LAST CALL FOR THE SONS OF SHOCK
Blank Frank notches down the Cramps, keeping an eye on the blue LED bars of the equalizer. He likes the light.
“Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon” calms.
The club is called Un/Dead. The sound system is from the guts of the old Tropicana, LA’s altar of mud wrestling, foxy boxing, and the cocktease unto physical pain. It specs are for metal, loud, lots of it. The punch of the subwoofers is a lot like getting jabbed in the sternum by a big velvet piston.
Blank Frank likes the power. Whenever he thinks of getting physical, he thinks of the Vise Grip.
He perches a case of Stoli on one big shoulder and tucks another of Beam under his arm. After this he is done replenishing the bar. To survive the weekend crush, you’ve gotta arm. Blank Frank can lug a five-case stack without using a dolly. He has to duck to clear the lintel. The passage back to the phones and bathrooms is tricked out to resemble a bank vault door, with tumblers and cranks. It is up past six-six. Not enough for Blank Frank, who still has to stoop.
Two hours till doors open.
Blank Frank enjoys his quiet time. He has not forgotten the date. He grins at the movie poster framed next to the backbar register. He scored it at a Hollywood memorabilia shop for an obscene price even though he got a professional discount. He had it mounted on foamcore to flatten the creases. He does not permit dust to accrete on the glass. The poster is duotone, with lurid lettering. His first feature film. Every so often some Un/Dead patron with cash to burn will make an exorbitant offer to buy it. Blank Frank always says no with a smile . . . and usually sports a drink on the house for those who ask.
He nudges the volume back up for Bauhaus, doing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” extended mix.
The staff sticks to coffee and iced tea. Blank Frank prefers a nonalcoholic concoction of his own device, which he has christened a Blind Hermit. He rustles up one, now, in a chromium blender, one hand idly on his plasma globe. Michelle gave it to him about four years back, when they first became affordably popular. Touch the exterior and the purple veins of electricity follow your fingertips. Knobs permit you to fiddle with density and amplitude, letting you master the power, feel like Tesla showing off.
Blank Frank likes the writhing electricity.
By now he carries many tattoos. But the one on the back of his left hand—the hand toying with the globe—is his favorite: a stylized planet Earth, with a tiny propellered aircraft circling it. It is old enough that the cobalt-colored dermal ink has begun to blur.
Blank Frank has been utterly bald for three decades. A tiny wisp of hair issues from his occipital. He keeps it in a neat braid, clipped to six inches. It is dead white. Sometimes, when he drinks, the braid darkens briefly. He doesn’t know why.
Michelle used to be a stripper, before management got busted, the club got sold, and Un/Dead was born of the ashes. She likes being a waitress and she likes Blank Frank. She calls him “big guy.” Half the regulars think Blank Frank and Michelle have something steamy going. They don’t. But the fantasy detours them around a lot of potential problems, especially on weekend nights. Blank Frank has learned that people often need fantasies to seem superficially true, whether they really are or not.
Blank Frank dusts. If only the bikers could see him now, being dainty and attentive. Puttering.
Blank Frank rarely has to play bouncer whenever some booze-fueled trouble sets to brewing inside Un/Dead. Mostly, he just strolls up behind the perp and waits for him or her to turn around and apologize. Blank Frank’s muscle duties generally consist of just looming.
If not, he thinks with a smile, there’s always the Vise Grip.
The video monitor shows a Red Top taxicab parking outside the employee entrance. Blank Frank is pleased. This arrival coincides exactly with his finish-up on the bartop, which now gleams like onyx. He taps up the slide pot controlling the mike volume on the door’s security system. There will come three knocks.
Blank Frank likes all this gadgetry. Cameras and shotgun mikes, amps and strobes and strong, clean alternating current to web it all in concert with maestro surety. Blank Frank loves the switches and toggles and running lights. But most of all, he loves the power.
Tap-tap-tap. Precisely. Always three knocks.
“Good,” he says to himself, drawing out the vowel. As he hastens to the door, the song ends and the club fills with the empowered hiss of electrified dead air.
Out by limo. In by cab. One of those eternally bedamned scheduling glitches.
The Count overtips the cabbie because his habit is to deal only in round sums. He never takes . . . change. The Count has never paid taxes. He has cleared forty-three million large in the past year, most of it safely banked in boullion, out-of-country, after overhead and laundering.
The Count raps smartly with his umbrella on the service door of Un/Dead. Blank Frank never makes him knock twice.
