Bite Club

by Hal Bodner

  BITE CLUB

  By Hal Bodner

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Hal Bodner

  Background image courtesy of:

  mysticmorning.deviantart.com

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Hal Bodner is the author of the best-selling gay vampire novel, Bite Club and the lupine sequel, The Trouble With Hairy. He tells people that he was born in East Philadelphia because no one knows where Cherry Hill, New Jersey is. The obstetrician who delivered him was C. Everett Coop, the future U.S. Surgeon General who put warnings on cigarette packs. Thus, from birth, Hal was destined to become a heavy smoker.

  He moved to West Hollywood in the 1980s and has rarely left the city limits since. He cannot even find his way around Beverly Hills—which is the next town over.

  Hal has been an entertainment lawyer, a scheduler for a 976 sex telephone line, a theater reviewer and the personal assistant to a television star. For a while, he owned Heavy Petting, a pet boutique where all the movie stars shopped for their Pomeranians. Until recently, he owned an exotic bird shop.

  He has never been a waiter.

  He lives with assorted dogs, and birds, the most notable of which is an eighty year old irritable, flesh-eating military macaw named after his icon—Tallulah. He often quips he is a slave to fur and feathers and regrets only that he isn’t referring to mink and marabou. He does not have cats because he tends to sneeze on them.

  Having reached middle-age, he remembers Nixon.

  He was widowed in his early forties and can sometimes be found sunbathing at his late partner's grave while trying to avoid cemetery caretakers screaming at him to put his shirt back on.

  Hal has also written a few erotic paranormal romances—which he refers to as “supernatural smut”—most notably In Flesh and Stone and For Love of the Dead. While his salacious imagination is unbounded, he much prefers his comedic roots and he is currently pecking away at a series of bitterly humorous gay super hero novels.

  He married again—this time legally—to a wonderful man who is young enough not to know that Liza Minnelli is Judy Garland’s daughter. As a result, Hal has recently discovered that the use of hair dye is rarely an adequate substitute for Viagra.

  Hal's website is www.wehovampire.com and he encourages fans to send him email at Hal@wehovampire.com. It may take him a month or so, but he generally responds to almost everyone who writes to him with the sole exception of prisoners who request free copies of his books accompanied by naked pictures.

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  Dedication, Acknowledgment & Apologia

  I’d make a rotten vampire. Vampires need to adapt over time to new things. I hate change, and I don’t deal well with it. I’m a creature of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I don’t understand why gasoline costs more than forty-seven cents a gallon, and I think paying more than thirty dollars for blue jeans is completely insane. But I’m not a curmudgeon by any means. I’m not bitter or resentful. I don’t protest in the streets. I’m just baffled and wistful for times that have passed.

  My love affair with West Hollywood goes back almost two decades. Though I was not around when we seceded from Los Angeles and became our own city, I arrived shortly thereafter. And, to my chagrin, West Hollywood has changed. It’s neither better nor worse than it was. But it is...different.

  The West Hollywood of Bite Club does not exist. It is a compilation of the city as it was, could have been and should be. It certainly reflects my habit of wanting things to stay the same but adds an element of wouldn’t-it-be-nicer-if. Readers familiar with our city may recognize some of the locations in their various incarnations. Others will be baffled that the geography or the nature of various buildings has been changed. Still others may search in vain for locations that they think they recognize but are complete fabrications reminiscent of something similar. Our city hall is no longer in a mini mall. We have instead a glorious architectural marvel, styled in something I affectionately call “Retro IKEA,” from which the city is run. The Athletic Club and the Sports Connection are long gone and appear here, in combination, as the Boys’ Town Gym. Some of the bars visited by Chris and Troy still exist, others have closed, and still others are fictional. The Harper apartment is a real building but it is located elsewhere. Those readers who feel that a Spanish Gothic edifice covered in pink neon strains credulity are invited to tour our city –we have one condominium entirely sheathed in stainless steel. At one time or another, I have seen all of the costumes described in my version of the Halloween parade–and I have seen some of them in months other than October!

  West Hollywood does not have a city coroner. Nor do we have an elected mayor; council members rotate to fill the office every year. We do have a city manager, however, and a sheriff’s captain. We also have a unique way of making our town work for us. The weird West Hollywood laws and ordinances cited in the book are very close to factual: If you happen to be a ficus tree, you may come here to find sanctuary. If you are a Styrofoam take-out container, you will be shot on sight. Municipally mandated death by slow torture also awaits any West Hollywood resident who has the temerity to de-claw a cat. Our city council’s commitment to fostering the arts does not extend to making aesthetic value judgments. Thus, undesirable sculptures installed on the median strip of Santa Monica Boulevard are never removed because they are unattractive, but may be banished if their sheer ugliness renders them a distraction to passing motorists, thereby becoming “dangerous” art. Lest anyone assume the rules, regulations and mores of our city are completely insane, I assure them that smoking cigarettes within one’s apartment is not grounds for eviction—that proposed ordinance was defeated some time ago.

