Joe Vampire

POST 44



Coming Out of the Coffin



Until the day vampirocity took up permanent residence in the crumbling real estate that was my life, sleep and I had been something of a hot item. Sleep was everything I could have ever wanted in a lover – always up for a good go-around when I was jonesing for a fix, never one to ask questions or make demands or hold me to a laundry list of unrealistic expectations. In every way, she was a willing and eager participant in a vast array of variations on our theme that never failed to make our encounters refreshing and invigorating. Nothing was outside the bounds of possibility. Quickies? You bet – our five minute get-togethers were more than enough sometimes to soothe the savage beast. Afternoon delight? Yesiree. On any given day we could be found between the sheets at eleven and in total bliss until three, without a second thought about the world at large for the whole heavenly time. Extended sessions on long weekends and holidays? A-yup. You’d have better luck milking glitter from a unicorn’s tit than trying to drag us out from under the covers on a Friday thru Sunday min-vacay. And though the bed was by far our favorite venue, we were never locked down to just one locale. We could make the magic happen anywhere, anytime we felt like it – on the couch, at the kitchen table, in the middle of a movie theater. In the bathroom.

Yeah… sleep and I, we were pretty freaky. And way deep.

Then This busted in on our little tete-a-tete without being invited, showed its jacked-up monster teeth and voodoo doll black button eyes and scared my beautiful love right out of my life. It was the one break-up that I can truly say I had no part in causing, and in which I know without question I did everything right. I didn’t take us for granted for even a second, and even though I tried my best to understand why it ended, the longing never left me. So you can imagine how stoked I was when, after my horrific excursion with Lucas and the Numb Nut twins, sleep and I hooked up again… and in a thoroughly major way.

According to the looky-loos who watched while it happened, sleep and I rocked it solid for forty-eight hours straight.

All bed action this time. No theater, no bathroom.

And the pay-off was totally worth the wait.

I would love nothing more than to know that the reason I dropped off into a death nap was because, after my three days in captivity, my body finally needed to give its batteries a recharge, and allow my brain the opportunity to fully digest all the unnerving details of what took place. If anything, I’d think those happenings would have caused some ghastly nightmares that threatened to keep me awake no matter how much my exhausted ghoulish ass protested. But I’m almost a whole year’s worth of vampire shit wiser than that by now, and I would be fooling myself if I didn’t admit that the real reason my body let me sleep after going for so long without is because of only one thing: the feeding. Lucas’ blood nourished something in me that all the corn-fed beef in Nebraska, all the coconut water in the tropics would never have been able to touch. And if this is true, then it’s not a stretch to think that while I’ve denied my sickening, selfish impulse to feast on a human being’s carotid artery, I’ve also been depriving myself a vital nutrient that I wasn’t going to get anywhere else. Once I had it in my system, everything leveled out to an eerie perfection all on its own. As part of the balancing act, sleep and I got our groove back. It was different this time around, though, less a recreational event and more of a soundless, motionless restorative thing… probably the kind you’d get snoozing in a casket, if you were a vampire who followed tradition. I wouldn’t be overhyping it to say it was peaceful to a fault. When I did finally wake up, I found myself in my own bed and in nerve-shattering agony surrounded by my peeps, all tending to me like I was coming out of a twenty year coma. Bo was there, and Louise. And Hube. And an old Asian man who smelled like cinnamon and nutmeg, but not in a blood-sucky way. In more of a homemade pharma-ceutical way. For a second I wondered which of them had been the tin man and which had been the scarecrow. Then I remembered that was someone else’s story.

Mine had vampires in it.

My shoulders raged with pain like nothing I’d ever felt, but were newly patched with gauze and Ace bandages. They also smelled like herb-infused fungal dick. Louise stood by to explain why I shouldn’t try to pull the dressing off no matter how much it itched or burned or stunk. “Mr. Fu has made you a salve of spruce resin and Devil’s Dung… the smell is horrid, but it’ll seal up the wounds and keep away infection. Mr. Fu says it needs time to work, though, so no touching.”

“Mr. Fu who?” I asked.

“Mr. Fu, my folk healer. He’s going to start you on the same vitamin therapy that I’m on. It should put you right in no time – and it’ll keep you right, if you stay on it.” She brushed my hair out of my eyes and said a lot about what had happened without having to say much of anything. That was different for her. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal, Joe. You’re lucky to still be among the semi-living.”

