Interview With a Jewish Vampire

by Erica Manfred

  “I may look old,” she said, “but in vampire years I’m young. I was turned into a vampire against my will by the Golden Grandmas. I started going to Golden Grandma meetings because my friend Edith went. I was lonely, my husband Herman had died the year before, my kids were all living far away and didn’t want to be bothered with me. After Herman died I just fell apart. Edith rescued me, she took care of me. My arthritis was killing me, not literally but you know… Or maybe you don’t--you’re all so young. Anyway they say getting old isn’t for sissies and I’m a terrible sissy.

  “I thought it was strange that the Golden Grandmas met at night--I mean most of us can’t even drive at night--but I didn’t ask questions. I had no idea that these ladies--who were very refined by the way--were really a nest of bloodsucking vampire AARP members. I felt so foolish when I found out. We’d sit around and talk about our grandkids, play mah-jongg, show movies. They talked me into joining them—into becoming a vampire. Edith was my only friend and she insisted. I never could say no to anyone, especially a good friend. But I don’t like the lifestyle. Not the bloodlust—that’s not a problem for me. I’m post-menopausal, I don’t have a lot of lust. I’m fine with animal blood, I trained my cat Tiny to give me the mice she kills. I suck the blood and he eats the body. It’s disgusting but I survive that way. But I’ll never get used to not eating food. I used to live for bagels and lox and chopped liver and cheese cake and steak and…”

  Everyone in the room started shushing her. “Mentioning food is considered terrible manners in vampire society,” Sheldon whispered to me. “It’s the hardest thing for us to give up. But it’s been so long for me I hardly miss it anymore. As long as I can still have sex I’m happy.” He leered at me.

  “I need to make amends to my kids,” Zelda said sorrowfully. “I just disappeared, moved in with Edith and never told them where I went. They called and wrote and I didn’t answer. They even sent private detectives and put up posters all over town. I was ashamed, how could I tell them the truth? I was so weak. I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want to be dependent on them, or on anybody. Is that a crime? I still don’t know what to do but I have to make amends.” She sat down, put her head in her hands and sobbed.

  I felt terrible for her. She was in a real pickle. What could she tell her kids? “Hey there Sonny, I’ve become a vampire. I’m going to live forever and you’re not—get used to it.” Poor Zelda. But her plight gave me an idea. I determined to talk to Sheldon about it after the meeting, as soon as we got home. But where was home? The Upper East Side or Crown Heights? Where did Sheldon sleep during the day? Could he sleep at my apartment or did he have to go back to his? Did he actually have to sleep in a coffin? Maybe I’d order a doublewide coffin that we could share. The only problem was I had severe claustrophobia. I found my mind wandering as more vampires talked, most with the same story. Uncontrollable blood lust, killings of innocents mostly accidental, and a lot of guilt and breast-beating. I supposed there were vampires who were remorseless killers but they weren’t in this room. It got boring after a while. I felt guilty about being too tired to be horrified continuously.

  I woke up abruptly when a disheveled young vamp with long uncombed black hair, who was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette that looked suspiciously like a joint, got up and said with a scowl, “My name is Luther, I’m a bloodaholic and I don’t want to be here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sucking human blood. That’s why we were made and that’s what we’re supposed to do. I was forced to come by Vampire Court—they said they’d lock me up in the dungeon and throw away the key if I didn’t change my ways. I’ve been sober for a week now, sucking rat blood, yuck!”

  “You have to fill me in on Vampire Court,” I whispered to Sheldon.

  “Later. I’ll answer all your questions.”

  “Can we leave, Sheldon?” I yawned. It was late and I was exhausted.

  “Not yet, be patient, it will be over soon. I’m a sponsor and Gary, my sponsee, wants to talk to me. There he is over there.”

  I saw a tall, slender, very handsome vampire with granny glasses, long messy blond hair, and a rumpled corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches looking at Sheldon expectantly. He was a professor type—Charlene loved professors. I decided to stick it out for her sake. Maybe I could fix her up.

