And the people who were neither Mother Theresa or Hitler? What about them?
According to the Catholics, they went to a place called Purgatory. Purgatory was kind of like the San Quentin of the afterlife. You did some hard time for all your petty little sins. And then you got to move on and hear all those angels strumming on their harps.
Such bullshit.
And of course, you had to be a member of the Club in life to make this all come to pass. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. You had to be baptized in the church in order to make it into heaven. Say you led a blameless, exemplarily life but you were a Buddhist? Or a Pagan? Too bad. No heaven for you. Ever.
There was yet another place for the likes of you. A place for you and all the little Catholic babies who had died before a priest had a chance to sprinkle some water on them and then suck them into the church.
And that place was called Limbo.
When I was a kid and going to St. John’s Catholic School, the nun in my third-grade class always made us recite a Hail Mary for all the little innocent babies in Limbo. As I bowed my head, and mumbled the words, I tried to imagine what Limbo could be like. All I could see, with my eyes tightly shut, was a gray sky and plump little naked bodies falling like rain. It always freaked me out.
Now I hear there is no such place as Limbo. The Catholic Church, with one Papal wave, did away with it. And I think they closed down Purgatory as well. Those places no longer exist.
Just heaven and hell. Heaven and hell.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s more bullshit.
You are here and then…
You die.
But maybe there is something after you die. Another life. A better life than this one. I really hope so. This one has been no picnic by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think it’s a place with clouds and harps and milquetoast angels. No. But a place where people do not have to get up anymore and go to jobs they despise. A place where people are good to each other finally. Where there is no greed or hatred. I know that is completely insane and naïve, coming from someone like me: a cynic, a vampire, a cold-blooded killer of women, but that is what I hope. I look at Marie’s body. I watch as it slowly darkens, as the skin begins to mottle in places, and I hope that she is in that heaven.
I really do.
And my father?
Well he can burn in hell.
Chapter Seven
“I’m looking at the river, but I’m thinking of the sea.”
Something like that. I AM looking at a river right now. And my thoughts are as far-ranging as the sea.
It’s a bright clear night in early September, about three in the morning or so. The writing wasn’t coming tonight. Well it was coming but it all seemed so obvious and stilted once it was down on the page. Sometimes I really wish I was a painter instead of a writer, because welding a brush seems like a more immediate way to get one’s feelings down and preserve them for a time. Or a musician. Charlie “Bird” Parker improvising long, fluid solos in some madhouse club.
The mechanics of writing, of language, sometimes just seem like one more jail cell in the world.
So I decided to quit for the night. Take a walk and try to clear my head.
It’s been a week now since I fed off of Marie. Last night, and still with some reluctance, I finally got rid of her body, burned the flesh and the bones away until there was nothing left. Just the memory of those black hole eyes, of course.
I didn’t see anything in the papers about her disappearance, but, of course, I don’t pick up the papers with any great regularity. There might have been something. But it has been my experience that the police do not put too much manpower in to trying to solve cases like Marie’s. She wasn’t really anybody. A stripper. Bummed around a lot. Maybe she just rode off in the middle of the night with some guy is how the thinking usually goes. I didn’t sense, when I was drinking her down into me, that she had any close friends who were going to make a federal case about her absence.
So maybe I’ll be OK.
Once again.
So I’ve been walking the streets, just thinking and smoking cigarettes. Ended up here at the river like I usually do when I go walking. It’s a nice place to be at night. Quiet and almost solemn. There’s this stone platform here, built right into the bank; it overlooks this cataract where the deep water upstream spills off into a shallower part of the riverbed. In the daytime, if I remember correctly, all sorts of birds: cranes, ducks, etc. used to fish close to that waterfall. I wonder if they still do. The river is pretty polluted now, and all sorts of trash has been dumped here. Pity. I imagine, as I stand there and smoke my cigarette, what it must have looked like over two-hundred years ago: a pure silver ribbon snaking through dense green forest. And the Indians came here to drink and fish, just as the birds do still. I wonder if there are any vampires around who remember that, who saw it with their own nocturnal eyes? It must have been something.
And then I realize, as I stand by the river thinking these things, that I am not alone anymore.
There’s somebody creeping up behind me. My vampire senses have automatically switched on to warn me. He’s (and it is a man, I’m pretty sure by the smell) he’s about ten yards to my left and behind me, lurking, not moving much really. His body is pressed up against this long hurricane fence that runs between the river and this steel and glass monster of a factory where they make plastics and resins and shit like that. Another mausoleum of progress. I can feel his eyes scouring my back. The hairs on my arms are at attention.
Well now. This could be some fun, I think, as I flick the butt of my smoke toward the river, watching the orange cone arc toward the watery darkness.
Again, I have not fed from a human being since my sweet Marie. I was fully intending to take a trip tomorrow to this biker bar I know of downstate, this shithole place where knife fights and hit and runs in the parking lot are not an uncommon occurrence. Another good hunting ground.
But hey, looks like I may not have to do that after all…
I turn and leave the observation platform, get on the bike path that’s sandwiched between the river and the chemical factory, start walking upstream toward Queen Avenue, where there is a bridge. I catch a glimpse of my friend as I do, in the corner of my eye. He is dark and big. Good. Means more blood for me.
