Joe Vampire

POST 5



Those Crazy Homophones



So I met up with Michelle and her friends at Pomme that Saturday night. It’s one of those ultra-hip places that serves drinks made of ferret tears and gold shavings served in glasses with no real bottoms so you can’t set them down on a table; you have to commit to carrying them everywhere you go. The club is actually an abandoned mattress factory long known as an underground flop house for modern urban hobos, but Michelle’s cousin bought the place a few months ago and turned it into a nightclub after running the hobos off.

Judging by the oil drum fires and the aroma of roasted cat outside, I think he might have missed a few.

Inside, the music was too loud for me to hear Michelle’s introductions, so I just smiled and shook hands with everyone. There were three phenomenally hot girls who looked pretty happy to meet me, a relatively angry sort-of hot girl who barely made eye contact and a guy in a fedora with a way-too-unbuttoned shirt and a sizable chain dribbling down his neck. The whole group looked far more prostitutional than I had imagined. Since the noise level was three decibels shy of shattering my eardrums, I spent the first half of the evening pretending I could hear the conversation, and that I knew which of these ladies was my date. I started to get the impression that instead of a one-on-one set up, this might be some sort of group style situation, one of those modern things that keep you from getting stuck on a date with someone you might not gel with. That way the whole group can sort of pair up – and hook up – as needed. It may have sounded like a wet dream come true, but my interpersonal skills were shaky when there was only a single woman to deal with; a small brothel’s worth could have easily caused deep psychological damage. It might have been the ferret tears talking, but when Michelle screamed that everyone was headed to a sushi bar up the street and wanted me to come along, I was completely in… and as surprised as anyone that I would be. I downed the last of my third round and laid the glass on the table as everyone sort of clustered together like a fleshy molecule. We drunk-danced our way to the door in an amorphous sexual cloud, drifting off toward the sushi bar.

My next memory, however, does not take place in a sushi bar.

It takes place in my house on the morning after, when I woke up alone beneath my bed with my shirt dragged over my head, sleeves knotted below my chin, and my pants on my arms instead of my legs. It had been a very long time since I’d done any serious drinking, but I didn’t think I’d be such a booze p-ssy. I made my way to the bathroom in a woozy stumble and untangled myself from my shirt and pants. To my juvenile delight I found an incredible war wound of a hickey on my neck. It was already eggplant purple – nearly black, even – and sort of ached. I couldn’t remember if there had been actual sex involved, but it looked like something noteworthy must have happened. Then my head started throbbing and my stomach fell into a permanent lurch, so I spent the rest of the day asleep in the bathtub.

I made my best effort to hit the office on Monday, sort of sweet on the thought of having had a wild time even though I still felt like I’d been on the losing end of a jailhouse love affair that I couldn’t recall. I chose the handiest item I could find to cover the hickey, which also turned out to be the most conspicuous: a way-too-long scarf my brother had given me for Christmas, the kind worn by celebrities who probably think this blog is about them. It finally came in handy, and at least I didn’t appear diseased. Just extremely douchey. Michelle found me as I shuffled toward my desk. “You two must have really hit it off after we left you behind.”

“I guess so… I don’t remember much. This thing hurts like a bitch, though.” I lifted the scarf and showed her, bragging a little. “I think it might be infected… it feels more like a bite than a hickey.”

She didn’t seem surprised by that. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Remind me which one I was with again… they were all pretty hot, but I’m kind of cloudy on the details. Was it the one in the blue skirt? Or the blonde who sort of licked her lips whenever she took a drink? Or the one with the mad cleavage who kept fingering the rim of her glass… was that Dawn?”

She just stared at me. “No. Don was the one with the fedora.”

I choked on my own air. “The dude? My date was a guy?”

“Well, yeah.”

“But you said her name was Dawn!”

“His name is Don.”

F*cking phonetics. “You mean I got this festering wound from a guy with a feathered hat and a pimp chain?” It suddenly hurt worse. “He wasn’t even slightly cool.”

Michelle cringed. “Shit. I’m sorry. You never talk about women, so I just assumed you were gay.”

I had not seen this coming. “Gay? I’m not gay; I’m just… ” Damaged goods seemed a tad too honest. “I’m just shy.”

“Yeah; I thought you were shy-gay.” Like that’s a real thing. “Listen, I’m sure it’s fine.”

Fine? I was staring down the barrel of Hepatitis C, possibly given to me by some guy dressed like an extra from a Poison video. It was definitely not fine. “Who is this Don?”

“I don’t know him that well; he just sort of glommed onto me and the girls a few weeks ago. He says the funniest stuff, and he pays for all of our drinks, so we let him hang. I thought you two might like each other.”

“Apparently he liked me,” I pointed out, “or I wouldn’t have this thing oozing out of my neck… it’s probably ruining my liver already. Who bites someone on a first date, anyway?”

“Um, about that… ” And then she dropped the real bombshell, even bigger than the Oops, I Set You Up With a Guy revelation. “Don sort of thinks of himself as a vampire.”

It sounded funny back then, when I still thought vampires only existed in books and movies, so I laughed. “A vampire?”

As if the fedora wasn’t awesome enough.