Andy extended a long-nailed hand at an occasional table beside the chaise longue. It was heaped with the night’s invitations, more parties and openings and galas than even Andy could hit before dawn.
‘Choose,’ he said.
Johnny took a handful of cards, and summarized them for Andy’s approval or rejection. Shakespeare in the Park, Paul Toombs in Timon of Athens (‘Gee, misa-anthropy’). A charity ball for some new wasting disease (‘Gee, sa-ad’). An Anders Wolleck exhibit of metal sculptures (‘Gee, fa-abulous’). A premiere for the latest Steven Spielberg film, 1941 (‘Gee, wo-onderful’). A screening at Max’s Kansas City of a work in progress by Scott and Beth B, starring Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus (‘Gee, u-underground’). A nightclub act by Divine (‘Gee, na-aughty’). Parties by and for John Lennon, Tony Perkins (‘Ugh, Psycho’), Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart (‘Ick!’), Blondie (‘The cartoon character or the band?’), Malcolm McLaren (‘Be-est not’), David JoHansen, Edgar Allan Poe (‘Ne-evermore’), Frank Sinatra (‘Old Hat Rat Pack Hack!’)
The night had some possibilities.
Andy was in a sulk. Truman Capote, lisping through silly fangs, had spitefully told him about an Alexander Cockburn parody, modelled on the lunch chatter of Warhol and Colacello with Imelda Marcos as transcribed in Inter/VIEW. Andy, of course, had to sit down in the middle of the party and pore through the piece. In Cockburn’s version, Bob and Andy took Count Dracula to supper at Mortimer’s Restaurant on the Upper East Side and prodded him with questions like ‘Don’t you wish you’d been able to spend Christmas in Transylvania?’ and ‘Is there still pressure on you to think of your image and act a certain way?’
Johnny understood that the real reason why the supposedly unflappable artist was upset was that he had been scooped. After this, Andy wouldn’t be able to run an interview with Dracula. He’d been hoping that Johnny would channel the Father’s ghost, as others had channelled such Inter/VIEW subjects as the Assyrian wind-demon Pazuzu and Houdini. Andy didn’t prize Johnny just because he was a vampire; it was important that he was of the direct Dracula line.
He didn’t feel the Father with him so much, though he knew he was always there. It was as if he had absorbed the great ghost almost completely, learning the lessons of the Count, carrying on his mission on Earth. The past was fog now. His European life and death were faint, and he told varying stories because he remembered differently each time. But in the fog stood the red-eyed, black-caped figure of Dracula, reaching out to him, reaching out through him.
Sometimes, Johnny Pop thought he was Dracula. The Churchward woman had almost believed it, once. And Andy would be so delighted if it were true. But Johnny wasn’t just Dracula.
He was no longer unique. There were other vampires in the country, the city, at this party. They weren’t the Olde Worlde seigneurs of the Transylvania Movement, at once arrogant and pitiful, but Americans, if not by birth then by inclination. Their extravagant names had a copy-of-a-copy paleness, suggesting hissy impermanence: Sonja Blue, Satanico Pandemonium, Skeeter, Scumbalina. Metaphorical (or actual?) children-in-darkness of Andy Warhol, the first thing they did upon rising from the dead was – like an actor landing a first audition – change their names. Then, with golden drac running in their veins, they sold themselves to the dhamps, flooding to New York where the most suckheads were. In cash, they were richer than most castle-bound TM elders, but they coffined in camper vans or at the Y, and wore stinking rags.
Andy snapped out of his sulk. A vampire youth who called himself Nothing paid homage to him as the Master, offering him a criss-crossed arm. Andy stroked the kid’s wounds, but held back from sampling the blood.
Johnny wondered if the hook he felt was jealousy.
Johnny and Andy lolled on the back seat of the limo with the sunroof open, playing chicken with the dawn.
The chatter of the night’s parties still ran around Johnny’s head, as did the semi-ghosts he had swallowed with his victims’ blood. He willed a calm cloud to descend upon the clamour of voices and stilled his brain. For once, the city was quiet.
