Blood Lite II: Overbite (29 page)

One defiant snake slithers out in front of the rest. “I did,” comes the reply in a distinctly feminine voice. “I’m sick of the vulgar display my brothers make of themselves whenever they see a cute bit of tail.” She pokes Hepzibah’s hand in disgust. “It’s degrading, and embarrassing—and it gives us a bad name.”

“Like biting and killing people haven’t contributed to that bad reputation,” observes Basil wryly, the moon having slid behind an incoming storm cloud.

“It’s you!”
comes an awestruck voice and we all turn to see who belongs to it—and, believe me, turning away from Hepzibah even for a second takes a major effort of will. And it so happens that the voice belongs to Goldberg, who is staring wide-eyed at her. “After all these years, it’s Salome!”

She gives him a good hard look. “I know you,” she says. “You’re that guy who hooted and hollered louder than anyone when I did my dance.”

Goldberg nods his head. He tries to say something, but his voice starts to break.

“Two thousand years and your throat is
still
hoarse from all that screaming?” she says with a smile. “I consider that a high compliment.”

“You’re as beautiful as ever,” he manages to say.

Which is an understatement, because she is even more beautiful now than when she entered the shop, but I decide not to contradict him, and besides my throat is so dry I probably can’t get the words out.

Just then the Grim Reaper emerges from the back room.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Goldberg. “I won’t let him touch you.”

The Reaper takes one look at her, grabs his stomach, bellows “
You’re
here, too? I’m gonna be sick again!” and runs back to the bathroom.

“‘Too?’” she repeats, looking at Goldberg with renewed interest. “You’re immortal?”

He nods.

“Well,” she says, “we have a lot to talk about.”

“You’ll actually talk to me?” said Goldberg, barely able to contain his excitement.

“Talking’s not my long and strong suit,” she replies in sultry tones. “But we can
start
by talking.”

Basil has to repress another howl. Harold’s lady snake looks shocked. Morton tenses, which is harder than you think for a skeleton. Otis merely salivates.

“So do I call you Hepzibah or Salome?” asks Goldberg.

She shrugs, and Basil and Harold almost faint before the last of the shrug fades from view. “Or Eve, or Lilith, or Helen, or . . .”

She goes on and on, and I begin to see that this is not only the most beautiful and exotic creature in the history of this and every other universe, but also a well-named one (or at least a multiple-named one). Not only that, but she’s got a real head on her shoulders or she couldn’t remember more than half those names.

“It was Salome I fell in love with, so it is Salome I shall call you,” says Goldberg. He continues staring at her, his mouth open (which is not always a good idea in New York City, as you never know what might fly into it). “What are you doing here?”

“Telling this wolf to shut up and let me sleep,” she answers.

“I mean, in New York. I have been searching for you for two millennia, and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten.”

“Really?” she says. “I’m flattered.” Which is wrong, because take my word for it, she isn’t anything with the word “flat” in it. “Who are you?” she continues.

“I am a man who has been cursed with wanderlust,” answers Goldberg. “A man who has loved you for two thousand years and has forsaken all other women.”

“
All
other women?” says Salome, clearly pleased.

“Yes,” he says. “Just as I know you have kept yourself pure for me.”

“Well, within reason,” she says with another shrug.

“I am doomed to wander the world,” says Goldberg. “Please tell me I no longer have to do so alone.”

“To tell the truth, I
am
getting tired of New York,” she says. “Sure, I’ll come away with you.”

“I’ll wait here and count the minutes while you pack your clothes,” says Goldberg.

“You’ve counted enough minutes,” says Salome. “Besides, who needs clothes?”

Basil starts whining piteously.

“Then shall we leave right now?” asks Goldberg.

“Why not?” she says, linking her arm in his. “Where shall we go?”

“The Riviera is beautiful this time of year,” says Goldberg.

She shakes her head. “I was just there last summer. How about Tahiti?”

“It’s not what it was back in Gauguin’s time,” he answers as they walk slowly toward the door. “How about a fling at the gaming tables in Monaco?”

“Been there, done that,” she replies. “Perhaps dinner at Maxim’s after we tour the Louvre?”

They are still trying to find a place they haven’t both been, or at least aren’t tired of, when they walk into the night and out of sight.

