Finally the sun goes all the way down, And I make my escape from my own little prison. I am going to have to check out of here this morning anyway, sleep the day off in my truck like I mostly do. This cheese shitbox costs only sixty dollars a day, but I can’t even afford that really. My meagre savings are dwindling down to nothing at all. If I go on like this much longer, I won’t even be able to afford gas.
Future problems. The immediate concern is blood.
I need a drink…I need a drink…I NEED…
And once again, the gods smile on ole Henry. I am taking the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel: this antique cage done up in gold leaf and crud. Seems to descend, dangerously, at a snail’s pace. And the drink comes to me. As it has, seemingly, so many many times in the past. The elevator stops at floor number four (I’m on the top floor—seven) and a woman flings open the metal screen that serves as an elevator door and gets in. She’s about twenty-five or so—maybe older—and she’s dressed like she’s just stepped out of some 80s slasher movie or something. Black tights. Leg warmers over those. And she has some kind of mink or sable wrapped around her slight shoulders.
Her hair is big and red.
That last really gets me, of course. She reminds me (somewhat) of Sara.
We start down, the elevator rocking and vibrating like some small craft in choppy seas. It seems to stop at every floor but no one is there to get on. (Maybe the ghosts of past residents?) I savor the delay though, appraising the girl surreptitiously. Her beautiful backside. Her elegant fingers, tipped with some kind of plum polish. A smattering of almost invisible freckles on her high cheekbones.
Her hard emerald eyes…
I smell her. A heavy cloud of perfume—all citrus and violet and lily-of-the-valley. I have smelled that perfume before, perhaps a thousand times on a hundred women. But under that I smell acrid sweat. And something else? What is it?
I take another deep sniff.
Yes, It’s semen. A man’s ejaculate. She’s just given a man a blow job somewhere on floor four of this crumbling hotel and is on her way away from that little death.
Another prostitute.
Another Hard Day’s Night…
I wonder if I am going to have to put up any cash for this drink. And then I glance down, once again, at her backside.
Certainly worth it…
And I’ll get it back of course. Probably more.
I get ready to speak, as the rickety elevator makes its slow way to the lobby. And, as if she is reading my mind, she speaks first.
“You lookin’ for some company tonight?” she asks, turning toward me and giving me a desultory smile.
I feel a momentary sense of deja vu. I have been in this same situation so many times in the past. So many women with only the one commodity.
I guess it beats working at fucking McDonald’s. Yes?
“What?” I say, pretending I didn’t hear her. Oh, I heard her alright…
“I said, you lookin’ for some company tonight?” she says more loudly, trying to stand a few inches taller, thrusting her little breasts up toward me.
And then, without any kind of warning, she snorts through her nose. And then moans. Her cheeks go concave. Like she has just been possessed by some thug demon or something.
I stare hard at her. What the fuck?
The smell of semen permeates the elevator cage.
She mutters an apology. Bows her head. And then she snorts and moans again. Like she is already in the midst of some half-ass orgasm.
“Sounds good,” I mutter back, as our elevator, finally, reaches the lobby. Apparently, my drink-to-be suffers from some form of Tourette’s Syndrome or something. Well, that’s a first. But not a deal breaker, of course. I assume that her blood will not pass on this sorry affliction to yours truly.
“Alright then,” she lisps, clutching at her mink as if it were some dear pet she loved more than life itself. I stare into her green eyes. Beautiful tributaries of pain and hurt exist there, veining her irises.
Soon…
“Yes,” I answer, vaguely, flinging open the elevator gate with one hand and kneading her ass with the other. “You wanna go to my truck with me and we can figure this out…?”
The lobby is full of old men, rotting on love seats under fluttering fluorescents. Old men whose luck has run out and are just sitting around now, waiting to die.
“Ok,” the girl says. And then she snorts and moans again, turning every grizzled head in the place.
The absurdity of all of this just makes me want to fall down on the yellowed tile of this lobby floor, call for the old men to rush toward me with a straightjacket or something.
But I don’t. My stomach rumbles hunger for the nth time. Keep it together for a little while, ole hoss…
It’s Happy Hour soon…
And so, I go into kill mode. I turn on the spickets of vampire charm. I wrap a sheltering arm around my drink-to-be.
“My truck is real close,” I sing to the girl, whose name I don’t know, who hasn’t ventured such information at all. I can probably call her whatever the hell I want to call her. As long as I have Jacksons, Hamiltons, and Franklins nestled in my wallet.
She shivers under my vampire touch and looks at me with those bruised green eyes, trying to figure out…
Why Why Why?
Why am I the first john to fill her heart with something beyond disdain? Something like that, I assume.
“OK,” she whispers, as I usher her across the lobby and toward the street.
