Full MoonCity (23 page)

Hersh had called at midday to tell me Fletcher Boggs, the occult investigator, had a sudden emergency case that had come up. Something involving poltergeists out in Malibu. Therefore, he wouldn’t be able to consult with me until seven. And not at my place but at his home.

I was lifting my watch out of my pocket for another look when the door chimes played Monk. Sprinting down the hall, I yanked the door open. “Damn, Hersh, night is fast approaching and-”

“Relax, it’s barely dusk.” Turning, he started down my front steps. “Let’s get going.”

I was feeling increasingly itchy. As I slid into the passenger seat and buckled myself in, I asked, “Where exactly does Boggs live?”

My friend started his BMW. “Not far from here.”

“And the town is?”

“Westwood.”

I stiffened in my seat. “Westwood?”

“He has a cottage near UCLA.”

“But Westwood Village is where that other wolf-man hangs out,” I reminded him. “The police are trying to catch him. Christ, Hersh, if I turn into a werewolf before we reach Boggs, the cops may nab
me
as the Wolf-Man of Westwood.”

“All you’ll have to do is tell them you’re really the Wolf-Man of Beverly Hills.”

“I’m serious,” I told him, my voice a bit froggy. “They’ll start shooting at me with silver bullets; villagers will pursue me brandishing blazing torches.”

“Don’t fret. We’ll reach the cottage long before nightfall.”

“Night is already falling.”

“Can you stop kvetching for a while?” He turned on the car radio. “I want to catch the news on KMA-FM. They’re supposed to mention my new show on-”

“… just in. The notorious Wolf-man of Westwood has surfaced again tonight. Just ten minutes ago he broke into a Venus’ Boudoir lingerie shop and made off with an armload of frilly undies. Police expect to run him to ground soon. LAPD is sending over its special Occult SWAT team to-”

“Great,” I observed as we entered Westwood Village. “Now a bunch of expert marksmen armed with high-powered rifles chock-full of silver bullets will be taking shots at me.”

Hersh said, “You’re not a wolf-man yet.” He glanced over at me. “Oops.”

I reached up a hand. It was furry. I touched my face with it. My face was furry. This time the transition from man to wolf had been swift. I hadn’t even dozed off.

From about a few blocks away came the sound of sirens.

“Duck down,” advised Hersh. “Keep out of sight.”

I hunkered down on the floorboards with my knees near my chin and my furry arms circling my legs. The streetlights had just come on outside and every time we passed one the interior of the BMW was illuminated.

“Potential trouble up ahead. Stay down there; don’t howl or make any noise.”

“What sort of potential trouble?”

“People on the corner we’re coming to, looking over the street and the sidewalks, about a dozen or more. Got digital cameras, cell phones. One guy’s got a baseball bat,” he explained quietly.

Just then Thelonious Monk began playing loudly in my pocket.

“Shut that damn phone off.” Hersh halted at the corner stop sign.

More progressive piano came forth before I could tug out my cell phone and, very softly, answer it. “What?”

Hersh drove on, eyeing the world outside uneasily. “We’ll be there in less than ten minutes. Keep a low profile, and a quiet one.”

“I’m scrunched up as far as I can scrunch, Hersh.”

“There’s something I have to confess, Dad,” came the voice of my daughter.

“Which of your damn cars did you smash into what?”

“No, no, this is about your current dilemma.”

“We already talked about that, kid, and just at the moment I-”

“This is about why you turned into a werewolf, Dad. Did that happen again tonight, by the way?”

“It did. We can have a nice long chat about that at a later-”

“See, I did order that werewolf potion.”

“Why in the hell did-”

The BMW suddenly went over something on the street we’d turned onto. Felt like part of a wooden box or something like that. The car bounced and I was thrown against the side of my improvised cubbyhole. I was suddenly visited by a very painful cramp.

“Hold on, Beth. I’ve got a cramp and I have to stretch my leg for a second.”

I eased painfully up off the floorboards to try to straighten out my leg.

