Blind Date with a Vampire

I reached up and carefully felt the two, razor sharp fangs now nestled securely in my upper row of teeth. What was happening to me?

When I found out, I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want to be a vampire, although Thad, when I found him, seemed to be taking everything in stride as always. Even in college, he had always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy. I tried to explain to him that the predicament we now found ourselves in was considerably worse than a Trig test he’d forgotten to study for or possible expulsion for drilling a hole in the wall of the girls shower room. Thad was always getting into some kind of trouble and dragging me with him, but this time he’d dragged me right out of the world as I knew it. We had been made into something wholly different —-something other. We weren’t even technically human any more.

Of course, Thad didn’t see it that way. To him it was just another way to meet girls. Not that he needed to become a vampire to do that. He and I are both tall, with dark hair, but that’s where the resemblance ends.

Thad has piercing blue eyes, one of those little clefts in the middle of his chin, and rippling abdominals. The last are a recent development, since it wasn’t something most people thought of in the fifties. They mostly kept their stomachs decently covered. Now, though, everybody has to have a ‘six-pack.’ Thad told me it wasn’t hard to bulk up. One nice thing about being a vampire, is how easily you gain muscle mass and lose fat. Must be the low carb, high protein diet, another thing we never considered in my time.

I sound like a grumpy old man moaning for the past, but really I don’t have anything against the new millennium. I just have culture shock in the worst way. Think of it as really profound jet lag.

I tried to make it as a vampire in nineteen fifty-five, I really did, but things just got harder and harder. To begin with, I found that animal blood couldn’t sustain me for very long. I craved the flavor of humans. I didn’t have to kill anyone when I fed, a few sips from the right person would satisfy me nicely, but I was choosy about whom I fed on.

Taking blood from someone, at least the way I like to do it, can be a very personal process…very intimate. Frankly, it wasn’t something I wanted to do with someone I didn’t find attractive, although it didn’t seem to bother Thad, an indiscriminate biter from the first. Of course, it put a damper on my love life, not that it had been red-hot to begin with. It kind of ruins the date if you ask for a good night bite instead of the usual kiss.

After a while, I found that I could sort of hypnotize the person I wanted to bite; I just touched them and made eye contact and they ceased to have any objection about letting me sink fangs into them. It didn’t feel right though. What I needed was someone who would donate willingly, without any of my tricks.

It’s never easy to find that special someone and being a vampire just makes it that much harder.

Besides my personal life, my career was in shambles. I had to quit my job as an investment banker of course —there was no way I could keep bankers’ hours now. I told my family I was looking for something else and hardly ever saw them. When I did come for dinner, my mother always complained I didn’t touch a thing. How could I tell her that the sight and smell of her pot roast, always my favorite before, now left me cold? That the cat sitting under the table looked more appetizing than her triple layer chocolate cake? I couldn’t come over at all when they had spaghetti and garlic bread– the smell alone would make me gag.

Gradually, over the course of a year, I drifted away from my friends and family. I had made some good investments before I was brought over and that was what I lived on now, not that my grocery bill was very large. People around me began to look at me with distrust. I heard whispering among my neighbors and people I used to know from church and work.

There goes that Nathanial Glover, used to be such a nice young man and now look at him.
Did you hear he quit his job at First National?
No — really?
Yes and now he just wanders around all night doing nothing. There’s something wrong about him.
There certainly is.
Gives you the creeps.

And on and on and on. Vampires have very sharp hearing so I couldn’t miss any of it.

It all got to be too much. I found a place that I thought was fitting — a crypt in the cemetery– and decided to hibernate for a while. I don’t know how I understood this was possible, but I instinctively felt that I could do it. Just lie in a state of utter dormancy for a few years, until the world became less restrictive. I mean, ask anyone who lived back then, during the age of McCarthyism– it was hard enough being a Democrat, let alone a vampire. I left a letter for my parents and sister, telling them I had joined the Foreign Legion (people really did that back then) and I took to my crypt.

The only person I told before I went was Thad. He was living it up in Miami, already an exciting place, although it’s bigger and flashier now. I called and told him my plan and he invited me to visit him first. It’s easier to be a vampire in a big city, he said. More people mean more victims and less notice of a few little love bites. Also, he said, he had met up with some more of ‘our kind’ and they were a great bunch– real fun-loving people. But I was fed up. I asked him to wake me up in a couple of years or if anything important happened.

Of course he didn’t.

So I slept through the entire second half of the twentieth century. I missed the sexual revolution, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the ‘me generation’, the Cold War, and the entire nineties. I asked Thad why he didn’t at least try to wake me up at some point and he said that I’d looked so peaceful, he just hated to disturb me.

Thanks a lot, buddy.

When I woke up in early September of 2010, most of my immediate family was dead, except for Mildred, my little sister, who was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. The world had literally passed me by.
I spent the next few months playing catch-up. My investments had continued to mature, so at least money wasn’t an issue. I bought a nice condo in Hyde Park and tried to figure out who I was in relation to a society I barely recognized as my own.

Thad, who had been living the high life for the past five decades, had been happy to welcome me back to the land of the living. Or in our case…well, you get the idea. The biggest news he had for me was that vampires, while still completely fictitious to the general public, were now ‘cool.’ To prove it, he gave me a list of books to read and movies to watch and I went through them all, even the really bad ones.

To my surprise, Thad was right. Being undead was not, apparently, the handicap it used to be. Not that it helped me that much. Because all of my extensive reading and viewing taught me one thing: I am not the right type of person to be a vampire.

Oh, I’m tall enough and my shoulders are fairly broad and I’m not a bad looking guy — except I’m pretty pale, obviously. But I’m just not the vampiric type.

