Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

“Pull theplug? Isthat what you call what you did? That was the mostdisgustin‘ horror show I ever saw! Those werevampires you killed! Prejudiced idiot vampires, sure, but stillvampires!”

Doodlebug gave Jules an honestly sympathetic look. “It was very unfortunate, yes. But I’m sure once you’ve had a chance to cool off and think the whole thing through, you’ll agree with me that itwas necessary. The only one I feel sorry about, really, is that rabbi’s wife.”

“You didn’t give me achance! I coulda turned ‘em around! Sure, maybe they weren’t as gung-ho as I expected. But if I just coulda talked to them some more, I’mpositive I coulda got maybe half of them to sign on-two-thirds, even! Butnoooooo — you hadda go jump the gun and turn ’em all into piles of goo!”

“My, my! The Grand Alliance is fraying already, is it?” Maureen got off her stool and sashayed toward Jules, aggressively thrusting her stomach before her. “Jules, as uncharacteristically dumb as Doodle has been so far on this visit, you can’t blame him for this latest fiasco. If anything, I’m sure it would’ve turned outworse if he hadn’t have been there with you. You know who you need to be shoveling the blame onto? I’d saylook in the mirror, but unfortunately, that isn’t possible, is it?”

Something in Maureen’s tone of voice got under Jules’s skin. “Yeah? It’s all my fault, huh? I justasked for Malice X and his goons to trash me, that’s what you’re sayin‘?”

Maureen leaned across their twin stomachs, putting her nose an inch from his. “Damn you, Jules Duchon!” Her eyes were afire with anguish and self-loathing, and her voice dripped with bitter resentment. “Itis all your fault! Every second of misery you’ve endured these past three weeks you’ve brought on yourself! Yourself! And you’ve forced me to suffer every miserable second right along with you!”

Jules frowned with befuddlement, not anger. “What’re you talkin‘ about, Mo?”

“Youmade me make him, damn you! You left me alone! I hadno one! Do you have anyidea what that’s like for a woman like me? Do you?Do you? ”

She collapsed onto the couch and buried her face in her hands. As the room filled with the sound of her ragged sobbing, Jules stood still as a gray, weather-beaten statue. Only a twitching in the corner of his mouth betrayed that he still possessed the power of movement.

Doodlebug knelt by Maureen’s side. He gently stroked her hair. “It’s all right, dear. It’s all right… try to get hold of yourself. I suspected it might be something like this. You have to tell us the rest. We need to know everything.”

“Oh God… oh God, please forgive me.” She choked back her sobs and raised her head from her hands. Tears and fingers had smeared her mascara into a mask of spiderwebs. Only her stained forehead and her eyes, turned toward the heavens, showed above the arm of the couch. “Lord, I know I haven’t any right to call on Your name. No right. But if You have any shred of pity for a damned creature like me, please send Your forgiveness.”

“Start at the beginning, Maureen.”

“Ten years ago, we… I just couldn’t live with Jules anymore. He was driving me out of my mind. He wouldn’t listen to anything I’d tell him. He’dsay he was going on a diet, that he’d watch what he was eating. But every month I watched him pile on the pounds, get grosser and grosser. He was destroying himself, destroying the beautiful man I’d wanted to preserve forever… Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I told him to get out. If he refused to take care of himself, he had to get out. I never meant for him to leave, notreally — but he took me at my word. He was too bullheaded, too goddamndense to realize that, yes, I’d reached the end of my rope, but actually I was onlywarning him… I wanted him to shape up, toreform, notleave…”

“So the man who became Malice X… you took him as your lover? He was Jules’s replacement?”

“Oh God… you have tounderstand. The house was soempty. After a few months, the silence was driving me out of my mind. I tried making friends at the club. But there was no one there who could understand me. I even thought about going back to the compound, back to Bamboo Road. But it had been too many years. I couldn’t bear going back there as an utter failure, a fat girl who couldn’t hack it on the outside. I was so lonely… and the men I brought home with me from the club only made it worse. Some of them, they’d try making conversation before we’d have sex… but it never mattered, because I knew that before sunrise, they’d be stiff as day-old doughnuts, and I’d be stuffing them down the furnace chute. White, colored, Spanish, Chinese… after a while, I hardly paid attention anymore. Going down the chute, they all had the same face. Exactly the same dumb, surprised, frozen face.

“One night, I noticed this young man staring at me. Oh, sure, they allstared, but this one was looking at me different-like he was appreciating me as a woman, not just as a slab of dancing meat. For weeks he came back, five, six nights a week. A colored kid, but he was young, good looking. And he had beautiful eyes. A beautiful smile. I waited for him to approach me like the older men did, the ones I’d end up taking back to the house. But he was shy. Finally one nightI approachedhim. I took him home with me. The night went like it usually did. But after I drank him dry, I stared at him lying there in my bed, and his face wasdifferent… Never in a million years did I think I’d do it, but I didn’t stuff him down the chute. I let him lie there in peace, lie there until he woke up-”

“I can’t listen to no more of this,” Jules said.

Maureen, eyes wide with terror, turned toward the dead, listless sound of her ex-lover’s voice. “Jules? Jules, you have tounderstand, I had noidea what would happen later-”

He slowly shook his head, a rusted automaton who could barely heed the commands of distant, weak radio waves. “I ain’t listenin‘ to one more word. C’mon, Doodlebug. Let’s get out of here.”

The cross-dressing vampire’s face was torn, conflicted. His words, usually so confidently spoken, were hesitant, almost mumbled. “Jules-I think-I really think she needs us, right now, to be here with her. Let’s hear her out-”

Jules turned and walked to the door. He opened it. In a low tone, speaking into the hallway, he said, “Either you’re with her. Or you’re with me. Your choice. I’m going now.”

“My whole life is a piece a shit.”

“No, it’s not.”

Jules and Doodlebug were sitting at a small, dirty, back corner table at the St. Charles Tavern. Jules hadn’t wanted to go anywhere he might see people he knew. Aside from a few listless neighborhood types sitting at the bar, the dim, sour-smelling tavern was deserted; most of its ex-clientele was just up the street a few blocks, at the Trolley Stop Cafй.

“Sure it is. Sure it is. One big piece a shit. When I was tellin‘ you about that time two weeks ago I ran away to Baton Rouge, I didn’t tell you the whole story. I did stuff I’m ashamed of. Stuff I’ll never forget as long as I’m still walkin’ this earth.”

Doodlebug slowly stirred his cup of coffee. “I’m sure it doesn’t really matter, Jules. We’ve all done things we’re, eh, less than happy with. Even me.” He smiled, briefly, perhaps hoping to spark a smile in return. It didn’t work.

Jules’s face, usually so animated as to appear rubbery, was a mask of petrified wood. “You ever fucked a stray dog?” And then it was all pouring out of him-his befriending the dog on the streets of Baton Rouge, how he stole dog food for her and then, violating all the rules of civilized vampirism, turned to a wolf so he could share her meal. Finally, he came to the worst part.