by Steven Luna
“Brother, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
To think, if I would’ve stuck with my hoodie, I wouldn’t have had any reason to go passing by Chloe’s desk to impress her with my business formalwear, and I wouldn’t have learned what I learned from her cubie. And without the need to look busy as I walked I wouldn’t have had cause to grab my Sudoku sheets off the pile, which means I wouldn’t have seen the card for at least another week. And if that had happened, I still wouldn’t know what I now know, which is that this thing between us looks like it’s really going to be a thing. All signs point there, as far as I can tell. Chloe and the Tool, in two different places. Moving out.
We should talk.
Dots connected.
Which is why I will never again underestimate the awe-inspiring magic of sleeves.
POST 17
Beyond the Pale
Anyone out there have a remedy to bring a more human tone back to skin that’s turned the color of E.T.? Hoping for more than make-up tips here, since that’s really not my thing. Just maybe some nature-based solution, like something I can eat or bathe in that will bring me closer to my former color. I thought my paleness would sort of level off by now, but somehow it’s gotten worse. Like my internal vampire parts recognized their kindred in my Eastern European DNA and are keeping me at a soft, dish-watery gray. My dietary limitations haven’t helped matters, I’m sure. But I’m a big believer in the overlooked miracles of the natural world, and I’m convinced there’s a way to trick my body into thinking it’s still healthy and alive even though it isn’t quite. I’d be happy if it could at least appear that way. And before anyone suggests tanning, let me explain why that won’t be an acceptable answer: it’s too obvious. And, for someone with severe light aversion, kind of dangerous.
And also: I’ve already tried it.
Epic fail, as the phrase goes.
My sister’s birthday is sneaking up, and my parents are having us all to their place for dinner. I’m so not ready to share the vampire aspects of my life with them. They’re a snarled knot of neo-Freudian dysfunction that I don’t have fingers limber enough to undo. It took my mother fifteen years to admit that I’m sexually active… and have been for the last fifteen years. Something like This would just mess her shit up. Hube thought maybe the change would be less noticeable – and therefore less enticing fodder for dinner conversation – if I reduced my white-itude by hitting a tanning salon. “Dude, I molt in sunlight. I’d rather be pale.”
“But it’s artificial sunlight in those beds,” he reasoned. “Maybe it won’t have the same effect.”
He was trying to be helpful. I hated to crush his soul. Plus, I had no better ideas. “Think so?”
“If it dims your permanent bloodless glow, it’s worth a try.” Okay. That wasn’t so helpful.
But I was already in.
I waited until I had worked up enough nerve – and until a coupon appeared in my mailbox – and showed up without an appointment at the nearest Tantastic. The girl behind the counter was about a shade past Oompa Loompa, and seemed a little put out for someone who should have as much vitamin D stimulation as she did. I wasn’t sure if she was grossed out by my ghoulish non-color or just ticked because I hadn’t scheduled a bed. Then she looked at what was in my hand, and it all came clear.
It was the coupon.
You can always tell when clerks don’t appreciate your frugality; they pause a little as they take your Certificate of Cheapskating, as if they don’t know where it’s been, or like it has boogers on it. “Says fifty percent off,” I told her, trying to be extra-friendly to compensate for my sickly appearance. I heard her think, You think I give a shit, Casper? But her mouth said, “Yeah… can’t beat that.” Her eyes never bothered to look in my direction.
That sort of set the climate for the rest of our interaction.
She walked me back to the booth and showed me the tanning bed. I stared at its futuristic sleekness, all fluorescence and fiberglass, never realizing until that moment how much those things resemble coffins. And she wanted me to lay down in it? Thanks, but no. I was nowhere near ready to make such a symbolic commitment to my vampireness. So I did what anyone facing a similarly difficult situation would do.
I faked a psychological condition.
“I’m kind of claustrophobic,” I told her, and I asked if there was any chance that there was a more open version of these things, maybe like a couch or a chair-shaped deal. “Another shape of tanning bed? You’re kidding, right?” I just smiled awkwardly. “What an idiot.” I didn’t need to read her mind for that one. She just said it right out loud. “Maybe you’re a candidate for airbrushing instead.”