Simultaneously the car passed a light post and a bunch of college kids who were emerging from a Burger Oasis. They got a very brief glimpse of me before I hunkered back down.

“Oh, God,” screamed a coed. “It’s him!”

“It’s the Wolf-Man!”

“Call the cops on your cell, Julie!”

Hersh gunned the motor and went bouncing along the night street. He skidded around a corner, drove down an alley to the next street over, slowed, and entered a darker, quieter, less frequented street. “I don’t think they got my license number.”

My leg still hurt, and my heart was beating at an unfamiliar rate. “Tell me about the potion, Beth,” I said into the phone.

“Are you okay? What was all that noise?”

“Villagers spotted me, but we eluded them. None of them had flaming torches.”

“Well, listen, Dad. I meant the werewolf gunk for Bryson Kranbuhl.”

“Your mother’s literary agent? The despicable oaf who suggested she write
I Married an Asshole
?”

“That Bryson Kranbuhl, yes. He’s also been trying to sell the memoir as a TV serial. He’s convinced that it can be the next
Survivor
,”she continued. “I ordered the potion for him. I was hoping it would distract him and also inspire Mom to evict the guy. She, you know, isn’t much of an animal lover. Bryson’s been pretty much living with us since early this year.”

“You’re saying you got the two philters mixed up and gave me
his
potion?”

“No, Dad, I’m saying that imbecile Vincent X. Shandu screwed up and sold me two doses of werewolf potion and none of love potion,” she explained. “I’m going to drive down to Palm Springs, since there’s a lot of desert around there and maybe I can find him and-”

“No, nope. Don’t
drive
anywhere,” I cautioned her. “I think we have another way to work a cure. So you wait until-”

“We’re there,” announced Hersh, braking the car on what felt like a gravel driveway.

“Stay where you are until I contact you,” I told my daughter. “Bye.”

“Information from your nitwit offspring?” Hersh came around to my side of the BMW, opened the door, and helped me get myself off the floor.

“Yeah, now I know who the Wolf-Man of Westwood is,” I replied as I emerged.

Fletcher Boggs was circling the straight-back chair I was sitting uncomfortably upon. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about sixty, tanned and with an impressive head of white hair. “Vincent X. Shandu is second-rate,” he observed, halting in front of me and scrutinizing my face. “You’re not much of a werewolf.”

“Sufficient enough for me.”

“You’re not even an authentic wolf,” the big occult investigator said, stepping back. “You aren’t four-legged, you don’t have a bushy tail; except for two canines, your teeth aren’t even especially lupine.”

Hersh had settled onto a low tan sofa across the cottage parlor. “Be that as it may, Fletcher, can you reverse the effect of the potion?”

Boggs frowned at him. “A defrocked veterinarian could do that.” He returned his attention to me. “Tell me what your daughter told you about this stuff she fed you. By the way, is she going to get back on
Posy Pickwick
?”

“Negotiations are under way,” I told him. “About the potion. Beth told me Shandu took it from a book of magic by a fellow named Count Monstrodamus, who flourished in the eighteenth century.”

“Actually he flourished through several centuries,” said the occult investigator. “The Count wasn’t immortal, but he hung on for almost three hundred years. Sounds like Vince was borrowing from a copy of
The Vile and Unholy Spells, Potions and Incantations of the Infamous, Black-Souled Magus, the Notorious Count Monstrodamus, Late of Vienna.
Any idea which edition?”

“The first. The one that’s supposed to be bound in human skin.”

Boggs shook his head. “Bullshit. It’s only goat skin,” he said. “But the first edition version of the werewolf potion is slightly different from the one in later editions.”

Hersh asked, “You have a copy?”

“Too expensive.” He crossed to the PC that rested on a tile-topped, iron-legged table against the wall. “I’ve modified my computer so it can access just about every forbidden sorcery book known to man.”

“Who put that stuff on the Net?” I asked him.

“Various adepts.” He seated himself at the computer. “I’ll take a look at the Count’s formula, then look up a surefire antidote. Did I mention my fee?”

