Instead there wasn't even a San Francisco fog. On Castro Street the crowds milled under a benevolent sky: the men and boys were thick as hasty pudding, and still on came the queens: we had to jostle our way against a sea of taffeta all the way to the DuBoce Triangle, where we hopped a streetcar over the hill to Noe Valley. Two vampires on the J-Church. Never drew so much as a glance.
The house was a narrow Victorian, painted black, trimmed in walnut, built high and narrow like a Queen Anne row, but free-standing, with a steep front staircase behind an elaborate gate with the initials JMW worked in wrought iron. Carriage lamps on either side of the door lit the top landing, and a butler opened the door. Inside there were costumed vampires and witches everywhere: on the stairs, in the parlor, picking at hors d'oeuvres in the kitchen while a costumed, red-headed Bride of Dracula nagged at them to leave the food alone until it was time to serve it.
And the best part was this: Leon went up on tiptoes to whisper it in my ear: "Anyone you may meet tonight in this house who is attired in vam-pie regalia is a vam-pie in actuality."
"What about the witches?" I wanted to know, but before he could answer a tiny woman in a black dress and pointy hat had approached us.
"You must be Nicolas," she declared, handing me a glass of punch as Leon sidled off into the next room. "I'm Selene. Jamey's just dying to meet you—he's read all your books." She stood on tiptoes and craned her neck. "There he is. Jamey, dear, over here!" Waving a skinny arm over her head. "Jamey, this is Leon's friend Nick, that he was telling us about." We were joined by a slim, elegant man with a disarmingly languid manner, and cold gray eyes to die for. "Nicolas San Georgiou, this is Jamey Whistler."
"It's Nick Santos, actually—San Georgiou's my pen name." I toasted him with a sip of the peculiar-tasting punch—it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn't wise to accept beverages from witches, but I didn't want to seem an ungracious guest.
"Ah, Saint Nick—that's an even better name for the author of The City of Blood."
"How do you mean?"
"Well it was a bit naive, you'll have to admit, all that soul-searching, all that talk of good and evil." He smiled effortlessly. "Please, don't misunderstand me—I absolutely adored the book: all that sex and blood—it reminded me of my own life." But he couldn't resist another dig. "On a slow night, of course."
"Of course." I returned his smile, and raised him a few watts for good measure.
"By the way, you'll have to forgive us our little Halloween charade." Rhymed with odd. "One night a year we indulge ourselves in that which must remain hidden the other three hundred and sixty-four."
Although we were standing in his hallway, I was required, in my position as King of the Castro, to remain rather less impressed with him than he was with himself. I turned to Selene somewhat stiffly—I had to rotate my torso along with my head, so as not to poke myself in the eye with that starched point of the cape collar—and offered to bet her that if you woke him up in the middle of the night he'd talk just like everybody else.
Whistler laughed heartily, though—or as heartily as he ever laughed, and for the first time I found myself starting to like him. "It's the goddamned tux," he said. "Everytime I put it on I end up sounding like Christopher Lee."
It was a magnificent tux. I complimented him on it, and he gave me the name and address of his tailor in Hong Kong. I jotted it down, feeling terribly urbane.
"Have you drunk tonight?" my host then inquired.
"You mean—?"
He nodded.
"Leon told me not to. He said—"
"Quite right: Selene and I had mentioned to him that we were hoping you would be free to drink with us this evening." He raised his eyebrows just high enough to convey inquiry, and not a hair higher.
"My pleasure," I said.
"You bet your ass," was the reply. Didn't sound a bit like Christopher Lee.
The party is in full noisy swing, but when Selene closes the door to the master bedroom behind us, all sound stops—shoop!—and I'm listening to the pulse in my ears. Half the room is taken up by a black-canopied king-size fourposter bed; the bedclothes are black as well. At the foot of the bed is a small round home-hooked black rug with a red pentacle. Selene positions us around the rug and says something about the greater evolution, then takes off her hat and tosses it into the corner of the room, and reaches behind her to unhook her dress. It falls to the floor with a rush. She's naked under it—slender, boyish—I barely have time to register any of this before Whistler wraps his cape around her one and a half times, like a burrito, and fastens it at her throat. Velcro. How clever.
