by Steven Luna
My dad glared. “What show? There’s five hundred channels on this damn thing.”
My mom rolled her eyes. “That one with the lady who used to be on the other show… pretty girl. Dark hair. Advertises eyeshadow sometimes.”
My dad stuffed his mouth with a pasta clot and half a meatball. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Oddly enough, I did. And I started to tell them both, drop a little IMDBidness on them to show I was still somewhat in the know about such things, but I bit my tongue before it could form the words. Not in the keeping-my-comments-to-myself sense of biting my tongue, but in the sense of truly, physically biting it – and not on one side or the other, where it would usually happen when you unwisely talk while chewing. I bit it on both sides at the same time, right about where the fanglets were hanging out. Pretty hard, too, which shouldn’t have been such a big deal… but the super-sharp double shot of pain told me something wasn’t right about this. I excused myself to the bathroom to see what damage had been done, and there they were in the medicine cabinet mirror, smiling back at me from my own undeniably vampirically-altered dental layout.
Son of a bitch.
The fanglets have become full-on fangs, ladies and gentlemen.
Fangs.
So much for keeping This on the down-low, now that it has its pointy little teeth sticking out of the way-up-high.
POST 19
Late Night Trouble in My Mouth
The rest of Amanda’s birthday dinner was noisy and troubling, as expected. To hide my new development, I just kept my mouth shut, laughing silently when something funny came up and trying not to show the undeniable proof of vampireship that had shown up unexpectedly during the party and made itself comfortable in my mouth.
Well. That sounded more erotic than I meant it to.
Luckily, just after the cake was cut I got a text from Hube. He and Lazer were headed out to a club called Damage, the place we’re playing in a few weeks, and wanted me along to figure out the set list for our pending gig. It’s our first real show at an actual club, and I was pretty psyched to check it out. So I quietly made my goodbyes, waving everyone off as I rushed out and telling Amanda I would chat with her soon about everything. And I really meant everything; I didn’t want to keep secrets from her, even if this secret required more than a little suspension of her disbelief. Everyone else in the family would just have to wait until I had a slightly better handle on the situation – that, and a carefully composed explanation that wouldn’t push them further into the need for group therapy. Not that they’d ever go. They sure as hell could use it, though, even without having a newborn vampire among their ranks. And with the fangs becoming the showstoppers of my dental world, I started questioning how much of a handle I have on things anyway.
When my dad finds out what This did to the orthodontia he opened a home equity line of credit to pay for, he’ll have a shit fit.
I found Hube at a table at the back of Damage, listening to an all-girl grunge cover band called Hervana and rocking out to the tuneage. Lazer was probably at least five drinks in, and it showed very plainly. He’s enough of a jerk when he’s sober; add alcohol, and there’s no telling what kind of shit might come flying out of that asshole.
A graphic image, maybe, but entirely accurate.
“I didn’t think you were gonna show,” he slurred. “Kind of starting to question your place in this band.” I, having had nothing to drink and not intending on ordering anything, would have been more than happy to sling shit right back. But the moment my tongue hit my new teeth, I remembered that opening my mouth to speak would involve baring my fangs in the most literal sense. So I held back… and that ass crack just kept going. “We need our leather pants, too; you should have had them back from the dry cleaners by now. Make sure you don’t forget. And the flyers need to go up… ” I let my angry eyes do the talking. With a powerful combination of brow-furrowing and white-exposing, and a little touch of a manic squint, I have no doubt they did the trick.
Hopefully you picked up on the sarcasm there.
Eyes just can’t speak angrily enough to someone as infuriating as Lazer, even when the brows get in on the action.
I motioned to the back of the club. “Hube – private talk,” I said, as clearly as I could without opening my mouth. He made his wha? face, so I raised my upper lip to half-Elvis and showed him the issue at hand… or, rather, at tooth. “Oh, shit,” he winced, finally getting it. We pushed our way to the bathroom, and I opened wide to show him all the exciting stuff I now had going on in my mouth.
