vampireblog

[vampireblog]

Virgin skin.

After all the trouble I got into the last time I wrote, I know what you’re thinking. We’ll get to that. But first the important questions. Can vampires get tattoos? Yes. But they don’t last. Which is how I ended up in the desert. Obviously you can’t go to just anyone for brand new ink on virgin skin that was covered when you left just a few weeks ago. And there are only so many great artists to go to for the first time, even in LA. Plus the tattoo world is small wherever you go. Everybody knows everybody and people talk. So you gotta have someone you trust. For years I had my girl in East LA. Amazing artist. Mexican. Can’t really be in the states legally, but can’t go back. Her brother was killed by the cartels. So we had an arrangement. She didn’t ask questions she was too smart to pretend she didn’t know the answer to, and I paid in cash. A month’s income in one night. Standing appointment. Dusk till dawn sessions. I could go until her arm went numb. And every six weeks there was a fresh canvas for all the scenes of gruesome, lurid, beautiful, transcendent death she had to get out of her head and onto my back. After she was done, she’d take a photo and come over and stand real close and zoom in on her phone to show me all the detail of her latest masterpiece as I watched her neck. I was her best customer. And in return she was my healer. When I felt the piercing pain of the needle, I felt relief. All the other pain went away. When I walked out, I felt light. Free. Sometimes I’d get a hit of analgesia just from the sound of the ink gun buzzing before it even touched my skin. Sometimes it’d start the moment I’d walk in and see the chair. For days after the fresh ink I’d dream about the chair and feel the relief in my sleep. Wacky vampire neurochemistry. But it’s the same for humans. Why do you think so often people get tattoos after someone they love dies? The desert was her idea. Carmen’s. Obviously not something I’d come up with. First of all, what am I supposed to do in the Mojave desert? 280 days of sunshine a year? Pass. Second…. honestly, it’s just hard to come up with anything new the longer you go. You’ve seen too much. You know how every story ends. The neurons that fired together, wired together. And they got stuck there. Humans only get a few decades to repeat their conditioned patterns. For a vampire, there’s no end. It’s so easy to get stuck in your own loops forever. The older you get the greater the likelihood you become one of those vampires who substitutes creativity for *taste.* Who can’t come up with anything new. All you can do is buy things.   Anyway, for years I listened to Carmen talk about her dream of a desert oasis for psychedelic healing. Since before I was sober. During the opioid years, when I’d waft into her little tattoo shop like a bad smell. But I never missed a session. Or at least I don’t think I did. I don’t know; I mean, I probably did. I wasn’t very reliable. I don’t remember that time all that well. But I remember after my sessions, just before dawn, she’d be pushing all the tattoo chairs against the walls of her shop to clear the room for morning yoga classes, and I’d tell her to go take a disco nap. I could move them all as easily as blow on them on my way out. And all those nights I was in her chair listening to her telling me about the power of the plant medicines, I was a captive audience for her investor pitch. Girl is a hustler. She’d tell me about the ancient lineage of the medicines in her culture, her family of curanderos stretching back to before the first Spaniard ever set foot on this continent. The medicine’s power to alter the consciousness of men. Men like the ones who killed her brother. A world full of men. But first she needed money. What do you say, shark? I been saving up. You know you already my biggest investor. But I want a real partner. After I came back from Switzerland (long story), sober for the first time in decades, I left everything in my life in LA behind except for the standing appointment with Carmen. My own private healing session. Carmen’s expressive arts therapy: a gun that shoots ink. Then I was ready to finally hear what she had been talking about all that time. Then I understood.   So here we are, in the desert. We found the land in May 2018, hired an architect, did the construction for 2 years (we had some special requests), and opened our doors March 1st, 2020. Perfect timing, right? The pandemic has been good to us. Me, of course, personally. But also it turns out lots of humans out there are dying to get out. Way out. To the middle of nowhere. To become new to themselves again. To let go of their collective trauma. To be reborn. We are booked solid for the next two years. Carmen guides the healing rituals and the vision. And I… do the landscaping. It’s nice to have something productive to do, you know? Carmen thinks psychedelics’ ancient magic is going to change the world. And she could be right for all I know. You’d be surprised the things that changed the world when you look back, in retrospect. In the end, the way I see it, these plants and molds and things have been around for a long, long time. Longer than you or me or any of us. Longevity like that doesn’t just come by accident, trust. You gotta be quite clever about it. You’ve got to respect anything that knows how to survive. That’s what I’m trying to do now. The new vibe is: keep going. You might as well see where this all leads. Since you’ve come all this way, anyway. Since you’ve already written your way here.

[vampireblog]

The past is never really dead. It’s not even past.

