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

by Stephen Jones

  – Conklin, ibid.

  Johnny Pop was certainly the social success of the Summer. He had just showed up at Trader Vic’s with Margaret Trudeau on his elegant arm. Penelope was not surprised, and Andy was silently ecstatic. An inveterate collector of people, he delighted in the idea of the Transylvanian hustler and the Prime Minister’s ex getting together. Margaux Hemingway would be furious; she had confided in Andy and Penny that she thought it was serious with Johnny. Penny could have told her what was serious with Johnny, but she didn’t think any warm woman would understand.

  From across the room, as everyone turned to look at the couple, Penny observed Johnny, realizing again why no one else saw him as she did. He had Olde Worlde charm by the bucketful, and that thirsty edge that had made him seem a rough beast was gone. His hair was an improbable construction, teased and puffed every which way, and his lips were a girl’s. But his eyes were Dracula’s. It had taken her a while to notice, for she had really known il principe only after his fire had dwindled. This was what the young Dracula, freshly nosferatu, must have been like. This was the bat-cloaked creature of velvet night who with sheer smoking magnetism had overwhelmed flighty Lucy, virtuous Mina and stately Victoria, who had bested Van Helsing and stolen an empire. He didn’t dance so often now that he had the city’s attention, but all his moves were like dancing, his gestures so considered, his looks so perfect.

  He had told several versions of the story, but always insisted that he was Dracula’s get, perhaps the last to be turned personally by the King Vampire in his five-hundred-year reign. Johnny didn’t like to give dates, but Penny put his conversion at somewhere before the Last War. Who he had been when warm was another matter. He claimed to be a lineal descendant as well as get, the last modern son of some bye-blow of the Impaler, which was why the dying bloodline had fired in him, making him the true Son of Dracula. She could almost believe it. Though he was proud to name his Father-in-Darkness, he didn’t like to talk about the Old Country and what had brought him to America. There were stories there, she would wager. Eventually, it would all come out. He had probably drained a commissar’s daughter and got out one step ahead of Red vampire killers.

  There was trouble in the Carpathians now. The Transylvania Movement, wanting to claim Dracula’s ancient fiefdom as a homeland for all the displaced vampires of the world, were in open conflict with Ceauşescu’s army. The only thing Johnny had said about that mess was that he would prefer to be in America than Romania. After all, the modern history of vampirism – so despised by the Transylvanians – had begun when Dracula left his homelands for what was in 1885 the most exciting, modern city in the world. She conceded the point: Johnny Pop was displaying the real Dracula spirit, not TM reactionaries like Baron Meinster and Anton Crainic who wanted to retreat to their castles and pretend it was still the Middle Ages.

  Andy got fidgety as Johnny worked the room, greeting poor Truman Capote or venerable Paulette Goddard, sharp Ivan Boesky or needy Liza Minnelli. He was deliberately delaying his inevitable path to Andy’s table. It was like a Renaissance court, Penny realized. Eternal shifts of power and privilege, of favour and slight. Three months ago, Johnny had needed to be in with Andy; now, Johnny had risen to such a position that he could afford to hold himself apart, to declare independence. She had never seen Andy on the hook this badly, and was willing to admit that she took some delight in it. At last, the master was mastered.

  Eventually, Johnny arrived and displayed his prize.

  Penny shook Mrs Trudeau’s hand and felt the chill coming from her. Her scarlet choker didn’t quite match her crimson evening dress. Penny could smell the musk of her scabs.

  Johnny was drinking well, these nights.

  Andy and Johnny sat together, close. Neither had anything interesting to say, which was perhaps why they needed so many people around them.

  Mrs Trudeau frowned, showing her own streak of jealousy. Penny wouldn’t be able to explain to her what Andy and Johnny had, why everyone else was superfluous when they were together. Despite the fluctuations in their relationship, they were one being with two bodies. Without saying much, Johnny made Andy choke with laughter that he could never let out. There was a reddish flush to Andy’s albino face.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ Penny told Mrs Trudeau. ‘They’re bats.’

