“Don’t make me compel you! I just need you to turn me. Just bite me and make me one of you.”
“Just bite you. Are you serious?”
“I know that’s how you get turned. Everybody knows it.”
I really fucking hate the bullshit that Hollywood and bad literature has spread about vampires. Dude was hitting every single one of my pet peeves, and the cross thing was just getting annoying. There were currently two options to get out of this so I could go somewhere else and drink until the sun came up, away from idiots wanting me to turn them into vampires.
Option one involved grabbing that stupid cross from Sidney and jamming it so far up his ass that every place he went to the bathroom after that would be the holiest place in the city. And, of course, not biting him at all, but still having enough time to drain the bottle. Option two was probably going to be more entertaining…
I took off my sunglasses and wiped my brow, pretending to be affected by the cross now.
“Okay, you got me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, can you please move the cross now?”
I glanced at Sidney, but he had suddenly seen my freaky light blue vampire eyes and the reality of what he was doing was crashing over him. Terror sweat had broken out on his upper lip and he had started to shake in fear. The thought occurred to me that he had maybe been hoping I was just a dude who was pretending to be a vampire or something and really wasn’t prepared mentally to deal with the reality that was me.
***
Think about it. How many vampires have you possibly met in your lifetime? Even when you think you know everything in the world, you don't even consider the possibility that you may have met a vampire or two and survived, blood intact, and just gone on with your life, never the wiser.
By the time you've lost the hope that you might have a chance of fitting in with the world and that you might actually make something of yourself, like your dad is always on about when you go to visit, you know for a fact that the world is shit and only what you can see, or touch, or who you can get to buy you the occasional drink so you can forget just how shitty your life is, only that is real.
You have a shitty life, a shitty job that nobody sane would want, even worse habits, and by now if you've had time to think about it, you're sure that even if vampires did exist, most of them would have killed themselves by now rather than live in a world like this; a world where nothing ever seems fair and there is always someone to keep you down or make you do stupid things and make your girlfriend leave you. Or something non-specific like that.
If you had time to think about it, you would consider the point that maybe it was because you were at the bottom of the heap and as everyone knows, vampires like heights; they like to live right at the top, so life for them would be tons better than your own lot.
This, of course, doesn't occur to you because by now, you're onto some other bad habit and sometimes you're sure you're losing your alcohol soaked and drug-addled mind.
By the time you meet a vampire, you don't ever recognize them for what they are.
Of course not: they look just like you.
***
I looked Sidney directly in the eye and gently pushed the cross down. He weakly allowed me to do this, definitely terrified of me now. Damn, my buzz was definitely fading away now and I really needed to pee pretty badly.
“Crosses don’t work. Neither does Holy Water, a chain of garlic, a silver bullet or whatever other stupid shit you’ve talked yourself into believing works. You have no protection from what I am, just because you read about it on the internet or whatever. Think about it Sidney and for once in your life, get out of your own head and into the real world. You are not the star of the show and for that matter neither am I. I’m going to be a footnote to you, an interesting story you can tell your friends about the night the vampire didn’t kill you, because believe me I can kill you and I’m not even the worst vampire you could meet. There are some really, really bad people out there, so if I were you I would never pull this shit again or you’re going to wind up very dead. You got me?”
He nodded mutely still staring at my eyes, and I wondered if he had heard a word I’d said.
“Gimme the cross.” He handed it over and I threw it discreetly under the table. I held out my hand to him again. “And the stake.” There were six of them, identical, all from the internet.
“Sidney, do you want to live?”
He nodded and I sighed. I was done playing and I really, really needed to pee now. I pointed over to Dorothy and her friends.
“Then fucking live. Go over there and ask her the fuck out. She’s either going to say yes or she’s going to say no, but at least get off your ass and get an answer and then you can move on with your life. And you’ll get to ask another girl later on and maybe she’ll say yes, because Dorothy there might not be the one for you and she’ll probably say no, I mean look at her… but damn dude you gotta try and I really gotta end this now cause I gotta pee, so whaddaya say?”
Sidney nodded and stumbled to his feet. I got up with him, feeling the weight on my bladder now of two bottles of tequila wanting to come back into the world a lot more diluted. I clapped him on the shoulder and he turned wordlessly and walked toward Dorothy, a man on a mission of certain doom, but damn he was embracing his doom-
I never got to see how it turned out. I ran off to the bathroom and as I stood there, relieving the sudden pressure, caught in a moment of pure euphoria that can only be equaled to the most persistent and sweetest high… I reflected on just how I’d gotten into this whole mess in the first place.
Oh don’t give me that look. You knew this was coming at some point, just like I know that you were wondering, so I’m going to cut through the shit and just tell you.
Don’t worry though, we’re not going back 300 years or something like that. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was like you, and not so long ago I thought I knew everything there was about vampires.
