GAY TEENAGE VAMPIRE

SAM HENDERSON

I’m a gay teenage vampire. My name is Nichol Stillman. I’m seventeen years old. I live with Darklady and Slayer. Darklady says I’ll have to choose a vampire name seeing as how my new teeth have grown but I haven’t picked one out yet. Slayer sometimes calls me The Fangster when he’s being an asshole. Other times he calls me Babylove.

Here is a photo of me that Slayer took last night. He was making me practice.

We live in Hensman Rd, Queenstown, in Death Metal House. At least that’s what I’ve called it ever since I walked past it on my way home from my McDonald’s job one night and I could hear someone playing Dismember’s ‘Indecent & Obscene’ up loud. Otherwise it was just an ordinary house.

This is a photo of the Death Metal House, except in daylight.

I stood at the gate and listened and I wanted to go in and say ‘Hi’ to whoever it was that was playing the music, obviously being one of the few people in Queenstown with killer taste, but I didn’t. The next Saturday night, when I was going home up Hensman Rd, I stopped outside again just to see what was happening. I didn’t know what band was playing this time. It sounded like Cannibal Corpse. I stood at the gate listening to the really evil music and then a voice said ‘You may as well come in instead of standing out there in the cold.’ It was an American voice, drawling and lazy. I could only see him as a shadow by the garage door with the red glow of a cigarette.

They’d come south for the winter. Darklady wanted snow and mountains and mountain lakes. Slayer liked the nightlife and casual sex of ski-resorts. Darklady was working on her ‘History of The Light And The Dark’, which told the story of the whole thing, for her website www.darklady.net. Slayer was just fucking around waiting for Ski Week and the season starting and everything going off. In the morning just before dawn, they’d scull Jack Daniels and Coke together, and pull the curtains closed and argue about things that happened in Denver or Warsaw or Bangkok in 1890 and 1919 and 1947 and explain shit to each other, just like they’d been doing forever. Then I arrived.

Cannibal Corpse’s first CD ‘Eaten Back To Life’ is grim. Fans, like me, rank the band’s debut as an all-round winner. Featuring songs like Shredded Humans, Edible Autopsy, Rotting Head, Undead Will Feast, Bloody Chunks, Skull Full of Maggots, and Buried in the Backyard, the album is a Death Metal legend.

The remastered version of ‘Eaten Back to Life’ also includes a video of ‘Born In A Casket’ which is live.

It was Slayer and I’s three week anniversary and to celebrate he’d got me into his room, onto the bed and, while he was still dressed, got me totally naked like he liked. He’d unzipped his black old jeans and he had my legs up and everything was going to plan as if he was going to do it like normal when suddenly he said ‘I can really take you into the Dark. I’ll give you Black and Grim I can give you Eternal Life, at least as close as you are ever going to get to it. I can give you Supernatural Insight and Vision, Superhuman Physical Strength and Faster Reactions. I can give you Ecstasies and Emotions you will never experience otherwise. The downside is that you’ll feel sick for a few weeks, your teeth will fall out before you’ll grow fangs, and you’ll never feel comfortable in the daylight ever again. You’ll gain strange appetites that will send you to the fridge in the middle of the night for a raw steak or give you the occasional desire to kill someone by ripping open their necks and drinking their blood, and then you’ll additionally be forever divorced from allegedly normal human beings who will hate you based on gut-instinct and some feeling deep in their bowels and who will hunt you down and attempt to destroy you in the cruelest way they can imagine, even tearing out your heart out while it still pumps given half the opportunity. Are you interested?’ It was a heavy, brutal, fucking evil text. ‘Uh,’ I said, ‘I guess.’ Slayer whipped the condom off and went straight in giving me no time for further consideration of things until finally, with some hard heaving of his hips, he came for the first time freely inside of me, and I came too, simultaneously or near enough so that it didn’t matter. ‘Fucking wow,’ I said. ‘Better believe it,’ he grunted back.

Darklady was pissed. ‘He’s too young to consent,’ she snarled at Slayer and quicker than I could see raked his face with her fingernails, drawing instant blood, leaving Slayer staring at her without speaking, red raw stripes beading on his cheeks. They stared at each other for the longest time. ‘Well he better move in then, hadn’t he?’ she said, finally, pulling out one of her menthol cigarettes and lighting it, still fucked off.

