When I fly around nude, I can usually hook my dangling penis against a cornice in one of the north shore buildings. Or swing low among the town houses in the Kenmore corridor and bounce my nuts off the pointed tips of the wrought iron fences encircling the properties.
That really gets the bloodlust going.
In both cases stated above, I’d chalk my idiosyncrasies up to the job I had until the chick bloodsucker forced me into an early retirement. Vampire cops are strictly from hunger and late-night syndication. I had been a thirtysomething homicide dick working the gay and lez bars along North Halsted toward the end. And I had no doubt that there was such a thing as a vampire, though I hate the fact that the world needs so badly to romanticize them.
There is nothing moral about killing anybody for the sake of sating one’s own thirsts and lusts; that is tantamount to Ted Bundy wanting us to place the blame of his murderous spree on the publishers of the adult, glossy magazines that I choose to have safe sex with. Barry Cook said it best back in ‘56, after being questioned on dismembering Judith Mae Anderson. He said that he had an urge. Simple as that.
Vampires have urges, the other ones out there that remind me of Bundy and Richard Speck and Larry Eyler. But myself, I needed to survive. I hate having to lamely justify it, but that’s the spot I was put into. It’s all from hunger that I do it.
So the swooping down on people like the ultimate raincoat exhibitionist sans raincoat is a cool thing, but when that doesn’t do the trick, how the hell does one cause pain to himself to help retain an erection when he can’t even feel pain? I had to discover ways. Hell, I had eternity, assumedly.
The public romanticizes vampires too much, but it is true that there is more to it than just the bleeding and the feeding. I still like the sucking and the fucking and the jerking off, too. Too much blood in me, I fart and belch as good as the rest of the living when they’ve eaten too much junk food.
I just don’t get what the thrill is for young kids to go gothic and do everything short of worship Satan. It is like what I said about the killers—and I admit there are followers of scuzbags like the Night Stalker chuckmeat out in California—and how I compare them with the vampire ideal. Myself, I’d be much more sympathetic to a werewolf, if there is such an animal, because I think of their particular suffering the same way I do that of an alcoholic. I can’t help but feel sorry for them in the way they are so utterly controlled by something they cannot change. The werewolves, I mean. Lon Chaney in the film, begging to be locked up. Only an infinitesimal number of the alkie cops I know abuse anyone but the dregs of our criminal community, and that’s the truth. Maybe the gothics don’t see the struggle because alcohol and drugs make them feel the immortality they crave.
The reason I knew about the vampires and their existence had its roots in a case I dealt with several years back. It was the summer and fall of ‘91 and there were several sudden deaths in a prominent gay bar under the el at Roscoe and Halsted. The Glory Hole, it’s called. One of the first to have an attraction called a “grab bag,” which would be best likened to the blind pigs of Prohibition days. Instead of illegal hooch and gambling, the gay bars (and presumably the dykeholes, too) had embarked on a thing where a patron could go into a darkened room way in back. In some cases, down stairwells. Naked men in chaps or crotchless Spandex would be hovering like wallflowers, discernible by neon hoops worn like bracelets or neon pins inserted in the penis or bicep.
(It is this, as well as seeing the lezzies wearing earrings in their temples or sewing their gash shut—I’d see the latter in lockup or hear the stories from the backups—that started me in on the No Pain No Gain aspect of my lovemaking.)
Yeah, I suppose it’s hard to swallow, no pun intended. I lost my sex drive completely over the course of those weeks. The kicker was when I came across a stash we found in the apartment of a well-known Chicago news anchor, which also happened to serve as a backdoor buddy’s fuck pad. Back room at the Wellington Hotel, a big box of magazines. Bootleg out of Farmingdale, Long Island, a stroke mag to end all stroke mags: HUSKS. Burn victims in erotic positions. Paralytics sixty-nining. Double limb amputees doing it doggy-style. My erection was so big, my ejaculate so strong, I was disgusted at myself. How could I be aroused at such atrocities?