My hair is just plain brownish-black and it’s not long enough to make me look romantic in the least. Also, my eyes aren’t midnight blue or emerald green or blazing amber — they’re a very uninspiring hazel. And it’s not just my looks, either– my background is way too plain.
I’ve never lived at Versailles and I’m not a thousand year old Viking or an ancient Roman or a veteran of the Civil War. I’m not even horribly scarred by holy water or emotionally stunted by a run in with the Spanish Inquisition. I’m just a plain old twentieth century American guy and I’m only ninety-four, pretty young for a vamp. I’m sexually straight and financially stable. I don’t need to ‘drain’ anyone to live and I stay away from turf wars with other vampires. Basically, I’m a boring guy as our kind goes– the vampire equivalent of a Republican.

But once you’re brought over, there’s no going back and since I didn’t want to hibernate again (who knows what I might miss this time?) I buckled down to learning how to get along in the twenty-first century.

One thing I do like is the technology, especially the Internet. It’s amazing to have so much information and entertainment right at your fingertips. Although I nearly choked the first time one of those porn pop-ups blinked on my screen. It’s been hard to get used to the way sex seems to pervade every aspect of American culture, from TV to movies to billboards on the freeway. The other night I was flipping through the hundreds of channels I get with my cable package and I found what I thought was a Leave It To Beaver marathon. It wasn’t.
But, at least the Internet is a good way to meet victims. I know that sounds callous but a guy’s got to eat, right? Or in my case, drink.

It’s harmless, really. I’d meet the girl at the restaurant or bar of her choice, do my little hypnotism thing on her and have a quick snack. I never took more than I needed or did anything else, no matter how much I might be tempted. To most vampires, according to Thad, taking blood, or ‘blooding’ is an opportunity to gain power and satisfy other appetites as well. But I didn’t go in for that kind of thing. No vampire seduction mind tricks for me– my mother raised me better than that. In the morning, the girl had a mild case of amnesia and a slight headache, which she thought was caused by a few too many drinks at the bar where that jerk she met on-line stood her up.

It still didn’t feel quite right, but I had to survive and I had pretty much resigned myself to never finding that special someone —-a permanent donor to share my life, such as it was. I based that on the few legitimate dates I’d had since coming out of hibernation.

The first girl I tried to date, Aurora (just call me Rory), had been a bubble-headed bleached blonde and self-confessed reality show addict. She invited me to a karaoke bar and proceeded to show me why she should have made the cut on ‘American Idol.’ It didn’t take my enhanced vampiric hearing to tell she was completely tone deaf.

The second time I went out was on a double date with Thad, who promised me he had found me the perfect girl. I wasn’t surprised that Thad had girls to spare. They love his carefully cultivated aura of mystery and danger and a lot of them seem to like dating a ‘vampire.’ Unfortunately, the girl he set me up with liked it a little too much.

“You may call me ‘Mistress Sonia’,” she intoned, raising one hand, as I joined them at the round booth in the corner of one of those fancy new coffee bars. They charge more for one tiny drink in those places than we used to pay for a whole pot of the stuff back in ‘55.

I noticed all of ‘Mistress Sonia’s’ fingernails were painted black and after a moment, I realized she was waiting for me to kiss her hand. I shook it awkwardly instead and she pouted unattractively. Her hair was dyed a deep purple, with a white stripe down the middle, like a mutant skunk and she was draped from head to toe in black velvet and lace. Her skin was paler than mine.

“What have you gotten me into?” I muttered to Thad, under the guise of retrieving my paper napkin, which I had dropped on purpose. He and I were both pretending to drink espresso while the girls were having frappuccinos. His own date looked pretty normal, besides an apparent fetish for black leather and chains. Thad likes all kinds.

“What have you gotten me into?” he mocked softly, doing his best imitation of me, which was a little too good for comfort. He had a hard edge to him now, that hadn’t been there before we were brought over and I wondered if something had happened in the last fifty years that he wasn’t telling me about.

But before I could say anything, Thad turned to my date. “Mistress Sonia is Goth, isn’t that so, my lovely?” he said, caressing her heavily made-up cheek with one long finger. He was in his ‘Master Vampire’ mode that night and loving every minute of it. Mistress Sonia fairly purred beneath his touch and his own date scowled jealously.
The night only went downhill from there.

I tried to stick it out and at least be polite, but the conversation was awkward at best. I think Sonia expected me to be smooth and sleek and sexily evil, to play a part the way Thad was for his date. But I just didn’t have it in me.

Look, I wanted to tell her, I’m not the Prince of Darkness sent from Hell to fulfill your darkest sexual fantasies and drain you dry. I’m just an ordinary guy who happens to drink blood now and then and not even that much of it.

But that obviously wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

The night came to an end abruptly, when Mistress Sonia invited me back to her place for ‘drinks’, as she coyly put it. As she issued the invitation, she was caressing her short, stubby neck with one black finger-nailed hand. She also implied that we might get into a little light bondage and domination. She didn’t say who would be holding the whip and I didn’t care to find out. I excused myself to the restroom, where I melted through the wall and never came back.
I guess I’m just an old fashioned kind of guy.

That was the last time I doubled dated with Thad. Unfortunately, none of the other dates I went on amounted to much more. I just couldn’t seem to connect with the women of this generation on any level deeper than a gastronomic one.

I blinked away the memory of the disastrous dates and looked once more at the picture on my HP flat screen monitor. She had the reddest hair I had ever seen and a pale, pretty face with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Only serious brown eyes the color of dark chocolate saved her from being unbearably cute.

Tonight’s snack.