  Eventually they got to the Serenity Prayer, and if there was ever a group who had to accept what they couldn’t change it was vampires.

  “So, Rabbi, how’s it hanging?” the cute blond guy said when he came up to Sheldon after the meeting. How’s it hanging? I hadn’t heard that expression since the late eighties. Some vampires must try too hard to sound cool and get their slang stuck in the wrong decade. I wondered how old this one really was.

  Sheldon introduced him to me and then took Gary aside to give him advice. I was impressed at his fatherly demeanor. He obviously cared for his sponsee, who may have been younger than him but in vampire years, who knows?

  I cornered Luther. “What’s this about Vampire court and Dungeons?” I asked.

  He stared at me like I was a bug. “You’re human, you don’t want to know.”

  “Oh yes I do,” I said. “I have a personal and professional interest in the vampire life.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it. Not to a human, and certainly not to you. It’s none of your goddamned business.” He stalked off angrily. I decided to ask Sheldon what he knew, or if there was someone else who could explain it.

  He looked worried when he came back to me. “Gary is a troubled soul,” he explained. “He’s killed quite a few humans. He picks up prostitutes because he loves sex, then he wants more and can’t help himself. He was ordered to go to B.A. by Vampire Court quite a while ago. He’s seriously in denial.”

  “What is Vampire Court? Obviously it doesn’t do much good if Gary is still killing people.” I decided maybe this wasn’t someone I wanted to introduce to Charlene. “He’s a killer. Why don’t you turn him in to the police?”

  “That’s something you need to understand right now, Rhoda, we NEVER turn each other in. The police don’t know we exist and we’d like to keep it that way. Some retired FBI agents know about us, but they keep it quiet because we police ourselves. Can you imagine what kind of hysteria would go on if people knew about us?”

  “Nah, not these days,” I said. “Everyone’s in love with vampires. No one would care about a few dead hookers. A TV producer would show up to do a reality series. You could make a fortune.”

  “Maybe that’s true but I still wouldn’t want to take that chance. In my day the people who hunted us weren’t paparazzi. We almost got wiped out by a group of vigilante FBI agents back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. They were running around with stakes opening coffins all over the place.”

  “How come I never heard about this?”

  “It was covered up, like Roswell. No one wanted to alarm people.”

  “What happened?”

  “FBI agents arrested some vampires back during Prohibition thinking they were bootleggers and the vampires wiped them out. J. Edgar took it personally. He went to war against us. It went on secretly for years, like his war against gays. He sent agents to stake us in our coffins, he assigned double agents to pretend they were vampires and out us, he forced us to walk into the light. Very ugly.”

  “Maybe J. Edgar was a vampire, a self-hating one, just like he was a self-hating homosexual,” I joked.

  Sheldon didn’t think it was funny. “That would explain a lot. Hoover seemed to know all our secrets. His agents would show up in places we thought only vampires knew about. Eventually we figured out some Feebs were vampires. The only solution was to police ourselves. When a vampire goes rogue the V.B.I, Vampire Bureau of Investigation, goes after him and he’s forced to go in front of Vampire Court. He gets sent to B.A., shapes up or is sent to the dungeon. By the way, B.A. was started by some Feebs who got turned. B.A. is pretty lenient these days though—now that J. Edgar is long gone. They give eve
ryone a lot of chances—first to go to B.A. and then to rehab and then they get locked up if they don’t escape first. One day my brother will synthesize blood and then we can come out of the closet, like on True Blood, but so far the stuff he’s come up with tastes good but lacks enough hearty hemoglobin. You couldn’t survive on it. It’s more like an aperitif than a main course.”

  “How about that blood in the coffee machine? Why can’t you survive on that?”

  “That would be like you drinking piss to survive, you would probably kill a human sooner or later for the real thing.”

  “I guess immortality isn’t easy.”

  “Neither is the alternative. Let’s get out of here, sweetie.” Sheldon gave me his adorable lustful leer. “I have plans for you before sunrise.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Once we got out on the street we had the “your place or mine” discussion. Unlike most such discussions, which usually involve a secret agenda of who wanted to be in a position to escape in the morning, this one hinged on where the coffin was located.

