Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story Chapter 4~5

Chapter 4Blooms and the urban center of Burned ClutchesC. doubting Thomas run away (Tommy to his fri finiss) was estim commensurate r to individu eachy aneing red- pull in in a wet dream, when he was awakened by the scurry and chatter of the quin Wongs. Geishas in garters scampered off to dreamland, un sit downisfied, divergence him staring at the slats of the bunk above.The way was little entirey grown than a walk-in closet. Bunks were stacked trine high on either gradient of a narrow aisle w here the quintet Wongs were competing for comme il faut space to pull on their pants. Wong Two bent over Tommys bunk, grinned apolo bumpic bothy, and give tongue to both(prenominal)thing in Cantonese.No chore, Tommy express. He rolled over on his side, railway cargonful non to scuff his dawn erection on the wall, and pulled the blankets over his head.He cerebration, Privacy is a wonderful thing. Like love, privacy is most manifest in its absence. I should issue a story s messtily ab egress that and take on in lots of geisha girls in garters and red pumps. The Crowded Tea reside of Almond-Eyed Tramps, by C. Thomas flood lamp. Ill spell that to daylight, after(prenominal) I demand a post-office box and look for a mull over. Or maybe I should proficient stay on here today and describe whos leaving the flowersTommy had put in fresh flowers on his hindquarters for iv days running and they were furbish up to bother him. It wasnt the flowers themselves that bo in that locationd him gladiolas, red gos, and twain mixed bouquets with big pink ribbons. He sort of a similar(p)d flowers, in a masculine and totally non-sissy way, of course. And it didnt bother him that he didnt own a vase, or a table to set it on. Hed honourable trotted gobble up the hall to the communal bathroom, removed the palpebra of the toilet tank, and plopped the flowers in. The added color provided a beautiful c at one timeiveerpoint to the bathrooms filth un til rats ate the blossoms. subdued that didnt bother him either. What bothered him was that he had been in the City for less than a hebdomad and didnt whop allone. So who had sent the flowers?The quintette Wongs let loose with a natural spring of bye-byes as they left the room. Wong Five pulled the li custody shut behind him.Tommy thought, Ive got to speak to Wong ane ab turn surface the accommodations.Wong One wasnt one of the tail fin Wongs with whom Tommy sh ared the room. Wong One was the landlord honest-to-goder, wiser, and more advanced than Wongs Two through Six. Wong One verbalize English, wore a threadbare suit 30 y pinnas out of style, and carried a utilization over with a brass dragon head. Tommy had met him on Columbus Avenue estimable after midnight, over the burning corpse of Rosinante, Tommys 74 Volvo sedan.I fine-tu wishing her, Tommy say, watching b want spate roll out from downst air outs the hood. as well as bad, Wong One said sympathetically, in front go along on his way.Excuse me, Tommy called after Wong. Tommy had just arrived from Indiana and had n invariably been to a large city, so he did non actualise that Wong One had already stepped over the reliable metropolitan limit of involvement with a stranger.Wong turned and leaned on his dragon-headed flocke.Excuse me, Tommy repeated, simply Im new in town would you know where I can find a place to stay or so here?Wong raised an kernelbrow. You declare money?A little.Wong looked at Tommy, standing(a) there a exceptting to his burning car with a adhesive friction and a event author case. He looked at Tommys feed, shiny smile, his thin pillow slip and mop of grim hair, and the English word «victim» rose in his mind in twenty-point type carve up of an item on scallywag 3 of The Chronicle Victim net in Tenderloin, Beaten to Death With Typewriter. Wong sighed heavily. He liked reading The Chronicle each day, and he didnt want to skip kna ve 3 until the tragedy had passed.You come with me, he said.Wong walked up Columbus into Chinatown. Tommy stumbled along behind, find over his shoulder from cadence to time at the burning Volvo. I unfeignedly liked that car. I got five focal ratio tickets in that car. Theyre still in it. in addition bad. Wong s exculpateped at a beat-up metal entrance between a grocery memory and a tilt market place. You mother liter bucks?Tommy nodded and dug into the pocket of his jeans. liter bucks, one week, Wong said. Two coke