Blood Lite II: Overbite (30 page)

This was something new for me. A gaping, wrinkled mess of missing and yellowed teeth and, yes, hairy gums, and flip-flappy coated tongue, clamping onto the fatty part of my calf—if such a ruined mouth could be said to “clamp”—proceeding to vigorously
massage
its way up my leg.

It’s not a favorite memory. To this day I break into severe facial twitching when presented with a plate of succotash.

Some abrasion and scratching did occur, some blood was drawn, but for the most part it tickled, so much so that I became rather hysterical, jumping up and down trying to get Grandpa Jules off my leg.

I’ve never known whether they were trying to assist him or me, but before I knew what was happening my mother and my father, Lonnie, and a couple of other family members had surrounded us and, grabbing whatever on our bodies seemed grab-able, were tugging and pulling, snarling and yipping, as if somebody had exploded a hamburger bomb at the dog park.

Grandpa, in his nervous excitement, began humping my leg at the same time he was biting it. I have to admit this was a dining experience I personally had never attempted.

Finally someone brought in a garden hose and opened it up on the center of the melee. There ended my ceremony before I even had the chance to announce, “Today, I am a werewolf.”

All that occurred years ago and, mercifully, some of the more sordid details have blurred through the mists of time. Uncle Verge and Grandpa Jules are now sharing quality time at a local nursing home, climbing the fences and howling whenever the mood strikes them. Mother and Father have divorced. He currently lives under a bush in her backyard. I think she still has feelings for him—at least she throws him the better scraps. Lonnie went away to college and now has nothing to do with any of us, insisting that our condition is completely the result of dysfunctional family dynamics.

And I’m a hairdresser in downtown L.A. with a very special clientele. At least now I feel marginally part of the family. Grandpa Jules never actually managed a firm bite that evening—at most some hard-edged gumming resulting in bruises and abrasions. I do go through the change, into something that looks a bit like a crazed Pomeranian. I try to stay out of the public eye during those times—it would be devastating for my business if anyone recognized me. But overall, living as a werewolf these days really isn’t that difficult—the hard part is doing it with style.

Eight-Legged Vengeance

JEFF STRAND

I am not typically a vengeful person, despite my “Blood for Blood!” temporary tattoo. But when my girlfriend Erica became my ex-girlfriend Erica the Skank, a bit of revenge was in order.

She claimed that she was cheating on me with my casual acquaintance Dave. However, Dave had an alibi for each weekend in question, and the
Guitar Hero
scores to prove it, so Erica finally broke down and confessed that she hadn’t been cheating on me at all—she just didn’t want to admit that she was repulsed by the small mole next to my ear. Now, I’m not saying that it’s an attractive mole, but give me a break. After six weeks of bliss, we were through.

And so I decided to seek revenge. I didn’t want to kidnap her dog or decapitate her favorite teddy bear or anything like that. I just wanted to do something that was clever and memorable, but not illegal or
too
mean. I invited my friend Dave (a different Dave than my casual acquaintance) over for a couple of beers and a brainstorming session.

“You could burn her house down,” Dave suggested.

“No. It can’t be anything that would involve the cops.”

“Wouldn’t they send the fire department instead of the cops?”

“Yeah, but when they discovered that it was arson, they’d involve the cops.”

“Bummer.” Dave took a swig of beer and swished it around in his mouth. “What about keying her car?”

“Nothing destructive.”

“What’s wrong with being destructive?”

“Destructive makes it seem like she got to me too much. I don’t want to convey rage. I want her to think I’m laughing at her, not punching holes in walls.”

“So you’re thinking more of a ‘nyahh-nyahh’ than a ‘screw you, hell-bitch’?”

“Exactly.”

Dave drank some more beer. “I can work with that. The way I see it, the best alternatives to bloodshed and/or destruction are fear and/or humiliation. Do you agree?”

I nodded. “Fear or humiliation. Yep. Both of those are good.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Humiliation might be kind of mean.”

“Dude, are you seeking revenge or shopping for an engagement ring? You
have
to be mean. That’s the whole frickin’ point!”

“I know, I know. I just don’t want to dump pig’s blood on her or anything like that.”

“So . . . fear or humiliation?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s flip a coin.” I reached into my pocket but found it coinless. I reached into my other pocket and found it equally lacking in coinage. “Do you have a coin?”

Dave patted his pockets, then picked up the bottle cap from his beer. “I’ve got this.”

“Okay, if it lands upside down, we’ll go with fear. If it lands right side up, we’ll go with humiliation.”