  The characters of Bite Club are all fictional. However, in any small town one will find certain “types”–many of which appear in these pages. I emphatically deny that Becky, Pamela, Clive and Eversleigh are based on real people. As for Chris, Troy, Scotty and Rex, the only real blood suckers one is likely to meet around here are Hollywood agents. Ghouls, on the other hand, can be sighted at almost any film premiere.

  Author’s Note – 2010

  Bite Club was first published in 2005. At times, it seems like just yesterday; at other times it seems a lifetime ago. In the scant five years since Chris and Troy’s “premier”, much has happened.

  West Hollywood has changed and, if anyone has read my editorials which appeared in the early days of the online WeHo News, you’ll already know how much I doubt many of these changes are for the better. I dream of a time when West Hollywood can return to its lost quirky and carefree style and blithely bumble through the business of running a city but, frankly, we no longer live in a carefree world and I don’t think it will happen.

  On the national front, we’re a nation devastated by an economy which seems intent on flushing itself down the toilet. Greed and entitlement have replaced honor and kindness. Rather than take responsibility for their actions, most p
eople resort to blaming someone else and often use the legal system as a battering ram.

  On a personal level, I’ve been through the mill during the last five years. I lost my husband, quite suddenly, to illness or, more specifically, to a can of chicken soup which turned toxic when he left it in the fridge. For more details, you can read the introduction to the third Chris and Troy installment, Mummy Dearest. The experience is far too painful to reiterate here.

  I was also evicted from my home of almost fourteen years due to what I believe was a landlord’s greed. In the end it worked out for the best – dubiously; I purchased my first house. In the excitement and first blush of home ownership, it seems a small matter to take a condemned 1903 six bedroom Craftsman mini-mansion and make it habitable. In practice, it is quite a different matter especially when one hires a contractor of dubious morals. If I’m lucky, the nightmares which kept me awake nights for more than a year while my home collapsed around me may someday provide fodder for Chris and Troy’s exploits in a later novel. If you find yourself reading about any of the Bite Club characters trying to cope with toilets that flush into the foundations of the house as opposed to into the sewer pipes, if they’re sliding along on floors that cant at extreme angles, if newly replaced roofs give way under the onslaught of a mild summer shower, you’ll know every fictional incident is grounded in my reality.

  I’ve also lost three very dear friends in the interim since this book was first published. Jojo D’Amore lost his battle with emphysema. He was very much an anchoring influence in my life and there are still times when I call his “wife”, Michele Hart, and half expect to hear Jojo’s throaty and perky, “Good Evening!” when she answers the phone. Ginger Czubiak, possibly my best female friend, also passed recently from liver cancer. Liver cancer provides an appallingly harsh death and, if there is any one good thing to say about having had to watch her die, it is that my resolve to quit smoking has hardened.

  And, of course, my best buddy Radu crossed the Rainbow Bridge at the ripe old age of seventeen. He had been having difficulty getting around for several months and was starting to show his age, most notably with the early signs of Canine Cognitive Disorder – the doggy equivalent to human Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, the move into the house may have hastened the process; though he had moments where he seemed to revive, he began going quickly downhill. His passing was thankfully sweet and gentle but nonetheless emotionally devastating for me.

  The long and short of the foregoing is this: Bite Club was originally written as a satire. Now, I fear, it’s become more of a fictional work. Moreover, as the great literary scholar John Lahr once wrote, comedy often has its roots in pain. If that’s true, y’all have a treat in store. There’s been a lot of pain; my job now is to translate it into something that will bring a smile to your lips, a chortle to your voice and, if I’m lucky enough to be particularly adept at my craft, send you rushing to the bathroom because you’re laughing so hard that you need to pee!

  Okay. Enough with the gloom and doom. Let’s get on to some less depressing matters…

  When I had the chance to prepare Bite Club for e-book format, I also had the opportunity to rewrite the thing. I seriously considered doing so. Bite Club was published in 2005 and was written almost ten years earlier in the mid-nineties, a time when the internet was in its infancy and the closest thing to a mobile phone was a contraption that could be installed in your car and made you feel like you were talking into one of Maxwell Smart’s shoe telephones when you spoke into it. In short, I find the novel to be, if not actually dated, very much a product of an earlier time. I’ve changed a few things to bring it up to date, but in the end I was able to resist the temptation to muck about with the book too much. There were far greater revisions needed in The Trouble With Hairy as one of the comic bits involved a Rube Goldbergian incident where the characters simply could not get in touch with each other via land lines, a scene made obsolete by the ubiquity of cellular phones.

