Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

  The audience sucked it up; most of them eschewed the tables and chairs and huddled close to the stage, watching Daniel's every move. As he moved across the stage to play another tape loop, the heads of the audience waved with him, like spectators at a tennis match. I found it deeply amusing, and largely watched the crowd for most of the songs. They were an even admixture of the L.A. intelligentsia and hopeful-looking Gothic teenagers, certainly far too young to be of drinking age, the whites of their eyes gleaming like jelly. The entire body of the Rotting Hall seemed to be in attendance, including Daniel's breakfast of earlier that day, her formerly crushed wrist held, bandaged, close to her heart.

  The band paused for a while, switching instruments. Daniel set down his tape machine, after turning on a low throbbing growl, which I recognized as a fetal heartbeat. "All right," he said into his mike, winding the cord round and round his hand, "this will be our last song tonight, and anybody who knows me knows this song, and a few of you who don't know me know this song too. It's a David Bowie song, of course." He gestured wearily, and there was a smattering of understanding and indulgent laughter from the audience. "From the Ziggy Stardust album, and it's called 'Rock and Roll Suicide.' It's really a quite cheerful song."

  The band began to lurch through a much slower and grainier version of the famous tune, Daniel slowing and lowering his voice to a nearly subsonic level. The girl who had been banging on the car parts, and a young man who had previously been manning some sort of synth console, began to dance with one another with an agile, athletic grace. I realized with a start that they must be brother and sister, two robust but delicate Asians, nearly identical in their black cutoffs and their elegant, spidery movements.

  David Bowie, in his Ziggy phase, would drag out the last verse of "Rock and Roll Suicide" for ever and ever, getting more and more melodramatic and hysterical while the androgen-maddened crowd went into frenzies. The only real lyrics of this outro are "Give me your hands, 'cos you're wonderful." Ziggy's backup band, the Spiders, would continue this litany while Ziggy took the opportunity to shovel on the drama.

  Daniel's band chimed in with this at the appropriate time, and for a while Daniel sang along with them. His voice trailed off, though, while their chanting continued, and I looked up from studying the fine sparkle of light on Lovely's scalp to find Daniel staring straight at me. There could be no mistake—we weren't so far from the stage that I couldn't tell exactly where his eyes were trained. He unbuttoned the red velvet blazer, leaned in to the microphone on its stand, and began to talk across the gulf to me.

  "I hope you'll forgive me for everything I've done. You see I can't help myself." He reached into a pocket for something, brought it out, unfolded it. The stage lights glinted painfully off the polished edge of a straight razor. The crowd between us let out a faint moan.

  "When I speak of love, I don't mean the ordinary thing. No such thing for me. What I need, what I feel, is far deeper, far more consuming, than anything these tiny minds can command. Only you and I have the possibility." He took a great deep breath against the mike, and the sound went sighing through the club, echoing and echoing. He held up the razor. "I want to climb inside you… climb inside you, love, and wrap your skin around me like a blanket. Slither around in your blood. Inside you I feel warm, I feel… immortal. Invincible."

  He drew the razor across the sleek smooth skin of his belly. The audience reacted with shock—not as much as a straight crowd would have given, but they had clearly not been expecting this. One fellow said "Whoa!" over the susurrus. The blood flowed down over Daniel's belly, black in the fluorescents, and down to the low-slung waist of the velvet trousers. "I want you to climb inside of me," Daniel said to me, cutting again. For a split second I saw the pink edge of flesh curl over; then the waterfall of blood rushed out anew.

  The Asian twins danced on heedless; the band continued to play.

  Daniel was sweating, sighing, a thick erection bulging in the velvet, and we all watched as the blood flow slackened, slowed, the blood dried on Daniel's belly, the heavy cuts smoothed themselves over. "Yes," Daniel whispered, "yes, I want you."

  I could smell my own cunt wettening by then.

  The band finished the last chorus on the major chord. Daniel idly flicked away the dried crust of blood from his stomach, revealing the smooth wholeness underneath. He turned back to the audience and smiled. "Thanks, good night," he said.

  The crowd went wild, deafening me with their screams and whistles and applause. Lovely turned round and looked at me with surprise. "That was cool," he murmured.

  "Does he always do that?" I said when I could find my voice.

  "Nope," said Nora. Her normally bloodless cheeks were pink. "He'd better not do it too much, but that… really worked. We could be onto something here."

  Chloe said, "C'mon, Ariane, we should get out of here."