“Not as yet.”

“Since you’re a buddy of Bernie’s, I’ll give you the discount. It’ll run you, soon as you’re satisfied with the cure, six hundred ninety-five bucks.”

“I can afford that,” I assured him.

I put on a fresh plaid shirt, buttoned several buttons and stepped into the john to observe my image.

I was my normal everyday self, as I had been since late last night when I’d swallowed the six ounces of Fletcher Boggs’s antidote to the werewolf potion my madcap daughter had slipped into my morning smoothie. Considering what I was paying, I expected he’d serve me out of something more upscale than an old peanut butter jar.

The important thing, though, was that the stuff cured my lycanthropy in a matter of minutes. Outside of severe nausea, heart palpitations, double vision, and cramps for about a half hour, there were no side effects to speak of. Since last night I hadn’t turned into a wolf-man again. And I noticed this morning that I didn’t even need to shave. Hopefully I was cured.

I’d been in the kitchen less than a minute, when I heard a rattling crash out on the front half acre. That was followed by a large splash.

Setting the half gallon of vanilla soy milk that I’d just fetched out of the refrigerator down next to the blender, I ran outside.

Beth, wearing a bright yellow singlet, crimson cycling pants, and a silver cycling helmet, was stepping gingerly out of the fishpond. This was a few feet from where the birdbath once had stood.

A black ten-speed bike was partially submerged among the lily pads and agitated goldfish.

“Have you run out of cars, child?” I inquired, bending and hefting the bicycle out of the greenish water.

“I made a vow not to drive a car of any kind for six months.”

“In church?”

“In the Will Destry offices,” my daughter explained. “Part of the deal everybody worked up to put me back on
Posy Pickwick: Rock & Roll Detective.”

“So you’re gainfully employed again.” I laid the dripping bike out on the lawn.

“I’m going to hire a chauffeur tomorrow, but today I used one of my bicycles to ride over to visit you.”

“As I told you last night, I am no longer a werewolf. If all goes well, I never shall be again.”

Beth said, “I’ve got some great news for you.”

“Such as?”

“Mom has thrown Bryson out and fired him as her literary agent.”

“Oh, so? What prompted that?”

My pretty red-haired daughter sat down on the stone bench beside the fishpond. “Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the police caught the Wolf-Man of Westwood last night.”

“I thought that might happen.”

“Bright and early this morning they looked into the cell they popped him in last night,” she continued. “There was Bryson Kranbuhl. He told the cops who he was, but he didn’t have any ID on him. They let him call Mom and she came down to Westwood to identify that jerk and bail him out.”

“Sounds like an act of deep affection to me.”

She shook her head. “Once she knew he was the Wolf-Man, she realized why Westwood was where he was always spotted,” she said. “Mom had suspected that Bryson had a tootsie in Westwood and had been spending some afternoons and evenings with her. She also thought his impulse to swipe women’s underwear was tacky. So he’s out.”

“What about
I Married an Asshole
?”

“She’s shelved that for now while she rethinks the project,” my daughter informed me. “So, Dad, this is a perfect time for you to get back together. Don’t you think so?”

Crossing, I sat beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Probably not.”

She looked sad. “Couldn’t you at least drop by and have dinner with us some night?”

After a moment I answered, “That might be possible.”

Beth smiled and clapped her hands together. “Neat. Then my efforts haven’t been in vain.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said.

T
he day my mother became a vampire, she ruined my life.
I
didn’t know it at the time, and I’m sure
she
didn’t have time to think about it-I have to admit that being dead and coming back to life more-or-less can be distracting-but that’s God’s honest truth and if I were of a slightly different persuasion I’d add “cross my heart and hope to die.”

Give me a
break
!

It wasn’t as if I were not
beside
myself with worry, what with Momma and Poppa off on their trip to Romania,
he
being, though he is my father and I love him, such a nebbish he never stood up to her about anything, so when he booked the two of them on that Dracula Fan Club tour or whatever it was with
non-refundable tickets,
you could have heard Momma’s jaw drop in Brooklyn, as she observed at the time, and we don’t live anywhere near Brooklyn.

