The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Johnny had over $11,500,000 in several accounts, and cash stashes in safe-deposit boxes all over the city. He intended to pay income taxes on some of it, quite soon. In a moment of candour, he had discussed his business with the Churchward woman. She was the only vampire of real experience in the city, besides Andy – who clammed up when asked about feeding, though Johnny knew that he took nips from all his assistants. Johnny and Penelope couldn’t decide whether what he did was against the law or not, but judged it best to keep quiet. Selling his own blood was a legal grey area, but assault and murder weren’t. He was reluctant to relinquish those tools entirely, but accepted that standards of behaviour in America were ostensibly different from those of his European backwater homeland. It wasn’t that assault and murder were less common here than in Romania, but the authorities made more noise about it.

  Those like Thana, left alive after his caresses, might argue that his powers of fascination constituted coercion, that he had perpetrated upon them a form of rape or robbery. Statutes against organ-snatching might even be applicable. Penelope said that soon it wouldn’t be safe to pick up a Mr Goodbar and suck him silly without getting a signature on a consent form.

  The first real attempt to destroy Johnny had come not from the church or the law, but from criminals. He was cutting into their smack and coke action. A couple of oddly dressed black men came for him with silver razors. The iron of the Father rose up within him and he killed them both, shredding their clothes and faces to make a point. He found out their names from the Daily Bugle. Youngblood Priest and Tommy Gibbs. He wondered if the black men he had seen outside the Chelsea on the night he met Andy were in with that Harlem crowd. He had glimpsed them again, several times, singly and as a pair. They were virtual twins, though one was further into the dark than the other. The knifeman’s partner packed a crossbow under his coat. They would not be so easy to face down.

  The Mott Street Triads had found a vampire of their own – one of those hopping Mandarins, bound by prayers pasted to his forehead – and tried feeding and milking him, cooking their own drac. Markedly inferior, their product was exhausted within a month, an entire body gone to dust and sold on the street. Soon, such nosferatu slaves, captured and used up fast, would be common. Other vampires would sell their own drac, in America or their homelands. If the craze could take off in New York, then it would eventually trickle down to everywhere.

  Johnny had repeatedly turned down offers of ‘partnership’ from the established suppliers of drugs. A cash payment of $6,000,000 to the Prizzi Family eliminated most of the hassle that his people had been getting on the street. The Harlem rogues were off his case. He could pass for Italian, which meant he was to be respected for the moment. Mafia elders like Corrado Prizzi and Michael Corleone were men of rough honour; younger wiseguys like John Gotti and Frank White, on the rise even as the dons were fading, were of a different stripe. Gotti, or someone like him, would eventually move into drac. By then, Johnny intended to be retired and in another city.

  The cops were interested. He had spotted them at once, casually loitering around crime scenes, chatting with dazed witnesses, giving penetrating stares. He had them marked down: the bogus hippie with the woolly vest, the completely bald man with the good suit, the maniac driver in the battered porkpie hat. Like the Father, he knew when to be careful, when to be daring. The police meant nothing in this land. They didn’t even have silver bullets like Securitate did in the Old Country.

  His own children – the dhampires – were busy. With his blood in them, they changed for a while. The first few times, they just relished the new senses, the feel of fangs in their mouths, the quickening of reflexes. Then, red thirst pricked. They needed to assuage it, before the suck wore off.

  Apparently, the biting had started in the semi-underground gay clubs, among the leather-and-chains community. Johnny guessed one of the Studio 54 bouncers was the fountainhead. Both Burns and Stu were denizens of those cruising places. Within a few months, the biting had got out of hand. Every week, there were deaths, as dhampires lost control during the red rush, took too much from their lovers of the moment.

  The money, however, kept coming in.

  In the lobby, already brightening with dawnlight, an unnerving twelve-year-old clacked together two pink Perspex eggs on a string. Johnny understood he was trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records. The child was a holy terror, allowed to run loose by his indulgent parents and their adoring circle. More than one resident of the Bramford had expressed a desire to be around when little Adrian Woodhouse ‘got his comeuppance’, but Johnny knew it would not do to cross the boy. If you intend to live for ever, do not make enemies of children.

  He hurried towards the cage elevator, intent on getting out of ear range of the aural water torture.

