My lips brushed the girl’s; I put my hand on her backside and she didn’t push it away. After a second, though, she pulled back, smiling in that “wait a second, what’s going on, wise guy?” way that really means, “We’ll be fucking soon but I don’t want you to think I do this all the time. Even though I probably do this all the time.”
Then the train swung around a curve in the dark and she stumbled on her platform shoes. I caught her; I don’t stumble, we’re all half cat. Her fingers lingered on my forearms and she looked at me, but I looked away. Something caught my eye in the next car. It was the kid. A little girl. Long black hair like an Oriental, but she was Anglo. Pale skin. Pretty but haunted. She was sitting two seats closer than she had been, though I never saw her move, holding a Raggedy Ann doll she didn’t seem interested in. She was looking at briefcase-hooker-notepad guy.
He looked back at her. And stared. It was all wrong.
But here’s what else was wrong: She was wearing makeup. Like a lot of makeup. She looked more like a doll than Raggedy Ann did.
My new girlfriend was oblivious, said, “So what’s your name?”
“Joey,” I said, distracted.
The train swerved again and the lights flickered, but I could still see. The Chinese woman looked up from her book. Something moved on the next train, in the dark.
Now the girl was holding the man’s hand, like she was his daughter. But she wasn’t! She was charming him. A vampire? That young? She looked seven.
Now she looked at me.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had a chill, but I caught one.
She looked through me.
Was she a vampire?
I didn’t know what she was.
At Grand Central, she got off the train with that guy, just a girl and her dad walking home. He left the briefcase, just left it and looked at it and left it anyway, and that one fact let me know in my black, dead heart that he would never get on another train. I knew it again when two little blond boys joined the girl, one of them taking the man’s free hand, one of them skipping alongside. The boys were pale, like her, no makeup, just very pale. The hooker-smelling guy looked stoned, drooled all over himself, but nobody in the subway gave them a second glance. Why would they? This was Grand Central Station; Hare Krishnas were dancing ecstatically near a bag lady with a Burger King crown on, a drunk guy was puking in the trash can but holding up a slice of pizza so he wouldn’t get any on it.
And a happy family was going home, only the children weren’t children, and Daddy had dying to do.
“Aren’t you going to ask me my name?” the girl said.
“No.”
PUNK CLUB
I went to the Village as planned, went to the loudest bar I could find—the Ammonia. It wasn’t as cool as CBGB’s—Chinchilla only went to CBGB’s—but I found the girls were consistently hotter at the Ammonia. Like just a little less punk, just a little more hot-poser. Okay by me. I wasn’t part of the fucking movement. And the bathroom at the Bowery place was fucking raunchy, even by guy-who-lives-in-the-subway standards.
Anyway, the Ammonia.
Kids jammed up the doorway, fast, blurry guitar licks hammering out the door through the hot jungle of limbs and vinyl, beery musket-puffs of breath billowing up under the streetlight. This under the eyeless gaze of Gilda Radner, a poster for her live comedy album; I say “eyeless” because some less successful comedian had ripped square holes where her mouth and eyes should have been, like the blackout smudges in a porno, only with brick showing through. The doorman, a sort of badly shaven ox-shank in a clownishly small porkpie hat, pushed two fingers into my shoulder as I tried to slither under his gaze.
“How old are you?” he shouted over the exploding guitars.
“Fifty-nine,” I shouted back.
“Cute. Get out,” he said.
“Be friendly. Buy me a beer,” I said.
He blinked twice, the charm hitting him like a baby’s fist between the eyes, then he said, “You want a beer?”
“Love one.”
