Bloodsucker Diaries
Contents
Tuesday, March 4, 1999
Dear Diary - Its been far too long since we have spoken. I sit here at my accustomed table towards the back of the main room at the Way Down nightclub in San Francisco. The light is dim in this shadowed corner. But I have a candle in a red glass jar that provides all the light I need for our intercourse. I like the candle, its a nice touch by Lorraine, like a votive for my long lost mortality. Yes Diary, I am maudlin tonight.
Wednesday, May 14, 1999
Dear Diary -
Sunday, June 22, 1999
Dear Diary -
Sunday, December 14, 2005 -- China Beach
Dear Diary - Please forgive me for my long absence, you see, I have been asleep for five years. Like the legend of Sleeping Beauty, I awoke tonight, but not in a crystal casket, but in the ruins of a collapsed building. I know its all sounds so confusing, let me explain.
Five years ago at the beginning of summer, I was called to the court of the new prince of San Francisco, Sara Anne Winder. There I was introduced to a number of Kindred I had never met before and it was explained to me that the Sabbat, the boogeyman-enemy of the Camarilla was preparing a strike against our home, the Golden Gate City. Truthfully, I was scared. And I have never been much of a fighter you see. I had been in my fair share of fist-fights, both as a kid and in high-school, but this was something different altogether. Those who surrounded me were men and women who had real fighting skill and stood a chance against the ravaging horde of the monstrous Sabbat. At the time, I asked myself why I had been called and what did I have to contribute. But this question would remain unanswered as I was paired up with a member of the clan of beasts named Liborio Tosetti. I had seen Liborio around a few times over the last four decades, but we had never had reason to speak more than a handful of words to each other over all that time.
This time was different. As partners, we were assigned reconnaissance duty. Our job was to watch over China Beach and Land's End national park in case the Sabbat chose to enter the city that way. Our base of operations was an old Victorian brownstone in the gated community of Seacliff. To be honest, it was a cushy assignment compared to what we might have ended up with and over a couple of nights Liborio and I managed to break the ice. Although the views of the Pacific ocean from Seacliff were breathtaking, I had a bad feeling about the location from the beginning, there was just something about that house that left me unsettled. The truth is, I think the old mansion on the cliff was haunted. When I mentioned it to Liborio he just laughed, which actually made me feel better, but I didn't spend any more time there than I had to and never alone.
All my fears and the unrelieved pressures of waiting for something to happen were ultimately irrelevant. Neither of us saw any Sabbat or any other vampire and when we went to sleep at sunrise on the third day, we never woke up. Sometime during that long summer's day something went terribly wrong. I don't know what happened exactly, but whatever it was, it did enough damage to both Liborio and I to put us both into torpor. What is torpor? Well the old vampires of San Francisco call it the "long sleep" and I have heard it called somewhat poetically the "Sleep of Ages," while both those descriptions are apt, they don't really explain what it is really like. For me, I went to sleep one morning and woke up starving, five years later. There was almost nothing in-between. Try to imagine if you will, going into a coma for five years, as all around you the people and places of you world change forever and you don't find out about it until later.
The first thing I can remember was the smell of human blood. It had a curious metallic tang that drifted on the cold night air to tickle my senses and drag me to consciousness. Next came a thirst as if I had wandered in an endless desert for days. It tore through my veins and up into my mouth, where it settled in my fangs. The ache is like nothing I knew in life. I would have screamed in hunger, but my throat was dry and raspy like old leather and my tongue was a shriveled up old root. Somehow I found myself in motion. Like a disgusting thing from the bottom of someone's garden, I crawled over broken earth and stone towards the smell of warmth and life. I could not see, for without blood to restore my shrunken mummified body, my eyes were just empty sockets covered by a thin layer of dry dusty flesh.
Had I know when I was still mortal, what the pain of the "thirst" was like and the dirty, ugly dead thing that torpor could reduce me to, I might well have told Eve to let me die a man. But I didn't and she didn't, and because of those decisions, I would kill someone eventually. The older vampires of San Francisco say we are the children of Caine, the first murderer, and that means murder runs in our veins and we are all killers. I truly hope not. If there is a god and he cursed Caine, then maybe as the children of Caine we can earn individual forgiveness, and until I know one way or the other, I just want to have some fun.
When I next became conscious, I was clinging to a man in the dark. His body was so warm and as gulped down his delicious warm red blood, it washed through me, giving form and substance to the hungry ghost I used to be. Its a terrible thing to find yourself clinging to another human being like a drowning person does drift wood, the only chance that you have to escape the cold grip of death and live again. He smelled of cheap aftershave, stale cigarettes and old sweat, I had never smelled anything so intoxicating. The wrinkles of his throat and the throb of his heart were my entire world as I lay atop him. His heart barely beat by the time I had the sense to stop feeding from him. The hole in his neck sealed itself after I licked it repeatedly like Eve showed me.
Friday, December 26, 2005
Dear Diary -
Friday, March 20, 2007 -- "Homecoming"
Dear Diary - Its been a long road and I finally understand Bob Seger's "Turn the Page". When the song came out in 1973, I was just fifteen years old and still mortal, but the words stayed with me down through the last four decades. While I had always loved the fiercely melancholy song with its undercurrent of rage, I failed to truly understand it until I finally took to the road to tour myself.
"The Times They Are a-Changin" -- Saturday, October 13, 2007
Dear Diary -