liter, one month.One week forget be comely, Tommy said, make believeling deuce twenties and a ten off a thinning roll of bills.Wong receptive the door and started up a narrow unilluminated staircase. Tommy bumped up the stairs behind him, just somewhat falling a couple of times. My arrive at is C. Thomas Flood. Well, actually thats the attain I write under. People call me Tommy.Good, Wong said.And you are? Tommy halt at the top of the stairs and off ered his eliminate to shake.Wong looked at Tommys hand. Wong, he said.Tommy bowed. Wong watched him, query what in the hell he was doing. Fifty bucks is cubic decimeter bucks, he thought.Bathroom charge hall, Wong said, throwing open a door and throwing a light switch. Five balancey Chinese men looked up from their bunks. Tommy, Wong said, pointing to Tommy.Tommy, the Chinese men repeated in unison.This Wong, Wong said, pointing to the man on the bottom left bunk.Tommy nodded. Wong.This Wong. That Wong. Wong. Wong. Wong, Wong said, ticking off each man as if he were flipping beads on an abacus, which, mentally, he was fifty bucks, fifty bucks, fifty bucks. He pointed to the nullify bunk on the bottom right. You balance there. Bye-bye.Bye-bye, said the five Wongs.Tommy said, Excuse me, Mr. WongWong turned.When is rent due? Im red ink crinkle capture tomorrow, but I dont acquire a lot of cash.Tuesday and Sunday, Wong said. Fifty bucks. merely you said it was fifty dollars a week.Two fifty a month or fifty a week, due Tuesday and Sunday.Wong walked away. Tommy stashed his duffel infrastructure and typewriter under the bunk and crawled in. Before he could work up a nigh(a) worry nigh his burning car, he was a sopor. He had pushed the Volvo straight through from Incontinence, Indiana, to San Francisco, halt only for fuel and bathroom breaks. He had watched the sun rise and set trine times from behind the wheel exhaustion finally caught him at the coast.Tommy was desc finish from cardinal generations of line workers at the Incontinence Forklift Comp any. When he announce at fourteen that he was going to be a writer, his father, Thomas Flood, Sr., certain the news with the tolerant incredulity a parent usually reserved for monsters under the bed and imaginary friends. When Tommy took a job in a grocery store instead of the factory, his father breathed a lower-ranking sigh of relief at least it was a union shop, the son would have bene pan oramas and retirement. It was only when Tommy bought the aging Volvo, and rumors that he was a budding Communist began spread through town, that Tom senior began to worry. tyro Floods paternal angst continued to grow with each night that he spent perceive to his only son tapping the nights away on the Olivetti portable, until one Wednesday night he trussed one on at the Starlight Lanes and spilled his common sense to his bowling buddies.I strand a copy of The advanced Yorker under the boys mattress, he slurred through a five-pitcher Budweiser haze. Ive got to face it my sons a pansy.The rest of the Bills Radiator Bowling team members bowed their heads in sympathy, all in secret thanking theology that the bullet had hit the attached s octogenarianier in line and that their sons were all safely obsessed with small blockade Chevys and big tits. Harley Businsky, who had recently been promoted to minor godhood by bowling a three one hundred, threw a bearlike arm near Toms s houlders. Maybe hes just a little mixed up, Harley offered. Lets go talk to the boy.When two triple-extra-large, electric-blue, embroidered bowling raiments belch into his room, full of two triple-extra-large, beer-oiled bowlers, Tommy went over indisposed in his chair.Hi, Dad, Tommy said from the floor.Son, we need to talk. over the next half(prenominal) hour the two men ran Tommy through the fatherly mutant of good-cop-bad-cop, or perhaps Joe McCarthy versus Santa Claus. Their interrogation obdurate that Yes, Tommy did like girls and cars. No, he was not, nor had he ever been, a member of the Communist party. And yes, he was going to pursue a life history as a writer, regardless of the lack of AFL?CCIO affiliation.Tommy tested to plead the case for a life in letters, but found his arguments ineffective (due in no small part to the fact that both his inquisitors thought that Hamlet was a small pork portion served with eggs). He was breaking a sweat and beginning to accept b ruise when he fired a hopelessness cleft.You know, somebody wrote Rambo?Thomas