Again, that doesn’t sound quite the way I meant it to.
“Dude… those are bona fide neck biters. They look like animal teeth.”
“Yeah, I know.” I checked them out again in the mirror, kind of wishing the disappearing reflection folklore stuff was slightly truer than it had turned out to be. “I can hide most of the weirdness of this vampire trip, but there’s no way I can hide these babies. I’d have to go without talking.”
Hube agreed. “Like that would ever happen.” My angry eyes came back. “Sorry. My cousin just finished dental school… she’s a hygienist. I can see if she could maybe work on them for you.”
“I don’t want to have to explain them to my family, let alone yours.” But he did have the right spirit. “Maybe I could just grind them down myself.”
“That might not be a bad idea. Try working with this for now…” He pulled a pack of Extra out of his pocket. “Just chew big whenever you talk, and maybe the gum will hide the extra pointiness. Don’t bite yourself, though.” It was a decent plan, enough to get me through the night at least. So I took four of the little dudes at one time, pulled off their wrappers and just stuffed them in my mouth right there in the bathroom, sucking and chewing on them until they were all moist and mushy and my mouth was full of white.
Wow.
It’s just going to keep happening like that, isn’t it?
As we came back to the table, Lazer was finishing up chatting with an elderly woman who looked strangely not so out of place with her bluish hair and her far-too-many ear gauges for someone of her advanced age. As if there’s a good number for something like that. “Who’s she?” Hube asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lazer answered with his expected level of consideration for others. “Let’s get to work, bitches. We’ve got a gig to plan.” Hube’s gum ploy worked perfectly. I just chomped away and threw in my two cents about the set list – all of which Lazer promptly dismissed and replaced with his own less-articulate version of exactly the same things I had said. Hube, in full-on peacekeeper mode, did his best to make things smooth and deflect all the conversation away from me so I didn’t drop my gum and show my gnarly chompers. Aside from all the times I accidentally stuck myself in my own lip it was pretty painless keeping the vampire teeth hidden from view.
Did any of that have a dirty double-meaning about oral sex?
No?
Ha.
I made a stop on the way home to a twenty-four hour Wally World and bought a mini-Dremel to work on the problem. I’ve never been much with tools, and I think it showed when I turned the thing on without any bits attached and tried to flatten my teeth with an empty nib. Idiot. I made test runs with all the heads until I found one shaped like a cone that let me keep the general contour of the tooth while knocking off the point. Other than grinding a little enamel off of the neighboring teeth it was a rocking success, if I do say so myself. I could run my tongue over my fangs without slicing through the skin, and they looked only slightly longer than they did when they had only been eyeteeth. Score one for the unintentional handyman. I flossed out the grit, polished them up with toothpaste and hit the sack for what little sleep I would be lucky to get, pleased to have solved at least one problem.
And when I saw myself in the morning, those fuckers had grown right back into vicious little points again.
So now, right next to my floss and my electric toothbrush is my
handy-dandy defanging tool. Just before I brush every morning, I grind them down to a manageable roundness. And every night when I come home, there they are again, sticking out of my lips like I never even touched them. They fall into the same category as everything else at this point: something I obsess over even when nobody else would probably even notice. And though it wouldn’t seem likely, this makes it worth the extra trouble to manage them. I keep waiting for the day when the haze lifts, and all of this is finally seen by everyone. There I’ll be: pale and cold, with pointed ears and a mouth like a human piranha.
I’d rather the fangs be kept in check for that moment.
It’s not just about self-preservation, either; ultimately, carving down my monster nibblers will help others, too. You see, I have this daydream about me and Chloe, and what happens on the day after she realizes how perfect we are together. I’ve had it since shortly after we started our drive-by flirtation at the copier, which has given me plenty of time to work through the details and refine the flow. It’s a slow motion rom-com montage, schmaltzy and clichéd as anything you’d find on late-night cable. But I don’t care how schmaltzy and clichéd it is.
