Jailbait and The Vampires
The last time I turned down a record deal, the A&R guy looked like something out of a Michael Jackson music video--all red leather, slicked hair, and black denim. Every time he opened his mouth, I half-expected him to unleash a falsetto scream, grab his crotch, and start moonwalking on top of the damn bar.
He’d just finished explaining to my “vampire” friend Sam why he and his band would never make it after watching them wail and thrash about for an hour on the venue’s rickety stage (ghost-rocket songs don’t sell, power-bass is too hip-hop for rock, gospel vocals don’t go with grunge…) Sam barely had time to take a breath before Mr. Man in The Mirror turned to look me over and ask, “What about you?”
I scowled. “What about me?”
“This whole--” he gestured to my face and dress-- “goth-y jailbait thing you got going on. I dig it. You play anything?”
Thom, Sam’s bassist, snorted, shot Sam a look, and walked to the other side of the bar, shaking his head. Teddy, the drummer, followed him.
“Cello,” I told Michael Jr.
He guffawed into his whiskey and wagged his finger at me. “That’s cute.”
“It’s not,” Sam said. “She does play. She’s really good, ac--”
“But seriously,” Wannabe Bad said as if Sammy had never spoke. “My production company is putting together an all-girl punk outfit. You’d be a great fit for the bassist. You in?”
Under the bar light, his face looked like a sagging jack-o-lantern. The space around him smelled like old coins and when he looked at me, I could almost hear boner blood rushing and accountant calculators cranking. I tried to shoot a can you believe this asshole? look at Sam, but the space where he’d been standing was empty.
I shook my head at Michael Jr. “Fuck off, man.”
I got back to the guys just in time to see Thom, who I’d been planning to hurl my virginity at like a molotov cocktail for the past seven months, leave with two fish-netted, raccoon-eyed waifs. Like an idiot, I yelled his name, but he didn’t look back.
The nylon and leather in my dress began to to itch like a costume. I stood there, letting Smashing Pumpkins crest and fall around me over the speakers while the next band set up onstage. My insides clenched.
I flopped down on the barstool next to Sam, took a tenner from my purse, and slid it over.
“Whatever you’re having,” I said.
He shook his head. Light brown tufts of hair fell into his eyes.
“Piss off, Mini-Pearl.”
“‘Mini-Pearl’? Dead Milkmen? Come on. You’re better than that, Dracula.”
Sam shoved the money back at me without taking his eyes off the Quicksilver in his cup.
“You’re too young,” Sam said. He swirled and sipped his vodka. “Always too young.”
I grabbed the drink out of his hand, spilling a little in my rush, and poured it down my throat before he could grab it back. I swallowed the whole damn thing. It burned and I drowned and almost choked, but the collision of venom and acid in my throat hurt just enough to be worth it. I handed Sam back the empty glass. He nodded, blue eyes unfamiliar pinpricks of reproach and resignation.
“Like mother, like daughter”
I opened my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but the cough I’d been holding back came tumbling out instead.
“Or not.” He put up a shadow of a smile; a look that would’ve been a smirk had Sam any facsimile of smugness in him.
“Well, we all can’t drink like the kids in Transylvania,” I croaked.
“You’re not funny.” His smile disappeared.
“What’s the matter, Edward? Did you and Bella have a fight?”
He was quiet, casting his gaze out at the liquor bottles behind the bar like a discarded net. He gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Oh, don’t be sad. I always thought you and Jacob would make a better couple, anyway.”
The look he gave me could have frozen lava. I half-expected him to fly up from his seat, hulk out into twice his normal size, clothes ripping, bones snapping, and bury his newly grown claws in my innards. I slid the ten dollars back over to him.
He snatched it off the bar.
“Thank you,” he hissed, and beckoned to the bar-tender.
Anger and confusion mixed and bubbled in my gut. Sam’s “vampirism” was almost an inside joke between us. It had been that way ever since I first met him in the living room of my parents’ townhouse. He’d introduced himself as the new border renting out my older sister’s room while she was at Stanford and, noticing the slightly slavic gutterality in his voice, I’d asked where he was from. When he replied “Alabama” and I’d raised my eyebrows, he’d nonchalantly explained “Oh, the accent’s just part of the trope. I’m a vampire” and smiled to show two incisors chipped into fangs.