I start walking and for a second I am afraid that he isn’t going to do anything after all. Just linger by the fence and watch me leave. But then I hear him. I hear the fence shudder and I hear heavy shoes slide through the wet grass and on to the path behind me.
Goody.
I speed up a bit as I walk. It’s kind of a pleasant game this, being prey instead of predator for once, and I try to sustain the moment, the excitement of it.
He speeds up too. I can hear the thud of his shoes, picking up momentum on the path.
And I can smell him too, among the hundreds and hundreds of night smells—the fish smells from the river, the smells of heaven-knows-what pluming from the chemical factory’s smokestacks. There is liquor on his breath: MD 20-20 or something cheap like that. And I think he’s wearing an old overcoat on this hot summer night. There’s a musty stale scent, like he’s worn that coat one too many days in a row, like he lives in that coat. And there is the smell of perspiration and dirt on his body. He’s definitely no captain of industry.
I hope he has a gun. Or a knife. Now that would be sweet.
He takes his time, but when he realizes that I will soon be coming up on a major intersection, with bright lights and traffic, he begins to quickly pare down the distance between us. Ten feet. Six feet. Three feet. Half a foot from me now. Closer…closer…
And suddenly he leaps up and grabs me, getting me by the throat with the crook of one padded arm, pulling me toward him. I pretend as hard as I can to be startled, just an ordinary citizen caught unaware by a nighttime mugger. I even manage to let out a convincing, theatrical gasp, as he crushes my windpipe with his arm.
“Don’t make a sound, fucker,” h
e says. His voice is deep and slurred. Dark. “I have a gun and I ain’t above using it.”
“OK. OK.” I squeak. I’m actually disappointed because I can smell that he does not have a weapon on him of any kind. Not even a pocket comb. Bummer.
“I want you to sit down,” he grunts, indicating with his free hand a strip of grass that runs between the fence and the path. His hand is large, black, almost simian in appearance. I notice that his fingernails are chipped and dirty.
“Ok. Don’t hurt me,” I bleat. I’m actually quite impressed with my acting. I’m really getting into the spirit of the thing entirely, letting him imagine that he is in complete control of the situation. I sit down in the grass and the man sits down next to me, grunting a little from the effort. He is huge and black. He is wearing a gray overcoat, the one I smelled earlier. His hair is short and wiry and his fleshy cheeks are covered with stubble. I look into his eyes. They are red-rimmed and as expressionless as Marie’s were after I drained her. It’s really exquisite.
“Stop starin’ at me bitch!” the man says. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll kill you!”
“Sorry…” I avert my eyes and look out toward the river. He is very big. I wonder greedily how many pints of blood he has in him. Seven? Eight? And then there’s the bonus of any alcohol or illicit drugs that might be coursing around in there. Could be quite a high.
“Give me your wallet,” he says, rubbing his pudgy fingers together just under my face. “And don’t do anything funny.”
So I reach into my pants pocket and pull out my cruddy wallet, hand it to him. There’s only about seven dollars in the bill compartment. He extracts the paper and rifles around, disappointed. He looks at me, frowning. Glaring.
“Is this ALL ya got?” he says.
“All I have. Take it.”
It’s really quite a funny scene--Henry the Vampire and John Doe the Mugger sitting here by the river exchanging pleasantries. To any passersby, we might just be two friends out enjoying the summer night. Yes. Two friends.
He goes through the rest of my wallet. Nothing much in there really. A library card I never use any more. My driver’s license, which I believe expired like a month ago and is going to prove a major hassle to renew. A Kroger Save-On Card. Nothing really.
He takes the money, puts it in his pocket, throws the cards and my now empty wallet on the grass. He looks at me in disgust.
“Jesus Christ…I went through all that for five dollars? I should just kill you, motherfucker!”
Seven, but who’s counting? I try to look as panicked as I possibly can. I shake my head. Wave my arms around a bit.
“Please! Oh, please! I’m sorry! Please don’t kill me! I’m too young to die!”
“You’re too pathetic to live” he says, brushing away my wallet and its debris as if they were just some flies he was trying to shoo. “But I don’t feel like wasting a bullet on your sorry punk ass, soooo…”
“Oh thank you sir, thank you,” I gush. It is almost time now. I feel my canine teeth start to tingle in my mouth.
“Yeah, OK, shut up. I’m gonna get up now and you are gonna stay put for awhile ‘til you can’t see me. If I hear you make a squeak, I’m gonna come back and bust a cap in your sorry ass.”
“No sir. No way. I won’t say anything. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”
“You better. Damn. Five dollars. What a fucking waste.”
He shakes his head sadly and then gets to his knees, preparing to stand. And with that, I am on him. The tables are turned. The prey becomes the predator. I sink my teeth into his pulpy, stubbly neck and drink my fill. So much blood. And it does not seem as if he is even surprised, really. His face, his eyes remain expressionless as I drain him. As if he had been expecting something like this to happen all along—another unlucky moment in an unlucky life. And it has been unlucky. I see it all as I drink him down. 9th grade dropout. Father nowhere. Mother almost nowhere, unable to get off of the rock. No chance really for a life beyond drugs and crime to support that life. Prison time. Cheap rooms in hotels. Pawn shops. The whole nine yards, like a case study in some sociology book. The American nightmare festering yet again.