It’s my dream and I’ll have it the way I want it, thank you.
At any rate, as the dream goes: during an afternoon in the park across the street from our office, while chasing our rascally retriever Baxter and the Frisbee he’s snatched away, after we make our mad dash into the corner café to get out of the sudden unexpected downpour that has made us laugh like madcaps as we cover our heads with newspapers, and while we’re waiting at the counter for the barista to bring us our cappuccinos, our eyes lock, she leans in and goes for The Kiss. But now, instead of The Kiss she’ll be caught up in The Bloody Freaking Mess That Permanently Disfigures the Lips I Love. Now instead of ending in a slow fade as we amble home love drunk, hand in hand to our two bedroom walk-up, it ends with a trip to the ER when she slices her tongue wide open on my goddamned teeth, sharp as woodscrews because I forgot to grind them down and buff them smooth before we left for the park.
Bastards.
So, I’m keeping myself defanged. I can deal with just about anything This has to throw at me, but if it blows my Hollywood kiss with the woman I love, vampirism and I will have some seriously messy shit to sort out. And it won’t end pretty.
For vampirism, that is. I should be fine.
I think.
POST 20
Lifted
I know it’s probably futile for me to be overly concerned about personal fitness. After all, many major parts of me are undead… whatever that means. I still walk, I still talk. I still digest things, for the most part. Most of the major functions are in place, so something vital is kicking around in there. It must be the living parts of me worrying that my age-suspended early-thirties self needs every advantage it can get now that it’s stuck where it is. Forever. When I was fully living, I was content with a long-distance relationship with fitness, a little lazy guy looseness challenging my waistband; there was always tomorrow to hit the gym if I could pull out of my lazy state and blast the fat to a slightly lesser presence around my mid-section. And then This happened, and suddenly I’ll always be fighting a losing battle when it comes to my appearance – the pallor, the drawn face. The teeth of a pit bull on steroids. The hair loss has been suspended, however, so at least I shouldn’t see any unwanted advances there. But if forty is the new thirty, then thirty-two is probably the new seventeen or so.
That’s a lot of new youth to keep up with.
Even for someone who might be immortal.
Ultimately, it’s a personal decision more than a vampiranical one. I wasn’t very happy as a soft-bellied thirty-two year-old when I was fully human; I can only imagine how much more miserable I would be as a soft-bellied thirty-two year-old ghoul. So I thought it might not be such a bad idea to put on the ol’ cross trainers and hit the gym again. And opting to spend my eternal half-life as a relative tee-totaler where blood consumption is concerned, I could use the extra zing in whatever form I can get it. But more crucial than any of this: Hube found out that Chloe’s Tool (ex-Tool by now) is a personal trainer with at least five out of six abs fully visible in his pack. That was all it took to throw me into competition mode… in a minor way, though. I’m not going full-on Tony Horton here; I just want to look a little more solid in my sleeves when Girl No. 3 returns from her Moving Out Vacation, a little closer to what she’s used to having so the transition feels natural for her. Maybe it’s a bit shallow, but I get the feeling I have a lot to live up to and I’m way behind in my efforts. And since we’re coming up on playing a real show in an actual club for the first time ever instead of noising up a bar mitzvah at Chuck E. Cheese, a little extra pep for the gig would be nice.
And a little extra tone never hurt anyone. Just ask Jack LaLanne.
I opted for a membership at Gymtopia a dozen miles away from my place so I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. Not that I’m hiding; I just wanted to slip back into the fitness scene without the added pressure of friends who know all too well what the before looks like waiting to see the after. The old gym had some Nautilus machines from the eighties and all of two instructors who taught calisthenics to old hip-hop records. On a turntable.
From the seventies.
