Joe Vampire (13 page)

And when I saw myself in the morning, those fuckers had grown right back into vicious little points again. 

So now, right next to my floss and my electric toothbrush is my handy-dandy defanging tool. Just before I brush every morning, I grind them down to a manageable roundness. And every night when I come home, there they are again, sticking out of my lips like I never even touched them. They fall into the same category as everything else at this point: something I obsess over even when nobody else would probably even notice. And though it wouldn’t seem likely, this makes it worth the extra trouble to manage them. I keep waiting for the day when the haze lifts, and all of this is finally seen by everyone. There I’ll be: pale and cold, with pointed ears and a mouth like a human piranha.

I’d rather the fangs be kept in check for that moment.

It’s not just about self-preservation, either; ultimately, carving down my monster nibblers will help others, too. You see, I have this daydream about me and Chloe, and what happens on the day after she realizes how perfect we are together. I’ve had it since shortly after we started our drive-by flirtation at the copier, which has given me plenty of time to work through the details and refine the flow. It’s a slow motion rom-com montage, schmaltzy and clichéd as anything you’d find on late-night cable. But I don’t care how schmaltzy and clichéd it is. 

It’s my dream and I’ll have it the way I want it, thank you.

At any rate, as the dream goes: during an afternoon in the park across the street from our office, while chasing our rascally retriever Baxter and the Frisbee he’s snatched away, after we make our mad dash into the corner café to get out of the sudden unexpected downpour that has made us laugh like madcaps as we cover our heads with newspapers, and while we’re waiting at the counter for the barista to bring us our cappuccinos, our eyes lock, she leans in and goes for The Kiss. But now, instead of The Kiss she’ll be caught up in The Bloody Freaking Mess That Permanently Disfigures the Lips I Love. Now instead of ending in a slow fade as we amble home love drunk, hand in hand to our two bedroom walk-up, it ends with a trip to the ER when she slices her tongue wide open on my goddamned teeth, sharp as woodscrews because I forgot to grind them down and buff them smooth before we left for the park. 

Bastards.

So, I’m keeping myself defanged. I can deal with just about anything
This
has to throw at me, but if it blows my Hollywood kiss with the woman I love, vampirism and I will have some seriously messy shit to sort out. And it won’t end pretty. 

For vampirism, that is. I should be fine.

I think.

POST 20

Lifted

I know it’s probably futile for me to be overly concerned about personal fitness. After all, many major parts of me are undead… whatever that means. I still walk, I still talk. I still digest things, for the most part. Most of the major functions are in place, so something vital is kicking around in there. It must be the living parts of me worrying that my age-suspended early-thirties self needs every advantage it can get now that it’s stuck where it is. Forever. When I was fully living, I was content with a long-distance relationship with fitness, a little lazy guy looseness challenging my waistband; there was always tomorrow to hit the gym if I could pull out of my lazy state and blast the fat to a slightly lesser presence around my mid-section. And then
This
happened, and suddenly I’ll always be fighting a losing battle when it comes to my appearance – the pallor, the drawn face. The teeth of a pit bull on steroids. The hair loss has been suspended, however, so at least I shouldn’t see any unwanted advances there. But if forty is the new thirty, then thirty-two is probably the new seventeen or so. 

That’s a lot of new youth to keep up with.

Even for someone who might be immortal.  

Ultimately, it’s a personal decision more than a vampiranical one. I wasn’t very happy as a soft-bellied thirty-two year-old when I was fully human; I can only imagine how much more miserable I would be as a soft-bellied thirty-two year-old ghoul. So I thought it might not be such a bad idea to put on the ol’ cross trainers and hit the gym again. And opting to spend my eternal half-life as a relative tee-totaler where blood consumption is concerned, I could use the extra zing in whatever form I can get it. But more crucial than any of this: Hube found out that Chloe’s Tool (ex-Tool by now) is a personal trainer with at least five out of six abs fully visible in his pack. That was all it took to throw me into competition mode… in a minor way, though. I’m not going full-on Tony Horton here; I just want to look a little more solid in my sleeves when Girl No. 3 returns from her Moving Out Vacation, a little closer to what she’s used to having so the transition feels natural for her. Maybe it’s a bit shallow, but I get the feeling I have a lot to live up to and I’m way behind in my efforts. And since we’re coming up on playing a real show in an actual club for the first time ever instead of noising up a bar mitzvah at Chuck E. Cheese, a little extra pep for the gig would be nice. 

And a little extra tone never hurt anyone.  Just ask Jack LaLanne.

I opted for a membership at Gymtopia a dozen miles away from my place so I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. Not that I’m hiding; I just wanted to slip back into the fitness scene without the added pressure of friends who know all too well what the
before
looks like waiting to see the
after
. The old gym had some Nautilus machines from the eighties and all of two instructors who taught calisthenics to old hip-hop records. On a turntable.

From the seventies. 

It wasn’t the hippest spot to work out in. But Gymtopia? It has everything I never knew was missing in a fitness facility, beginning with disco lighting synchronized to a thumping sound system – and that’s just at the entrance. There are also power lifting stations that look pieced together from black market Terminator limbs, a full-service smoothie bar with its own indoor fruit garden so juice can be harvested live while the fruit is still on the tree, caffeinated colonic cleansing stations, practitioners of Swedish and other European forms of massage, and beautiful people hired solely to walk around and fool you into thinking you stand half a chance of ever looking like them… which will never happen no matter how much you Spin or Bounce or Jazzercise. I think you can even rent one of them to work out for you so you can watch the cable news on the Endless Wall of TVs while you sip your smoothie instead. It’s like a one-stop fitness buffet. I might try a little bit of everything before I’m done.

I draw the line at the coffee enemas, though. 

My body holes clench up just writing down the words.