Happy Valentine’s, mortals! Do you like your plague? I do! It’s been a minute since I’ve written. Well, 7 years, but you know a minute in my years. Things got pretty crazy at the end there, huh? Woof. Well, let’s see. What happened? I went to Switzerland. I got clean. Got boring. Grew up. It takes a while to grow up when you never get old. Sorry if I worried you. First there was nothing to say, and then there was nothing more I could say, and then, you know. It was “a whole thing.” As they say. Death. One night at a time. Whachagonnado? Yes, mortal friends, what HAVE you been doing? These last couple years. Man! Thank you! As you know, I fucking love pandemics. And this one is terrific! A thousand bizarre symptoms! No one knows what it’s capable of. Convenient! Somehow it fucks your blood? That’s something we have in common. Malaise. Heart attacks. Strokes. I love it! This is the most relaxed I’ve felt in decades. I honestly don’t think my mental health has ever been better. I started meditating in rehab! I do yoga now. Can you imagine? The marines stationed out here in the desert tell me they’re taught yoga during training now. I tried to picture someone teaching yoga to us Union boys. Mindfulness training for the Virginia battlefields. Being a soldier today is a whole different world. At the bars in 29 Palms they talk about robot dogs. And Mars missions. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s been so long! Let’s catch up! How have you been? Tell me everything! It's a pandemic and we’re reconnecting with old friends we drifted apart from years ago to try to keep each other from succumbing to the death of boredom as we try to stay alive together on the life-raft. Well, not me of course. You’re dead on the life raft with me. But you understand what I’m saying. Me? I’m in great spirits! It’s a party out there. I mean, I don’t party anymore like I used to, but the younger vampires, the ones who’ve never had a proper plague before are out there living their best deaths right now. So yeah what else, I quit everything. After I came back from Switzerland, I sold the drug business which is just as well since dealing with the cartels sucked. Now I basically just invest in tech funds. The Norcal cartels. Between me and you, I can't stand any of those people up there, and they taste like shit, too if you want to know. Maybe it’s all the crazy supplements they think are gonna help them live forever. (Surprise! They won't.) The billionaires are all drinking vampire blood now. Peter Thiel. All those people. Vanity Fair writes, “The Silicon Valley billionaire reportedly sees blood transfusions as the pathway to radical life extension.” Not human blood, friends. He can’t go all the way, of course. Too much risk during daylight. But he’s invested in a bunch of Silicon Vampire startups. Trying to figure out how to get the keys to immortality in the sun. He’s got the Council on board. Collaborating on moonshot research. Hands on the gears of power in the world of the living and the undead. But enough about that asshole. How have you been passing the time, friend? I’ve been gardening. It’s not easy in the desert, but you know landscaping; succulents. I grow mushrooms and host psychedelic healing retreats at my desert compound. Sometimes I partake of the psychonaut participants. That's how they got me clean in Switzerland, you know. Psychedelics man. The real deal. My new look is hair pulled up in a manbun, white linen suit, driving a murdered out matte black 59 Impala with black velvet interior and off-road suspension. The staff at the compound call it the Batmobile. Not my favorite superhero, as you know, but I’ll take it. No doubt, you’ve seen me around. I’m out at night with the top down and the volume up playing ambient music as I roll into view through the dust. That’s me now. The Vampire healer. Immortal zen dealer. Angel of ego death. (Also regular death). Here I am. Stuck in Saṃsara with you. The new group is just arriving for the healing ritual now. Gotta go.

[vampireblog]