It wasn’t the hippest spot to work out in. But Gymtopia? It has everything I never knew was missing in a fitness facility, beginning with disco lighting synchronized to a thumping sound system – and that’s just at the entrance. There are also power lifting stations that look pieced together from black market Terminator limbs, a full-service smoothie bar with its own indoor fruit garden so juice can be harvested live while the fruit is still on the tree, caffeinated colonic cleansing stations, practitioners of Swedish and other European forms of massage, and beautiful people hired solely to walk around and fool you into thinking you stand half a chance of ever looking like them… which will never happen no matter how much you Spin or Bounce or Jazzercise. I think you can even rent one of them to work out for you so you can watch the cable news on the Endless Wall of TVs while you sip your smoothie instead. It’s like a one-stop fitness buffet. I might try a little bit of everything before I’m done.
I draw the line at the coffee enemas, though.
My body holes clench up just writing down the words.
To ease back into things on my first go-around, I opted for a yoga class. Ordinarily it was the kind of thing I would have only done so I could interrupt the instructor with lame jokes about Doing it Downward Doggie Style and Getting Busy with the Rutting Cock. Now that I think about it, that last one might be a feature I saw in Hustler once, not a yoga pose.
I don’t recall.
Despite our strained history, I tried to take yoga seriously this time, and hoped it would offer me the same in return. I even did the warm up, though the whole thing seemed like a warm-up that didn’t know when to quit. Not sure if I was stiff from being half-dead or just from not having made any attempt at physical activity in the last eight months or so, but I was only able to reach my hands midway down my shins before I realized it was as downward as this doggie was going to get. And the balancing poses? There are so many of those damn things that halfway through I lost track of which one I was supposed to be doing. I ended up in some impossible combination of Dying Flamingo, Preening Lemur and Incarcerated Street Mime, I think. I just made up my own name for it: Suffering Idiot. And that was a whole ten minutes into a ninety minute session. At this point, I Warrior Posed my way out of the room.
The groin pull from that was a real treat.
Yoga and I aren’t going to be friends anytime soon.
I went for cardio next. All gut considered, I’ve never had too much of a weight problem; it’s more of a composition problem, with a stomach soft as memory foam and a bony ass in eternal need of more padding. As much as I’d love to ditch whatever spare flesh there is, running isn’t my thing. I only run when I’m being chased, and even then it’s a total question m
ark. At the old gym, my time on a treadmill was always just an excuse to catch up on my backlog of old Maxims while walking slowly enough to “read the articles”. But passing through the bank of exercycles at Gymtopia was like walking through a high-end dealership full of shiny, self-powered sex vehicles. It’s not something you can let pass you by. So I hopped on one, hooked up to the monitors and plugged in my tunes as I pedaled away. I must have pumped that sucker at top speed for twenty minutes without breaking a sweat or busting a huff before I realized that I wouldn’t experience any benefit from this contraption. Because it’s cardiovascular exercise. And my heart doesn’t beat anymore.
I guess that settles that.
In my last-ditch effort to at least get some benefit from this excursion, I hit the weight machines. It made sense that I might be able to maximize my extra protein intake and turn it into something more closely resembling muscle. I’d even take some firmed-up flab, if that’s all I could manage. And lifting stuff is totally my thing. I may not bend like a circus performer, and I’ll never again hit my target heart rate, but I can pick things up and put them down again like a motherfucking pro. And this place had the coolest things to pick up and put down. The stackable weight plates and nested interlocking dumbbells were light years ahead of my old gym’s set of plastic weights filled with Orbatron – whatever that shit is. I wasn’t looking for any muscle tears to augment my aching Yoga Crotch, so I went light at first. Turned out light was a little too light, so I moved the pin down and added a few more plates. Even that felt like it was lacking in substance, so I dropped the pin to the bottom of the stack. That put the load at two hundred and fifty pounds. And I lifted the whole damn cluster of plates with the same amount of effort it took to move the first set. I moved from station to station trying it with everything, mostly hoping to prove it was some fluke. But it just kept working. As a final test, I waited until all the stations had cleared out, then leaned down and lifted one of the machines. Not really lifted, but tilted it up halfway off the floor before I reached my limit. But that was enough for me.