He said it.
I’ll spare you the details, but games were played. You know, those games that aren’t really games, but the grown-up puts child-friendly names on them. Margaret’s fangs were showing completely by the time Cvets finished that part, and it looked like it took some effort for her to drape her lip back over them and put them away.
“I’ll have to speak to him first. I’ll see it in his eyes if it’s true. I just can’t seem to make myself believe it,” she said, drooling and wiping it off with the sleeve of her bathrobe. People drool when they’re charmed. Vampires drool when they want to bite.
“We often live next to monsters unawares,” Cvetko said. “Look at us, carrying on our business below the feet of stockbrokers and secretaries; their shadows pass over our grates by day and we crawl into their windows by night.”
“You and your fucking philosophy,” Margaret said.
“The Son of Sam,” I chimed in. I had followed that with interest.
She waved my comment away.
“How did they bust out?”
“As Odysseus escaped the cave of the Cyclops,” Cvetko said.
“I must have missed my lesson that day. And how was that?”
“Sammy blinded him with a pencil.”
* * *
Peter liked the Rolling Stones. He must have seen Mick Jagger on TV because he actually did a little imitation of him, dancing and shaking his ass, hands on his hips, pouting out lips still bloody from the hunt. Watching him wiggle around like that was a little ooky after learning what had happened to him, but I put that out of my mind. He was just a kid. This was our third time playing “Gimme Shelter” on my hi-fi set and he was lip-syncing almost the whole thing. I boogied with him, tried to get Cvetko to join in but that was like trying to make a turtle play basketball. Manu danced with us, though. This was taking place in the common area outside our rooms, mine and Cvetko’s, I mean. We had abandoned their lockers and stolen new ones, easier than humping theirs all the way here, and Peter’s had been just a little small for him anyway. This time we got individual lockers, put them in their individual cells. These cells were honeycombed back here.
The transit police had come by the 18th Street station, like a dozen of them with lights and guns. We heard them a mile off, got clear fast, hiding our most important shit behind a false panel of loose tiles we hoped they still didn’t know about, came back for it later. This was nothing unusual, they did it from time to time, but it meant we should leave it alone for a while. That station was too close to the surface to be good long-term digs.
Probably some observant conductor caught sight of one of us, saw the lockers, who knows. Whatever the reason for the lame little raid, I asked Margaret if we could move back into our regular place and move the kids in with us. I could tell she wasn’t thinking about peeling them anymore. She was on their side now.
It had been a tense night. Hunting had gone okay, even though we had to feed Peter four times. The kids were happy, but the rest of us were on edge. We knew the Latins were going to peel the Hessian tonight; they had been casing his place and had a plan. I, for one, didn’t have a lot of faith in that plan. But I have to admit, I was curious to know what he was sitting on. Gold doubloons?
“What do you think the Hessian’s sitting on?” I asked Cvets. “Underground, I mean. What do you think he has?”
“Besides a room that locks from the outside for the imprisonment of children?”
“Don’t be a grump. You know what I mean. Treasure-wise.”
“Perhaps the lost gold of the Knights Templar.”
Always some obscure shit with him.
“No, really,” I said.
“Why didn’t you go on the expedition with our Hispanic friends? You might have seen for yourself.”
“I don’t think it’s going to go well for them,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“What should be done, then? About this kid business?”
He looked at me.
“Must something always be done?”
“Everybody knows you don’t turn kids. Let alone all that other stuff. Are you saying we ought to let that slide?”
“I am playing devil’s advocate. Indulge me.”
“It’s not right.”
“Neither was the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets. Or the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese.”
“Yeah, I remember people saying something about Tibet. The Dalai Lama, right?”
“Yet both acts went unpunished. Why?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about our neighborhood.”
“It is only a question of scale. Why did not the brave American army march into Budapest and save the Hungarian resistance who begged Mr. Eisenhower, in the name of democracy and freedom, to take their side? Why did we sit by while the Soviet tanks rolled in and hammered the beautiful old city?”