To ease back into things on my first go-around, I opted for a yoga class. Ordinarily it was the kind of thing I would have only done so I could interrupt the instructor with lame jokes about Doing it Downward Doggie Style and Getting Busy with the Rutting Cock. Now that I think about it, that last one might be a feature I saw in Hustler once, not a yoga pose. 

I don’t recall.

Despite our strained history, I tried to take yoga seriously this time, and hoped it would offer me the same in return. I even did the warm up, though the whole thing seemed like a warm-up that didn’t know when to quit. Not sure if I was stiff from being half-dead or just from not having made any attempt at physical activity in the last eight months or so, but I was only able to reach my hands midway down my shins before I realized it was as downward as this doggie was going to get. And the balancing poses? There are so many of those damn things that halfway through I lost track of which one I was supposed to be doing. I ended up in some impossible combination of Dying Flamingo, Preening Lemur and Incarcerated Street Mime, I think. I just made up my own name for it: Suffering Idiot. And that was a whole ten minutes into a ninety minute session. At this point, I Warrior Posed my way out of the room. 

The groin pull from that was a real treat. 

Yoga and I aren’t going to be friends anytime soon. 

I went for cardio next. All gut considered, I’ve never had too much of a weight problem; it’s more of a composition problem, with a stomach soft as memory foam and a bony ass in eternal need of more padding. As much as I’d love to ditch whatever spare flesh there is, running isn’t my thing. I only run when I’m being chased, and even then it’s a total question mark. At the old gym, my time on a treadmill was always just an excuse to catch up on my backlog of old Maxims while walking slowly enough to “read the articles”. But passing through the bank of exercycles at Gymtopia was like walking through a high-end dealership full of shiny, self-powered sex vehicles. It’s not something you can let pass you by. So I hopped on one, hooked up to the monitors and plugged in my tunes as I pedaled away. I must have pumped that sucker at top speed for twenty minutes without breaking a sweat or busting a huff before I realized that I wouldn’t experience any benefit from this contraption. Because it’s cardiovascular exercise. And my heart doesn’t beat anymore. 

I guess that settles that.

In my last-ditch effort to at least get some benefit from this excursion, I hit the weight machines. It made sense that I might be able to maximize my extra protein intake and turn it into something more closely resembling muscle. I’d even take some firmed-up flab, if that’s all I could manage. And lifting stuff is totally my thing. I may not bend like a circus performer, and I’ll never again hit my target heart rate, but I can pick things up and put them down again like a motherfucking pro. And this place had the coolest things to pick up and put down. The stackable weight plates and nested interlocking dumbbells were light years ahead of my old gym’s set of plastic weights filled with Orbatron – whatever that shit is. I wasn’t looking for any muscle tears to augment my aching Yoga Crotch, so I went light at first. Turned out light was a little
too
light, so I moved the pin down and added a few more plates. Even that felt like it was lacking in substance, so I dropped the pin to the bottom of the stack. That put the load at two hundred and fifty pounds. And I lifted the whole damn cluster of plates with the same amount of effort it took to move the first set. I moved from station to station trying it with everything, mostly hoping to prove it was some fluke. But it just kept working. As a final test, I waited until all the stations had cleared out, then leaned down and lifted one of the machines. Not really lifted, but tilted it up halfway off the floor before I reached my limit. But that was enough for me.

Maybe I should rethink the superhero idea.

Psych. Not really.

I haven’t noticed any increase in muscle mass from the workout, but I also haven’t gone back for another round.   One workout probably isn’t going to make much of a difference no matter how much I can lift. So I still need to figure out how to improve my form if I’m going to make a suitable follow-up boyfriend for Chloe. But after the strange assortment of freakish features showing up one on top of another, I’ve finally found something beneficial among the madness of this vampire ordeal.  

It’s about fucking time. 

The show at Damage is this Saturday. Hit us up if you want to see what Vomiting Nonsense is all about. Can’t make it? I’ll catch you up in the next post. 

Should be an interesting gig.

POST 21

Damage Done

If you were at Damage on Saturday night, and you saw what went down before Vomiting Nonsense played, I owe you an apology. If you stuck around when we were done and saw what happened after it was over, I owe you an apology for that as well. And if you stayed for the middle part, the part where we played our so-called songs with a special X-rated appearance by the newest – and, ironically enough, also the oldest – member of Vomiting Nonsense… well, then I owe you more than just an apology. I owe you a refund.

Doesn’t matter that it was a free show. 

You should be compensated for having to live through it.

If you weren’t there – and I really hope that applies to most of you – here’s the lowdown, in all its gory detail. I suggest you slam a few Tums if you have any handy. 

VN was slated to go first, as an opener for a few better-known – and better-sounding – bands. It was quite the opportunity, one that Lazer had managed to secure for us through any manner of haggling. It probably involved a sex act in an alley and a gross compromise of personal principles, so I didn’t ask how he did it. I was just grateful that we had an audience that filled three quarters of the venue, even if they were here to see the other bands. And even if admission was free. It was more about the exposure. And wanting to appear as professional as possible, Hube and I showed up well in advance so we could cable the synths and run a quick sound check. Not that we have a huge array of equipment to set up, but we were a little anxious and wanted to make extra-sure that everything went smoothly. But it was only the two of us who wanted this, I guess; Lazer apparently had more important matters to tend to, and showed up an hour later. And he didn’t come by himself.

I mean that in all the different ways it can be meant.

He walked up with a date. Or whatever he calls them. “Guys this is Iris; Iris, this is Vomiting,” he pointed to me, then to Hube, “and this is Nonsense.” It was the older woman from the other night who had shown up with him… not just with him, but
with
him, as we could see by the way she had her hand tucked in his back pocket. It was as disturbing in person as it sounds in print. In case my previous description of her didn’t paint a complete picture, Iris: