Joe Vampire

POST 25



Louise



At first, working with another vampire – especially one who could have stood in for my mother – made me question my choice in job reassignments. Not that she was threatening or overbearing. Just present. She would throw me a knowing glance when I walked in each night, but she stayed with her books and her yarn balls, and I kept my ear buds firmly planted from the time I started till the moment I left. It’s been a solid few weeks now, and I’ve been trying to open my mind a little more. But the idea of gossiping about things like how to slake your blood thirst without killing people in the process still doesn’t sit too well with me. Those Google-less questions keep cropping up, though, and I’m not one to let the curiosity monkey ride on my back for very long. I’m not proud of my Need to Know, but I sure am a sucker for information. Don has his addictions; I have mine. And I held out as long as I could.

But I finally caved.

Turns out it wasn’t such a bad thing.

I find that the more I talk to Louise, the easier it is to deal with everything. And I get the feeling Louise is happy to have someone around the office to talk to about this stuff, too. She’s not shouting it from the rooftops, but she doesn’t seem too shy to chat about it in the break room. Maybe because there’s only the two of us in there at the time. I’m still not convinced that This should be the topic of casual conversations, and even though I’m reluctantly taking her advice and letting it be a part of me, I’m staying pretty guarded about it. It’s a personal matter, and other than Hube I hadn’t discussed the particulars with anyone. And no offense to Louise, but it feels like I’m talking to a much kinder, more reasonable version of my mother sometimes. So there’s that neurotic hurdle to get over. But she’s the one who brought it up in the first place, so I figure she can lead the charge for our discussions. Mostly I just listen while she talks, but sometimes I’ll pick her brain. And it’s quite a brain to pick.

The woman knows a hell of a lot more than I do about This.

I haven’t asked her age, but she looks like she’s in her mid-fifties or so. I know that means nothing, since aging is somewhat suspended for us. But she’s been a vampire longer than I have, so she’s figured out how to deal with a lot. She’s come up with all kinds of solutions to things I’m just starting to work on, such as:

• Carrots and beets, eaten whole or in juice form, will add color to a pale complexion

• Contact lenses with transitional properties can help dull the sharpness of all light, indoors or outdoors; get the colored ones and you can put back the iris in whatever color you want

• UV protective fabrics can minimize sun damage, but not for extended periods, so be sure to carry something else to cover up with

• Hydrogen peroxide is a hell of a warrior in the battle against fabric-based blood stains

And, best of all:

• Coconut water can serve as a blood substitute. Sort of.

The last one was huge for me. I’ve tried it, and while it doesn’t provide the same zing as a 20 ounce porterhouse, it makes me feel pretty balanced and leveled-out without always having to have raw meat handy. It lifts away much of my hazy lethargic veil, that living-on-too-little-sleep sluggishness that has become a regular part of my life. And because they market the stuff as a health drink, it’s all over GNC and way easy to get ahold of. Good information to have. So our chats have been quite a learning experience. I’ve been missing my Me Time, though. I still have four seasons of Saved by the Bell to get through before those kids head off for their college years.

But I guess this stuff is slightly more important than catching up with Jessie and Slater. They are the nineties, after all.

Louise is the now.

Even more than helping sort out the day-to-day of everything, she’s been a wealth of information about the vampire Big Picture – where it starts, where it might end up, and what you do to get through it all. She’s pretty comfortable discussing it from every angle, kind of a Know Thy Enemy approach. She’s effectively been able to turn her enemy into a friend, which isn’t an easy thing to do.

My enemy is still an intrusive stranger camped on my love seat, openly scratching his balls and hogging the remote.

The other night we were comparing sleep habits when I brought up the topic of being changed. It’s impossible that everyone would end up this way as the result of a poorly-communicated group date invitation; that’s pretty much just a “me” thing, I bet. I wondered who she’d come across in her own life generous enough to give her this shitty gift. “My ex-husband. He bit me one night while we were making love. Just sank his teeth right in, above my clavicle. He didn’t even ask me first. That’s a vampire for you. Fem-pires are much more considerate.”

fem-pire (FEHM-pyr), n.: The empowered modern female equivalent of a male vampire.

I have man-pire; she has fem-pire. I guess I’m not the only one adding vocabulary words to the vampire dictionary. “So he changed you; who changed him?”

“A woman in his carpool,” she sighed, “during their affair.” Yikes. Sensitive territory, but she stayed steady and sober about the whole thing. “She did ask him, and he said it sounded like fun… but I never saw any holes on his neck. I’m pretty sure she bit him on the penis.” Holy. Freaking. Moly. That’s a painful erotic twist I had never considered. “He thought biting was some kind of sex game. Can you imagine?”

Apparently, when under the influence of sake, I can.

