The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  When it came her turn, Lourdes stepped between Selene's legs and squatted down to suck; she could feel the soft damp nest of the witch's pubic hair against her cheek. She drank greedily, and felt her high coming on even as she drank. Whistler had warned her about this. "Live blood, fresh from the vein," he'd cautioned her, without a trace of English accent. "Shit'll kick your ass."

  But she hadn't paid much attention, and now, sucking at the pulsing vein, she couldn't have cared less anyway: she would not have been able to stop if Whistler had not been there to gently tug her away with one hand while applying pressure to the cut with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand.

  Then it was over, not a drop of blood in the water, Selene floating peacefully, back arched and hips raised. Lourdes, stoned beyond belief—she might as well have been in a trance herself—bent her head to Selene's breast and began nursing rhythmically. The older woman opened her eyes. "That feels very nice, Lourdes," she said sweetly. "But I ought to tell you I'm celibate."

  Lourdes turned her head to the side. Her eyes were already beginning to glitter red in the lantern light. "I know," she said. "Does that mean I have to stop?"

  "Not right away, dearie."

  THREE

  Nick Santos's third career (after the military, which he'd told Betty about that afternoon, and the literary, which he had pointedly failed to discuss, having published three vampire novels under the name Nicolas San Georgiou) was as a freelance programmer/analyst specializing in computer security.

  This made him an old man in a young man's game, but he knew a few tricks the kids hadn't learned yet, such as if the NSA said encryptions were secure up to eighteen bits, that meant they'd already learned how to crack eighteen-bit cryps. Something else he knew—this was a lesson they'd learned the hard way in Nam—you can only truly protect something if you're willing to destroy it.

  So he not only recommended thirty-six-bit cryps for his most sensitive clients, but kept his own private files on unlabeled floppies that were never stored to hard disk; each of the floppies was in turn infected with a doomsday virus which would, if not disabled by a password, cause it to erase itself while at the same time reducing the host computer's operating system to the functional level of—well, to the level of the sitting vice-president: he had dubbed it the Quayle. It was nothing fancy—you just had to be willing to take the risk.

  Or minimize the loss: this Sunday night, out of the tens of thousands of dollars of high-tech equipment resting on desk-high shelving braced against three walls—Macs, clones, printers, plotters, modems, faxes, red-lighted surge protectors, thickets of power cords tangled and dense enough to hide Br'er Rabbit—only one monitor, a worthless CGA-board antique, was aglow in the darkened office down the hall from Nick's bedroom, and that in turn was wired up to the oldest computer in the room, an equally worthless first-edition IBM-XT. That way, even if he screwed up while accessing one of his protected files, he wouldn't lose any equipment of value.

  Not that he had any security work planned for tonight. He supposed he could have started working after midnight, but the fact was that he'd been keeping his promise to Betty a little too well: he'd obsessed over this sperm-donor idea all through his regular Sunday night A.A. meeting, and afterwards, over coffee and pie at Nation's, his A.A. sponsor had expressed some concern. "You seem awfully distracted, Nick."

  "No, no problem," Nick had assured him. "Just trying to get a few things straight in my mind. Nothing I can talk about yet." Just whether I should tell this woman who wants me to father a kid for her that I'm a recovering vampire.

  "Well if you can't talk it out yet, why don't you write it out?" was his sponsor's suggestion.

  To which Nick had replied, in his mind: Writing? That's what got me into this mess in the first place.

  But he couldn't dismiss the idea as easily as that, he realized a few hours later, settling into his work chair, a state-of-the-art leather and tubed-steel masterpiece that was worth considerably more than the CGA monitor and the XT put together. It might be easier to get a few thoughts down on paper—pros and cons, that sort of thing.

  It wasn't until he'd popped in one of his protected disks that it occurred to him that he hadn't written a line of anything but programming or tech specs in nearly twenty years, and that the reason for that had been a writer's block the size of the Transamerica Pyramid.

  So he sat there staring at the blank screen for a few minutes, tapping a few keys and then erasing the letters with the back-arrow, until all at once it came to him: Fuck it. Who'm I kidding? Nobody's ever gonna read this anyway. And he found himself typing the following sentence: I thought I was the King of the Castro. Then he went downstairs to make himself a cup of instant coffee.