He was bloated with multiple feedings – at every party, boys and girls offered their necks to him – and Andy seemed flushed enough to suggest that he had accepted a few discreet nips somewhere along the course of the night. Johnny felt lassitude growing in him, and knew that after relieving himself and letting the Good Catholics go to work he would need to hide for a full day in the refrigerated coffin unit that was his New York summer luxury.
The rectangle of sky above was starless pre-dawn blue-grey. Red tendrils were filtering through, reflected off the glass frontages of Madison Avenue. The almost-chill haze of four a.m. had been burned away in an instant, like an ancient elder, and it would be another murderously hot day, confining them both to their lairs for a full twelve hours.
They said nothing, needed to say nothing.
Valerie Solanas was the founder and sole member of the Society for Killing All Vampires, authoress of the self-published SKAV Manifesto. In bite-sized quotes, the Manifesto is quite amusing – ‘enlightened vampires who wish to demonstrate solidarity with the Movement may do so by killing themselves’ – but it remains a wearisome read, not least because Valerie never quite sorted out what she meant by the term ‘vampire’. Of course, as an academic I understand entirely the impatience she must have felt with what she considered irrelevancies like agenda-setting and precise definitions of abstruse language. In the end, Valerie was a paranoid sociopath, and the vampires were her enemies, all of whom were out to get her, to stand in her way. At first, she didn’t even mean nosferatu when she referred to vampires, but a certain type of patriarchal oppressor. At the end, she meant everyone else in the world.
She is in one of the little-known films, I, Vampire (1967) – mingling briefly with Tom Baker as the vampire Lord Andrew Bennett, and Ultra Violet, the wonderfully-named Bettina Coffin and a Nico-shaped patch of empty screen. She had various grudges against Andy Warhol – he had lost a play script she ‘d sent him, he wouldn’t publish her book, he didn’t make her famous – but no more than any one of a dozen other Mole People. Billy Name has said that he was never sure whether he should kill himself or Andy, and kept putting off the decision.
Oliver Stone’s Who Shot Andy Warhol? is merely the culmination of thirty years of myth and fantasy. It bears repeating that the conspiracy theories Stone and others have espoused have little or no basis in fact, and Valerie Solanas acted entirely on her own, conspiring or colluding with no one. Stone’s point, which is well taken, is that in June 1968, someone had to shoot Andy Warhol; if Valerie hadn’t stepped up to the firing line, any one of a dozen others could as easily have melted down the family silver for bullets. But it was Valerie.
By 1968, the Factory had changed. It was at a new location, and Warhol had new associates – Fred Hughes, PaulMorrissey, Bob Colacello – who tried to impose a more businesslike atmosphere. The Mole People were discouraged from hanging about, and poured out their bile on Andy’s intermediaries, unable to accept that they had been banished on the passive dictate of Warhol himself. Valerie turned up while Andy was in a meeting with art critic Mario Amaya and on the phone with yet another supervamp – Viva – and put two bullets into him, and one incidentally into Amaya. Fred Hughes, born negotiator, apparently talked her out of killing him and she left by the freight elevator.
It was a big story for fifteen minutes, but just as Andy was declared clinically dead at Columbus Hospital news came in from Chicago that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Every newspaper in America remade their front pages, bumping the artist to ‘and in other news . . .’
Kennedy stayed dead. Andy didn’t.
– Conklin, ibid.
The Halloween party at 54 was desperately lavish, and Steve made him Guest of Honour, naming him the Official Spectre at the Feast.
In a brief year, Johnny had become this town’s favourite monster. Andy was Vampire Master of New York, but Johnny Pop was Pri
nce of Darkness, father and furtherer of a generation of dhamps, scamps and vamps. There were songs about him (‘Fame, I’m Gonna Live Forever’), he had been in a movie (at least his smudge had) with Andy (Ulli Lommel’s Drac Queens), he got more neck than a giraffe, and there was a great deal of interest in him from the Coast.
Cakes shaped like coffins and castles were wheeled into 54, and the Man in the Moon sign was red-eyed and fang-toothed in homage. Liberace and Elton John played duelling pianos, while the monster-disguised Village People – the Indian as the Wolf Man, the Cowboy as the Creature From the Black Lagoon, the Construction Worker as the Frankenstein Monster, the Biker as Dracula, the Cop as the Thing From Another World, the Soldier as the Hunchback of Notre Dame – belted out a cover of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s ‘The Monster Mash’.