The day I moved in my teeth were bothering me. They were a hot itch. ‘Just pull them out,’ said Darklady, ‘you’ll really love it. And they’ve got to come out so your new ones will grow.’ I gave one of them a tug, but I couldn’t. ‘I’ll do it,’ said Slayer and I opened my mouth and he put his motorbike-oil tasting fingers in and pulled at one of my back teeth and then wrenched it out. I nearly came, it was so hot and horny. My head was one bolt of white master-blasting cum. And then he did it twenty-seven more times.

This is a photo of Queenstown at night that I took with Slayer’s camera the first night we started going out again after I transitioned.

My new teeth were still buds and I was wearing his big Spyder ski-jacket. I wanted to get out of the house now that I was beginning to feel better. I was still getting used to seeing things differently. There was a chrome colour throbbing inside all the other colours now. Everything had it, sometimes bright, sometimes dull. It was heat. Dark Lady had told me I’d be able to see heat, then eventually I’d be able to see life energy. When I asked what that was she said it would be like trying to explain sight to a blind person and I’d know what it was when I could see it. Slayer had his arm around my shoulders as we walked. He didn’t give a shit if anyone saw us. We passed McDonalds in Camp St and I wondered about the old crew there, how they were getting on. Then we went up the Skyline Gondala and stopped at the top, looking out over the town, Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables. ‘How many others have you made?’ I asked Slayer. ‘A few,’ he said. ‘How many?’ I insisted. ‘Fifty maybe,’ he eventually answered. He was 236 years old so that was around one every two years. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘Are they all still around? I asked’ He shrugged. ‘Most of them, I guess,’ he said. ‘It’s not like we all still see each other,’ he drawled. I didn’t say anything. ‘I see some of them,’ he finally admitted, ‘but don’t get pissed. It’s not like what you think. Anyway, this is your night.’ He pulled me to him and held me in the cold air. He kissed me on the lips, gently still because my teeth hurt even though they were growing fast.

Vampirism is mainly a guy-thing. ‘It’s just a virus,’ Slayer said. Guys can transmit it by their cum. Female vampires have to do blood-to-blood which is more complicated. ‘Ask Dark Lady, she knows all the facts,’ Slayer suggested, like he wasn’t real interested in that side of things. ‘Most male vampires are gay,’ he said, ‘it comes with the territory. Once in bed I asked him how he was made. It was in America not long after the War of Independence. He thought it was around 1790 but he said that he couldn’t even read then and they didn’t keep track of years in those times like we do now. He said he was raped in a ditch late one night after he had been drinking. This was somewhere just outside Boston. He said the vampire that did it was insane and would have killed him afterwards except for the fact that he was chased off by a pack of village dogs. Dogs hate our kind. ‘Vampires often were insane then because a lot of them didn’t know what had happened to them. Now it’s different.’ He said he had gone crazy, too, for a long time, roaming the dark, sleeping wild, killing for blood, but then Darklady had found him and sorted him out.

‘Harmony Corruption’ was Napalm Death’s 1990 album release. It took their earlier Grindcore style and merged it with Death Metal influences. It was only a temporary change in the band’s musical direction but for me it is still their most wicked album and it was seminal in the creation of modern Death Metal. The track-listing also contains all the material from their EP ‘Mentally Murdered’. Full of heavy blasting, it’s a raw choice for any hardcore Death Metal fiend.

I found an old Polaroid photograph in the back of Slayer’s address book. It is an ancient book, you can tell by the way it’s made. They don’t make things like that now. The paper is really thick and creamy. There were appointments written in old faded ink, all these crossing outs so you couldn’t read things, doodles of skulls and crossbones, stuff in other languages, lists of motorbike parts, and lots of hotmail and gmail e-mail addresses towards the end. The photo was inside the back cover with an unused 25 August 1962 PanAm airline ticket from New York to London.

It is Slayer standing there in that bathroom but I do not know what is happening in the photograph. I really want to ask him but I don’t think he’d like me nosing around his stuff. I also really wonder who took it. It makes me horny just looking at it.

