The Vampire Henry

by Michael S. Walker

  There was a plastic cap at the top and, gently, I unscrewed it, opening the thing. I could smell the blood. Sweet. Teasing my nostrils with its heavy, tangy odor. God, I wanted it.

  And just like that--123--I hoisted the bag to my lips. I sucked at it, my cheeks going concave from the effort. It was an epiphany: the greatest drink I have ever had in all my years of drinking. It was nectar. It was ambrosia. It was double-malt scotch. It was ALL. I stood there and drank blood. And as I drank, I felt as if I were in the middle of some profound transformation. As if I were a butterfly shedding the very last vestiges of its caterpillar life in a no longer necessary cocoon. All the sickness from minutes before seemed to slough away. I drank and was free. It was exhilarating. I never ever wanted it to end.

  Emily stood there in silence, watching as I drank down the pint bag of blood. Finally, I drained it dry.

  “More,” I said, smiling at her, beaming. “Give me some more.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not right away Henry. To overindulge will make you sick.”

  I dropped the completely dry plastic to the floor. I felt like Superman. I felt like God. I wanted to find Norman Mailer and punch him in the face. I wanted to stay up for days on end and type an epic poem about the Helen known as BLOOD. I wanted…

  There was Emily in her nightgown, looking at me, her brow still furrowed with worry. I wanted to fuck all those furrows away now. I felt my cock rise in my shorts like some sentient machine made of muscle and blood. And need.

  “Come here…” I said. My voice was a thing: a new instrument of power and control. All I had to do was talk and entire worlds would bloom into being. Amazing.

  “Come here…”

  And then Emily was in my arms. And I was raising that flimsy nightgown, pulling her bikini panties down…

  I didn’t know fuck all about vampires. Horror wasn’t my thing really. Real life seemed horrible enough on its own without bringing the undead in to salt the meat.

  Thank God Emily was there to teach me, help me along. I probably would have expired sometime in that first week if she hadn’t been there.

  Most of the notions that people attach to vampires, most of the things that surround the vampire mythos, are complete and utter bullshit.

  Crosses. Absurd. I myself have a German Iron Cross from World War 2 dangling from the mirror of my pickup. I love to look at it when I’m driving. Oh yeah, and I can see myself in the mirror too. That’s not so much a plus. But the story that vamps cannot see their own reflection is just not so.

  All the other trappings of institutional mumbo jumbo have no effect on me either. Sprinkle me with Holy Water and I will probably be pissed, nothing more. It’s just tap water that some priest has passed his hands over when he wasn’t busy pawing an altar boy somewhere. I have no problem stepping into a church either although I don’t think I have been in one since I was a little boy and my parents forced me to go to the Catholic mass every Sunday without fail.

  And the other stuff? Running water? Nope. Silver? Nope. Garlic? Definitely nope.

  There are three things for a vampire to worry about. Well there are lots of things to worry about if you choose to but fuck it. I don’t care. But there are three things that will indeed put a hurting on me.

  Sunlight. Most definitely. That was why I never once saw Emily in the daytime. That big ball of hydrogen and helium is a surefire killer for bloodsuckers. And I had to test that one, foolishly, cause like I said those sunrises I saw when I was bumming around were among some of my fondest memories. Emily told me over and over that I had to stay out of the sun, but I guess I needed some empirical evidence or something. I had been a vamp all of four days and I got it into my head to stay up, catch the morning, see for myself just what the fuck the friendly sun could do to me.

  “You will be sorry,” Emily had sighed as she padded off to bed, tired of arguing with me about it.

  Yeah. It happens. So I sat there in the kitchen, sucking up a bag of Emily’s private stock, waiting for the sun to rise. It was an overcast day: early February in San Diego, CA. At about 7:30 or so I got up from the table, took a deep breath, and ventured toward the infamous sliding glass door, now enveloped in heavy drapes.

  “All right, champ. Here goes nothing.”

  I stuck my hand through a gap in the curtains, gritting my teeth as I did so.

