DSosnowski - Vamped

by Vamped (v1. 0) [lit]

  “Marty, Marty, Marty,” she says, patting her cold hand against my cold arm, once for each “Marty.” She stops with the last one and leaves it there.

  I place my own hand on top of hers, look in her eyes again, and finally ask who’s memory she’s got immortalized back there.

  T pulls her hand out from under mine. She mimes a cigarette drag. “Mom,” she says, blowing out a plume of imaginary smoke. “Throat cancer,” she answers before I even get a chance to ask.

  “Dad,” I say, touching my heart. “Lungs.”

  “You couldn’t…?”

  “Too late.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m sorry,” we say, over each other, and then freeze. We’d been shouting before, just to be heard over the background music. But it’s the silence between songs into which we shout our mutual sympathy, followed by every glassy black eye in the place, turning to stare at us.

  “Ihate when that happens,” I say, once the music resumes. T shrugs.

  She sips her blood. I sip mine.

  “So,” I finally say. “How old were you?”

  “When she died,” T asks, “or when I got the tattoo?”

  “Both.”

  “Thirteen,” she says, “and then sixteen.”

  I look at T’s hands, both of which are on the table. The fingers of one cross the fingers of the other, as if the hands on her back have been taken apart and put back together wrong. She taps the bottom one very nearly in time to the music that’s playing.

  I wait for the silence between songs. “You wanna talk about it?” I ask, barely more than a whisper.

  T points at her head, letting it drop heavily to her chest. Letting it struggle back up. Letting it fix just opposite me, whiteless eye to whiteless eye.

  “This is me,” she says, “rogering that.”

  Here’s something you may not appreciate: the teller at your bank wasn’t always a teller. Telling—or whatever it’s called—was not her calling. Making change was not what her growing up was about. Banking was not the thing that filled her heart and made it beat. Things just happened along the way, like the setup of a joke, and telling just turned out to be the punch line.

  The same goes for your car dealer. The gas station guy. The factory worker. And all the other nameless, faceless people we use to do our business.

  Like strippers, for instance.

  It seems the woman I vamped all those years ago wasn’t always a dancer. What Tombstone was, in the “always” department, was the daughter of a “for real” circus clown, one who didn’t plan on being a clown any more than her daughter planned on dancing along the edge of the Detroit River at a place called Teezers. In the “always” department, Tombstone’s mom was a TV weatherperson who never was.

  “A love for the performing arts,” T says, tapping her imaginary cigarette into an imaginary ashtray. “That’s what I got from my mom.”

  Her mom’s professional name was Rags, and she dressed in, well, her namesake. Her husband died shortly before T was born, and so it was Rags’s job to put food on the table, which she did by dragging her only child from small town to small town, following the warm weather. It was a strange existence, but it worked—more or less—until T turned thirteen and Rags the Clown was diagnosed with throat cancer.

  “When she died,” Tombstone says, “they buried her with full circus honors.” She says this like it’s supposed to mean something to me.

  “Meaning?” I say.

  T doesn’t answer at first, instead making a pair of fists at the memory.

  “They cut holes in her coffin,” she says, and then notices what her hands are doing. “For her clown shoes,” she says, punctuating the statement with both fists, pretending she’s made them for this illustration. “To poke through,” she adds, before asking if I can imagine being thirteen and seeing my mother’s dead feet humiliated for all eternity.

  All I can think of is that magic trick—the one where the woman gets locked in a box and then sawed in half. Did her mother’s feet look like that to the little girl who grew up to be a teezer? Did her heart break at even the thought of magic like mine did whenever I heard Christmas carols?

  The pallbearers and all the other clowns got dressed up in their full circus regalia. But they wouldn’t cry, not a goddam one of ’em, because they were afraid of smearing their makeup. Instead, they wore trick daisies, sending out arcs of slapstick grief whenever they squeezed the bulbs hidden in their too-wide, garish lapels.

  “Like my mom’s dying was such a knee-slapper,” T says, her hands making fists again.

  Tombstone was the only one around the grave wearing normal funeral clothes. She was the only one without patches, or suspenders, or some oversized something that honked. She didn’t care. She was glad to stand out. She wasn’t there to mourn the clown her mother had been. She was there to mourn the woman with a face so constellated with acne scars it stopped her from living her dream of doing the TV weather. Sitting in their trailer at dinnertime, T and her mom would watch the news together, each eating a TV dinner from her own TV tray, the TV itself turned down, so her mom could supply the weather report in her perky, “everything’s okay” voice. Some evenings, the talk was all about the chances of rain. Others dealt with barometric pressure and fronts of various kinds. But the evenings T loved most were like little science lessons, detailing the difference between thermometer cold and the cold of exposed skin.

  T looks at me now, a professional exposer of skin.

  “She could have been happy,” she says, having already made the connection I’m just making now, “if only she had better…skin.”