Uh… yeah. That’s what I was thinking.
She walked me to the bonus humiliation section of the shop where, instead of laying on tubes that emanate cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation, you stand balls-out naked in a tiny closet while hydraulic jets spray you with toxic flesh-colored paint. Apparently, my coupon covered either one. I know I don’t keep up with trendy things, and I’m sure I’ve seen people covered in aerosol skin color before and just didn’t realize what I was looking at. But coming face to face with the machine that makes the magic happen was almost as disturbing as seeing the tanning casket. When a girl stepped out of the chamber dripping beads of brown sweat down her fluffy robe, I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off digging the Maaco coupon out of my mailer instead; if I was going to be spray-painted, I might as well be weatherproof, too. But I’d gone this far, and I’d already given Carrot Face my coupon.
It was too late to exercise my zero other options.
So I got color-tested by someone who, judging by her own personal preferences, maybe didn’t have the greatest talent for that sort of thing. The pumpkin-colored clerk worked intently, holding paint chips against my arm to gauge the right shade. She ended up choosing a color called Dappled Pecan. “I used to date a stripper by that name,” I joked. It did nothing to lighten the mood. She shoved me into the chamber where I dropped trou and waited, pale and naked and wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just let my family learn to love my ultra-whiteness. There was some hissing and chugging as the machine calibrated, or whatever the terminology is.
Then nothing.
So I called out, “Is it working?”
A muffled noise came from the other side of the door, sounding something like “Keys or mouse hut” spoken with a whole lot of attitude.
Maybe she hadn’t heard me. “I said, is it working?” The same muffled noise came back, in the same shitty tone. “Listen,” I hollered after a few more seconds, all out of patience, “is this thing going to work or not?”
“Keep your mouth shut, dumbshit!” she hollered back… just as the machine kicked on and dropped a load of dye in my gaping maw. I was busy hoping it wouldn’t make me sick (because apparently I don’t consider being a vampire to be sickness enough) when another jet took my eyes. So I spun and spit and wiped, feeling paint invade places that Sherwin Williams wasn’t meant to go. I had my hands over the high jets, and one foot covering the lower jets while the other tried to keep planted on the floor as it covered with slippery goo. Then it came out from under me, and I landed on my super-white ass… which was now the tannest part of me besides my palms, my eyes and the soles of my feet.
It was so not worth the coupon.
When Hube saw me at practice that night, all zebra-striped in cadaver gray and mottled beige, he sort of knew not to ask what happened. Lazer, on the other hand, laughed his ass off. I expected as much. I can just imagine my family will react in varying degrees of the same. And now I’m busily making up excuses to avoid telling them the truth while I shower repeatedly, waiting for the patches of Dappled Pecan to mellow into a slightly less humiliating tone of Splotchy Stupid White Guy. I can’t help but wonder if other vampires out there are putting themselves through the same ridiculous paces just to keep the lid on their weirdness.
And I’m still open to suggestions, by
the way.
POST 18
House Full of Crazy
It’s never easy getting together with my family, and it has less to do with scheduling conflicts then it does with personality conflicts. My sister’s birthday dinner was a prime example of how, as soon as they converge in one sphere of space-time, they each fall into their predestined role amid the chaos and confusion. We all do, I guess, since I’m in that sphere right along with them, but at least I’m aware of it. I paid just enough attention to my Psych 101 professor to be able to give official-sounding descriptions to the unstable behaviors each of us exhibit. Here’s the rundown:
• Maureen (Mom) – lives in a state of constant denial, yet aware enough to be painfully critical – of everyone; removed from reality by at least two levels of the philosophical babblings from several Oprah-sanctioned talk show hosts.
• Jerry (Dad) – id-driven, unfiltered, self-expressive, complete with situation-inappropriate cursing and general misuse of modern slang.
• David (Brother, older by four years) – stereotypical first-born; dick-swinging, overachieving, materialistic prick who shows more concern for his own financial well-being and overactive sex life than for anything else.