I’d spent the rest of the day in my room with the door locked.
Stray guitar chords reverberated from the speakers onstage overtop the Hole track.
A sound technician walked between microphones, speaking into one then the other. “Mic check: One, two… Mic check: One, two…”
I let my eyes drop to the bar and stared holes into the cheap, black plastic: Don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink... I blinked. When I looked up, the liquor bottles, all standing proud and shining like beauty queens, winked at me from their neon pedestals in the dim lights. I thirsted.
I thought about the burning acid hours I’d spent bleaching my black hair white. About the Friday night black dress I’d stolen from my older sister’s closet and cut to fit me. About the leather hooker boots I’d bought with my mom’s credit card and spent three weeks blisteringly learning to walk in. About the fake ID that had just barely gotten me into the bar tonight. About the kiss Thom had slammed on me in the back of the van on the way to the show and the relief that swelled inside me even as my bottom lip ached from where he bit it.
Wasted. All wasted.
A few discordant cheers and claps sounded as a skinny man in a ripped tank top stepped up to the microphone and introduced himself, the fat Hawaiian on the drums, and the blue-haired woman on bass as The Angry Strawberries. They launched into a pitchy rendition of Green Day’s “Brain Stew.”
“Sammy,” I said. “Tell me about Alabama.”
“What?” he yelled over the strings, watching the bartender pour him a shot.
“Alabama! Tell me about Alabama!”
“It was very hot.”
“I’m serious.”
“What, did Anne Rice put you up to this?” he yelled, blue eyes dying under the weight of furrowed brows.
Sammy picked up his shot and swirled it, staring at the liquid like it was a well.
He seemed determined to be me. I figured I might as well be him.
“This can’t be the first time you’ve been rejected. It happens to every musician, right? Even The Beatles got turned down.”
“I’m no Beatle,” he chuckled, tossing the shot back.
“You could be,” I lied. A Pixie, maybe, but never a Beatle. His voice was too soulful, his songs too hyperbolic--anthems and litanies of the Ritalin-deprived.
“Yeah,” he laughed. “Just like you could be Thom’s girlfriend, right?”
Because it was Sammy--and only because it was Sammy--I waited for him to realize his mistake. When he didn’t, I pushed him. Hard. He almost fell off the bar stool.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” I said.
He regained his balance and fixed me with a blank stare. Something in him ignited and his eyes widened, his lips thinned, his brows stretched, his face lengthened. He looked every bit the bloodthirsty, demonic mongrel he wasn’t. He brought his face inches from mine. I could smell the Quicksilver on his breath.
“No,” he said. “What the hell is the matter with you? You were supposed to be cool and you go falling for the first smooth-talking asshole you see? You were supposed to be better than that. Your whole life, you don’t take shit from anybody and now you want to bitch and moan because you dress up like a slut for some tool in skinny jeans and he won’t fuck you? Grow up. You’re acting like a… a fucking--” The arctic faded from his eyes. His face crinkled and fell.
“A what, Sam? A fucking what?”
He dropped my gaze and turned back to the liquor bottles. I hit him on the shoulder.
“Say it. Go ahead. I’m acting like a what?”
He shook his head and tried to wave me away.
“Like a teenager?” I screamed. “I’m acting like a teenager? At 17? Well, what a fucking shocker!”
He didn’t move.
Anything he might have said would’ve been drowned out by the screech of guitar chords anyway. As I forced myself on my spiked heels and walked out of the bar through a back exit, the skinny man in the ripped tank top sang out “On my own/ Here we go…”
My forgotten purse stayed forgotten until the two metal doors closed behind me, sealing me in a snowy alley behind the bar. Cursing myself, I turned and tried to wrench the door open. It wouldn’t budge.
I couldn’t pull any harder. The ground was icy and I was in heels--there was no way to get enough traction. Cursing, I tore my half frozen hands from the metal and tried to abbreviate the scream I wanted to release into a sigh. This was not how tonight was supposed to go.