It is a pleasure to see Blank Frank’s face overloading the tiny security window; his huge form filling the threshold. The Count enjoys Blank Frank despite his limitations when it comes to social intercourse. It is relaxing to appreciate Blank Frank’s condition-less loyalty, the innate tidal pull of honor and raw justice that seems programmed into the big fellow. Soothing, it is, to sit and drink and chat lightweight chat with him, in the autopilot way normals told their normal acquaintances where they’d gone and what they’d done since their last visit. Venomless niceties.
None of the buildings in Los Angeles have been standing as long as the Count and Blank Frank have been alive.
Alive. Now there’s a word that begs a few new comprehensive, enumerated definitions in the dictionary. Scholars could quibble, but the Count and Blank Frank and Larry were definitely alive. As in “living”—especially Larry. Robots, zombis and the walking dead in general could never get misty about such traditions as this threesome’s annual conclaves at Un/Dead.
The Count’s face is mappy, the wrinkles in his flesh, rice-paper fine. Not creases of age, but tributaries of usage, like the creeks and streams of palmistry. His pallor, as always, tends toward blue. He wears dark shades with faceted, lozenge-shaped lenses of apache tear; mineral crystal stained bloody-black. Behind then, his eyes, bright blue like a husky’s. He forever maintains his hair wet and backswept, what Larry has called his “renegade opera conductor coif.” Dramatic threads of pure cobalt-black streak backward from the snow-white crown and temples. His lips are as thin and bloodless as two slices of smoked liver. His diet does not render him robustly sanguine; it merely sustains him, these days. It bores him.
Before Blank Frank can get the door open, the Count fires up a handrolled cigarette of coca paste and drags the milky smoke deep. It mingles with the dope already loitering in his metabolism and perks him to.
The cab hisses away into the wet night. Rain on the way.
Blank Frank is holding the door for him, grandly, playing butler.
The Count’s brow is overcast. “Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?” Only a ghost of his old, marble-mouthed, middle-Euro accent lingers. It is a trait that the Count has fought for long years to master, and he is justly proud that his English is intelligible. Occasionally, someone asks if he is from Canada.
Blank Frank pulls the exaggerated face of a child committing a big boo-boo. “Oops, sorry.” He clears his throat. “Will you come in?”
Equally theatrically, the Count nods and walks several thousand worth of Armani double-breasted into the cool, dim retreat of the bar. It is nicer when you’re invited, anyway.
“Larry?” says the Count.
“Not yet,” says Blank Frank. “You know Larry—tardy is his twin. There’s real-time and Larry time. Celebrities expect you to expect them to be late.” He points toward the backbar clock, as if that explains everything.
The Count can see perfectly in the dark, even with his murky glasses. As he strips them, Blank Frank notices the silver crucifix dangling from his left earlobe, upside-down.
“You into metal?”
“I like the ornamentation,” says the Count. “I was never too big on jewelry; greedy people try to dig you up and steal it if they know you’re wearing it; just ask Larry. The sort of people who would come to thieve from the dead in the middle of the night are not the class one would choose for friendly diversion.”
Blank Frank conducts the Count to three highback Victorian chairs he has dragged in from the lounge and positioned around a cocktail table. The grouping is directly beneath a pinlight spot, intentionally theatrical.
“Impressive.” The Count’s gaze flickers toward the bar. Blank Frank is way ahead of him.
The Count sits, continuing: “I once knew a woman who was beleaguered by a devastating allergy to cats. And this was a person who felt some deep emotional communion with that species. Then one day, poof! She no longer sneezed; her eyes no longer watered. She could stop taking medications that made her drowsy. She had forced herself to be around cats so much that her body chemistry adapted. The allergy receded.” He fingers the silver cross hanging from his ear, a double threat, once upon a time. “I wear this as a reminder of how the body can triumph. Better living through chemistry.”
“It was the same with me and fire.” Blank Frank hands over a very potent mixed drink called a Gangbang. The Count sips, then presses his eyelids contentedly shut. Like a cat. The drink must be industrial strength. Controlled substances are the Count’s lifeblood.
Blank Frank watches as the Count sucks out another long, deep, soul-drowning draught. “You know Larry’s going to ask again, whether you’re still doing . . . what you’re doing.”
“I brook no apologia or excuses.” Nevertheless, Blank Frank sees him straighten in his chair, almost defensively. “I could say that you provide the same service in this place.” With an outswept hand, he indicts the bar. If nothing else remains recognizable, the Count’s gesticulations remain grandiose; physical exclamation points.
