So You Might Be a Vampire

by Rodney V. Smith

  A quick inspection of the club showed that no big ugly men were currently heading toward me, so I had somehow still managed to stay under the radar. So taking my chances while I still had them, I slipped out of the booth, and head down, tried to disappear into the crowd as well as I possibly could.

  I watched the band for a little while, trying to catch a glimpse of Sammy out there on the dance floor, but it was just on this side of impossible, so I gave that up after a while and headed upstairs for possibly a better view.

  “Oh my god, I love your eyes! Are you one of the family?”

  A gorgeous redheaded goth chick almost spilled my drink as I was walking onto the balcony high above the dance floor. She had stopped and looked straight up into my eyes and was instantly mesmerized and thrilled. The family she was referring to, of course, was us vampires.

  “I don't ever see a lot of you guys outside the VIP area and you know how hard it is to get in there. Well, except for the brothers Cohen, but they're so fucking creepy.”

  “I'm Bob.”

  “Really? I'm Meredith. So glad to meet you Bob.”

  My new friend was so nice, so sweet and bubbly, but she was practically throwing herself at me. I've always had a thing for redheads and this one, despite the whole goth thing she had going on, was pretty damn sexy. Must have been the red hair. They tended to like the dark haired girls better back in the VIP room.

  “Good to meet you too Meredith. Tell me something, will you. Have you been with one of the family yet? Or are you new here?”

  “I'm new. This is my second week. My friends Angelyne and Syndine got snapped up almost as soon as they got here. I've just been dancing and trying to have fun though. It's such a neat place.”

  I'd heard this story before, hundreds of times by now.

  “It’s the names you know. They come across as more gullible. You stuck with your real name.”

  “Well, it’s mine and it’s the only one I have.”

  “And that’s why they get picked first. They’re not holding onto who they are you know,” I said, and I kind of felt sorry for her.

  It was true about the names you know. You’d find a lot of girls in the club who loved the whole romanticism of the vampire scene. I mentioned the type before, the ones that play at being vampire. They’d read all the stories and had fantasized about being a vampire’s mistress or even about being a vampire themselves, never knowing that just be being born not rich, they were destined to be nothing but playthings. So they dyed their hair, bought fake fangs and wrote bad poetry. And when they somehow got themselves invited into the presence of real vampire, most of them pretty much lost their shit and were ready to lose their identities, their lives, everything they had ever been up to that point just to be close to their gods. They didn’t even need to be led. And all of them had stupid fucking names, mainly because they thought Lucy and Vanessa didn’t sound vampiric enough. I guess they hadn’t heard of vampires named Harry.

  I smiled at Meredith. She was a sweet girl, I could see that and she didn’t deserve one of these other assholes who wouldn’t ever see her for who she was. I recognized her though, one of the freaks and geeks who wanted to fit in so much and yet was always the last picked even though she was more badass than her stupid friends. I used to be her in a way. Well, you know what, fuck her stupid friends. There was no reason Meredith shouldn’t get to see the inside of the VIP room as well… plus she smelled kind of nice.

  “Would you like me to be your first Meredith? I'll be gentle...”

  She was mesmerized by then. Somewhere deep inside I wanted to slap her and wake her up, ask her what she thought she was doing, but I pushed that urge down and focused on the girl. Focused on my needs...

  Meredith nodded, and I took her by the hand and led her towards one of the doors in the back of the room. The large guard looked at me suspiciously, but nodded and let me through. Meredith followed eagerly and nervously.

  I could practically hear her heart beating in her tender little breast...

  When I sat on the couch and drew her to me, she didn't resist.

  When I took her arm and nicked it with my little knife, she hissed in pain but I shushed her and she looked deep into my eyes as I kissed at the cut. She was still looking into my eyes when I started to suck on her sweet, sweet blood.

  Welcome to the one place in this fine city where you can possibly meet every vampire in the city. Welcome to the hell that is the Hall of the Drunken King. Here is where they serve up new addictions, the new drug of the ages. The drug of the vampires.