“Are they gone?” rasps the Grim Reaper from the back room.

“Yeah, you can come out now,” I say.

He comes back into the shop and glares at me. “You got any more surprises for me, an honest hardworking guy who’s never done you any harm . . .
yet
,” he concludes meaningfully.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I say. “You want a trim while you’re here?”

He shakes his head and walks to the door. “This has been a very upsetting experience. I’ve got to go out and find some stale air to breathe.”

As he leaves, Harvey the yeti, his shaggy fur dripping ice water, brushes by him on the way in. The Reaper mutters something, and Harvey yells after him, “Yeah? Well, I’m not half as abominable as a guy who takes our starting quarterback three weeks before the playoffs!”

“Hi, Harvey,” I say as Basil gets up and the yeti takes his place. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve come for a blow-dry,” he says in his deep gravelly voice. “I’ve got a hot date with a fire nymph in a couple of hours.” He looks around the room. “I’ve never dated one before. Anyone got any tips?”

A moment later Otis is telling him how to find a fire nymph’s jugular, Basil is explaining which cut of her goes best with mashed potatoes and glazed carrots, and Harold’s snakes want to know why a fire nymph would prefer a yeti to them.

It’s just another night at The Close Shave.

Shaggy Dog Story

STEVE RASNIC TEM

You probably remember that poem from one of those old Lon Chaney Jr. movie classics. The gypsy woman, her face looking like that road map your dad wadded up after one too many wrong turns and shoved into the rear of the glove compartment with last month’s missing Beer of the Month Club bill, fetchingly played by the great Maria Ouspenskaya, her eyes as luminous as two cheese crackers on a hot radiator, tells the somewhat put-out Chaney what he can expect every time the moon is full and the Wolfbane blooms.

Not exactly what you want to hear after a homeless man wearing a floral patterned scarf on his head just took a bite out of you, but the threat of six rounds of rabies shots over a four-week period makes for exciting cinema.

The poem invites numerous questions, such as what the hell is wolfbane and can I get some kind of spray for it? And what if the moon is only semibright? Hairy palms and a mullet?

You should hear my Uncle Verge deliver those lines. Slow, sonorous, and full of angst—back in the sixties they got him laid. Now they get him an extra dose of meds at the nursing home.

Uncle Verge’s shtick was always family history and legacy. He made that poem sound like some legendary summation of our particular family curse, instead of what the screenwriter threw together when he needed a poetic moment. Verge fed that line to hairless types in a cynical bid for some pity grooming. And he got it, until they got tired of flossing the hair out of their teeth.

Yes, indeed, we’re a hairy bunch. The family orders its hair spray by the skid. Family reunions resemble a Civil War reenactment performed by beavers. My father’s father used to lose his house keys in his belly hair, along with the remains of three Jehovah’s Witnesses who’d knocked on his door before breakfast. And my Aunt Elona, that was one hairy woman. Even her unibrow had a unibrow.

Uncle Verge wasn’t the first one in the clan to use the image of the tormented, misunderstood werewolf to his own advantage. You should have heard my mother when I told her I was dating a dog walker from Yonkers.

See, that’s the way it’s always been in our family. We act like we’re above it all, like the normal rules don’t apply to us. Like it’s normal to offer a mail carrier as a door prize. But then we’re not above pulling that “poor wolfy” crap if we think it’s to our advantage, lie on our backs and beg to have our tummies rubbed (or as Uncle Verge used to call it, “stroking the pelt”).

It’s embarrassing. It’s a wonder I’m as normal as I am. Just don’t say “fetch” in my presence if you don’t want to see me pee myself.

And if a person doesn’t look like the rest of the family, if he’s not as hairy as a bar of soap in a bearded ladies’ spa, well, he’s just an embarrassment. He’s just the “hairless rat,” the “naked coconut,” the “depilitated Cossack.” My cousins called me all of those names, and in a confusing attempt to belittle me even further, the “Jersey urinal.”

Yes, I was born without the family curse, or as my mother so delicately puts it, “an overly generous beard.”