Darklady made some really good investments in the 1880s and then Slayer said she’d got in early on Microsoft a few years back. She gives me an allowance of $500 a week. I’ve been paying for mega downloads from itunes. I now have complete mp3s of every album by Carcass, Morbid Angel, Entombed, Obituary, Sepultura and Pestilence to add to my collection. Deathlady has a top of the range broadband connection that I use too. She needs it for her website. Slayer calls www.darklady.net Vampire Central. ‘Even fucking really old vampires are online now,’ Slayer says, ‘you should checkout the member chatrooms if you’re into older guys.’

Slayer didn’t come home one night. He said he was just going out to get cigarettes and he didn’t come back. ‘He’s got appetites,’ Darklady said around 4am, studying me to see my reaction, ‘and you’ve got to let him satisfy them. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with you.’ I wanted to ask her what he did but I knew she wouldn’t tell me. They both were good at keeping each other’s secrets. When Slayer came in at 6am, I pretended nothing unusual had happened. Then we had the best sex we’ve ever had. Being a vampire makes it better. It’s like lions mating. You can smell and feel and somehow you want things more. Everything seems bigger and harder and more focused. Slayer’s mouth tasted metallic and warm with blood which excited me more. I could smell it. My head roared.

Slayer has two motorbikes. His favorite is a Bonneville T100. It’s got an 865 cc engine. This is a photo of it we took in the driveway.

Most nights now we’ll go for a ride. I like sitting behind him pressed up close to Slayer’s body in his leathers. In the cold, snowy air these night rides on the high roads around Wakatipu are exhilarating, especially with my new senses, the tussock and rock and darkness whipping past, the black starry sky humming with energy, and all the fang-sharpening feel of everything.

Darklady tells old stories when we’re all winding down with a Jack and Coke just before dawn. I’ve learned about the old Vampire tribes that lived in the European and Russian forests, the evil blood-lusting Vampires who create human wars so they can surf those great red waves of battle, the last days of the Hapsburgs when the Austro-Hungarian nobility was filled our kind, and all about New York in the 1970s when gay vampires flaunted themselves in the discos and the sex clubs. Slayer paces up and down looking at the night through the big windows and smoking his Lucky Strikes. ‘Tell him about Berlin in 1945,’ he says. ‘Tell him about Von Reichenburg’s Vampire Hunters and what he did.’ ‘What about Killjack? Tell him about Killjack and Jagged and the Great Fire of London.’ Later, when we’re in bed, the curtains closed against the day, Slayer will tell me about other things because he was already going to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple concerts in the 1970s, right at the birth of Heavy Metal, and somehow he’d accidentally dropped in to the Metal Grinder in L.A. in 1987 when Death were recording ‘Bloody Scream Gore’ there and he actually met Chuck Schuldiner and talked to him. He knows I love all that shit.

Death’s ‘Bloody Scream Gore’ is the rawest of Death’s albums with the heaviest lyrics. It has a killer track listing including Infernal Death, Mutilation, and Zombie Ritual which has the album’s greatest intro riff. It is a really vicious compilation from the dawn of Death Metal and any true Death Metal Head needs to own and treasure a copy.

‘Sharper,’ I said to Slayer, ‘What about Sharper?’ I’m still trying to find my vampire name. Sharper is an evil name, I think. I like it. I look in the mirror and I even look like a Sharper, especially if I show my new fangs. ‘And Slayer and Sharper sounds grim together,’ I say, ‘Sharper and Slayer. Slayer and Sharper.’ ‘I’ll blood you soon enough,’ Slayer had said earlier on, ‘when it’s time. Don’t be hassling.’ He told me that we’ll hunt and do it together and just thinking about it, and how he is going to be there with me when we do it, makes me hot. It makes me want to strip off my clothes right there and then and let him have me. I undo my belt buckle with its big silver Goth buckle. He watches me. I snarl at him, just a low growl like he likes. I slowly unzip. His lips draw back from his teeth a little. They are wet and shining with saliva. We’re going to make a wicked team.

SAM HENDERSON is 27 and lives in Queenstown with his partner. ‘I’ve written a number of gay vampire stories set in the Wakatipu Basin and I’m currently working on a novel featuring the characters introduced in Gay Teenage Vampire.’ Sam believes that every gay man intrinsically understands the Vampire genre ‘because it is almost an exact metaphor for our lives.’

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.