I’m in a support group for monsters, loosely defined. Our aims swing wildly between reform and self-acceptance depending on whose turn it is to lead the meeting and what phase of our cycles we’re in—remorse, defiance, fixation, bloodlust etc.

Today, it’s my turn to share: “My name is Joe and I’ve been a vampire for 74 years,” I begin. “Twice as long as I was human.” 

You’re supposed to introduce yourself in relation to your humanity because there are some rather outdated ideas about humanity and goodness. Is it actually helpful to think of our existence as a shadow cast from our human life, getting longer and longer, distorting but still adhering to the same foundational shape? It’s a controversial topic. I share instead about how my girlfriend left me. 

“She’d moved to L.A. with me to help me become an actor. For a while there was a trend of shows about vampires. Every network had one, some were even played by actual vampires. Hamsun, you might have seen him at this meeting? Anyway, I’m not trying to namedrop. Just like high school students are rarely played by actual high school students, vampires rarely play themselves, and I’ve personally had no luck getting cast as a vampire or anyone else. The closest I’ve come is getting two callbacks for a Chili’s commercial. I know I’m not handsome. My face is too fleshy and loose. I’ve been told I’m striking, but this is probably only on account of my height. Strangers are always asking me if I’m alright because of how pale I am. 

Of course I’m not alright! 

Not even remotely. This city of sunlight, the endless auditions, the traffic, it’s worn me down.

My girlfriend and I lived in a shitty apartment complex, a dingbat in East Hollywood next door to a family of six from Honduras. I never thought of our relationship as anything serious, but time passes differently for her. She started to get old. She kept hoping I’d fill her with my blood and turn her, but I didn’t picture us together in that eternal sort of way. She worked as a bartender and was always trying to get back at me by falling in love with young men. This usually ended with them throwing her ukulele out the window and their wives or other authorities getting involved. I’d try to comfort her: I’d mix her a Soggy-Stacey, a drink she’d named after herself. She drank a lot. Her hair started falling out. One of her eyes started to droop. Her body didn’t heal the way it used to. The bite marks I left in her neck got infected and filled with pus. Her blood sat heavily in my stomach and left me feeling sluggish and bloated. My cold dick gave her yeast infections. We were not biologically compatible, and yet being with her kept me in line. Her blood dulled my senses just enough that I didn’t seek it elsewhere.”

“He killed her,” a werewolf whispers and someone shushes him.

“I didn’t,” I respond, though we weren’t supposed to engage with cross-talk. “She moved to the desert. She doesn’t matter to this story, it’s just context.

One morning, after she left me, I was lying in the dry bathtub, trying to rouse myself for acting class. I’d started taking naps there because there were no windows. Through the wall I could hear the grandma giving the youngest of the three neighbor children a bath. I could smell the baby soap, the bathwater, and underneath all that, of course, the blood. I took a deep long breath in through my nose and exhaled slowly through my mouth. A craving was beginning to form behind my eyeballs. 

I stood up and splashed cold water on my face. My girlfriend had written in lipstick pencil all over the mirror affirmations in her shaky hand. ‘You are beautiful,’ ‘You are loved.’ 

It was passive aggressive. Her way of trying to take for herself what I hadn’t been able to give her.

Then the neighbor boy stopped by. 

‘I heard a new joke,’ the boy said. ‘Why did the vampire take the stairs?’

He liked to come by and tease me a little, peer around my shoulder into my dark apartment. 

I was a curiosity. He was food. Despite the constant repression, the seal on my true nature is not air-tight! And yet, I was able to, thanks to this group, close the door in his face then and get ready to meet with my acting teacher.  

My teacher has a storefront in a strip mall in Van Nuys, between two competing donut shops. He’d had a recurring role on a popular sitcom that everybody used to watch on Thursday nights. As soon as I got there, I could tell he was in a bad mood. He singled me out.

‘What have you got for us, Joe?’ he asked, fanning himself with a free newspaper. He had powdered sugar on his shirt and a smear of jelly on his cheek.

