SPACE FOR RENT, it said. INQUIRE INSIDE FOR DETAILS.
“Is that for real?” I asked him and he gave me a look that told me all I needed to know about my available bargaining power.
“Why you asking?”
“A friend of mine is looking for a place to rent is all.”
“You're bad fucking liar.”
“I know. How much you want for it?”
I was screwed before I opened my mouth, so the next five minutes of negotiation was me putting up a token fight and then dropping my pants and taking it up the ass. Figuratively speaking of course.
So that was how I got my little meeting room just above the porn shop where I worked. It was a dinky little room with barely enough space for the ten foldout chairs that I put there. I'd gotten the chairs from various street corners and back alley-ways, so they were all mismatched and in various stages of disrepair, but they didn't smell too bad and you could at least sit on them.
I even made a sign:
FRIENDS OF VLAD MEETING
CALL 555-449-5478 for more info
I was proud of the wording for my little ad. I had worked on it all night at the porn shop, writing and rewriting until it said everything I needed to say, or at least thought I needed it to say. The random customers at the porn shop didn't bother me. They never did, and that's why I was perfect for the job. I really didn't care about the job or the customers and they didn't care about anything as long as they got their porn. As far as I was concerned, as long as they weren't trying to cop a feel or exposing themselves in the shop, then they didn't exist. You usually get the weirdos and freaks in the afternoon anyway.
Oh the stories I could tell you about working in a 24 hour porn shop…
Now you must be wondering why I have to have a job at all. After all I'm supposed to be a vampire right? What do I need a job for? The easy answer is the obvious one: to pay the rent and pay the bills, same as you my friend.
What? You think I sleep in a coffin in a graveyard somewhere? If you do, you've been watching way too many movies. I live in the same place that I did before I got turned and I had to quit my old part-time day-job in order to work full time at my night (previously part-time) job. I still have a social security number, still pay my bills and my taxes... sometimes when I remember. I'm still in the system, just another ordinary citizen, making his way through life, or if you'd prefer, the afterlife. I don't fly anywhere either because how the fuck am I going to do that without wings? I saw you thinking it, so don’t pretend! That's just another conceit of the movies, a plot device to keep things moving forward. I still take the bus, and on rainy nights, I drive my old piece of shit car. And it's the same old piece of shit car I had before.
Nobody tells you what an elitist bunch of pricks vampires are.
The old ones are the worst, because they're the richest. They've had time to accumulate wealth you see and they consider it a prerequisite that in order to be worthy of vampirehood, that first you be rich. Trust-fund kids are the best candidates for this of course, and the fact that so many of them are already rich assholes pre-qualifies them to be rich vampire assholes.
They say it's for their own protection and I see their point. It's expensive to be a vampire because you now have to really plan for the future, get those investment portfolios rolling, because it's no longer your grandkids you have to worry about leaving something for; it's yourself.
And you wonder why so many vampires are ecologists.
I'm wandering again, I know, but there's just so much that you need to understand about the world I live in. Sure it's the same world that you live in, but there is a different set of rules here.
Sammy came in while I was printing off a bunch of fliers to take out with me. I was using the office computer and the boss kinda frowns on that kind of thing. Sammy loves to piss off the boss though, so she was a natural ally.
“The fuck is 'Friends of Vlad'?” she wanted to know.
“It's a club I'm starting. A vampire club.”
“Cool. Can I come?”
“Are you a vampire?”
“No. What does that have to do with it? It's not like you're a vampire either.”
“If I was, how would you know?”
“You haven't even tried to kiss my neck, let alone bite me, and I know I'm practically irresistible to vampires.”
There is probably not a man alive, let alone a vampire, who could resist the urge to bite Sammy for very long. She was a steaming little hot-body of sexual energy just waiting to be released, and she had the most exquisite neck, along with a predilection for tattoos. If there is one thing some vampires find irresistible it’s a gorgeous woman with tattoos. Sammy was gorgeous and she definitely had the tattoos to qualify as vampire-bait. She had a full-sleeve of the most exquisite Japanese dragon you've ever seen and had confided to me that she'd spent about 240 hours just to get it completed. No, she hadn't minded the pain. It was one of her kinks, pain, but it was a pity that I'd never get to try that out. Total vampire bait. Sammy also had a tendency to be a total bitch to me, so while I may have considered sucking on her neck at some point, unless I wanted battery and attempted assault charges, (I didn't, since I'm no rapist; my mother did raise me to be a good boy after all) not to mention busted and swollen balls and any number of broken bones, Sammy was completely off limits.
“You haven't met very many vampires have you?”
“And you have?” She flipped her hair at me and disappeared into the back room. “I'm going to make coffee. You want any?”
“You wanna help me cut these out?”
I still had half an hour to go before I left for the night. Sammy liked to come in early just to torment me. She was cute in her own way, abrasive as hell but got away with it easily enough. I think it was her perpetually curly hair that did it for her. Those thick black curls were the first thing anyone noticed about her. By the time they realized that they'd been having a conversation where she had insulted them ten ways from Sunday and she still had such a sunny smile on her face, they dismissed it as a trick of the mind. Sammy especially liked to fuck with the customers and more often than not teased the hell out of the poor slobs. She had the 4AM to 12PM shift and for some reason sales always seemed to spike in the morning.
