Anno Dracula (22 page)

Andy was in a sulk. Truman Capote, lisping through silly fangs, had spitefully told him about an Alexander Cockburn parody, modelled on the lunch chatter of Warhol and Colacello with Imelda Marcos as transcribed in
Inter/VIEW.
Andy, of course, had to sit down in the middle of the party and pore through the piece. In Cockburn’s version, Bob and Andy took Count Dracula to supper at Mortimer’s Restaurant on the Upper East Side and prodded him with questions like ‘Don’t you wish you’d been able to spend Christmas in Transylvania?’ and ‘Is there still pressure on you to think of your image and act a certain way?’

Johnny understood the real reason that the supposedly unflappable artist was upset was that he had been scooped. After this, Andy wouldn’t be able to run an interview with Dracula. He’d been hoping Johnny would channel the Father’s ghost, as others had channelled such
Inter/ VIEW
subjects as the Assyrian wind demon Pazuzu and Houdini. Andy didn’t prize Johnny just because he was a vampire; it was important that he was of the direct Dracula line.

He didn’t feel the Father with him so much, though he knew he was always there. It was as if he had absorbed the great ghost almost completely, learning the lessons of the Count, carrying on his mission on Earth. The past was fog, now. His European life and death were faint, and he told varying stories because he remembered differently each time. But in the fog stood the red-eyed, black-caped figure of Dracula, reaching out to him, reaching out through him.

Sometimes, Johnny Pop thought he
was
Dracula. The Churchward woman had almost believed it, once. And Andy would be so delighted if it were true. But Johnny wasn’t
just
Dracula.

He was no longer unique. There were other vampires in the country, the city, at this party. They weren’t the Olde Worlde seigneurs of the Transylvania Movement, at once arrogant and pitiful, but Americans, if not by birth then inclination. Their extravagant names had a copy-of-a-copy paleness, suggesting hissy impermanence: Sonja Blue, Santanico Pandemonium, Skeeter, Scumbalina. Metaphorical (or actual?) children-in-darkness of Andy Warhol, the first thing they did upon rising from the dead was - like an actor landing a first audition - change their names. Then, with golden drac running in their veins, they sold themselves to the dhamps, flooding to New York where the most suckheads were. In cash, they were richer than most castle-bound TM elders, but they coffined in camper vans or at the Y, and wore stinking rags.

Andy snapped out of his sulk. A vampire youth called Whistler paid homage to him as the Master, offering him a criss-crossed arm. Andy stroked the kid’s wounds, but held back from sampling the blood.

Johnny wondered if the hook he felt was jealousy.

Johnny and Andy lolled on the backseat of the limo with the sun-roof open, playing chicken with the dawn.

The chatter of the night’s parties still ran around Johnny’s head, as did the semi-ghosts he had swallowed with his victims’ blood. He willed a calm cloud to descend upon the clamour of voices and stilled his brain. For once, the city was quiet.

He was bloated with multiple feedings - at every party, boys and girls offered their necks to him - and Andy seemed flushed enough to suggest he had accepted a few discreet nips somewhere along the course of the night. Johnny felt lassitude growing in him, and knew that after relieving himself and letting the Good Catholics go to work, he would need to hide in the refrigerated coffin unit that was his New York summer luxury for a full day.

The rectangle of sky above was starless pre-dawn blue-grey. Red tendrils were filtering through, reflected off the glass frontages of Madison Avenue. The almost-chill haze of four a.m. had been burned away in an instant, like an ancient elder, and it would be another murderously hot day, confining them both to their lairs for a full twelve hours.

They said nothing, needed to say nothing.

The Hallowe’en party at 54 was desperately lavish. Steve made him Guest of Honour, naming him the Official Spectre at the Feast.

In a brief year, Johnny had become this town’s favourite monster. Andy was Vampire Master of New York, but Johnny Pop was Prince of Darkness, father and furtherer of a generation of dhamps, scamps and vamps. There were songs about him (‘Fame, I’m Gonna Live Forever’), he had been in a movie (at least his smudge had) with Andy (Ulli Lommel’s
Drac Queens),
he got more neck than a giraffe, and there was a great deal of interest in him from the Coast.

Cakes shaped like coffins and castles were wheeled into 54, and the Man in the Moon sign was red-eyed and fang-toothed in homage. Liberace and Elton John played duelling pianos, while the Village People - the Indian as the Wolf Man, the Cowboy as the Creature From the Black Lagoon, the Construction Worker as the Monster, the Biker as Dracula, the Cop as the Thing From Another World, the Soldier as the Hunchback of Notre Dame - belted out a cover of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s ‘The Monster Mash’.

