Joe Vampire

by Steven Luna

  And so I tinkered and tampered, like a mad food scientist, adding this, removing that. Still working on it, in fact. Soft things work best, and I figured out how to thicken blood into a sort of gravy that seemed to work for a while. But nothing hits the spot like the raw stuff, even though my energy level is not exactly where I’d like it to be. Hopefully there’ll be a rebound for that. And smells have started to take on more definition… and confusion. It sounds totally insane – though not more than anything else in this whole vampire deal, I guess – but recently I’ll smell what seems to be something baking, like a cake just ready to be taken out of the oven, or cookies, maybe. We have a kitchenette at work, and people are always microwaving stuff for snack time. So when the smell hits, I’ll get up and follow my nose, hoping there might be something good at the end of the trail. And inevitably there is, but it’s not in the microwave. Hell, it’s not even baked goods. It’s a person. Usually a woman.

  Sometimes it’s a dude.

  I want this to go away – all of it would be nice, but this smell thing for sure. I’ve taken it as a sign that I’m maybe one step removed from chowing down on people, and I am so not going to let this vampire shit go that far. But I’m sort of at a loss here, not knowing what else to expect.

  And I fucking hate surprises.

  I did find out a little more, though, after the unsuccessful trip to the doctor. I knew Hube was upset that I wasn’t taking care of myself like I told him I would, but I also knew that there was more going on here than an after-flu letdown. I’d have to tell him about all of it at some point. He’s my best friend; he was always checking in to see how I was doing. He wasn’t going to take “meh” as an answer forever. So instead of trying again with a doctor, I figured I should consult with someone else, the only one who might have any real answers about what was going on. There would be no nurse to protect my balls from this time.

  Another vampire maybe, but no nurse.

  I needed to talk to Don.

  POST 11

  Once Bitten, Twice Shy-Gay

  I had to put the shakedown on Michelle to get Don’s address. She was reluctant to give it up, thinking I wanted to beat the crap out of him for the bite. As if I have any crap-beating tendencies. Or abilities. I told her I needed to find out his medical history – not a lie – and knowing how sick I’d been, she understood. I said nothing about thinking he might actually be a vampire, or that I might be one now, too.

  That fun little secret was best kept between me and my commode.

  I showed up unannounced at his loft, which happened to be a few blocks away from Pomme. I thought I’d be afraid to face the guy who’d done me such undeniably bizarre harm, and to find out what I was really in for. But I was more angry than scared when I hit the buzzer. It took a few minutes before he finally emerged from the entryway, bleary and blinking like it had been a rough night for him. A rough couple of weeks, even.

  You and me both, buddy, I thought.

  He looked like a gaunt, shirtless Bret Michaels with about ten years extra mileage. All guy-linered and tattooed, with shaggy blond extensions falling out from under a straw ten-gallon hat, ridiculously decorated with feathered clips hanging from the band. I had the feeling that somewhere in Haight Ashbury there was a half-stoned scarecrow with a cold head, missing his lid and wondering how he was going to finish off his roaches. Most notable about Don: he wasn’t pale like I was. He wasn’t even semi-flesh toned; he was completely tanned… just like Bret Michaels. That had to be fake. Maybe feeding on people blood rather than sirloin blood gives a vampire a healthy Bain de Soleil glow. Or maybe this whole thing was a product of my overactive imagination. Then he smiled and a little pair of fangs shone in the sun.

  Not my imagination. Damn.

  “You look like shit, man,” he said, all gravelly and wheezy. I wrote it off to chain smoking and Jack Daniels, both which he must have started consuming at the age of six.

  I hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a coming feature of being a vampire.

  “Yeah, well I feel like shit, and I’m pretty sure you know why.”

  “Hey – not my fault if the stuff I sold you was bad. I have no control over my suppliers. They provide; I sell. No refunds, no returns.” So not just a vampire, a drug-dealing vampire.

  Beautiful.