  It was like someone was flinging lit matches at my poor hand. I wanted to cry out in pain, but I gritted my teeth even more and quickly pulled my hand back in. I looked at it curiously. It was the color of a medium-well steak and smarting badly. I went to the kitchen tap and ran some cold water over it. That seemed to hush the throbbing in it a little bit. Then I went into the bedroom, almost apologetically, to sleep the day away with Emily.

  “I told you Henry,” she murmured, as I climbed into the bed next to her.

  The second thing is a stake (or anything sharp really) to the heart. You can shoot me. I will keep coming. Emily told me that, after she had been turned, she had a girlfriend who knew she was a vamp shoot her in the shoulder with a police revolver just to see what the hell happened. (This was about ten years before yours truly was turned.) She said that the bullet was immediately expelled from her body--like you would spit out an orange seed or something--and the wound closed up with a pop. I don’t know exactly what would happen if you cut off my arm but I’m pretty sure that, like a newt, I would grow another one.

  But a stake to the heart? That is a deal breaker. Definitely. I have empirical evidence about that too. But more on that later.

  The third is not feeding. Vampires have to drink blood in order to survive. Emily told me that it was possible to last two or three weeks without sucking down some blood but, eventually, all of God’s creatures gotta drink. Right?

  And that is where Emily and I had our final falling out. Over the logistics of feeding.

  Emily had been a vampire for about ten years or so when she turned me. She wasn’t very forthcoming on the details. It had happened to her right after her daddy died, in some Texas desert she liked to frequent. It had been almost like a rape, she said. This shadow had come out of the hills and attacked her. She was pretty certain it was a man, and she was pretty certain she knew him too. This pale, nervous guy who was an accountant, kept track of her daddy’s oil money. She didn’t know why he hadn’t killed her that night. It was all pretty much a blur. And she had to discover all the stuff about being a vampire on her own. Horrendous.

  Anyway, Emily did not believe in killing people to survive. It wasn’t her thing. Emily, besides being an editor and a bad poet, was a Buddhist. She believed human life was sacred. She could not bring herself to take it. Even taking an animal life was hard for her.

  “What about the coyote?” I said. “And what about ME?”

  She told me that sometimes the blood lust took her and there was no way on earth to subdue it, reason it away, concentrate on breathing or chanting or whatever.

  And that night. She had been lying awake, fighting it. And she had heard, with her vampire ears, that stray coyote wandering down from the mountains, kicking around in the chaparral. Nothing to do. She had gotten up in a trance and stalked it. Stalked it naked and caught it. And drank it down.

  “And what about me?”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “I’m sorry, Henry.”

  Emily had money. So it was possible for her to obtain blood in other ways. There was some community health worker in a community blood bank somewhere that she bribed to get what she needed.

  And occasionally, when she needed to, she took out dogs and cats.

  And coyotes.

  I asked her if she had ever fed on another human besides me. I mean to the point of death.

  “Once.” She said it so sadly that I had to go to her, kiss that heart-shaped face until she brightened.

  So the days passed and there was a truce of sorts between Emily and me. I might have been the better writer, but she had been a vampire
much longer. I needed her to show me the ropes. She kept apologizing over and over for making me a vampire, but as far as I was concerned it was the greatest thing to happen to me in twenty-five years. I had never felt so alive. I could feel the very globe turning below my feet. My senses were so utterly heightened that simple things took on an almost mystical significance. Clouds. Stars (when you could see ‘em in southern CA.) I could write a poem about a lizard scurrying into a crack in an adobe wall and that poem would have the same ripples of meaning in it as an entire Shakespeare play. Emily beamed every time she put down something I had just written.

  But one thing was bugging me.

  After that initial epiphany, the high from a pint of blood started to diminish. It became less and less the kick it had been. It became more and more a tedious necessity, just like eating had been for me when I was human. And drinking alcohol? That had always been a kick. Alcohol always made me want to dance, reach up into the sky and punch the sun or something. Alcohol had been my drug of choice for eleven years or so, ever since a classmate of mine named Billy Thorton and I had stolen a bottle of Carlo Rossi red from my old man and gotten stinking down by the creek in back of my house. I missed the fire brought down by drinking too much. I wanted my senses dulled a little. Not heightened. I wanted to die, if only for a time, to my own ego and bullshit.