***
Flashback to a year ago and me in the backseat of my Honda POS banging this chick I’d just met, on one of the extremely rare one night stands I’d ever had. It was tight quarters and I was making the most of it until the girl decided she liked how I tasted and proceeded to take a bite out of me.
When you're a guy my age with my experiences and level of alcohol tolerance, as well as my jaded mind, you do exactly what I did.
“You like to play rough huh?”
Her answer was to bite me again, and she was laughing while she did. I couldn't even remember the chick's name, Gloria or maybe Gladys or some shit like that. It wasn't important at the time, knowing her name. All that mattered was that I hadn't had sex in three months, and this chick had been hot for me from the first time I bumped into her at the bar.
Of course, I had managed to spill my Vodka Seven all over my shirt and was mourning the loss since I was extremely broke at the time and had just spent my last three dollars on said drink... which was now soaking into the front of my shirt. If I could have reached, I probably would have been trying to lick my shirt just to get a taste of some of that ever-so-important alcohol that would at least give me a little buzz. The alcohol levels in my blood were at a dangerously low levels and I was about to slip into a coma out of sheer depression.
“Did I do that?” She had asked, and I nodded, already in mourning.
“Yep. That's alcohol abuse you know, spilling it like that.”
“I can think of a much better use for it myself. Let me buy you another one to make up for it.”
“I think I will let you do that. Can't let you go around committing mortal sins like that.”
“Well, what kind of sins should I be committing then?”
“The non-mortal kinds?” I grinned and shrugged. “I dunno. It sounded wittier in my head than it did coming out of my mouth.”
“Don't you just hate it when that happens? You should find a better use for your mouth you know.”
“That's either a big come on or I'm being reject
ed without even trying.”
“You weren't coming on to me?”
“No, actually. I was still mourning the loss of my drink. Hadn't had time to notice you yet.”
“You're kidding, right? I thought you were looking at my boobs.” She jiggled them, and they were quite an attractive pair. I was sorry I hadn't noticed them earlier.
“Well, I was, but I was also looking at the alcohol in my shirt.”
“Shouldn't have put it there then.”
“I didn't. I had been planning to put it into my mouth.”
“I have something else you can put in your mouth...”
That's a line that us guys only ever dream of hearing. About ninety-five percent of us single guys will die without ever hearing those words uttered from the lips of a drunken bimbo at a sleazy dive bar. I could now die a happy man.
“Now if I'm not mistaken, that one was a come on line, wasn't it? And I do hope you're talking about breasts...”
“Definitely.”
“Which one?”
“Both.”
“You wanna get outta here?”
“I was going to say it, but I didn't want you to think I was a slut.”
“Would it matter?”
“No, I'd fuck you anyway.”
It wasn't until she bit my neck that I wondered what kind of a freak I'd ended up with.
***
Now, things like that experience do not, under any circumstances, happen to me every day. In fact, they do not happen to me at all.
At this point, I think I need to make myself absolutely clear: you do not become a vampire just from one biting you. This is where the movies all got it wrong, and it's where a little common sense could do us all some good.
If you stopped to think about it, how much sense would it make for your food to come back and compete with you for the rest of the food out there? Pretty soon, every steak you ate would be stealing that nice juicy pork chop off your plate, just because you happened to eat it. The steak I mean, not the pork chop. It makes no bloody sense that just because a vampire bit you and drank your blood that it would A.) kill you and B.) turn you into one of them.
The food chain doesn't work like that.
Now if vampires used people to feed on like the stories all say, it would work out very differently. What would happen is that people would be meat. Just meat. It's as simple as that. We'd be cattle who happen to walk and talk and cuss and kill stuff, but cattle nonetheless. Our self-awareness doesn't count for shit when we are what's for dinner.
Somebody did a calculation recently that showed exactly what would happen if every person that was bitten by a vampire, turned into a vampire. Apparently it would spread like a disease and in about a month, there would be no one left to feed on. Everybody would be a starving vampire just imagining how tasty everyone else would be. Pretty much we would be back to where we had been before, all alike, one race looking for ways to not eat each other, because that's just gross.
Imagine that. Wipe out the entire human race and food supply just because you had to have a blonde for a midnight snack. Wow.
So, now that logic is at work here, you’ll know that just because I got bitten several times by the ever enthusiastic Gloria, or whatever her name was, that I didn’t turn into a vampire. So let me tell you exactly how you get turned into one of the so-called “undead” and have your entire world turned upside down.
I've been a vampire for almost exactly one year now, and I still hate it. I hate it because my afterlife sucks as much as my life did before I became a vampire.
They don't tell you when you become a vampire that you still have to hold down a job.
***
There is a support group for vampires. I started it and for two months, I was the only member.
I got the idea one night after being thrown out of Harry's club. You know the place: it's downtown, the most popular joint in town, and it's got long lines of people right down the block every Friday night. I won't say the name here, but I think you know the one I mean.
