twenty-four hour deli counter with meats butchered fresh by Sal’s uncle every day. It was close to morning by then, and if anything was going to drown the sorrow of a date gone disastrous, I figured it would be some MGD and a slab of raw Angus.
Then Hube walked in as I was walking out.
The night turned out to be more than beer and beef could fix.
POST 30
That Joe and the Do-Gooder
If you’ve ever had a friendship go sour, then met up again by surprise with said friend while things were still in the crap stage, you know the feeling that comes with an unexpected reunion. The strange tension as you forget for a second that things aren’t kosher between the two of you, the odd way you instinctively start to pick up where you left off as if nothing ever happened. The gut churning befuddlement of wanting to hook your arm around his neck, ask him what’s up and head for the cooler to get your six-pack to split… just before your stupid, grudge-holding brain reminds you that this isn’t someone you do stuff like that with anymore.
That’s where I was.
It was all just one big ball of confusion.
“Hey, Joe.” Hube looked me straight in the Ray Bans. I was thrown off a little by his friendliness until I realized that I was the one who was ticked at him, and not the other way around. I guess I thought he’d be mad that I’d blown him off for so long. If he was, he hid it well.
“Hey, man.” I kept it sort of cold. Not hard to do considering my permanently lowered body temperature.
And my sustained bitterness.
“How are things?” he asked.
I know he wasn’t trying to make me uncomfortable, but it happened anyway. Here I was in my rumpled, pseudo-stylish date clothes, with my shirt half-untucked, fangs at full-staff, hiding my light-sensitive eyes behind a pair of shades, with wine stink still lingering around me like rancid aftershave. There was probably a stain on my pants, too, somewhere right around the crotch area, left behind by my still-deflating wood. I looked like I’d fallen off of a park bench coming down from a three-day drunk. He’d seen me in far worse condition, but still… it felt weird. I might have been imagining the disappointment in his eyes, but I don’t think so. “Things are… things. Y’know. Same ol’, same ol’.” There was no word cloud for this.
“You let the fangs grow in?” He motioned to my teeth.
I felt like I should cover them up, but I just left them there in all their glory. “Not on purpose. It just sort of… happened. Earlier tonight.”
“Oh.” He eyed my bags full of chops and cutlets. “That’s… a lot of beef. Are you feeling okay?”
This horrible rush of bitterness pushed through me, helped along by the Cabernet and the happenings of the evening, I’m sure. Here I was, one foot in each world, trying my damnedest to negotiate a decent life somewhere between my old self and my new self, holding on as much as I could to the man I used to be while not letting the creature I had been turned into take over every aspect of me. How could he ask something like that having watched my descent into vampiredom? Right before his eyes I’ve become even less than less-than, some hopeless sub-species that doesn’t get a real name or a page in the science books. I have no idea how long it will be until this hateful affliction totally mows me over, or what it will look like when it’s all said and done. And there’s Hube, not three feet in front of me, healthy and hearty and whole.
And human. All the way.
Everything I used to be, and everything I wanted to be again.
I don’t think I realized it until that moment, but God, I resented him.
That bottle deep inside that Louise is always trying to get me to open finally popped its cork. “Am I feeling okay? Are you fucking kidding me? No, I’m not feeling okay. I crave blood, Hube – real, live people blood, all the time. But rather than running out and neck-fucking transients or biting vampire groupies, I suck the juices out of raw animal flesh instead. Have you ever tried it to see what it’s like, maybe just to get an idea of what I go through every day? Don’t bother, because I can tell you exactly how it is: it’s