by Varian Wolf
Then Chris had opened his present, and he had discovered inside, complete with a big bag stuffed with candy, a shiny blue gumball machine.
That was the only Christmas our family ever had.
But Yoki did not give my brain time to linger on that subject. Like the whirlwind she was, she was already on to others.
“So, tell me all about yourself, and I’ll tell you all about myself, and after we’ll be best of friends.”
“Pretty ambitious.”
“You too? All right, my turn. I’m studying dance with a minor in political science. My dad works for the British Foreign Service, and he’s divorced from my mum, who’s a dental assistant and is married to a chap named Fred who runs an accounting agency. My mum collects tea cozies, and Fred seems to have no interests whatsoever.”
What the hell is a tea cozy?
“They’re boring people, really, which is why she divorced my dad –that and I think she got tired of all his lady friends, for which I can’t say I blame her, and it works well for me because I get two Christmases, and I have my choice of places to stay when I fly home on holiday. Now you.”
There was something distracting on the television –something political. There was some guy standing at a podium with an American flag in the background. He was gesturing with his hands and trying to look all caring.
“Annie?”
“Uh…I like to fight. I...went to school for a while –didn’t work out, and my parents aren’t worth talking about.”
I made myself put the picture down. I just had to get it out of my hands.
“Oh, and mine are? I just told you my mum and stepdad are the two most boring people on the planet, that he does arithmetic and she cleans molars for a living, and you think yours are worse?”
“They’re worse.”
“What are they, then? Dustmen? Bellhops?”
“Since when do our parents define us?”
“They define everything about us, until the day we realize it and start trying to rip ourselves out of that mold…Is that bothering you?”
She noticed the eye I had on the television. The man had now gone down into the crowd who was watching him and had his arm around a grim-looking old lady. His embrace of compassion was so vigorous that he had her shaking back and forth.
“Are you voting for him?”
She grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.
“Me, voting? I don’t even know who that is.”
The man sounded like a televangelist.
“Oh, you really haven’t been around long, have you? That’s Ralph Goodwin, the man who’s going to save the city. He started the Renewal Union, a philanthropic organization dedicated to reinvigorating the Gulf Coast starting with New Orleans. He does these sunrise speeches and talks about the city being a ‘lighthouse on a hill’, and taking care of itself instead of relying on outside aid. He’s really quite inspiring. My friend Dr. Rathstein who advises the political club at the school is advocating for his election for the senate. Most of the students here are for him. We’re pretty sure he’s going to win.”
Do I look like I care?
She seemed to recognize the pained look on my face for what it was.
“How about I change the channel?”
She hit a button on her remote and ended my case of political hives. There was another man on the tube, wearing a dark suit, standing on a street talking into the microphone that had been thrust up to his face. In contrast to the politico, he looked about as happy to be on camera as someone with the flu, praying to the porcelain god at three a.m. He was easier to ignore.
“So,” she said, sitting down and gathering Jesus Christ into her lap. “You’re going to finish that drink and be warm and fuzzy inside, and then I’m going to take you out and meet some friends of mine.”
“Is that how it’s gonna be?”
“Yes indeed. You have fallen into the care of Yoki Hayashi, incorrigible hostess and unofficial representative of the Queen’s good will abroad –not to mention dancer extraordinaire.”
With that, she leaped onto the bed and began bouncing like a chigger. The groaning springs indicated that she did this often. Jesus Christ reacted to this new situation by leaping from her arms and running insane circuits around the room, under the bed, over, it, round and round and round. I downed the Hen in a single gulp to prevent its sloshing out under these earthquake conditions.
There was something terribly amusing about all of this. Realizing that I was realizing this made me realize that ordinarily I would be pissed off, get the hell out, or never have gotten the hell in in the first place. What was it about this girl that made me tolerate her? Or was it this city? Or the vampire? What was going on with me? I had been under a lot of stress lately…or had I?
I was suddenly, thoroughly nonplussed. What was this I was feeling? I’d have to think about it.
But something interrupted my thinking. A snatch from the broadcast on the TV caught my attention.
“…We have not yet ascertained with certainty that the Louisiana Werewolf is responsible for this killing. We are looking into it.”
A man was being interviewed about the Werewolf killings.
“Mr. Robicheaux,” said a reporter, “the girl’s mother has claimed to have found her daughter’s body covered with bite marks. If that’s true, wouldn’t that be an indication that the Werewolf was involved?”
“As I’ve said, we do not have that information at this time.”
“But the Werewolf is purported to use his own teeth to at least mutilate and kill his victims. Is there anyone else who follows that pattern?”
“We have made no statements as to whether our information suggests that one person or more than one person is involved in the perpetration of these crimes.”
“Are you afraid of a copycat killer?”
“We don’t have any reason to believe that this is the work of a copycat.”
“So you think this is the Werewolf then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That man is a tidy Cajun,” interrupted Yoki. “I fancy his accent. So you’re interested in the Louisiana Werewolf?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “I mean no, not really. I just keep hearing about it, and I wonder… is there such a thing?”