  “Rhoda.” Sheldon looked at me apologetically. “We don’t have time for me to go to your place and then go home. It’s already 4 a.m. and I might not make it. I’d hate to wind up on the subway at daybreak and then find it’s too light to get home when I get to my stop. I’d have to spend the entire day sleeping on the subway. I might wind up in jail.”

  “OK, but why can’t you sleep at my place? How about if I draw the blinds and the curtains—it’s dark.”

  “Not dark enough. You’d have to get blackout curtains. And I’m not sure that will work for the entire day. I take my old coffin wherever I go with dirt from Transylvania in it. I wouldn’t be comfortable anywhere else. My coffin is like a broken-in pair of shoes.”

  “Yuck,” I said. “Maybe dirt from any graveyard would do?”

  “I’d be willing to try it—for you. But for tonight, why don’t you come with me to Crown Heights? You can go home when it gets light. I’ll give you cab fare.”

  I sighed. The last thing I wanted was to schlep to Brooklyn, but there was no way around it. Sheldon hailed a cab. At least I’d be going there in comfort. If I had to stand on a smelly subway platform at 4 a.m. I would be miserable.

  We pulled up in front of Sheldon’s building and he escorted me up three flights of a walkup. Three flights and no elevator. He didn’t offer to fly me up either. Maybe he thought I could use the exercise. Not what a Jewish princess was used to! I wanted to complain but kept my mouth shut—I didn’t want to ruin the mood. The inside of Sheldon’s apartment looked pretty barren, like a typical bachelor pad except for the ornate coffin in the middle of the bedroom. There was no bed, but there was a ratty old couch that he pulled me down on as soon as we got inside. The only decoration was a large life-sized whitish statue in the corner, of a woman with a babushka. I guess she reminded Sheldon of home. Or he was an art collector. I forgot the surroundings very quickly under his expert hands. I could have been in the middle of an earthquake and wouldn’t have noticed. Actually I was in the middle of an earthquake, my own, and I was screaming with pleasure. Sheldon broke the mood by putting his hand over my mouth.

  “Rhoda, shhhhh. People will think I’m killing you … literally.”

  I gasped for breath and said, “Who would think that?”

  “This whole building is filled with Hasidic vampires, including my brother Herschel. They’ll get suspicious. They know I’m in B.A., but they’ll think I fell off the wagon.”

  I sighed, got up and put my clothes on as Sheldon looked at me appreciatively. “Might as well get dressed,” I said. “Just in case another vampire comes by.”

  “Herschel tends to drop in a lot. He looks out for me.”

  “You’re lucky you have a brother,” I said. “I’m an only child and my only family is my mother.” I took a deep breath and decided to ask him if he’d change Mom. “She’s dying, Sheldon, of heart disease. I don’t know what to do to save her. She refuses to have another surgery—she already had two coronary bypasses.”

  “I wish I was a doctor, but I can’t help you there.”

  “Yes you can, you can save her, you can turn her into a vampire.”

  Sheldon backed all the way across the room and stared at me. “You want me to turn your mother into a vampire? You have to be kidding.” He stared at me. “You’re not kidding.”

  “Not kidding. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and when I heard Zelda at the B.A. meeting, that convinced me. She’s an old lady vampire.”

  “She’s a miserable old lady vampire,” Sheldon said. She can’t see her grandkids, she can’t have bagels and lox, she….well she does have friends but she’s not happy.

  “My mother doesn’t have any grandkids, she has me, and she can’t eat bagels and lox anyway because of her heart.”

  “How about friends?” he asked. “What will she do with herself as the only vampire in Century Village?”

  “Her friends love her. They’ll accept her the way she is. They’ll get used to going out late. They never go out during the day anyway, it’s too hot. She’ll miss the early birds but she can walk on the beach with them in the evening. She can still play mah-jongg and visit after dark. She won’t be able to go to museums but she can still see movies and plays. The most important thing is she’ll be alive—I’ll still have a mom.” I started crying, not on purpose but it did a job on Sheldon. He got very upset. Maybe he wasn’t used to women weeping.