So we spent the next half hour cutting out my fliers with the one pair of rusty scissors that the boss kept around. That is to say, I cut them out and Sammy watched and drank her coffee.
“Is this meeting thing what you're going to be using the upstairs room for?”
“Mostly, yeah. I don't know if anyone will come though.”
“I heard the boss screwed you on the price.”
“That kinda goes without saying. That cheap prick would screw his own grandmother.”
“Eww gross! That's not the kind of imagery I want to start the day with. You can find enough of that shit in aisle three.”
“Sorry.”
“How you gonna get them upstairs?”
“What?”
“I'll repeat and use small words, just for you.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“Look around you Bob. This is a porn shop, a seedy creepy place with more than one weird and totally disgusting guy jacking off in the back aisle to the “Afro Anal Queens Volume 17” and IF HE DOESN'T PUT IT BACK INTO HIS PANTS I'M GONNA GET FUCKING HOSTILE ALL OVER HIS ASS!”
This last bit shocked the crap out of me and the guy in the back aisle wearing the trench coat, who did happen to be caught in the act of masturbation and was staring all wide-eyed at Sammy. Sammy also happened to be on the store’s PA system, so at this point she was the voice of God.
“BUY SOMETHING AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
The man was practically trembling now. He was terrified of Sammy and I couldn't blame him. Most of these perverts can't even talk to a woman without fumbling for words, let alone look them in the eye. Some of them were fearless and completely shameless, like the one guy who came in every Tuesday like clockwork to get a
ll of the new releases before anyone else could get them. That guy was special and I could write monologues about him, but thankfully, most of them were just like our present masturbating pervert. Trench Coat Dude now stumbled to the counter fumbling a random DVD off the shelf as he came.
“SIR, PLEASE PUT THE PENIS AWAY.”
Sammy then proceeded to ignore Trenchcoat Dude as he turned to zip up his pants. She turned back to me and smiled.
“My point is that it's a porn shop and the only entrance to the upstairs room is through the store itself. Anybody who comes to your little meeting is first going to have to brave our noble and austere customers.”
“Oh.” I hadn't thought of that.
“You did think of that though, right?”
“Of course I did.” I'm such a bad liar.
Sammy rang up the one item that our embarrassed customer had picked up, and put it into a bag. The fact that it was a 12” dildo didn't faze her in the least and the fact that poor old Trenchcoat had probably grabbed the first thing that came to hand out of embarrassment and shame after dropping the DVD he had grabbed first, didn't seem to matter. The store had a no return policy, especially on sex toys.
“Try to keep it in your pants, okay?”
“Sure,” Trenchcoat mumbled and left in a hurry.
She had a point about the entrance to the room, and it was something that had been bugging me in the back of my mind for a while. I had probably been thinking like a vampire when I took a look at the place and had only taken stock of the important things like the fact that it was relatively soundproof and had one tiny window that was easily covered over.
I thought about this potential problem on the bus ride home and then shrugged it off. It wasn't like anybody was going to come anyway. If anything, it would give me something to do on Thursday nights besides trying to catch up on whatever police procedural shows were on television that night. I liked to keep busy and hell, maybe I could actually catch up on my reading.
So I went ahead and started to put up my little fliers on the way home. I only put up three of them, one at the bus stop since I was there anyway, another one at the Supermarket on the way to my house and then, just for kicks, I plastered one onto the side of the phone booth in the supermarket.
I considered hitting Denny's for a quick meal, but the sun was coming up and I had already learned that staying up to watch the sunrise was a pretty bad idea. I would put the rest of the flyers out tomorrow and watch the sunrise from someplace safe, like inside my apartment. Or even better, on TV.
As sunrises go, they're all pretty over-rated. Do you know how long you have to wait until you get a nice good look at the sun? A lot of people have never even seen the sunrise, so Hollywood is able to sell another lie about us vampires without even trying.
For those of you who have never seen a sunrise, you really should make a point to do it. Get up early or stay up late and watch the sun come up one morning, and you'll realize it's nothing quite as dramatic or romantic as the movies make it out to be. Yes, being in the direct sunlight will probably kill me (eventually) since I now have a high sensitivity to light, but it's more of an advanced kind of skin cancer... the kind where I'll actually catch on fire and have to take at least a couple days off to let the skin grow back. But it's nothing like the movies. I don't think I can say that enough.
Sunrises tend to be slow affairs. It's more of a gradual brightening of the sky where you can make out shapes slowly, and then start to see more clearly after a while. A whole half hour can go by like this where it just grows brighter and brighter, but you know what? Even then there is no sun. You can wait an entire bloody hour before the sun even decides to make an appearance, and by that time any vampire in the area has sauntered off to someplace dark to either continue getting completely piss drunk, or whatever he's been up to. The whole sun coming up and the vampire turning to dust thing? Yeah... not likely to happen unless you have a really slow moving vampire.