The day drac became a proscribed drug by act of Congress, Johnny stopped manufacturing it personally and impressed a series of down-on-their-luck
nosferatu
to be undead factories. The price of the product shot up again, as did the expense of paying off the cops and the mob, but his personal profits towered almost beyond his mind’s capacity to count. He knew the bubble would burst soon, but was ready to diversify, to survive into another era. It would be the eighties soon. That was going to be a different time. The important thing was going to be not drac or fame or party invites, but money. Numbers would be his shield and his castle, his spells of protection, invisibility and fascination.

He didn’t dance so much, now. He had made his point. But he was called onto the floor. Steve set up a chant of ‘Johnny Pop, Johnny Pop’ that went around the crowd. Valerie Perrine and Steve Guttenberg gave him a push. Nastassja Kinski and George Burns slapped his back. Peter Bogdanovich and Dorothy Stratten kissed his cheeks. He slipped his half-caped Versace jacket off and tossed it away, cleared a space, and performed, not to impress or awe others as before, but for himself, perhaps for the last time. He had never had such a sense of his own power. He no longer heard the Father’s voice, for he was the Father. All the ghosts of this city, of this virgin continent, were his to command and consume.

Here ended the American Century. Here began, again, the Anni Draculae.

Huge, lovely eyes fixed him from the crowd. A nun in full penguin suit. Red, red heart-shaped lips and ice-white polished cheeks. Her pectoral cross, stark silver against a white collar, smote him with a force that made him stagger. She wasn’t a real nun, of course, just as the Village People weren’t real monsters. This was a party girl in a costume, trying to probe the outer reaches of bad taste.

She touched his mind and an electricity sparked.

He remembered her. The girl whose name was Death, whom he had bitten and left holding a scarf to a leaking neck wound. He had taken from her but now, he realised, she had taken from him. She was not a vampire, but he had turned her, changed her, made her a huntress.

She daintily lifted her cross and held it up. Her face was a gorgeous blank.

Her belief gave the symbol power and he was smitten, driven back across the flashing dance floor, between stumbling dancers. Death glided after him like a ballet dancer, instinctively avoiding people, face red and green and purple and yellow with the changing light. At the dead centre of the dance floor, she held her cross up high above her head. It was reflected in the glitter ball, a million shining cruciforms dancing over the crowds and the walls.

Johnny felt each reflected cross as a whiplash.

All his friends were here. Andy was up there on a balcony, somewhere, looking down with pride. And Steve had planned this whole evening for him. This was where his rise had truly begun, where he had sold his first suck, made his first dollars. But he was not safe here. Death had consecrated Studio 54 against him.

Other vampires in the crowd writhed in pain. Johnny saw the shredded-lace punk princess who called herself Scumbalina holding her face, smoking crosses etched on her cheeks and chin. Even the dhampires were uncomfortable, haemorrhaging from noses and mouths, spattering the floor and everyone around with their tainted blood.

Death was here for him, not the others.

He barged through the throng, and made it to the street. Dawn was not far off. Death was at his heels.

A taxi was waiting for him.

Inside the hack, he told the driver to take him to the Bramford.

He saw the nun step out of 54 as the vehicle moved off. He searched inside himself for the Father, willing the panic he had felt to subside. His flight from the party would be remembered. It did not do to show such weakness.

Something was still wrong. What was it?

The nun had shaken him. Had the girl become a real nun? Was she despatched by some Vatican bureau to put an end to him? The church had always had its vampire killers. Or was she working with the mafia? To evict him from the business he had created, so the established crime families could claim drac fortunes for their own. Perhaps she was a minion of one of his own kind, a cat’s paw of the Transylvania Movement? At the moment, Baron Meinster - the treacherous dandy, still desperate to be King of the Cats - was petitioning the UN for support. TM elders considered Johnny an upstart who was bringing vampirism into disrepute by sharing it so widely.

Throughout the centuries, Dracula had faced and bested enemies almost without number. To be a visionary was always to excite the enmity of inferiors. Johnny felt the Father in him, and sat back in the cab, planning.

He needed soldiers. Vampires. Dhampires. Get. An army, to protect him. Intelligence, to foresee new threats. He would start with Rudy and Elvira. It was time he gave them what they wanted, and turned them. Patrick Bateman, his young investment advisor, was another strong prospect. Men like Bateman, made vampires, would be perfect for the coming era. The Age of Money.