  Nora dropped us off at Chloe's apartment, across the street from the Rotting Hall, and we went up on the roof for a while, smoking and being quiet. I was almost completely sober by now, but there was no way I was going to be able to sleep. Chloe and Mimsy stayed with me for a while, but they got tired and decided to go to bed; I remained outside, my lungs raw, my brain a smoking wreck.

  The eastern sky had begun to turn salmon pink as I stared at it, hypnotized, and Daniel came slowly up onto the roof by way of the fire escape. He was back in black stretch jeans and a white Jim Morrison T-shirt, and he sat easily beside me. I didn't say anything.

  "Did you like it?" he asked shyly.

  "I can't tell if it was for me or not," I said.

  "Do you want to come back to my place and get naked?"

  I shook my head and laughed. "Yeah," I said. "Sure."

  In the darkness of his apartment, as the sun was coming up, he undressed me, kissed my body gently, almost chastely, then slipped his cock into me and we fucked. It was all so gentle. In the middle, as I was almost ready to come, he bit my neck, puncturing it easily with his sharp upper teeth. I felt the orgasm build abruptly within me. Then my spasms pumped the blood steadily into his mouth, and a sweet, umbrous darkness came.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  Chloe and I had gone to Denny's for an afternoon breakfast of hash browns, apple sauce, orange juice, coffee, and cigarettes. We must have looked like sisters; Chloe voluptuously plump in a lacy dress and me more butch in jeans and a T-shirt, both of us with wild damp straggles of curly hair and makeup-less night-bleached skin. She was telling me her repertoire of sick jokes, which was vast, and had me snorting orange juice into my nasal passages.

  At once Lovely burst into the Denny's, his forelock flyaway, and threw himself at my feet next to the table. "Oh, Ariane!" he wailed. "I'm so so sorry, please don't hate me, I hope you don't hate me."

  Looking around the restaurant at the amused gazes of the other patrons, I pulled him off the floor and made room for him beside me on the yellow vinyl. "Ummm… of course I don't hate you," I mumbled. "Why would I hate you?"

  He clung to me, burying his face in my shoulder. "I'm just such a slut! I should respect you!"

  Chloe smiled and lit another Turkish oval; I realized that Lovely must have been referring to last night's public blow job at the club. I gave the boy a reassuring squeeze. "No, don't even worry about it," I said, shaking my head and stirring my coffee. "You should hate me. I'm horning in on your boyfriend."

  Lovely wiped his nose and began picking at the hash browns with his slim fingers. "No, he's totally not my boyfriend," he said. "I could never hate you. You're so cool."

  I must have been blushing something awful; Chloe was all but grinning by now. Lovely didn't allow me to go on apologizing, but drew a little crumpled black plastic bag out of his baggy back pocket. "I stole this for you, to make it up to you," he said, holding it out at arm's length. I took the little parcel from him and unwrapped it; it was a gorgeous silver pocket watch on a chain, etched with a picture of a rat's skull, open in a furious-looking snarl.

 
I was aghast. "Oh, Lovely, you shouldn't have."

  "I know, but I saw it, and I thought about you immediately. Do you like it?"

  "Where did you get it?"

  He shrugged and smiled a wicked child's smile. "Nowhere," he said.

  Chloe leaned over to look. "Lovely's got what you call talent," she explained. "He could steal a warhead from the Pentagon. He'd just stuff it down those idiotic big shorts of his."

  "Shut up, bitch," Lovely said playfully. "Can I bum a cigarette?" He lit up and looked around him at the Denny's, now held in thrall by our dark little table. "Where is our lord and master anyway?"

  "He's fucking Nora," I said tiredly. I played with the watch, flicking the delicate exoskeleton open to look at the face, already set to the right time. "He dismissed it as an 'unpleasant obligation.' You know, what a hardship."

  "I can't stand Nora," Lovely said. "She's so holier-than-thou. One of these days I'm just gonna snatch her bald!" He suffered a little paroxysm of hatred, then composed himself and went back to picking at my plate. "I guess we'll just have to amuse ourselves. Sooooo, tell us about your other vampire. I'm dying to know. Chloe is too, she's just too polite to bug you about it."

  Chloe shrugged her agreement.

  I poured the last glass of orange juice out of the force-pressed glass carafe. "I don't know," I said. "What is there to tell? What do you want to know?"

  "Well, does he have a court like Daniel? How does he score his feeds?"

  I paused while the waiter—the same pissy young boy from last time—came over and asked Lovely if he wanted anything, brought Chloe and me more coffee, rolled his eyes at the lot of us. "I don't know," I began. "He doesn't really drink blood all that often."

  "Huh? How does he live?"

  "I guess he takes just enough to keep him alive," I said. "I gather it's not very much. He's pretty old."