“After twelve days of nearly crapping his brains out through his intestines, I think he realized it was no game. Then his features started showing up, and a few weeks later he changed me. Three months after that, he left. He told me I was becoming a monster, as if he wasn’t the one who made me that way. He didn’t want to spend the rest of eternity with someone so frigid.” Wow. “That was eight years ago, and I haven’t seen him since.”

She may have made peace with it, but hearing her describe it I could tell it hadn’t fully scarred over. “Sorry, Louise. He sounds like a real a*shole.”

She brushed off my pity. “It was bound to fail at some point. Relationships between vampires never work out. It’s bad enough when only one of you is cold and soulless; with two, it’s just a houseful of misery that never resolves itself. You’re always trying to outdo each other with your own suffering. No one has a chance to be happy then. And the sex… well, he was right about me being frigid. But so was he – and it wasn’t for lack of desire on either of our parts.” The mother-talk neurosis kicked in and almost shut down my brain right about then. “It was a failure of physiology, and physics. There’s not a chance that frozen flesh against frozen flesh will cause anything close to a pleasurable sexual friction. It’s like rubbing ice cubes together and hoping for fire.” Now there’s a nasty little image that I’ll never be able to forget: Mr. and Mrs. Louise, ice-f*cking. “No; if you’re going to bring something cold to the table, someone else has to bring something warm. It’s the yin and yang of everything, true in life, death – even un-death.”

I had never thought about it that way. Honestly, I had never thought about two vampires becoming a couple at all. That seemed like overkill.

And frictionless sex would just be a total waste of an erection.

Then, as I figured would happen, it was her turn to ask. “Who changed you?” It was only fair that I tell her, since her story was way worse than mine. So I told her about Don, and the date, and sake. And the humping. And how he had been reduced to pushing dope and sucking blood out of homeless dudes behind a nightclub to survive. “Not surprising,” she said. “Not everyone can assimilate as well as we have.”

Assimilate? I was holed up in an office every night to avoid people and sunlight, with no friends to speak of and no life beyond pushing a button every two hours and web cruising in between. “I wouldn’t say I’ve assimilated. I’ve just learned to hide my business from the world at large.”

“What do you think assimilation is? People do what they have to do to survive, hopefully in as harmless a manner as possible. We’re trying not to hurt others with our weird existence, in the same way that others have hurt us with theirs. But we haven’t let it ruin us, either; we have some semblance of a normal life, like the life we had before we changed. Even with my knitting and Latin dancing, it isn’t a perfect life by any stretch. But whose is?” She had a feel-good answer to counter every defeatist comment I came up with. “We’re out in the world, even if it’s only at night. We have jobs, and interests, and intellectual pursuits – you with your internet, me with my books. We’re making do with what we have. I think we’re doing a pretty okay job, all things considered. Don’t you?”

She keeps saying it, again and again.

Maybe I’m starting to believe it.

That doesn’t mean I’m ready to let my guard down all the way. But I’ve said more to her about my vampiring than to anyone since Hube. At this point, opening up a little is as good as opening up a lot. It’s been helpful for me getting to know someone who hasn’t let the whole raw deal of This cave her head in. Louise has found a middle ground that works for her, which is exactly what I want for myself: if not a totally happy path, at least clear road to walk through it all among the broken glass and discarded needles littering the streets of Vampire Shit Town. That stuff about her husband is some major garbage, though – glass and needles all the way. But she seems peaceful about it. I’m still hoping she’ll tell me there’s a way to have some kind of normal relationship with someone – anyone – especially now that I’ve learned about the uselessness of frozen boners and ice-ginas.

Maybe I’ll have to come up with my own path to that one.

There was one more thing I wanted to ask Louise about, something stupid that had been bugging me since my urge to crawl under the coffee table had returned. “So, do you sleep in… a coffin?” She looked at me like my ass was hanging out of my pants.

She laughed like it was, too.

“Geez, Joe. No… so morbid. That would kill my back. I have a Sleep Number bed. I’m a seventy three.” That was a relief.

This whole thing has been a relief, actually. It’s like I’ve found a Vampire Godmother, a giver of good and true knowledge about all things Undead and Yet Unliving.

Not something I would have thought was possible.

I’ve been thinking there might be someone else who could benefit from some of this new-found knowledge. He may be totally beyond help by now, what with the drug addiction stacked on top of the vampire trip. Still, I can’t help but feel something of an obligation to help him, as sick as that sounds, knowing I wouldn’t even need to help myself if it wasn’t for him. But maybe that’s how the chain is broken in something like This. Instead of just trying to end the insanity for myself, maybe I have to turn around and give someone a leg up to help them end their own insanity. Sort of like Paying It Backward to go with the Paying It Forward.

So I figure I’ll pay Don a little return visit and pass on to him what Louise has passed on to me. What have I got to lose?

I just hope he’s wearing a shirt this time.