i stumble out of the warehouse on bay street. my old porsche is parked diagonally across two spaces about 20 feet away from the entrance. my vision fades out like the tide, never quite coming in. my feet are dragging and the ground rocks beneath me like a boat. things feel aqueous. i press the button on the fob and blurred globes of light flicker twice silently on the car. i somehow make it all the way. i fumble with the door handle for a while, finally managing to grasp it and pull, opening the door, falling inside, my feet leaden, still on the gravel. i have to focus all my concentration on moving my legs inside the car now. my mind feels bloated, like it’s full of silicone sloshing about behind my eyes. it seems almost impossible. i don’t hear the car pulling up until it’s already stopped alongside me. i blink through a layer of film. how long has it been there, idling? i’m not sure. all my senses are dulled, the aural wiring short circuited. dead. the radius of sensory stimulation has decreased until the outside disappears just beyond arm’s length. i can’t register anything outside my skin. i am underwater now. still struggling, trying to move my legs inside the car. the door of the car next to me opens. no one gets out. it’s dark inside. or maybe i just can't see that far. i don’t smell a thing. i’m not sure how long this is all going on for, but after a while hands are reaching in towards me, inside the car. they seem disembodied. ghost hands, pulling me out. i register white shirt cuffs and black blazers. Council secret service. they’re lifting me out of my car, depositing me inside the other — which, outside now, i’m noticing is a limo, actually. it feels like i’m inside a tornado. i am lying on the floor of the limousine now and it’s dark and i can finally smell just a little bit, not because the high is waning but because the scent is so strong for me. i know what it is. the limousine begins to move, backing up out of the gravel lot. i am on the floor, trying to hold on to the seat cushions as the whale car shifts gears, begins going forward. i’m pulling myself up onto the seat, barely, as we roll up to the stop sign just before the freeway onramp, my whole body lurching like i’m on a rollercoaster. every movement is protracted exponentially. i can focus on the scent, and on some deep, instinctive level i know what’s happening even if my mind is too addled to understand how all these pieces fit together. i can only focus on one thing at a time right now. stumbling in a stupor from thought to thought. each one a paralyzing revelation. i am deeply nauseous from all the movement. then the car begins to speed up, gaining momentum up the onramp and then out onto the deserted 5 am freeway, going faster and faster. i’m sitting with my back to the driver, slumped in a heap, leaning against the window, watching the freeway barrier moving backwards. my insides feel like they’re all going to come out. a thought briefly flashes through my mind like the halo of a passing light outside the window, that i should be composing myself. considering. considering what i can smell. and who i know is in the darkness at the other end of the limo, though i cannot see her. i consider being embarrassed that she should see me like this, after all this time, but that complicated emotion is currently outside the range of capabilities in my limbic stupor. and furthermore, i’m kind of enjoying that it should be like this. that i am completely beyond control in any way. i won’t pull it together for her. this is how i am now. far, far away, much further back than just the other end of the limo, i hear her voice, saying, “Hello, Jonathan.” and i try to will myself to reply, but instead, all i can do is lean forward, open my mouth, and the swaying of the giant whale car pushes the rising tide up and out of my mouth. the last thing i remember is blood splashing out all over the seat, against the window, ricocheting back over me. then everything gets cold and gray and dark and then the light goes out altogether. i wake up. i am lying in a square, cement container. there is no light here, but my eyes are adjusted. i can see there is an instruction label taped to the lid of the container about a foot away from my face. i can read through the pitch black, it says there’s a button on my right inside the container. push button to open. so i do. light floods in at me as the container lid slides away, disappearing into the wall. i sit up and find myself in a recessed pod in a cement floor. i can feel my pupils contract suddenly, and my head begins throbbing instantly, even though the only illumination in the room is just some sourceless, ambient, backlight accents. there isn’t any direct light in the room at all, which is circular and bare. it’s like something from kubrik’s 2001: a space odyssey. i suppose it was probably built around exactly the same time as the movie came out, no doubt inspired by it. all lacquered cement and white fiberglass. some 1970s vampire’s vision of the modernist world 21st century vampires would inhabit. and here we are now, as usual, living in the past. i crawl up out of the pod onto my hands and knees. there is another instruction label at the foot of the pod indicating a button to press to close the lid, which i do, and it slides back out from the wall, perfectly into place, resealing the pod’s opening. i get up onto my feet unsteadily, and notice there are a number of other pods in the floor, all closed, but i can see the outline of the pod covers, rectangular shapes radiating out like flower petals, empty by the smell of them. i walk slowly out of the room and into another where the light is a bit brighter, but the change is not as dramatic so it doesn’t hurt my eyes as much. my head is still throbbing anyway. there are mirrors in this room. a long stretch of them, like the greenroom of some massive broadway production. the smooth, frictionless vastness of the empty space is eerie. like an abandoned space colony. my iphone buzzes in my pocket — i’m still wearing the clothes i was in last night, stiff and soiled brown now with dried blood — and the sound of the insistent vibrating echoes in the empty space. the text message reads, “Clean clothes in the toilette, on the other side of the hall. Clean yourself and come upstairs.” i smile for the first and last time that night. the movement of these facial muscles feels foreign. i have forgotten what it’s like to have anyone telling me what to do. especially her. when i’ve showered, and dressed — the clothes are the same secret service uniform of white shirt, and black suit as the disembodied hands that dragged me from my car earlier — i take the elevator up. the doors open and i walk out into another vast space. ahead of me windows overlook the twinkling lights of Los Angeles below. I am in the Hollywood Hills, and I can smell Leelee before I see her. my range of vision has expanded somewhat now that i’m not high anymore. she’s sitting at a desk, legs crossed, her face lit in the dark by the light of a computer monitor, typing away at superhuman speed. she looks up at me as i walk towards her, still typing, then back at the screen, finishing an email no doubt, mouses over to click. send. i sit down in a chair facing her, and finally she turns away from the screen, towards me. we don’t say anything for a really, really long time. i focus beyond her, on the flickering city lights below. i’m beginning to zone out. my head hurts even more now, and i can feel it all throughout my body. the high is completely gone, and i know it’s going to get worse if i don’t fix. then she speaks. “You look like shit, Jon.” “that makes sense,” i say. “i feel like shit.” these are the first words i’ve spoken to her in a decade. she gets up out of the chair and walks over in her blood red-bottom stilettos to the kitchen area of the giant open space. there’s a row of glass-door fridges. inside i see only stacks of transfusion bags. she opens a glass fridge door, grabs two bags, plops them into one of a half dozen microwaves. we don’t speak as the blood bags rotate around inside for 30 seconds, warming up. then she comes back to the desk, sits down and tosses a bag at me. “O neg,” she says. “Your favorite.” she watches me as i eye it warily, but don’t move. after a while she leans back in the chair, and says, “How long since you’ve drunk sober?” “i don’t know,” i say. she sighs. “How did you let it get to this?” i shrug, and look back out the wall of windows. “is that why you’re doing this” she says, and swivels the computer monitor towards me. i turn to look at the screen, and am both surprised, and not, to see my blog. i sigh. “so that’s why i’m here?” “Why else would you be here?” “it’s just a blog,” i say indifferently, “among, like, a million other blogs.” “People are reading it.” “what people? like, teenage girls. suburban moms. twilight fans.” “Twilight,” she says with disgust, “is fiction.” “so? so is my blog.” she looks from the monitor, back at me, then reaches across the glass desk and picks up the pack of O neg. “You and I both know,” she says, ripping the pack with her teeth, “that this is not fiction.” i watch her drink and i can feel myself start to get aroused. things seem to focus in more sharply. the lights outside. i’m starting to see the city below in more detail. i can smell the blood as she drinks. hear it flowing down her throat as she swallows, sliding past the opening of her white, button-down shirt, tight around her breasts. it almost makes me want some, too. thought not enough to do anything about it. “no one knows the difference” i say quietly. she stops. the bag is half empty now. she wipes her lips; licks her fingers. “You’re listing dates. Places. Specific protocols. Names. My name. It's criminal, Jon.” “is that why you’ve come” i ask. “to arrest me?” she shakes her head. “This is an unofficial meeting.” “an unofficial meeting is the first step in the protocol,” i say. she looks me dead in the eyes and says, “It is.” i don’t say anything. so she gets to the point. “You must stop writing this blog, Jon. You know the consequences.”   i try to say something, but it comes out garbled. i’m trembling now. but it’s not fear. i do the math. i threw up most of the blood i drank last night, which means, i haven’t actually fixed in 48 hours. i could go much longer than that without blood, but this is different. it’s heroin withdrawal. “Christ, you’re such a mess,” she says, and tosses the other blood bag at me. i fumble, catching it. “Grade A junkie plasma,” she says. “Drink it.” my hands are convulsing as i mangle the bag, trying to open it. i can’t even clench my chattering teeth to tear the plastic seal. Leelee has to walk over and do it for me, holding it up like a bottle of baby formula as i drink so i don’t spill the blood everywhere with my trembling hands. i empty about half, and she slowly removes the bag. i look up at her face, which i haven’t until this moment even allowed myself to remember is beautiful, though of course it is. unimaginably. angelic, serene, knowing. she puts the bag down on the glass table and kneels down at my feet, crossing her arms over my legs and resting her chin on top, looking up at me. “Let me help you.” she says in her way that is both plea and seduction. i remember this well. this ancient female tone that used to be so common before the suffragettes and the feminists. a tone that compels a man to imagine her desire must be what he himself wants after all. the tone of creatures who could only get what they needed in this way. Leelee is impeccable. i can hear her talking about rehabilitation, but the blood is dissolving through me now, carrying the drugs, and i can’t focus properly to give this performance the appreciation it duly deserves. that range of sensory perception is folding back up into itself now. i can just focus on the weight of her arms on my legs, her smell, piercing through everything. “it doesn’t matter,” i slur. “you want me to go to switzerland? i’ll go. it won’t change anything.” i can feel the shifting weight of her arms on my legs, the fluctuating pressure of her chin as she moves her mouth to speak. it takes me a while to understand what she’s saying. “What do you want, Jonny,” she asks. i focus only on my name coming from her lips. it’s the first time she’s called me that since i’ve seen her. she has to ask me again. finally, i tell her, “nothing.” she’s still talking. saying things that register much later after she’s said them. the meaning of her words arriving on a delay. i can feel her hands moving up my thighs. “You must want something,” she’s whispering. i have to consciously focus to move my arms, like they’re controlled by muscles i haven’t used in decades. i put my hand over hers. at first she waits for me to do something more, but eventually she realizes i’m trying to stop her from inching any further. “it doesn’t matter,” i say again, shaking my head. she looks up at me for a very long time. or maybe it’s only just a moment that lingers in my mind as i zone out. there