  By the time he returned, his primitive screensaver program had kicked in, and the room was dark. He settled back down into his chair and tapped the space key. When his sentence reappeared, he nodded. "Yeah," he said to himself. "Fuck it."

  Then, on a whim, he backspaced to the top of the screen, inserted the centering code, and typed four words—My Life on Blood—in the largest available font.

  His mouth had grown fearfully dry. He took a sip of the hot coffee, set it down on the counter, levered his chair back into a nearly reclining position, took the keyboard onto his lap, reminded himself one more time that no one was ever going to read the damn thing, cursored down to delete the period after Castro, and began to type in earnest.

  MY LIFE ON BLOOD

  I thought I was the King of the Castro, back in the mid-seventies when the Castro was the only kingdom worth having. Never mind the exact years—numbers don't signify here. It was the Golden Age. It was the time of Before.

  The month was October. They say there are no seasons in San Francisco, but there were in the Castro. Autumn meant bunting blooming in the windows of Harvey Milk's camera shop and size ten fuck-me pumps and ruby slippers sprouting up in the shoestore windows weeks before Halloween.

  The Bar of the Month that October was Oscar's Place, which we all referred to as the Pistachio Palace, after the rather saprophytic shade of chartreuse with which the owners had seen fit to decorate the walls.

  But no one came to the Pistachio Palace for the decor, especially not on Sunday morning. No, you came to brunch for Leon's pepper-shot Bloody Marys, hair of the dog, good fer what ails ya, and a mushroom omelet to die for, if you'd gotten past the praying-to-the-porcelain-god-Ralph stage, and for the deep dish about last night, Saddie Night, Amurrica's Date Night, and who done what to whom and how often?

  The drinks were on me again that morning. I was still celebrating a rather obscene advance my publishers had given me for a fourth vampire novel, as yet uncompleted, and I hadn't even managed to spend the money I'd gotten for the mass paper edition of the trilogy. My friends and I were doing our best to remedy that little oversight, however, and I'm afraid we were keeping poor Leon rather busy at his shaker.

  We were at our regular table, a long narrow Da Vinci Last Supper job in the raised alcove at the back of the dark room (when Leon was working brunch the black drapes were always kept tightly closed), and I remember that for some reason we had rechristened our waiter Benedict, as in I'll have the eggs, Benedict!—oh, what cards we were!—and kept calling loutishly across the room for Drinks, barkeep. More of that voodoo that you do so well. And it is altogether fitting that at this defining moment of my life, for so it proved to be, I was getting cheap laughs with a story I blush to repeat here, about having been recognized in the Bulldog Baths the night before by a boy newly arrived from Iowa who was performing a rather personal act upon me at the time:

  "… so he looked up, and his eyes bugged out to here, and he said—and these are his exact words—he said, Hahrn't hoo Hick Han-horr-heeho, huh hriter? and I looked down at him, and replied—and these are my exact words—Dear boy, didn't your mother teach you not to talk with your mouth full?"

  Well, I hardly need tell you that the hilarity was general, and every-time it started to die d
own, somebody'd start sputtering and repeating fragments of either punchline—Hahrn't hoo Hick, or Dear boy—and set us all off again, and in the middle of it Leon appeared at our table with another round of Bloody Marys and Tequila Sunrises and Mimosas and god knows what other noxious concoctions we were drinking in those days, and something in his face dried up the last of the giggles.

  Which was unusual, for Leon had one of the world's top ten funny faces: a droopy-nosed, long-lobed basset-hound face, like a cross between Yoda of Star Wars and one of the lesser Seven Dwarves. But then, it was unusual for Leon to come out from behind the bar in the first place. "You the one who writes about vam-pies?"

  That's pies, as in apple or rhubarb: Leon was from some little southern town—I never got the real name—he always referred to it as Deepshit, Jawjah.

  I allowed as how I was indeed the one who wrote about vampires.

  "Well siss on you, pister, 'cause you don't know so mucking futch." And he turned his back and—what is the word for Leon's walk? somewhere between a flounce and a stalk—flalked back to the bar.