Finally, I drop his body, sated, bloated on John Doe’s cheap blood. Actually, I know his name now. Maurice Jones. I retrieve my seven dollars from his pocket, stuff the plastic back into the compartments of my wallet. I pick up the body as if it were a weightless balloon and take it down to the riverbank. I bury it in a deep grave among some dead trees. And then I head for home, with the warmth of a good meal sitting in my stomach. Thank you, Maurice Jones. RIP.
Chapter Eight
Thoughts From A Dirty Old Vampire (On My Father)
It’s always hard to write about my father because I never can seem to get the objective distance to do so with any degree of success. The man terrorized me for eighteen years of my life, gave me beatings that I can still feel today on my arms and buttocks. And for nothing really. For forgetting to take out the trash. For leaving a single dandelion in the backyard when I was supposed to weed them all away. A mountain of little things.
I see those beatings in my mind in slow motion, my father towering over me, shaking with rage. And behind him, my mother seems to float, her face bloodless, her big eyes bursting with terror. I would like to forgive my mother, love her, for she was always good to me when my father was not around. But she never lifted a hand to try and stop him. Her silence and her fear marked her as his accomplice for life. I know that she was scared that if she tried to stop him he would just turn on her, but…
My father’s rage was something he carried around with him always, some kind of pollution that he seemed to exhale into the very air of our little house. Even in the good times, even on weekends and holidays, you always walked around on eggshells, wondering if he would go ballistic over some fool little thing.
I think my father was mad at the entire world, more than he was mad at me. I was just a convenient punching bag. I believe that my father thought that the world owed him something in a big way. For following the rules. For working as hard as he did. For being a good citizen. And he was pissed that the world was not following through and living up to its obligations.
I’m not exactly sure what my father did for a living. Systems analyst. Something to do with computers. Anyway, he was always coming home pissed off. Sometimes he would come home depressed, not saying much at all. He would take off his tie, unbelt his work pants, and just lie on the couch staring blankly at the TV until it was time to eat. The JOB obsessed him, ate at him. The JOB was everything. Get up in the morning and go to the JOB. Got to have some new clothes for the JOB. Got to study up on these new machines they are putting in for the JOB. Study hard Henry and one day you too can have a JOB.
I asked my father one day how much money he made on the job and he answered cryptically: “Enough.” Well, it never seemed that way. It never seemed that there was ever enough money. “Turn off those lights,” my father would bark. “What do you think I am, the electric company?” “No, I will not buy you those tennis shoes, Henry. What’s wrong with the shoes you’ve got? Do you think I am made of money?” “There’s nothing wrong with instant milk. Now drink it. It tastes exactly like real milk.” A constant battle between my father and all of the forces that conspired to cheat him out of his meager salary. The utility companies were always always the worst. “Those sons of bitches,” my father would rant, clutching the latest gas bill with bloodless hands. And then he would stomp around the house, turning down all the thermostats, urging the family to bundle up in sweaters and blankets because “those sons a bitches” were not going to squeeze another dime out of him. That would last about a week, and then the thermostats would all be back in the livable zone again.
The only thing really that my father seemed to enjoy was eating. No talk at the table. Dinner was religious, cathartic for my father. I would watch him in silent disgust, as he shoveled food between his gray lips. Pot roast. Turkey. Steak. Mashed potatoes. Corn. Stew
. His pin slit eyes would grow larger and larger. As if he were taking the food down into his eyes rather than his stomach. It seemed my own appetite would shrink, in inverse proportion to his.
“What’s the matter, Henry? Eat your chicken pot pie before it gets cold.”
My father died in 2006 of lung cancer. He had been a smoker all his life--three unbelievable packs of Marlboro Reds a day. It’s strange, but my mother proceeded him to the grave by a year or so: a brain aneurysm. I had been in San Diego then with Emily, becoming a vampire. I had not spoken to my parents for six years. It was as if my mother was really dead before she died. But somewhere she was still walking around, drinking coffee, trying to placate my father when he was in a mood, sitting down to do the crossword puzzles she always loved to do. Now she really was gone. No way at all to see her ever. No way to resuscitate the old relationship. Dead.
When my father died, I went to see his body at the funeral home. I don’t know. I was a vampire and I thought that my vampire nature would help me see something about my father that I had missed before. That there would be some special epiphany or something.
There really wasn’t.
There was my father’s body lying in a silver coffin, flanked by all sorts of dying flowers. Thinner than I remember, ravaged by the cancer. But my father. My mortal enemy for so many years. The reason I left home. The reason I drank. The reason, if you looked at it hard enough, I became a bloodsucker. It was him all right. The bushy black eyebrows. The thick moustache. The iron jaw. Like Joe Stalin lying in state or something.
The Vampire Henry Page 6