The old men in the lobby continue to stare at us. (Well her, mostly.) Have they always always been down here, sitting around? I guess I never noticed before. But of course, I have only been holed up in this shitbox for two days. It’s like a ward in some sorry-ass VA hospital or something. The broken and the battered. There’s one old vulture—he could anywhere between seventy to one hundred. He’s dressed in a red and black plaid shirt—the cotton caked with what looks like a thousand past meals of Quaker Oats or something. Now archeological strata. He has only one good eye apparently. His right eye is just a hooded horizontal slit—an ocular grimace. But still, his left eye stares and stares. And there’s another dude. He’s hooked up to what looks like a portable oxygen machine, tubes running up into his putty nose. He has his gnarled hands up close to his chest and they move and shake involuntarily, as if he were getting ready to throw a pair of dice at any moment.
Roll some snake eyes…
And he, too, is staring hard at my drink-to-be prize.
Like he thinks she can bring him back from the dead…
“C’mon. let’s leave,” I mutter, wrapping my arm more tightly around the girl.
So many
I had not thought
Death had undone
So many…
The girl voices assent with another snort and moan.
#
It’s butt-reaming cold in the streets outside the hotel. The girl shivers again, deliciously, as I guide her toward my truck.
“Whatcha want, baby?” she says/whispers. I can tell this is her standard business opener, but my vamp mojo has really undermined all her slick hooker patois. She is confused by Henry.
And also, disturbingly, aroused…
Bad for business that.
“I don’t know…Whatcha got, baby?” I reply, laughing. It’s a short jaunt to my pickup. It’s behind the hotel, in this gravel lot that’s boxed in on all sides by dark, crumbling storefronts. My truck seems to be the only vehicle ever to be anchored there…
Good.
It’s very dark there.
Double plus good.
“You want me to suck your cock?” the girl continues, warming my earlobe with her sperm-tinged breath.
Double double plus good.
“Sure,” I say. “That would work.”
We walk. And I sniff the night air (as I usually do) for a hint of Charles Robinson Serling. My nemesis. My Moby Dick. And there is nothing. Nothing. A kaleidoscope of smells, most assuredly. Fried chicken from some franchise somewhere. The sulfurous taint of a catalytic converter. Fish rot from the nearby river. Etc. Etc.
No Serling…
We are about four blocks east of Greektown. I can actually see the sign for the casino I was sitting in last night. It hangs in the black sky, at the rim of the building, like a caption above some lurid cartoon panel. Promising everything. Promising…NOTHING.
The futility of this hits me as it usually does.
Sara…
And then, once again, my stomach rumbles. Communicates its insistent, short-term goal.
“You hungry?” the girl asks. And snorts and moans.
“Oh yes…always,” I say.
“Hungry for me I hope?” she replies. Like some bad actress in a porn clip.
Above the city, two arc lights dally with each other, cross and retreat like dueling light sabers. One more whistle, out on the river, cuts into my vampire bones.
“You better believe it,” I say, clutching her close.
And in the end, there is no more foreplay. I help her up into the cab of my truck and she starts talking to me about prices. You can prod me here for this amount. I will lick you here for this amount. And I don’t want any of that now. Although sex is certainly NOT something I am above. There is a buzzing in my ears. Water bugs seem to scurry across the screens of my eyes.
“And if you want to…” the girl drones.
And with that, I am on her. In one dizzy, swift movement I lock in on her jugular vein, sink my canines down down into her pale, freckled neck. Explosions in the sky. Everything sweetly fades away as I join with my 80s Tourette’s princess.
“Ahhh…” she cries, clutching once again at her mink/sable pet.
And as I feed on her warm blood, the whole story of her life flows into me as well—like some naturalistic novel delivered all at once by brain transfusion. Her name is Alice. Yes…She wanted a thousand centuries ago to be a dancer. Yes…She’s from some shithole town in Wyoming. Yes…
And of course, there’s the Tourette’s. Her curse. Her fucking father used to beat her every single time she did the snort and moan trick. Her mother took her to some Baptist preacher when she was eight, searching for some miracle. Some cure…
Yes…
When she was thirteen, it went away. Just like that.
And then, when she was fifteen…it came right back.
Yes…Yes…Yes.
It’s all double plus good.
I drain her to the very last drop. She expires, falls against my drum of a heart.
Goodbye, Alice…
I snort and moan a requiem as I pull my teeth from her punctured neck.
I sit there in the cab for a few minutes, post-coital if you will, satiated, Alice still draped against me, staring straight ahead at some brick wall outside the windshield. There is some caption out there sprayed on the rough stones, some graffiti study in scarlet, and I read it over and over as if it were some Bible prophecy. Some augury written exclusively for me.
“The whole thing of art is how do you organize chaos?”
Indeed…