“It’s legal. Food. Drink. Some smoke.”
“Oh, yes, there’s the rub.” The Count pinches the bridge of his nose. He consumes commercial decongestants ceaselessly. Blank Frank expects him to pop a few pills, but instead the Count lays out a scoop of toot inside his mandarin pinky fingernail, which is lacquered ebony, elongated, a talon. Capacious. Blank Frank knows from experience that the hair and nails continue growing long after death. The Count inhales the equivalent of a pretty good dinner at Spago. Cappucino included.
“There is no place in the world I have not lived,” says the Count. “Even the Arctic. The Australian outback. The Kenyan sedge. Siberia. I walk unharmed through fire-fight zones, through sectors of strife. You learn so much when you observe people at war. I’ve survived holocausts, conflagration, even a low-yield one-megaton test, once, just to see if I could do it. Sue me; I was high. But wherever I venture, whatever phylum of human beings I encounter, they all have one thing in common.”
“The red stuff.” Blank Frank half-jests; he dislikes it when the mood grows too grim.
“No. It is their need to be narcotized.” The Count will not be swerved. “With television. Sex. Coffee. Power. Fast cars and sado-games. Emotional encumbrances. More than anything else, with chemicals. All drugs are like instant coffee. The fast purchase of a feeling. You buy the feeling, instead of earning it. You want to relax, go up or go down, get strong or get stupid? You simply swallow or snort or inject, and the world changes because of you. The most lucrative commercial enterprises are those with the most undeniable core simplicity; just look at prostitution. Blood, bodies, armaments, position—all commodities. Human beings want so much out of life.”
The Count smiles, sips. He knows that the end of life is only the beginning. Today is the first day of the rest of your death.
“I do apologize, my old friend, for coming on so aggressively. I’ve rationalized my calling, you see, to the point where it is a speech of lists; I make my case with demographics. Rarely do I find anyone who cares to suffer the speech.”
“You’ve been rehearsing.” Blank Frank recognizes the bold streak the Count gets in his voice when declaiming. Blank Frank has himself been jammed with so many hypos in the past few centuries that he has run out of free veins. He has sampled the Count’s root canal quality coke; it made him irritable and sneezy. The only drugs that still seem to work on him unfailingly are extremely powerful sedatives in large, near-toxic dosages. And those never last long. “Tell me. The drugs. Do they have any effect on you?”
He sees the Count pondering how much honesty is too much. Then the tiny, knowing smile flits past again, a wraith between old comrades.
“I employ various palliatives. I’ll tell you the absolute truth: Mostly it is an affectation, something to occupy my hands. Human habits—vices, for that matter—go a long way toward putting my customers at ease when I am closing negotiations.”
“Now you’re thinking like a merchant,” says Blank Frank. “No royalty left in you?”
“A figurehead gig.” The Count frowns. “Over whom, my good friend, would I hold illimitable dominion? Rock stars. Thrill junkies. Corporate monsters. No percentage in flaunting your lineage there. No. I occupy my time much as a fashion designer does. I concentrate on next season’s line. I brought cocaine out of its Vin Mariani limbo and helped repopularize it in the Eighties. Then crank, then crack, then ice. Designer dope. You’ve heard of Ecstasy. You haven’t heard of Chrome yet. Or Amp. But you will.”
Suddenly a loud booming rattles the big main door, as though the entire DEA is hazarding a spot raid. Blank Frank and the Count are both twisted around in surprise. Blank Frank catches a glimpse of the enormous Browning Hi-Power holstered in the Count’s left armpit.
It’s probably just for the image, Blank Frank reminds himself.
The commotion sounds as though some absolute lunatic is kicking the door and baying at the moon. Blank Frank hurries over, his pulse relaxing as his pace quickens.
It has to be Larry.
“Gah-DAMN it’s peachy to see ya, ya big dead dimwit!” Larry is a foot shorter than Blank Frank. Nonetheless, he bounds in, pounces, and suffocates his amigo is a big wolfy bear hug.
Larry is almost too much to take in with a single pair of eyes.
His skintight red Spandex tights are festooned with spangles and fringe that snake, at knee level, into golden cowboy boots. Glittering spurs on the boots. An embossed belt buckle the size of the grille on a Rolls. Larry is into ornaments, including a feathered earring with a skull of sterling, about a hundred metalzoid bracelets, and a three-finger rap ring of slush-cast 24K that spells out AWOO. His massive, pumped chest fairly bursts from a bright silver Daytona racing jacket, snapped at the waist but not zippered, so the world can see his collarless muscle tee in neon scarlet, featuring his caricature in yellow. Fiery letters on the shirt scream about THE REAL WOLF MAN. Larry is wearing his Ray-Bans at night and jingles a lot whenever he walks.
“Where’s old Bat Man? Yo! I see you skulking in the dark!” Larry whacks Blank Frank on the bicep, then lopes to catch the Count. With the Count, it is always a normal handshake—dry, firm, businesslike. “Off thy bunnage, fang-dude; the party has arriiiived!!”
“Nothing like having a real celebrity in our midst,” says Blank Frank. “But jeez—what the hell is this ‘Real’ Wolf Man crap?”
Larry grimaces as if from a gas pain, showing teeth. “A slight little ole matter of copyrights, trademarks, eminent domain . . . and some f*ckstick who registered himself with the World Wrestling Federation as ‘The Wolfman.’ Turns out to be a guy I bit, my ownself, a couple of decades ago. So I have to be ‘The Real.’ We did a tag-team thing, last Wrestlemania. But we can’t think of a good team name.”
“Runts of the Litter,” opines the Count. Droll.
“Hellpups,” says Blank Frank.
“F*ck ya both extremely much.” Larry grins his trademark grin. Still showing teeth. He snaps off his shades and scans Un/Dead. “What’s to quaff in this pit? Hell, what town is this, anywho?”
“On tour?” Blank Frank plays host.
“Yep. Gotta kick Jake the Snake’s ass in Atlanta next Friday. Gonna strangle him with Damien, if the python’ll put up with it. Wouldn’t want to hurt him for real but might have old Jake pissing blood for a day, if you know what I mean.”
Blank Frank grins; he knows what Larry means. He makes a fist with his left hand, then squeezes his left wrist tightly with his right hand. “Vise Grip him.”
Larry is the inventor of the Vise Grip, second only to the Sleeper Hold in wrestling infamy. The Vise Grip has done Blank Frank a few favors with rowdies in the past. Larry owns the move, and is entitled to wax proud.
“I mean pissing pure blood!” Larry enthuses.
“Ecch,” says the Count. “Please.”
“Sorry, oh cloakless one. Hey! Remember that brewery, made about three commercials with the Beer Wolf before that campaign croaked and ate dirt? That was me!”
Blank Frank hoists his Blind Hermit. “Here’s to the Beer Wolf, then. Long may he howl.”
“Prost,” says the Count.
“F*ckin A.” Larry downs his entire mugful of draft in one slam-dunk. He belches, wipes foam from his mouth and lets go with a lupine yee-hah.
The Count dabs his lips with a cocktail napkin.
Blank Frank watches Larry do his thing and a stiff chaser of memory quenches his brain. That snout, the bicuspids, and those beady, ball-bearing eyes will always give Larry away. His eyebrows run together; that was supposed to be a classic clue in the good old days. Otherwise Larry is not so hirsute. In human form, at least. The hair on his forearms is very fine tan down. Pumping iron and beating up people for a living has bulked out his shoulders. He usually wears his shirts open-necked. T-shirts, he tears the throats out. He is all piston-muscles and zero flab. He is able to squeeze a full beer can in one fist and pop the top with a gunshot bang. His hands are callused and wily. The pentagram on his right palm is barely visible. It has faded, like Blank Frank’s tattoo.
“Cool,” Larry says of the Count’s crucifix.
“Aren’t you wearing a touch as well?” The Count points at Larry’s skull earring. “Or is it the light?”
Larry’s fingers touch the silver. “Yeah. Guilty. Guess we haven’t had to fret that movieland spunk for quite apiece, now.”
“I had fun.” Blank Frank exhibits his tat. “It was good.”
“Goood,” Larry and the Count say together, funning their friend.
All three envision the tiny plane in growly flight, circling a black and white world, forever.
“How long have you had that?” Larry is already on his second mug, foaming at the mouth.
Blank Frank’s pupils widen, filling with his skin illustration. He does not remember.
“At least forty years ago,” says the Count. “They’d changed the logo by the time he’d committed to getting the tattoo.”
“Maybe that was why I did it.” Blank Frank is still a bit lost. He touches the tattoo as though it will lead to a swirl dissolve and an expository flashback.