was a time when this could have been the answer. this could have been everything i wanted. it could have solved everything. fixed me. but we are long past that now. she’s trying to quicken me, but she can’t. she is a ghost to me now. she’s something i read about happening to someone else. i’ve begun to doubt it ever happened to me at all. when i focus back in she’s leaning against the glass desk, her arms crossed over her chest, looking down at me. “You have to want something,” she’s saying, scolding and concerned, “otherwise, why do you get up at night?” i look away from her, out the window again, the city lights below dancing now. “why do you get up at night,” i ask the window. “I have a responsibility, Jon,” the window says. “is that enough, for you?” “It's everything for me,” says the window. “It gives me a sense of purpose; a sense of direction. Accomplishment.” “and importance and power.” “and… love.” i look back at her now. it’s like she’s just leaned over and casually ripped my throat out, but she hasn’t moved at all. i focus in, looking for the most hurtful thing i can find to say. it’s surprisingly not difficult. like it’s been there all along, just hovering beneath the surface from the moment i first smelled her scent in the limo, from long before that, always this thing i’ve carried around with me since she left, which, i suppose it is. “nothing lasts forever.” i’d spoken these words to her in the Council facility after the fire, when she had come to see me to tell me how sorry she was about the way everything had turned out. before i met Leelee i had been a vampire for 50 years, but i had been a child. i had believed i was immortal. Leelee taught me what it truly means that nothing lasts forever just because it can. she gets up off the desk then, and walks to the window, facing away from me. i start to drift off, the smell of her blood filling my senses. it takes me a while to realize i’m not hallucinating; i’m actually smelling her blood. she must be crying. through the opiate haze i realize i feel something i haven’t in an incredibly long time. i almost don’t even understand it. this must be what Leelee was talking about: satisfaction. “I'm not going to do this with you,” she says quietly to the window, wiping her face. “I know how much I have hurt you. It is something I carry around with me every night and I hate myself for it. I wish it could have been different. But it’s been a decade now. How long until you stop punishing me?” “this isn’t really about you,” i mumble. i try to say, i’m punishing myself, but she’s talking too fast for me to keep up. “Just managing to get your nightly fix seems accomplishment enough for you. And you don’t have to think about anything bigger, anything beyond that. like a mouse on a wheel, running, running, running and never getting anywhere. Just so long as you’ve got something to keep running nowhere for. You could have so much more, Jonathan.” i catch up with her here, slurring, “there is nothing more out there for me.” “It doesn't have to be that way,” she says, turning around to face me, and i see the red streaks on her face, and it makes me want to get up, out of the chair, and taste them, but i really can’t move right now. she’s saying, “You could see. If you just get clean. You’d realize—” “it doesn’t matter,” i repeat. and then i start rambling catatonic, “i don’t even know which way back is anymore. there is no way back. there is nothing. there’s no one that knows who i am anymore. i am untethered. like a cloud. just floating above everything. shapeless. a haze even to myself. if i get clean, Leelee, i will have absolutely nothing keeping me from the truth that there is nothing else. no reason to get up at night at all.” “This isn’t a reason, Jonathan, it’s a compulsion.” “that’s all i get, Elisabetta.” she sits back down and cleans her face with some baby wipes she plucks from a container on the desk. she looks down at her lap and shakes her head, resignedly. “I am not equipped for this. I came on a cease and desist ordinance. I’m not enough for an intervention. “no,” i say, managing, in spite of the opiate, a somewhat pointed emphasis, “you aren’t.” then after a while, rousing myself a little with this question that’s just dawned on me, i ask “why did you come at all? they don’t send you for C+D.” “I thought…. I thought it would help." "why the fuck would you think that?” and then i realize. “it was his idea, wasn’t it?” she says nothing. “he thought you would fix me? seeing you? that that’s all it would take to get me to stop? like that’s all i’ve been waiting for. for Leelee to discover my stupid blog, and show up. summoned by my desperate cry for help. the answer to all my problems.” Leelee just sighs. “if you believe that…. if you believe he understands anything about you and me….” i don’t really know how i intended to finish this train of thought when i began it, so the words just hang there, menacingly, though i don’t mean them that way. the conclusion of that thought was definitely not a threat. i think it was most likely tears, because i can feel them now, running down my face, warm and viscous, turning my vision red. i haven’t cried over her in a very, very long time. it’s like riding a bike. we’re both crying now, but the drugs are keeping me pretty numb. my voice is lethargic, almost dreamy, as i tell her, “we are the infections in each other’s wounds. we cannot make the other better, Leelee. only worse.” i want to tell her never to see me again, like i did before. and she’d listened. for 10 years. but i’m scared. i’m scared perhaps it will be a century this time. and there’s a part of me that can’t let go. will never be able to let go. a part of her infection that i keep quarantined off, where even the drugs, and the apathy and all the rest of my self destruction cannot reach it. i am unwilling to relinquish this last part of her inside me, though it festers, and keeps me sick. even if it destroys me to remember, i can’t renounce that i had known how to love the way i loved her. that i, jonathan garner, had once been capable of it. because if i let that go… so i say nothing. i let her call down for the car, and shuffle off to the elevator, and then down to the concrete garage, and board another limousine which takes me back down to the city and on the way i call the kid who deals for me and he helps me get out of the limo at the bay street warehouse, and i lean on him as he walks me inside. “what are you wearing, dude?” he says. and i never say goodbye to Leelee.

