We are sluts. Wenot only devour each other, but webite, hard. We’re blood-hungry teenagers; our rage knows no bounds and coagulates the pulse of our victims on contact. We devour them too; the bodies of mortals become drained when they reach our fangs. Our cause is nothing, we believe in nothing. Actually, we believe in Methamphetamine. I’ve been living off crank, cough syrup, and blood for a year now. I ride the rails with a bunch of immoral shitheads, hopping freight trains, secreted away in rail cars across this country. We have no home, no parents. I can’t remember being a child, maybe I never was one. But I’m sure I’ll never die; I get older, my body stays the same. My spine breaks, and then gets back together. I have the Hepatitis, I give it to everyone, but it never will actually get me. Our kind doesn’t die from anything, all we do is die all the time.
There was nothing but an orange wash of day left as I stepped off the freight car for the night. An ominous voice extended out of nowhere, whisking up dead leaves and small birds on the ground: tell us who we are. They dry hump reality, with only a tenuous grasp of decent living. They live parenthetically to organized society . Slutty first and foremost, an organizing principle, united by teen vampirism, hunted by militias and bounty hunters, reviled by polite dads and police everywhere. They arise out of the depths of sunken freight rail cars, out of an ashen heap to wreak havoc across the land, their chosen territory for crime and debauchery: your town. Don’t try and stop them; they have one tiny paw around your neck before you even know they’re there. They have dangerous, dirty sexual relations with their kind, and yours, constantly, so lock up your heirs. Doomed motherfuckers. They can hear what you’re thinking so don’t try to run, they’ll find you. You could be two thousand miles away and they can still see you. Hobos may fight for “existence,” righteous battles for the sap of tradition — the tramp code. Vampire hobo junkies, on the other hand, are reprehensible assholes who would rather whip your little sister raw than smoke a corn-cob pipe in a boxcar. Fuck them. Wrenched from foster homes across the country, teeth cut on whites at a tender age, these shitheads could really use some of your cash. Their insatiable thirst for drunk fucking, hard sucking, and speed freakouts will ravage your township and leave your mayor begging for more. Fuckin junkies, junkie legends… Knowles, don’t eat that pasta — that was on the ground! Is this still Lane County? Can we smoke in restaurants here? We have the urge to do a lot of things but only some stuff gets done, mostly for legality reasons. The dead bodies on the train tracks? That’s not us, that’s some local murderer the newspaper calls Dactyl — or rather, that’s what was signed at the bottom of a note the self-described “Janitor of Souls” submitted to the editors. This guy basically took credit for every unsolved homicide from the last decade, but it was so much bigger than him. Dactyl was just one more soldier in the unwar. The cops laughed at the photos of his victims, mostly clipped from snapshots of other people. The dead girls looked weird whooping it up all alone, caught in a fuzzy moment stripped of context or friends. They weren’t real pictures; likely none ever existed. The poor girls didn’t go to school or prom; they didn’t drive. They mostly just went about their lives, on a street where nobody looked.
I’m only seventeen. That means I grew up in foster care and I’m really fucked up because I don’t know right from wrong. I became a vampire after I got screwed over by my foster family for the last time — just woke up different and I knew I had to leave the house for good. Now I suck blood for a living. I’ll suck dick for cash and admission tickets to events, shows and rides too, but that’s another story. This story is about how every night I climb down from the freight car where I sleep during the day and wreak havoc in a different town. I steal, I scratch, I suck. I don’t murder. There are a lot of other kinds of freight train riders to watch out for; those crazy fuckers with the piss-soaked bandanas hanging around their necks, those guys will fuck you up!
Peering out of a tuft of brush into a forest clearing, the illuminated husk of a convenience store below, five white faces cold with pink cheeks and noses; warm breaths all in synch. Waiting for the call of their leader, a big boy, skinny, holding his concave chest bent comely like an insect or a wasp… Our bodies were empty, drained; we were only half there. Pulled up to the filling station, you could say. Given the signal we break loose from dry branches and tumble down the hill. We break into the 7-Eleven, surprising the clerk inside, a kid just like us, no older, no smarter — only still fully human, still 100% alive. We suck his blood, yeah, but not before making a mess at the coffee station, sampling tins of meat and peaches, trying on sunglasses, touching each other in the backroom… The boy loses consciousness about the time we get bored with our toys. Seth gives the signal to bail but I slip away into the back again, stooping low to the ground looking for clues to my lost little baby, my beloved true love sister Kim, now gone these fifteen months. She ran away from me and our fake family. I was real, though, I was a real person there, then, for her. We kept each other alive those long winters… Before rushing into the night I look for markings, etchings on the floorboards, hobo hieroglyphics maybe or a scrap of lace or strands of her long brown hair. But I find no trace, just old cans of engine oil and aprons and a bunch of nametags piled in an ashtray. None of the other boys understand, maybe because it’s hard for me to talk about and I end up just not saying much of anything. Instead I communicate with Seth (and certain other meaningful men) through my touch my kiss.
I tried a fur coat on in a thrift store and the robocreep in a black three piece suit behind the counter said, in a German accent, that we must wear fur because we need to demonstrate to the “beasts” from which the fur was taken, who would “kill us if they could,” that we have mastery over the forces. But what doesn’t kill ya leaves its mark and you can read it like a book. I store the history of what happened to me here, in my body. This journey is going to help me tease it out. You get to watch. Along the way I hope to be reunited with my sister, my one true love.
Unlike most kids I met my family when I was 12 years old. Kim was already living there but didn’t beat me by much. Dinner at our house went like this: green salad, arguing, praying at bedtime… It wasn’t so much that she ran away, she just clocked out. I left to go follow her. She wasn’t going to get away that easily.
I’d always been raised to believe that the truth was within me. Who the hell raised me anyway? Maybe this journey was a way to find out. It may sound weird but I always have been aware of the fact — we always have held close as a motivating factor — that I can achieve greatness in my lifetime. We all are part of that for each other.
I remember grabbing Kim by the shoulders: Who’s my family? I hissed in her face. Where do I come from?
I felt as though one day my parents had been replaced with actors, or maybe I woke up to the realization that they had been actors all along. I felt unprecedented in history, origin-less. I was born every night.
My lover said, as I left him and my would-be family back home for the last time, “I hope you find somebody to take hold of that face and never let go…” Well I still haven’t and I’m not sure if I’m going to. I had been bitten and changed in the night into something I didn’t recognize anymore. The urge to sleep all the time came soon after. I thought my life was ending, and in a way I was right. I may have looked the same on the outside but inside I was a monster. I was in a faraway place. Some could tell when they looked me in the eye that things weren’t right. I just wasn’t there; maybe I was already there. So I practiced saying one thing and thinking the other. I didn’t show my hand to anybody. My face only betrayed by half.