  ‘Johnny, Johnny . . .’

  As he spun around, excess blood dizzied him. He felt it sloshing around inside. Everything was full: his stomach, his heart, his veins, his bladder, his lungs. It was practically backing up to his eyeballs.

  The dhampire was cringing in a shrinking shadow.

  ‘Johnny,’ she said, stepping into the light.

  Her skin darkened and creased, but she ignored it. She had crumpled bills in her hand, dirty money. He could imagine what she had done to get it.

  It was the girl he had once called Nocturna. The Virgin of 54. She wasn’t fresh any more, in any way.

  ‘Please,’ she begged, mouth open and raw.

  ‘Things have changed,’ he said, stepping into the elevator, drawing the mesh across between them. He saw her red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Take it,’ she said, rolling the bills into tubes and shoving them through the grille. They fell at his feet.

  ‘Talk to Rudy or Elvira,’ he said. ‘They’ll fix you up with a suck.’

  She shook her head, desperately. Her hair was a mess, singed white in patches. She grabbed the grille, fingers sticking through like worms.

  ‘I don’t want a suck, I want you.’

  ‘You don’t want me, darling. You can’t afford me. Now, pull in your claws or you’ll lose them.’

  She was crying rusty tears.

  He wrenched the lever and the elevator began to rise. The girl pulled her hands free. Her face sank and disappeared. She had pestered him before. He would have to do something about her.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t do business that way any more, but that he had to be more selective about the clientele. For the briefest of suckles from the vein, the price was now $10,000. He was choosy about the mouths he spurted into.

  Everyone else could just buy a suck.

  Rudy and Elvira were waiting in the foyer of the apartment, red-eyed from the night, coming down slowly. They were dhampires themselves, of course. The Father had known the worth of warm slaves, his gypsies and madmen, and Johnny had taken some care in selecting the vassals he needed. As Johnny entered the apartment, peeling off his floor-length turquoise suede coat and tossing away his black-feathered white Stetson hat, Rudy leaped up from the couch, almost to attention. Elvira, constricted inside a black sheath dress low-necked enough to show her navel, raised a welcoming eyebrow and tossed aside The Sensuous Woman. Rudy took his coat and hat and hung them up. Elvira rose like a snake from a basket and air-kissed his cheeks. She touched black nails to his face, feeling the bloat of the blood.

  They proceeded to the dining room.

  Rudy Pasko, a hustler Johnny had picked up on the A-train, dreamed of turning, becoming like his master. Jittery, nakedly ambitious, American, he would be a real monster, paying everybody back for ignoring him in life. Johnny wasn’t comfortable with Rudy’s focused needs, but, for the moment, he had his uses.

  Elvira, this year’s complete Drac Hag, was a better bet for immortality. She knew when to run cool or hot, and took care to keep a part of herself back, even while snuffing mountains of drac and chewing on any youth who happened to be passing. She liked to snack on gay men, claiming – with her usual dreadful wordplay – tha
t they had better taste than straights did. Andy had passed her on, from the Factory.

  The money was on the polished oak dining table, in attache cases. It had already been counted, but Johnny sat down and did it again. Rudy called him ‘the Count’, almost mockingly. The boy didn’t understand; the money wasn’t Johnny’s until it was counted. The obsessive-compulsive thing was a trick of the Dracula bloodline. Some degenerate, mountain-dwelling distant cousins could be distracted from their prey by a handful of pumpkin seeds, unable to pass by without counting every one. That was absurd, this was important. Andy understood about money, why it was essential not for what it could buy but in itself. Numbers were beautiful.

  Johnny’s fingers were so sensitive that he could make the count just by riffling the bundles, by caressing the cash. He picked out the dirty bills, the torn or taped or stained notes, and tossed them to Rudy.

  There was $158,591 on the table, a fair night’s takings. His personal rake would be an even $100,000.

  ‘Where does the ninety-one dollars come from, Rudy?’

  The boy shrugged. The non-negotiable price of a suck was $500. There shouldn’t be looser change floating around.

  ‘Boys and girls have expenses,’ Rudy said.

  ‘They are not to dip into the till,’ Johnny said, using an expression he had recently learned. ‘They are to hand over the takings. If they have expenses, they must ask you to cover them. You have enough for all eventualities, have you not?’