Clad thus in a loose cape of black silk that covers her from neck to foot, Selene clambers up onto the high bed, and crawls into the center—long crawl: enormous bed—and sits waiting. "Do we prefer any vein in particular?" asks Whistler.
"Not really. Do you have any recommendations?"
"There's a very nice one just—" He climbs onto the bed without wrinkling his tux, unfastens her cape, and lays it open. "—here." Pointing out a cute little pulser that rests against the top front of the collarbone. "Shall I tap it for us?"
"Thank you, that'd be fine." Trying to maintain a professional demeanor, you understand.
"Have to get out of this monkey-suit, then. Recommend you do the same: 50 hard to get blood off these silk lapels, you know."
Selene hadn't said a word all this time—she appeared to be dropping into some sort of trance, but I'm pretty sure she watched us as we stripped with a good deal more interest than her expression betrayed.
It was an easy vein to tap with a scalpel—you could pin it against the clavicle, and get a nice clean cut: I made note of the location, and studied Whistler's technique assiduously. Selene appeared not to feel any pain, but she definitely started getting aroused when he began sucking at the hard bone below the throat, and by the time he ushered me to the wound she had begun to moan.
And while I can't swear that they had choreographed the whole dance, it sure worked out slick as spit: the tap was on the left collarbone, but I was on her right: the only way for me to reach the blood was to climb on top of her. It was awkward at first, but only until I had sucked a few times, and her blood had begun to flow again.
At this point the bottom begins to drop out of my consciousness. What the fuck was in that punch she'd handed me? I'd been mickeyed once in Saigon, and the drop-off felt a little like that—but instead of falling through to black, I find myself in some extraordinary psychedelic warp where hallucinations take the form of a hyper-reality: the warm naked flesh, the blood filling my mouth, the small breasts my clutching fingers have somehow found: all more real than real, while my thoughts run thick and slow and clumpish.
I open my eyes: I'm staring down into Selene's eyes. I don't know what color they are—black, all black. I have no peripheral vision, I can only stare down into her. I am inside her now—I don't know how long I have been inside her—inside her body, sure, but inside her trance as well. I can feel Whistler clambering about, but he is no longer hyper-real, not the way Selene is—I feel that if I turned my head I would not be able to see him.
Now here's the part that feels most like a dream: we have been making love, all blood-high and slick and sweaty, for time beyond time, when Selene slips from underneath me and rear-presents, anthropologically speaking, and it occurs to me that she has a tail—a small naked tail some three inches long, that moves easily aside, out of the way, as I enter her. And what is dreamlike is not the tail, which might as easily be an hallucination as an actual tail, or even the way I take it for granted (although that's what you do in dreams, you know: take odd things for granted), but rather the question I ask Whistler as he positions himself behind me.
"Do I have one, too?" I ask him. "Is it in the way?" Now that's a dream state, Jack: I have found that no matter how high you may get in your everyday consciousness, you never actually lose track of whether you have a tail or not.
In the course of the next year or s
o I would have ample opportunity to ensure for myself that Selene did not, in fact, have a tail. She did, however, have the ability to cast spells. Wicca may well have been a religion, but at least the way Selene and her Coven (the other witches at the Halloween party: many of them had the same sort of arrangements with one or the other of the vampires as Selene had with Whistler) practiced it, it included the study of all the traditional witchly arts, both white and black. Still, as far as I could tell, her spells owed more to roots and herbs and telepathy and hypnotism than to supernatural factors—in any event, it was definitely the Goddess up there at the top of the Wicca organization chart, rather than Satan.
Selene had another talent besides spells: an amazing capacity for producing blood: I don't know how often Whistler drank from her, but I rarely let a week go by without paying them a visit.
At first, of course, it was largely for the blood, the sex and the new kink—there weren't many new kinks left by then—but after a year, which is about how long it took for my blood jones to reach the point where I dared not let a day go by without drinking, not crashing was as important as getting high. It wasn't the physical part of the crash I feared—that you could medicate—but the Elephant, which is what I called the depression that always showed up to take its perch on my soul if I woke up at night and did not drink within a few hours.