  And it’s the way she dwells on the word “skin”—the way she keeps on repeating it—that helps me see how the little girl in my head became the stripper sitting in front of me. This was the daughter of a woman who had to hide her dream and her skin behind greasepaint. This was a daughter who’d be damned if she’d follow in her mother’s oversized footsteps. No. She hated the thought of hiding behind anything. She hated the idea of playing the fool. If fools had to be involved, it’d be her audience, not her. She’d be the one in control. There’d be no laughing at her expense. And you could bet there’d be no clowns in her future. Not after this. Not after all this was done.

  “Ever notice how before, the kids always cried when the clowns showed up?” T asks. I nod.

  “The clowns were supposed to be for the kids, right? That’s what the parents used to think. But every kid I ever saw at any show my mom ever did, their first reaction was to cry. And who can blame ’em? The place already smells like shit, and then here comes this dead white face and this huge, bloody red mouth, making loud noises and big crazy gestures and…”

  T pauses. “You wanna know a secret about clowns?”

  I nod.

  “They knew they scared kids and they did it anyway.” T says she knows this for a fact, having heard her mother’s coworkers talking after hours. “They’d score the little bastards in decibels, getting a real kick out of the way the parents sweated, struggling with some squirming, panicky kid.” She pauses to compose a cap for her feelings, and comes up with this:

  “Never underestimate the bitterness of clowns.”

  It was her own bitterness toward the motley profession—and her secret knowledge of her mom’s true dream—that made Tombstone smile for the first and only time during the funeral. They were all standing around the grave site. The made-up pallbearers wearing their coats of many colors had set the coffin atop the canvas straps of the bier, ready to lower it when the time came. Even the priest had been coaxed into wearing a rubber nose. Out of everyone there—the sword and fire swallowers, the freaks, geeks, and barkers, the clowns, tamers, and acrobats—the priest was the only one T didn’t hate. The priest was bending the rules, sacrificing his self-respect to lighten the burden for the deceased’s loved ones. He didn’t know that if T had her way, there wouldn’t be a smudge of greasepaint or even lipstick within ten miles of the place.


  “Naked,” she says.

  “It would have been better if we all stood there naked,” she repeats, sitting across from me, at least partially there. “Funerals should be about letting go, letting out, not hiding behind a bunch of fake faces and folderol.”

  And that’s why she smiled.

  Standing next to her mother’s coffin, mourning, listening to the priest, and the occasional horn honk of clown grief, T noticed the shadow of a cloud pass over her own normal-sized shoes. She looked up at the dark, rain-heavy thing, imagining that her wishing had made it so, had brought it into existence, and there, right over all those painted heads. And since it washer storm cloud, T closed her eyes, wishing it into doing what it was meant to do.

  When the first drop splashed, big and heavy on her un-made-up cheek, T smiled and opened her eyes.

  “You should have seen ’em.” T smiles now, still remembering. Still remembering the clowns turtling their heads inside their motley pajamas; the others shielding their makeup with Mickey Mouse hands, or popping open their too-tiny umbrellas.

  They’d been holding balloons. Balloons, instead of flowers. Instead of handkerchiefs. Or candles. Or anything else more appropriate. And when the rain came and the clowns panicked, they let go of their balloons, trying to protect their hidden selves from the judgment of heaven. Tombstone watched as the balloons rose, struggling upward against the rain, the drops drumming on their tight skins, making them beat, like wild hearts.

  Good.

  That’s what T thought, watching the rain wipe the smiles off a dozen faces, watching all those fake grins run into all those big collars.

  For you, Mom.

  That’s what that little girl thought—all alone then, all alone still—her clothes growing heavy with rain, her normal-sized shoes already squishy with the stuff. She imagined her mother and father both, smiling up there, where the rain came from, holding hands again. The father she knew only from pictures would be looking down at how his daughter had grown. And her mom’s skin would be clear, finally, and perfect enough for TV.

  Except for that one time, tracking the first of Clarissa’s killers, I haven’t been in one of these places since Isuzu came into my life. The thought of missing even a minute of her growing up, staring at some stranger’s tits—no. But then Ebola struck the Kowalski household. And suddenly, an additional pair of mammary glands seemed like a good idea. And so I’m back. I’m back, and doing the falling-in-love thing all over again.

  But I’ll tell you this right now:

  I don’t know if I believe Tombstone.

  I don’t know if I believe the pink tear she’s just shed.

  People who don’t come to these sorts of places probably think these sorts of places are all about lap dances, hard-ons, and stuffing money down G-strings. And thoseare a big part of it, but not the only part. There’s the talking, too. The storytelling. The customers making up better jobs and lives to impress the dancers, the dancers making up traumas to pry a few more bills free. T could be full of grief, or full of shit—I don’t honestly know.

  I don’t honestly care, either.

  I love them both. All of a sudden. And just like that. I love the little girl, defiantly mourning her mother the clown. And I love the conniving stripper who could make up a story like that. I even love that once-scary tattoo, now that Imight know what it’s all about.

