Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Layla loved me, I guess. In her way, she loved me more than anyone else. Maybe it was because I never surrendered to her like the others did. Maybe that’s why she kept coming back for more, each time expecting that she’d finally break me and I’d be all hers. I guess that’s a strange kind of love, but Layla was strange. She had her own way of getting what she needed, even if it meant settling for less than she wanted.

Like the trip to Napa. She said what we needed was something heavy, bloody, nothing less than a good California Zinfandel. None of that sour piss they bottled in the Central Valley would do. We needed the real deal — the product of foggy nights and sunbaked days and oak barrels coopered in the Valley of the Moon.

That sounded good to me — sucker for escape that I am. The day hadn’t been one of my best. I was worried about the picture and the director (who’d been whittling my brains for four straight months), but most of all I was worried about where I was going to be in a couple of years. I’d always wanted to be on top, and once I was on the verge of getting there all I could think about was fading. Just fading, and that isn’t even romantic. Nothing so Hemingwayesque as a bullfighter dying beneath a sun that gleams like a Spanish doubloon.

When I was like that — morbid and scared and way too romantic — I turned to Layla. Back then, in the beginning, she made me feel indestructible, like I’d go on forever.

So we had our little trade-off, Layla and me. It seemed so simple at first. Too bad it changed to something else. Like I said, it was all tied up with our wants and needs — what we wanted from each other, and what we needed to survive; what we were willing to surrender, and what we needed to keep to ourselves. An ace in the hole, some secret part held back for the final hand. It was a very fine line, and we walked it like the edge of a razor blade, and damned if both of us didn’t end up stumbling.

Whoa. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, like I was saying — red lips laughing in the dark. Night wind of California slashing a dead white face with tangles of long black hair. A Spyder sports-car, a would-be movie star, and a gorgeous corpsette riding shotgun.

A quiet graveyard.

How Layla found just the right grave, I’ll never know. But she did. She eased out of the Spyder, cocked those sexy hips of hers, and stared down tilting rows of marble and granite. Then she pointed, her fingers extended as straight and stiff as marble daggers.

We waited in the darkness, the radio cutting in and out, snatches of Fats Domino and Bill Haley worrying the static that ruled the fog-choked night. Layla stood there in the dark, as quiet as stone, and I found myself remembering the crazy party where we’d met. Layla had been as quiet as stone that night, too, until she whispered that she could help me get a break. Whispering hot in my ear as she tried to maneuver me into a dark closet. That was the moment I’d been waiting for since first hearing about her. I told her no, it wasn’t going to be that way between us. And I kissed her, and I let my hand brush her breast so lightly that she couldn’t help but feel it way down deep, and I walked out on her.

And the phone was ringing in my apartment when I got home.

I’d heard all the stories, you see, and the funny thing is that there was something inside me that let me believe every damn one of them. Layla the vampire. Layla the witch. Layla and graveyards, and dead cats, and midnight rituals.

My story: Layla, as quiet as stone, in a Napa Valley cemetery

Momentarily, we felt the earth shudder.

Heard clumps of clipped grass tearing beneath the shroud of fog.

Saw his silhouette rise before us.

I guess Layla didn’t know everything, though, because she had to ask him the name of the winery where he’d worked.

I wanted to put him in the trunk. He smelled pretty ripe, and I didn’t want his muddy ass messing up the Spyder’s upholstery. Layla pointed out that we didn’t know how to get to the winery. I asked him for directions, but he couldn’t speak well enough to get them out.

So down the two-lane blacktop we went with a dead vintner sitting behind us — his feet jammed in the little space between the bucket seats; his moldy butt on the trunk; his dead hands on our shoulders, holding on for dear life… or whatever.

The winery grounds smelled of oak and stone. The place was even quieter than the graveyard. The dead man knew where a passkey was hidden. He led us across the grounds, through a heavy oak door, and down a stone-lined corridor that cut into the side of a hill. Being a man of discriminating taste, he chose a rare Zin from prohibition days, when the wineries had managed to survive via sacramental contracts.

He uncorked the bottle with precision and a certain grace, as if he wasn’t dead at all. We all had a little taste. Then we got down to business.

Layla stood behind me. With one hand she undid my fly and took me between those marble fingers. Her other hand held the open bottle.

I closed my eyes. Her fingers moved slowly. She was going to enjoy this, play it for all it was worth, because she knew just how much the director had worn me down, and just how badly I needed her help.

This time she had me at the end of my goddamn rope.

Her words tickled over my neck as she whispered the incantation. “The bottle uncorked by the man who corked it. Thirty years in the cellar, thirty years in the ground. The juice of the grape and the seed of the man. The seed of the man and the juice of the grape…” It went on from there. Then her grip tightened, and her sharp little teeth closed on my earlobe.

Skyrockets, if you want a cliche. In this case, it’s no exaggeration.

When I opened my eyes, the bottle was corked once more and wore a new lead capsule. The dead vintner lay on the floor, withered in his moldy suit. Whatever had been left in him was now gone.

But there was wine on his grinning lips, and Layla knelt at his side. The tiniest of smiles crossed her face as she rose. Her white fingers swam toward me in the darkness, and her red lips parted. Her tongue did a coy little dance over her teeth and she laughed.

She’d seen the look of horror on my face. She’d gotten a little bit of what she wanted, and I’d lost a little bit of what I needed.

A piece of me that I could never get back.

I turned away, bloody Zinfandel roiling in my gut, and hurried up the stone corridor, trying to convince myself that Layla hadn’t pulled me out of a grave, that I was still alive and breathing.

You see, she’d touched me once, and once was enough.

It was the only time I ever let her touch me.

I wrapped a big red ribbon around the bottle of wine and gave it to the director. He eased off after that. I don’t know what did the trick: Layla’s enchanted Zin or the insane deadline the studio had imposed. Either way, the sly old puppeteer didn’t have another word to say about me until the first reviews appeared.

Layla wouldn’t go to the premiere, of course. She said it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen in the company of an older woman who earned her living showing monster movies to a TV audience of slobbering teenagers. She selected a starlet who’d caught her eye, even bought a corsage for the girl. I picked her up at Layla’s bungalow in Hollywood.

Big night. Starlet and Spyder and me. Little pistons pounded in my skull, so steadily that I could hardly watch the picture. I had choke fever real bad; I couldn’t even bring myself to take the starlet’s hand for fear she’d reject me and storm out of the place in search of a real celebrity.

The movie plodded along. My face seemed to hang on the screen for minutes at a time, so huge, but like I said, flat and somehow unreal. And then the last scene finally came, all tears and shadows on the big screen. My own voice wailed at me while I made promises to a sick man who was supposed to be my father.