A TRANSYLVANIAN GENTLEMAN
I arrived in New York City with the Hunger hard upon me.
Much nonsense has been written down through the centuries concerning our peculiar tribe, Stoker's silly novel far from being the worst of it, and as for the endless B-movies, the less said the better, yet no one has gotten it right.
I seriously doubt that any of these people ever met a real vampire. Certainly I, the real Count Dracula, have never granted an interview, though at times I have been sorely tempted.
What a rotten press I've had down through the ages!
So I impaled a few people in my callow youth. But they were Turks, or collaborators with the Turks, or those who impeded my patriotic crusade against these asiatic barbarians, or anyway those I suspected of tendencies toward same. Do these yellow journalists tell you that Vlad Dracul was a hero to his people in those days? Do they tell you that I made my pact with A Certain Gentleman in order to secure the powers necessary to save my country from its despoilers?
Oh no, no one's ever made written that novel, or made that movie, Count Dracula has to be the pure dark-hearted villain, enslaving rat-eating wretches like the entirely fictitious Renfield, terrorizing villages of noble peasants, who, believe me, are nothing but a brutish small-minded rabble, chasing after empty-headed ingenues who are not at all to my taste, impersonated by talentless actors with lounge-lizard hairdos, slandered, and vilified, and--
But I digress. Or perhaps not. All right, so I'm a vampire. I am constrained to avoid sunlight, crosses, holy water, and garlic. But do not millions of ordinary humans share some of the same allergies, if perhaps not in the same combination? Indeed, there are those who are allergic to milk, sugar, common dust, even themselves. This makes me a weirdo?
True, I dine on human blood. But there are people out there who eat live fish, bugs, slugs, good lord, cow-blood laced with urine! I have a loathsome food preference?
So I prefer to sleep in a coffin. Why not? I can endure without one when I must, and the business about native soil, is, of course, chauvinistic rubbish. But a well-made coffin costs a good deal less than one of your electrically-heated waterbeds, it's comfortably padded, and it's made to last. With the lid snugly closed, it's light and sound proof too, an important feature for those of us who sleep during the day, when the rest of you are up and around making commotion and noise. Try it some time. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Yes, I have superhuman powers. I can turn myself into a bat if I have to at the cost of a severe headache afterwards. Barring exposure to excessive ultra-violet or a stake through the heart, I cannot die. I can reproduce my kind with a careful love-bite. We all have our little strengths and weaknesses. I cannot swim, run a four-minute mile, bench-press more than a hundred pounds, and I am perfectly dreadful at billiards even after a century of practice.
As for my reputed lack of a soul, a base canard! On a scale between Mr. Hitler and the simpering saints, I am surely squarely in the middle of the bell-shaped curve.
No, the only thing that really places the vampire outside the civilized circle of the human community, such as it is, is the Hunger. The price we pay. Admittedly, it is a nasty business. And of course, the scandal mongers have it all wrong.
Believe me, I don't enjoy it. I may have begun life as little more than a rude tribal chieftain, but after all these centuries, I count myself a civilized gentleman. I dress elegantly, I have good manners, I am by now widely-read, and many have been the ladies who would have been proud to have me to dinner with their parents.
You really think I enjoy being turned into a slavering beast without a thought in his head save sinking his fangs into the nearest available throat and sucking up blood till I am gorged and torpid? All right, all right, maybe I do enjoy it at the time, when my higher being is entirely subsumed by gibbering need, but how would you like to come to your senses stuffed and reeling, your clothing splattered with gore, standing over the corpse of some slattern or lout to whom you would not ordinarily give the time of day?
Elegant, it is not.
Fortunately, the Hunger does not come upon me often. Unlike certain other callow vampires of my acquaintance, I do not indulge myself more often than is absolutely necessary. Long centuries have taught me the discipline to hold back until I am really famished beyond reason, the happy result being that three or four meals a month will suffice, and I have retained my youthful figure. Oh yes, blood is quite caloric, and a vampire with pride in his appearance must indeed watch his weight.
Unfortunately, I hadn't had any blood for nearly two weeks by the time my flight from London landed at Candy airport, and I was in rather a dreadful state.
Airline travel these days is tedious and grueling to begin with, and being constrained to limit myself to night flights, making the connections from Bucarest to New York, via Budapest, Frankfurt, and London was almost enough to have me wishing I had tried it as a bat.
Particularly since the unfortunate situation in Romania forced me to sit around in Bucarest for a week before I could secure an exit visa and a flight to the West.
Indeed, it was the unseemly chaos in Romania that had forced me to flee the country of my birth in the first place. Well, not exactly the country of my birth. For while Transylvania may presently lie within the borders of Romania, given my history as a Hungarian patriot, I have always counted myself a Magyar, and, more to the point, perhaps, been regarded as such by the local authorities.
As you may know, Transylvania has long been a bone of contention between Hungary and Romania, and the Magyars thereof subject to much unpleasantness during periods of Romanian rule. Under the previous administration, I myself had been exempt from such persecutions, for, despite his odious reputation in certain quarters, Nicolai Ceaucescu was a fellow with whom I had much in common, and we had worked out a nice little gentlemanly quid pro quo.
After his unfortunate demise, many of his former associates met unpleasant ends, and it seemed only a matter of time before the vengeful new order got around to me. Indeed, as it turned out, I escaped, as it were, by the skin of my teeth.
Why New York? Why not? In a city where five and a half murders are committed in an average twenty-four hour period, many of them a good deal more bizarre and gory than anything in my limited repertoire, my modest and relatively discrete depredations upon the local populace should surely pass beneath the notice of the overworked police.
By the time I landed in JFK, though, I was vibrating with famishment, my hands were shaking, and I was in a testy mood indeed. Waiting half an hour to secure my baggage did not improve my disposition, and by the time I had blustered my coffin past the oafish customs agent, it was all I could do to restrain myself from tearing out his throat.
The cab driver, who charged me a hundred dollars to tie my coffin on the roof and transport me to Manhattan, cracking stupid vampire jokes in broken English all the while, never knew how close he came. As for the desk-clerk in the Chelsea Hotel, the only thing that saved him was his admirable attitude to my peculiar menage.
"A coffin, hey?" he said with glassy-eyed indifference. "For an extra ten bucks a night, I could let you have the Sid Vicious suite."
By the time I had wrestled my coffin into the elevator, down the hall, and into my dingy room--for despite its reputation as a hotel for thespians and literary artists, the Chelsea lacked a proper porter--I was sorely vexed with the denizens of this city, and slavering with need. To make matters worse, by this time it was nearly 5 AM, all too soon till the sun came up, and I freely admit I was in no mood to be choosy.
I stowed my coffin upright in the closet away from the prying eyes of chamber-maids as is my custom when traveling (a sort of jury-rigged Murphy Bed as it were), opened the door and stepped out in the hallway, determined, if such coherence could be ascribed to my present state of consciousness, to slake my burning thirst in the first available throat.
)
A love story in a jugular vein. Count Dracula arrives in New York very thirsty indeed, and the first victim he chances upon is a junkie girl who has just shot up with heroin. Love at first bite, or something like it. One good jones deserves another, doesn't it? Doesn't it?