[vampireblog]

"ghost" building

Last night, bored, researching real estate opportunities, I was overcome with desire to buy this "ghost" building downtown. It used to be part of the Alexandria hotel, and I thought maybe I’ll move my junkie squatter kids in there, clean us all up and turn us into a gumshoe gang, and we’ll all work and live in this abandoned old hotel, fighting demons, maybe get a reality show.

I got serious enough to call my financial planner, after hours. She said it was a terrible investment, since the building doesn’t actually have its own stairways or elevators — it was a late addition to the Alexandria, and once the hallways were bricked off, the individual floors was amputated like stacks of necrotic organs. She said it wasn’t worth the time and resources it would take to bring it back from the dead.

I asked her if we were still talking about the building.

She said to stop watching Angel high anymore.

[vampireblog]

Just Another Immortal I No Longer Recognize

Things move fast in the 21st century. The Downtown of 10 years ago is completely different from the streets I know today. I’ve seen it transform before my very eyes. Used to be, after dark, when the suit and tie crowd went home it was night of living dead out there. In the shadows of skyscrapers, bodies far more lost than I can ever be, no matter how hard I try, wandered empty garbage-strewn streets. The uniquely modern and yet strangely, anciently familiar smell of burning crack wafted through blacked-out, Old Hollywood art deco buildings with gilded facades. Hotels and theaters once frequented by the first wave of movie icons, before sound came along, turned into squats and Mexican party favor wholesalers, their fronts bulging with piñatas and quinceañera dresses. Now they’ve built new luxury lofts. Converted those abandoned buildings into condos. Slathered the gangrenous stretch of skid row with the ointment of gentrification. First, gay couples with little dogs moved in — once that happens you know change is gonna come. I’ve seen it happen since long before there was such a thing as “coming out." Then came the young creative types with tattoos and rock ‘n roll hair, Ph. D. students from USC, hip kids on scooters. The Beverly Hills rich kid who deals for me calls them Downtownsters, to distinguish them from the hip kids on scooters to the north, in Silver Lake and Echo park, whom he calls hipsters. So many turf lines now in this vast 20th century obsession that is cool. So I watch old Angel episodes in the background streaming on Netflix as I cut up some product for delivery later. I read on a blog that last year Downtown had the most bicycle thefts of any other part of the city. I’d wager that last year more bikes got stolen Downtown than were even IN downtown at all 10 years ago. I think about this new and bygone LA, just another inscrutable immortal I no longer recognize, then I heat up some blood in a microwave-safe container and write this after I get bored playing Wii golf and wait for darkness.

[vampireblog]

The boy in the green 450 SL

Last night on Mulholland, just before sunrise, I saw a boy parked on the side of the road in an old, green 450 SL, lights off, standing up on the backseat, one hand in his pocket, smoking a cigarette. Not really a boy anymore at all. 25 or 26, perhaps. I never got to live that long. I watched him smoke in the darkness, looking out across the chasm at the Hollywood sign on the next hill, standing on the final stretch of youth, the earth crumbling beneath him, falling down into the silent darkness. I could feel every cell in his body. Age was coming for him. Not even old age yet. Lines had just started settling on his face; he’d started noticing gray hairs in the blonde. The first real, unignorable signs of invincibility waning, of the body decaying and the deep down understanding that no one could ever truly accept that nothing could be done about it. He would have given anything he had, stripped off his soul and given that over to me too if I would just save him from one more second of dying. Of living. He had his whole life ahead of him and his despair was overwhelming. I could feel it. I knew it intimately, like I and his despair had been lovers in youth. He asked me if I wanted some company even though I knew he didn’t want it and I had never wanted anything less but I let him give me a blowjob for a while anyway and didn’t come and gave him an 8 ball of coke wrapped up in a piece of magazine because it was, embarrassingly, the only form of payment I had on me. Afterwards, I came back to the warehouse downtown that I own where I let the junkies squat for red rent and drank so much smack I wasn’t even sure if I’d left anyone alive and driving back to where I sleep threw up blood, semi-conscious.

[vampireblog]

Rebirth & Undeath

Daylight drags on forever. Like eternity itself. Nothing to do but deal with email, watch Netflix movies, read blogs, play Wii Golf, or Words With Friends on my iPhone with random opponents, airplane mode on till sundown. I came across this interesting quote on io9 about the new Iron Man movie:

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker's life lesson is that "with great power comes great responsibility," Tony Stark's is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.

