by Paula Guran
Blood was his freak. No surprise, Pranksters: because if you traveled the rippling sidewinder desiccation to that Shock! Theater on the mesa, you had to have resources, interior (that is to say, gray matter) and exterior (that is to say, eyes and ears) that the average headfeeder either did not have or use very well. So you synthesized; that is to say, you took things in. You figured things out.
You were observant. You grokked the fullness of the situation.
Going to the castle was the Great Bloodfreak Trek, the GBT, and you did it straight enough to drive, stoned enough to take the edge off, beating on the dashboard to the arrhythmic spasms of your carotid artery and the great good muscle that pumped it all together now. You and whatever merry band you had banded with could not help but hear the stories at the gas stations where you copped a pee and the bars where you guzzled whatever was cheapest (“We don’t serve no hippies.” “Right on, man, we don’t eat ’em.”) The bourgeoisie crossing themselves like flipped-out movie extras, and cops warning you off the rumble-crunching dirtrock road. Go back, go back, go back, you stupid kids; he really is a fuckin’ bloodsucker.
So are mosquitoes, baby. It’s all one big mandala. He was out front with it; he liked to suck people’s blood, and if you pretended not to grok his trip and showed up on his doorstep anyway, that was your bullshit, not his.
Vlad Dracula was no longer certain if he was mesmerized or bored to tears by the antic dances of the counterculture. In the fifties—Kerouac and the beats, bongos, and a fascination with Italy—he had moved from San Francisco with his servants and his Brides and sought refuge in the desert. In San Francisco there had been too much scrutiny, too many questions, and then a woman he had entertained a number of times began writing poetry that she read in coffee shops:
He is my biterman, Daddy-o,
he ramthroats my red trickle
down.
Thus identified, he had fled.
In the desert, he had hibernated for a time, missing the chill and the rain of San Francisco, the cold and the snow of Europe. But he had existed undetected, and kept himself fed, enjoying his homesickness as only someone who is very old can enjoy the sublime delicacy of emotions less intense than grief or despair—wistfulness, nostalgia, the watercolor washes of faint regret. But for him this was a game; he could leave any time he wanted.
Then came the changeling children, with their psychedelica and their excesses that reminded him of the oldest of his old days. The pageantry and drama of his Transylvanian court, the blood baths and virgins and the joy of opulence and extremity. Somehow one confused flower child stumbled to his castle, and then another, and another, until he was the source of a pilgrimage.
His servants begged him to leave, or at least to halt the flow of half-baked mortality. But he found he enjoyed the little hippies not so much for the quality of their company as the fact that they sought him out. They capered and gyrated for his amusement, ate his banquets, made up terrible, overwrought poetry that they loved to recite to him after dinner, and dared one another, in hushed tones, to bare their necks for him, even though he never asked them to. Was he or wasn’t he? He never revealed himself, keeping his own counsel and instructing the Brides and his servants to do likewise.
Gradually he came to trust his admirers as he had once trusted his Gypsies. They proved worthy of that trust, if only because no one who could do anything about him listened to their conjectures about the Court of the Crimson King. His most ardent groupies were ineffectual and inarticulate, and therefore, harmless.
For that harmlessness, Dracula pitied them. In their bearded costumes and banshee hair, they whirled and swirled and postured. I’m so… so much, man! He wondered if they were actually more controlled and controlling than their middle-class comrades who had gotten Beatle cuts and stayed home with their families. Among the scruffy little vagabonds, each stunt, each pronouncement, each thought was scrutinized, analyzed, compared against an unfathomable standard of intellectual prowess they didn’t possess and karmic serendipity that did not exit:
I said “red,” man, and the Captain walked into the room!
Whoa, heavy! Check it out! You just told me that and he left the room!
He was sorry that there was no such thing as karmic serendipity. It would have made his long life more interesting.
So, like the hundreds of thousands of this time, he turned to drugs. The children took an astonishing variety of drugs: hashish, marijuana, Thai sticks, peyote, mushrooms, and pills of all shapes and sizes. They popped the pills as one might vitamins; they smoked their hemp and hashish like cigarettes, and the rest they cooked with butter and honey and nibbled like Turkish Delight.