Oxbody actually abandoned his post, shoved two girls out of his way, and deposited me at the bar like a cop bringing a collar to his desk. He gestured, the bartender nodded, and soon a frosty Molson Light was fizzing before my eyes. I tipped the bartender a quarter and swigged. I like beer okay, and I can keep it down if I have blood in my stomach. Food’s a different story. I won’t barf if I’ve got blood in me, but the food-processing factory isn’t what it used to be and just digesting something wears me out. There’s more, but you don’t want to hear about that. Basically, if I eat food it’s just for show, and I’ll pay for it later. Drinking anything but blood wakes the pee-works up, and that’s no fun, but every once in a while it’s nice to feel like you’re still a person.
I was glad the music was loud, even though I’m not really a punk fan. According to the posters, we had ourselves a double bill—the band was either the Skullpumps or Miss Katonic, depending on what time it was. Probably the former.
I got no time for
people in the city
I got no time for
people in the country
I got no time to
do my fuckin’ laundry
so I hope I smell bad
real bad
I hope I smell real bad!
The lead singer had white, square-looking shoes with no socks, super-tight jeans and white-blond hair teased up into a sort of hurricane of dye and hair spray. Fake fur half-coat over a T-shirt with the nipples cut out, his own nipples taped over with swatches of black electrician’s tape. Something about his aesthetic made me think I might have found the culprit in the case of the vandalized Gilda Radner poster. The punked-out crowd was really into these guys. A couple of them held up bicycle pumps, confirming my guess about the name, and up toward the front the dancing was pretty thrashy and violent.
I wouldn’t stay here long.
I would just drink my Molson and hopefully the guitars would hammer-wash the image of those creepy children out of my head. I had had a case of the thousand-yard stares since I saw them, had been only marginally aware of the “Happy Valentine’s Day, prick” from the girl I had completely ignored after seeing them, this dropped as she popped a stick of Juicy Fruit gum between her lipsticky lips and exited the train one stop after the others did. She had said some other things to me, but I had turned off like a transistor radio, it’s a very bad habit of mine. If I’m focused on something, I just shut down to everything around me. It’s inexcusably rude, I know it is; she wasn’t entirely off base calling me a prick.
I am kind of a prick.
Take what happened next at the Ammonia.
The thrashy dancing had gotten intense—I don’t know how bouncers are supposed to tell that kind of horseplay from a fight—and pretty soon a guy with bushy black hair got popped in the face with an elbow so hard he started bleeding down the front of his shirt, kind of a button-down zebra print. He dove onto the stage and scrambled to the drum set, upon the face of which he planted a smeary, bloody kiss, like his big Happy Valentine’s Day, pricks! to the world. Oxflanks had already been making his way there, and now he grabbed the bleedy kid by the Chuck Taylors and hauled him belly-down off the stage, rolling up his shirt to expose his greyhoundy ribs. I thought he would kick him out, but he contented himself with jabbing a warning finger in the kid’s face and heading back to the door. Some freckly, overmascaraed redheaded girl materialized and kissed zebra-shirt’s bloody mouth. They frenched for a good five-Mississippi, and she broke away, laughing with her friends, her mouth bloody now. She didn’t even know the guy.
Everybody clapped, even the bassist, but nobody notices when the bassist stops playing.
Before I could even think, I was on my feet and had ducked through the bouncy tangle of the crowd. I grabbed her by the hand, spun her around, and went up on tiptoes. Stil
l laughing, she bent halfway down and kissed me, a beery, bloody, hemoglobin kiss, bitter with cheap cigarettes but salty and elegant and perfect for all that. It was his blood, but I wanted hers.
“Come into the alley with me!” I shouted into her ear.
She just laughed at me and sat down, now watching the band.
“No, really, come into the alley with me!” I said, pouring on the charm. She went glass-eyed and drooly, but she got up. The charmed, it might not surprise you to learn, are not known for their physical grace, and we weren’t Skynyrd’s three steps toward the door before she bumped straight into a mean-mouthed girl, knocking from her hand the three beers she had been finessing back to her table.
An apology would have fixed it, but my new girlfriend was slack-jawed. “Sorry,” I said, moving between them, pulling my new friend toward the cold air coming in the front door. A man with a bandana and dogtags around his neck decided he didn’t like me, I can’t say I blame him, and took a poke at my eye. The Ammonia was kind of a punchy place, if you haven’t already gathered that.