I tried to hide it. In grade school I’d shave the family cat, sprinkle the clippings all over myself and tell everybody I had allergies. By the time I was fifteen, when my peers were all jumping into kiddy pools full of mousse and styling gel, I was hanging around barbershops with a vacuum cleaner and a bucket full of contact cement. After a while I decided to go right to the source and became the family’s in-house hair stylist, creating the most elaborate pompadours this side of Paris. (Well, Paris, Texas, at least.) But my mother recognized that something was wrong. Not once had I borrowed her industrial Bic Lady Shaver without asking.

“What will your father say?” That was all she was worried about.

“He’ll say ‘pass me the remote, it’s time for
Jeopardy!
” I replied, whereupon she slapped me across the face with a carp.

You might think my escape from the family malady would be a cause for celebration, relief that at least one of ours wouldn’t have to spend his twilight years lugging around five gallon jugs of pet wee cleaner, but not
my
family. You’d think I’d deliberately piddled in the gene pool.

I tried to reason with them. I attempted to appeal to my father’s thrifty side by explaining just how much I’d be saving in hair accessories and chew toys alone. It was a waste of time. It’s like taking a busload of monkeys to a Mahler symphony—they might sit and listen, but they’d much rather be picking their noses.

My father appeared to consider what I’d just said, then explained how they’d all been very proud of their hair, they had lots of it, thank you very much, and they had no intention of braiding it and trying to pass as a bunch of goddamned Rastafarians. I thanked him for his wisdom and shoved a rawhide chew into his mouth.

It’s important to understand that although I did not have the family curse per se, I’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in family traditions, interests, and attitudes. I enjoyed a nice plate of raw meat, for example, with Texas toast and a modest side salad. I liked chasing things: cars, people, big shiny balls. I liked crouching naked in the park and howling at the moon—you meet some of the most interesting people that way. I was thoroughly werewolf, sans hair, sans dates on Fridays or any other night. I wanted to fit in.

So it is a fortunate thing that a clan as old as ours has developed rituals, procedures for handling just this sort of occurrence. Although in our family this hirsute transformation is hereditary, a perhaps more familiar situation involves some poor clueless innocent such as a computer programmer or a tax accountant bitten by a full-fledged member of the Order of the Tooth and Claw (a kind of werewolf version of the Kiwanis Club).

An essential aspect of this, of course, is that the bite be survivable, which is far less likely if the werewolf hasn’t yet done his grocery shopping. Youthful passion
can
be a factor, which is why the mothers in local towns often tell their sons to avoid heavy petting if the girl has more chest hair than they do.

So when a member of our family is born without the requisite fur suit in his or her repertoire he or she must endure a bite from a more mature member of the household. Adolescent members of the family have referred to this practice, quaintly, as “getting geezer gobbled.”

The desired result is a lycanthrope, the wolf who walks on two legs, when affordable public transportation isn’t available. But that “ideal” result doesn’t always occur, which highlights a particular misapprehension about our condition which has always bugged me, and which I’m grateful now to have the opportunity to correct.

A common misunderstanding is that we are wolves. We are
not
wolves. Have you ever seen a wolf with dentures (I mean
their own
)? We look like wolves. Sometimes we act like wolves. We are “as if” wolves. The ontological “as if,” as in “I may look as if I’m a wolf but I know I am not one. At least I’m pretty sure. What does ontological mean again?” “Wolf” is simply a metaphor, like “gainfully employed.”

Think about it this way. Is a starfish a star? I’m not sure it’s even a fish. I’ve never been able to find its mouth—have you? Maybe that’s a bad example. How about the lowly foxglove, being neither fox nor glove, and certainly not a fox’s glove, which would make it very hard to eat fish, one of its favorites, after tiramisu, but what would really be hard, for anyone, really, would be to eat a starfish, and why would one even want to? I was never very good at biology. My high school biology teacher said my scores barely qualified for sentience.

Of course, I understand such distinctions are of little more than academic interest when one of my relatives is busily retooling your digestive system.

But we’re expected to look like wolves. That’s a given. And I didn’t even have a five o’clock shadow. Mine had barely made it past one fifteen. So I had to be bitten. “And,” my father told me, “you have to pretend to like it. Your Grandpa Jules is going to provide the service. It’s an
honor
. He doesn’t do this kind of thing much anymore.”

Grandpa Jules? I’d always avoided him. He smelled like a cheese shop with a tanning salon in the back.