  ‘I don’t suppose this’d do anything for you,’ said the girl from Star Wars whose real name Penny had forgotten, cutting a line of red powder on the coffee table with a silver razor blade.

  Penny shrugged.

  Vampires did bite each other. If one were wounded almost to death, an infusion of another’s nosferatu blood could have restorative powers. Blood would be offered by an inferior undead to a coven master to demonstrate loyalty. Penny had no idea what, if any, effect drac would have on her and wasn’t especially keen on finding out. The scene was pretty much a bore.

  Princess Leia was evidently a practised dhampire. She snorted through a tubed $100 bill and held her head back. Her eyes reddened and her teeth grew points.

  ‘Arm wrestle?’ she asked.

  Penny wasn’t interested. Dhampires all had this rush of vampire power but no real idea of what to do with it. Except nibble. They didn’t even feed properly.

  Most of the people at this party were drac addicts. They went for the whole bit, black capes and fingerless black widow web gloves, Victorian cameos at the throat, lots of velvet and leather, puffy minidresses over thighboots.

  Half this lot had dracced themselves up completely for a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Waverly, and were just coming down, which meant they were going around the room, pestering anyone they thought might be holding out on a stash, desperate to get back up there. There was a miasma of free-floating paranoia, which Penny couldn’t keep out of her head.

  ‘Wait till this gets to the Coast,’ said Princess Leia. ‘It’ll be monstrous.’

  Penny had to agree.

  She had lost Andy and Johnny at CBGB’s, and fallen in with this crowd. The penthouse apartment apparently belonged to some plitical bigwig she had never heard of, Hal Philip Walker, but he was out of town and Brooke Hayward was staying here with Dennis Hopper. Penny had the idea that Johnny knew Hopper from some foreign debauch, and wanted to avoid him – which, if true, was unusual.

  She was welcome here, she realized, because she was a vampire.

  It hit her that if the drac ran out, there was a direct source in the room. She was stronger than any warm person, but it was a long time since she had fought anyone. The sheer press of dhampires would tell. They could hold her down and cut her open, then suck her dry, leaving her like crushed orange pulp. For the first time since turning, she understood the fear that the warm had of her kind. Johnny had changed things permanently.

  Princess Leia, fanged and clawed, eyed her neck slyly, and reached out to touch her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Penny, slipping away.

  Voices burbled in her mind. She was on a wavelength with all these dhampires, who didn’t know how to communicate. It was just background chatter, amplified to skull-cracking levels.

  In the bedroom where she had left her coat, a Playmate of the Month and some rock ‘n’ roll guy were messily performing dhampire 69, gulping from wounds in each other’s wrists. She had fed earlier, and the blood did nothing for her.

  A Broadway director tried to talk to her.

  Yes, she had seen Pacific Overtures. No, she didn’t want to invest in Sweeney Todd.

  Where had anybody got the idea that she was rich?

  That fat Albanian from Animal House, fangs like sharpened cashew nuts, claimed that new-found vampire skills had helped him solve Rubik’s cube. He wore a black Inverness cape over baggy Y-fronts. His eyes flashed red and gold like a cat’s in headlights.

  Penny had a headache.

  She took the elevator down to the street.

  While looking for a cab, she was accosted by some dreadful drac hag. It was the girl that Johnny called No
cturna, now a snowy-haired fright with yellow eyes and rotten teeth.

  The creature pressed money on her, a crumpled mess of notes.

  ‘Just a suck, precious,’ she begged.

  Penny was sickened.

  The money fell from the dhampire’s hands, and was swept into the gutter.

  ‘I think you’d better go home, dear,’ advised Penny.

  ‘Just a suck.’

  Nocturna laid a hand on her shoulder, surprisingly strong. She retained some nosferatu attributes.

  ‘Johnny still loves me,’ she said, ‘but he has business to take care of. He can’t fit me in, you see. But I need a suck, just a little kiss, nothing serious.’

  Penny took Nocturna’s wrist but couldn’t break the hold.

  The dhampire’s eyes were yolk yellow, with shots of blood. Her breath was foul. Her clothes, once fashionable, were ragged and gamy.