  “Not drugs, dirtbag. I’m the one you bit a few weeks back… remember?” I stretched out my neck to remind him.

  “Oh… it’s you, bro. I thought you looked familiar.”

  Now I just felt cheap. “Thanks. Nice to know I blend in with all the other guys you’ve chewed on.”

  “Actually, you were my first.”

  As seasoned as he looked, that just couldn’t be right. “Your first what – first bite, or first group date that ended in neck sex?”

  “My first change.” There it was. Vampire vernacular.

  Crap.

  I tried playing it off, like I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Change? What change?”

  He looked me up and down, and I felt the Nurse Giggly discomfort return. “Oh, you’ve changed, bro… you weren’t that gray when I bit you, or that skinny.” He looked down into my eyes. “Or that short.” People I’ve known for almost a decade couldn’t tell, but some wanker I met once in a bar saw the differences right away. It made sense, since he’d probably gone through the same thing. But I couldn’t even muster a reaction. “So was it as nasty for you as it was for me? Did you shit your asshole inside out, with a fever and chills you couldn’t get rid of?” Yes, and yes. “Climbing the walls from outside your own body?” Sadly, yes. “How long did it take?” I told him: nine days. “Wow… only nine? My change took two and a half weeks. Reminded me of when I made the switch from crystal to crack… you know how that is, bro.”

  No. I don’t know how that is. “Forgive my ignorance. I’ve never had an addiction to transfer from one drug to another.”

  “Good… good for you. Stay away from that shit; it’s all poison. ” His odd concern surprised me, even though it was focused on entirely the wrong things.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. “I was attacked by a gay, drug-dealing, style-challenged vampire.”

  “Hold up, bro. Back up the truck. I’m not gay.”

  “But you bit my neck – me, a guy – when we were in a sushi bar on a group date with a bunch of hot women. And Michelle distinctly said she was setting me up with you not a girl named Dawn, like I thought she was. She couldn’t have thought you were exactly straight.”

  Don scratched his scruff. “It’s probably my shirts. Anyway, I tried with the girls but they all said no.” I didn’t realize volunteerism was a requirement for a vampire bite. “Michelle said you didn’t seem to be into women, so you were probably gay.”

  “I’m not gay – I’m just shy!”

  “Yeah; she said you were shy-gay.” Again with this?

  “Why couldn’t you just do the women anyway? Why me?” That was not like me, wishing my own victimization onto someone else. But I was a little done in by what I was hearing.

  He looked at me like I’d broken his bong. “That would be rape, dude… I’m not a rapist.” At least he had some kind of morals. Or one moral, anyway. “You kept humping my leg, so I just figured you were into it. And when I brought up the idea, you said yes. You also kept running your hand over my chest and sighing, real disappointed-like.”

  A small slice of memory came back when he said it. “That’s because I thought you were a chick with really flat tits!” I actually had brought this on myself.

  Shit.

  “Ah… the new vampire’s a breast man. Sweet. You’ve never had sake before, have you? It packs a punch like that sometimes.” Don was the last person I was going to heed chemical advice from. I think he could see this wasn’t sitting well with me, probably by the way I was heaving and slumped against the wall. And I may have been rocking a little bit. “If it helps, if you’d have said no I wouldn’t have bitten you either, bro. And it didn’t go any furth
er than the bite – hand to God.”

  “Oh, well… thanks a lot for your restraint.” Small relief, I guess. By then I’d sort of lost my train of thought, but there were still a thousand more blanks to be filled in. Questions slowly arose. “So how many people have you bitten?”

  “Memory’s not my strong suit.”

  No. It probably isn’t. “Take a guess.”

  “To feed? About sixty, I’d say. Maybe more.”

  Mother of Hell – more than sixty? “And you killed all of them?”

  “No way, bro! I don’t kill any of them. I just take what I need and leave them be. It’s a deal I make with them: a little nip in exchange for a dime of whatever they might be interested in. They get jacked first, and I feed off of them to get the blood and the high. Double whammy.”