He connected, I saw the proverbial stars, but even so I kicked out at him almost simultaneously, heard him yelp. I kick pretty hard. Now I was separated from the girl, but that was just as well. I wasn’t starving, just being greedy. Now Oxlungs was blocking my way to outside, he had seen the kick, maybe suspected I had been up to no good with the girl, and he grabbed me by the coat, which I slipped out of quick as an eel. The door was more crowded than the toilets, so I ran back into the bar.
Bandana was limping after me, Oxballs too, so into the filthy-but-better-than-CBGB’s little john I went, hoping for a window I thought I remembered. I got one. Painted shut and small. I leapt up on the shoulders of one guy pissing in the trough, but he was high as a kite and just laughed, at least until the counterforce of me wrenching the window open knocked him down. I went with him, paint flakes showering everywhere, but leapt again as soon as I hit concrete.
I don’t know what it looked like to the guys coming in, but I got small. That means my body changed shape a bit, just a bit; shoulders came dislocated, ribs flattened out, you get the idea. “Whoa!” somebody said behind me, probably pissing guy. Next thing I knew, I was long-legging it through a dirty heap of leftover blizzard snow, my pants good and ripped, my boots still in the bathroom, my belt off and in one hand, I don’t have any idea how that happened. But I saw Oxtongue’s oxey head and one arm come out the window behind me. He had that back neck-roll fat tough guys all have. The devil was in me, I guess, because I turned around. Went back up the snow mound. He flailed at me.
“Come here, you little shit!”
“Okay,” I said.
I stood up on the snow heap, one foot propped on a Dumpster. He grabbed my shirt but I pried his hand open; that surprised him! I resisted the urge to break his arm, just shoved it down good and hard. I could see he wanted to go back down now; this wasn’t going the way he planned, but he was wedged in.
I could not help but see his predicament as a gift from the gods, which must never be scorned.
So I fed. Pretty hard. He made a weird sound, like with his tongue jammed up against the roof of his mouth, his eyes rolling up white in his head. He might have creamed himself, that’s not unusual.
Blood and beer, blood and beer, mine was a happy mouth.
I stopped myself at about a pint and a half, he was a big boy, then I delicately plucked his porkpie hat off his head—it seemed a fair trade for my coat—and tramped down the snow heap.
“Come back,” he said, more like a lover than an enraged bouncer.
“Sorry. Past my bedtime.”
A rat in the Dumpster squeaked and moved up to get a look at me, dislodging a bottle. I tipped my new hat at it and made my way down the street, my breath steaming with borrowed warmth, whisper-singing, “I hope I smell real bad, real bad, I hope I smell real BAD!” which was great for a while. Great until I got back down into the subway and found myself looking everywhere for pale, haunty-eyed children.
* * *
“And what do you think these children were?” Margaret said, her Irish brogue still porridge-thick after three-quarters of a century in New York. She wasn’t even from Dublin or someplace civilized like that; she was from some turf-cutting wasteland where they pronounce their Bs like Ws and only speak English in banks, which they never go into because they’re shit broke. She was in her thirties when she was turned, which was not long before I was turned. I’ll get to that.
“Vampires?”
“Is it a question you’re askin’ me, or are you tellin’ me your own thoughts?”
“Vampires, I think they were vampires.”
I was sitting on the old refrigerator that served me as a coffin, avocado green and covered with magnets. I collect fridge magnets. Snoopy lying on his doghouse is my current favorite. Did I mention I used to have a dog?
Margaret crouched on her heels in that weird third-world way so she looked like a witch in want of a pot, her tangled, ratty, browny-red hair spilling over her shoulders in an open challenge to all combs. On this particular evening she was wearing her second-favorite outfit, a faded, flowered housedress that had clearly been bled on repeatedly, and a pair of thong sandals. Most vampires avoid sandals because our veins are more pronounced, especially in our extremities—our feet aren’t that attractive. Margaret just didn’t give a shit.