But none of it worked on Dracula. He tried everything, smoking and popping and even shooting up as well as sucking the blood of some child who was high or tripping or strung out. Nothing worked.
Nor could they explain to him what it felt like. Mostly they lay on the cold castle floors with the same vacant delirium that accompanied one of his feedings, making trails with their hands and quoting song lyrics. It was a terrible waste to him that the expansion of these inarticulate, unformed minds yielded nothing more than an increased capacity for vacuousness. Whereas he, with his supernatural lifespan and deep connection to the very mythos of this race, possessed a mind worth expanding, and he couldn’t do it.
He kept hoping one of them would rise like cream to the top, someone with whom he could explore and converse, that from this one he could learn the secrets of the drug-taker’s universe. He continued to encourage their pilgrimages to his castle, their whisperings and invasions of his privacy. (Is he or isn’t he? It’s so trippy, the man’s so white!) The young men all wanted to have sexual intercourse with the Brides, and the young girls wanted to have sexual intercourse with him. That was all right; he was into their scene of promiscuity. Breasts and thighs and hips and sex organs, so much writhing flesh brimming with ramthroat red; it was groovy, as they said.
But after a while, it was all only a series of repeat performances, endlessly repeatable. There was not a one among them he would consider Changing. He had not Changed anyone in almost a century. The hippie children became tiresome and he considered impaling them all. But someone on the outside was bound to find out and then there would be hell to pay. The authorities in America were currently as repressive and autocratic as he had been in his prime. They didn’t torture their victims physically, as he had; instead they lied about them to the press and threw them in prisons on trumped-up charges. Had he possessed the same means of mass communication in his day back in Carpathia, he might have done the same thing. It certainly was effective.
Then his lieutenant, Alexsandru, came to him one day with excellent news: Dr. Timothy Leary wanted to pay him a visit. The famous Dr. Leary, father of this entire movement of tuning in and turning on, of dropping acid and exploring alternative realities.
The standard bearer of the deeper life.
Dracula didn’t realize at the time that Dr. Leary had just broken out of jail in San Luis Obispo, a town up the coast. He hadn’t known Dr. Leary in the first place. But word of his imminent arrival swept through the castle like the sharp wail of a wolf.
Tim Leary, Dr. Leary. The mortal’s name was a mantra among the hippie children. Despite his anxiety about the local authorities, Captain Blood found it within himself to chuckle at his own jealousy of their anticipation of the visit. He was used to being the princely topic of discussion. Perhaps a legend should never try to compete with an icon.
He only hoped that Dr. Leary would bring rain to the desert.
He waited like a schoolgirl for the visit, laying in food—the hippies were happy with brown rice and miso soup, but one noble must entertain another suitably. He went over his wardrobe—fringed jacket and tie-dyed shirt? Black turtleneck sweater and sports jacket? He presided over the castle preparations—rooms cleaned, linens washed and pressed—until one sunset, Alexsandru’s rap sounded on the door of Dracula’s inner sanctum a
nd the lieutenant announced, “They’ve arrived!”
Dracula finally decided on a Nehru jacket and black trousers—he was not a hippie child, he was a grown man—and descended the staircase with an unhurried air although his unbeating heart contracted once or twice.
Leary came to him with both arms extended and took Dracula’s hands in his. Dracula looked into his large, deep eyes and knew that at last he had found his mortal counterpart: a man who had lived the depth and breadth of experience. Hopeful, Dracula embraced him.
“Ah,” said the mass of counterculture lounging in the great hall. The cavernous room thick with scented marijuana smoke, clove cigarettes, astringent red wine, and sweat. The yeast of sex.
“Welcome,” Dracula said.
Leary winked at him and presented his wife, Rosemary. Dracula gaped. She was astonishingly beautiful. His attraction to her was immediate and intense. To mask it, he ignored her.
“We’ll dine,” he added, sounding to himself old-fashioned and silly, a movie version of Dracula. Lugosi the Drug Addict, not Vlad the Impaler, in whose presence the fathers of daughters trembled and the daughters fainted. In those days, his favor was like a comet tail: either a beautiful radiance or a harbinger of disaster.
How he had fallen in the New World! Plummeted!
The servants prepared an exquisite table, which the hippie children devoured with no hesitation or delicacy whatsoever while Leary spoke of the movements toward universal truth and inner peace. He revealed to Dracula that many prominent psychiatrists in Los Angeles were using LSD in their practices. They were giving LSD to movie stars like Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Cary Grant had wanted to make a movie about LSD. So had Otto Preminger. He spoke of all the brilliant thinkers who had moved to Los Angeles, attracted by the climate of intellectual freedom: Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley. As he talked, his wife listened as if she had never heard any of this before. Excellent woman! Intriguing man! Dracula was overjoyed that they had come.
So were the flower children, who sprang up in the castle hothouse like so many celestial poppies. In microvans and magic buses, caravans and myriad groups of simpleton singletons. Across the Great Desert on the GBT, to sit at the feet of the great and mysterious Leary.
Who talked faster than a speeding bullet.
Who leaped through chasms in a single bound.
“If we charged admission, you’d be rich,” Leary told Dracula one night, as they kicked back with some Panama Red. Rosemary was nowhere to be found, but a few addled braless girls lounged about, perhaps angling to become Brides. Dracula contented himself with caressing them idly, if only to feel the heat of the pulses beneath their skin. It was a pleasant habit, like biting one’s nails.
He was more interested in discovering what pulsed inside Leary’s brain. The stories the man told! The adventures he had had, inspired by the drugs he had taken! Taking psilocybin in Tangier with William S. Burroughs! Discussing with Allen Ginsberg the politics of ecstasy. Arguing with Jack Kerouac, who disdained him. Leary’s life was one vast experimental, highly responsive moment in the now. Dracula came to look upon him as a counterculture Scheherazade, a mortal who could tempt him to stay up all night and look upon the fatal sun.
“Let’s go in the hot tub,” Leary said suddenly one evening, shedding his clothes. The girls threw theirs off as well.
Dracula had once been warned that he couldn’t immerse himself in water, but he had found this to be untrue. The hot tub almost warmed his cold flesh. So he took off his clothes—the king of the undead!—and joined Leary and the young virgins in the water.
“Admission,” Leary said. “We’d make enough money to fund the film.”
“I’m a nobleman,” Dracula replied. “I have obligations of hospitality.”
“Vladimir, you’ve got to shed these outmoded thought patterns,” Leary chided him. Though the girls bobbed and grinned, Leary ignored them, talking only to Dracula. It was apparent that the man was faithful to his wife and would continue to be so. Dracula found that admirable, if somewhat stifling. He would like very much for his wife to have a reason to retaliate against ill treatment. She was that stunning.
The girls got tired and left. Leary leaned forward and whispered, “Bite me. I want to know what it feels like.”
“So you believe I’m really a vampire?” Dracula asked. “I’m not just another acid trip for the little kiddies?”
Leary looked surprised. “I believed in you before I got here, man. Why do you think I came?”
Dracula was momentarily embarrassed. He had assumed the sophisticated Leary believed that he, Dracula, was simply another guru of the times, a charismatic leader who attracted rootless, searching kids. Dracula had taken pride in the notion that there was something intrinsically fascinating about him besides the fact that he was a supernatural being.
But over the course of the days and weeks, it became apparent that that was the only thing Leary found fascinating about him. Leary interrupted Dracula’s musings, both when they were alone and in front of his hippie children of the night. He debated him, and handily won, as Dracula didn’t have many facts and figures to pull from his head, while the well-read, well-connected Leary did.
He revitalized many of the young hippies who came to the castle, as a decent guru should. In their quest for coolness, they had become radicalized: they were leftist, cynical, and unhappy.
But Leary lambasted them: “You can’t do good unless you feel good,” he told them. It became the phrase of the day on the GBT.