That meant I had to keep a stash: a one-day supply at first, then two, then five. And a padlocked refrigerator, and a virtual laboratory full of blood drawing and storing paraphernalia, and yet I still had to procure more blood nearly every night—how else do you keep the stash at the m.c.l.: minimum comfort level?—and sometimes the hunt turned… unpleasant. And after each unpleasant episode I would swear I'd cut back, and that vow would last a good, oh, thirty-seven hours, and there I'd be with my head in the refrigerator and my self-respect down the shitter.
But only until the blood got me high again: then I'd laugh at myself for being such a sentimental schmuck.
Of course if you were a vampire you were luckier than most junkies: you only had to score once a night. What's more, your particular drug wasn't even illegal. Some methods of procuring might have been, but a vampire attorney (no, that is not a redundancy) of my acquaintance announced one night that he had searched the criminal code, and that there was no statute currently on the books which prohibited one person buying blood from another in a personal and private capacity—or selling it, which rather amused several prostitutes I knew.
August Fetterman, the aforementioned vampire attorney, was a well-connected Deadhead. He had grown up in Menlo Park, and hung with a gang that lived out of cars and smoked marijuana and drank cheap wine. His parents had sent him east to college to get him away from the corrupting influence of "those beatniks." August turned into a lawyer; the beatniks turned into the Grateful Dead.
All of which is of interest only because Augie, who looked like a young Robert Morley (was there ever a young Robert Morley?) was always good for a backstage pass or two, or in this case four: Augie, Leon, Whistler and myself. The Dead were playing at the Greek Theater in Berkeley—it was June, the kick-off of the summer tour, and we each had our chores: Augie supplied the tickets, Whistler chauffeured us, and Leon and I took care of the drugs: he brought the blood and I supplied the acid, which had been lurking in my pharmacopoeia since my Awakening.
We drank first, at my place, but lightly, sipping refrigerated whole blood from aperitif glasses, then licked our Easter Seals (it had been the fashion that spring: one 250-mike drop on the back of each stamp: you could get high and contribute to your favorite charity at the same time) and hopped into Whistler's classic silver Jaguar sedan. And then, if I may paraphrase the Gonzo Master: We were ten yards out of Frisco when the drugs took hold.
Middle of the Bay Bridge, actually. We had left my apartment half an hour before sunset, but the sun was low enough, and the fog had poured through the Twin Peaks gap thick enough that we'd been able to avoid direct sunlight. It came strobing through the girders of the lower deck, though, and sent us all reaching for our wrap-arounds. The Dead were in the tape-deck, and I was riding shotgun, going down the road feeling good, at least until it occurred to me that the driver was easily as wrecked as I was, and I was watching white lines performing Native Hawaiian folk dances on the roadbed.
"Have we never tripped on blood before, then? Nicky?" With some difficulty I brought my attention backwards through the windshield, into the car again. Whistler was glancing over at me with as much concern as he could bring to those gunmetal eyes.
"Nope."
"Let the acid serve the blood, and not the blood the acid."
Leon piped in from the backseat. "Remember this, baby-heart: Vam-pies don't have bummers on acid. They give 'em."
I turned my attention back to the dancing lane-markers, narrowing my eyes like Clint Eastwood. That forced them back into line, but there was something different about them now: not just that they were alive—the blood alone would do that—but that now I understood that inside their straight little white-line hearts they were dying to get up and hula.
It was a playful combination, acid and blood, but not all its effects were as benign as the dancing lines. A few minutes into the Dead's first set I took off my glasses—the sun had dropped well behind the amphitheater wall—and wandered out front to merge with the tribal mass writhing before the stage. Now I'm no tie-dyed in the wool Deadhead, but I've found that if one is willing to take enough drugs to paralyze one's critical and ironic faculties, Dead shows can be awfully fun.