  Like I had the night Emily fed on me.

  I began to think that maybe a vampire could only obtain that kind of feeling by hunting and killing living prey. Maybe God (or the Devil) had fashioned vamps to prey on human beings. Maybe we were their natural predators and to not hunt and kill was somehow wrong. Emily’s Buddhist teachings made her believe that every living thing in the universe is somehow connected to every other living thing and to take another life was to somehow diminish your own existence. But we weren’t in that equation, were we? We were both as dead as Julius Caesar. The night Emily had turned me, I had stopped as a human being. Outside of pissing and shitting, I no longer had much in the way of bodily functions. I no longer sweated. I no longer had to blink. I no longer had to even breathe but I did, I guess, because it had been kind of a habit for so long.

  I felt my chest. My human heart no longer beat in there.

  Even Emily, with all her Buddhist bullshit, was not immune to the need to kill. She had not been able to say no to her own nature. She had not been able to placate it with reams of religious dogma. When that coyote had come sniffing around her backdoor, Emily had answered it as a vampire, not some Bodhisattva. She was a vampire and that was what vampires did.

  They killed.

  Christ, she had almost killed me.

  I decided I had to test this theory out. One night, when Emily was out, checking on the latest number of Mockingbird at the printer, I prowled around the quiet suburbs where she lived. There was a tennis court about half a mile from her house, and behind that tennis court I found a fat orange tomcat. Someone’s pet I guess. And, inexpertly, I caught that cat, sank my teeth into it, as it fought and scratched me every inch of the way.

  And I was promptly blown away.

  The blood was delicious but even more delicious was the overwhelming feeling of power and control that surged through me as I felt that cat’s life ebb away from its body, spread out, and suffuse my own. It was amazing--a feeling equal to that first dramatic feeding. This. This was what I was meant to do.

  But not cats. No. Cats were small potatoes.

  I had never really wanted to murder a human being in cold blood even though I was pretty cynical about humanity in general. They were, as far as I could tell, akin to Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels: greedy, violent, unable or unwilling to recognize beauty, truth, art. Always going on about “The Dignity of Work.” As far as I was concerned, that was just a strategy to keep the poor at the wheel. The “Dignity of Work” mostly involved me being a slave for somebody else, sweating my ass for their profit and maybe amusement. No, I did not really hate people. But I seemed to feel better when they were not around.

  The idea of weeding a few souls from among six billion or so did not fill me with any real revulsion at all.

  As a matter of fact, the idea started to fill me with pleasure.

  My very first kill, my first kill of a human being, happened a week after the cat incident.

  Emily took me to LA with her to see some rock bands she was hot on. For a vampire, Emily had many human friends among the artsy set in southern CA: writers she published in Mockingbird, artists, photographers, and a moveable feast of musical acts. She was always going to some hole in the wall club to see some act she considered geniuses because they had a vague idea who Antonin Artaud was and who could fake three chords on heavily amplified guitars. I had managed to avoid quite a few of these forays. The bands were always so terrible and so mind numbingly loud. Most of the time, when I did go, my one thought was please someone drive a stake through my heart right now. Even vamps have their limits of endurance.

  This sounded like it might be OK though. The gig was going to be on the beach, in a marina bar that some fag friends of Emily’s had bought and converted into a punk club. It was called Club Skank or some such bullshit. I figured if it got very bad I could just walk out of there, clear my head on the beach or something. I was kind of going crazy at Emily’s even though I was writing and there was blood to drink. And maybe…

  The club, basically this giant pontoon boat tied to a dock, was dark and smelled like sweat and mildew. Rows of Japanese lanterns sloped down from the low ceiling. Too many people were packed inside, trying to shake their bodies to the Sturm and Drang that issued from a stage the size of an ice chest. When I was human I would have automatically made a beeline for the bar. Ordered a Tank Ride and told the bartender to keep them coming. Since that was no longer an option, I scanned the crowd of sweaty patrons, particularly the young girls in their ripped t. shirts and leather skirts. I imagined what it would be like to plunge my nascent fangs into those stems, draw the nectar from them like a buzzing bee.