My poppa, he was bats about bats, and about Dracula and Children of the Night and all that stuff. He had a vampire-movie collection like you wouldn’t believe. I think it was the one thing Momma couldn’t take away from him. After I went off to college and they were alone, he got even
battier
, and so they went on this tour that was supposed to last two weeks, and after they didn’t come back and I didn’t hear a thing from them for
six months,
you think I shouldn’t worry?

It was one thing, that two weeks, during my spring break, me back in the old house, watching Poppa’s movies when there was nothing else to do-he really does have a dubbed copy of
Mein Yiddishe Drakula
-and taking care of the cats. The cats, Elvira and Vlad. Poppa named them before Momma could. Just as well because
she
probably would have called them Pusscha and Poopsie.

Me, I am nothing like my mother, which is just as well, but I have to worry.

My
putzy
, sometime boyfriend Max, he says maybe they were carried off by the fairies, and I said no, in the Balkans you get carried off by the Gypsies. Ireland, fairies; Romania, Gypsies. Got it?

So Max, not worrying-I should have shot him-says, “Maybe Dracula turned her into a vampire…” and I have to laugh, despite my worries, because Momma is so
short.
What would she do, stand on a stepladder so she can reach people’s necks to bite them?

Max has no idea what he is talking about.

Then the
packages
arrive, delivered by Gypsies. The truck says TRANSYLVANIAN PARCEL SERVICE, but I know these guys are Gypsies because what kind of delivery men wear scarves and earrings and make jokes about pulling one over on the
gajos
while hauling these
enormous
packages into the living room? I have to make sure the silverware doesn’t disappear.

Max and I are left staring at these two boxes the size of phonebooths, which are marked DO NOT OPEN UNTIL SUNDOWN but today is Tuesday so the Shabbat rules do not apply, so what the hell does this mean? I want to know.

Nevertheless, it is getting late and starting to get dark, and God knows what’s inside these packages, so we close the curtains. Then Max and I whack away at the first crate with hammers and big screwdrivers. Dirt pours out onto Momma’s immaculate living-room rug, and the lid comes off, and inside is a
coffin
packed in more dirt. To get
that
open, we have to remove a whole bunch of
silver
nails, which are probably worth something, so I put them carefully aside.

The coffin lid
creaks
open just like in the movies. As soon as
Momma
, lying inside it, sees the hammer in my hand, and I see
her
, we
both
scream so loudly we could split the eardrums of everybody from Jersey City to Canton, China. She clutches her chest and says, “Go ahead, drive a stake through your poor mother’s heart. You’ve already broken it!”

I let the hammer drop to the floor. It lands on my foot. While I’m hopping around in pain, I say, “I have?”

And Momma, she looks so
weird
, I should say
terrible-
her hair all frizzed up and tangled, her nails like
claws,
her
face
so pale and sunken like a balloon that’s lost most of its air, and her
eyes
so dark and somehow
burning
that I can’t look away from them. Momma, she turns to Max (who also drops his hammer but misses his foot) and says, “No mother, living or dead, wants to come home after so many trials and tribulations to find out her daughter’s still messing with a
sheygets.
”

“But, Mom-” I say.

“But
nothing.
When are you going to get a serious boyfriend, somebody with a future, somebody you can
marry, one of your own kind
?”

Max blurts out, “Who said anything about marriage?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded. Max is a bit of a doofus. He works in a flower shop and makes tie-dyed T-shirts on weekends and would have been a hippie if he’d been born a generation earlier. Maybe he’s not such a good prospect, but this is a stupid time to bring this up.

Apropos of not knowing what else to say, I get defensive. “But, Momma, I
like
Max.”

Max beams at me like a dope, “You
do
?”