“As what? As a werewolf? Of course there are –people who turn into wolves on the full moon, hunt the innocent by night. Been happening for centuries. We have this thing at home called Black Shuck. It’s like a demon dog, jumps ten-foot walls and such. Terrorizes people.”
“You sound serious.”
“Oh,” said Yoki, jumping up indignantly, “I am. Haven’t you noticed my room?”
She gestured around grandly. Apparently not satisfied with my reaction, she hopped over to her DVD collection, pulling cases off the shelf and tossing them onto the bed one by one.
“You see,” she said, “Wolf, Silver Bullet, An American Werewolf in London and Paris…”
Clack. Clack. Clack…
Jesus Christ leaped in the air like a piranha as each DVD passed over his head.
“…The Howling, Ladyhawke –I think of it as a werewolf movie…”
Clack. Clack…
I was busy listening to the man with the steel-gray hair field, with patience and decorum, inane questions meant to unearth sensational factoids into which the news guy could sink his journalistic fangs.
“Do you have any new leads?” the reporter asked.
“I cannot divulge that kind of information at this time, but we are investigating all of the evidence to that end,” he responded ambiguously but matter-of-factly. It was a matter of fact that he had to respond ambiguously.
“…Abbot and Costello and the Wolfman,” clack, “and my favorite, Blood and Chocolate –oh so cute. I’ve done all the research, you see. I’m something of an expert. It’s too bad the Werewolf has never killed anyone in the French Quarter, or I could incorporate the scene into my tours. But,” she said raising her eyebrows, “werewolv
es are not my real passion. That honor belongs to our unliving, undead, eternally gorgeous, eternally tormented, coming-to-find-me-someday-and-sweep-me-off-my-feet-and-make-me-one-of-them friends, the Vampires. You see: I have all the Hammer films. I have Nosferatu and Shadow of the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Underworld, Interview, Queen of the Damned…”
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack…
“…Five versions of Dracula…”
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack…
“…Blade and the Blade comics, My Best Friend is a Vampire, Sundown…”
Clack. Clack. Clack… They were really starting to stack up.
“…And that’s just the good ones.”
She hauled a cardboard box almost as big as herself out from under the bed and, with some effort, dumped it on the heap.
Clackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclackclack…
A flood of DVDs and VHSs came out of it.
By now I really was staring. I had bumbled into four or five blood-and-roses flicks in my movie-watching days –more than enough as far I was concerned, but this collection was hard core.
“That’s the first box. I’ve got three more under there –vampire movies in seven languages, and then of course there are the books,” she said proudly. “My favorite of all time are the Les Daniels books, but I must tip my hat to Her Other Majesty Queen Anne.”
“Your country has two queens?”
Yoki stared at me, stricken.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said, a hand on her heart. “You don’t know about her. But I will educate you. You see, I have three real passions in life: sex, vampires, and hopefully one day, sex with vampires.”
“Have you actually seen a vampire?” I asked tentatively.
Yoki plunked down on the floor beside Jesus.
“No,” she whined, then instantly brightened. “But I will. There’s one out there right now, having clairvoyant dreams about me because I am perfect for him, and I am his destiny.”
“Somehow I doubt it works like that. I think if you ever meet a vampire you’ll be lucky enough not to be killed and eaten,” I said.
“Now what would you know? You don’t have a romantic bone in your body.”
“I don’t think death has much to do with romance.”
“And that’s why the vampire is going to fall in love with me, not you.”
It really wouldn’t be nice to tell her the truth about vampires and sex.
“I hope you get one. I really do.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed, looking at her watch. “I’m late for practice! See what you’ve done, getting me all on about vampires! You shouldn’t mention the v-word when I’ve got an appointment. Come on!”
She grabbed my arm.
“Where are we going?”
“To meet my friends. You’ll love them. We’ll have loads of fun. –Actually, you’ll probably hate them, but we’ll still have fun, or at least I’ll have fun watching you make them uncomfortable. Come!”
She hauled on my arm, which did not cause me to budge. She was like a tick trying to haul the dog to which it was stuck.
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure about this. It felt all wrong somehow, like anal sex. It wasn’t Yoki. It was just that…What was I doing here? I was in New Orleans. I’d just gotten out of jail. I’d killed some people, whose homedogs were still chasing us, and up until about two hours ago I had been in the company of vampires –the real thing, not the cute ones tucked safely behind the TV screen where you could hit pause when things started to get hairy. I had been living, sleeping, with a vampire, a dead guy, and now here was this cute little girl talking to me about them like they were some kind of fairy tale, like they weren’t really real, like I was back in the…real world.
Was that it? Was I uncomfortable back there, back in the real? Back in the real, I never would have been talking to this Yoki Hayashi from Great Britain –I would have punched a kid like her in the nose just for looking at me. She sure as hell never would have given me a gift. I never would have been in New Orleans in the first place. I would have been stuck back in Michigan, freezing my ass off, sticking spoons in people’s ears, and going out of my head. There would have been no such things as covens or vampires or road trips in a SLR-series coupe, packing heat in defense of a hot homicidal dead guy who’d promised me immortality. There would only have been Angry Annie and her demons. There would only have been pain.