Dave flipped the bottle cap. It landed on the floor, upside down.

“Humiliation,” he announced. “Cool.”

“No, that was fear.”

“It’s upside down.”

“I know. That was fear.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Dave finished off his bottle of beer. “Fear. Fear, fear, fear. Lots of possibilities in the fear arena. What’s she most scared of?”

“Terrorists . . . cancer . . . dying alone . . .”

“What about spiders? Is she scared of spiders?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What about a big ol’ hairy tarantula?”

“I assume so. We never really talked about it. You think I should mail her a tarantula?”

“Not unless you’re a complete
loser
,” Dave said. “You’ve gotta be more inventive than that. Mailing a spider is a level one plan. You have to bring this to level two or three at the very least.”

“You’re right. What could we do with a tarantula to make it more memorable?”

“Dress it up?”

“Please stop being stupid,” I requested.

“My bad.”

“We need an inventive delivery method for the tarantula. Maybe a singing telegram or something.”

“Do they really do singing telegrams?” Dave asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve never actually seen a singing telegram. I thought maybe it was just something they did on TV.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Have
you
ever had a singing telegram?”

“No.”

“Then maybe I’m right. Where would you even go to get one?”

“I don’t know! Any party store! How can you doubt the existence of singing telegrams? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“Sorry,” Dave said. “Can I have another beer?”

“Later. Anyway, I don’t think we’ll find a singing telegram service that will sing a song and then chuck a spider at her. Let’s think of a better delivery method.”

“It would be cool if we could figure out a way to get it to jump out of a cake, like one of those naked girls.”

I sat up straight. “I’ve got it!”

“What?”

“We could bake a tarantula in a cake!”

“When’s her birthday?”

“Not for a few months, but still, there has to be a cake-giving occasion coming up. It’s perfect! She gets this nice, beautifully decorated cake delivered to her house. She takes a bite, and something’s a bit off. She investigates a little further, and there’s a frickin’ tarantula baked right into the cake! She freaks out. Vengeance is mine.”

Dave rubbed his hands together in malicious glee. “You, sir, are a genius. Albert Einstein never would’ve thought of that. He would’ve thought of something about physics or science or something. A spider in a cake. That’s brilliant!”

And so our nefarious scheme was hatched. After I gave Dave another beer, we divided up our duties equally: Dave would obtain the tarantula, and I would obtain the cake.

It was a difficult decision. Should I go with chocolate? Vanilla? Angel food cake? Pineapple upside-down cake? After much thought and price comparison, I settled on a yellow cake, since it seemed like it would show off the tarantula the best. I also bought some yellow frosting and a tube of red goop used for writing words on cakes.

I returned to my apartment and played football on my Xbox until Dave showed up. He had a tarantula in a small plastic aquarium, which he set on my coffee table.

“Cool,” I said, tapping the plastic.

“You owe me thirty-five bucks.”

“Thirty-five?”

“Twenty-five for the spider, ten for the aquarium.”

“Twenty-five bucks for a spider?”

“How much did you think it was gonna be?”

“Free! I thought you’d go to a shelter or something, where they were going to step on it if nobody took it home!”

“It’s not a puppy.”

“Well, why did you buy the aquarium?”

“It was half price with any pet purchase. I wasn’t gonna drive it home on my lap.”

I wanted to smack him in the face with an empty beer bottle. “It’s not a pet! It’s a sacrifice! Why did you get a live one?”

“Where am I gonna get a dead one? You think they have a dead tarantula aisle at Walmart?”

“But . . . twenty-five bucks? It’s not even a big one.”

“It’s average size for the species.”

“No, it’s not. Tarantulas are huge.”

“You’re thinking of tarantulas in fifties horror movies,” said Dave. “This is a tarantula in real life.”

“I didn’t think it would be the size of my house, but it should at least be the size of my hand!”

“It’s a perfectly good tarantula. Stop being such a whiner.”

I held out my hand. “Let me see the receipt.”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

“I’m not paying you back without a receipt.”

Dave sighed. “Okay, fine, it was thirty-two, not thirty-five. You’re so damn suspicious all the time. Jeez.”

“Jerk.”

“Cheapskate.”

“Drunk.”

“Cheapskate.”

“Fine.” I took out my wallet and dug out a twenty, a five, and five ones. That pretty much wiped out my beer budget for the rest of the month. Who knew vengeance would be so pricey?

“Oh, there was tax, too,” said Dave.

“Screw you.”