  Again, the hilarity was general, but although I managed a chortle or two my own bad Pagliacci self, I was not only hurt, but I couldn't imagine for the life of me what had prompted the little man's outburst. I'm sure I never dished him behind his back: I had a friend who had a friend who'd heard a story about him that "could not be repeated, my dear." but all I knew about him for certain was that he made the best damn Bloody Mary this side of Market Street.

  Benedict didn't know what was going on with Leon either, so I took the check down to the bar myself, and dealt with his effrontery the way real men do: I apologized. Said I didn't remember ever doing anything to offend him, but if I had I was sorry. And he apologized back, and said he didn't know what had gotten into him, and of course we both snickered at that, and then he told me that if I really wanted to learn something about vampires, dot dot dot.

  Actually, his voice only trailed off, but he had a very expressive way of speaking, and the ellipsis was definitely implied. And although it was true he was far from my type (anything short of drop-dead gorgeous was far from my type in those callow days, I must confess), it was also true that the above-mentioned obscenely-advanced-upon novel was not only uncompleted, but uncommenced, and unlikely to be commenced if I didn't stop celebrating soon and get to work.

  So I humored the little guy. And you know, he was right: I didn't know so mucking futch after all.

  Dating—such as it was—was different in the time of Before. Not so much pressure—nobody was auditioning for a life's partner. You could meet, have drinks at the Elephant Walk or the Pistachio Palace, maybe dinner at the Chinese place at the corner of 18th Street with the bamboo-screened booths, and if it wasn't working out you could go to the baths and lose each other at the door, and if you happened upon each other in one of the cubicles or the tubs or the orgy pit in the course of the night, a grin and a courtesy wave would suffice, no hard feelings, heh heh.

  That's by and large the way I figured it would go with Leon. Chinese, then lose him in the baths. I mean, I was the King of the Castro, wasn't I? You bet. But by the time the potstickers had arrived there wasn't anyplace on earth I'd rather have been than sitting across from that little goblin of a man, listening to him talk about vam-pies in a voice so full of honeyed southern charm it made Slim Pickens sound like Bugs Bunny.

  What we did at first was play a what-if game. What if there really were such things as vampires? What if they weren't superhuman monsters, but only human beings for whom human blood was the greatest drug of all? What if they didn't need to kill their victims, but only take a cup here and a pint there—no more than the blood banks?

  I don't know at what point I began to understand that he was not just pitching a plot to me. (That's something that happens not infrequently to novelists—as if plots were in short supply.) I know it was sometime after the arrival, and dispatch, of the velvet prawns, but before the litchi nut ice cream, because once I understood what he was driving at I couldn't eat a bite. Stirred my dessert into white silken mud in the red-rimmed china bowl. And I dearly love litchi nut ice cream.

  I hadn't lost my appetite from revulsion, mind you. I was simply nervous as a schoolgirl with a crush, wondering whether he was going to ask me to the prom or not. I already knew what my answer would be, and when he asked me whether I wanted to go back to his room with him I was cool on the outside, I was the King of the Castro, but on the inside I was Molly Bloom and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  Somehow when I think back on Leon's apartment above the Pistachio Palace, I think of Blanche DuBois, of paper fans, and weeping willows dripping with Spanish moss. Silly, I know: it was only two rooms overlooking Castro, but Leon could do that—cast a spell like that around him. And there was a four-poster bed—that was real. And every carpet and shade and curtain and doily had tassels and deedly-balls, and a beaded curtain separated the bedroom from the living room.

  He took my blood at the kitchen table. It was a cafe table. It even had a hole in the center for an umbrella. The chairs were wrought iron cafe chairs. The needle was a larger gauge than you use for injecting drugs—didn't hurt a bit, though, and as I watched him decant the vial into a hollow-stemmed champagne glass and drink it down, slowly, his peach-pit Adam's apple bobbing, I thought to myself: I must remember this!

  Only nothing much happened. He smacked his lips thoughtfully, and looked up. "Nicolas San Georgiou. Nicolas God-dayam San Georgiou. Who'd a thunk it, who'd a thunk it, who'd a thunkety-thunk thunk it."

  "What?"

  "Le's give it just a little more time, bud."

  "Give what time, bud?"