  I'm an addict again, but it is no ordinary drug for me this time.

  This time it is blood that is my poison.

  I've had some time to find out exactly what it means to be a vampire, and most of the time I really don't like it at all. Most times I don't like me, not one bit.

  ***

  What the hell is a vampire? I mean apart from the bloodsucking and the freaky eyes, oh and the not being able to go out into the sun without catching on fire... besides all of those little things, what exactly separates a vampire from an ordinary human being?

  Believe me, philosophical thoughts about the nature of your own humanity become quite commonplace when you wake up early and wait for the sun to go down so you can go out. Daytime television just has that effect on me.

  Thanks to Walmart and Big Lots, I had managed to get some heavy black material, which now served as over-sized curtains that did an awesome job of keeping the sun out of the entire apartment. For once I had been glad of the fact that the apartment had only two windows instead of the many windows I'd always dreamed of having. You have no idea how expensive curtains are until you have to buy some for a house or an apartment. It's when the windows start multiplying that you start being thankful for your trust fund. And if, like most of us, me included, you don't actually have a trust fund, then you either find alternatives or start taking out loans. Me, I've always been a fan of alternatives. My mom had taught me to sew a long time ago, and I still used that skill on the rare occasion, but the biggest find for me was one of those little handy sewing machines that I found at Big Lots. It was on clearance too, the last one, so I picked it up for $5 and got 6 yards of heavy black material from Walmart. Walmart: the superstore of vampires, especially since they opened 24 hours.

  If you want to meet a vampire, you should check out Walmart at around 2:00 AM. Just look for the people wearing dark sunglasses inside. They're usually the ones buying the over-sized pictures of sunrises and beaches. Me? I'm usually doing my shopping and pretending that I'm normal.

  There's quite nothing like being outside of humanity to make you realize just how important it is to relate to humanity. You don't miss other people quite as much as when you're no longer one of them. It must be how celebrities feel walking in disguise among us, or even in a momentary obscurity. Me, I just did my shopping and watched the other late night shoppers, wondering how many of them were vampires wishing that they too could fit in. It would have been particularly funny one night if all of the customers were vampires all reflecting on their loss of humanity, all of them wishing that they could be like everybody else, when everybody else was them...

  I've thought about this and sometimes I think I'm in the same place that I was when I started out, but at times like that I'm just fooling myself.

  I wake up in my darkened apartment, aware of the position of the sun in the sky even though I can never look, and I go about my morning routine. I shave the same way I've always shaved, like real people do, and sometimes I even cut myself, but that's a rare occasion. Sometimes if my hair is too long, I give it a trim. Haircuts are a luxury you see, and I don't have the patience or the money to go to a barber anyway. Then I just watch daytime TV or surf the Internet... maybe even try to call some of my friends or even my mom on the phone, all of it really just a means of biding my time until the sun goes down.

  Sometimes, I just go back to sleep until it's time for me to go to work. Then it's work for e
ight hours, flirt outrageously with Sammy for an hour if I'm lucky, and make it home before the sun comes up. On the odd occasion, I'll do some shopping or maybe pop by the pub, and see my friends, but that's happening less these days. These days nobody calls me that much anymore, and I don’t call either, but that had been going on even before I became a vampire. I had drifted apart from my friends who were busy getting on with their careers and lives, getting pregnant and falling in love. They were doing something with their lives for good or ill and me... I was just standing still and waiting for life to happen to me. I was a mere simulacrum of a life, an island of me in a sea of them. So of course we had drifted.

  It sucks to think back on it and realize that my best friend had become this one guy Maurice, and the only thing we had in common was our love for good drugs. We'd get together and spend the evening either going to get stoned or being stoned. It happened after Jaime and I broke up of course, and that had been a different kind of personal hell. I suppose that was another reason for me drifting from my friends: they all knew Jaime and of what had happened with us. In the end they had become more her friends than my friends, so who needed them anyway?