That other time I stayed awake to watch the sunrise? That was dumb, because I was exhausted and I then proceeded to fall asleep. I didn't wake up until I was already smoldering and could smell what turned out to be barbecued me. I'm really not in a hurry to repeat the experience thank you very much.
These days, if I wanted to watch the sunrise, I watched from inside. From behind the curtains.
Even at home with a bowl of Cheerios in my lap, I still couldn't figure out what to do about my meeting room. Then I just decided to say fuck it all and went to bed.
And no: I do not sleep in a coffin.
***
You can find anything you want on the Internet. “Craigslist” is especially useful for finding all of the stuff that nobody wants anymore. Looking for some old junk, some new junk, or somebody to haul that junk for you? Then it's all right there. If you want, you can find people to smoke out with, people to hang out with, regular (but discreet) fuck buddies, or in some cases, not so discreet, if that is your taste. Anything you want its there. If you're lucky you might even run across my advert from my Vampires Anonymous meeting. Go ahead and do a search and it will pop up. I know it's there. After all, I've been posting and reposting the same damn advert every single week.
I got kind of lazy and despondent after my first meeting where, as I predicted, no one at all showed up. Nobody had called or emailed me, so I knew that nobody was coming, but it still depressed the shit outta me.
So I read my book.
It was some story by someone I'd never heard before called “The Survivors”. It was just getting good when Sammy popped up to see me, interrupting the vivid description of puke that the author was for some reason obsessing over.
“There's some dude here looking for you.”
I almost fell off my chair.
“What? Really?
“Nah, I'm just fucking with you. How's it going?”
Some days I found Sammy unbearably cute and sexy, especially the way she played with her curls when she was distracted. This wasn't one of those times and I told her that.
“Yeah? Well fuck you too.”
I almost went after her since she actually seemed hurt, but in the end I just sat there and went back to my book. It was either that or try to get into the club, but I wasn't in the mood for a beating.
There is something calming about an empty room. I don't know if this is a good calm or what, but I know for sure that every Thursday night at around 9PM, I'd head up and it would always be reliably empty. No one was showing up to discuss their problems with being a vampire. Who knows, maybe other vampires didn't get depressed or question their mortality or lack of it, or maybe I was just defective. Either way Thursday nights were reliably dead times, and I'd catch up on my reading. Sometimes Sammy would come up to keep me company when she wasn't torturing some poor schlub downstairs; other times she'd just stay away and let me have my peace.
She didn't know I was a vampire and I liked it that way.
I didn't want to see the fear in her eyes, thinking I was about to kill her.
“If I was a vampire, what would you do?” I asked her one day.
This was on one of the occasions that she was talking to me and busy painting her toenails on the floor of my little room. The scent of nail polish would linger there for days afterward but I didn't mind.
Sammy paused and shrugged.
“I supposed I'd have to get a stake and drive it through your heart. Then cut it out and bury it in salt somewhere.”
“Ouch, violent. Are you always this violent?”
“Only if you try to drink my blood. I like my blood exactly where it is thank you very much.”
“It's not like you're using it you know. Blood is a renewable resource. Our bodies just make more of it.”
“Look at the big brain on Bob. You've been reading some medical books or something?”
“Nope--”
“Then what the fuck do you know? Anybody tries to drink my blood, vampire or human, is going to regret the day I was born.”
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“Why salt? You'd have to buy a lot of salt you know.”
“Shut the fuck up Bob.”
“Shutting up.”
Sammy had one hell of a mouth on her. I think her mouth was directly descended from pirates or something, but I liked having her around when she wasn't throwing things at me. It made Thursday nights bearable and less lonely. It was when I got lonely that I got restless, and when I got restless, well I just got into trouble and had to go feed my addiction. I'd been managing to keep it under wraps and so far I didn't think that Sammy had actually noticed anything. Besides, as long as she had known me I was abusing some substance or the other. I think it was when I was actually sober that she thought I was being freaky or something. She was good company though and for some reason, better company when I wasn't using.
And when she wasn't around, I had my books.
One Thursday someone showed up.
“Is this where the meeting is?”
“If this is one of Sammy's jokes then please just stop right now.” I was busy digging through the stack of my books and magazines that I had collected, and didn't even look up.
“Well she said that you were having a meeting, but--“
So the joke was on this guy then. I wasn't going to let him suffer too much.
“Sammy has a really fucked up sense of humor-“
I stopped talking because I had turned around. I had stopped talking because my brain had caught up with the rest of me and an alarm was going off in my head.
The vampire standing in the doorway had the exact same reaction as me.
“You're a vampire.”
“I've seen you before I think. Harry threw you out last weekend.”
I suppose this would be a good time to tell you about Harry, or even why he was throwing me out last weekend, but I think I'll hold off for a bit if you don't mind. It will make a long and sordid tale, but by the time I finish you'll understand why he hates me so much. As for why he was throwing me out, well it's a little embarrassing and still stings a little, so let's hold off on that conversation for a bit.
“I'm Bob,” I said. Then curiosity got the better of me. “You said you came here for the meeting?”
So You Might Be a Vampire Page 3