There was evidently something about Seth that drew guys to him; his neurotic routine only made him that much more quizzically alluring. He had circus tattoos on much of his arms, figures which became poxed and sickly when his freckles came out. I guess he’d lived the circus life, all tears and bruises, so there was something to that, and the way he hoisted me up when he fucked me was special. Like a saber-tooth cat he clawed my lungs up so I couldn’t scream his name or tell stories about him to his enemies. He left a pin-prick on my soul that has been throbbing ever since; it will never completely seal. Running around with a bunch of his friends was weird and complicated. There were times I half-woke in the middle of the morning, my mind jogged to try to place the man in my bed — which one was he? Who did I most want it to be? This happened several times, the moment of forgetting, and was disorienting — not to mention Guilt City. Back in our Eugene trailer days there would be many mornings when I came home to find Seth sitting at a fold-down table, vacuously listening to tapes on a small boom box he had brought out from our bedroom, playing cassette single after cassette single… He was bent at having to work at a food co-op/ commune for money. Everyone staying out there lived a pretty much communist panhandling lifestyle. They shared everything: change they picked up off the sidewalk, the house, shit they groundscored, food, beer, and anything that got kicked-down. They were a pretty good group of squatters. The house routinely had a bunch of bands, with the usual circulating of Anarcho-Syndicalist literature in the vestibule, an array of moist couches on the back patio — half-eaten bowls of beans overflowing with cigarette butts. I sat on a low carpeted platform in the backyard and watched the band that at that moment sounded ludicrously scrappy and wild; its vocalist, in tiny cut-offs and boots, routinely dropped to the ground in stock-worship at the altar of destruction, writhing around, kicking up plumes of dust and foliage, grabbing some dude’s shins and singing into his crotch. He stood and urinated a little into his shorts, which gathered a brown stain of dust when he fell again. During the fourth song he puked on his microphone, singing a spout of bile into the audience in front of him. Walking around the compound I happened on an outbuilding where a makeout party was awkwardly winding down. Pools of beer soaked my feet, getting me to run away faster, while silly-fast rock played on a boom box in the corner. Passing this on my way to the backroom/kitchen, I ducked into heavy black drapes. Here I found Seth with two other guys and a girl, ensconced from the rest. I gathered they were a rare strain of yuppie punks, decadently resting on long low pieces of furniture. The girl was wearing a stretchy salmon shift, possibly one oversized turtleneck, and she photographed me at regular intervals without explanation, limply holding the camera at strange angles to herself, sighing when the flash failed to go off. I sat awkwardly perched on a stool in the middle of the room, the only place left, while Seth rolled cigarettes with the other dudes. A prehistoric bluegrass 45 rotated on the portable next to the door, the dead man sang a gigolo is the only way to go-o. The record cracked and popped, the sound of slowly opening a peanut butter sandwich. They let us sleep in an RV on the property and I woke alone in the afternoon with the sweet charred flavor of burnt baked beans wafting in through the window. Some flaky Anarchos had been heating up some shit at the campfire next to the car and then left it there for long enough to have reduced the can of beans to a firm, dry brick on the fire. I threw handfuls of dirt at the embers from a sensible distance until it went out, then walked for hours across town to the rail yard and hid in the bushes. As night fell I became aware of having walked somewhere else, more putrid and rust-smelling, and having awakened for real at about four a.m. I was in some waterbed, set in from the wall like a bedcave, and there was by my early calculation more than one other person in there. A few. I remember the others waking and they were all around me. I was breathing pillow and hair and I couldn’t fully wake up. I remember having a lot of things done, said, scratching some guy ’cause he tried to kiss me. Another guy told me I had two choices: one, I will eat you; or two, I will cut your arms and legs off — for Love! When it was over I got some money, took some? Can’t say for sure. Got paid, whatever. Left that fuckin place and went back to the camp. Wrap the bones in newspaper and put the parcels in a black plastic bag. The objects that occupy my mind in these moments when white madness fades and bloodsucking rage emerges from a crack in my fractured teen psyche: one, my pornographic obsessions, memory, anarchy, reflections on the inability of men around me to relinquish claims on my body. Two, how to make what you do okay with yourself: living with the knowledge that your body will never get old, but as a vampire you’re both undead and dying all the time. Throw it away. This preserved teen body, something just a little off — is it the foggy eyes? Drained, heavy limbs, fecund core? Liquid bones? Is it our reptile brain? Homing, mating, aggression, defense of body, territory, Cinders, wind, and frost have irritated and roughed teen skin. Sickly and suffering from chronic under-nourishment, they appear to subsist almost entirely upon their fingernails, which they gnaw habitually. There is something about being 17 and being immortal, like wishing you could turn into a magical being and then waking up, looking into the mirror, and seeing that you are. Cuz you can’t see shit and you know it happened, you turned vampire. So one day my reptile brain thought, “I could tell that fuckin story.”