“Hey, we saved that f*ckin studio from bankruptcy.” Larry bristles. “Us and A&C.”
“They were shown the door, too.” To this day, the Count is understandably piqued about the copyright snafu involving the use of his image. He sees his face everywhere, and does not rate compensation. This abrades his business instinct for the jugular. He understands too well why there must be a Real Wolf Man. “Bud and Lou and you and me and the big guy all went out with the dishwater of the Second World War.”
“I was at Lou’s funeral,” says Larry. “You were lurking the Carpathians.” He turned to Blank Frank. “And you didn’t even know about it.”
“I loved Lou,” says Blank Frank. “Did I ever tell you the story of how I popped him by accident on the set of—”
“Yes.” The Count and Larry speak in unison. This breaks the tension of remembrance tainted by the unfeeling court intrigue of studios. Recall the people, not the things.
Blank Frank tries to remember some of the others. He returns to the bar to rinse his glass. The plasma globe zizzes and snaps calmly, a man-made tempest inside clear glass.
“I heard ole Ace got himself a job at the Museum of Natural History.” Larry refers to Ace Bandage; he has nicknames like this for everybody.
“The Prince,” the Count corrects, “still guards the Princess. She’s on display in the Egyptology section. The Prince cut a deal with museum security. He prowls the graveyard shift; guards the bone rooms. They’ve got him on a diet of synthetic tana leaves. It calmed him down. Like methadone.”
“A night watchman gig,” says Larry, obviously thinking of the low pay scale. But what in hell would the Prince need human coin for, anyway? “Hard to picture.”
“Try looking in a mirror, yourself,” says the Count.
Larry blows a raspberry. “Jealous.”
It is very easy for Blank Frank to visualize the Prince, gliding through the silent, cavernous corridors in the wee hours. The museum is, after all, just one giant tomb.
Larry is fairly certain ole Fish Face—another nickname—escaped from a mad scientist in San Francisco and butterfly-stroked south, probably to wind up in bayou country. He and Larry had shared a solid mammal-to-amphibian simpatico. He and Larry had been the most physically violent of the old crew. Larry still entertains the notion of talking his scaly pal into doing a bout for pay-per-view. He has never been able to work out the logistics of a steel fishtank match, however.
“Griffin?” says the Count.
“Who can say?” Blank Frank shrugs. “He could be standing right here and we wouldn’t know it unless he started singing ‘Nuts in May.’ ”
“He was a misanthrope,” says Larry. “His crazy kid, too. That’s what using drugs will get you.”
This last is a veiled stab at the Count’s calling. The Count expects this from Larry, and stays venomless. The last thing he wants this evening is a conflict over the morality of substance use.
“I dream, sometimes, of those days,” says Blank Frank. “Then I see the films again. The dreams are literalized. It’s scary.”
“Before this century,” says the Count, “I never had to worry that anyone would stockpile my past.” Of the three, he is the most paranoid where personal privacy is concerned.
“You’re a romantic.” Larry will only toss an accusation like this in special company. “It was important to a lot of people that we be monsters. You can’t deny what’s nailed down there in black and white. There was a time when the world needed monsters like that.”
They each considered their current occupations, and found that they did indeed still fit into the world.
“Nobody’s gonna pester you now,” Larry presses on. “Don’t bother to revise your past—today, your past is public record, and waiting to contradict you. We did our jobs. How many people become mythologically legendary for just doing their jobs?”
“Mythologically legendary?” mimics the Count. “You’ll grow hair on your hands from using all those big words.”
“Bite this.” Larry offers the unilateral peace symbol.
“No, thank you; I’ve already dined. But I have brought something for you. For both of you.”
Blank Frank and Larry both notice the Count is now speaking as though a big Mitchell camera is grinding away, somewhere just beyond the grasp of sight. He produces a small pair of wrapped gifts, and hands them over.
Larry wastes no time ripping into his. “Weighs a ton.”
Nestled in styro popcorn is a wolf’s head—savage, streamlined, smiling. The gracile canine neck is socketed.
“It’s from the walking stick,” says the Count. “All that was left.”
“No kidding.” Larry’s voice grows small for the first time that evening. The wolf’s head seems to gain weight in his grasp. Two beats of his powerful heart later, his eyes seem a bit wet.
Blank Frank’s gift is much smaller and lighter.
