Joe Vampire

by Steven Luna

  I didn’t argue too much, because I knew she was right. As always. If I was waiting for the right time to do it, I would probably be waiting forever.

  Not that this wasn’t a possibility. But it wouldn’t solve anything, either.

  “If you don’t want the vampire to take over your life, “then you need to take your life back from the vampire.”

  Damn, Louise.

  If you ever decide to give up knitting and playing Push the Button, I think there’s a real future for you in writing supernatural fortune cookies.

  So now, in addition to sharing my weirdness with a vampire hunter – or reformed vampire hunter, rather – I’m seriously thinking about how to tell Chloe everything that’s been going on, and let her in on exactly how I feel about her. I don’t know if I can muster enough honest forthrightness for all of that in a single swing, but the more I consider it, the more I feel like I have nothing to lose. I’m essentially on my own at this point; that doesn’t just go away all by itself. And I was ready to lay it all on the table with her before, back when I thought things were in my favor; after everything I’ve been through, it can’t be all that much more difficult now… can it?

  Maybe it can.

  As you can tell, I’m still on the fence.

  And thanks to the little skirmish between Bo and me, I’ve lost the comfort of having a coffee table to crawl under if it doesn’t work… although it is next up on his fix-it list. But that’s not the point. The point is I think this might be as good a time as any to clear the air, to speak my peace and let the chips fall where they may, if that’s not mixing too many metaphors. Maybe, ready or not, it’s the right time to finally talk to Chloe – talk talk, not just office flirtation or polite chitchat. But talking to my family? There’ll be a lot more prep work before I can make that happen for real.

  Those people are a whole different box of crazy to deal with.

  Let’s see how it goes with Girl No. 3 first.

  POST 36

  Saving the Bearded Lady

  Through the unforeseen roller-coastering ups and downs of this whole vampire trip, I feel like my success rate for holding it all together has been spotty at best. The blog has helped me attain an illusion of organization, though I’ve come to realize that even the best laid, overly obsessed-upon plans have elements of risk so huge and unpredictable that you couldn’t possibly cover every angle no matter how much thinking you do. I’ve learned that in spite of having the ability to sneak peeks at other people’s thoughts, there’s just no way to look around every corner and know for sure what’s coming your way. And even if you could figure it out, there’s someone else looking around that same corner from the opposite side, with a whole different take on what lies beyond it for them. Same corner; different perspectives. And each of you thinks your angle is tops… and both of you are probably right. Life is everyone’s circus – not just yours. You can train your monkeys and tame your lions all you want, but if someone else’s elephant decides to take a dump on your bearded lady in the middle of Ring Three, the show’s over, folks. The big top is coming down – monkeys, lions and all. Probably only for you, though.

  Whoever brought the elephant has the makings of a hilarious sideshow.

  It’s all about perspective.

  I’d like to think I’ve kept my perspective hopeful yet realistic overall – a largely impossible undertaking when you consider how it all started out: dude getting back into the prime of his life gets turned into a vampire, dude plays avoidant and tries to pretend otherwise, dude gets ass handed to him by vampirosity. But as of this post, all of my symptoms have leveled off into a manageable state of self-maintenance – new territory for me overall, but absolutely do-able. No new features have reared their ugly heads (hello, turning into a bat? I waited and waited but you never came… ) and though I’m sure just like everyone has their own shitting elephant to ruin their best-laid plans, so too everyone has their own vampirical timeline for how and when things like this make themselves known. I’m not fooling myself; I fully expect more strangeness to show up somewhere down the line. But I think if I can at least hold a tight leash on what’s happened up till now, I stand a fair chance of keeping my bearded lady dung-free from here on out. Not to be glib about it, but I can sort of see my mother’s point now: if you try hard and work long enough at it, you can deny your way into happiness about anything.

  Thanks, Mom.

  With the vampire thing dialed down to a low background roar, I felt far more comfortable taking measures to go get Chloe, as Bo so eloquently put it. Making the approach would be the most difficult part… I hoped. So, as with most everything else in my life, I figured it would be best if I overthought every aspect until I was paralyzed by fear once more.

  Thanks again, Mom.

  When Chloe and I went our separate ways, it hadn’t been on the best of terms. It hadn’t been on the worst of terms, either. Actually, it hadn’t been on any terms, unless you call flirting at the copier and having one short semi-disagreement in front of a coffee machine “terms”. Considering that our history was so limited, I felt far less pressure to overcome having been an asshole, because I hadn’t ever gotten the chance to be one. If anything, she was the… um…

  Okay – I may talk a lot of shit on this blog, but the one thing I would never do is call the Woman I’m Pretty Sure I Love an asshole.

  And that one doesn’t count.

  We’ll just say she was the one who got to decide how things went – or didn’t go, as was the case. I was just happy to remember that it wasn’t some character flaw of mine that caused things to never be what they might have been, other than my lack of motivation to bust a move. So in my overthinking about how to finally get a leg up on move-busting, I came up with three distinctly different approaches. I’m sure you could see the bullet points for this coming from a mile away.