  Soon…

  Emily, of course, had dressed the part for a decadent night out. She was wearing one of her corsets, of which she seemed to have an endless array, and she had her hair done in pigtails like a schoolgirl. She kept dragging me all over the bar/boat, introducing me to people, shouting my name over the din of god-awful bands. “Lovell, this is James. James paints abstract-expressionist paintings with his genitals.” And I would nod politely, wondering if there was really a market for cock paintings, and wondering why the dude wasn’t working for the railroad or something. “Lovell, this is Miriam. She used to be a stripper, but now she does living statues in Balboa Park.” And I would nod, a little more earnestly, because Miriam was wearing a low-cut turquoise dress and looked like an Asian version of Veronica Lake. But no time to talk about the Zen of standing still for a few hours, because Emily was dragging me across the bar to the next big thing. Christ. Did she know everyone in California? “Lovell, this is Bill. Bill is a poet too. You two should have lots to talk about.” Well, no. There is nothing more boring than talking with another poet about poetry. I’d rather be writing. Or fucking. Or drinking. It’s been my experience that good writers write. And bad writers talk about writing.

  “Emily, I have to get out of here,” I said, after the fourteenth or so introduction of this sort. A band called Give Me Your Lunch Money was about to take the stage for their set and, by the looks of them, I could tell they would not be kicking out any Brahms.

  “You should stay and hear this band, Lovell. They are really good,” Emily said, sticking her tongue out at me.

  “No…I need some air Emily. I’m going to go take a walk on the beach.”

  Emily sighed.

  “What are we ever going to do with you? You need to live a little sometimes, Lovell.”

  “I was living. Remember?”

  That shut her up for a second.

  “Ok, Henry. Go walk. Remember we have to get home before dawn.”

  “Ok, Emily.
”

  With difficulty I squeezed through the crowd, made my way out of that punk boat and on to the beach. It was a beautiful silvery night, another full moon casting its wan smile down on the vast Pacific. I walked up the beach, relishing the ocean wind as it blew past my body, thinking hard about Emily. How could someone so passive in bed subject herself to, nay wallow in, the sounds of such violent, aggressive music? I thought about the night she had turned me, how her face had looked as she sunk her teeth into my throat. I wondered how many of her so-called friends knew she was a vampire. I wondered if any of them had begged her to make them one too. That would be the cool thing, wouldn’t it? Make art with your genitals for all of eternity. Pound out sonic hymns to Hitler and Himmler and then drain some Aryan princess dry when the sweaty gig was over. As I looked out at the dark waves breaking far out to sea, I realized that Emily’s world was not my world at all. Even if we both subsisted on blood. It was high time to move on.

  I walked about a mile or so down the beach, occasionally checking my watch. I did not want to be stuck in LA with daylight coming on. That would not be pretty.

  That was when I came across a small colony of seals just lying there in the sand: tiny cubs trying to attach themselves to sleek, overblown females. Who seemed dead there on the beach like exhausted madams. It was an incongruous sight for me and I shook my head, thinking I was hallucinating or something. But fuck. Where else are you gonna find seals? I stood there and watched them in silence. There was something very sad about the whole scene--those seals flopping around in the sand. They seemed like the sole survivors of some great atomic cataclysm, trying to carry on as the darkness from the Pacific came closer and closer to their little magic circle. It was sad and it was beautiful at the same time.

  And then I realized, I wasn’t alone.

  Directly opposite of me, on the other side of that enclave of seals, was a young girl, about twenty-three or so. I recognized her from the club. She was wearing an extremely short plaid skirt, like something a Catholic schoolgirl might wear, and a cream-colored shirt, barely buttoned, showing off firm tits in a lacy pink bra. There was such a solemn expression on her face that if my heart had been beating in my chest it would have probably stopped for a second just from watching her. I decided to go and talk to her. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t intending to do anything…