  These days, whenever I feel like beating myself up, if I have enough time before I have to be in for work, I swing by Jaime's work and hope to catch a glimpse of her...

  That is my life as a vampire. Pathetic isn't it? Same habits as before. I just have a different drug now.

  Maybe that right there is the fundamental difference between humans and vampires. We're both biologically and emotionally human. We make the same fucked up choices and can't help but to be creatures of habit. But maybe the one defining thing is that despite the healing factor in vampires and the strength, the one thing that is truly different is as basic as our addictions.

  And to think that we go through life feeling so damned superior.

  ***

  “Hey Bobby-kins, where'd you vanish to?”

  Sammy caught up to me just when I was exiting the bathroom. I had drunk a little too much of Meredith's blood and had a serious buzz going on. Her friends had come and broken up our little party before it got any more physical, so that had ended that. A couple of the rich boy vampires had swooped down on them moments after, and I'd just gotten sick of the whole thing.

  Being an addict of old, I know that the sharp decisions one makes while in an altered state of being, are not as good as they seem at the time. So I ignored my urge to find Sammy and get the hell out of there. I think that was possibly the real turning point for me, the time I really began to question everything, to see it all with new eyes. It doesn't matter that the eyes that were doing the looking belonged to a man currently strung out on a blood-high. What mattered was that every bit of it was true and that I was tired of being fed shit and being told that it was chocolate.

  I didn't belong here.

  It was as simple as that.

  It was in a kind of stunned dream that I walked downstairs to look for Sammy, just floating through the crowd. People seemed to magically part for me, and I was glad they did. I don't know what I would have said if they had blocked my way, but it possibly would have been something unpleasant, and it would have just gone downhill from there. Somehow I made it through those fake plastic people and those toothy smiles, all predators out in the open. It was unnatural the way they were just so open about it and these silly girls and boys who gave themselves so willingly. Like seriously: what the fuck is that about? It was like sheep cozying up to the wolves and pointing out the best cuts of meat on themselves.

  For some reason, that one thought made me lose it. I rushed to the bathroom and puked my guts up into the sink.

  So that was my state of mind when Sammy caught up to me. Confused and pissed at myself for being any part of this entire sham, and most of all for involving my friend in it.

  “I don't think I want to stay here anymore Sammy.”

  She gave me one of her looks, and I knew she was about to make life very difficult for me.

  “What's the fuck's wrong with you? The night's just getting started.”

  “I'm just not feeling it tonight is all.”

  “How can you not? This place rocks! Have you been up to the VIP section yet? King was gonna take me in a few.”

  That got my attention. I had to get Sammy out of there, now. For a moment I wished that I could have thrown up on Sammy right now, instead of having deposited it so neatly and cleanly into the toilet.

  “I can't stay here is all. I gotta get outta here.”

  “I just want to let you know how much you officially suck. Can I do that?”

  “I accept my suckitude gladly. I promise we'll come back again some other night.” I was of course, lying, but I wasn't going to tell her that. There was no way I was ever going to step foot in the club again if I could help it.

  ***

  “Maybe we should start a twelve-step program.”

  This one caught us completely off-guard, but coming from Benjamin, that wasn't too much of a surprise. Lately Ben had taken to a more philosophical bent, and some of the stuff he thought up was like way out of left field.

  We were well into our fifth month, and we now had a rotating membership with different people popping in and out on occasion, but the core group remained Benjamin, Frankie and me. The others came in, looking a little uncomfortable, but then they'd start talking, and all discomfort would go out the window. They'd connect with us and at the end of the night we all knew that they would return, if not the next week, then the week after that. At first Ben was suspicious and glared at anyone new from over his book. I think he was jealously guarding the donuts that we'd taken to bringing, but I can't say for sure. Ben liked his donuts and on a slow night, could down half a dozen of them in about the space of five minutes. The only thing that ever slowed him down was him having to take a sip from his coffee cup. For such a skinny guy, he ate a hell of a lot.