The day drac became a proscribed drug by Act of Congress, Johnny stopped manufacturing it personally and impressed a series of down-on-their-luck nosferatu to be undead factories.
The price of the product shot up again, as did the expense of paying off the cops and the Mob, but his personal profits towered almost beyond his mind’s capacity to count. He knew the bubble would burst soon, but he was ready to diversify, to survive into another era. It would be the eighties soon. That was going to be a different time. The important thing was going to be not drac or fame or party invites, but money. Numbers would be his shield and his castle, his spells of protection, invisibility and fascination.
He didn’t dance so much now. He had made his point. But he was called onto the floor. Steve set up a chant of Johnny Pop, Johnny Pop’ that went around the crowd. Valerie Perrine and Steve Guttenberg gave him a push. Nastassja Kinski and George Burns slapped his back. Peter Bogdanovich and Dorothy Stratten kissed his cheeks. He slipped his half-caped Versace jacket off and tossed it away, cleared a space, and performed, not to impress or awe others as before, but for himself, perhaps for the last time. He had never had such a sense of his own power. He no longer heard the Father’s voice, for he was the Father. All the ghosts of this city, of this virgin continent, were his to command and consume.
Here ended the American Century. Here began, again, the Anni Draculae.
Huge, lovely eyes fixed him from the crowd. A nun in full penguin suit. Red, red heart-shaped lips and ice-white polished cheeks. Her pectoral cross, stark silver against a white collar, smote him with a force that made him stagger. She wasn’t a real nun, of course, just as the Village People weren’t real monsters. This was a party girl, dressed up in a costume, trying to probe the outer reaches of bad taste.
She touched his mind, and an electricity sparked.
He remembered her. The girl whose name was Death, whom he had bitten and left holding a scarf to a leaking neck-wound. He had taken from her but now, he realized, she had taken from him. She was not a vampire, but he had turned her, changed her, made her a huntress.
She lifted her crucifix daintily and held it up. Her face was a gorgeous blank.
Her belief gave the symbol power and he was smitten, driven back across the flashing dance floor, between stumbling dancers. Death glided after him like a ballet dancer, instinctively avoiding people, face red and green and purple and yellow with the changing light. At the dead centre of the dance floor, she held her cross up high above her head. It was reflected in the glitterball, a million shining cruci forms dancing over the crowds and the walls.
Johnny felt each reflected cross as a whiplash. He looked around for help.
All his friends were here. Andy was up there on a balcony, somewhere, looking down with pride. And Steve had planned this whole evening for him. This was where his rise had truly begun, where he had sold his first suck, made his first dollars. But he was not safe here. Death had consecrated Studio 54 against him.
Other vampires in the crowd writhed in pain. Johnny saw the shredded-lace punk princess who called herself Scumbalina holding her face, smoking crosses etched on her cheeks and chin. Even the dhampires were uncomfortable, haemorrhaging from noses and mouths, spattering the floor and everyone around with their tainted blood.
Death was here for him, not the others.
He barged through the throng, and made it to the street. Dawn was not far off. Death was at his heels.
A taxi was waiting for him.
Inside the hack, he told the driver to take him to the Bramford.
He saw the nun step out of 54 as the vehicle moved off. He searched inside himself for the Father, willing the panic he had felt to subside. His flight from the party would be remembered. It did not do to show such weakness.
Something was still wrong. What was it?
The nun had shaken him. Had the girl become a real nun? Was she dispatched by some Vatican bureau, to put an end to him? The Church had always had its vampire killers. Or was she working with the Mafia? To evict him from the business he had created, so that the established crime families could claim drac fortunes for their own. Perhaps she was a minion of one of his own kind, a cat’s-paw of the Transylvania Movement. At the moment, Baron Meinster was petitioning the UN for support, and TM elders considered Johnny an upstart who was bringing vampirism into disrepute by sharing it so widely.