  It just kept getting worse.

  “And who are these people?”

  “Mostly hobos from the mattress factory – I mean, Pomme – before they all made tracks.” And I thought eating raw beef was unsanitary. “I’ve never bitten anyone else to change them, though. You’re it. Didn’t even know if I’d have it in me, but it looks like I’ve got the touch, eh?”

  I couldn’t believe how cavalier he was. “Are you proud of making me into this, Don? Really – are you? You’ve turned a perfectly clean stranger into some undead blood-eating monster. Is that okay with you?”

  “Dude, do you think I wanted to be this way? I didn’t ask for this; I was taken, just like you.” Taken. It sounded so victimizing, so hostile.

  So Criminal Minds.

  I had the stomach-churning impression that I might be gazing into my own future when I looked at Don. “How long have you been like this?”

  “Just about two years. I didn’t always sell skag to the homeless, either, but after a while the night-crawling takes a toll… gotta do something to pay the bills and feed the hunger.”

  Change. Feed. Hunger.

  The vocabulary of my new life.

  I was sort of desperate to know more about it. “Listen, I really need you to tell me what happens from here. What else is coming for me with this whole vampire deal?”

  “It ain’t like those beautiful kids in the Nightfall films, bro… not by a longshot.” And he told me, in terms more lucid than I would have thought someone who was probably on several illegal substances could manage. He told me about the hunger and the feeding, and how the urge to change someone else into a vampire just came upon him one day, so he thought he’d give it a go. He told me about the guilt and the fear that never go away, taunting reminders of how human he once was. He told me about the loneliness and isolation of gradually becoming more creature than man until you hardly recognize your own impulses. And he told me how much it sucked having no one around to understand what you go through every day. “This wasn’t something I chose for myself, but I’m going with it now, making the most of it. Playing the cards I was dealt.”

  In other words, he was settling for This.

  And shoving it on other people.

  I was numb by the time he was finished, and I think he knew he’d overwhelmed me. We just shook hands, and he told me if I ever needed to talk it through I knew where to find him. I walked away feeling more pity for him than I probably should have, knowing that I was in the same boat and rowing right beside him toward the falls. I’d hate to have people pitying me for this, and I surely wasn’t going to pity myself. As bad as I felt for Don, I’d be damned if I was going to let his badly planned reaction to his own life-ruining experience determine my path.

  I was too shell-shocked at that moment to understand that it already had.

  POST 12

  The More You Know

  I’d like to address a few common misconceptions about We the Undead, a way of unscrewing some of the nuts and bolts of vampirition now that I have more personal experience with such matters. In no particular order:

  • Garlic repels them – This is only sort of true. It’s not the most pleasant smell in the world for us – kind of like sweaty crotch boiled in apple cider vinegar – but if you can get past that, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy a nice pesto once in a while.

  • Crosses ward them off – For the Christian vampires, maybe. I’m Jewish, though – remotely, but still. So crosses don’t have the intended effect. A mezuzah might do some damage, or maybe a Star of David. Haven’t tried it though, and I’m not about to go looking for trouble.

  • They have no reflections – Not true. I still see myself in every shiny surface, pale and gaunt, a cruel token of the fact that I’m not as I used to be. Digital photography doesn’t do me any favors, however. But that could just be poor lighting on white skin. Nothing a bit of Photoshopping can’t take care of.

  • A stake through the heart will kill them – Really, wouldn’t that kill anybody? I have no heartbeat though, so there’s no telling at this point. Let’s just hope I never have to find out.

