When I started this blogging thing a couple weeks back, at the suggestion of a friend, I didn’t know if it would be a good thing or a bad thing. And by “good” and “bad,” I mean helpful and not so helpful to me. It has been painful, but the last few years have been pain-filled.

Putting these thoughts into a written form has made me think that we have very little control over the direction our lives have taken. Maybe we’re not on a path at all, a path as Robert Frost, the American poet, believed. Maybe we’re in a torrential river being swept along; and yes, we have choices as we are being swept along. We can grab for that tree root sticking out of the bank and try to grab fast and hold on; and if we should be lucky enough to hang on, things may change; but the torrent of water erodes the hand-hold and what progress we think we’ve made and we are carried away again, buffeted and beaten down by the debris created by all of the others in the river.

Oh, if only we were walking in a peaceful yellow wood. But we’re not.

And I had this paranoid delusional murderer sitting in my office. And as it would turn out, that 100 g’s that he paid wouldn’t save him and could never be a measure of my loss. As I said, we are carried along by the torrent of life; and it is only when we look back that we believe that we had choices that we could have made that would have made a difference, but that is only because we have realized an outcome. The if-only-I-had-done-that statements come after the fact, after the outcome. The events became “choices” only in retrospect, when at the time, prospectively, there weren’t any choices to make. At the time, we go with the flow or we do our jobs or we do what we have to do. Two roads might diverge in the yellow wood, but who can say that the outcome would have been different if Frost had taken the other road instead of the road less traveled.

So, moving on. Enough of the philosophical mumbo-jumbo, for now. That was the therapeutic part of the blogging experience. I was dealing with a well-dressed, gap-toothed gentleman accused iof killing his high society wife who believed himself to be a vampire.

Of course, vampires were the fodder for pulp fiction. Count Vlad of Hungary was the model for the vampire tales, or so I recall from reading it somewhere. Vlad the Impaler, I think. I’d do a search on Google, but I don’t feel inclined to delve into the origin of vampires. I have had my fill.

No. I didn’t believe him. That was the bottom like, and he didn’t appreciate my lack of faith; so, he had to explain. Explain. Someone had a lot of explaining to do about his socialite wife on a long white table, so cold, so bare, and so dead; but he wanted to yammer on about vampires and such. And I wanted to get rid of the guy. I needed to meet with the prosecutor out in those parts, talk to the detectives, get to work on his case. But he was talking, I noticed, and explaining about vampires.

He said that whether we admit it out loud or not, we think about vampires when we’re alone on a dark night and we hear that little something we can’t identify or we see that something out of the corner of our eye. “People out there,” he claimed, waving his hand toward the window 48 stories up and overlooking the Public Square, “believe. More people than you could ever imagine.”

I watched his second chin jiggle as he spoke. Was I supposed to admit that I got scared at night when I was alone; that, after I raided the refrigerator at three in the morning, I’d race up the steps, hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, chills running up my spine? Was I supposed to admit that my 35-inch, 34-ounce, Louisville Slugger with my name burned into the barrel was ever-ready, at hand just hiding out of sight, but not out of reach, under our bed? No way was I going to do that.

I found myself looking at those pools of black in his eyes, pools of black that reminded me of black holes, drawing all matter near them into the void. A thin-lipped smile cut across his face, but the black pools remained deep and lifeless. “You are one of those who won’t admit it, but you believe. You have believed since you were a child. Your grandparents, perhaps, spoke of ancient rituals to rid their small towns of vampires. You’ve read about the exhumations and how the priests drove stakes through the hearts of the dead. You know the stories. But you see, it's simply a hereditary thing. Like hemophilia -- a sex-linked, recessive gene causes it. Very, very rare. There are about 25 of us left in the States and about 35 of us world-wide. There are only three females left in the U. S., though; and that's the problem." I thought he was crazy. This statement just added to his lunacy. But he was right. There were people out there that believed – there are people out there who still believe. There are those who have their teeth filed down by dentists into fangs and who knows what else to emulate the living dead. Geez, I could have charged admission.

He didn't look like Bela Lugosi's Dracula and, obviously, couldn't touch Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu. I think he had a problem, but only three females wasn’t the problem. He then, without waiting for me to ask him just what the problem was, explained that there was a group that wanted to breed -- to insure survival of his race. I guess that meant that 32 guys would be looking at only three females. He said that he was being forced to breed with the three females, but that he was part of a small group opposed to, how did he put it … forced arrangements.