“You were a conundrum,” says the Count. He enjoys playing emcee. “So many choices, yet never easy to buy for. Some soil from Transylvania? Water from Loch Ness? A chunk of some appropriate ruined castle?”
What Blank Frank unwraps is a ring. Old gold, worn smooth of its subtler filigree. A small ruby set in the grip of a talon. He holds it to the light.
“As nearly as I could discover, that ring once belonged to a man named Ernst Volmer Klumpf.”
“Whoa,” says Larry. Weird name.
Blank Frank puzzles it. He holds it toward the Count, like a lens.
“Klumpf died a long time ago,” says the Count. “Died and was buried. Then he was disinterred. Then a few of his choicer parts were recycled by a skillful surgeon of our mutual acquaintance.”
Blank Frank stops looking so blank.
“In fact, part of Ernst Volmer Klumpf is still walking around today . . . tending bar for his friends, among other things.”
The new expression on Blank Frank’s pleases the Count. The ring just barely squeezes onto the big guy’s left pinky—his smallest finger.
Larry, to avoid choking up, decides to make noise. Showing off, he vaults the bartop and draws his own refill. “This calls for a toast.” He hoists his beer high, slopping the head. “To dead friends. Meaning us.”
The Count pops several capsules from an ornate tin and washes them down with the last of his Gangbang. Blank Frank murders his Blind Hermit.
“Don’t even think of the bill,” says Blank Frank, who knows of the Count’s habit of paying for everything. The Count smiles and nods graciously. In his mind, the critical thing is to keep the tab straight. Blank Frank pats the Count on the shoulder, hale and brotherly, since Larry is out of reach. The Count dislikes physical contact but permits this because it is, after all, Blank Frank.
“Shit man, we could make our own comeback sequel, with all the talent in this room,” Larry says. “Maybe hook up with some of those new guys. Do a monster rally.”
It could happen. They all look significantly at each other. A brief stink of guilt, of culpability, like a sneaky fart in a dimly lit chamber.
Make that dimly-lit torture dungeon, thinks Blank Frank, who never forgets the importance of staying in character.
Blank Frank thinks about sequels. About how studios had once jerked their marionette strings, compelling them to come lurching back for more, again and again, adding monsters when the brew ran weak, until they had all been bled dry of revenue potential and dumped at a bus stop to commence the long deathwatch that had made them nostalgia.
It was like living death, in its way.
And these gatherings, year upon year, had become sequels in their own right.
The realization is depressing. It sort of breaks the back of the evening for Blank Frank. He stands friendly and remains as chatty as he ever gets. But the emotion has soured.
Larry chugs so much that he has grown a touch bombed. The Count’s chemicals intermix and buzz; he seems to sink into the depths of his coat, his chin ever-closer to the butt of the gun he carries. Larry drinks deep, then howls. The Count plugs one ear with a finger on his free hand. “I wish he wouldn’t do that,” he says in a proscenium-arch sotto voce that indicates his annoyance is mostly token.
When Larry tries to hurdle the bar again, moving exaggeratedly as he almost always does, he manages to plant his big wrestler’s elbow right into the glass on Blank Frank’s framed movie poster. It dents inward with a sharp crack, cobwebbing into a snap puzzle of fracture curves. Larry swears, instantly chagrined. Then, lamely, he offers to pay for the damage.
The Count, not unexpectedly, counter-offers to buy the poster, now that it’s damaged.
Blank Frank shakes his massive square head at both of his friends. So many years, among them. “It’s just glass. I can replace it. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
The thought that he has done this before depresses him further. He sees the reflection of his face, divided into staggered components in the broken glass, and past that, the lurid illustration. Him then. Him now.
Blank Frank touches his face as though it is someone else’s. His fingernails have always been black. Now they are merely fashionable.
Larry remains embarrassed about the accidental damage and the Count begins spot-checking his Rolex every five minutes or so, as though he is pressing the envelope on an urgent appointment. Something has spoiled the whole mood of their reunion, and Blank Frank is angry that he can’t quite pinpoint the cause. When he is angry, his temper froths quickly.
The Count is the first to rise. Decorum is all. Larry tries one more time to apologize. Blank Frank stays cordial, but is overpowered by the sudden strong need to get them the hell out of Un/Dead.
The Count bows stiffly. His limo manifests precisely on schedule. Larry gives Blank Frank a hug. His arms can reach all the way ’round.
“Au revoir,” says the Count.
“Stay dangerous,” says Larry.