• Amanda (Sister, older by two years) – total middle child, family mediator, sympathetic to a fault… sometimes to the point of martyrdom.
I think my place in the pop psychology heritage of my family line is pretty evident by now: I’m the baby, doted over and a little spoiled, and the one who keeps the greatest distance from the family unit. You can easily find pieces of all the others in me as a snarky self-deprecating critic, a slightly distant, liberally cursing, sort-of in denial people pleaser just trying to cope with my own stuff. I am a product of my environment, even more than I am of my own invention. And I know each of these people and their bat-shit, unhelpful reactions to challenging situations.
This vampire thing would really rattle the family cage.
Which is why, despite the spectacular failure at covering my cold, colorless skin with tan paint to disguise my affliction, I’ve opted not to tell them.
Not yet, anyway.
Certainly not at that particular event.
It was only a dinner, a two hour flesh-press and catch-up session. And it was for my sister’s birthday, a happy occasion, and definitely not the right place for an in-depth reveal of their youngest becoming a creature of the night. I’m just getting settled with the idea myself; I didn’t want to rehash and justify everything again from the beginning. Plus, they didn’t show up to my intervention because they had TV to watch that night. Sort of indicates the true level of their concern for my well-being. It seems I don’t even rate above a made-for-cable series. That didn’t keep them from shoving their noses up my ass as soon as I hit the door, though.
And being last to arrive, I got the full treatment.
My mom met me first, with a half-smile of welcoming disapproval. “Oy, you look so skinny… what have you been eating?” As inconsiderate as it is, it actually translates as a generally-accepted version of “hello” from her dialect of Mother Tongue. Nonetheless, you know you’ve done something wrong when she starts out in Yiddish. Though it may look sort of lovingly worried in writing, in person it sounds as it’s meant to be: a condemnation of my choice in food.
It’s all in the tone.
Sure, I’d lost some weight on my All-You-Can-Meat diet. But prior to This, I tried to keep my junk food tendencies to myself, to avoid just this sort of judgment. I never told her about the snack cake dinners and Junior Mint desserts; I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about sucking blood out of raw meat. She kissed my cheek, turning my face from side to side afterward. “And you look pale, but only in certain places. You need more sun.” Wasn’t going to tell her about the tanning fiasco, either.
Dad hit the door next, coming in for a hug. “Back up out of his barbeque grill, Maureen… he just got here.” Then privately, in my ear, he said, “She’s all day long with this kind of shit.”
Ah, dad.
He squeezed a little hard. “You do feel thin, though… cold, too. Everything okay, dawgie?” In stark contrast to Mom, he didn’t go looking for things to be wrong just so he could deny them into oblivion; he just wanted confirmation that they weren’t wrong in the first place so he could hurry back to napping in front of the TV.
“Yup, Dad – all’s well in Joeville. Thanks for asking. And it’s dawg, not dawgie.” Didn’t matter.
He had already jumped back into his recliner.
David swaggered in to say hey, with too much cologne and too little sincerity. “Skinny ain’t so bad, as long as your gettin’ laid and stayin’ paid like your big bro, eh, Joey? Dreamin’ and creamin’, right?” He must spend a lot of time coming up with his douche-isms and dropping the g from the end of ing words. Way too Jersey Shore for someone as not-Italian as he is. He gave me the Yo, Dude Hand Clamp – One Arm Shoulder Block Hug combo thing. I’m not good at that crap. I think I clocked him in the chin.
Which was perfectly fine by me.
Then his new girlfriend Krissy walked over, towering above us all in her giant high heels. Each one looked like a shoe stacked on top of another, even taller shoe. The false height brought her giant breast implants to eye level, which I’m sure was her intention. And David’s. “Nice to meet you, Joe.” I was just telling Davey how crazy it is that we’ve been dating for, like, three weeks and I haven’t even met his family until now. Isn’t that crazy?” No, it isn’t. Why would she have met us after only three weeks? Still, most of David’s relationships didn’t even make it past first orgasm afterglow, so three weeks was quite an accomplishment. But she was just the latest in a long line of tightly dressed, bumpy-haired, blow job-ready lip-injected sex fodder for my unprincipled brother.