He was talking about this breeding bullshit like I was all interested in it, when what I really wanted to know was how he was surviving in the daylight. I mean, what the hell? That was the question I had on my mind at that point. Why hadn’t he burst into flames like in that John Carpenter movie, which I thought was pretty damn cool.

I checked out the twinkling lights on the telephone. All of the lines were in use. David Goldman, one of the names in the law firm’s marquee, would be complaining about the phone system at the partners' meeting set to start at about sunset, when all good vampires awaken and leave the sanctuary of their coffins to search for sustenance. Inquiring minds wanted to know, "It's daylight," I said. "Why are you out during daylight? Aren’t you in going to burst into flames and die?” I admit that I laughed when I asked him that. Who wouldn’t? This guy was trying to be serious here about being a vampire – he was trying to convince his lawyer that he was insane, and his lawyer was laughing. I don’t think Morton understood that he had made his point and that his lawyer was, indeed, convinced.

And do you know what Frank Morton, Vampire with a capital “V,” said? He said, “That's the movies. This is real life." He raised his left eye brow.

Yeah, right. Forgot. Real life. I took a deep breath, exhaling long and slow. I looked at him. Earning the fee the guy had paid was going to be difficult enough without having to listen to this story, but I was stuck. Captive audience, so to speak. It turns out that the daylight thing was a myth, a legend. The pasty complexion I saw him wearing at that moment belied the notion that it was a myth. It looked like his skin hadn't seen the light of day -- ever. The he said that it was a genetic disorder. He claimed that – and he couldn’t make being a vampire too difficult, could he? – he went to sleep when he was tired, just like me and you; but that he didn’t get as tired as quickly as “humans,” though. He required a few hours of sleep every three or four days.

Morton was calm, more relaxed. Confession was good for the soul, I guess. Morton chuckled and smiled, saying, "I see you are getting a bit more comfortable with the idea."

The Idea. Figured. He was running his “Idea” past me to see if it could fly. The newspapers had already given him the Idea – “VAMPIRE KILLER!” was the headline of the Register -- so he'd play it out and spend a couple years in the state hospital and walk away. The Idea. I stood up and, courtesy be damned, took the few steps to stand at my bank of windows, and looked out over the quadrangle known as Public Square, my back to the man.

The Cleveland Indians were playing a day game and a group of six, seven, eight people wearing Indians’ hats scurried across Superior Avenue. One of them carried a baseball glove. Unlike Anne Rice, this was my first interview with a vampire. This was better left to the shrinks, but I was curious. The little blank on the intake form for his date of birth bothered me. So, I asked him how old he was supposed to be, pointing out to him that perhaps he had lied about his true age on his driver's license. I was still watching the street scene below me, and a bum bent over near the fountain on the northeast quadrant and picked up something, maybe a cigarette. I turned around and looked at Morton. And I had a question. Was Morton looking at my neck? He was looking at my neck. I put my hand up to the side of my neck, covering the spot he was looking at. No. Couldn't be. He couldn’t have been looking at my neck.

He didn't let on that I thought he was staring at my neck, wanting to nibble a bit – snack time or something. He told me, "I was born in 1725.” He waited for my reaction of disbelief.

He got it. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe this fucking shit,” I said in a low, steady voice. And he shook his head at me and smiled, teeth showing. The truth was often hard to face is what he said to me at that point. He told me that the myths and legends were based upon facts, and that the years had distorted the facts. And the years had distorted his mind, too. And immortal? No, a life expectancy of 700 years. They die; it just takes a little longer. His father died at the Battle of Gettysburg, he said – shot in the chest; but where do you expect a vampire to be? Lots of blood in a battle.

That part, the drinking blood part, was not a myth. "Yes, that part's true," he said, looking at me with his dull, black eyes, ignoring my sarcasm and poor attitude. "They killed her and drained her blood as a sign to me," he said, without emotion.

"I don't mean to sound stupid, Mr. Morton," I started. "But it seems to me that they went about this all wrong."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Why would they want you in some insane asylum when they just could have kidnapped your wife and held her captive while you did what they wanted you to?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said curtly. "How am I supposed know?"

"I’ll set up an appointment with a psychiatrist," I said, having had enough for one day. "He'll give you a call to give you the particulars."

"I'm not crazy," Morton said.

"But you'll do it," I added.

And that was it. Just plain crazy.

Comments

[amber]

I was upstairs, ready for bed and remembered I had to get then next installment...it was worth the extra trip down and back up the stairs...g'nite (I'll be sleeping with one eye open)