t like it that it feels good. Makes me feel like a queer.”
“It’s like a shot,” I said. “Let’s go with that.”
“Shots are good for you,” his mother slurred. She reached for her wine without looking at it, spilled it all over the carpet. Luckily it was white wine, so it wouldn’t stain, but her spastic movement started her wrist bleeding again, and she got a smear about the size of a garden slug on the arm of the couch.
The father nodded, agreeing about the virtues of getting a shot. They were all watching the Magnavox, which now showed a rust-bearded Burger King with a rust-colored semi-Afro appearing from behind a magic door. Twin rusty caterpillars over his eyes. They had some dumb little bathtub toy with a rubber-band propeller making a pair of little kids squeal. It was so easy to charm people who had been watching the television—maybe Cvetko was right. Maybe it does rot your brain.
So I poked the chubby kid’s sweet, chubby neck and drank and then I stuck my fangs into the hot, flushed neck of the ham-handed dad who smelled (and tasted) like Hai Karate aftershave, and then we all watched the rest of Soap together. I cleaned up before I left—picked up the Pringles, scrubbed the blood with Joy so it mostly came off the ivory-colored couch’s arm, put the wadded-up, bloody paper towels in my pocket. I even wiped the dad’s upper lip, which was coated with nasty little white wings of snot. I hate snot. And it wouldn’t do to have them start to figure out something was wrong. I came here maybe twice, three times a month.
Of course I visited other places, I had a kind of routine, but the Bakers had the biggest veins, the weakest minds, and the most comfortable furniture on the East Side. But mainly I picked them for the huge, glorious console television I saw lighting up their window lo these many months ago as I walked on the sidewalk below. Think about that the next time you shop for TVs.
THE GIRL ON THE SUBWAY
I skittered down the fire escape doing my best impression of a monkey, but moving so fast and light anybody who saw me wouldn’t know what they saw. The Bakers had good, fatty beef-fed blood, singing with iron, and I felt like a million dollars. I wanted a mirror even though I had already used one in the Bakers’ bathroom to tidy up before I left (I helped myself to Dad’s cologne, too), but I never got tired of the way I looked after I fed: healthy, strong, just as much color in my face as yours (if you’re a Caucasian, that is; I shouldn’t make assumptions). My hair always looked dynamite after a good feed, too, like a dog’s coat when you feed him an egg every day, although I never tried that even when I had a dog. I think I heard it on TV.
The point is, I had a real spring in my step, which is quite a spring when you’re a vampire. I wished it were warmer, I felt like running, but it wasn’t running weather. Big heaps of unmelted snow from the blizzard stood packed here and there, forcing what people there were on the streets to bunch up, the long-legged ones in a hurry making grumpy faces behind the old and slow, trying to pass but here comes a dad with tiny kids in parkas, jumping in front of them won’t look too cool. Between the packed snow you got an ugly slurry of ice-mush and dirt that a lesser fellow would be prone to slip in and fall. No, really, if you grew up somewhere south and you think all sweetly about snow, or if you only ever saw it on the tops of mountains for Heidi to yodel over or melting down into streams for Bambi to lap up, come to Manhattan in February. New York’ll bust your snow cherry fast. You show me a postcard from Lapland with mountains and a reindeer and I’ll show you a man-high, snow-capped heap of trash bags and cardboard piled around a tree that probably has tuberculosis, little yellow pockmarks of dog piss at the foot of it, all of it sprinkled with soot, real evenly like it came out of a shaker, and garnished with soda cans, cigarette butts, and, for no good reason, a brand-new left shoe, but just the left one and there’s dried blood on it, so who’s going to take it?
I was in the mood to hear music and meet a girl or two, so I decided to train my way to the Village. Down I went into the mouth of the subway, hopped the turnstile fast as a squirrel, then just for a laugh I walked in the blind spot of a briefcase-carrying guy who smelled like hooker, real close to him, my toes almost on his heels like something Charlie Chaplin would do. He didn’t see me at all, even when he turned around once. There was a girlie in a denim jacket getting on the car past the closest one, so I ditched my first playmate and popped the collar of my shirt over my leather jacket. I had already checked myself postfeeding, but I spat on the back of my hand and wiped my lips and chin just in case; I guess you’d call it a nervous habit. She was dirty blond, taller than me, but that’s not unusual; she would have been taller than me even without her platform shoes. Very sexual vibe from that one, automatic, broadcast to mankind in general like Radio Free Europe. Nice hips, and I liked how shaggy her hair was; she looked tough and pretty at the same time.
She was just about to look at me; I can always tell when you’re about to look at me. There came the eyes. Brown eyes. I would have thought blue. I smiled, she smiled. Quick shy looking-away game, but one of us would peek again in ten seconds or so. The only other person on our car was an older Chinese woman reading Danielle Steel, Passion’s Promise, don’t make me laugh.
The third time girlie peeked at me I leaned back and swung around gracefully on the pole, sort of an ironic comment on the awkwardness of flirtation, right up her alley. She laughed. Also, I was charming her a bit so I looked twenty-two-ish, like she was. Maybe more like twenty-five. She looked like she knew what she was doing, and she fit nicely in her jeans.
I remember her down to the button, not because I fed on her or slept with her—I swear, Your Honor, I never touched the lady—but because of what I saw next. You know how that is? Like you remember the book you were reading when somebody told you Elvis Presley died (Exodus by Leon Uris, don’t be impressed, I never finished it) or what you were wearing the night you lost your virginity (a tweed coat and suspenders, but don’t think “how cute”—I was already a vampire so it was weird).
The point is, I remember this girl because I stood with her on the ledge of great and permanent change, though neither one of us knew it, and she would never know it. The ledge was mine only.
I was about to see one of them.
But not just yet.
Not until Lexington.
And we were just coming up on 68th.
More people got on, but I wasn’t paying attention to them.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Why not?”
“It just seems a funny thing to say before hello or anything.”
The train started moving.
“Maybe one day you’ll want to remember the first thing I ever said to you. Maybe it should be more interesting than ‘Hello.’”
She liked that.
In the next car, past the tangle of unreadable Magic Marker graffiti that had sprouted on every subway car like chest hair on a Greek, through the porthole window and the graffiti on that, too, hooker-smelling briefcase man was writing something down on a little notepad, wrinkling up his mustache; he didn’t like whatever he was writing. He was just about to look at me. He looked. First time I saw his bored eyes behind those slightly tinted big brown eyeglasses so much in fashion. My reflection and the girl’s swam over him like giant ghosts. A kid behind him, not his, sat alone, and that struck me wrong though I wasn’t thinking about it yet because the train was moving from the lit space by the platform into the darker space of the tunnel, my real home, Cvetko’s home. And I saw tough girl’s reflection turning toward me, her reflection in profile, so I turned also and looked her straight in the nose—I did mention she was tall? She giggled, warm fake-fruit smell of chewing gum riding her out-breath, and I took her chin in my hand to point her mouth down at mine. Her eyes darted at the Chinese woman, but I guess Danielle Steel can write the hell out of a book, because the Chinese woman’s face was like eight inches from the page.
The Lesser Dead Page 3