I don’t bother to explain that much of the time I’m not entirely sure of that because Max does have his shortcomings. But before I can utter another word Momma gets out of that coffin, opens her mouth to reveal
huge, dripping
fangs, and
slinks
over to Max in a way that no respectable short,
zaftig,
middle-aged woman should, and says, “Well, if you’re going to marry him, he has to convert.” She pronounces it
convoit,
her accent having somehow grown a lot thicker.

I stamp my foot (not the one the hammer landed on) and shake my finger at her. “Momma, we’ve been over this before! Get used to it! Max doesn’t want to become a
Jew
!”

Momma’s fangs somehow arc out of her mouth the way a rattlesnake’s do and still (I have no idea how) she’s able to say, “That’s not what I have in mind.”

Now
there’s a loud pounding from inside the other box. Momma pulls back, her fangs disappear back into her mouth, and she looks as close to normal as she is going to since stepping out of that coffin. She is Momma again and she’s giving orders.

“Marsha, let your father out. We need to have a family discussion. Max, you help her.”

So we let him out, carefully removing six more valuable-looking silver nails, which Momma cringes from and won’t even look at. Soon the coffin lid creaks open and there’s my father, dressed in black cape and black pants, white shirt, vest, medallion, and one of those bat-shaped ties I know Momma has always hated-it
doesn’t
go with the outfit-and his eyes are red and gleaming and he makes a claw out of one hand as if he’s trying to hypnotize me, and says in a thick, thick accent,
“I vant to drink your blllooodd!!”

Then he trips over his cape and stumbles out onto the rug amid an
avalanche
of dirt that will be
impossible
to clean up. Somehow he twists around and lands on his butt, and there he is sitting in the dirt, staring up at me while his mechanical bat-tie flaps pathetically, only one of its wings working.

“Marsha?”

“Hello, Poppa.”

I help him up, taking him by the hand.

“Brrr! Poppa, you’re
cold
!”

“There’s a lot to explain.”

At our family conference, a
lot
that needs to be explained is explained. Max is there, holding on nervously to his hammer and screwdriver, as if that would do him any good. After all, he
might
become family, or at least Momma wants to allow for the possibility. Besides, he knows too much now.

“After all I’ve
given up
for you,” she moans, meaning me, not Max. She doesn’t care a rat’s ass about Max.

And I break in, saying that I had to
give up
a whole semester at Bryn Mawr to be here minding the house
just in case
she and Poppa should somehow reappear out of nowhere, and I did take care of Elvira and Vlad just fine, and I can’t help it if they hiss and run and hide when Momma comes near them. (They hide from Poppa, too; he’s really unhappy about that.) And she has the nerve (I almost say
noive
but stop myself) to tell
me
to stop kvetching when she, my mother, is the world’s greatest
kvetch,
a Niagara Falls of guilt poured out, a woman put on Earth by God to
complain
about how things aren’t right and make people feel guilty about them. I think the only reason she doesn’t want me
kvetching
is she’s afraid I may have inherited some of her talent for it and she wants to make sure that if anybody in this house is going to
kvetch,
it’s going to be
her
, no competition allowed.

And she says, “Besides, you’re not going back to that snooty school, anyway.”

And when I say, “What?” she
explains
that there have been some, uh,
changes,
like she and Poppa are technically dead now, but not in any sense that really matters; they’ll just have to keep different hours. Then she tells the whole story about how Poppa
dragged
her on this Children of the Night Special tour of Transylvania, and after
days
of wandering into one crypt after another, something
happened
and now they’re both vampires, which did not, I gather, change her disposition much, or stop her
kvetching.
Although she’s vague on the details, I gather that after some months of bouncing around in crummy coffins listening to Gypsy jokes, and reaching people’s necks, not with a stepladder, but by getting people to bend over to look at a map of Bucharest when she asked them for directions (even if she was in some other city), and realizing she was
still
being her old self, not
svelte
like the vampire women in movies, she
kvetched
all the way up the chain of command until Dracula himself couldn’t stand her anymore and had her and Poppa nailed up in special coffins with silver nails so they couldn’t get out. But
even then
she
kvetched
so much (he could still hear her; vampires have very good hearing), he finally gave up and shipped the two of them home.

