by some guy dressed like an extra from a Poison video. It was definitely not fine. “Who is this Don?”
“I don’t know him that well; he just sort of glommed onto me and the girls a few weeks ago. He says the funniest stuff, and he pays for all of our drinks, so we let him hang. I thought you two might like each other.”
“Apparently he liked me,” I pointed out, “or I wouldn’t have this thing oozing out of my neck… it’s probably ruining my liver already. Who bites someone on a first date, anyway?”
“Um, about that… ” And then she dropped the real bombshell, even bigger than the Oops, I Set You Up With a Guy revelation. “Don sort of thinks of himself as a vampire.”
It sounded funny back then, when I still thought vampires only existed in books and movies, so I laughed. “A vampire?”
As if the fedora wasn’t awesome enough.
POST 6
And So It Began…
Now that Michelle’s friend Don had spent an evening chewing on my neck, there was a very real possibility that I would come down with something nasty in addition to still feeling blasted from the sake. The vampire thing was creepy enough without needing a true supernatural element. I’ve seen lurid investigations on Friday night news programs about people who fill some sort of perceived leak in their energy by drinking the blood of others. They wear tiny top hats and have fang-shaped dental implants, and give themselves names like Mephistopheles Nevermore and Morticia Sucksalot.
Okay… I made those up. I don’t remember what their names were.
But it was a real news story.
I figured Don was one of these weirdos, someone who might turn up on To Catch a Predator: Vampire Edition. I also assumed that this wasn’t his first rodeo, so who knows what kinds of brain-eating microbes might be rampantly reproducing in his slobber. He hadn’t exactly looked like a testament to modern hygiene. I couldn’t help but wonder where else on my body he might have put his bacteria-laden pie hole while I was passed out. It may have been due to the gradual realization throughout the day of these and other disturbing facts about my so-called date, but I ended up feeling more and more shitty as time passed. I finally checked out early and went home to sleep, hoping it was just the remains of the hangover or an ensuing battle with bad fish from the sushi bar. Shortly afterward, I got my first taste of Vampire Shit.
That so doesn’t sound how it’s supposed to.
I took to the couch and only left to hit the bathroom, waiting until the very last minute to make the dash. Sometimes the delay didn’t pay off. My carpet paid the price on those occasions. Mind you, at the time I really thought I was only fighting off a bastard virus, something Nyquil couldn’t quite take the edges off of. All of my best intentions of heading to an urgent care kept falling by the wayside whenever the urge to shit liquid took over my body. Honestly, it was easy to mistake this sickness for something seasonal; the whole thing felt akin to the worst flu imaginable, something I would have gauged to be beyond bird flu and swine flu combined. It seemed like nature somehow skipped right over the rest of the farm and shot straight to giraffe or elephant flu, or maybe orangutan. In my soul-rotting delirium I couldn’t quite figure out how Don would have had contact with any of those creatures unless he had recently returned from an animal fetish sex safari. But my memory of the night was riddled with holes, and the guy was pretty gross, so nothing could be ruled out at that point. I never for one second thought I was actually becoming a vampire, though.
Okay… maybe I did. Just for a second, though.
But we’ve already discussed that.
Onward.
The symptoms came one by one in a spiteful, continuous parade – first the arctic nerve chills, then joint-killing body aches, followed by a roiling fever, swells of nausea, showers of sweat, and ultimately the never-ending spigot of water poop. On day two, when I realized it wasn’t going to be a short-term deal, I gave in and let it take me. With as much repulsive bathroom agony as I was in, I was sure the next day would be the pinnacle and everything would be on the upswing from there on out. But it just kept getting worse.