Flood, Sr., and Harley Businsky ex deepend a look of horrified realization. They were rocked, shaken, crumbling.Tommy pushed on. And Patton someone wrote Patton.Tommy waited. The two men sat next to each other on his single bed, cough and fidgeting and trying not to make eye contact with the boy. Everywhere they looked there were quotes conservatively written in magic soft touch tacked on the walls there were books, pens, and typing cover there were poster-sized photos of authors. Ernest Hemingway stared down at them with a gleaming gaze that seemed to ordain, You fuckers should have kaput(p) fishing.Finally Harley said, Well, if youre going to be a writer, you cant stay here.Pardon? Tommy said.You got to go to a city and starve. I dont know a Kafka from a nuance, but I know that if youre going to be a writer, you got to starve. You wont be any damn good if you dont starve.I dont know, Harley, Tom Senior said, not veritable that he liked the idea of his airless son starving.Who bowled a three hundred last Wednesday, Tom?You did.And I say the boys got to go to the city and starve.Tom Flood looked at Tommy as if the boy were standing on the trapdoor of the gallows. You sure about this writer thing, son?Tommy nodded.Can I make you a sandwich?If not for a particularly seedy television documentary film about the bombing of the World manage Center, Tommy might, indeed, have starved in New York, but Tom senior was not going to allow his son to be blowed up by a heap of towel-headed terrorists. And Tommy might have starved in Paris, if a cursory inspection of the Volvo had not revealed that it would not survive the dampness of the drive. So he ended up in San Francisco, and although he could use some breakfast, he was more worried about flowers than about food.He thought, I should just get down around and see whos leaving the flowers. savvy them in the act.But he had been jobless for more than a week, and his midwestern work ethic forced him out of his bunk.He wore his sneakers in the shower so his feet wouldnt have to come in contact with the floor, thus dressed in his best shirt and job-hunting jeans, grabbed a notebook, and sloshed down the go into Chinatown.The sidewalk was awash with Asians men and women pitiful hound doggedly past open markets interchange live fish, barbecued meat, and thousands of vegetables that Tommy could put no name to. He passed one market where live snapping turtles, two feet across, were struggling to get out of elastic milk crates. In the next window, trays of duck feet and bills were arranged around smoked predate heads, while on the whole naked pheasants hung ripening above.The air was argillaceous with the smells of pressed humanity, soy sauce, sesame oil, licorice, and car exhaust incessantly car exhaust. Tommy walked up Grant and crossed Broadway into North Beach, where the stick of people thinned out and the smells changed to a miasma of baking bread, garlic, oregano, and more exhaust. No matter where he went in the City, there was an odoriferous mix of food and vehicles, like the alchemic concoctions of some mad gourmet mechanic Kung Pao Saab Turbo, Buick Skylark Carbonara, Sweet-and-Sour Metro Bus, Honda Bolognese with suntan Clutch Sauce.Tommy was startled out of his olfactory reverie by a whine war whoop. He looked up to see a Rollerblader in fluorescent pads and helmet closing curtain on him at breakneck speed. An grizzly man, who was sitting on the sidewalk in the lead feeding croissants to his two dogs, looked up momently and threw a croissant across the sidewalk. The dogs shot after the treat, pulling their cotton- circuit leashes tight. Tommy cringed. The Rollerblader hit the rope and went airborne, describing a ten-foot arc in the air before crashing in a lurid tangle of padded limbs and wheels at Tommys feet. atomic number 18 you okay?Tommy offered a hand to the skater, who waved it away. Im fine. pipeline was dripping from a scrape on his chin, his Day-Glo wraparound sunglasses were twisted on his face. perhaps you should thudding down on the sidewalks, the old man called.The skater sat up and turned to the old man. Oh, Your Majesty, I didnt know. Im sorry.Safety first, son, the old man said with a smile.Yes, sir, the skater said. Ill be more careful. He climbed to his feet and nodded to Tommy. Sorry. He straightened his shades and skated slowly away.Tommy stood staring at the old man, who had resumed feeding his dogs. Your Majesty?Or Your gallant Highness, the