  • Phone call – Believe it or not – like it’s difficult to picture this coming from me – I spent at least an hour having imaginary phone conversations with her. And not just on my cell, either. I tested the same conversations on different phones. I even captured some of them on a digital recorder so I could see how my voice sounded and rehearse every pause and break. But a phone call seemed impersonal; I wanted to see body language when I spoke to her, so I could gauge her true reaction to what I had to say. Despite losing an hour that could have been better spent writing her a shitty poem, I decided to scrap the phone call approach. On the upside, I learned that I sound like a leaking balloon on the phone, something I had never known about myself until now. I’m considering only speaking through Auto Tune from here on out. So it wasn’t a total waste.

  • Flowers – This old fallback appeared in a scene I imagined, where I show up at her door with a mixed bouquet the size of a small child, wearing a tuxedo and pinky ring (me, not the bouquet). I was also smoking skinny cigarettes, which I don’t, and had my hair slicked down to a petroleum sheen, which I never would, and I’d arrived in a limousine driven by one of the evil henchman who tried to kill James Bond in… well, take your pick – in any James Bond movie. They’re all pretty much the same. Even with adherence to reality in the play-out, plying her with floral beauty and formalwear seemed a bit forward. Plus: I don’t know where she lives… and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know at this point. She’s had sex with someone else in that house of carnal horrors. The temptation to soak it in sterno and toss a match on it might be too much to resist. So no flowers.

  • Fucking her brains out – Yeah, right. With my track record in that area, it might have the opposite intended effect. I could totally end up fucking her brains in instead. And where would that leave me? Furthermore, as my encounter with Megan so explicitly reminded me, a sex tactic is best reserved for at least the third date. Or maybe the second date, if you hit it off early on. But crazy-banging on a first date just to make sure someone remembers that you exist? That’s just sleazy.

  There were several others that I won’t bother to list her
e, mostly because they were far more asinine than phone calls and flowers and fucking. And none of them started with the f sound, which ruined the flow. It didn’t matter. No amount of bullet points could navigate me through this one. I was going to have to try a decidedly un-Joe method. In a daring move for one so dependent on having all of his steps laid out on paper with little dots to the left of them, I ditched the entire list in favor of a more direct approach.

  I just showed up at her desk.

  How’s that for spontaneity?

  I was far less nervous than I thought I would be. I was also a bit less excited than I wanted to be. I think overall I was… pissed off. Not at first, though. Walking through the doors in daylight hours for the first time since I’d downshifted to nights, I felt like I was reliving the last day we had seen each other, but in reverse sequence. I was downright chipper when I passed my old work station and saw the new guy sitting in my place, and completely sociable as I made the rounds to say hey to all my old workmates. But the closer I got to Chloe’s desk, the more I felt like the misunderstanding that led to the belly-down, broken-wheeled crash landing of us before we even got off the ground wasn’t entirely mine. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the distribution of confusion was equal across the board. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the We should talk… in her card was purposely misleading. It was leading, though, and ambiguous at the very least. And at most it was hugely deceptive if she didn’t think as much as I did that our back-and-forth was headed more forth than back. By the time I took the last five steps to her cubicle, my hope for a potential relationship had cooled into an expectation of some reasonable clarification for why things should have gone the way they did. Besides the whole complication of the Tool being in the picture, I mean. There was no mistaking that what I wanted with Chloe was to reach the Soup Stage.

  What I deserved from her, though, was an explanation.

  You may think that sounds completely arrogant. I’m sure you’re right.

  That’s just the way I am sometimes. Now I have my vampire parts to blame for it.

  She was in the middle of a phone call, had a desk strewn with documents and a screen overloaded with content. And I just walked in and stood on the other side of her desk until she noticed me. She might have picked up on my indignant air, or she might have had her mind on other things. Either way, she didn’t light up at the sight of me like I thought she would. Like she used to. Waiting for her to finish her call gave me a chance to consider how purposeful I could make my newfound sense of irritation. All I came up with was, “We still need to talk.” Not exactly the burn I was going for.

  She didn’t look game for this. “Can you wait until – ”

  “I think now might be good.”

  “I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes… ”

  “You can cancel it.” That was just rude of me.

  I didn’t seem to care all that much.

  Chloe walked ahead of me to the kitchenette, and I had visions of my non-beating yet still-breakable heart being dropped with the get well card in the trash can all over again. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to go through a replay of all that. And though the anger in me had pushed aside the tidy speech I had prepared for the occasion, I was sure that whatever I would come up with instead was more than could be contained in a space the size of a not-walk-in closet – and with a drove of corporate drones staggering in and out to get more crullers or top off their French roast sludge. “Let’s go across the street instead. I’d rather not have the creamer witness my humiliation twice in one year.” She gave me a look that said she wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. But she must have been okay with it, because she headed for the door without protest.

  I hate to sound like even more of a jerk, but if I would have known it was this easy to take control of the situation, I would have done it from the beginning.