  "That's weird," Lovely said. "That's like eating just enough to keep you from starving to death."

  "Not that weird," Chloe replied. "Nora does it. She thinks eating is boring. She hates everything."

  "You guys don't like Nora much, do you?" I said, trying to disguise the fact that I didn't either. The look on her face had been just insufferable when Daniel had announced to us all at "breakfast" that he was going to spend the rest of the daylight hours tickling her ivories.

  "I used to like her fine," Chloe explained, running her hand nervously through her hair. "But she's been getting on my tits. She's so into money and rank and class and 'the industry.' She thinks she's making all of Daniel's money and managing it, when she has no fucking clue how much money Daniel's worth. You think he'd tell her? She'd embezzle the hell out of it, buy herself a mountain of crystal meth, and put him on MTV. Shit, she'd buy MTV."

  "Does Daniel know this?" I asked.

  Chloe nodded sagely. "Daniel knows everything," she said. "She wouldn't have the guts. She's just as pussy-whipped—or should I say cock-whipped?—as anybody else. I can't say I blame her—I've been there." Everyone at the table nodded in agreement. "So tell us more about your other vampire," Chloe said.

  "I don't know. All we ever did was hang around in his hotel room and talk about nineteenth-century Europe. He took me out to dinner a lot and spent money on me and trashed my apartment. You guys would probably find him really boring."

  "I don't know. He sounds kind of cool. Like a really genteel sugar daddy." Lovely got misty-eyed.

  "I don't want a sugar daddy, though," I mumbled. "I just wanted to be in love with him, I think. I think I wanted a normal boring relationship with fucking and sweet talk and all that lame bullshit. I don't think he knows how to do anything like that anymore, if he ever did. I don't really want to talk about it anymore. He really, really hurt me."

  "I'll say," Chloe said. "I stitched you up. But that's OK. If you don't want to talk about it, we don't talk about it, right, Lovely?"

  Lovely frowned and sighed, but conceded.

  That evening I ended up haunting the streets with Lovely. We got made up in zombie finery—he wore the jewelry that looked like silver bones piercing his nipples and his black eye smudge filled the entire space between brow and cheekbone—and hung around on the sidewalk outside a Goth club in Los Angeles. It was twenty-one-and-over and he had been thrown out of the place repeatedly for buying liquor with a fake ID, he said, but he was drawn there again and again, especially on Friday nights when he was without Daniel; hanging around on the sidewalk outside was better than going inside most clubs.

  Certainly, the sidewalk was a raging scene—women dressed entirely in shiny black vinyl leading half-naked men around on leashes, more big crimped hair, purple lipstick, and skull buckles than you could shake a stick at, and always the swelling din of the music coming from inside. We weren't alone in the rejects pile either; a couple of other tatty young punks slouched in their personal corners, drinking alcohol from 7-Eleven Big Gulp cups, greeting friends they knew as they went inside.

  Lovely and I shared a flask of amaretto and dope-laden cigarettes. "So where the hell did you come from?" I asked him.

  "Precisely," he replied. "From hell."

  "Whereabouts in hell?"

  "Oklahoma," he said. "Norman, Oklahoma."

  "No kidding!"

  "I only wish I were," he said. He handed me the flask and eyed a strapping young man with a sheer, moth-eaten black skirt and bare torso. In my opinion, he didn't hold a candle to Lovely himself, but there's no accounting for taste. "I spent fifteen years there. There's just nothing there—just gray grass, as far as the eye can see. And Norman's not so bad as far as Oklahoma goes. My grandparents lived in Tulsa and they sent me there every summer—and I thought I was going to go nuts. I remember I spent one whole summer locked in my room, jerking off all day, then going outside at night and catching bugs and killing them. I think I was twelve that year."

  "Ever thought of reading books?"

  He smiled at me knowingly. "I did that plenty," he said. "I forgot to mention the book reading. I read while I was jerking off. I got sick of reading the books I had—I must have read them ten dozen times apiece. I read a whole lot of Michael Moorcock."

  "Oh, child, that explains everything."

  "Doesn't it? Doesn't it just? By the time I was fourteen I used to hustle my ass in Tulsa in the summer, just for something to do. I let anybody pick me up. It's a wonder I didn't get myself fucking killed doing that—more than I care to remember, some redneck bastard would pick me up hitchhiking, then beat the hell out of me and tell me to read the Bible or something else retarded. But you'd be surprised—a lot of the time I'd be peeing my pants going, 'This shitheel's about to blast me with his shotgun,' and they'd buy me a hamburger and then just take me to bed and suck my dick as nice as you please. Go on home to Bessie Lou and say, 'Aw, honey, I was just shootin' some pool over at the Dew Drop Inn." It was striking to see the urbane and bubble-headed Lovely putting on his homegrown heartland accent, much rougher and drier than my swampy polyglot Southern one. He was looking off into the distance at the punks across the street, who had grown sick of sitting still and had begun to half dance, half fight.