“That happened?”
“You have just written the epitaph of America. Yes, that happened. Twenty-two years ago. It was on the radio. It was in the newspapers. What were you doing, watching the Looney Tunes? Sitting in Battery Park with Emma Wilson?”
“Shut up.”
He knew better than to talk about Emma Wilson.
But I saw what he was getting at. He spelled it out anyway.
“The application of justice is a by-product of power. We look to leaders to protect us. We organize for collective defense. Or collective acquisition. Why do we submit to Margaret’s governance?”
“She’s tough and she knows her shit.”
“Precisely. But is she tough enough to impose her ethics, such as they are, on other groups not under her direct supervision? Should vampires in Brooklyn refrain from feeding under Borough Hall or Court Street because she has decided it is verboten for us?”
“The feeding thing is about protecting your turf. Let them do what they want.”
“Might not the discovery of murders underground in Brooklyn lead to sweeps of the tunnels in all of the boroughs? The transit police are not parochial.”
“Sure. But we can’t make Brooklyn guys do what we say.”
“Can we not? I doubt there is a larger enclave than ours in Brooklyn. We could give them an ultimatum.”
“Yeah, but that’s a big fight if they say no. What’s it win us?”
“Now you are thinking like President Eisenhower. And like Margaret.”
“The kid thing is different,” I said, not feeling so sure. Cvetko always made you feel like you were on thin ice.
“Not feeding in the subways is a matter of survival. Not matriculating children is a matter of taste.”
“And survival,” I said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“They can be taught. My point is that your disgust at the actions of the Hessian, while understandable, is not necessarily sufficient motivation to attack a creature of his age and tactical knowledge.”
“He gets away with it because he’s strong.”
“This is the story of mankind.”
“I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.”
“Yes. But then I read the newspaper.”
EMMA WILSON
Emma Wilson was my girlfriend for the summer and fall of 1955 or ’56, I don’t remember. I think ’56 because of what Cvetko said, but I don’t know if I ever told him a year. I never bit her. I never told her I was actually dead. I think I loved her, if it’s possible to love somebody without liking her that much. I think it is. She was pretty like some Dutch porcelain thing; she had a closet full of angora sweaters and a neck like a swan’s. We used to sit on benches and make out; I liked the innocence of it so I never pushed her, I let myself forget what I was when I was with her. She thought I was a student at Columbia; I even charmed a professor into bumping into me at a late-night diner and acting like I was the smar
test guy since Einstein. I ate hamburgers and French fries looking into her big baby blues even though I knew the food was going to twist around in my rotten old guts and come out practically the same way it went in, and that that was going to hurt. It was worth it for her to look at me like a real boy, I felt like fucking Pinocchio with her. Did I charm her a little? Yeah, not to the point of drooling, but you would have, too, I don’t care who you are. I really don’t. She was just that pretty, Grace Kelly pretty, blond Adele Mara pretty, and I think of her when I smell certain flowers, I don’t know their names. Her in her painted-on capri pants, tiny veins almost invisible on the tops of her feet in their white slippers. She gave me her virginity. She did that, even said it like that. “Joey, I want to give you my virginity.” I got us a room at the Astor hotel and everything, this after I sucked it up and took her to see My Fair Lady, which looked like only girls would ever like it but turned out not to be so bad. She had told her dad she was sleeping over with a girlfriend, so I had the whole night with her, and that was the only time she didn’t have to cut it short. It was me stealing away before morning, though, rushing out of the Astor and down into the subway to run back to the draped-off, bars-on-the-windows, triple-locked apartment I rented off Bleecker Street, sure I was going to burn. It was the longest and shortest night of my life. The seconds were pouring through my fingers like sand and I could watch them go but I couldn’t stop them. I remember every minute of it. We made love three times. In between, we ordered drinks and room service; we talked about Forbidden Planet, which was the first movie we saw together; we talked about London and put on Cockney accents. We ran the halls and ballrooms, trying to see every inch of this glorious hotel, and I mean this thing was magnificent. Coral Room, Rose Room. A section of the bar just for the gays. They had this garden on the roof; we walked around up there and the moon was out, not full but big. It’s all gone now, the Astor. I was hoping it would be cloudy when they knocked it down, I wanted to come outside and see. But it wasn’t. And I didn’t.