  As short-lived as it ended up being, it still would have been worth the risk.

  POST 37

  Revelations

  When trying to convince someone that their actions may have fallen short of your expectations, taking a strong stance on your position in spite of the fact that you might also have been somewhat wrong – even if you aren’t quite aware of your wrongness – can sometimes work to your advantage. Sometimes, it serves to put the person on the other side of the table on the defensive from the get-go. And sometimes it just makes you look like a total ass.

  In my case, it did all three.

  For a solid minute after we sat down at a window table in the corner café where I had dreamed our Hollywood kiss would happen, I just looked at her through my Ray Bans. I couldn’t help myself; somehow I’d forgotten how truly lovely she was. I think our last exchange may have stunted my memory, and as a survival technique against the damages of heartbreak it washed our past with a filth-ridden haze – one that didn’t belong over the whole experience. I could see that now as I gazed across the table. She finally broke my unintentionally sinister stalker-stare. “So, you wanted to talk. Go ahead… talk.”

  “Yeah. Um… ” I suddenly remembered what I wanted to tell her, but however I had prepared it in my head sounded sort of silly and not good enough anymore. So I started with something small and simple instead. And totally freaking lame. “I haven’t seen you in a while. You look nice.”

  The compliment didn’t take. “That’s why you pulled me away from the million things I have to do, because you needed to tell me I looked nice? Seriously, Joe. That’s just… not good.”

  Then everything else started falling out of my mouth, without any of the kindness I had included in the prepared version. “Yeah, well, it can’t be all good all the time right? Things can be going along sweet and smooth for a great long while, and one day when you least expect it, they get all shitted up… and just when you thought they were about to get even better.”

  This, she understood. “You’re still stuck on what I wrote in that card, aren’t you?”

  Okay. Maybe she didn’t quite understand all of it. “Screw the card, Chloe; it’s not the card. It’s everything. I thought we were headed somewhere beyond playing coy at the copy machine, and I’m pretty sure you thought we were headed there too.” She wouldn’t respond. “I’m not wrong, am I? I wasn’t kidding myself that all the build-up came to a screeching halt right about the time I… ” I was so close to telling her about This. Ultimately, I felt it would clutter the issue, so I did the duck-and-cover thing I’ve become so skilled at. “… about the time I got sick.”

  “Right. About the time you got sick.” Oh. I see how it is.

  I could practically hear the italics of her sarcasm.

  But I wasn’t giving it to her. If she thought I’d turned into an addict, she was going to have to say it out loud. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She backed down. “Look, I honestly don’t know what it is that you’re going through. I’ve heard rumors and whispers around the office, things that otherwise I wouldn’t give a second thought… but then you move down to night shift on a moment’s notice, and you drop out of life entirely as far as I know, since no one ever hears from you at all anymore. And now you show up all this time later, pulling me away from my job with zero warning so you can tell me I look nice and that you’re angry because we never got past flirting with each other. What am I supposed to think? All you’ve done is make the rumors look even more like they might be true.” Of everything she said, what I picked up on the most is that she’d noticed I wasn’t around.

  That was nice to know.

  But now she was looking at the hoodie, mostly in the region of my forearms, no doubt wondering what it might be covering up. Sleeves, so long ago a trusted confederate, had gone turncoat and were now the enemy. So, in the relative protection of the blinds in the window we were sitting in front of, I rolled them up past my elbows. “Is this what you want to see?” I showed her my track-free arms, totally grateful now for the phony carrot juice tan. “I’m clean, Chloe. No matter what you
’ve heard, it’s not true.” Unless you’ve heard I’m a vampire.

  In which case: probably all true.

  “And the Wayfarers are just a fashion statement, right?” She was a little feistier than she’d let on in the whole time I’d semi-known her.

  Sweetness.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to take off the shades just to prove her wrong. “Yeah… I’m all about the accessories.” That got a little laugh. “Do I look like I’m on drugs to you – honestly? And even more than that, would you rather believe a bunch of gossip you hear bouncing around a roomful of resentful nobodies? Or would you rather have a conversation with me and figure things out for yourself?” She thought for a second, which I allowed without protest since I hadn’t been around the day shift to counter the scuttlebutt. “They don’t always have their facts straight,” I reminded her. “Most of the time, they don’t even have facts.”

  “But do you see how I might have had no choice other than to believe them? You disappeared… we had one unhappy conversation and you took off.” She sounded genuinely sad about it. “I missed you.”

  Hearing that sent a warm feeling through me that almost thawed my vampirious permafrost. “I know. I didn’t handle things in the right way, and I apologize for that. I just got a little freaked out after you and Malibu Ken kicked it up a notch. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  She didn’t seem to want to talk about that, and I wouldn’t look into her head for fear of what I might find there. She changed the subject. “So… you were really sick?”

  Here was my opportunity to lay the whole vampire deal on the table. But I could hardly bring myself to tell her how I felt about us; there was no way I was going to blow her mind with something like This. “I really was, and I still am. Some weird chronic thing that I’m just now getting under control.”