Joe Vampire (4 page)

This was why I had decided to take the invitation to Pomme when Michelle – another office friend, and
only
an office friend, though not even much of that anymore – told me she had a nowhere-near-the-office friend by the name of Dawn who I might be interested in meeting. I figured that aside from band practice and our shit gigs at birthday parties opening for eighties cover bands, it had been a very long time since I’d gone anywhere remotely fun. And I might as well have a back-up plan, in case this universe never catches up with the other and Chloe remains a non-thing. And Pomme was supposed to be a hotbed of Exciting First Moments. This could have been the shot in the arm I needed. As it turned out, it was more like a sleazy, saliva-soaked shot in the neck. 

Well… what do you know? 

I guess I’m ready to talk about how it happened.

POST 5

Those Crazy Homophones

So I met up with Michelle and her friends at Pomme that Saturday night. It’s one of those ultra-hip places that serves drinks made of ferret tears and gold shavings served in glasses with no real bottoms so you can’t set them down on a table; you have to commit to carrying them everywhere you go. The club is actually an abandoned mattress factory long known as an underground flop house for modern urban hobos, but Michelle’s cousin bought the place a few months ago and turned it into a nightclub after running the hobos off. 

Judging by the oil drum fires and the aroma of roasted cat outside, I think he might have missed a few. 

Inside, the music was too loud for me to hear Michelle’s introductions, so I just smiled and shook hands with everyone. There were three phenomenally hot girls who looked pretty happy to meet me, a relatively angry sort-of hot girl who barely made eye contact and a guy in a fedora with a way-too-unbuttoned shirt and a sizable chain dribbling down his neck. The whole group looked far more prostitutional than I had imagined. Since the noise level was three decibels shy of shattering my eardrums, I spent the first half of the evening pretending I could hear the conversation, and that I knew which of these ladies was my date. I started to get the impression that instead of a one-on-one set up, this might be some sort of group style situation, one of those modern things that keep you from getting stuck on a date with someone you might not gel with. That way the whole group can sort of pair up – and hook up – as needed. It may have sounded like a wet dream come true, but my interpersonal skills were shaky when there was only a single woman to deal with; a small brothel’s worth could have easily caused deep psychological damage. It might have been the ferret tears talking, but when Michelle screamed that everyone was headed to a sushi bar up the street and wanted me to come along, I was completely in… and as surprised as anyone that I would be. I downed the last of my third round and laid the glass on the table as everyone sort of clustered together like a fleshy molecule. We drunk-danced our way to the door in an amorphous sexual cloud, drifting off toward the sushi bar. 

My next memory, however, does not take place in a sushi bar.

It takes place in my house on the morning after, when I woke up alone beneath my bed with my shirt dragged over my head, sleeves knotted below my chin, and my pants on my arms instead of my legs. It had been a very long time since I’d done any serious drinking, but I didn’t think I’d be such a booze pussy. I made my way to the bathroom in a woozy stumble and untangled myself from my shirt and pants. To my juvenile delight I found an incredible war wound of a hickey on my neck. It was already eggplant purple – nearly black, even – and sort of ached. I couldn’t remember if there had been actual sex involved, but it looked like something noteworthy must have happened. Then my head started throbbing and my stomach fell into a permanent lurch, so I spent the rest of the day asleep in the bathtub. 

I made my best effort to hit the office on Monday, sort of sweet on the thought of having had a wild time even though I still felt like I’d been on the losing end of a jailhouse love affair that I couldn’t recall. I chose the handiest item I could find to cover the hickey, which also turned out to be the most conspicuous: a way-too-long scarf my brother had given me for Christmas, the kind worn by celebrities who probably think this blog is about them. It finally came in handy, and at least I didn’t appear diseased. Just extremely douchey. Michelle found me as I shuffled toward my desk. “You two must have really hit it off after we left you behind.”

“I guess so… I don’t remember much. This thing hurts like a bitch, though.” I lifted the scarf and showed her, bragging a little. “I think it might be infected… it feels more like a bite than a hickey.”