  This experience has been a lot like learning the ugly scoop about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Ziggy Stardust all in one truth-revealing go-around. Only in this case, I’m sort of happy to learn that whatever I’ve come to believe about the magical land of Vampiria was going to be less magical than all the fictional mumbo-jumbo had let on. I would much rather have heard that Santa and Ziggy were real and vampires were bogus, though; in that scenario, everyone makes out like a bandit and no one craves anyone else’s blood. Just cookies and super-bad haircuts. But you don’t always get to choose what ends up as fantasy and what turns out to be reality. Sometimes you have to ride the wave you land on and dodge the rocks as best you can.

  For the moment, I’m just hanging ten until I hit the shore.

  After talking to Don, I realized that this was going to be a long-haul sort of thing. There will be no quick fix; I’ll have to tough it out, and somehow fit it into the life I’m still determined to have. The vital statistics don’t lie: as far as my major systems are concerned, I am not entirely living anymore. That means a whole lot of things will be different for me, all of which I’m still discovering as I go. And as isolating as it feels sometimes, I am not doing this entirely alone. I’m getting by with a little help from my friends.

  One friend, at least. Now that he knows what’s going on.

  I had fully intended to devise a way to hide the Vampire Within by covering up the Vampire Without. Once I had a handle on what the situation would be – even if was bound to change up a little as it progressed – I could at least fall back on a standard collection of lies and excuses that I would have at the ready. Who’s good for a full day of Warped Tour? Sorry, guys… three more ultraviolet rays and this freckle will be a melanoma. Join us for happy hour at the Samurai Ham On Rye? Not after the last time, thanks – previously undiagnosed fish allergy. You’re looking a little peaked… are you okay? Iron deficiency… just need to up my spinach intake. I could totally play this off, with my workmates, my family – just about everyone.

  But not with Hube.

  And anyway, after everything I’d learned I knew I had to unload on someone. Aside from my sister, who would be hard-pressed not to share it with the rest of my family, he’s the only one I would go with something so enormous. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go to him.

  He came to me.

  He showed up one Wednesday night and walked right in, which isn’t anything different for him. I thought maybe I’d missed another practice, but I saw right away he wasn’t here for music. His hair was combed, his shirt buttoned up to his chin. He looked stern and sort of preacherly, like he’d been rolling through the neighborhood passing out postcards with Biblical scriptures on them. He was even carrying a little black book. When he laid it on the table, I read the title: How to Conduct an Intervention.

  Oops.

  Then he began conducting. “Hey, Joseph.” He never calls me Joseph unless he has a point to make. “I think we need to have a talk.”

  I started in with something sarcastic, then decided it probably wasn’t the best appr
oach given the touchiness of the situation and changed course. “You’re right, Hube. We do.”

  I don’t think he expected that. “I’ve been worried about you lately. You’ve been… different… since you got sick.” He made little air quotes when he said it. “I thought you’d be better by now, and then you blew off the doctor… do you want to talk about what’s going on?”

  “Dude, it’s not what you’re thinking – believe me.”

  “And what am I thinking, Joe? Hmmm?” Whoa. He was calm, superior and condescending – all at the same time. And he wasn’t cursing at all, not even PG-rated stuff. He had really rehearsed this. “What is it that I’m thinking right now?”

  Without even trying, I picked up his thoughts. Since we’re pretty much on the same wavelength anyway, I figured it would be easy. And it was, almost like Radio Hube had switched itself on in my brain. It was even easier than it had been with the nurse. I read it all to him, word for word: You weren’t sick; you started hitting the smack and now you’re trying to hide the fact that you’ve become addicted. “Hitting the smack, Hube? Is that from your book? Come on… you know me better than that.” His mouth dropped. Holy fuck… you just read my mind! “I know… yours and everyone else’s. It’s freaking me out big-time, and I really need your help with what’s causing it. But it has nothing to do with drugs.” This is some sort of trick… something you learned on You Tube. “Not a You Tube trick, buddy – something else. Something way worse.” I don’t believe this. “I don’t believe it either, but it’s true.” He fell totally silent, except for a few incredulous squeaks. We had just held a two-way conversation with me doing all the talking, yet he still couldn’t get what was happening.