  And so I keep trying not to put my foot in my mouth. I go clever. Cute. Charming. I make connections that demonstrate I have a brain, and am not like the other defectives she’s probably used to.

  Tombstone smiles at me. “I like the way you…,” she begins. She tips the rim of her glass against the rim of mine, making them ring.“…tink.”

  Something tells me she’s used this joke before—perhaps as a barometer to judge the quick-wittedness of her customers. Not wanting to disappoint, I chime in with, “Tank you,” and am rewarded with another smile.

  By this point in the evening, we’ve already told our big stories. For T, it was her mom’s funeral; for me, the war, my vamping, my zigzaggy stumble toward benevolence. We’ve talked about our jobs, music, movies, what we remember about the last sunset we ever saw.

  “I was standing out back of this place, by the Dumpster, smoking a joint between sets,” T says, remembering. “The sun was going down at the end of the alley, lighting up all the puddles between it and me. The sky was lavender, and the tall grass growing along the fence began sparking with all these neon green fireflies…”

  “I just remember hoping I’d get to see it come up again,” I say. “I’m in France and there’s a war going on. And I’m having one of those days where death seems to be scratching closer and closer. I keep getting hit by the side effects—dirt and pebbles from a grenade going off, splinters from an exploding tree, a spray of blood from the guy I was just talking to. As it’s going down, something between the sun and me is on fire, striping the sky with black ribbons of smoke…”

  “I like mine better,” T says.

  “Ditto.”

  We pause and my eyes wander, settling finally on a reflection of Tombstone’s back over her left shoulder. As I’ve explained before, the myth about mirrors and vampires isn’t true, and you don’t need much more proof than this place. There are mirrors everywhere, multiplying your viewing options, letting the shy guy stare without seeming to, letting the dancer enthralled with the trivia you’re spouting check her makeup, scope out her next prospect, wink at a girlfriend onstage. Looking at the praying hands on T’s back in the mirror behind her, I recall my favorite bit of recently learned trivia—the female praying mantis’s habit of decapitating its mate during sex.

  I share this information with the tattooed lady sitting next to me, and she says:

  “Pretty slick, Slick.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She checks her watch. “That’s your second serious play to get me into bed in less than a half hour.”

  I blink. I really hadn’t thought about the seductive potential of insect husbandry, but now that T mentions it…yeah, okay.

  Pretty slick, Slick, I think, trying not to smile. Instead:

  “I’m flummoxed,” I say. “I’m flabbergasted. I’m…”

  “…busted,”T says, letting out another plume of imaginary smoke.

  She takes my hand and pat-pats it, as I begin bracing myself for the Explanation re policies—official, personal—regarding the dating of customers. Or perhaps she’ll introduce a convenient boyfriend or—who knows?—girlfriend, maybe. Women have so many ways of telling a guy no without driving a stake through his ego. Being a guy, of course, I’ve heard them all—with the possible exception of what T says next.

  “So,” she says, blowing an invisible snake of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

  This is it, I think—the blowoff. Foreshadowed by actual blowing. Nice touch.

  “This bed of yours,” she goes on, sticking to the subject she’s introduced like a fly to flypaper, “it’s not like some old-schoolcoffin, is it?”

  “No…”

  “And your shower gets plenty of hot water, right?”

  I nod—perhaps a bit too eagerly. T’s nice enough not to notice.

  “Okie-dokie,” she says, stubbing out her invisible cigarette. “I get off at two.” Pause. “From work, that is.” An even sexier pause. “We’ll have to see about that other thing.” She crosses fingers on both hands, mouthing the word “hope,” comically, and twice. “Pick me up?”

  “It seems I already have.”

  “I mean later,” she says, sneaking a quick peck at my cheek. “Right now, though, I gotta skedaddle.” She does a surveillance-camera pan of the room. “Got me some younguns to entertain.”

  “I…,” I begin, but she’s already disappeared into munchkin land along with my heart, my head, my all.

  In case you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to find, rent, and furnish an apartment in less than six hours, the answer is yes. The complete answer is: “Yes, provided mone
y’s no object.” And you know, when you haven’t been laid in several decades, it’s surprising how much discretionary cash you can suddenly scare up—even after accounting for that pet mortal you’ve been raising in your spare time.

  Speaking of which…

  “Are we moving?” Isuzu asks, watching as I dart about the apartment, filling a garbage bag with books and assorted idiosyncratic knickknacks—“Or are you like Santa Claus’s evil twin?”

  “Um,” I stall. How am I supposed to explain what I’m doing, what I’ve got planned?

  Well—I imagine myself saying—there comes a time in the life of every boy vampire when he meets someone special. But he doesn’t want hisnewsomeone special to know about his other someone special (at least not yet) because, God knows, carnage could ensue—and that would not be a good thing. The boy vampire wants to get to know the new person better, and then he can introduce the Big Picture when the time seems right. Ifit seems right, which—cross fingers, hope, hope—it might. And that’s when the first someone special gets her own someone special to talk to about special female stuff, like Ebola.