I walked slowly onto the makeshift stage, cleared my throat and began to recite a monologue I’d prepared from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: 

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

He tugged his ear, which he did when he was agitated, but I tried to speak louder.

They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. 

This description of a lifespan always got to me a little, because it had been taken from me.

At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. 

‘Joe,’ the teacher interrupted. ‘Look at me.’

I could smell the donuts on his breath and, under that, his bleeding gums. 

‘Bringing Shakespeare to a network TV audition is batshit, but this aside, maybe it could be memorable for this very reason if you were actually performing it, but you’re not giving me anything.’

Because I’m a vampire I’m supposed to be passion embodied? If I allowed myself to give in to passion, we all know how that would go!  

Then he started in about my childhood, trying to rile me up.

‘Think back to when you were still human. Close your eyes.’

I closed my eyes. These images have already lost their crispness, but there they were:

The one-room schoolhouse. A drought. Dust flying through the streets. A cow starved to death in the silo. My parents ill and yellow, my baby sister sticking out her tongue to lick the last drop of watered-down milk. The widow, who I followed from the train station to the boarding house thinking I’d rob her. Of course, things turned out differently. She fed on me for years and later turned me into this.

But why re-tread all this? Why does it have to determine the rest of my existence?

‘Okay,’ my teacher said, making a show to the class of how patient he was being with me and that he needed to try another tactic: ‘How about your girlfriend. Imagine me fucking her. Go ahead, close your eyes.’

I pictured Stacey riding my teacher looking sad and bored, yeast coming out of all her orifices. I opened my eyes. I didn’t like this game.

‘I bet you want to bite my neck right now, don’t you?!’ The teacher grabbed my face and pressed it into his own clammy neck. ‘You want to drain me! Come on!’

The smell of his rancid diabetic blood made me nauseous.

‘How am I supposed to teach a wet blanket to act?’ he panted. ‘Why’d you come out here anyway?’

Why did he keep pushing me? I came here because I wanted to learn to become someone else. Those moments, and they were rare, but when I didn’t have to feel my own true nature throbbing under everything—this is what made life bearable. 

The teacher took out a dirty handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘You’re not willing to do the work.’ He said that to me.

But all I do is work! My entire existence is white knuckles. I felt this driving out of the valley in the searing light. The strong medicinal scent of the eucalyptus trees filling the car.

I screeched then to a halt in front of a small ranch house with a chain link fence and had my way with a beagle. A step backward, yes, but it cheered me up. The beagle’d had a happy life, and I felt this happiness now, inside me. 

I finished reciting the monologue since I hadn’t been given the chance in class. It was about the last stage of human development, old age:

That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

When I got home, I rubbed the remnants of my girlfriend’s affirmations off the mirror with my thumb and stared at myself. I was cursed forever: all teeth, all eyes, all taste, all everything. Unquenchable. Loose-faced and hideous.

The next day, the boy from next door came by again, knocking and knocking. I don’t enjoy causing others pain. My hands started to shake, as much with dread as with anticipation. 

‘Who is it?’ I called out, even though I knew exactly who it was. I could smell the boy through the door.

‘Pedro.’

I put my hand on the doorknob.

‘What do you want?’ I asked, standing very still.

‘I’m selling candy for my soccer team,’ he lied. 

I opened the door.

‘I have peanut M&Ms and regular.’ He hesitated on the threshold, suddenly not so brave.

The boy was round but surprisingly light, like he was mostly air. I lifted him up and set him on the kitchen counter.

‘Shh!’ I said, as he struggled. ‘You got bit by a snake. You have to let me suck the venom out.’ 

I bit into the boy’s neck. 

A damp boat in the night, the rustle of lifejackets. The entire family tucked into a bed. A girl with braids hanging from the monkey bars. The deep blue sky over a bonfire on a beach. A tin case covered in stickers buried under a rhododendron bush. The grandmother’s rosaries wrapped around his wrist. Soccer on the television and everybody cheering. 