And I guess then I was at the Arclight, at midnight on a Tuesday, gulping down free-range stoner blood from one of those BPA-free, stainless steel, eco-friendly bottles, watching previews. In Europe, during the war, the American boys introduced me to Superman. The superhero fascinated me. I could kind of identify to an extent. Not so much to the hero aspect, obviously — though I never saw myself as the arch villain either. Especially in those days, how could I? No vampire in his right mind would dare think himself a supervillain in Hitler's Europe. No, what I always appreciated was this reflection of the outsider walking among humans, furtive, guilt-ridden, self-hating, longing to be accepted, knowing he could never be. I recognized him immediately. The nuclear reactor of the 20th century had forged the concept of world war like an unstable new element. Before the century had even ticked past its halfway mark I'd watched a couple of these isotopes wipe out nearly 100 million people. And yet, here was Superman, for whom all life was precious, and justice attainable. He seemed to have arrived not from outer space but from the future. The Man of Tomorrow. He was such a modern artistic expression. Post-modern, even. So beloved, so all-American, so alien. Years later, when he'd gotten a prestigious post-war promotion from comic pages to miraculous TV screens, each episode would introduce our hero as the unequivocal defender of "Truth, Justice and the American Way." And yet, he was none of these, completely duplicitous, an ideologue, a foreigner. In 1981, the year Leelee and I decided to stay in New York, we went to the opening of Andy Warhol’s Myths series at a gallery in SoHo. The series contained prints of 10 iconic figures of American film, history, and pop culture. We smiled at seeing Dracula make the cut, of course, but the one that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go was the one of Superman. In the print, Superman appears twice, a strange double exposure effect not used for any of the other Myths subjects. The first exposure is Superman as we know him. The vivid, posterized color blocks of his blue suit, red S and cape, yellow belt and chest piece. His dark hair glossed with midnight blue. He appears flying over us, classic superhero pose: arm upraised, stretched out into the foreground, leading with a clenched first to guide his righteous path. The second exposure is offset to the right and overlaid on top of the first. It is the outline of the same figure, in the same pose, but this time with all the color drained. His shape appears only as a faint glow against the print’s black background. An outline of himself. The second Superman is a ghost, a non-thing. You can look straight through him and see nothing, just the other, colorful superman showing through behind him. He is there, and not there. Obvious and invisible. Vivid and obscure. Warhol made 200 of these Superman prints and I got one. The screenprint had diamond dust. I hung it as the centerpiece over the television in our old Alphabet City warehouse. Other vampires never got it. Even Leelee found it amusing, referring to it ironically as "Jonny's Dorian Gray picture." But she always was too French to truly understand. The doubled image screamed the secrets I'd always sensed in the depths of the conflicted farm boy, lurking below the surface of his superhuman costume. It had screamed, dangerous, silent, my own secrets. Watching Tony Stark reveal publicly that he is Iron Man, and humanity finally, after all this time, accept a superhero's ultimate truth, I saw the double exposure merge into one. I knew time had caught up with yet another immortal. It is the year two thousand ten, and Superman is no longer the man of tomorrow. The fall of the secretive, guilt-ridden, double life has been the fall of a century, and Tony Stark, exposed, explicit, so wholly a part of this revelatory new age with its ubiquitous cameras and personal blogs and celebrity culture, is the next stage in superhero evolution. There is no Clark Kent anymore. And there is no Superman. No more secrets. No hiding in the shadows. There is only the brutal, sublime, unflinching digital glare. I can understand why Downey fought for this role. I had once seen myself in Superman's secret; he must have seen himself in this: this entirely modern existence where all one's brilliance and ugliness is inescapably public at all times. How familiar it must be for him, his dazzling successes and deepest journeys into the heart of darkness having always been completely exposed. He fought and failed in public, over and over. And rose from the ashes of self immolation there, too. I've been remembering something he said at the end of the old millennium, back when he was hooked on heroin and getting arrested on, like, a weekly basis. It was during some televised court proceeding, and I watched, on the screen beneath Warhol’s Superman, one the greatest actors of his generation — and if I do say so, even longer — wearing an inmate's orange, say to the judge, “It’s like I have a shotgun in my mouth and I’ve got my finger on the trigger and I like the taste of the gunmetal.” Of course, the disgrace of Downey's past makes his newfound glory only that much more profound. His life has been its own sort of superhuman struggle. His success, a victory in the most epic battle of all: the battle with the worst one can do to oneself. And all along, everyone had always wanted him to win. Everyone was rooting for the hero that he could be to defeat the demons destroying him. They wanted him to triumph "not just for his own good, but as a victory for the human spirit." They really wrote that about him, in Newsweek in early 2001. I still remember. I had a lot of time to read that year, lying immobile in an intensive care unit at a Council facility, my entire body covered in 3rd degree burns. I remember reading that then and wanting to laugh at this outpouring of hope for a man so singularly determined on his own blazing doom. I remember wanting to cry from the excruciating, desperate envy I felt for that hope. I remember wanting to pull out the tube pushing morphine blood down my throat, and just fucking surrender to the infinite, unquenchable hopelessness devouring me, which I felt as powerless to stop as to do anything else but lie there, on the edge of existence, read stale news magazines, and get better. And eventually, by the end of that summer, I was well enough to walk out on my own. But I never did recover. Leaving the theater, I knew that for the first time Warhol's double print was no longer a vision of modernity. It was an atavism. A memory. Yet one more piece of me lost in the fire. Driving east on Sunset, towards Downtown, stoned, thinking about Downey's journey from junkie to superhero, about my own past, my own present, I knew that this is a part of humanity that stays with you forever, even through hopelessness, even in undeath: the longing for rebirth.