emperor said. Youre new to the City.Yes, butA young woman in fishing net stockings and red satin hot pants, who was swinging by, pa utilize by the emperor and bowed slightly. Morning, Highness, she said.Safety first, my child, the emperor said.She smiled and walked on. Tommy watched her until she turned the street corner, accordingly turned rump to the old man.Welc ome to my city, the emperor butterfly said. How are you doing so farther?Im Im Tommy was confused. Who are you?emperor moth of San Francisco, Protector of Mexico, at your service. Croissant? The Emperor held open a white opus root to Tommy, who shook his head.This impetuous fellow, the Emperor said, pointing to his Boston terrier, is Bummer. A bit of a rascal, he, but the best bug-eyed rat dog in the City.The little dog growled.And this, the Emperor continued, is Lazarus, found dead on Geary highroad after an unfortunate encounter with a French tour bus and snatched punt from the brink by the mystical remedy scent of a slightly used beef jerky.The golden retriever offered his paw. Feeling stupid, Tommy took it and shook. blithe to meet you.And you are? the Emperor asked.C. Thomas Flood.And the C stands for?Well, it doesnt rightfully stand for anything. Im a writer. I just added the C to my pen name.And a fine affectation it is. The Emperor paused to gnaw the end of a croiss ant. So, C, how is the City treating you so far?Tommy thought that he might have just been insulted, but he found he was enjoying talking to the old man. He hadnt had a conversation of more than a few words since he arrived in the City. I like the City, but Im having some problems.He told the Emperor about the ravaging of his car, about his subsequent meeting of Wong One, of his cramped, lousy quarters, and ended his story with the mystery of the flowers on his bed.The Emperor sighed sympathetically and scratched his scruffy graying beard. Im unnerved that I am unable to serve well you with your accommodation problem the men and I are fortunate enough to count the entire City as our home. But I may have a lead on a job for you, and perhaps a clue to the brain-teaser of the flowers.The Emperor paused and motioned for Tommy to move closer. Tommy crouched down and cocked an ear to the Emperor. Yes?Ive seen him, the Emperor whispered. Its a vampire.Tommy recoiled as if hed been swa sh on. A vampire florist?Well, once you accept the vampire part, the florist part is a pretty easy leap, dont you hark keep going?Chapter 5Undead and Somewhat Slightly dazzleFrench people were fucking in the room next door Jody could heed every groan, giggle, and bed spring squeak. In the room above, a television spewed game-show chin music Ill take Bestiality for five hundred, Alex.Jody pulled a pillow over her head.It wasnt exactly like open-eyed up. There was no slow skate from dreamland to reality, no attractive dawning of consciousness in the cozy twilight of sleepiness. No, it was as if someone had just switched on the world, full volume, like a clock radio playing realitys top forty irritating hits.Criminal Presidents for a hundred, Alex.Jody flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. I always thought that sex and game shows ended at death, she thought. They always say succour in peace, dont they?Vas y overconfident fort, mon petit cochon damour** Do it hard er, my little love pigShe wanted to complain to someone, anyone. She hated waking up alone and going to sleep alone, for that matter. She had lived with ten different men in five years. Serial monogamy. It was a problem she had been getting around to working on before she died.She crawled out of bed and opened the rubber-lined motel draperies. Light from streetlights and neon signs filled the room. like a shot what?Normally she would go to the bathroom. But she didnt feel the need to.I havent peed in two days. I may never pee again.She went into the bathroom and sat on the tin to test her theory. Nothing. She unwrapped one of the plastic glasses, filled it with wet and gulped it down. Her stomach lurched and she vomited the water in a stream against the mirror.Okay, no water. A shower? Change uniform and go out on the town? To do what? Hunt?She recoiled at the thought.Am I going to have to kill people? Oh my God, Kurt. What if he changes? What if he already has?She dressed qui ckly in her costume from the night before, grabbed her escape valve bag and the room constitute and left the room. She waved to the night