We went into the kitchenette of my studio apartment and I made the cake batter, while Dave provided helpful advice about what I was doing incorrectly, and I provided very specific suggestions about what he could do with his advice. I cursed as some eggshell dropped into the mix.

“Who cares?” Dave asked. “If it’s going to have a spider in it, it might as well have some eggshell.”

“If she crunches down on a piece of eggshell, she’ll quit eating the cake, then she’ll never find the tarantula, and then my devastating revenge will have been that she ate a bit of eggshell.” I dug out the shell bit and flicked it at him.

“Ow! Ow! Dammit! You got my eye!” He recoiled and stumbled backward, smacking into the counter.

“I did not.”

“Take a look! Take a look! Is it protruding?”

“Move your hand away so I can see.”

“I think you poked my iris, dude!”

“Move your hand.”

“Oh, crap, I’m gonna be seeing eggshell for the rest of my life!”

“Move your hand.”
I grabbed his hand and pulled it away from his eye. “I can’t see it.”

“It’s in there!”

“Okay, I see it. It’s not jutting out or anything; it’s just stuck in the corner.”

“Oh, crap . . .”

“It’s no big deal. We’ll just run some water on it.”

“What if the water flushes it up under my eyelid? It could slice my eye all up! Oh, crap . . .”

“Stop being such a baby. It’s just a tiny little speck of eggshell in your eye.” I took a dishcloth out of the sink, ran it under some cold water, and twisted the corner. “Don’t move.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna scrub your eye out with a scouring pad. What do you
think
I’m gonna do? I’m going to flick the shell out.”

“Be careful.”

I poked at the corner of his eye with the cloth. I could no longer see the piece of eggshell.

“It’s out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I can still kind of feel it.”

“Well, it’s not in your eye anymore.”

Dave rubbed his eye. “Thanks, dude.”

“No problem. Can we go back to making the cake now?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure thing.”

I stirred until the batter was completely mixed, then I poured it out into the pan. “When should we add the tarantula?”

“I’d say now.”

“How do we kill it?”

“What do you mean?”

“How. Do. We. Kill. It.”

“Just bake it.”

“We can’t just throw a live tarantula into the oven! That’s cruel!”

“Dude, it’s a bug.”

“I don’t care. You don’t cook things alive like that. It’s uncool.”

“That’s how they boil lobsters. And I think it’s how they cook deer.”

“Well, it’s not gonna happen in my oven.”

“Maybe it’ll drown in the batter first.”

“Shut up.” I peered at the spider, which was crawling around on a miniature plastic log. “So what’s a quick and humane way to kill it?”

“Stomp on it?”

“Get the hell out of my apartment, dumbass.”

“What?” Dave asked. “I wasn’t saying that you should stomp it flat and scrape the mess off into the batter. But you could, y’know, stomp on it gently and break its back or something.”

“No.”

“Cut off its head. It’ll still look like a tarantula.”

“This would’ve been a lot easier if you had just brought home a dead one in the first place.”

“They don’t sell dead tarantulas locally! I already told you that! Maybe we could poison it.”

“The cake?”

“The tarantula. To kill it.”

I considered that. “I don’t think I have any spider poison.”

“Do you have any ant poison? That would probably work.”

“No. I don’t keep a lot of poison in the apartment.”

“Do you have any cigarettes? We could blow smoke in there until it chokes to death.”

Instead of calling Dave a moron, I gave him a look that said “You’re a moron.”

“Fine. You’re the leader of the Be Humane To Cuddly-Wuddly Spiders movement,
you
decide how to kill it.”

“I don’t know! I have no idea how to kill a tarantula without squishing it. Screw it. Let’s just bake the stupid thing.” I turned on the oven.

“We should name him.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s give a name to the creature that’s going to die a horrible, agonizing death because of us. Let’s call him Timmy the Tarantula and paint a smiley face on his back.”

“We could name him Eight-Legged Vengeance.”

“Don’t be such a frickin’—actually, that’s pretty cool. Let’s go with that.” I tapped on the aquarium. “Hello, Eight-Legged Vengeance. How’s it going?”

Eight-Legged Vengeance did not respond.

“Maybe we should feed it a mouse as one last meal,” Dave suggested.

“Do you have a mouse?”

“No. But I could go get one. I think the pet shop had mice.”

I started to give him another “You’re a moron” look, but decided that it wasn’t worth it. “Let’s just put him in the batter and get it over with.”

“Sounds good.”

I lifted the top off the aquarium. “Okay, reach in there and grab him.”

“Yeah, that’s gonna happen.”

“What, you’re scared?”

“It’s a tarantula! They’re venomous!”