Into the Den

WARNING FOR: Domestic abuse, violence, suicide, drug abuse

My emo vampire debut. Anyways, here it is.

INTO THE DEN

The Hustler girl was in my studio apartment, fixing me coffee in nothing but black lace panties. I wished she would go away.

A girl like Stevie looks better in a dark club or centerfold in a magazine where you can’t smell the heavy stink of coffee beans and hunger on her breath, where you can’t see the dark circles under her desperate eyes and the little folds of skin at the corners of her mouth. She’s out of place in the grey morning light.

I feigned sleep. I couldn’t tell if the humming in my head was psychosomatic or coming from the refrigerator. Through the whirring, I heard her walking towards me. Those feet, I could picture them, the strange, long toes, overlapping like so many crooked teeth, chipped red polish. It revolted me. Then I felt the hand on my shoulder, shaking me, and the humming was so loud, and her nauseating little voice like a mosquito buzzing in your ear…

Trav wake up, Travvy come have some coffee with me, on the balcony

(She loved to sit on the balcony, her nipples like stars on her small breasts, pointing to the street below).

let’s go baby, you’re so boring. All you want to do is sleep.

I opened my eyes and watched her toothy smile fade into nothing. She had Clinique Black Honey on her lips, that shit I bought her at Ricky’s NYC. Her belly button ring was from me too. She’d been hanging on to me like a tick for at least the last month.

I took the coffee cup. Hot, watery black stuff. She’d ruined it, and it was the good shit too, ten dollars a bag, at least.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” I demanded. “Right fucking now.” I couldn’t stand to look at her for one more second.

“Travis, what’s wrong? I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” She blubbered with that stupid fucking baby voice.

“Are you fucking deaf?”

She started to cry right there on the foot of the bed and slur something about love and emotional barriers. She looked so pathetic and naked, still drunk from last night. I grabbed a mat of red hair and threw her to the ground. The greens and purples of her bruises blended together like watercolor.

I hated her. I could’ve killed her. And I hated her even more as she stumbled out of the door, skeletal legs struggling into tight jeans.

Finally, I could rest.

I fixed myself a syringe. I promised myself I would write something when it was dark out. The day was always irritating to me.

I woke at 10:00. The true witching hour. All the normal folks are inside and the rest of us are still waking up, zombies before the amphetamines and parties begin. It’s the perfect time to think up some poems. I took another shot for the creativity and walked down Bleecker street.

I still couldn’t get that humming out of my brain- I thought it was the girl- but I still couldn’t think of anything to write about, not with that awful sound in my head. But I knew it’d be okay. The Brians were having a party at the old comedy club. But Stevie would probably be there and she’d probably try to reattach herself to me... The thought of it made me nauseous. I decided not to go.

My career had been dead in the water since July. The critics called my last novella hackneyed and derivative, a poor imitation of Kerouac or Brautigan, and I agreed. I sort of knew it was over then, so I tried to kill myself but it didn’t work out and I ended up in some mental hospital in the Bronx.

I was going to do it right this time.

I climbed up the Bayard-Condict fire escape. The rooftop was a regular haunt for me since I moved here- girls thought it was a romantic place to have a fuck

(Stevie liked it a lot up there, she was always bothering me to take her and ‘hold on to her,’ she didn’t really like doing much else but holding onto each other and talking, I hated that, it was exhausting, the best climax I could get with her was leaving)

and I liked sitting up there with my notebook and a cigarette.

I sat up there for a little bit, looking at the city. I hoped that maybe inspiration would strike and I’d start writing the next great thing and I wouldn’t have to kill myself after all, but that was stupid. Girl shit. Say yes.

So I was pretty much ready to do it. I was looking over the edge and it seemed high enough to kill me on impact. But with one foot over the edge I felt something behind me. It grabbed the collar of my jacket and lifted me off the ground.

The humming stopped. A cold jolt went through my body as I met the two yellow eyes. I felt like my guts were freezing and rearranging themselves into crystalline shapes.

“Travis E. Mallory. I read your book.” I fell at its feet, limp.

It looked normal. An older man in a Yankees cap and a black overcoat, white and crumpled like paper.

“You know, it wasn’t too bad. Yes, uninspired, a little stale maybe, but what isn’t nowadays? Not every book can be a Butterfly Wings in China. Nothing to kill yourself over,” he talked like we were at a literary meeting. A faint accent, like the fast-talking guys in the old movies.

I stared at him from the ground. “What the fuck are you?”

He smiled. I could’ve sworn I saw fangs.

“I’m your golden ticket to a bestseller by tomorrow morning.”

I stood up and backed away, towards the edge of the building again. “What the fuck? What’re you going to tell me, I need to give you a blowjob and the rest of my money and you’ll write me the next great American novel?”

It grabbed me again with yellowed fingernails and pulled me towards itself like I was

nothing but a doll.

“No, no- that system doesn’t quite work anymore. Two hundred years and erectile dysfunction pills still haven’t come far enough for me. But I do have everything you could ever want. A novel that writes itself. A girl who doesn’t love. A cure for the humming, a cure for everything! A life for you that feels like that first hit of heroin, forever. And you just have to let me do one thing.”

