The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

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Again with the vampires.

You know, I’m so over the idea of walking dead with a penchant for plasma. There was a vampire sex club where I used to live, and people would line up on Saturdays to get in, dressed in black, flowing clothes, white pancake makeup, black lipstick and onyx eyeliner. I stared, sure, because it’s what they wanted, but I didn’t taunt or tease. I felt sorry for all the effort they were going to, especially when the skin colour they coveted was my natural hue, and that the contrast to my black clothes made me gleam in the moonlight. I would stand in line for the club across the street (I had a very brief interest in club life, but mine was called Zoo Bar, and it was supposed to be a sexually themed place, but it wasn’t, which was why I went). The vampire place wasn’t that sexual either, it just had the title to get the numbers at the door. Mostly, the people who went there sat around looking tragic and scary in the half-dark. They drank, they threw up on the same corners as everyone else. There were drugs, too, but they were in every bar up and down the street, and the only real difference in the people who frequented the place was the abundance of pretension, the quest to aspire to something different and interesting, the need to belong to something meant to intimidate. It always fell short. The idea of a place that blended death and sex was appealing to the young and immature. When you get older, you sort of want to keep those things separate, unless you’re into…well, moving on.

There was a few people in my life who were into it, though. My cousin, for one. She did the ripped nylon, multi-layered black skirt, black-lipstick, long, red kinked hair thing. She had a Satanic bible under her bed. She basically exuded mayhem and relished it. Her friend, Stafford, wore a cape and fake fangs (everyday, not just on festive ones) and he would practice staring deeply into someone’s eyes when they spoke to him, often reducing them to shivering, pathetic messes. I remember running the refreshment booth at a school blood drive, and in they walked, a little gaggle of living dead wannabes, and it unnerved a few people, which is what they wanted. I rolled my eyes, because I knew these people. These were the rejects of yesterday, the kids who were a little odd and sought some kind of belonging, if only with each other. They wanted to shake up the cheerleaders and the quarterbacks, who laughed behind their backs but kept a safe distance. That actually made me laugh a little. When Stafford came to my table for a doughnut and a glass of orange juice, he did it with a little flourish, raising his cape over the bottom half of his face. He stared at me with his Houdini eyes, trying to burn his way through my skin, and I sighed and reached for a cup before saying, ‘I think the juice is B negative, but I can’t be sure.’ He looked at me harder then, unflustered. I stared back at him, just as hard and white-skinned, before adding, ‘Dude, you have a booger in your nose’. No, it wasn’t as eloquent as ‘I vant to suck yer blawwwwd’, but it was enough to send him fleeing from the room. I think he works at a bank these days, and I’m fairly certain he’s cape-less. My cousin is also a born-again…something or other, not sure which. She was never anything before, raised in a religiously unconscious family, so she hunted around until she found one that gave her money. Her church donates funds to her in exchange for her raising her kids with their doctrine. Turns out she did not give up blood-sucking.

My first real boyfriend, J. bit my lip hard when we were kissing, so that he could taste my blood. Not a bright boy. He said he needed to taste me, that he wanted to know my essence. A fan of Vlad the Impaler, who lacked the stuff to impale, he annoyed me with his nonsense and we broke up. Well, there were other reasons, but that one was on the list. It hurt, and it was weird, and it made me realize how stupid he actually was. Look, I’d seen ‘The Doors’ like he did, and I’d watched the scenes with the naked hand-slicing and the Wiccan wedding ceremony and the references to Dionysis. It was a movie, J., and no one is buying that Jim did any of that nonsense. My obsession with Jim Morrison had little to do with his alleged dabbling with bodily fluids. I love him in spite of it.

There was also Steven, a boy who was three years my senior, whose mother was chummy with my mother. When we’d visit, he’d often set his sights on me, telling me that he wanted to play ‘Vampire’, whatever that was. When we slept over at his house, and I was sleeping soundly on the couch in front of the fireplace, I woke up to find him under the blanket, trying to touch me. Luckily, my dad came in and set him straight, but I’m not sure if my father really knew what the guy was up to. Another time, I was at school, and the bell went, signalling the end of recess. As my friends and I began to move toward the doors at the end of the playground, a hand reached out and pulled me behind some trees. It was Steven, and he had a hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming. Instinctively, I knew what was going on, even if I didn’t really understand. I was eight, but I sensed something sexual and violent in him. I struggled, he fought me. I tried to run away, he restrained me. Finally, I bit down on his hand as hard as I could, and I felt my teeth sink into the skin between his index finger and his thumb. A flood of pennies filled my mouth, and he screamed in agony as I held on like a rabid pitbull. He begged me to let go, and I did, with a smudgeof his blood around my lips before running off toward the school. He needed stitches, and when his mother called my mother to complain, I told my mother what happened, which she relayed over the phone.

‘Well, then,’ his mother said, ‘I guess he deserved it’.

Yes, he did, and it was clear to me then, that the vampire had more to fear in me, than I did in them. Last I heard, he had left his family and gone off somewhere, never to be heard from again. I don’t much care if he’s dead or alive, but I’m most certain that if he is dead, he’s not walking around looking for a milky white neck to sink his teeth into.

I hope that’s the end of these characters.