  Penny glanced up and down the street. She could use a cop, or Spider-Man. People were passing, but in the distance. No one noticed this little scene.

  Nocturna brought out something from her reticule. A Stanley knife. Penny felt a cold chill as the blade touched her cheek, then a venomous sting. The tool was silvered. She gasped in pain, and the dhampire stuck her mouth over the cut.

  Penny struggled, but the dhampire was suddenly strong, juiced up by pure drac. She would make more cuts and take more sucks.

  ‘You’re his friend,’ Nocturna said, lips red. ‘He won’t mind. I’m not being unfaithful.’

  Penny supposed she deserved this.

  But, as the red rush dazed Nocturna, Penny broke free of the dhampire. She dabbed her cheek. Because of the silver, the cut would stay open, perhaps even leave a scar. Penny had too many of those, but this one would be where it showed.

  There were people nearby, watching. Penny saw their red eyes. More dhampires, out for drac, out for her blood. She backed towards the lobby, cursing Johnny Pop.

  Nocturna staggered after her.

  A taxi cab stormed down the street, scattering dhampires. Penny stuck out her hand and flagged it down. Nocturna howled, and flew at her. Penny wrenched open the cab door and threw herself in. She told the driver to drive off, anywhere, fast.

  Nocturna and the others hissed at the window, nails scratching the glass.

  The cab sped up and left them behind.

  Penny was resolved. Penance was one thing, but enough was enough. She would get out of this city. The Factory could run itself. She would leave Andy to Johnny, and hope that they were satisfied with each other.

  ‘Someday a rain’s gonna come,’ said the taxi driver. ‘And wash the scum off the streets.’

  She wished she could agree with him.

  It is easy to overstate the importance of Nico to Warhol’s late sixties work. She was, after all, his first ‘real’ vampire. Croaking, German and blonde, she was the dead image of Edie, and thus of Andy. Nico Otzak, turned some time in the fifties, arrived in New York in 1965, with her doll-like get Ari, and presented her card at the Factory.

  She trailed the very faintest of associations with Dracula himself, having been a fringe member of that last party, in Rome 1959, which climaxed in the true death of the Vampire King. ‘She was mysterious and European,’ Andy said, abstaining from any mention of the ‘v’ word, ‘a real moon-goddess type.’ Like Dracula, she gave the impression of having used up the Old World and moved on, searching for ‘a young country, full of blood.’

  In Edie: An American Biography (1982), Jean Stein definitively refutes the popular version, in which the naive, warm American is supplanted by the cold, dead European. Edie Sedgwick was on the point of turning from vampire to victim before Nico’s arrival; she had made the cardinal error of thinking herself indispensable, a real star, and Andy was silently irked by her increasing need for publicity as herself rather than as his mirror. She had already strayed from the Factory and towards the circle of Bob Dylan, tempted by more serious drug habits and heterosexuality. Edie was justifiably miffed that the limited financial success of the films benefited only Andy; his position was that she was rich anyway – ‘an heiress’, one of his favourite words – and didn’t need the money, though farless well-off folk did as much or more work on the films and silk-screens for similarly derisory pay. Edie’s self-destruction cannot be laid entirely on Andy and Nico – the Dylan crowd hardly helped, moving her up from amphetamines to heroin – but it is undeniably true that without Warhol, Edie would never have become, in the English expression, ‘dead famous’.

  With Nico, Andy finally had his vampire. At the back of their association must have been the possibility – the promise ? – that she would turn him, but for the moment, Andy held back. To become someone’s get would have displaced him from the centre of his life, and that was insupportable. When he turned, a circumstance that remains mysterious, he would do so through anonymous blood donation, making himself – as usual – his own get, his own creature. Besides, no one could seriously want Nico for a mother-in-darkness; for the rest of her nights, she drew blood from Ari, her own get, and this vampire incest contributed to the rot that would destroy them both.