The night is brown browntime, the day is orange orangetime, then pink pinktime. Traveling on hijacked rail cars, or real cars, causes a lot of friction — among passengers — and a strong breeze smelling of fecund air conditioning and freshly burst bags of chips is almost medicinal. Convenience stores convey a conduct for the use of their services and stations. Convenience people understand these things, the conduct that is carried forth on a wave of pink then brown air, door-chimes echoing into eternity whenever the steps of the initiated cross a threshold from one transaction to the next. Convenience people require fast, cheap service, as well as access to the penny tray, if necessary. Their vocations require whoring of the body in the browntimes and whoring of the mind in the pinktimes. Both require fuel and this is where the blood comes in. Blood transfusions from neck to teeth and then throat are linked in spirit with the transfusion of essence from boner to mouth-seal and then throat. They need both to survive, the convenience factor of each becoming such only after passage out of the transfusion scene, and complete and utter mobility is maintained in perpetuity… We duck into a Flying J across from an almond orchard. I disappear into the ladies’ room, down a long grey corridor, setting aside a mop and bucket to get the door open. Once inside I turn the light off and point the hand blower up at my face so my old tears bake on my skin, plastered around my eyelids where they belong. I can barely make out my reflection in the mirror — the light from a lamppost outside informing my features in the darkened room in brown night. In the mirror I look otherworldly and my voice comes out low and disembodied. I’m speaking like this for God knows how long before it seeps out, “Bloody Mary — raise my blood from the dead, my sister rots under the ground, not on top of it like me.” Comically, the hand dryer shuts off and I’m able to slowly reach into the mirror’s frame, beyond the meshing point, and fix my own fractured smile from beyond the grave. Outside, in the radioactive perma-dawn of 7-Eleven, I fix a large 24 oz. cup of coffee, pouring from the fullest pitcher, leaving a half-inch at the top for the two things of hazelnut non-dairy creamer. I stir with two red straws before discarding them. Blue lid, a couple of napkins in my apron pocket for spills, one of which is already necessary to blot up beads of hot condensation that have gathered around the rim only to have fallen on the web between thumb and index finger. I’m a hungry wolf! I lunge at your eyeballs, infecting your insides by horrifying your bulging gaze, releasing chemicals in your brain that spark a sudden decay. I seek prey out of the endless night, fog shrouding my knives, my secrets. I will rummage around in your soul — don’t let me! Don’t let me too close, I will bite you, I will tear at you. I want to eat you! When anti-sleeping in a boxcar, Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies receive and send out neural stimuli with shared minds. I have found that this causes boners in the male mind, and uncontrollable weeping in the female mind. I’m sleeping now. With every crack of synapse a small felt thread grows and spreads across my body until I am covered with layers of a dusty web. This shroud obscures me, while it confines me to the self-annihilation scenario. Every thread wraps even tighter around me, until I’m suffocated by my ESP addiction, held fast by my insatiable urge to undo men through telekinetic mindpower!