  "How'd you get to L.A.?"

  He smiled slowly. "I robbed the student council," he said. "They'd just had a bake sale and dog wash to buy more Sunday school books for the church across the street from the high school. Got myself a cool eighty bucks. Stole the rest from my dad's wallet while he was sleepin'. I got my faggy ass on a Greyhound and came out here."

  "And then what?"

  "Then I fucking hustled, obviously. Hustled my faggy, skinny, white, podunk ass." He took a deep drag on his cigarette and showed no signs of letting go. "I slept on the street for a month or two, mostly in the stairwells out back of buildings. Then I was kind of successful. I didn't get beat up too often. I guess men liked how I looked—I had sort of long blond hair then, you know, big brown eyes, looked kind of like I was straight, T-shirt and jeans. I knew a lot of really nice men who paid me OK money to sit on their cocks. N
o hardship, as far as I'm concerned. I'll climb on top of a hard cock any minute, even now. All I ask is that they wipe their ass every now and then, and don't think I look cuter with some of my teeth missing." He smiled at me to demonstrate, and I saw that one of his lower canine teeth was gone, and the other teeth had valiantly tried to fill the space.

  I moved over to him and hugged him as hard as I could. He kissed my hair, then nudged me away for another mouthful of amaretto. "No, see, it's fine now, I'm with Dan now. I don't regret it. I don't regret anything."

  "And how'd you hook up with Daniel?"

  "He was a trick, of course." He grinned. "He called my pimp, who apparently had done Dan wrong sometime in the past—maybe it was just the fact that he was a pimp. Daniel fucking hates pimps more than anything. He loves hookers—he thinks hookers are great—but if they don't get all their money, Daniel goes on the warpath. He's wasted more pimps… But anyway, my old man brought me over to some party or something, and I had cut my hair like this for the first time that day, and my pimp was so mad, he was ready to sell me to Shanghai or some shit; but there was this party in Beverly Hills, and my old man brought me in, and brought me up to Daniel—I remember Daniel was sitting there like a prince in a big red velvet chair, in a proper Umberto suit and white shirt and tie, but with his lips painted the same color red as the chair. So my old man goes, 'Well, I'm sorry, he cut his hair, like, two hours ago, and it was either this or bring you a skinhead,' and Daniel goes, 'No, no, that's fine… quite all right… lovely, really. Lovely.' " Lovely imitated Daniel's voice perfectly; he must have been practicing it for years. "So, like, Daniel and I go off into another room, and he asks me if I really want to, and I'm like 'Uh, yeah,' and he goes, 'I have something I want to show you,' and he bares his fangs at me. I was like, 'Cool, nice fangs, dude, that's so Love at First Bite,' but then he starts taking off his domes, and I can see how fucking white he is—he's like snow. Snowy white. And he, like, reaches out to me and tweaks my tit, this was before I had them pierced, and he tweaks my nip with his fingernails, and I'm like, 'Whoa, shit, that ain't fake.' But I never panicked or anything. He was nice. He kissed me just a little. He kind of bit my lip and tasted my blood just a little bit, and I was ready by then to do fucking anything the man said. He, like, asked me how old I was, and how long I'd been hustling for that guy, and then he was like, 'Watch this, little one.' And I followed him into the other room where my old man and some other, like, coke-dealer guys were sitting around smoking cigars and talking and shit. And… Daniel just goes to fucking town." Lovely held out his hands in parallel planes. "He fucking killed those dudes so fast, I didn't know what was going on until the last guy fell. Daniel just like… he like… I think he crushed their hearts and slit their throats. All he has to do to crush a guy's heart is punch him in the chest and his breastbone just goes whooom. Instant death. Guy doesn't feel a thing except he can't breathe so good. And there I was just standing there and watching this one guy's neck just kind of pouring blood all down the front of his yellow silk suit, looking at Daniel all startled, but he's, like, already dead. And Daniel just kneels down and drinks the blood coming out. He fills his hands with it and drinks it like he's drinking water out of a river. My pimp is sitting there with his chest caved in like somebody hit it with a sledgehammer. Four men, just like that. When he was done drinking the blood he came over to me and said, 'Get undressed, I'm going to fuck you, and I don't want to ruin your clothes.' "