Harry doesn't like me. Never has, but that was just my own damn fault for being too much of a smart ass to a man who could and would conceivably kill me as soon as look at me. Harry took the opportunity to remind me of this fact every single time we met. He'd often just come right out and tell me, but I preferred that to him just hauling off and hitting me. He always said that I didn't give him the measure of respect I should give someone in his position, his position being that of a man who could cause great amounts of pain to be liberally applied to my body.
I think Harry liked to see me suffer, but I'll tell you more about Harry later.
Right now I'll tell you about my first attempt at a support group.
It was about into my second month as a vampire and all I'd gotten was attitude, a bad habit, and had discovered that everything I'd seen in the movies or read in books was almost all completely wrong.
I'd already had an extremely bad non-flying experience, which we won't even go into at all, and I had now completely sworn off Mexican and Thai food. I was now scared even to approach an Indian restaurant and welcomed the sight of a Denny's or IHOP or any good old American Diner. There is something to be said for the taste of breakfast food and that there is a discernible lack of garlic anywhere in it. For that matter, there are no hot spices to deal with.
Do you know how much a simple chili pepper can mess with a vampire?
Forget the chain of garlic. If you want to ward off a vampire, invest in some pepper-spray (as effective as a gun if used correctly), or failing that, a nice big bottle of Frank’s Red Hot.
I guess it wouldn't be as romantic for the stories if the vampire was warded off by the smell of Thai food in the evening, but trust me on this one: it works.
Now, it was because of the lack of information of any kind that the idea occurred to me that starting a support group might just be the thing to do. I didn't know of any existing groups so I first decided to try to see if anyone had had the same idea. No point in reinventing the wheel, right? I figured that I was going to be pretty much shit out of luck before I even started looking, but I had to give it the old college try, right?
Now imagine you were a vampire looking for a support group. Where would you look, and more specifically, what group would you be looking for? It's not like we vampires go around advertising the fact of what we are.
If you happen to see someone boasting about how much they like blood and how they “welcome the darkness”, and you notice that they dress in all black and are all gothy-looking and stuff, please for the love of all that is good, avoid them like the plague. They're idiots, all of them. They have no idea what they're talking about, and they just make us real vampires look bad. These idiots go around and write bad poetry, all the while playing at the whole romanticism of it all. They don't know the whole truth behind real vampires and most of them wouldn't have ever been allowed to join except as the occasional “blood-donor” and there were more of those around than I had expected. Nobody new got in... not unless they were an accident like I was, but then again that's not exactly under the heading of actually “being allowed," now is it?
Ignore those idiots.
The guy you ought to be watching is right next to you at the bar. He's the guy who looks perfectly normal, can really hold his liquor and most times is a real jerk, the kind of guy you wish somebody would do something about, but nobody ever does. You don't see them too often unless they're like me, sick of the whole club experience and just want to experience something that more closely resembles real life, but when they do come out, they carry the arrogance with them, and chicks dig it. No matter how jerky this real vampire is, somehow he always leaves the bar with some chick on his arm. It's just the natural order of things you know, so get over it.
This is the point when your vampire alarm should be screaming at you. I know that something is screaming that there is something wrong about this guy, but you can't quite figure out exactly what. All you know is
that he is wrong and that's hardly something to make a judgment on, right?
He doesn't advertise and he certainly knows how to blend into the shadows. Your more charming vampire will have you convinced that there is nobody else as normal as him, forget the fact that he wears sunglasses at night. You won't know what he is until you wake up in the morning with a pounding headache and cuts on your wrists or neck. The pounding headache is from the lack of blood now pumping through your veins and you'll need to restore some electrolytes. If your vampire is a nicer one, he'll have provided you with a nice tall glass of orange juice and you'll be back to full strength in no time.
No point in thinning the herd, right?
So a few things were working against me for finding or even forming the support group, but I was undeterred. I went through a whole rash of support groups, from cancer to goth suicide groups, to former altar boys with revenge fantasies.
Once at an AA meeting I ran into another vampire.
“I'm Bob,” I introduced myself.
“You're new aren't you?”
“Four? Five weeks--”
“Don't care. I'm going to talk right now, and you're going to shut your face and listen carefully.”
I nodded mutely. This dude scared the shit outta me.
“You listening?”
Another nod from me still pretending to be a mute.
“Fuck off.”
“But you don't even--“
Dude cut me off with a single look. I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone's eyes glow red before then or since and I gotta tell you that it's the most unnerving thing you've ever seen.
“Do you want to find out how much pain you can take before you die?”
“No.”
“Then fuck off kid. Get the fuck outta here before I change my mind. Goddamn junkie.”
I left in a hurry.
***
I was late for work that night and my boss was busy chewing me out, telling me what an idiot I was and how much I was costing him, when I noticed the sign on the board behind his head.
So You Might Be a Vampire Page 2