  Andy was especially fascinated by Nico’s relationship with mirrors and film. She was one of those vampires who have no reflection, though he did his best to turn her into a creature who was all reflection with no self. He had her sing ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, for instance. ‘High Ashbury’, the oddest segment of**** / Twenty-Four-Hour Movie (1966), places Ondine and Ultra Violet either side of an absence, engaged in conversation with what seems to be a disembodied voice. There are signs of Nico’s physical presence during the shoot: the displacement of cushions, a cigarette that darts like a hovering dragonfly, a puff of smoke outlining an oesophagus. But the vampire woman just isn’t there. That may be the point. Andy took photographs of silver-foiled walls and untenanted chairs and passed them off as portraits of Nico. He even silk-screened an empty coffin for an album cover.

  Having found his vampire muse, Andy had to do something with her, so he stuck her together with the Velvet Underground – a band who certainly weren’t that interested in having a girl singer who drank human blood – as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the club events he staged at the Dom on St Mark’s Place in 1966. Amid so much black leather, he dressed Nico in bone white and put an angelic spotlight on her, especially when she wasn’t singing. Lou Reed bought a crucifix, and started looking for a way out. The success of the EPI may well have been partially down to a wide cross-section of New Yorkers who were intrigued by Nico; most Americans in 1966 had never been in a room with a vampire, a real vampire. Andy knew that and made sure that, no matter how conveniently dark the rest of the packed club was, Nico was always visible, always the red-eyed wraith murmuring her way through ‘Femme Fatale’ without taking a breath. That song, of course, is a promise and a threat: ‘Think of her at nights, feel the way she bites . . .’

  As the Velvets performed, Warhol hid in the rafters like the Phantom of the Opera, working the lights and the projectors, cranking up the sound. Like Ulysses, he filled his ears with wax to get through the night. Behind the band, he screened his films. Often, as his real vampire paraded herself, he would show Veneer, trying to project Edie onto Nico as he projected himself upon them both.

  Everybody agrees: between 1966 and 1968, Andy Warhol was a monster.

  – Conklin, ibid.

  Johnny was one of the privileged few allowed into Andy’s town house to witness the artist’s levee. At high summer, it was impractical to wait for sundown before venturing out – so Johnny had to be ferried the short distance from the Bramford to East 66th St in a sleek limo with Polaroid windows and hustle under a parasol up to the door of Number 57.

  With the Churchward woman’s desertion, there was a blip in the smooth running of Andy’s social life and he was casting around for a replacement Girl of the Year. Johnny was wary of being impressed into taking on too many of Penny Penitent’s duties. There were already so many demands on
his time, especially with that mad Bella Abzug whipping the NYPD into a frenzy about ‘the drac problem’. It wasn’t even illegal yet, but his dealers were rousted every night, and his pay-offs to the Families and the cops ratcheted up every week, which pushed him to raise the price of a suck, which meant the dhamps had to peddle more ass or bust more head to scrape together the cash they needed. The papers were full of vampire murders, and real vampires weren’t even suspects.

  The two-storey lobby of Number 57 was dominated by imperial busts – Napoleon, Caesar, Dracula – and still-packed crates of sculptures and paintings. Things were everywhere, collected but uncatalogued, most still in the original wrapping.

  Johnny sat on an upholstered chaise longue and leafed through a male pornographic magazine that was on top of a pile of periodicals that stretched from The New York Review of Books to The Fantastic Four. He heard Andy moving about upstairs, and glanced at the top of the wide staircase. Andy made an entrance, a skull-faced spook-mask atop a floor-length red velvet dressing gown which dragged behind him as he descended, like Scarlett O’Hara’s train.

  In this small, private moment – with no one else around to see – Andy allowed himself to smile, a terminally ill little boy indulging his love of dressing-up. It wasn’t just that Andy was a poseur, but that he let everyone know it and still found the reality in the fakery, making the posing the point. When Andy pretended, he just showed up the half-hearted way everyone else did the same thing. In the months he had been in New York, Johnny had learned that being an American was just like being a vampire, to feed off the dead and to go on and on and on, making a virtue of unoriginality, waxing a corpse-face to beauty. In a country of surfaces, no one cared about the rot that lay beneath the smile, the shine and the dollar. After the persecutions of Europe, it was an enormous relief.