“What, suck my blood or suck my cock? You’re giving me a really fucking weird vibe.”

“Travis, for Satan’s sake, no!” But he seemed amused, at least. “Getting warmer

though, dear. But men… eh, us vampires, we don’t swing that way, not unless we really have to. Women are more succulent, their suffering… it’s purer. More delicious.”

“You want Stevie,” I laughed. I thought I was going insane, that maybe I’d overdosed and I was dying already. “Well she’s not mine. Take her, whatever.”

“Travis,” he put his grey hand on my shoulder and I felt my bones sing Golden Brown–

(Never a frown (never a frown), never a frown

With golden brown (with golden brown), with golden brown)

–-“She uses your 5-in-1 shampoo to smell like you. She smokes your cigarettes and tries to choke herself on your tongue, your name is the only thing she eats and drinks. Her misery is a beacon, it brings monsters like us to her bosom- her suffering could feed us for a decade, maybe. I need to have her. And you’re the only way I can get her. She’ll let you in.”

I’ve met some strange people in New York. I knew the stranger- the vampire- was different.

When he bit into my neck it was like I’d been injected with the strongest heroin north of the border.

…

The creature was behind me. I was wearing the too-big beige suit my mother had gotten me for my New Yorker interview about Butterfly Wings in China. She told me her son wouldn’t be on television in a holy shirt twice. She didn’t really understand poetry or music or literature. I had a bouquet of scarlet begonias

(Once in a while, you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right, I sang her that and she said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard, and she cried in my arms and told me she loved me, and I threw up in my mouth and told her to shut up so she did, and then it was her favorite flower forever)

in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. I knocked on her door and fixed my hair.

She cracked the door open to peek out (she never opened a door fully she was too scared, she kept it chained shut and poked her slender little face through like a frightened animal, her big blue eyes were so wide and afraid and hopeful and purple all around the socket where I’d slammed her head against the floor, I wanted to stick daggers through them) and that grin came back. “Trav!” she threw the door open and wrapped her arms and legs around me. Her dress was a meshy, gossamer little thing. Nothing underneath. Always almost naked, that’s how I described her in that idiotic poem. She started to cry and blubber again and I wanted to hit her upside the head.

“Missed you Vixy,” I grinned (Vixy, I called her that because in the magazine they called her a red hot vixen, it was anything but the truth, I would call her a pathetic street dog with tits like her lazy eye).

She pushed her lips against mine. I let her kiss me. She tasted like cherries and Hooper’s Hooch. It was only when she finally detached from me that she noticed it. Behind me, like a shadow.

“Oh, and your friend, rude of me, sorry, I’m Stephanie, but you can call me Stevie” she was standing on her own two feet now. She was taller than me by an inch or two maybe. She looked ashamed of herself for once under the gaze of the old… thing. I liked to watch her squirm, but I remembered my act and I wrapped her up in my suit jacket. It could’ve fit both of us, all 200 pounds of skin and bones. “Well, come in. It’s cold out tonight, isn’t it? You’re cold, Travis. Are you feeling well?”

“I feel lovely.”

She’d let us in.

…

The creature never introduced himself to her. It was like he was barely there. Watching, waiting for me to make my move.

She stuck my arm wrong and it bled black like ink. She was too strung-out to really care by then.

“I knew you loved me Trav,” she slurred, her pupils dilated. “I knew because I love you so much, like God. Hold me, please, hold me…”

I held her and kissed her neck. The creature touched me and I felt another jolt of music, an orchestra vibrating in my teeth and I bit.

It all poured back into me with the scarlet bloom of blood. The words. A whole novel crystallized in front of me, I felt the glowing reviews and the orgasmic flow of already perfect prose. A novel. Hers.

“Thank you, Travis.”

She slumped over in my lap and the creature began to feed as well.

…

Ginsberg if he knew how to write. Burroughs if he really had teeth. That’s Travis Mallory’s third book, Shooting Up the Moon. Fresh out of the mental hospital and reeling from a suicide attempt, this is his best, rawest work yet. The old axiom is true; suffering breeds brilliant art.

I replayed the interview for the twenty fourth time.

The creature didn’t lie. It was all I could ever want- he had done well for himself too. He called himself Charles Drury and sold paintings out of a gallery on Broadway.

Until she died, that is.

He left then, started feeding on prostitutes on Bleecker. Turns out you can’t get high the same way if you don’t really have human blood.

It was my fault. I was writing my follow-up to Shooting Up the Moon. I needed it to be even better than the first installment and I got too hungry.

A shame.

The creature was right. Her suffering was really something special. They loved what I created with it. I made something worthwhile out of her.

I’d been living out of the rancid apartment for weeks, watching interview clips and drinking out of rats, when I was invited to the book signing. I think I still had blood smeared around my mouth when I went to the bookstore.

I signed lots of books, for unassuming old folks, some skinheads, some tattooed hipsters. It’s tiring work.

Then the girl with the dog eared copy of Butterfly under her arm. She was so nervous she could hardly speak. I wanted to choke her, rip the words out of her throat.

And I knew I would write again.