Andrew Fox - Fat White Vampire Blues

Jules had remained standing, uncomfortably, throughout Malice X’s monologue. His knees were aching again. “Yeah. One more. Why the warning? If you got so many goons to watch where I go, how come you haven’t just rubbed me out?”

The black vampire stood and straightened the crease in his pants. “I owed somebody a favor. I just paid it by givin‘ you a heads-up. Actually, I didn’t lose nothin’. See, I figure you’re too stupid to listen. A week, maybe a month from now, you’ll gimme some excuse to come down on you. Hard. You know them big, fat white toadstools that grow on neutral grounds after a heavy rain? I always loved kickin‘ the shit outta them things. Stompin’ ‘em to pieces. Just like I’m gonna love stompin’ you.”

Jules’s repertoire of wiseass comebacks was dry as a drought-stricken riverbed. The bayou of sweat dripping down his back had swelled to a Mississippi.

“Hey, Jules? You said before you can do some neat tricks, right?” Malice X removed his jacket, folded it, and placed it over the back of a rusty chair. Then he removed his shoes, unbuttoned his shirt, and loosened his alligator-skin belt and the clasp on his pants. “Well, here’s a trick I just learned.”

The black vampire’s form shimmered and wavered like a reflection in a twisting fun house mirror. His limbs contracted, his face elongated, and his gray skin sprouted a dense, smooth coat of coal-black fur. Seconds later, a sleek, heavily fanged panther gracefully shook off Malice X’s clothes. The bloodred bow tie remained tied around its neck. The great cat loped lazily to Jules’s side of the room, moving like ball bearings on smooth ice. It rubbed its face, its neck, and its side against Jules’s thick legs, purring hypnotically. Jules didn’t dare breathe.

Then it trotted to the coffin and, before climbing the stairs, showered it with a steaming spray of pungent urine.

It had been ten long, sometimes lonely years since Jules had seen Maureen last. He’d stayed away a decade out of deference to her feelings, irrational though they might’ve been. Now he was about to step onto her turf again. He had no choice. Only she could tell him how to reach the High Krewe of Vlad Tepes. She’d just have to understand.

Jules rubbed his eyes and yawned. He’d had a lousy day’s sleep. No amount of scrubbing and bleach had been able to completely remove the stench of urine from his coffin.

He paused on the sidewalk in front of Jezebel’s Joy Room to stare at the photographs of the dancers. He wanted to be sure that Maureen still worked there before he committed himself to climbing the stairs. Jezebel’s was on Iberville between Royal and Chartres, a stretch of the upper Quarter that had managed to avoid the rampant gentrification that had pasteurized most of the rest of New Orleans’s central tourist zone. The club’s surroundings had changed very little since the early 1960s, when the last few legitimate burlesque houses had died off and been replaced by bump-and-grind joints. This was a block respectable tourists rushed by on their way to the House of Blues or Cafй du Monde, averting their eyes from the yellowing photographs of naked female torsos.

Jules quickly scanned the contents of Jezebel’s come-on display. It didn’t take long to find her.Yup; that’s Maureen, all right. None of the photos inside the roach-eaten display case showed any of the women’s faces. The picture of Maureen, however, was unmistakable. Unlike all the others, it was a charcoal sketch, almost Fauvist in its primitive vitality. The caption beneath the sketch announced in bold lettering,ROUND ROBIN-BIGGEST EROTIC ATTRACTION IN THE QUARTER-YOU WON’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES! Staring at her picture brought a flood of memories crashing down on his head. Some good, some not so good. The picture was wrinkled from the oppressive humidity, and its edges had begun peeling away from the cork backing of the display case. If the sketch were true to life at all, then Maureen’s torso had grown even more monumental than it’d been ten years ago.

Generic disco music blared from cheap speakers in the second-story room high above, making the heavy air throb around Jules’s blunt head. He gathered his courage and pulled open the front door. Jezebel’s was at a competitive disadvantage compared with the clubs located right at street level. It lacked the free and effective advertising of a front entrance, which displayed flashes of the goods inside to curious passersby every time the door swung open. Jules waddled into the landing. The stairs were steep and narrow, lit by a single naked lightbulb. His fleshy nostrils twitched. The aroma inside the foyer was a barroom classic-stale beer mingled with cigarette haze and a hint of drying urine. Lately, it seemed he couldn’t escape the scent of piss.

Three minutes later, a veritable eternity of agony for his joints, Jules reached the second-story landing. The pounding in his ears obliterated the soulless, mechanical music howling from the speakers above the gaudily lit stage. His knees felt like huge, swollen beefsteak tomatoes, bruised, squeezed, and pinched by hundreds of manic shoppers at some pre-Easter sale at Schwegmann’s Giant Super-Market. But when he caught sight of who was on stage, Jules immediately forgot all about his knees.

Beneath a glittering, revolving disco ball, Maureen danced like some fantastic vision from an antediluvian, pre-Weight Watchers world, a fertility goddess who’d be worshiped by a tribe of blue-eyed albinos. As she danced about the stage with almost supernatural grace, every part of her-her hips, thighs, belly, double-dimpled arms, buttocks, jowls, neck rolls-shimmied and gyrated in time with the music, an unceasing undulation of fleshy movement. It was hypnotic. Jules estimated that she had packed on at least two hundred additional pounds since he had last seen her.

He made his way, as quietly and unobtrusively as he could manage, to a table near the back of the club. He wasn’t as invisible as he’d hoped to be. When he was just halfway to his destination, Maureen’s eyes snapped open, as if from a trance. Her placid face dissolved into a mask of horror and abject humiliation, as Jules was treated, along with every other patron in the club, to the astounding spectacle of Maureen’s immense, chalk-white body turning scarlet red.

She stumbled out of her dance routine like a punch-drunk boxer, then ran as quickly as her doughy legs would carry her to the side of the stage and theEMPLOYEES ONLY exit, covering her face with her hands. Jules frowned. He hadn’t anticipated his presence having such a dramatic effect on her. What was it with women, anyway? Jules had figured she’d be surprised, maybe even shocked, by his sudden reappearance. But shouldn’t she be happy to see an old friend again?

Another dancer hurried onstage as someone fumbled with the tape player and two employees stripped the black curtains from the mirrors surrounding three sides of the dancing platform. Compared with Maureen, the new girl was decidedly ordinary, apart from silicone-enhanced breasts. Jules overheard a few of the other patrons mumble with disappointment; several got up to leave.

Jules fidgeted for a few minutes while he tried to watch the new dancer. She wasn’t much good. Half the audience had cleared out since Maureen had made her abrupt exit.

The floorboards to the right of his table creaked. He heard a bemused, exasperated sigh, one he remembered all too well. “Hello, Jules.”

“Hey, Mo. Pull up a chair?”

“Sure. Long as I can find one that won’t bust when I sit down.”

She had dressed herself in a custom-made kimono, yards of black silk embroidered with green, purple, and gold dragons. Her long, frizzy blond hair was pulled back from her face by three glittery purple clips. Despite the forlorn, heavy sag of her alabaster jowls, Jules thought she was as beautiful as he’d ever seen her. As beautiful, even, as she’d looked the first night he’d met her, the last and only time he’d gazed at her with human eyes.