Throughout the centuries, Dracula had faced and bested enemies almost without number. To be a visionary was always to excite the enmity of inferiors. Johnny felt the Father in him, and sat back in the cab, planning.
He needed soldiers. Vampires. Dhampires. Get. An army, to protect him. Intelligence, to foresee new threats. He would start with Rudy and Elvira. It was time that he gave them what they wanted, and turned them. Patrick Bateman, his young investment adviser, was another strong prospect. Men like Bateman, made vampires, would be perfect for the coming era. The Age of Money.
The taxi parked, outside the Bramford. It was full night, and a thin frost of snow lay on the sidewalks, slushing in the gutters.
Johnny got out and paid off the taxi driver.
Familiar mad eyes. This was someone else he had encountered in the past year. Travis. The man had changed: the sides of his head were shaved and a Huron ridge stood up like a thicket on top of his skull.
The cabbie got out of the taxi.
Johnny could tear this warm fool apart if he tried anything. He could not be surprised.
Travis extended his arm, as if to shake hands. Johnny looked down at Travis’s hand, and suddenly there was a pistol – shot out on a spring device – in it.
‘Suck on this,’ said Travis, jamming the gun into Johnny’s stomach and pulling the trigger.
The first slug passed painlessly through him as if he were made of water. There was an icy shock, but no hurt, no damage. An old-fashioned lead bullet. Johnny laughed out loud. Travis pulled the trigger again.
This time, it was silver.
The bullet punched into Johnny’s side, under his ribs, and burst through his back, tearing meat and liver. A hurricane of fire raged in the tunnel carved through him. The worst pain of his nosferatu life brought him to his knees, and he could feel the cold suddenly – his jacket was back at 54 – as the wet chill of the snow bit through his pants and at the palm of his outstretched hand.
Another silver bullet, through the head or the heart, and he would be finished.
The taxi driver stood over him. There were others, in a circle. A crowd of Fearless Vampire Killers. The silent nun. The black man with wooden knives. The black man with the crossbow. The cop who’d sworn to break the Transylvania Connection. An architect, on his own crusade to avenge a family bled dead by dhamps. The ageing beatnik from the psychedelic van, with his smelly tracking dog. A red-skinned turncoat devil boy with the tail and sawn-off horns. The exterminator with the skull on his chest and a flame-thrower in his hands.
This company of stone loners was brought together by a single mission, to put an end to Johnny Pop. He had known about them all, but never guessed that they might connect with each other. This city was so complicated.
The cop, Doyle, took Johnny’s head and made him loo
k at the Bramford.
Elvira was dead on the front steps, stake jutting from her cleavage, strewn limbs like the arms of a swastika. Rudy scuttled out of the shadows, avoiding Johnny’s eyes. He hopped from one foot to another, a heavy briefcase in his hands. The arrow man made a dismissive gesture, and Rudy darted off, hauling what cash he could take. The Vampire Killers hadn’t even needed to bribe him with their own money.
There was a huge crump, a rush of hot air, and the top floor windows all exploded in a burst of flame. Glass and burning fragments rained all around. Johnny’s lair, his lieutenants, his factory, a significant amount of money, his coffin of earth. All gone in a moment.
The Vampire Killers were grimly satisfied.
Johnny saw people filling the lobby, rushing out onto the streets.
Again, he would have an audience.
The Father was strong in him, his ghost swollen, stiffening his spine, deadening his pain. His fang-teeth were three inches long, distending his jaw. All his other teeth were razor-edged lumps. Fresh rows of piranha-like fangs sprouted from buds he had never before suspected. His nails were poison daggers. His shirt tore at the back as his shoulders swelled, loosing the beginnings of black wings. His shoes burst and rips ran up the sides of his pants.
He stood up, slowly. The hole in his side was healed over, scabbed with dragon scales. A wooden knife lanced at him, and he batted it out of the air. Flame washed against his legs, melting the snow on the sidewalk, burning away his ragged clothes, hurting him not a bit.
Even the resolute Killers were given pause.
He fixed all their faces in his mind.
‘Let’s dance,’ Johnny hissed.
Now Andy was really a vampire, we would all see finally, doubters and admirers, what he had meant all along.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 83