But none of that was real. Michigan wasn’t real. All those years up there…all that… It could just freeze in the glacial hell I’d left it in.
I yielded to Yoki’s pull, and we went down the stairs together.
Yoki was right. I made her friends very, very uncomfortable, but I wasn’t alone, because they all made each other uncomfortable. More than any other social group I had ever met, the five people who comprised the Gay Hippies –that’s right, Yoki sprang her band on me after all, seemed mismatched. They were like a square, a triangle, a parallelogram, a tetrahedron, and a Buckminsterfullerene all jammed into that proverbial round hole together.
First, there was Trevor, the much-railed-upon drummer with whom Yoki got into a shouting match within a minute of walking into the practice room in an old multiuse hall on campus. He was a skinny, Black-T-shirt-Posse kid with hair spiky enough to pop a beach ball. Then there was Dru, a pothead who dressed, looked, and smelled like a pothead, and who had a tendency to fall over like a pothead. When dragged into a sitting position, Dru could be relied upon to sit relatively erect and pat playfully, if arhythmically, on the bongo drums with a brainless smile on his or her face (it really could be argued either way), until he or she fell over again and needed to be propped up. On the keyboard was little Bobby White, called “The Quail”, a shrimp with a faux-hawk and birth control glasses, who maybe only didn’t have a pocket protector because it’d been busted when some jock stuffed him in a locker.
Finally, there was Jeanne, who was tall and slender with sumptuous red hair and clothes that screamed money. She was from some small town where she’d been crowned Tomato Queen (was that slang for tits?), and she got paid to ride horses. When I was completely confused by that concept, she explained that right now she was riding a local celebrity, a big black horse named Warren who was bred in Louisiana and supposedly worth way up in the six figures. On top of it all, she was far too pretty to be hanging out with these freaks and geeks. About the only person I had ever met who I could picture hanging out with her was…Andy. They would look nice together. They could enjoy ridiculing all the little people together.
But, contrary to what my instincts would have had me believe about her, when Jeanne opened her mouth, she was actually extremely pleasant. Though her background gave her absolutely no training in how to deal with a person like me in a social setting, she never said or did one thing that I could satisfactorily label as rude, which maybe annoyed me more than if she had been rude, because my background gave me absolutely no training on how to deal with someone like her in a social setting either –except to call her a spoiled, snobby, bitch-whore. That would’ve been easier.
The Hippies seemed likelier to rip each other’s throats out than to make melodious music. Bobby White had a desperate, excruciatingly apparent crush on Jeanne, and Jeanne was excruciatingly aware of it. Dru was repeatedly the cause of tripping the others or knocking over a microphone or colliding with an amp, and Yoki and Trevor simply wanted to rip each other’s throats out. They’d make great vampires.
The Gay Hippies, none of whom were either gay or hippies, incidentally, seemed the poster children for potential genocide, that is, until they began to play. Then, they didn’t make melodious music, didn’t make the planets come into alignment –oh no, the planets were running for their lives. What they made could not be called music –unless it’s the kind played in Hell as part of the eternal torment business, but they seemed to be happy at it. Jeanne ripped on that two-thousand-dollar electric guitar like she was a tall, hot, redheaded, female Eddie Van Halen. Dru patted
blissfully on those bongos. Little Bobby White’s fingers tripped over that keyboard like a pack of four-year-olds on a cracked sidewalk. Yoki screamed into her crappy microphone like the reincarnation of Janis Joplin without any of her talent. Like the ill-fated bagpiper who had been smitten by the Lord Jesus Christ, the Gay Hippies wailed with no concept of how amazingly bad they really were.
Except Trevor. The poor son of a bitch was not only the only one who knew how sickeningly bad they were, he was the only one who could play. I could see why Yoki hated him.
I cringed in a corner while they hashed out such original (and tuneless) tunes as “Oops, I upchucked again” and “God is great (in bed)”. I only knew what they were called because they told me. Yoki’s indecipherable caterwauling could not possibly have been mistaken by any sane person for real words. Between songs sometimes Dru would mumble something, but nobody listened.
Fortunately for my hammer, anvil, auditory hairs, and eardrums, practice did not last long. It took only a half hour for the chronic Yoki-Trevor argument to escalate to the point where he threw his sticks at her and stormed out.
“Does that happen often?” I asked Jeanne, as we watched Yoki snatch up a drumstick and fly down the stairs after him with blood in her eyes.
“Oh,” said Jeanne, “that’s how practice always ends.”
She lifted her guitar strap over her head and headed for her guitar case, the others similarly packing up.
Well no wonder the Hippies were shit.
“So you fellows want to hit the Quarter?” Yoki asked, hands in pockets, swinging her hips to and fro so that her chains set up a lethal perimeter around her.
“Sure,” I said. I lived there.
“I don’t have to get up early,” said Jeanne.
Dru mumbled something.
“I don’t know,” said Bobby, “I got a paper to research, and this history project, and trig homework, and my ankle’s been bothering me, and it’s the second Saturday of the month, so I just know you’re gonna want to run a…”
“Aw, come on, Quail. You don’t want to be a pussy,” said Jeanne. I couldn’t believe those words had come out of her.