Queen of the Damned

The old queen never knew what hit him when you flew from the shadows and latched onto his leathery neck.  You didn’t know it was a pint and half of blood was boy blood, until you tried to toss the corpse in a garbage bin.  Your fingers had wrapped around something that felt like a polish sausage and you dropped it like a hot crucifix.

When you got back the Den of the Brood, you said, “I ate a man!” Your face turned rosy, you had overstuffed yourself and the blood pooled in your cheeks.  They laughed at you, and you wondered why you confessed so quickly.

That’s when it had really begun, they called you the Queer Vampire and you started getting an itch that could not be scratched.  The girls didn’t have any taste, no, not after that Old Queen, and you began to hang around the all night gay bars and drinking blood cocktails mixed with vodka and black pepper.  Your hips got a little looser, and then one night you missed the neck completely–the poor guy was wearing a pair of lighting bolt earrings and your tongue got pierced on the hooks and when you pulled away it split right down the middle, just like a serpent.  From that day on you hisses, and lisped and things went down hill from there.

The Brood laughed you right out of the den, “Boys eat girls, girls eat boys!”  The shame of your addiction became known through out the land.  You were exiled, and had to go underground.  There you slept, the metamorphose, the metaphor.

It was sleepy, dreamy for so long and when you awoke and clawed the dirt from your eyes, you were pale and thin, more like a scarecrow then a creature of the night.  You had erased the slate, oh yes, the slate was clean.  But in forty days you were back to your old tricks and drinking up boy blood like Old Scratch was coming tomorrow.  The Brood wouldn’t take you back, and their laughs had turned to menacing jeers and tasteless jokes, “Boys eat girls, girls eat boys,” But you couldn’t help it, no, not you, so you decided to embrace your condition and began dressing in Victorian garb, even though it was the twentieth century.  You wore pale red lipstick and puffed up your hair, painted your nails blood red, stuffed your bra with tissue paper and wore apocalyptic-red-knee-high-f*ck-me-boots.

But as your appearance grew feminine, your soul grew masculine and you admitted you were angry, madder then hell–“Why can’t they accept me for what I am?  I am Brood, yes, why can’t boys eat boys?  Tell me!” You shouted to the gathered Brood.

It was Dirty Peter himself, the old Irish blood sucker, that offered to settle it all in true Brood fashion.  Well, you know as well as I, he was an old coot, and getting up there in years, (nearly five hundred and fifty three).  He tried to smear the queer, but the queer smeared back and you tore his head from his body, destroying a legend, and earning yourself the name, The Queer Vampire Slayer.  All the women cried and called you foul things for killing such a sweet old man.  Things were never the same from that day on, oh no.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Do you remember how you wandered those alleys, sleeping in trash cans?  Do you remember the day they hauled you to the dump as you slept and you woke up during the day, with only a thin layer of garbage to protect you from the sun?

Do you remember your passionate attempts at suicide.  The drowning, the sun, the churches, the garlic, begging to that stupid pie-eyed priest that didn’t believe you were Satan’s minion until you drained his flesh and hung it from the life sized ceramic crucifix.  You knelt at His pierced feet and begged for death?  Even the lamb of God ignored your cries?  Do you remember the day the world was black, and you tried to drive a stake through your own heart?  Do you remember?

I know your remember Henry, or Honey, as he preferred to be called.  One old queen began it, and another ended it.  Yes, and the world became so cheerful, the night birds started singing again, the moon became a diamond in the sky, the stars winked at you.  Good Honey, Mama Honey, sweeter than the taste of virgin man blood.

“Emanate a stench of solicitude, surround yourself with a cloud of sincerity, embrace what and who you.  Do not be taken back by the simple minds of the Brood.  I know, I went through it all my, boy.  Come on, dance the merry jig with me,”

You and Honey locked arms and danced around that back alley, you felt awkward at first, yes, but that passed, and that little jig set the world spinning again for you.  Good Honey, sweet Honey, Mama Honey, that Old Vampire Queen.

“I am not the asshole, I have supposed,” you said, “No, I am a vampire, a little different than some.  But I am like you.  No matter, what you think, and I will embrace my addiction, strip the clothes of the women, and drink the blood that pleases me.  For I have a soul, too, just as undead as yours.  So don’t kid me, don’t lie, speak it loud and clear.  I am a Queer Vampire and I will not feel guilty.”

The Brood’s face’s in a collective O of surprise, and you walked into the night.  You and Honey, holding hands, ready for a man blood spree.  You kicked up your heels, and clicked them together, and kissed Honey on the neck.  He said in his booming man’s voice, “France, my boy, it is common place in France, for boy to eat boy, and girl to eat girl.  They do not call it queer or strange . . . so let us go than, you and I.”

And in case you don’t remember, you thanked that first nameless queen that you so naively drank from that night.  For the world was so much more alive, and you had regained a certain part of your humanity, something that the Brood had always lacked, for reasons of fear, reasons of custom, of reason of ignorance . . . boy may eat boy, and girl may eat girl.

THE END

(You’re invited to visit Bosley Gravel’s Hall of Vain!)

Originally posted 06/08/2008

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