Had Thom been there, he would have Heathcliffed right up to me, shaken his pierced head, grappled my hand, and, heedless of my anger, dragged me back into the bar through the front entrance. He would have backed me into the wall by the metal double doors and demanded to know in his lowest and loudest voice, deep and clear as a mountain night sky, what the hell I was thinking. He would have gone on and on about how if I got hurt, Sammy would be blamed and get kicked out and the band wouldn’t have a place to practice and and and… And I would not be able to stop staring at his perfect Valentine lips, blazing brown eyes, and white chiclet teeth, and thinking One day, you’ll be happy just to have known my name. Delusionally, of course.
Since Thom wasn’t there, I took a long, deep drag off of the accumulated years of secondhand smoke in the frozen alley and pulled my anger close because it was the only thing that was mine. Shivering and cursing, cursing and shivering, I walked around to the front of the building--and forced myself not to turn tail and run when I saw that the bouncer was not the one who’d granted me entrance earlier that night.
The bulbous pile of swollen flesh and black sweats took the cigarette out of it’s mouth and exhaled smoke as I approached. “You lost, kid?”
The voice had enough tar and gravel in it to be it’s own road.
“Um, no, actually I was in there earlier and accidentally left my bag and coat, so--”
“ID?” The bouncer held out an impassive hand.
“ My ID is in my purse,” I said slowly. “Which is in the bar. So if I could just...”
The flesh pile shook her head (which was impressive, as she didn’t appear to have a neck.)
“No ID, no entrance.” She raised a flabby arm and waved me away. “Run along, honey.”
A gust of wind ripped through me. She watched me shiver and, I swear, almost laughed. Bombs went off in my head and I threw one of them in her general direction as I walked away. She retaliated with a flick of ash and infuriating indifference.
Once back in the alley, I threw myself into pulling at the door, waves of profanity tumbling from my lips. I slipped and slid in my heels, pulling myself back up each time. After five full minutes of fruitless effort, I sagged against the door, shivering, and tried to resurrect my hands with my breath. Sleep grabbed and pulled at my aching head. I half-heartedly imagined dying out here either from cold or from a mugging gone wrong, as I would surely have to walk through the blue light district to get home. Teddy probably took the van back already and no buses ran this late. I wondered if my sister, Ren, would bother to attend my funeral. It would be a small affair. My parents didn’t like any of my friends.
If Ren did come, maybe she’d meet Thom (Sam would be sure to drag him there). His heart would jump right out of his dick upon seeing Ren and she would know at once why I stole her dress. They would date and he would change and she would marry him and birth perfect blond baby after perfect blond baby.
Maybe they’d even name one of the daughters Christina after the dead, foul-mouthed teenager who brought them together. Maybe she’d grow up to be kind, patient, and gracious just like Ren… just like the person my mother wishes I’d grown into.
Half-awakening from my wonderings, I thought I heard Sammy’s voice from inside the bar, but I couldn’t tell. It was Friday night and The Angry Strawberries were still blaring, so he must have been screaming if it was him. Then there were footsteps and footsteps and my name and footsteps and--Thwam!
The impact of the door knocked me to my knees. Walls, stars, snow, and concrete blurred into nothing then back to everything. The pain put tears in my eyes. They trickled down and more grew in their place.
Sam was leaning over me, face wrinkled in dismay. He reached to examine my head, but stopped when he realized I was crying. His face softened and he draped his coat around my shoulders. He lowered his eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch him feel sorry for me. I handed him his coat back and shakily got to my feet, ignoring his outstretched hand. He handed me my purse. We started to walk. The buildings were still spinning a little, the world darkening and pixelating.
I sighed. First I was a bratty, rejected, underdressed virgin, now I was a fucking rescued princess. The A/V creep’s voice kept echoing in my head: gothy jailbait, gothy jailbait, gothy jailbait… I bit the inside of my mouth and stared into the scattered lights.
To his credit, Sammy left me the hell alone until the tears stopped. He was even nice enough not to mind when I at first declined his arm to help steady myself, but leaned on him a second later when the street wouldn’t stop dancing. Smiling softly, he put his arm around me and, as we walked, told me about how when he was a kid in Alabama, he would always chase rabbits in the summer, hoping to find Wonderland, though he could never get through the Disney movie without crying because he felt sorry for Alice. The other kids teased him about it mercilessly, but they still went looking for Wonderland with him.
“My parents could never convince me it wasn’t real,” he told me.
“You were an adventurous young vampire.” I smiled.
He shook his head. “I wasn’t a vampire yet. I did get my fangs around that time though. Chipped them on a desk.”