At least she smelled better than the last one.
Then came Amanda, my Sanity Buddy through this ridiculous emotional minefield. She saw me without pointing out my uneven coloring, hugged me without commenting on my thinness or my temperature. “You’re good?” she asked. “I’m good,” I confirmed, though after hearing my parents’ assessment she probably figured I was lying. But Amanda actually cares about how I’m doing, not just what I’m eating or how my Roth IRA is panning out. She cocked an eye as she looked closer, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to cover up with her if she asked. “You look… ”
Crap.
So she was going to call it out, too, like the others did. How did I look to her – gaunt? Pale? Like I’ve been slurping the blood out of every veal cutlet I can get my hands on? I was too nervous to peek into her head and pick up her thoughts. I would never do that to her, anyway. I respect her too much. I just sweated it out while she chose her adjective.
“… happy, Joe. You look happy.”
That was totally unexpected. It couldn’t have been from smiling too much, since I’ve been keeping my mouth pretty closed lately to avoid showing my fanglets.
But I was glad she’d noticed.
“I am happy.” And I told her – cautiously – about Chloe. And she told me to stay cautious. “You tend to take this stuff pretty heavily when things don’t work out… with the coffee table camping and all.”
“It’s all under control this time,” I told her, totally convinced that it was. And I wished her a happy birthday. Then we all headed for the dining room to chew on other uncomfortable topics of conversation along with the requisite spaghetti and meatballs, since that’s the only item on the birthday dinner menu. Ever.
And my mom questions my eating habits.
And, of course, the TV was on. Because the TV is always on. It’s like a fourth child babbling for attention in the background, always more interesting than the three other children in the room. The three who happen to be real.
Even the one who happens to be currently undead.
It all settled down into the superficial chatty brew of pop culture gossip and current events that these things are prone to turning into
. Amanda caught me up on her fun times; with her PR job taking her around the world, she has the most enviable life of us all. In contrast, I’m pretty sure David’s girlfriend was giving him a hand job under the table, but he multitasked nicely by simultaneously grilling me about my stock portfolio without moaning out loud. Shithead. He knows I don’t have a portfolio, and that I’m not getting hand jobs from anyone other than myself. So our whole interaction was something of a slap in the face all the way through.
I sound jealous.
Maybe I am, just a little.
Still, there he sat, getting his knob yanked while telling me his company’s stock just split and how he was worth twice as much today as yesterday. “Isn’t that crazy?” Krissy chimed. “It’s crazy!”
Seriously?
Someone needs to start a hash tag for this woman and others like her: #crazythingsthatarentreallycrazy.
“You wanna come work for me one day, Joey?” David offered. “You just say the word, and I’ll make it happen. I’ll set you up right, little bro.” It would have been nice of him if it hadn’t been a thinly disguised dig at how not adequate he thought my own job was. It was so difficult to hold back telling him about This, knowing I could blow away his one-upmanship with a single one-up. But I had no intention of doing that. I’ve been trying to fit all my shiny new vampirish tendencies into the context of a normal life. And this shit? It’s as far from normal as you can get.
There’s no room for vampirism in a house already full of #crazy.
Though their interactions tend to be icky things to get stuck in the middle of, this time my parents actually ran a little unintentional interference with an escalating exchange about the proper way to make pasta without having it clump. “Add olive oil to the water – that’ll fix it,” said Dad.
“What do you know about it? You can’t cook,” my mom replied.
“I’m eating your spaghetti, and I know this much: neither can you,” my dad tossed back.
My mom clenched her fork and snorted like a Pamplona bull who’d just gotten an eyeful of red, scraping its hoofs and readying for the run. Then, in an instant, a glimmer from the Magical Fourth Child in the living room made everything all better. “Oh. My. God,” she gasped. “Is that Tom Selleck? I love Tom Selleck! He needs to keep the mustache, but he’s so good when he plays the mean guy on… what’s that show called?”