Emma Wilson.
You’ll never guess what broke us up, and, if you do, you’re such a cynic I feel a little bad for you.
I was so busy keeping the fact that I was a vampire hidden that I let slip the fact my mother was Jewish. And once I said it, I couldn’t charm the knowledge back out of her, her bigotry was that deep. “It changes the way you smell to me,” she had said, making a face like she knew what an asshole she was but that she couldn’t help it. “I’m going away to college anyway,” she said. “Winter session.” That’s when it dawned on me she wasn’t a nice person, and that I had never really liked her beyond the way she curled up on a sofa like a cat or the way the light looked in her eyes, or those almost-invisible veins at the tops of her Grace Kelly feet. I was in love with a doll. And when she spoke, when she spoke from her soul, she came out with that anti-Semitic horseshit. After all her pretending to be worried about children starving in Communist China.
“It changes the way you smell.” Can you believe that? I breathed the stale air out of me for half an hour before I saw her, I practically drank mouthwash, I charmed her, but now I smelled “Jewish.” Here I was crawling in windows, drinking blood, she never saw me in the daytime, but never mind that; she would never get past the idea that my mother ate matzoh.
Maybe it was in 1956.
Maybe she did say something about Hungary.
It was a long time ago.
THE VELVET ROPE
Back here in 1978, I needed some time to myself.
Away from Cvetko, away from Margaret and the kids, all of it. I was sick of politics and everybody getting all wound up. I wanted to dress up and look good, maybe get some action, feed on new people without the hungry little brood tugging at my shirt wanting their turn again and again.
I wanted loud music to make me feel sexy, young, and powerful.
The Ammonia was great for that, but I was feeling more disco than punk, and, besides that, I had an odd craving.
I wanted to bite somebody famous.
I knew just the place.
* * *
“What about me?” I said. I was on the wrong side of the velvet rope at Studio 54 and the little dago-looking tyrant who decided who got in was lording it over the crowd.
I was dressed to the nines, putting out a low-grade charm so I looked twenty-twoish, but never mind all that, he looked straight over my head.
“Okay, you with the poodle-fur vest or whatever, you can come in. And you, geisha lady, I like the way you dance.”
“Hey,” said a man with a fedora and a pin-striped coat.
“I told you not to wear a hat, nobody wears hats in here.” The loser threw the hat away like a Frisbee but it was too late, he had lost any hint of cool he might have had.
Limos, cars honking, somebody yelling farther up 8th Avenue.
Grace Jones poured herself out of a limo. We parted like water around Moses. Of course Mussolini let her in without her asking, she just said, “Hello,” and slid past the rope on her mile-long legs, so tall and black and elegant she was like another species, a better one.
“What about me?” I said again.
“What about you?” said the frowny-faced guy next to me with tangled-up gold chains nesting in his chest hair and a collar so wide I thought he might fly. He’d already been waved off but wasn’t giving up, was ready to stand there for hours if he had to, and he resented the fact that I just walked right up with attitude like I knew I was getting in. Fact is, I knew I was getting in. All I had to do was catch Little Italy’s eye, but that wasn’t easy. He purposely wasn’t looking at me because I was short. I hate that. He wasn’t so tall himself.
So I took out the greasy red firecracker I brought for exactly this purpose and lit it with the Zippo I took off the dead Hunchers. People stepped back from me, called me names while it sizzled, and I flicked it down right in front of my boots, BANG! A lady who had been too busy tripping balls to hear the hiss went “AAH!” and waved her hands like she was trying to dry her nails.
“You!” the dago said, pointing at me. “Don’t do that, it doesn’t help.”
He looked me in the eye.
Gotcha!