I laughed, knowing he’d probably been singing or dancing on top of his desk in the middle of a class.
“So, who bit you?” I asked.
“The hospital,” he said. “I was 22, working at a summer camp. I started getting dizzy for no reason. Started talking funny. The doctors said I was very sick. First, they drained me of all my time and money, then my parents.”
“Then what happened?”
He shrugged. “I got better. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”
I gave him a dubious look.
“They couldn’t decide what was wrong with me,” he said. “But I felt worse every day they kept me in bed. I figured, fuck it. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die doing what I love... And I’m going to bleed people dry doing it.”
That last sentence was so insidious, so un-Sam, I couldn’t help but grow warier.
“People spend their whole lives pouring themselves into work they can’t stand. Their essence is no longer in their blood--it’s in their money. Then they give it to artists--writers, musicians, dancers, people who get away with making a living off of what they love--for beautiful things to keep them alive. They feed off our efforts and we feed off theirs. It’s really a very mutually beneficial relationship.”
“So, since you have the job at the hotel, you’re technically an aspiring vampire?”
“No, I sing there.”
“But you’re a valet. Nobody pays you to sing.”
“That’s not true. I get tips all the time.”
“Okay,” I said, rolling my eyes.
The streets were eerily quiet. Everything was dark but for the snow and scattered lamp post light. The buildings all had that cheap, gray, gnarled look I would have loved during the day. It was becoming very hard to separate the dots from my head and those that were actually falling from the sky.
“I never wanted to date Thom,” I told Sammy. “I just wanted to fuck him.”
“Why?”
“Well,” I said, eyes on the concrete swimming in front of me. “For one thing, even if the the condom broke, he’d never get me pregnant because have you seen how tight that dude’s pants are? Fuckin’ ridiculous.”
He chuckled. “Nice try. But I’m serious.”
I shrugged.
I thought about the first time I’d seen Thom. He’d emerged from the basement steps of my parents’ townhouse right as I had gotten home from school. I hadn’t even had time to shuffle out of my Catholic School loafers. He’d stopped and stared at me like I was the alien in his house, cappuccino eyes burning their way up my legs, around my hips, and over my breasts, finally coming to rest on my face. His confused frown had cleared and was immediately replaced by a crooked smirk.
“So,” he'd said. “You’re Jail Bait” like it was my fucking name. He refused to call me anything else.
“Man, I don’t know,” I sighed. “Because he’s sexy and mean and has great hair and all that other shit seventeen year old girls cream their pants over.”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”
I stayed quiet. What he choose to believe was up to him.
“You’re not other seventeen year old girls,” he said. “You’re smarter than that. Even if you did have a stereotypical teenager moment, it’s not like you to let it bother you so much. Besides, you don’t even date musicians.”
“Like I said: I wasn’t planning on dating him.”
“So, what, it would have just happened and been over?”
“I believe that’s the definition of a one-night-stand, yes.”
“You went through an awful lot of trouble for a one night stand.” He looked me up and down. “You dyed your hair. You’re wearing a dress, for God’s sake! I didn’t even know you owned a dress.”
I didn’t. I remembered the way it looked, folded up in a box in the attic along with all Ren’s other discarded treasures--skirts, bracelets, necklaces, the lockets from high school sweethearts she’d always proved to be too good for in the end. The tomb of a princess dead to the East Coast.
Maybe treasures is the wrong word for the trinkets. She hadn’t touched them in years. I don’t know for whom or for what she was saving them. They’d never been offered to me, in any case.
Sam yammered on and on about how my decisions didn’t make sense tonight, about how Thom was an idiot I never should’ve bothered with, about how I deserved better and should know it… Basically, about how I was acting my age for the first time since we met and how he didn’t like it.
“You could have anyone,” he said, his grip on my shoulder tightened. “Literally anyone. You don’t even have to try.”
I bit my lip, wishing I could swallow it. Why the hell did he have to say shit like that?
I’d just gotten my heart nice and numb. Here he was trying to defrost it.
