Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Hey! Who’s your tailor, my man? I gotta getme a outfit like that!”

“Fuck you, Erato. Thanks for coming so quick.”

“You was lucky. I was droppin‘ a fare only five minutes from here when I got your call. Get your ass in the car, already.”

Jules clambered in. He reluctantly admitted to himself that the Lincoln had a nice, spacious rear seat. “Take me straight home,” he said in an exhausted, defeated voice. “You know the way.”

Erato backed out and headed for West End Boulevard. “What? Don’t you want me to take you by the police station first? You’ve gotta report what happened, man. Give them cops a chance to catch those motherfuckers.”

“No. Straight home. I seen enough of cops tonight to last me a lifetime.”

They took the interstate until they reached Esplanade Avenue. They drove along the grand, crumbling old Creole boulevard, following the edge of the French Quarter until they reached Elysian Fields. Jules’s depressed musings were interrupted by a sudden exclamation from Erato. “Hey!” His friend dug through a pile of cassettes in an open shoe box on his front seat. “I got somethin‘ here that’ll cheer you right up. This tape’s by a new blues guy named Mem Shannon. He’s a cabby, just like us. It’s calledA Cab Driver’s Blues. Is that perfect, or what? Take it. It’ll do your sufferin’ soul some good, believe me.”

Jules examined the cassette. Its cover pictured a handsome, somewhat heavyset young black man, dressed in a cabby’s uniform, leaning against a dark gold taxi. “Aww, Erato, I can’t take this offa your hands. It’s brand new. Musta cost you fifteen bucks or so.” He tried handing it back.

Erato wouldn’t take it. “No, you keep it, man. Right now, you need it lots more than I do. I’ll just pick myself up another copy.”

A few minutes later they turned onto Montegut Street. The street, with its weed-strewn lots and graffiti-covered, termite-eaten shotgun houses, looked even more desolate than usual. On a normal night Jules would feel happy and secure driving through his old, familiar neighborhood. But tonight he felt scared, vulnerable, and alone.

They pulled up the narrow concrete driveway in front of Jules’s garage. Erato put his transmission in park and leaned back over his seat. His face was creased with concern. “You gonna be okay? You want me to come in for a few minutes?”

Jules mustered a smile. “Naww. I’ll be fine. Thanks, Erato. Thanks for everything.” He patted his friend on the shoulder, then opened the door to get out.

“Well, you need anything, you just call me on my cell phone, okay? Day or night. Hey! How are you set for cash? The Caddy insured? I could, y’know, ask some of the guys down at the Trolley Stop to pitch in. We could get some kinda benefit going. Maybe Mem Shannon would play!”

Jules carefully, respectfully shut the Town Car’s rear door. “Don’t you worry about me none. I’m flush. Me, I always land on my feet. I’ll be in touch, pal.” He remembered Maureen’s final words from two nights earlier. “Hey, you watch your ass, okay? Don’t let no shitheads takeyour cab. ‘Cause I won’t be able to come rescue you, least not for a while.”

Erato smiled. “Sho ‘nuf! God bless, Jules. You be good, you hear? And let me know what you think of that tape.”

Jules stood and waved as Erato backed out of his driveway. He walked to the curb and watched the massive Lincoln disappear down Montegut Street. Only when the cab was out of sight did he open his front door, still not repaired from Malice X’s invasion, and go inside.

His living room was hot, musty, and silent. He turned on a lamp. Its weak bulb cast long, ominous shadows over the room. As if on cue, his stomach emitted a tremulous moan. He stumbled to the couch and collapsed.

What to do now? He stared at his alabaster belly, which rose from the couch like a mountain of refined flour. Its lower extremities pulsed and jiggled as his gut sent out distress signals. Maybe the solution to his weight problem was to crawl into his coffin and stay there until he either wasted away to nothing or his gut, in desperation, devoured the rest of him.

His eyes fell upon his mother’s portrait on the mantelpiece. He tried looking away, but her stern, Victorian gaze held him fast.Son, I didn’t carry you in my belly for nine months, nourish you from my breast for another thirty-six, and watch over you until the day I died so that you could be a quitter.

For the second time in as many nights, Jules felt himself blush from head to toe. He forced himself to sit up. Then he picked up the nautical flag from where he’d dropped it on the floor. He read the embroidered inscription again.DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!

Jules climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled on a pair of briefs, and selected his best trousers, shirt, and jacket from his closet. Then he tied a bright yellow-and-green polka-dot necktie around his collar. He was many things, a lot of them no good. But he was no quitter.

Out on Montegut Street, he began singing French-Irish drinking songs in a slurred tenor. He affected an inebriated, stumbling gait; given his many infirmities, this wasn’t hard at all. After a few minutes of weaving along the middle of the empty street, he detected hurried footsteps coming toward him from a side alleyway. He stopped singing.

An unpleasant voice broke the stillness. “Hey, Slick! Shoney’s Big Boy! Wait up! I got to talk wit‘ you!”

Ah, music to his ears. He turned and zigzagged unsteadily toward the dark alley. The black man approaching him carried a switchblade in one hand, and what looked to be a bag of fried pork rinds in the other. He was shirtless, his ebony skin glistening with sweat. Multiple rolls of fat hung over his faded jeans. Jules’s saliva glands went into overdrive.

Come to Papa,Jules thought.Fuck the goddamn diet. And while I’m at it, fuck Malice X, too.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Let the good times roll!

At last, the night was kind to him. But for Jules Duchon, the good times would not roll for long.

The Third District police station on Moss Avenue didn’t look like a government building at all. From the outside, the spacious complex, with its horse stables and neatly parked rows of large white sedans, looked like an upscale jockey club. Several horses whinnied nervously from inside the dark stables as Jules crunched across the gravel parking lot.

He rubbed his aching posterior as he ruefully remembered his public bus ride from his neighborhood to the station, along Esplanade Avenue. He hadn’t been on a public bus in more than thirty years, and this ride had reminded him why; aside from being way too cramped for a person of his magnitude, the stale air inside had smelled of rancid chicken grease and the bodily odors of dozens of people who’d been standing in ninety-degree heat waiting all day for buses.Erato’s cab would’ve been waymore comfortable,Jules thought as he approached the front entrance.But some things you just can’t drag your buddies into. And stealing my stuff back from the New Orleans Police Department is definitely one of those things.

Jules wondered what his mother would think of him now-her only son, sneaking into a police station to commit a felony. Sure, he’d killed plenty of folks, but he never thought of that as acrime — that had been eating. Even his mother had accepted this; or she’d seemed to, anyway. It had been one of those things they’d never gotten around to talking about. During his early years as a vampire, whenever Jules had tried to relate to her the guilt his feedings were causing him, she would quickly turn on the radio, and instead of talking they’d listen to the New York Philharmonic orFibber McGee and Molly.