The goal became to be happy, to feel good, to grow and learn. And it became obvious to Dracula that his groupies believed Leary could teach them how.
Leary, and not he.
They ate his food and slept in his rooms and barns and outbuildings and bothered his horses and hit on his servants, all the while discussing What Tim Said, What Tim Meant, What Tim Did. They lost sight of the fact that they were guests and became squatters; that they were visitors who had become denizens. They stopped cleaning up after themselves, because Leary didn’t. They stopped saying “thank you,” because Leary never did.
But worst of all, they stopped being afraid of Dracula. Was he or wasn’t he? No one cared. Their minds dwelled now on all the confounding possibilities Leary presented them with so much charm and enthusiasm that they didn’t appear to realize he was casting pearls before swine. At least, that was how Dracula saw it all.
One day Alexsandru came to him, bowed deeply, and told him with all deference that the great lord must reassert his position, and that His Grace the Count must tell Leary to leave. Dracula promised to do both.
But it was difficult. In this modern country, he possessed no authority to compel the hippie children to do anything, least of all respect him because he had once been more ruthless than any of the leaders they distrusted. And he didn’t want Leary to leave, because as dominating as Leary was, he was the most interesting person Dracula had ever met.
“I sense you have cognitive dissonance about something,” Leary ventured one night in the hot tub. “How about this?”
Then he suggested a wild plan: that on the next full moon, when the forces of night were strongest, he, Leary, would ingest terrific quantities of LSD and other drugs, he would then hypnotize Dracula into a receptive state, and then he would bite Dracula.
“It will Change you,” Dracula told him.
Leary smiled. “It’ll Change you, too.”
So, Leary tempted Dracula into making him a vampire by promising him an acid trip. That was what it boiled down to, when Dracula examined the offer from all sides. Was it worth it? He imagined Leary moving through the centuries, gathering acolytes, spreading the word. Not about vampirism, surely. Either he would agree to silence on that score, or Dracula would refuse him.
The moon moved through her courses. Dracula watched its progress and Leary watched him, eager to die.
Finally Dracula decided that as much as he wanted the gift of great consciousness, he could not share his powers with
Leary. The man was already too strong. His powers of persuasion were admirable and awe-inspiring. If ever they found themselves in disagreement, Dracula would have created his own worst enemy.
He put off telling the charismatic mortal, hoping Leary would understand his reticence and give up the idea himself.
Then Alexasandru informed him the FBI were coming. They had been pursuing Leary, a fugitive from justice, ever since his jailbreak, and they had just picked up on the scent.
Dracula was alarmed. This did not bode well for a blood freak. The blood freak of all time.
He told Leary, who apologized profusely.
“The best thing you can do now,” Dracula told him, “is to leave as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” Leary agreed, and Dracula was relieved. He ordered his servants to prepare a marvelous feast for the great man’s last night among them. Rosemary dressed for the occasion in a stunning black dress embroidered with jet beads, a costume Dracula’s mother might have worn. He wanted her more than ever, and he was sorry he would never have her.
There was wine and revelry and though neither Leary nor Dracula had told the hippie children that Leary was leaving, they seemed to know. Some were packing with the idea of following him wherever he went. At dinner he rose and begged them not to, pointing out that the FBI would surely find him with so many little bloodhounds trailing after. Dracula, jealous, wished the disloyal ones would leave: he would cull his herd that way, swooping down in the dead of night as they made their way across the vast expanses of Leary’s flight to Egypt.
“One last glass together?” Leary asked after they finished the magnificent dinner.
“Yes,” Dracula agreed.
Dracula led him to the turret room where the already-bubbling hot tub was. They got in, sighing with the heat. Leary poured two glasses of deep, rich Hungarian wine from a bottle on the deck. He handed one to Dracula—who could drink it, contrary to folk myth—and they toasted.
“To the incredible possibilities of existence,” Leary said, and Dracula found tears in his eyes for that which was not to be, a long and enduring friendship with this extraordinary man.