I sat up, pushing against the pain and holding back a heave from the nasty smell of the salve. “About that… ” I knew how it had ended but I had no idea what had made it end in the first place. So Hube filled me in, telling me about the alerts he posted on the blog when I didn’t show up for lunch, and how he and Bo tapped into the GPS on my phone and followed the signal to a gutted chop-shop in an industrial ghost town area about twenty miles from my home. The same place where Don’s body was discovered. And when they reached me, they found the two meatheads standing guard outside, bickering about how much experimentation on me would be too much and whether or not they would still be considered accomplices to kidnapping, assault and murder if they were to cut and run right then. So Bo snuck up behind them and put a sleeper hold on Kyle, then launched a pile driver on Jeremy and tied them together with the tow rope from his truck. Once Lucas was out, they called the police and hauled me away just in time to avoid having to explain why I’d gone all feral, and how I was the victim in this situation despite the fact that three unconscious dudes were taking up floor space inside while I was walking around fanged and shirtless and bloodstained. Instead, the trio of maniacs would be found with Don’s head lying next to them in a puddle of goo, in their so-called lab stocked to the gills with a dungeon’s worth of torture devices and raving about ridding the world of vampires. It would all sound like the babbling of madmen, since Hube and Bo would have gotten me home before anyone of authority would have actually seen me in Total Vampire Mode. Unless… “There was a camera running… they were recording me the whole time.”

Hube showed me a box full of crushed plastic and metal that used to be a digital camcorder. “Bo got that taken care of, too. You’re free and clear.” I almost asked if they’d saved the memory card so I could watch the playback of the money shot, to see what I looked like from the outside when the monster in me made his debut.

I decided it was best if I never saw myself in that state.

The fewer the nightmares, the better.

Then the man himself poked his head into my line of vision. “Hey, Joe Vampire,” Bo said, holding out his fist.

The shoulder situation made it hard to meet his knuckle bump, but I did it anyway. “Hey, Bo Hero. Thanks for what you did. I think I owe you more beer.” More than I could ever repay.

“Finally got to try out a few of my MMA moves on those wanks.” He’s picking up all kinds of stuff hanging out with me. That may not be such a good thing. For him, anyway.

For me? I kind of like hearing my words played back in a southern accent.

Louise brought me some god awful curative tea that smelled almost as rank as the salve. I could only imagine what part of the devil that crap was made from. “Someone else is here to see you,” she informed me. “Someone who needed to know the truth.”

I gave her the hairy vampire eyeball. “Louise… who did you tell? You know I’m big on keeping this stuff hush-hush.”

Her eyebrows frowned. “You were in a life-threatening situation, and I really didn’t know if you’d come out of it in one piece. I thought your family deserved to know.” Ah. More of that. “So I called your sister and told her the truth.”

As if cued by Louise’s admission, Amanda flew into the room and burst into tears as soon as she saw me. She would’ve thrown herself onto the bed and bawled if I didn’t smell like devil’s ass from every angle. “God, Joe, why didn’t you say anything about this?”

“Sorry… just never seemed like a good time to bring it up.” I slipped right back into damage control mode, my favorite state of being.

“You’ve been going through this alone the whole time?”

I glanced at Hube and Louise and Bo. “Not totally alone.”

She brushed my arm, felt how cold my skin was and pulled back. I couldn’t blame her for it. It was shocking, and I probably would have done the same thing in her position. “Does it hurt?”

“The shoulders? They hurt like a son of a bitch. The vampire thing? Only sometimes. It took me a while, but I was getting it all under control. I’m not so sure about that anymore.” As f*cked up as it is to say, tasting human blood satisfied something in me that could never have been satisfied by my chosen diet of beef and avoidance. Make no mistake here: I don’t want it to be that way. It’s what I’ve fought to keep from happening since this whole ridiculous situation rained down fire onto my life. But as ugly a manner as it had come about – and as little as I want to recognize this – fulfilling the blood lust has done wonders to amp down my desperation. I no longer feel like there’s some wild version of me clawing around within for validation, or that I’m in constant battle with my other self just to keep him from breaking out of my own skin. But who knows how long it will last? I’m sure it won’t be that way forever, and now that I’ve tasted the vitality in the blood of the living, I don’t know that I’ll be able to go very long without it. So I hold up Louise as an example for alternative modern vampire living. She tried chowing on people, decided it wasn’t for her and discovered a way around it. She gets on perfectly fine with her chickens as a workable compromise. I might just have to look into that.

I’ll even stick with her No Cocks in Mouth rule.

Seems reasonable to me.

Amanda looked at me for a long time, like she was getting a complete visual on Joe 2.0 and fitting it all into her head. There was a little pity creeping into her gaze, too, and I felt like I need to put the kibosh on it before it spread to the rest of her. “I’m still the same guy, Manda. I’ve busted my ass to make sure this didn’t get the better of me. And it hadn’t, until those f*ckwads rang my bell. But it’ll be okay again… it’s like any other disease; I’ll treat it with respect, and it will show me the same consideration in return.”

She kissed my forehead. “It’s so unreal.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, sister. But lucky you – you get to help me figure out how to tell mom and dad. And David. I think I’ve finally accomplished something he can’t beat me at.” Too bad it’s This.

But a win is a win.