You don’t need eye contact to charm, but the subject needs to know it’s him you’re talking to. And eye contact definitely makes it take better.
“It helps plenty,” I said, “but I won’t be a bad boy once I’m in.”
I kept his eyes nailed to mine; he wouldn’t have looked away if a golden unicorn walked up waving a big boner. Which could have happened there.
“No?” he said, starting to drool a little.
“Of course not. So point at me and tell me to go in.”
He did exactly that.
General groans erupted from the others.
“No fuckin’ way,” somebody said, as outraged as if St. Peter had waved a known pervert into heaven. Somebody else said, “I’m bringin’ a cherry bomb tomorrow.” The balls-trippy lady, in a spasm of druggy clarity, even said, “He hypnotized him! I watched him do it!”
But fuck them, I was in.
I walked through a sea of half-dressed and freaky partiers; man, this was the place to be. Here was a woman all in blue body paint with seashells on her tits, and what tits, and there went a super-buff Asian guy wearing zebra-skin pants and cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, no shirt, a monkey on his shoulder. At first I thought it was weird that they let monkeys in, but I had heard about a horse getting in with Bianca Jagger riding it, so what’s a monkey? But then I realized the monkey was stuffed. It wore a little cowboy hat, too. Funny a monkey and a buff Oriental could wear hats, but not that schmuck outside. Asian guy smiled at me. I had heard this place was a circus, and boy that was no lie. A big crescent moon hung over the dance floor with a light-up coke spoon under his nose, the busboys ran around in short-shorts and bow ties like Christmas presents, everybody’s hand on their asses
or thighs, people were actually screwing on the balcony, and there were gays everywhere. This was like the Indianapolis 500 of gays, all souped-up and rolling around in circles, happy as hell, and why shouldn’t they be? Nobody was going to curb-stomp them in here, nobody was going to judge them. And, let’s be clear, I wasn’t judging them. I just didn’t want them, you know, touching me. Not even the guy who looked like Freddie Mercury. I mean, I thought he looked like Freddie Mercury. Turns out it fucking was Freddie Mercury.
Who else did I make that night besides Grace and Freddie? Andy Warhol for sure, you can’t miss that wig. Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Billy Joel. One of the chicks from Charlie’s Angels, not Farrah (I wish!) but one of the brunettes, her brunette locks tumbling all down her bare back. I wanted to bite her, but she was going to be hard to get away from her table. I didn’t recognize anyone else at her table, but they were attractive and intense and at least two of them were coking it up. Cocaine people don’t charm easy; what you want is a drunk or a pothead.
Then I saw her.
The prettiest girl in the place, and that was no easy feat here.
I couldn’t remember her name, but it was that girl from the remake of King Kong, her character name had been Dwan. She was prettier than Fay Wray had been, sort of all-American wholesome but smart in the eyes. I mostly didn’t care for the remake, but I saw it twice just because of Dwan. She was out on the floor dancing, really graceful, simple black dress. I think they were playing Earth, Wind and Fire. I watched her for a minute, then I went out on the floor, too. I had to duck the flailing arms of a highly energetic pantsless fireman on roller skates; earlier he’d been letting people pull him around by his cock, and I stopped to boogie with a cute little lady like eighty years old, what the hell was she doing here? But then somebody picked her up and the whole crowd passed her overhead as carefully as they might pass a baby while she giggled and spread her arms and legs wide. I worked my way closer to Dwan. She smelled like the best perfume, just undercut with sweat; I was starting to get a little bit aroused. I looked at her face while I danced, waiting for her to notice me staring at her and then look down at me so I could get my hooks in her, tell her to follow me outside or to a booth; I was actually hot enough and hungry enough to risk biting her in a booth in here. Anything could happen in here. People who saw would probably ask me to do them next. Anyway, Dwan turned her face to me and I caught her eyes and held them. But before I could say anything, I got bumped into. Hard. I looked over and saw this very tall, incredibly sexy brunette in a black choker and a black sequined flapperlike dress with tassels. She was staring down at me.
The Lesser Dead Page 17