Cvetko was looking at her in that lovelorn way he has of looking at any woman over thirty who talks to him for more than thirty seconds. Margaret looked like a dishrag-pretty thirty-five, sassy in that using-a-rolling-pin-as-a-weapon way, big blue eyes made for being bloodshot, made for anger, the kind of woman who would stab a drunk husband in the gut with a meat fork and never interrupt her lecture. Sorry, did I say “would stab”? Make that “did stab.” I think that was in 1930 or so; he survived that but was probably as dead as James Joyce by now.
Margaret charmed better than anyone except maybe me. No, she was better than me. There’s a lot of variation with us—some guys can barely do it to a drunk; some, and this is rare, can charm a whole room. Margaret wasn’t quite like the last kind, but she could really operate one-on-one. She could tell you to cut your own throat with a soup can lid and you’d do it and hope you hadn’t pissed her off by being too slow about it. She was completely brazen. I watched her get into a limo behind a woman in minks, tell the driver to keep it running and roll up the windows. Three minutes later she climbed out still checking her face in her compact and the limo drifted off slowly, hit a cab. The cabbie was screaming at the limo driver, but he just drooled and said he was sorry. Mink woman got out, confused, went to light a Virginia Slim, then barfed on everybody’s shoes and sat back down. Margaret must have tapped her for a good quart. Would have joyfully killed her if she’d had more privacy, and if we didn’t have rules about killing. I think Margaret bends her own rules sometimes, though. Margaret hates rich people.
Did I mention I used to be a rich person?
I had better do this now.
MARGARET
Margaret McMannis came to work as a cook in my father’s house, our narrow, four-storied Greenwich Village town house, in the spring of 1933, when I was fourteen years old. The last cook, Vilma, a chubby Hungarian woman with a birthmark like a sunburn on about a third of her face, had been like an adopted mother to me since my own mother was always busy with shopping, organizing parties, and charity work that involved little charity and even less work. Children were for cooks, teachers, and nannies to worry about. She was the kind of woman who would wear shoes she knew would give her a blister to Central Park just so she could buy shoes that would give her a blister somewhere else and pick up a third pair a block and a half from home. Because she couldn’t be bothered to carry two boxes, she would toss the first pair in the trash. The family money was mostly hers, her dad was big in textiles, but still.
Is it any wonder I ended up s
elfish?
Vilma never thought I was selfish. Vilma taught me spices, tarragon and paprika and rosemary, coriander, too. Vilma let me taste brandy and eau de violette; she made lemon cookies and shortbread and gingerbread men and cupcakes and when I remember the sun I remember it coming in the kitchen window with Vilma bending down to put a wooden spoon slathered in batter to my mouth, calling me Joey-bird.
“You want taste, Joey-bird? You come taste!”
Her English always sucked. I miss Vilma like I miss nobody else in this world and I don’t even know what happened to her after what happened with us. I’ll get to that.
Dad wasn’t bad when he noticed me. Always seemed genuinely interested in what was going on in school, what have you, bought me a Yorkshire terrier over my mother’s protests about hair getting on her dresses. Any dad anywhere can get a get-out-of-jail-free card for about three years by buying his kid a dog. The Yorkie’s name was Solly, but you don’t give a shit. Other people’s dogs are boring. Suffice it to say that a dad, a cook, and a dog can just about make up for a mom.
I didn’t mean to turn this into a headshrinker’s couch or anything, but it feels good to get this stuff about my mother off my chest. It isn’t like her family was bad. Her sister Golda had been a nurse in World War I and she came to see me when I had chicken pox and told me stories and I remember praying to God asking why she hadn’t married my dad instead. That sounds rotten, and kids can be rotten, but just wait.
The Lesser Dead Page 4