  Rudy looked at the heap of messy bills and nodded. He had to be reminded of his hook sometimes.

  ‘Now, things must be taken care of.’

  Rudy followed him into the reception room. The heart of the penthouse, the reception room was windowless but with an expanse of glass ceiling. Just now, with the sun rising, the skylight was curtained by a rolling metal blind drawn by a hand-cranked winch.

  There was no furniture, and the hardwood floor was protected by a plastic sheet. It was Rudy’s duty to get the room ready for Johnny by dawn. He had laid out shallow metal trays in rows, like seedbeds in a nursery.

  Johnny undid his fly and carefully pissed blood onto the first tray. The pool spread, until it lapped against the sides. He paused his flow, and proceeded to the next tray, and the next. In all, he filled thirty-seven trays, each to a depth of about a quarter of an inch. He lost his bloat, face smoothing and tightening, clothes hanging properly again.

  Johnny watched from the doorway as Rudy worked the winch, rolling the blind. Rays of light speared down through the glass ceiling, falling heavily on the trays. Morning sun was the best, the purest. The trays smoked slightly, like vats of tomato soup on griddles. There was a smell that he found offensive, but which the warm – even dhampires – could not distinguish. Like an elder exposed to merciless daylight, the blood was turning to granulated material. Within a few hours, it would all be red dust, like the sands of Mars. Drac.

  In the afternoon, as he slept in his white satin-lined coffin, a troop of good Catholic boys whose fear of Johnny was stronger than the bloodhooks in their brains came to the apartment and, under Elvira’s supervision, worked on the trays, scooping up and measuring out the powdered blood into foil twists (‘sucks’ or ‘jabs’) that retailed for $500 each. After sunset, the boys (and a few girls) took care of the distribution, spreading out to the clubs and parties and street corners and park nooks where the dhampires hung out.

  Known on the street as drac or bat’s blood, the powder could be snuffed, swallowed, smoked or heated to liquid and injected. With a fresh user, the effect lasted the hours of the night and was burned out of the system at sunrise. After a few weeks, the customer was properly hooked, a dhampire, and needed three or four sucks a night to keep sharp. No one knew about long-term effects yet, though serious dhampires like Nocturna were prone to severe sunburn and even showed signs of being susceptible to spontaneous combustion. Besides a red thirst for a gulp or two of blood, the dhampire also had a need, of course, to raise cash to feel the habit. Johnny didn’t care much about that side of the business, but the Daily Bugle had run editorials about the rise in mugging, minor burglary, car crime and other petty fund-raising activities.

  Thus far, Johnny was sole supplier of the quality stuff. During their short-lived venture, the Triads had cut their dwindling drac with cayenne pepper, tomato paste and powdered catshit. The Good Catholics were all dhampires themselves, though he kicked them out and cut them off if they exceeded their prescribed dosage – which kept them scrupulously honest about cash. His major expenses were kickbacks to the Families, club owners, bouncers, street cops and other mildly interested parties.

  Johnny Pop would be out of the business soon. He was greedy for more than money. Andy had impressed on him the importance of being famous.

  Warhol and Tavel made Veneer (1965), the first film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (1973), Stephen Koch reports: Warhol handed Tavel a copy of the novel with the remark that it might be easier to compose a scenario based on fiction than one spun out of pure fantasy. He had acquired the rights to the Stoker book for $3,000, he said; it ought to make a good movie. And so it did. It’s not hard to guess why Warhol was impressed by Dracula. (I should mention in passing that, contrary to the myth he propagates, Warhol is quite widely read.) The book is filled with the sexuality of violence; it features a tough, erotic vampire dandy joyously dominating a gang of freaks; its theme is humiliation within a world that is simultaneously sordid and unreal; it is a history which at once did and did not happen, a purposeful lie. Finally, there is the question of class . . . I think Warhol participates very deeply in America’s best-kept secret – the painful, deeply denied intensity with which we experience our class structure. We should not forget that we are speaking of the son of semi-literate immigrants, whose father was a steelworker in Pittsburgh. Within the terms of his own intensely specialized mentality, Warhol has lived through American class humiliation and American poverty. And Dracula, although British, is very much about the sexuality of social class as it merges with spiritual domination.’