  Getting Bite Club in shape for e-book format was a major hassle. It was published in the waning times when authors were given hard copy galleys to edit – a sheaf of paper which we would mark up in colored pencil and mail back to the publishers. (You remember pencils, right? How about mail – you know, that thing with the rain and sleet and dark of night?) Thus, though I wrote the book on a computer, there was no final extant electronic version of the published work. It was necessary to sit down at the screen, open an ancient Word Perfect 3.0 file and compare it word by word to a published copy of the book to make sure they conformed. Thankfully, my boyfriend is compulsive about certain things and I was able to enlist his help.

  As for revisions to the ebook, the temptation to meddle was almost overwhelming. I was never satisfied with the climax of the piece as I always felt Pamela Burman should have played a bigger role. Perhaps, in the television version, they’ll make the change. Then again, having spent twenty years of my career in the movie and TV biz, I know how those “creative types” think. By the time they’re done with Bite Club, they’ll probably have a twenty-three-year-old blonde with breasts straining at her skimpy halter top playing Burman!

  There was also one particular scene that I rewrote in less than four hours immediately before galleys were due. At the eleventh hour, my editor pointed out some inconsistencies in the manuscript which needed to be corrected. I’d love to “re-vamp” that scene as well but doing so would be flying in the face of advice given to me by my friend John Skipp which was, in a nutshell, “Stop fucking around and get the new stuff out instead.”

  I have left the original author’s notes and dedications intact. I have also used prodigious feats of will power to prevent myself from mucking about with the plot. I have even, though it made me cringe at times, avoided correcting many of the “first book” mistakes which most authors almost universally make though, truthfully, I’ve tweaked things here and there in minor fashion. To my surprise, I found much of the satire still holds up – even a decade or so after it was written. Even the “groaners” can make me grin. It just goes to prove what I’ve long believed: Gay High Camp will never die!

  And now I shall do something which I’ve been repeatedly told never to do. I’ll let my readers in on some of my tricks – the literary ones, not the sexual ones! Get your minds out of the gutter, people! – and let them see some of the “seams in the stitching”.

  As I’ve said in interviews over the years, my original goal in writing Bite Club was to try and restore some of the Gay community’s sense of humor. AIDS and the political struggles of my LGBT brothers and sisters have very often made us take ourselves far too seriously for my taste. Not that I urge frivolity – the epidemic and the quest for civil rights are both serious matters – but, we need to step back every once in awhile and laugh at ourselves and the world around us, no matter how screwed up we may think it is.

  Though most of the reviews have been positive, some critics have griped that the characters in Bite Club are stereotypes. To them I say, “Duh-uh!” I did this intentionally, seeking to push past the stereotypes to the point where the emotions, flaws and attributes of Becky and the others become, in a sense, even more real. Via highlighting the extremes of human character I feel one can develop new insight as to the Human Condition – if that’s not too pretentious a phrase to use.

  I am also thrilled to report that no less that three reviewers “got” my attempts to spoof on the television and movie industries. (And I can virtually see y’all scratching your heads and wondering, “Huh? What the hell is he talking about?” Relax, mes amis, I’m about to tell you.)

  Bite Club is structured like a television sitcom. We’re talking French scenes, teasers and tag lines. In fact, I’ve intentionally written some of the most hackneyed, over-the-top, groan-inducing tags I could think of. If you didn’t realize this the first time you read this book, it’s not through any failing on your part. Even my editor complimented me on the “great” final line in the Anthony Balencini sequence, and let me
know how “touching” she found Rex’s last words. I had to reply, “Uh…er… it’s not supposed to be a great line, Angela. Or even touching. It’s supposed to be camp!” She did, however, realize that I’d deliberately written each scene from the prospective of the camera person, complete with “pans” and “zooms”.

  In conclusion, I think Bite Club is a damned good book, even with its flaws. It was a hoot to write. If this is your first experience with Chris and Troy, I hope you have a blast. If, on the other hand, you’re re-connecting with some old friends, you may find yourself giggling anew. To quote from the line I always add when readers ask me to autograph their copies of Bite Club – Enjoy the ride!

  Thank you!

  There are some people who I would like to thank for their support over the years, and to them this book is dedicated.

  John Altschul and Nancy Greenstein first introduced me to West Hollywood politics. Though Nancy has moved on to bigger pastures, John still serves as a city commissioner.

  Andrea Carrero, Dan Felix, Jack Freinhar, Robert McGarity and Rob Stevens all read early versions of this novel and made suggestions and comments.

  I would not be alive at the ripe old age of forty-something had it not been for Sharon Nesselle. She has my “undying” gratitude.

  My editor, Angela Brown, told me to trust my heart. She also waded patiently through roughly seventy-five title suggestions. Any thanks to Angela come accompanied by warm fuzzy thoughts directed to Harry.

  Alyss Dorese, my brothers Dark Hoffman, and Alan Nielson have always tolerated my dramas and eccentricities. When I was completely broke, when the computer crashed, when I “went Hollywood,” and when I was dating any of the “Davids,” they were always there for me.