She didn’t seem surprised by that. “Oh. Yeah.” 

“Remind me which one I was with again… they were all pretty hot, but I’m kind of cloudy on the details. Was it the one in the blue skirt? Or the blonde who sort of licked her lips whenever she took a drink? Or the one with the mad cleavage who kept fingering the rim of her glass… was that Dawn?”

She just stared at me. “No. Don was the one with the fedora.” 

I choked on my own air. “The
dude
? My date was a
guy
?”

“Well, yeah.”

“But you said her name was
Dawn
!”

“
His
name is Don.”

Fucking phonetics. “You mean I got this festering wound from a guy with a feathered hat and a pimp chain?” It suddenly hurt worse. “He wasn’t even slightly cool.” 

Michelle cringed. “Shit. I’m sorry. You never talk about women, so I just assumed you were gay.”

I had not seen this coming. “Gay? I’m not gay; I’m just… ”
Damaged goods
seemed a tad too honest. “I’m just shy.”

“Yeah; I thought you were shy-gay.” Like that’s a real thing. “Listen, I’m sure it’s fine.”

Fine? I was staring down the barrel of Hepatitis C, possibly given to me by some guy dressed like an extra from a Poison video. It was definitely not fine. “Who is this Don?”

“I don’t know him that well; he just sort of glommed onto me and the girls a few weeks ago. He says the funniest stuff, and he pays for all of our drinks, so we let him hang. I thought you two might like each other.”

“Apparently he liked
me
,” I pointed out, “or I wouldn’t have this thing oozing out of my neck… it’s probably ruining my liver already. Who bites someone on a first date, anyway?” 

“Um, about that… ” And then she dropped the real bombshell, even bigger than the
Oops, I Set You Up With a Guy
revelation. “Don sort of thinks of himself as a vampire.” 

It sounded funny back then, when I still thought vampires only existed in books and movies, so I laughed. “A vampire?” 

As if the fedora wasn’t awesome enough.

POST 6

And So It Began…

Now that Michelle’s friend Don had spent an evening chewing on my neck, there was a very real possibility that I would come down with something nasty in addition to still feeling blasted from the sake. The vampire thing was creepy enough without needing a true supernatural element. I’ve seen lurid investigations on Friday night news programs about people who fill some sort of perceived leak in their energy by drinking the blood of others. They wear tiny top hats and have fang-shaped dental implants, and give themselves names like Mephistopheles Nevermore and Morticia Sucksalot. 

Okay… I made those up. I don’t remember what their names were. 

But it was a real news story. 

I figured Don was one of these weirdos, someone who might turn up on
To Catch a Predator: Vampire Edition.
 I also assumed that this wasn’t his first rodeo, so who knows what kinds of brain-eating microbes might be rampantly reproducing in his slobber. He hadn’t exactly looked like a testament to modern hygiene. I couldn’t help but wonder where else on my body he might have put his bacteria-laden pie hole while I was passed out. It may have been due to the gradual realization throughout the day of these and other disturbing facts about my so-called date, but I ended up feeling more and more shitty as time passed. I finally checked out early and went home to sleep, hoping it was just the remains of the hangover or an ensuing battle with bad fish from the sushi bar. Shortly afterward, I got my first taste of Vampire Shit.

That so doesn’t sound how it’s supposed to.

I took to the couch and only left to hit the bathroom, waiting until the very last minute to make the dash. Sometimes the delay didn’t pay off. My carpet paid the price on those occasions. Mind you, at the time I really thought I was only fighting off a bastard virus, something Nyquil couldn’t quite take the edges off of. All of my best intentions of heading to an urgent care kept falling by the wayside whenever the urge to shit liquid took over my body. Honestly, it was easy to mistake this sickness for something seasonal; the whole thing felt akin to the worst flu imaginable, something I would have gauged to be beyond bird flu and swine flu combined. It seemed like nature somehow skipped right over the rest of the farm and shot straight to giraffe or elephant flu, or maybe orangutan. In my soul-rotting delirium I couldn’t quite figure out how Don would have had contact with any of those creatures unless he had recently returned from an animal fetish sex safari. But my memory of the night was riddled with holes, and the guy was pretty gross, so nothing could be ruled out at that point. I never for one second thought I was actually becoming a vampire, though. 