The day of the ceremony I got up early and started practicing my “transformation face.” I knew that a dignified transformation face was probably beyond my reach—I just wanted to avoid looking ridiculous. You can imagine the difficulty. Not to be too indelicate, but the experience of morphing from human into wolf shape is a bit like evacuating your bowels, having an orgasm, regurgitating a week’s worth of dinners, and giving birth to a baby all at the same time. It makes for a full evening. If the wrong people witness your transformation your social calendar empties out rather rapidly.

I spent most of the morning in front of the mirror, but I’m afraid the best I achieved was the classic “My groin just exploded!” look.

How do you dress for such an event? And will there be refreshments? You don’t want to wear anything too nice, because it’s going to be destroyed. Something loose-fitting is most often recommended, but my cousin Vinny likes to wear tight clothes for the occasion—he claims the resulting explosion of material impresses the ladies. Clothing is a werewolf’s number one expense, after breath mints, with a new outfit required every full moon. I finally settled on sweats and an “I’d Rather Be Golfing” T-shirt.

The attendance was somewhat disappointing: my mother, my father, cousin Vinny and Uncle Verge, Aunt Elona, my little brother Lonnie, two old ladies from the bar mitzvah next door complaining they’d run out of cream cheese, and Grandpa Jules, who fell fast asleep as soon as he reached his chair. I wasn’t that surprised by all the empty seats, actually—the clan may claim to treat everybody equally whatever their origin, but those of us who have been bitten will always have that stench of the victim about our person and the propensity to dive under furniture when anyone cracks a smile.

The ceremony began with a speech from my father explaining why we were all there, his attempt to reinterpret my follicle deficiency as the beginnings of a noble quest rather effective until he made that strange connection between furry bedroom slippers and codfish. My mother was up next for five minutes of hand-wringing and an elaborate confession involving a bald lingerie salesman consumed during the second month of pregnancy.

Finally Uncle Verge got up to introduce Grandpa Jules. He stood at the front of the hall, both paws firmly gripping the lectern, leaned forward and looked at each one of us, his eyebrows resplendent and fully unfurled. “Grandpa Jules was a giant among our kind. He was not ashamed of who he was, although from time to time just a little self-awareness might have been nice. But if not for him, none of us would be here today. We could have been in New Jersey instead, with all that humidity! But his like will never be seen again, certainly not his
exact
like, that would be weird, because he never told us he had a twin, or even a brother, which might have been nice, having an uncle to take you to the baseball game, and on to the petting zoo for dinner.”

Grandpa Jules sat in the front row grinning ear to ear, literally. Finally Uncle Verge noticed this, obviously realized he’d mistakenly been delivering the man’s eulogy, pretended to choke on a hairball, and was dragged from the building.

Grandpa sighed loudly, shook his head, and climbed to his feet. Turning around at the front of the room he motioned me forward. “Come along, Lowell. Let’s get this over with.”

I had been nervous enough about the ceremony in general, but had tried not to think about the actual biting. I had never been a great fan of teeth, had forsworn zippers in favor of buttons, and avoided pianos whenever possible. Trembling uncontrollably, I came forward, stopped a few feet away, and, in a final desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable, I brushed up my scant bit of hair and imagined myself a giant onion.

Grandpa Jules saw through my clever plan and shuffled forward. Suddenly he was possessed by a violent seizure, began to hack and spit, and after a disconcerting interval of moonwalking, started removing his clothes and folding them neatly on the floor beside him. Stretching out his full four-and-a-half feet of white hairy nakedness he began to strut youthfully in my direction. As one the audience turned their faces away, some melodramatically covering their heads with whatever was available, including skirts, chair cushions, and trash cans.

With each step Grandpa Jules appeared to spasm out a different body part, jaw and ears and elbows, hands and feet elongating and twisting, pulsing and warping. It was all blurry and much too disturbing to focus on, but I swear there was a moment he appeared all haunches, hackles, and hemorrhoids.

At the end he not so much leapt as collapsed at my feet and began to gnaw on my left tennis shoe.

“Grandpa, maybe a little higher,” I said.

He twisted his head up furiously, eyeing me with those huge, bloodshot peepers, his mouth full of chewed tennis shoe rubber, Odor Eater insert and Hello Kitty logo. He spat these out and, I noticed, about half his teeth.