  This particular night was a slow night, and we were sitting around shooting the shit. Frankie was telling the story of how he'd led the ugly twins, Ryan and Ryan down at the club, on a chase that lasted pretty much the whole night. Ben just sat looking miserable as he always did, and then just came out with this particular gem.

  “What?” I asked, unable to believe my ears. Ben met my eyes and shrugged.

  “A twelve step program. I think maybe we could benefit from one. Personally I don't like the whole blood thing, and I think it could do us some good to be not like all the others.”

  “Whoa now there Ben, don't be harshing on the blood--”

  “Have you even looked at yourself in the mirror recently? Have you? You're a fucking junkie Bob, and somehow you think this is a good thing?”

  “I'm not a junkie. I can stop anytime I want to!”

  I grinned at my little joke and caught Frankie's eye. He didn't return my smile. In fact, he was looking like he was taking Ben seriously.

  Far a second, Ben actually looked a little nervous being the center of attention, but he shrugged it off and pushed on through, determined to be heard.

  “Let's actually do something here in this glorified book club and make some good of it. We can make a difference in our own lives instead of just talking about it so damn much. I don't even like the blood that much and I'd like to be able to stop, wouldn't you?”

  Okay, first stop on our journey is the state of Denial. Watch your elbows on the way out...

  “I don't have a problem with blood-“

  Even as I said it, I wondered and thought back to my first taste of it. I seem to remember wanting to throw up, but it had been so long ago...

  Ben obviously didn't believe it either. He remembered everything I ever told him.

  “What are you talking about? You said that you pretty much freaked the hell out the first time you tried it. You said that you almost literally had a meltdown because it felt just like heroin!”

  Maybe he was right, but I wasn't going to let him score that point undefended.

&nb
sp; “Wel--”

  “Well I've never used heroin or any drugs and personally I don't want to use any kind of drug even if it's something simple as human blood. Besides, the whole blood thing freaks me the hell out too.” Benjamin shivered and I looked at Frankie to try to gauge what he was thinking. Surely he wasn't buying into this too... Dammit. From the look on his face, he definitely was.

  “Hey now, you guys, let's not rush into this. Maybe we should think about it for a bit. You know discuss a few things--”

  Frankie looked disgusted. “You're such a junkie.”

  “Yeah I know. But habits die hard.”

  “Come on dude, you're always the one going on about how we don't have to be like the rest of them and you're just sinking deeper into it man. What the hell happened to you?” Frankie actually looked pissed now, but whatever man.

  I shrugged, not wanting to share. We hadn't talked about everything yet. With me it was a slow unraveling and while they knew about Louise, I hadn't quite told them the whole story. That one I saved for the times I really wanted to fuck myself up emotionally and just hide from the world. No, not that one, but I could tell them the truth.

  “What happens when we die?” I heard myself saying, and that had their attention. They exchanged mystified looks. Frankie looked lost.

  “I dunno. I've kind of avoided the whole death thing myself. I have slight aversion to pain.”

  “We all do. We spend our entire lives avoiding pain of any kind. It doesn't matter if we know that we have the regenerative ability of a fucked up starfish. You cut us and we will bleed, and yes we will eventually heal... but in the meantime it hurts like a motherfucker.”

  “I got impaled once,” Ben offered and I gave him a flat look.

  “Yes, I remember Ben. So you know how much something like that hurts. But the thing is that you didn't die.”

  “Still hurt,” he mumbled and Frankie patted him on the back.

  “I died. And the worse thing is that I remember dying. Fuck.” I was pissed now. How dare they? “You want to know why I need the oblivion of any kind of drug? It's not because I like it so much, because every time I do it I hate myself for what I've become, but a part of me likes it. Actually likes it, and it wants more. It wants to feed and I can feel it scratching at me, wanting to take over, wanting to be set loose.” I took a deep breath. “And I want to let it free... I just want to let it take over me and just stop having to control myself every single minute of every single day...”