Blank Frank closes and locks the service door. He monitors, via the tiny security window, the silent, gliding departure of the Count’s limousine, the fading of Larry’s spangles into the night.
Still half an hour till opening. The action at Un/Dead doesn’t really crank until midnight anyway, so there’s very little chance that some bystander will get hurt.
Blank Frank bumps up the volume and taps his club boot. A eulogy with a beat. He loves Larry and the Count in his massive, broad, uncompromisingly loyal way, and hopes they will understand his actions. He hopes that his two closest friends are perceptive enough, in the years to come, to know that he is not crazy.
Not crazy, and certainly not a monster.
While the music plays, he fetches two economy-sized plastic bottles of lantern kerosene, which he ploshes liberally around the bar, saturating the old wood trim. Arsonists call such flammable liquids “accelerator.”
In the scripts, it was always an overturned lantern, or a flung torch from a mob of villagers, that touched off the conclusive inferno. Mansions, mad labs, even stone fortresses not only burned, but blew up, eliminating all phyla of menacing monsters until they were needed anew.
Dark threads snake through the tiny warrior braid at the base of Blank Frank’s skull. All those Blind Hermits, don’t you know.
The purple electricity arcs to meet his finger and trails after it loyally. He unplugs the plasma globe and cradles it beneath one giant forearm.
The movie poster, he leaves hanging in its violated frame.
He snaps the sulphur match with a black thumbnail. Ignition craters and blackens the head, eating it with a sharp hiss. Un/Dead’s PA throbs to the bass line of “D.O.A.” Phosphorus tinges the unmoving air. The match fires orange to yellow to steady blue-white. Its flamepoint reflects from Blank Frank’s large black pupils. He can see himself, as if by candlelight, fragmented by broken picture glass. The past. In his grasp is the plasma globe, unblemished, pristine, awaiting a new charge of energy. The future.
He recalls his past experiences with fire, all of them. Burn down the monster. He drops the match into the thin pool of accelerator glistening on the bartop and the flame grows, quietly.
By striking the match, he has just purchased a feeling, as the Count would no doubt observe.
The Monster blunderingly topples a rack of beakers, a modern-day sorcerer’s brew of flammables and caustics . . .
Never has he precipitated the end on purpose. Never, except in the first sequel. We belong dead. He was making a point.
The movie poster stays behind, in its smashed frame. That will be the price paid. Sacrifice something valuable.
More convincing, that way. He is staying dangerous.
Good.
And Blank Frank does, in fact, feel better.
Light springs, hard reddish-white now, behind him as he makes his exit and locks the door of Un/Dead. The night is cool by contrast, near foggy. Condensation mists the plasma globe as he strolls away, pausing once beneath a streetlamp to appreciate the ring on his little finger. He doesn’t need to eat, to sleep.
Uninjured by the cataclysm, the Monster stumbles, grunting, away from the village and into the forest . . .
But this time, thinks Blank Frank, the old Monster knows where he’s going.
He’ll miss Michelle and the rest of the club staff. But he must move on, because he is not like them. He has all the time he’ll ever need, and friends who will be around forever . . .
Un/Dead blazes. The night swallows him.
Blank Frank likes the power.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates was born in Millerport, New York, in 1938. She received a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. In 1962 she married Raymond J. Smith, settling in Detroit. There she wrote the novel them (1969), a searing study of the race riots plaguing the city. Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada; from 1978 onward, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University, where she is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Oates, one of the most prolific of contemporary American writers, has received many awards for her work, including the National Book Award and the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature.
The supernatural has been a pervasive theme in much of Oates’s work as novelist and short story writer. A series of four novels, Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), and My Heart Laid Bare (1998), applies the Gothic mode to American history and culture. Bellefleur features seven generations of grotesque characters, including a vampire, a mad scientist, and a mass murderer, dwelling in a haunted mansion. Much of Oates’s horror work is nonsupernatural, as in the novel Black Water (1992), the short novel Beasts (2001), and the novel The Tattooed Girl (2003).
Oates has also utilized supernatural horror in many of her short stories. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) contains the highest proportion of horror tales, but several of her other collections include one or more specimens. Oates has compiled the anthology American Gothic Tales (1996), the introduction to which elucidates her theory of supernatural writing. She has also edited Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (1997).
“Demon,” a short story first published in the small-press chap-book Demon and Other Tales (1996), is a gripping and ambiguous horror tale in which the supernatural may or may not come into play.