Hube came in close on my other side, like he didn’t want anyone to hear what he was going to say. “Um, I kind of maybe told someone else, too… someone besides Lazer. You can hate me again if you want.”

I had treated him like absolute garbage and he was giving me the latitude to hate him even more? The guy is a total mensch. I was suddenly totally serious, and my missing apology words appeared. “Hubert, the biggest mistake I’ve ever made – aside from, you know, that group date fiasco – was shitting all over you after you had my back again and again through the nasty, f*cked-up weirdness of this whole thing. You’ll never know how sorry I am for that. And there’s not a chance in the world I’ll ever do it again, no matter who you tell.”

“See who it is first… then decide.”

I smelled her honeyed sweetness before I saw her, and he didn’t have to say anything else. “Good call, buddy,” I told him as he left the room. She came to the bed, and I fully expected her to turn her head to avoid staring at me when she saw the fangs and the eyes, and got a good whiff. It would have been completely understandable if she had. But she didn’t turn away for a second. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Chloe said back.

“So, that chronic thing I’ve been trying to keep under control…?” I wanted to say the words, to admit the ultimate truth about myself that I just couldn’t seem to allow no matter how much I raved about it in my head or ranted about it on this blog. I wanted to tell her, I am a vampire.

I just wasn’t bold enough to say it out loud to her yet.

“Hube told me everything.” She took my hand. I almost pulled it away, to spare her having to feel the unsettling chill of my flesh. She kept it anyway, and laced her fingers into mine. I know it was freezing; I could easily find a contrast against the incredible warmth of her skin, so she must have, too. But she didn’t let go. She squeezed harder instead. “You could have let me in on this, you know.”

I made myself sit up again, to face her and not let my fear minimize what I wanted to say. “Really? You almost didn’t want to hear how close I am to falling in love with you. Would you seriously have wanted to know about This?”

“You being a vampire, I can deal with… as impossible and surreal as that sounds. What I can’t deal with is you wanting something from me that you knew I wasn’t able to give you.” That was unexpected. “I would have been completely into it from the beginning if things had gone a little differently between Micah and me. Maybe if I had been braver earlier on and told you how things were right up front, I could have saved us both a whole lot of heartache.”

“Yeah… me, too.” Now this was the conversation we should have had from the start.

She had more. “But I didn’t, and you didn’t. And here we are.” Okay.

That part was a whole lot of nothing.

My recently-returning bravery suddenly showed up again, with a scrap of selflessness stuck to its shoe. “And here’s where I wander past my limits for self-preservation and risk one last misguided broken heart… I know I screwed up, and I know I waited too long to tell you how things were with me. I’m sure I’ll regret that forever. But I hope you guys can have the rest of your fairy tale – really, nothing but the best for you from here forward, no matter how challenging it might be for you. You deserve a happily ever after, in whatever form you can find it.” That came out more jackass-y than I thought it would.

At least I kept myself from calling him the Tool.

“I don’t think there’s a happily ever after for me with him… and there definitely isn’t a happily right now.” She had my full attention at that point. Not that she hadn’t had it from the start. But I had the impression that she was leading somewhere significant now, and I didn’t want to miss a word. “I thought a lot about what you said the other day, about not getting a million second chances to have what’s best for me.”

“That’s not exactly how I said it.” But at least I knew she’d heard me.

“Let’s not split hairs here. The point is that I think you might be right. I’m not sure I’m ready to settle for less than exactly what I want.”

My eyes were drawn to the notably empty ring finger on her left hand, the one that rested on the back of my own hand, all naked and diamond-free. “And what exactly is it that you want?”

“I really have no idea.” Well. That sucks. “But I’m pretty sure it has something to do with us… you and me.”

Better.

I motioned to my face. “Even with all this being the way it is? ‘Cause it’s not going away any time soon. It’s part of the deal now.”

That made her pause a beat or two. I had a feeling it might. “Does adding vampire to your resume make you any less Joe than you were before?” It had taken me a bit longer than it should have to finally understand that becoming vampiristic made me something other – maybe something more – than just the Joe I used to be. But I’m convinced that all of me is still in there along with the new stuff, and they’re just now learning to live together in harmony, like my own personal Ebony and Ivory. Except we both tend toward an orangish-gray.

“Are you sure that’s what you want, Chloe? Even vampire-free, this much Joe might not be the carnival ride you think it is.” I wanted to give her every opportunity to back out. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to run away this time.

She stayed where she was. “I’m willing to give it a whirl and find out.”

Okay, then. At square one.

With Girl No. 3.

I looked around the room. Everyone else was gone. It was just me and Chloe, and the best and worst of the Joe Vampire Affair suddenly mashed together into the same moment. It seemed that all of my alternate universes – even the ones I hadn’t thought to consider – had finally caught up with one another.

And not a moment too soon, either.