[vampireblog]

Self-destruction

Leelee told me when a vampire starts writing a diary his days are numbered. It was the Fall of 2002 then, and she was sitting across from me at the rooftop club of the new Standard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. She was wearing a tailored power suit, her hair pulled back in a sophisticated bun, compulsively touching her oversized black Chanel sunglasses, as if they might slip off at any moment and expose the bloodshot eyes, the dark circles, the puffiness of a hangover from the bender that had been the end of the 20th century. A debt of excess which I knew, intimately, her flawless face, frozen in time, would never need to repay. Others were calling her Lisabette now, as they hadn’t for a very, very long time. A vintage Christian name resurrected to match the serious wardrobe, and her new position on the Council. I still remembered Leelee as she had been before, a beautiful blonde girl wearing a bright pink, sleeveless dress, dancing at the newly-reopened Studio 54 in the last days of 1981. We were immortal teenagers with fake IDs, losing ourselves in the crowd,  flushed with blood from a young man we’d just met up in the bathroom; Leelee’s arm around my neck, her hips moving with mine, skin electrified, music throbbing, her teeth grinding strangely, and I was realizing mine were too, kissing her bleeding lip hard as the music washed over us in waves, like something physical, and her voice, like the best blowjob I’d ever had when I was still alive, whispering to me, “Something’s coming. I can feel it.“ She had a gift for sensing things, recognizing patterns. Could divine the future like a palm-reader from subtle changes in the blood. Later, looking back on how things turned out, I would understand the inevitability of her place on the Council. Later, I would know we had been dancing on the edge of an epidemic that MDMA-fueled New York night. "Epidemics are so much more civilized,” she’d say, eternal echoes of ancestral aristocrats in her French accent, “than wars.” The two safest places for vampires. For who would notice one more dead body in either? And what an epidemic this one had been. The most beautiful victims you ever did see. Certainly, that I ever had. Young, tan bodies with perfect teeth piling up like stacks of garbage on the New York sidewalks, being eaten away by disease from the inside, and by us from the out. I remembered how it had felt when we realized we wouldn’t have to leave New York, could stay on the dying island and be safe. The childlike euphoria of the world opening up to us again, almost like the days before forensic science or penicillin. I remembered moving in together in a converted warehouse by the river, making art and music like we were human, walking arm in arm through Alphabet City drunk and high on nightlife blood, stepping nimbly around wet cobblestones glittering with syringes, humanity’s immune disorder an endless party, and we its VIPs. On the roof of the Downtown Standard, the bright pool steaming up into the 21st century night, Leelee had said with neither nostalgia nor regret, “No one is dying of AIDS anymore. Now they are living with it.” The party was over and the party girl had become a policy-maker, wearily reciting public health data, distracted, apprehensive, like a hypochondriac in a sex club, not wanting to look at me; the unseemly mess which I, by that point, has already become. She adjusted her shades again, the interlocking rhinestone Cs on the side gleaming like fangs. “Where they are dying,” chirped the ancient feudal Frogs in her accent, as always, “One may as well be in a war zone anyway. Often, one is.” A Santa Ana gust blew through my hair, scratching my face, my hot dry throat, and then a sudden flash of a battlefield, one I had actually fought on not just fed off, the air exploding around me, my mouth filling with dirt, smoke sucking the oxygen out of my lungs – back when I still had need for it. My cellphone buzzed in my pocket as it had been all night, I let it go to voicemail again, touched my own sunglasses, Ray Bans, a brand I’d started wearing in the 90s for their commercials, my hands shaking, thirsty, wanting to fix. There’s a self-storage facility in South Central filled with boxes and boxes of yellowed, crumbling handwritten pages, dirtied, bloody journals of front-lines war reportage, typewritten movie scripts, half-finished novels, poems scrawled on bar napkins, hard drives filled with Word documents. This is what eternity looks like. Everything I’ve ever written that still survives is locked up in that storage unit, stuck, like its undead author, in its own obscure oblivion. I keep expecting to show up one night and find the whole storage building burned to the ground, and by daybreak me along with it. Yet still it stands, just filling up with ever more words, words, words. A good-looking kid that works for me dealing the day shift in Beverly Hills, spending a year making urgent deliveries to addict agents before heading off to study business at an Ivy League college in a place he refers to anachronistically as “back east” even though he is no more from there than the ship his old world ancestors disembarked when they first got there, told me I should start a blog. He writes one under a pseudonym, satirizing hipsters — “They’re all your Silver Lake and Echo Park clientele,” he explained. As though being 18 for 163 years I wouldn’t know what the word meant. He showed me the Google analytics, and it’s apparently quite popular. It even gets some decent advertising revenue. The kid said that considering the current state of the Vampire-saturated media landscape — his words — what with Twilight and True Blood and Vampire Diaries and some band my clients seem to like called Vampire Weekend, the kind of SEO traffic I could get would be — and he said it with the amusing conviction that he knew what the word meant — epic. The last thing Leelee said to me before she stood up and straightened her suit and pushed the elevator button and then down on 6th Street told a driver in a waiting town-car to take her to Santa Monica airport where a private G4 would be ready and the jet door closed behind her and she disappeared from L.A., now almost a decade ago, was, “For a vampire writing is self-destruction.” And I replied, “I’m trying."