He was still staring straight ahead. His cheeks looked pinker than usual. I thought back to how angry he’d gotten the day I told him I didn’t date musicians. The subject had come up casually--he’d asked me about my day, I began to tell him how this guy had asked me out and how I’d turned him down because all he ever did was talk shit about everyone and because I didn’t date musicians. Sammy, open and attentive until then, had yelled at me like I’d told him I thought Mick Jagger was one of the original members of Maroon 5. He’d called me a snob, a hypocrite because I’d been playing cello since I was nine, a harpy worse than any vampire. Even after I’d explained to him that my ban on musicians came from years of watching perfectly nice, down to earth idiots transform into arrogant assholes the second they learned their first chord, he’d glared at me. He’d said,“I love you, Chris, but you can be a real bitch sometimes.”
He’d gone back to making pancakes and humming Prince songs the very next morning. Tonight was the first time the conversation had been referenced and I wanted to feign naivete and wonder why, but a terrible knowledge was beginning to rise in my gut.
Sam was a twenty-eight year-old, red-blooded, heterosexual male. Not once, in his year of living under the same roof as me, had he so much as smiled at me flirtaciously, but not once had he ever talked to me like a child either.
Even if I tried to pretend that his kindness to me meant nothing, even if I told myself he was just a nice guy being a nice guy, I remembered the look on his face after Thom had kissed me. Ashen and long. His mouth had hung open just enough to show the tips of his fangs, but he looked like he was the one bitten--or, at the very least, wounded.
I planted my feet where we were and pulled him around to face me. My hands found his collar and I yanked it to my level so he couldn’t look away. I glared, burning, into his stupid baby blue eyes and soft open face. I would cut him. He needed to know how fucked up I was. He needed to know for his own good. We’d go no further. Not one step.
“I wanted to fuck him,” I spat. “Because I wanted to bite the smirk off his face. Because I am jailbait. Because I wanted dirty metal on my teeth and my blood under his fingernails. Because it would have hurt and been over. Because I would have laid in bed or in van or wherever, undone and crying while he got dressed, smiling, thinking it was because of him. Because I wanted to fill a space, but not a void. Because, because, because…”
I’d begun to shake. Or maybe the world had. There was an ache forming beneath the burn in my throat I could no longer push down.
Sammy reached over and clasped my claw.
“Because with him,” Sammy finished softly. “ It wouldn’t have meant anything.”
I collapsed. All the tendrils of tension and concrete venom melted and disappeared down the storm drain. My hands felt too heavy to hit, feet too heavy to kick. I released Sammys collar and didn’t pull away when he wouldn’t let go of my hand. The truth didn’t hurt anymore. It just weighed.
You could have anyone. The words echoed through my head as I watched him watch me. He was standing steady, keeping the concern from clouding his brow. Waiting. His eyes had never looked brighter.
Finally, I clamped down on my shakes, condensed them into my chest, put them with all the hurt, and packed it all into a breath. I exhaled. A cool breeze glanced through us. My head had stopped hurting, but I suddenly felt very, very tired.
Face reddening, Sammy opened his mouth, but I shook my head. I felt myself soften and he must have seen it, because he cocked his head and frowned. Before he could say a word, I hugged him. He smelled like peppermint and rain. After a moment, he put his arms around me.
“I’m sorry I stole your drink,” I said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t buy you one.” He stroked my hair. “And, Chris?”
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t bleach your hair again. You don’t look like you as a blond.”
“Deal.”
The wind pushed us the rest of the way home. By the time we stumbled through the door of the townhouse, I don’t think there was a single inch of exposed skin not left numb. We buried ourselves in blankets and drowned each other in hot chocolate until we were drunk on warmth and each other’s company. He began to sing Michael Jackson songs in the living room and I drummed along on the coffee table. Because my mom was once again spending the weekend in Hoboken with my Aunt Linda and my dad was once again working late, there was no one to wake up.
Right before I drifted off to sleep on the carpet, Sammy made me swear that if we were ever in a band together, we’d call ourselves The Mellow Strawberries. We would wear gold lamé suits safety-pinned together and only play smooth jazz covers of Green Day songs. I tried to croon out “American Idiot,” but couldn’t keep a straight face. My lungs ached from laughter.
In my dreams, all was warm darkness, but Sammy’s voice singing “She” played on a loop all throughout the night.
She
She screams in silence
A sullen riot penetrating through her mind
Waiting for a sign
To smash the silence with the brick of self-control
Somehow, I knew I was on bass.