  “Please don’t cry, honey, please, please.” He threw his arms around me, pulled my head on his shoulder and started patting my back.

  “I don’t know what to dooooooo …” I moaned. “I don’t want to lose Mom. She’s all I’ve got.”

  “You’ve got me, baby,” he said comfortingly.

  “You’re not my Mom. No one will ever love me like my Mom.”

  Then Sheldon started crying. He was heaving and sobbing loudly, this time not holding back like he had at Fiddler, but there were still no tears. We had our arms around each other and were both crying.

  “I miss my mother too, Rhoda. When I became a vampire I had to disappear. It would have scared her to death, knowing I was a dybbuk, or some other evil creature. She was very religious. It was easier for her to think I’d died. Or that’s what I thought. She went into mourning for me and never stopped. Eventually she died too, of consumption. Everyone died in those days of consumption. When Hershel got it and it looked like he was going to die I turned him into a vampire so I could have a family. He begged me to do it. I understand what you’re going through. I will always regret not changing my mother. I love that you’re so devoted to yours.”

  “Will you do it?” I begged.

  “I want to do it for you. If I couldn’t save my mother at least I could save yours. But let me think it through. An old person shouldn’t become a vampire. They’ll be old forever.”

  “She won’t feel old, will she?”

  “Yes and no” he said. “She’ll have some vampire powers, and her heart will be OK because it won’t beat anymore. She’ll still have arthritic knees and wrinkles, but no aches and pains. I once talked to Zelda about her change and that’s what she told me. She said she didn’t like having to hobble around forever but her joints didn’t change when she died. But she was really strong and could knock out a boxer if she had to. She could fly a little too. Actually vampires can develop different skills. She needed some way to move fast so she developed flying.”

  “I won’t tell mom that she’s not going to become young again, or she won’t do it.”

  “What are you going to tell her?” Sheldon asked.

  “Ummm. Not sure. I guess I’ll play it by ear. Actually you’ll be the one telling her. We’re going to Florida together.”

  “Florida!!” Sheldon almost shrieked. “That’s rogue vampire territory.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Vampires who don’t want to play by the rules move to Florida—or Mexico. Also vampires wh
o like warm weather. Florida is more—well—easygoing than New York. All those drug dealers and drug wars—you can get away with murder there, and a lot of vampires do. I’m a New York vampire through and through.”

  “What’s a New York vampire?”

  “I have a terror of beaches and palm trees. Too sunny. No cold, dark graveyards. Not that I ever go to cold, dark graveyards but I could if I wanted to. I could even go up to the Cloisters and hang out in a castle. I do that sometimes just to feel at home. It’s not open at night but I sneak in. Transylvania isn’t exactly tropical.”

  “Well I hope you can deal with Florida weather—for me. I’ll book us a night flight. Now what do we do with your coffin? Do you want to travel in it?”

  “Not really. What if it gets lost? What if the airline loses it? We’ll leave late and I’ll ship it separately.”

  “Maybe you don’t really need it.”

  “I don’t want to take that chance.”

  “Let’s experiment before you go. See what you can tolerate. Maybe you just need the dirt from a graveyard nearby and you could sleep in a bed with blackout curtains?”

  Sheldon looked terrified. “Sleep without my coffin? It’s my security blanket, I’d have insomnia anywhere else. Goldie reads me to sleep when I’m in it.”

  “What a mama’s boy you are!” I laughed.

  “Will you read me to sleep?”

  “Sure. What the hell. As long as it’s not nursery rhymes.”

  “I prefer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories.”

  “You’re on. While we’re talking about it, what about Goldie. Where is she? I thought she lived with you?’

  “She does. She’s right over there.” He pointed at the statue.

  I shrieked in terror. “That thing is a golem? It comes to life?”

  “Only when I want her to. There’s nothing to be afraid of. She’s a pussycat. She’s inanimate except when I animate her. There’s an ancient spell I use. She can stay there forever when I’m away.”