And then after the rush of the boy’s warm consciousness splashing down my throat my mind went blank. 

The rest of the afternoon, I can’t fully account for. I came to as I was driving, arms bare and blistering from the city’s endless light. I felt acutely ill swerving up Vermont Avenue, nauseous and itchy.

‘What am I doing? What am I doing?’ I said the words out loud to think them, as I blew through two stop signs, and nearly hit a man standing too close to the curb at a bus stop. 

What would the human-me have thought about what I’d done? We’re trained to ask ourselves. But what would that slack-jawed rube know about anything?

At the intersection with Jane St. I slammed on my brakes and took a sharp turn into the lot of the East L.A. animal shelter. Even with the windows up I could hear the dogs in the building going crazy.

It was a windowless room with floor-to-ceiling rows of cages. The attendant, a youth with a sparse mustache, followed me down the corridors of barking dogs.

‘Are you alright, sir?’ he asked. 

I was leaning against one of the cages with my eyes closed, unable to suppress a grin. 

‘Yes,’ I told him, without opening my eyes. ‘Thank you.’

‘You look a little pale.’ The attendant sounded nervous. The dogs in our immediate corner had gone silent. He must have thought I was having a heart attack.

I opened my eyes and straightened up. ‘I’ll take ‘em,’ I gestured behind him at the wall of dogs.

‘Who?’ The attendant was confused.

‘Oh,’ I squinted at my choices. ‘That one, that one and that one,’ I pointed.

‘Misty? Fredrick?—‘

I didn’t need to know their names. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Exactly.’

I felt giddy looking forward to what I was about to do with all those hot-blooded little darlings.

‘Are you interested in seeing the cats?’ a woman in horn-rimmed glasses asked me as I filled out the adoption papers. 

And risk a century’s worth of parasites? No, thank you.

I walked a lap around the small office, looking at all the framed certificates, keeping my hands jammed in my pockets so I wouldn’t touch everything and give myself away. I paused at the bulletin board of Lost and Found animals. There, pinned neatly was a poster:

LOST: 

Beagle mix, answers to the name Chucky. My daughter has not stopped crying since he disappeared. 

Below was the picture of the dog I’d drained after my acting class sitting in the lap of a little girl in a wheelchair. She was hugging the dog, smiling into his fur. 

He was her seizure dog. My husband blames himself, he thinks he left the gate open. If you have any idea where he went, please call us. We can’t give you money because we don’t have any, but you can have our television set.

Not good. I was staring too closely at the poster, making it flutter with my heavy breathing. My girlfriend had been the dam between myself and society, and without her weight on the other end of the bed, her dull presence and available blood, everything was spinning quickly out of control. I’d come out here to be an actor, but really the only time I’d managed to escape myself into someone else was when I drained them. I tore down the poster and crumpled it in my pocket.

The lady with the horn-rimmed glasses was calling my name. ‘You have to pay the adoption fee,’ she was saying, as if I’d been arguing.

‘I’ll also take a rabbit,’ I added impulsively.

I drained the rabbit before I even put the car in drive. 

hay, the air against my ears, 

I pulled over somewhere on Hillhurst and drank the terriers. They yipped and yipped and had a strange burnt taste maybe from the shots they’d gotten. 

Slippers, an old woman, a pee-soaked carpet, ceramic dolls. All of it mixing together.

When I got to the bullmastiff he looked at me with his round trusting eyes, tongue out, panting hot breath on my face, and, for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him. Maybe his eyes looked familiar. 

I spent the evening walking around Griffith Park in a daze, feeling the freedom of the children and animals I’d consumed, breaking into a trot on the dirt trails behind the Observatory. 

My new dog loves to stick his head out the window. The whole ride over here I watched him in the side mirror, his tongue lit silver in the moonlight. 

And friends, dear friends, maybe I’ve turned a corner. Maybe I know exactly who I am, and oh how my heart is bursting with hope.”