So I Might Be a Vampire - Book 1 (Original Version)

14: Not as Advertised

I tried out a couple other groups and meetings, working my way down the list over the next couple of weeks. Short nights and one day off a week really don't work so well for me; social time is insufficient, and on regular days it seemed all I was doing was sleeping, avoiding the sun and then getting to work late. Rinse and repeat until Thursday where I could get out to the next set of groups.

The meetings that were scheduled too close to sunset I completely ignored, and I tried to look for other warning signs, but I somehow ended up in a few weird situations.

One was a bondage group where the members fetishized drinking human blood and spent a lot of time talking about the romance of blood and other bullshit. Some of them even had done some expensive dentistry to have fangs fitted onto their teeth and talking to them was a chore since fangs give you an instant lisp, so the mandatory shower that came with the conversation got tiring after a while.

That particular group appealed to me because of the readily available blood supply, but one of the girls who seemed really into me... how the hell do I say this? Her blood smelled bad.

Remember that sensitive nose I was talking about? I could smell her the instant she walked into the room. I had resigned myself to just hanging out for an hour and then heading across town to the next group meeting for what would inevitably turn out to be more humans pretending to be vampires, but she kind of fast-tracked things for me.

Salvadore (the host) and I had been in a heated conversation about why I preferred Stuart Townsend's Lestat over the Tom Cruise version when he spotted her and waved her over.

"Lyssandra," Salvadore had called out, and I had just rolled my eyes. Of course, she had an 'exotic' sounding name. It seemed that most of them did even if they were white as hell and maple syrup ran in their veins. The only vampires I'd met with 'exotic' foreign sounding names had actually been from another country.

"Come meet our new friend 'Bob,'" Salvador had said.

Lyssandra had wrinkled her nose at my name. "What the hell kind of name is 'Bob' for a vampire? You should get that changed."

I went to shake her hand, but my nose was already in overdrive, telling me that there was something wrong about this girl. There was something sour under the layers of her perfume and natural musk, something that was almost rancid, and I just couldn't figure it out. It wasn't that she smelled bad in a haven't-showered-for-a-week way, since that would have been a shame for such a good looking girl. It was something different. Something disturbing.

She was a good looking Indian girl, tall and slim with gorgeous long black hair. She'd had specialty fangs made that she could easily slip into her mouth like a retainer, but I imagined gave her some difficulty.

I found out a month later while scrolling through the Facebook Group component of the meeting that she had been diagnosed with cancer. The group was devastated by the news, and I finally knew what it was about her that had smelled so wrong. I left the group soon after, disconnected myself from most of them completely. While some of the people had been nice, it definitely wasn't what I was looking for, and now I had the cancer-detection thing looming over me.

That was easily the worst part about finding out something like that. I could now recognize the smell on people and all of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere I went. Riding the bus was becoming torture when every time I got comfortable, there it was, that smell again. Knowing was the worst thing, especially one day when I smelled it coming from this beautiful little girl who couldn't have been more than six or seven. I wanted to say something, but how do you stand up in public and tell someone that they need to get their child to a doctor because they have cancer? Oh, how do I know that? Because I can smell it on them?

There is no easy answer to this question. I ended up scribbling a note and made some allusion to a bruise and slipped it into her mom's pocket, and hoped to hell that she did something about it. Even that felt like a cop-out.

***

After a while, I began to see patterns and realized that there was not a single vampire among these groups and even if there were, they would have been in deep trouble.

Those people only pretend to be vampires and aren't worth your attention if you're looking for the real deal.

The guy you ought to be watching is right next to you at the bar. He's the guy who looks perfectly normal, can actually hold his liquor and most times is a real jerk, the kind of guy you wish somebody would do something about, but nobody ever does. You don't see them too often unless they're like me, sick of the whole club experience and just want to experience something that more closely resembles real life. You have to know what to look for to really be sure, but when you spot them, you can see it easily enough: they carry the arrogance with them, and chicks dig it. No matter how jerky this real vampire is, somehow he always leaves the bar with some babe on his arm. It's just the natural order of things, so get over it.

This is the point when your vampire alarm should be screaming at you. You know that something is screaming that there is something wrong about this guy, but you can't quite figure out exactly what. All you know is that he is wrong but that's hardly something to make a judgment on, right?

He doesn't advertise, and he certainly knows how to blend into the shadows. Your more experienced vampire will have you convinced that there is nobody else as normal as him, forget the fact that he wears sunglasses at night. You won't know what he is until you wake up in the morning with a pounding headache and rapidly fading cuts on your wrists or neck that will be forgotten by the time you leave for work. The pounding headache you have is due to the reduced amount of blood pumping through your veins, and you're definitely going to need to restore some electrolytes. If your vampire is a nicer one, he'll have provided you with a nice tall glass of orange juice, and you'll be back to full strength in no time.

So a few things were working against me for finding or even forming the support group, but I was undeterred. I branched out a little and looked through a variety of standard support groups, from cancer to goth suicide groups, to former altar boys with revenge fantasies.

Once at an AA meeting, I ran into another vampire.

"I'm Bob," I introduced myself.

"You're new aren't you?"

"Pretty new, yeah. Acci--"

"Don't care. I'm going to talk right now, and you're going to shut your face and listen carefully."

I nodded mutely. The dude scared the shit outta me.

"You listening?"

Another nod from me still pretending to be mute.

"Fuck off."

"But you don't even--"

Dude cut me off with a single look. I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone's eyes glow red before then or since and I gotta tell you that it's the most unnerving thing you've ever seen.

"Do you want to find out how much pain you can take before you die?"

"No."

"Then fuck off kid. Get the fuck outta here before I change my mind. Goddamn, junkie."

I left in a hurry.

I was going to have to start my own group. Dammit.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

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QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think a good vampire crash pad would look like anyway? I'm seeing lots of black and a nice big tv with a Netflix subscription.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.