“It was midsummer,” I told Veda the very first night she asked about my attitudes toward kinky sex, vampire-style. “I was able to hose down my pants in the shower down the hall, deal with them being sticky-dry for the rest of my shift.”
“Isn’t nothing wrong with having thoughts about a book like that,” Veda Daanse whispered, licking her fangs as I licked her nipples, her saliva running down her Nordic breast to mix with mine. “It isn’t like they were being tortured.”
“But I feel like I’m torturing my own victims for my own inadequacies at attaining the bloodlust…”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it torture, baby,” she told me. “Their deaths were quick and painless. All you made them do was struggle a little. We all struggled when we were alive…”
I had told Veda everything. About my descent into the minor’s&m dens, the endless bars, the one joint on Eugenie where I met the perfect date. The girl with the smile from dark nowhere and a snatch that beckoned with sanguine anticipation. I swallowed it and she swallowed me, never even getting to the point of finding a cheap dive on Belmont and a bed she could handcuff me to; no, it was suck, fuck, out of luck. Fangs in the neck, you know the drill.
In the back seat of a ‘93 Taurus.
The worst part about it, she only led me on with the kink bit so that she could get at my blood. The hell with these romantic soap opera/rock star/Beverly Hell 90210 vampires you see on the bestseller lists. This one was a damn bloodsucking killer, yet she couldn’t believe I wanted someone to inflict pain on me! I never saw the undead bitch again. Just up and left without a simple by-your-leave (a gothic vampire phrase, that last part, huh?).
Well, it was bad enough that I found myself with a pair of fangs and a face as pasty as Drew Barrymore’s in that Amy Fisher made-for-TV flick. Hell, I’ll save you all that virgin vampire ennui crap. The idea of being undead was secondary to the fact that I still had my sado-masochistic tendencies.
As above, so below. Yeah, right. Just like the days before the change, when I’d find it so hard to get an erection, nights that I’d masturbate with futility so hard that the skin would break and bleed when I finally got a blue-veiner of any worth, now it was the same, except that I needed to get the taste. The bloodlust. Wanted to give someone the crimson kiss. Sanguine sex. All those phrases that filled pages of cheap vampire novels the way phrases like “boxing the clown” and “revving the Viking Pontiac” appeared in the s&m books in my hall closet.
It didn’t just suck. It blew.
I knew what I’d become; I understood that I’d have to kill. But it wasn’t the scent or smell that got me going into a frenzy. There had to be pain on my part. Physical pain, like the things I begged my first victim to do as told at the beginning of my narrative.
Gouge into my temples with blood-red lacquered fingernails. Tear open my lower lip so that it hung down like a deflated balloon. I had begged this from every one of the undead wannabes from the Division Street singles bars to the clotted neon dives beneath the elevated tracks on Belmont, windowless joints where fourteen-year-olds hung out wearing crotchless leather pants and black overcoats, listening to teenage death songs.
Show them what the hunger was really like when taken to the extremes. like a warlord’s lackey in Mogadishu forcing a captured airman to read some trash statement on camera before blowing a hole in the back of his head, my requests were as insane. Did the kid in the bomber jacket from Ludington, Michigan, ever think he would die in the desert reading a maniac’s bible? Hell, how many rape/murders did I handle as a cop where the victim’s last words equated to just tell me what to do and let me live? (The killers would always talk about it, either in lockup or at trial.)
Within months I had deg
enerated to the point that I could no longer get the bloodlust simply by having my skin torn and shredded. I forced a girl in Bucktown to try and bite off two of my fingers before I broke her neck.
No. Forced is not a pathetic enough word.
Requested might do it. At the very least, I wasn’t pleading yet.
Veda and I in bed in the abandoned factory on Goose Island. She was a damn exciting lay and was into more than a little experimenting. I am handcuffed to her bed. She has taken a dog muzzle I reshaped and placed it on my face snugly so that my lower eyelids are pulled down over my cheekbones.
I try to squeeze my eyes tightly into focus, like gun turrets, and the simple pain excites me greatly. My eyes dry out quickly and the light from the lone bulb in the hallway burns me.
Veda is nude and luxurious to watch. Even before she begins to play with herself, putting four fingers up her cunt and jamming her thumb into her pelvic bone, I am already erect with the anticipation of what she will do to me.
With her free hand, she takes a plastic gun, one that squirts high-powered streams of water. It is filled with formaldehyde.
She aims at my eyes. Blows me a kiss with fingers that glisten with her come.
With Veda, I did not have to beg.
Seven months into my new eternity, I started moving my killing ground farther west, past the housing projects and into the part of Chicago where art galleries sprang to trendy, two-dimensional life from the husks of converted factory lofts. It was here that I met Veda Daanse.
The place was called Indulgence. First of the new strip bars to return to Chicago after a decade-long ban; I was a rookie walking the State Street mall beat back when Joe DiLionardi, along with the Cook County Sheriffs Offices instituted Operation: Angel. A modern day Eliot Ness, the cops under his command had effectively shut down every major prostitution house in the downtown district. The fact that Robin Gecht and the Korkoralis brothers were serving up the breasts of street whores for devil worship had little to do with things. Truth was, there was a mayoral election the next spring.
Come the summer of ‘93, there was riverboat and casino gambling in all of Chicago and its collar counties, and “topless dance halls” such as Indulgence and The ToyHouse emerged from the cracked husks of long-empty buildings in the River West area. Forbidden fruit behind stucco walls painted in pastel colors.
If I had still been human and driving around in my old beater Pontiac Sunbird, I might’ve circled for an hour looking for the place. Indulgence was housed in a nondescript building on Blackhawk and Kingsbury, white stucco, red neon, a maroon rococo roof with rain dancing off of it the first night I flew over.
I perched atop a water tower for an abandoned paint factory and watched the men walk in, arriving in cabs or limousines. Three hours later, in the false dawn, I was still there, watching the women leave. In the time between, I had flown through one of the air ducts to check the activity on the inside. I had to remain in the shape of a bat because my clothes would not rematerialize after I had shrunk so small. It’s not like all us vampires are tight with some guy like Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four, and have Spandex outfits made of unstable molecules.
The place was disco meets industrial, with most of the music that the girls table-danced to being heavy metal and rockabilly. Because they served alcohol, full nudity was not allowed; the girls wore gstrings and rubbed latex over the nipples that quickly bubbled in the stage lights. On a few of the women, the result reminded me of the antiskid things one might have on the bottom of a shower stall.
I watched over three dozen women making their rounds, some with fine blond hair on their backs like gold dust, others with black manes that hid everything but their eyes, lips, and intent. A few of the girls wore dog collars; others dressed like drum majorettes.
None excited me in the least. The bloodlust was not there, though I was in need of a kill. I felt as frustrated as some of the chinless wonders sitting at the tables below, imagining their sex with women named Mercedes or Ballou while they stuck their tongue between their teeth and lower lip as if exploring for food. When times were this bad, I broke into blood banks and felt like some pathetic drunk. And burdened with the guilt of someone who masturbates his dick purple.
I watched the women leaving near 5:00 A.M. The rain had stopped, the sky a bluish-grey, like in a rock video. In a last-ditch effort, I had rolled naked in the muddy water of the rooftop and tried to look feral as I imagined Mercedes or one of the others clawing at me, their rubberized breasts bouncing in their final moments of life.
While I was standing up above, I saw a blond woman I hadn’t recognized from within walk by, alone and defiant. She was wearing black boots and a matching raincoat.
She raised her head and looked directly at me, the dawn at my back, my pubic hair matted and dark. She opened the sash on her raincoat and I saw an almost white thatch and the sharp line of her pelvic bone. I felt myself harden as she smiled and crossed the railroad tracks.
Behind the abandoned factory, I watched her strip, out of sight from everyone else. Her skin was almost as white as her teeth, her hair a frosted blond. I wasn’t certain if I was imagining that her lips looked too blue to be lipsticked. The hair that reached up from her pussy to her navel was the texture of miniature snowflakes.
Incredibly, I stared as she metamorphed into the purest white cat and pranced off as if following a ball of twine, her clothing rolled up and stashed beyond a broken window.
I hurried into my own clothing, holding back my desire. I had barely taken flight when I ejaculated into my jeans.
That was how I had first seen Veda Daanse. An innocent tease, I let her love me and become corrupted by me, as well.
An innocent tease, the way an employee of a major nationwide strip joint chain is expected to portray oneself. In the months we were together, Veda never knew of my sado-masochistic tendencies. Not until the very end.
She never handcuffed me and shot my eye sockets full of formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid, never sewed my tongue to the inside of my cheek. Those were all my private fantasies of her, albeit slightly different than those of the men at Indulgence, watching the women dancing while they probed their mouths with their tongues, thinking of the most proper witty comment.
I remembered the desperate thoughts from my days as a cop. My days among the living. Yessir, becoming a vampire has also done wonders for my writing skills. I could’ve used this speed when I was typing my F. I. reports in triplicate.
Veda’s body hasn’t even been reduced to slack skin on bone and here I am on, what?, page thirteen. A regular speed demon.
And when I’m done writing this, bringing it all to the present, well…
I’m doing myself up next.
I followed her through the streets of River West, across Goose Island to a cul-de-sac by the Kennedy Expressway. Willard Court had mock-brick buildings on only one side of the street the farther north it wound. The two-story flats along its west side were rented to artists and other self-employed individuals, including drug dealers. The east side of the street was devoid of houses and littered with burnt husks of cars. Before she jumped up to one of the shattered wrecks, an old Delta 88, I watched in awe as her cat-form successfully dodged across eight lanes of interstate traffic. This, after strutting along past the warehouse, allowing me to stare up the crack of her ass as if she were in her human form.
I landed in front of the Delta 88; it had probably been maroon once. The cat perched on the hood and stared at me with, what’s that word, aloofness? Blinked several times, sniffed the air.
Then simply walked on by me like the girl from Eugenie Street, the girl with the smile from dark nowhere, padded on by me with my dirty clothes and my pubic hair matted to a wet spot on my trousers with her tail swaying in the light of a summer’s dawn. I was thinking “What the hell?” when she nudged her snout against a brown door halfway up the street. It opened easily and she disappeared inside.
A moment later, the door swung open fu
ll. She was there in her human form, nude with no one to see but me, the cars speeding along on the expressway eight feet below as if their drunken, overtired drivers were also vampires trying to race away the sun’s cancers.
She kept the door open, hand on the inner knob, allowing me to stare at her nakedness. It was no longer just a flash of the pubes from a distance, it was everything. She looked almost Nordic. I thought this even before being told her name. Blond hair frosted near-white, though I didn’t know which was the true color. Cut in a pageboy bob. Her face was all soft angles and she had a slight cleft in her chin, enhancing her bluish lips and eyes the color of chipped ice, her smile tight and turned down as if she were trying to look drop-dead sexy for the first time.
Her nipples were large for her breasts and I followed the shadows all the way down her flat stomach until I reached the downy mane of her pussy. Her legs were set apart and I longed for a look at her ass, because I knew I’d be able to see her pubic hair between her legs. As light as it was, it was full and sleek.
“You think I was going to change out there?” she said to me, her voice like a breeze. She had a slight accent that matched any of the Slavic languages spoken in the neighborhoods that side of the expressway. I suspicioned that she had lived there, in that neighborhood, before being bitten.
“What?” I mumbled back, probably drooling.
“I mean, it’s a bad neighborhood, y’know?” She smiled and I saw her tiny sharp fangs.
“But you’re a shape-shifter, a vampire like me.”
Love in Vein Page 33