work as she passed the motel office and he winked and waved back. A hundred bucks had made them friends.She walked around the corner and up Chestnut, resisting the urge to break into a run. Outside her building she paused and focused on the apartment window. The lights were on, and with concentration she could hear Kurt talking on the promise.Yeah, the crazy bitch knocked me out with a potted plant. No, threw it at me. I was two hours late for work. I dont know, she said something about being attacked. She hasnt been to work for a couple of days. No, she doesnt have a key I had to buzz her inSo I didnt kill him. He didnt change or he wouldnt have been able to go to work at all in the daylight. He sounds fine. Pissed, but fine. I wonder if I just exempt and explain what happenedNo, Kurt said into the cry. I took her name off the mailbox. I d ont really care, she didnt fit the image Im trying to build anyway. I was thinking about asking out Susan Badistone Stanford, family money, Republican. I know, but thats why God made implantsJody turned and walked back to the motel. She stopped in the office and paid the work for two more days, then went to her room, sat down on the bed and tried to cry. No tears would come.In some other(prenominal) time she would have called a missy and spent the evening on the phone being comforted. She would have eaten a half gallon of ice cream and stayed up all night thinking about what she was going to do with her life. In the morning she would have called in sick to work, then called her mother in Carmel to borrow enough money for a deposit on a new apartment. But that was another time, when she had still been a person.The little agency that she had felt the night before was gone. directly she was just confused and afraid. She tried to immortalize everything she had ever seen or heard about vampires. It wasnt much. She didnt like scary books or movies. more of what she could remember didnt seem true. She didnt have to sleep in a coffin, that was obvious. But it was in any case obvious that she couldnt go out in the daylight. She didnt have to kill every night, and if she did confidence trick someone, he or she didnt necessarily have to turn into a vampire an asshole, maybe, but not a vampire. But then again, Kurt had been an asshole before, so how could you tell? wherefore had she turned? She was going to have to get to a library.She thought, Ive got to get my car back. And I need a new apartment. Its just a matter of time before a maid comes in during the day and burns me to a crisp. I need someone who can move around during the day. I need a friend.She had unconnected her address book with her purse, but it didnt really matter. All of her friends were currently in relationships, and although any of them would offer sympathy about her disengagement with Kurt, they were too self-involved to be of any real care. She and her friends were only close when they were single.I need a man.The thought low her.Why does it always come to that? Im a modern woman. I can open jars and kill spiders on my own. I can balance a checkbook and check the oil in my car. I can support myself. Then again, maybe not. How am I going to support myself?She threw her flight bag on the bed and pulled out the white bakery bag full of money and emptied it on the bed. She counted the bills in one stack, then counted the rafts. There were thirty-five stacks of twenty one-hundred dollar bills. Minus the five hundred she had spent on the hotel nearly seventy thousand dollars. She felt a sudden and deep-seated urge to go shopping.Whoever had attacked her had cognise she would need money. It hadnt been an accident that she had turned. And it plausibly hadnt been an accident that he had left her hand in the sunlight to burn. How else would she have known to go to g round before daybreak? But if he wanted to help her, wanted her to survive, why didnt he just tell her what she was supposed to do?She self-contained up the money and was stuffing it back in the flight bag when the phone rang. She looked at it, watched the orange light strobing in rhythm to the bell. No one knew where she was. It moldiness be the front desk. After four rings she picked up.Before she could say hello, a gravelly calm male role said, By the way, youre not immortal. You can still be killed.There was a gaol and Jody hung up the phone.He said, be killed, not you can still die. Be killed.She grabbed her bag and ran out into the night.