But not this time: this time I felt like Colonel Sanders dancing among the chickens: all I could think of was how much I wanted to drink blood—right then, right there. Not to get high—I could hardly get much higher—but just to be drinking, to have my mouth against warm flesh. For the first time, I could picture myself tearing open a vein with my teeth. Not a pretty picture. I tried to banish it, but it stayed with me as I pushed my way to the side of the stage and flashed my All-Access badge to a large shaven-headed hoop-earringed black genie in the uniform of a Bill Graham security guard.
In my condition, though, even the open-air backstage seemed otherworldly, with its Grecian pillars and parapets and the gray-green eucalyptus and the new-fallen sun backlighting the clouds, and turning the western sky a glowing periwinkle. Nor did it help my attenuated sense of reality that the only person in sight was Wavy Gravy, everybody's clown but nobody's fool, in full red-nosed slap-shoed clown livery: the Hog Farm had the backstage child-care concession. He howdied me, and I thought about going downstairs to see the little Deads—I thought perhaps it would take my mind off blood. But then on my way down the stairs I thought again: what if it didn't? What if I looked at a child and couldn't stop myself from thinking about tearing its little throat open? Quel bummer, eh?
For good or ill, I never got the chance to find out: just as I reached the bottom of the stairs I glimpsed Leon ducking down a side corridor. I hurried after him, but he'd disappeared like the White Rabbit. "Leon? Augie? Guys? Whistler?" I called. The door nearest me opened a crack, and I slipped in sideways; Whistler locked the door behind me.
Augie was perched on the edge of a folding canvas cot, bent over the shirtless body of a pale young Deadhead. He looked up—his eyes were cartoon pinwheels, and a thin tracery of blood marked the corner of his mouth. "Jerry's good tonight, huh?" he said, then went back to his feeding.
Actually, from what I'd been able to tell out front, during my more lucid flashes, Jerry—Garcia, the Head Dead—seemed to be having trouble finding the neck of his guitar, but it was a moot point: down here all we could hear was the loopy beat of the bass booming through the cinderblock walls: I thought of Vonnegut's harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. In any case, I was hardly in a critical frame of mind. "Who's got nexts?"
"That'd be me." Leon raised a forefinger. "Why, you hurtin', baby-heart?"
"Jesus, Leon, I don't know what the fuck it is, but if I don't get some blood soon I'm gonna go we
rewolf." I'd heard others use the term for a vampire who'd gone over the edge—apparently it covered everything from ripping chests open with your bare hands to taking a nip out of your neighbor on the streetcar—but I'd never seen it myself. Or felt anywhere close to it until now.
"Calm down. Nobody's going werewolf around here," he replied soothingly. "Counsellor Fetterman, I believe it's time to introduce Nick to our new friend."
Augie sat up again, swaying, but he wasn't so far gone that he failed to pinch off the blue vein at the front of the boy's shoulder. "This is—well, I call him Tad: he couldn't quite recall his name when we first met," Augie explained as I approached the cot. I could hear voices in the corridor, and smell pot burning somewhere.
"What is he, out cold?" Leaning over, I positioned my thumb and forefinger outside of Augie's. We counted one, two, three, and at three he let go of the vein and I pinched it off without losing a drop.
"Hard to tell." He stood up unsteadily, and I took his place. "He was on his way to the freak-out tent with a major acid bummer, but luckily he ran into old Doc Fetterman, first, and we decided to medicate the problem."
"With?" I leaned down with my lips to the pinch of flesh between my fingers, rather like a man preparing to blow up a balloon.
" 'Lude and a Talwin. If he ain't asleep, he's close enough."
And the last thing I heard before I loosened my grip and tasted the hot salt blood spurting into my mouth was Whistler, across the room, humming the shave and a haircut tune.
'Lude and a Talwin, two bits.
Madness. By any definition, madness to be whirling through the crowd, to return again and again to the basement room to drink, to laugh when the shoulder vein collapses, to help Whistler find his favorite tap at the junction of the groin—I've drunk from Selene there, but Tad's groin is more to my taste: asleep or no, sometimes his cock flutters against my ear. The blood seems to pulse to the beat of the Dead through the walls, and the more I drink, the stronger the acid comes on. Then I have to dance, which makes me thirst again, and around we go.
The World on Blood Page 10