  "Well, you can't tell only from the taste, but with blood this fresh, if I don't get a buzz within the next few minutes then we'll know for sure."

  I knew my next line: Know what for sure? but I have always resisted the role of straight man, so to speak, so we sat there making small talk, and at the end of the allotted waiting period he reached across the little round table rather formally, and we shook hands, and then he burst into laughter, which did alarming things to his floppy jowls. Didn't bring up his color—he was still white as newspaper stock—but even his Easter Island earlobes were shaking merrily as I sat there with my bare face hanging out, wondering whether it had all been an elaborate prank.

  I picked up the empty champagne glass. Red dregs in the stem, tapering to a thin red thread, like a thermometer tube at the very bottom, and a pinkish gleam around the rim, were all that remained of my blood. I ran my finger around the edge of the rim, trying to make the crystal sing, but couldn't get it going. I put the glass back down. "So Leon, ol' buddy, ol' baby-heart, I think it's time for you to tell me what the fuck is going down here."

  He got up and walked over to the window, pushed the curtains aside and peeked out. It was a move right out of some classic thirties gangster flick—Bogart or Cagney could have pulled it off, but then, they weren't usually dealing with flounced curtains. "Sorry I laughed. Wadn' at your expense—I was only laughin' from pure delight." The blinking neon light over the bar below cast pale periwinkle stripes across the right side of his face when he turned back to me. "See, the fact is, you' a vam-pie, son."

  "Oh, I see."

  "No. No you don't. But you will, baby-heart. Very soon, you will."

  A discreet bronze plaque marks the entrance to the Parthenon Baths—a discreet bronze plaque and a day-glo lavender door. That good old YMCA-pool smell of chlorine hits you first—it's not until you've negotiated the long black-lighted corridor to the inner door, flashed your membership card, paid your five bucks, and been buzzed through to the locker-room/check-room that you catch your first whiff of the distinctive ambience of the bathhouse. For unique as each bathhouse may be (the Bulldog, for instance, has a trucker theme: miniature license plates mark the cubicles, and one can commune with like-minded men in a full-scale mock-up of a Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler cab; while the Parthenon has a classical theme: sunken R
oman Baths, and Greek everything else), the smell is always the same: a melange of pool and poppers, sweat and cologne, KY and the latest designer Crisco.

  Next comes the ritual of the towel: as delicate and circumscribed as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. First the waist wrap: high if you're fat and low if you're flat. Then the tuck & I-grow-old-I-grow-old-Do-I-dare-to-wear-my-towel-rolled? Depends on whether you want to show your thighs. Some do that shouldn't.

  Next order of business: the Stroll. Leon seems to know where he's going: I follow him through the warren of the Parthenon, which is a honeycombed maze of aisles and stairways. We pass up the tubs, the orgy pit, the black-out room, the cubicles. Take your time—no hurry in the baths—here's an open door: a boy beckons. I catch Leon's eye; he shakes his head; I feel the pulse of the Euro-trash synth-rock disco beat that quakes the very walls; regretfully, I pass. Never passed up such a pretty open door before.

  On the other hand, I've never cruised for blood before, either, and it isn't until we've passed the vinyl room (the Parthenon is not slavish in its adherence to the classical theme) and headed up a narrow iron stairway that twists first to the left and then to the right, that I realize where he's taking me: to the roof.

  Now, there's nothing wrong with the roof of the Parthenon: I'd spent many a lazy morning there, stripped and oiled and toasting in the sun. But the only reason for going up there at night is to get a breath of fresh air if you've overdone the 'ludes, or something. I mention this to Leon, and he taps his temple with his forefinger. "Attaboy. Now you' thinkin' like a vam-pie, bud."

  "You bet, bud," I reply, totally mystified until we reach the top of the stairs and open the door to the roof—brrr—and see the boy. Now you're supposed to be twenty-one to get in the baths, but I'm damned if this cutie, sprawled naked on his side, half-on and half-off the thin mattress, an odalisque for the Castro, is a day over seventeen. Leon puts his forefinger to his lips, and circles around to approach the boy from behind. He taps the naked shoulder—no response. "Some nights you get lucky, baby-heart," he whispers to me, across the unconscious lad.