Okay… maybe I did. Just for a second, though.

But we’ve already discussed that.

Onward.

The symptoms came one by one in a spiteful, continuous parade – first the arctic nerve chills, then joint-killing body aches, followed by a roiling fever, swells of nausea, showers of sweat, and ultimately the never-ending spigot of water poop. On day two, when I realized it wasn’t going to be a short-term deal, I gave in and let it take me. With as much repulsive bathroom agony as I was in, I was sure the next day would be the pinnacle and everything would be on the upswing from there on out. But it just kept getting worse. I wondered if I wasn’t actually dying. It seemed like everything was draining from me, more than just the fluids I was trying to drink. And then visions came, nightmarish scenes featuring me burning alive, falling endlessly through blackened skies, smashing into pieces as I finally hit the ground. At one point I could have sworn that I – or some version of me – had literally climbed the wall, like my tortured soul had escaped my aching flesh and was staring back at me in pity from my popcorn ceiling. I had no fight left by then, and I figured that this must be the end of me. And my DVR was full of stuff I hadn’t watched yet.

Damn. 

The doorbell woke me from my dying. 

It was Hube, my boy, stopping by to make sure I was okay and rouse me from my demise. If there’s anyone in the world more eager than me to please people, it’s Hube. He makes me look like a heartless shit. To tell the truth, I was a little surprised that he hadn’t made contact earlier. “Dude, what’s the deal? You haven’t answered your phone in forever, voicemail’s full, no Facebook posts… people at work are flipping out.” 

I saw through the door as he closed it that it was night. He kept a little distance, not sure if I was still contagious. And also, I smelled like an ass taco filled with burning hair. So I understood. “Sorry… didn’t mean to worry you,” I said, and told him I’d been too sick to move let alone pick up a phone or get online. He told me that Human Resources was hot to fire me for not showing up and not calling, but he begged them off by saying I had a doctor’s note that I’d fax them as soon as I could. Like I’m twelve and missed gym class. Seeing as how I’d filled in my boss on Monday before I left, I was surprised they were taking this so seriously. Three days out sick wasn’t such a big deal. Then Hube told me I had been MIA for a total of nine days. 

Nine, not three.

That orangutan flu really messes with your head.

I told him I was doing much better now, though I wasn’t sure how true it was. The symptoms had died down for the most part, and I was more starving than anything at that point. Hube’s eyes seemed to see through my bullshit, as if however I looked was way more convincing than my words. “Band practice tonight,” he said cautiously, “only if you’re up for it. Lazer’s a little ripped that you’ve missed the last two, but I told him you were in pretty bad shape.” See what I mean? That’s Hube in a nutshell: always covering for me and making me look more together than I am. 

Lazer, on the other hand, is just a prick.

I said I was in, and he offered to drive, so I went to wash the puke out of my hair and put on real clothes. When I caught myself in the mirror and saw what Hube must have seen, I felt the nausea return. My skin wasn’t just sallow or pale; it was gray, like all the blood in me had gone still. My eyes were sunken and lifeless, and my face was drawn, which was reasonable since apparently I hadn’t eaten in more than a week. The hickey-bite had cleared up for the most part, having mellowed down to a greenish-yellow stain. I could now see in the center what the bloody black bruise had concealed: a set of teeth marks – not two little holes like you see on TV when someone is bitten by a vampire, but a whole sloppy double horseshoe of red scabs with two super-punctures on either side of the top half, as if Don had tried to take a proper chunk out of me. Whatever disease he gave me seemed to be on its way out, though, and at least I could function again. I walked out and asked Hube how I looked. “Slightly less dead than you did a minute ago. But only slightly.” To be honest, I only felt slightly less dead, too. He pointed to the bite. “I take it your little encounter with Michelle’s friend was eventful.”