  Casting Edie as an ephebic silver-haired Dracula (Drella, indeed), Gerard Malanga as a whip-wielding but humiliated Harker and Ondine as a sly Van Helsing, Warhol populated the Factory’s Transylvania and Carfax Abbey (the same ‘set’, black sheets hung with silver cobwebs) with lost souls. Well before Francis Ford Coppola, Warhol saw that the problems in filming the novel could be sidestepped by force of will. Indeed, he approached the enterprise with a deliberate diffidence that all but ensured this would not be a proper’ film. Ronnie Tavel at least read half the book before getting bored and typing out a script in his usual three days. Since shooting consisted of a complete run-through of the script as a performance, with breaks only when the magazine ran out, Tavel considered that there ought to be actual rehearsals and that the actors should stoop to learning their lines. Too fearful of confrontation to disagree, Warhol simply sabotaged the rehearsals that Tavel organized and even the shooting of the film by inviting the Press and various parasites to the Factory to observe and interfere, and sending Malanga off on trivial errands or keeping him up until dawn at parties to prevent him from even reading the script (as in the book, Harker has the most to say). Koch, again: ‘The sense that making a film was work – that it should involve the concentrated attention of work – was utterly banished, and on shooting day the Factory merely played host to another “‘Scene’ ”, another party.’

  Stoker’s intricate plot is reduced to situations. Harker, in black leather pants and Victorian deerstalker, visits Castle Dracula, carrying a crucifix loaned to the production by Andy’s mother, and is entertained, seduced and assaulted by the Count (Edie’s enormous fangs keep slipping out of her mouth) and his three gesticulating vampire brides (Marie Mencken, Carmillo Karnstein, International Velvet). Later, in Carfax Abbey, Harker – roped to the Factory Couch – watches as Dracula fascinates and vampirizes Mina (Mary Woronov) in a tango that climax
es with Mina drinking Campbell’s Tomato Soup from a can that Dracula has opened with a thumb-talon and which he declares is his vampire blood. Van Helsing appears, with his fearless vampire hunters – Lord Godalming (Chuck Wein), Quincey Morris (Joe Dallesandro), Dr Seward (Paul America) – dragged by Renfield (a young, ravaged Lou Reed), who is leashed like a bloodhound.

  Crucifixes, stakes, whips and communion wafers are tossed back and forth in a bit of knockabout that makes some of the cast giggle uncontrollably and drives others – notably, the still-tethered Malanga – to furious distraction. In Tavel’s script, as in Stoker’s novel, Van Helsing’s band corner and destroy Dracula, who was to be spray-painted silver and suffocate, but Ondine is distracted when a girl who happens to be on the couch for no real reason – she seems to be a set-visitor straying into frame – calls him a ‘phoney’, and Ondine ignores the King Vampire to lash out at this impertinent chit, going for her face with his false fingernails. Ondine’s methadrine rant rises in a crescendo, peaks and fades: May God forgive you, you’re a phoney, Little Miss Phoney, you’re a disgusting phoney, get off this set, you’re a disgrace to humanity, you’re a disgrace to yourself, you’re a loathsome fool, your husband’s a loathsome fool . . . I’m sorry, I just can’t go on, this is just too much, I don’t want to go on.’ The camera, handled this time by Bud Wirtschafter, tries to follow the unexpected action, and for a few brief frames caught the ghost-white face of Andy himself hanging shocked in the gloom; the removal of this slip is perhaps the only proper edit in any Warhol film made before the arrival of Paul Morrissey. Van Helsing, inconsolable, stands alone and the film runs on and on as he reassembles himself.

  Edie, fangs spat out but still regally and perfectly Dracula, gets Wirtschafter’s attention by tossing the soup can at him, spattering the lens, and commands the frame, hands on hips, for a few seconds before the film runs out. ‘I am Dracula,’ she insists, the only line of dialogue taken directly (if unintentionally) from the book. ‘I am Dracula,’ she repeats, sure of herself for the last time in her life. Stoker had intended to inflict upon Dracula the defeat he eluded in reality, but Edie has dragged Warhol’s Dracula movie back to the truth. In the Factory, Drella bests the squabbling Vampire Slayers and reigns for ever.