She finishes deciding, “So the best thing for all of us, will be that I should bite you, and,
ugh,
your father can bite Max, and then we’ll all be a vampire family together.”

Max raises his hammer and his screwdriver and crosses them. When Momma glares at him, he drops them to the floor:
clunk, clunk.

I put my hand to my throat. “Momma, gee, you’ll never get any grandkids that way.”

Then Poppa pipes up, which is amazing, since he never interrupts when Momma’s Decided and Made Up Her Mind About What Is Best. Now he says, “Wait a minute, Honey Love”-a name he calls Momma when he’s trying to wheedle something out of her-“sometimes it’s useful for our kind to be cared for by mortals, like that nice Mr. Renfield we met-”

And Momma rears up, eyes blazing, fangs gleaming, and she says,
“No
daughter of mine is going to eat bugs!!”

“That may not be necessary, Honey Love-”

She nods to Max. “Now
he
can eat all the bugs he wants, but not Marsha Leibowitz.”

So the family conference ends and I get to stay among the living, and so does Max, although Momma puts the whammy on him and before long he
does
eat bugs, insisting that they’re organic and all-natural and taste like roasted peanuts, rather than simply disgusting. I can’t imagine what I ever saw in him.

But he is really helpful around the house, once you get used to his gibbering, drooling, and constantly looking around for insectile snacks. The place seems to be overrun with bugs now and Momma will
not
allow me to call an exterminator. So, bugs and all, Max and I have to break up the basement floor with jackhammers-and I will
kill
anybody who asks if it ruined my nails-and dig a pit for the two coffins to rest side by side in their “native” New Jersey earth (with all the Transylvanian earth I could vacuum off the carpet thrown in for good measure), and, by day, that’s where my parents sleep.

Yes, I know that vampires are
evil
and totally given over to Satan and a menace to be destroyed, yadda yadda yadda, but she’s still my
mother,
and if you know
my
mother, you don’t worry about such things as going to Hell. Hell on Earth is having to listen to her
kvetching,
which she can keep up until Hell freezes over unless she gets her own way.

Poppa has Max fix up a flat-screen TV on the inside of his coffin lid and hook up the VCR to it so he can watch tapes during the daytime.

I never return to Bryn Mawr, but after some whining I get to transfer to Columbia, which is in Manhattan, to which I commute as a day student. But I’m under strict instructions to get home every evening by dusk, so I can help her and Poppa out of their coffins and “see them off” for their “evening rounds,” as Momma calls it. “Terrorizing the countryside” is what Poppa calls it, as he swirls out the door in that ridiculous outfit with the cape. If he doesn’t turn into a bat and fly away, he’d like me and Max to think he does. I’m past caring.

Can you
imagine
what this does to my social life? Max has moved in. I can watch him eat bugs, or watch TV, or do my homework. I become very studious. I get straight A’s. But believe me, romance is not on the roster.

The
scary
part of all this is that sometimes I am not sure I really
am
living with my parents anymore, or with two all-devouring
things
, who will gobble up even me at the end. When your parents are undead, you can never be certain they love you. It causes anxiety, believe me.

Then there is the one time I dare to bring over my best friend Sylvie for a night of shared homework and girl talk-and miraculously she is willing to put up with the bugs and the
stench
of the place. Did I tell you that vampire lairs
smell bad
? I could go on and on… I even convince her that Max is a retarded cousin the two of us should lock in the basement (we do, and he sits down there contentedly chomping on bugs). Things are going swimmingly, and I feel almost
normal
for once, when suddenly I’m not sure what is happening, and there is a
mist
sliding under the bedroom door, and that mist has red eyes in it and looks a bit like my mother. It might be a dream. I am not sure. I can’t move. I want to call out, but I can’t, and when I really do wake up, there is Sylvie on the bed next to me, pale as the other white meat with two holes in the side of her neck and her eyes crossed and rolled up.