Need (6 page)

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Authors: Todd Gregory

BOOK: Need
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He'd been right, of course. But it wasn't that easy to shake off what you'd always been raised to believe.
Then again, I'd also been raised to believe my sexuality was an abomination and I was going to spend eternity burning in hell.
Bourbon Street was crowded, as it always was on a Friday night when there was a convention or two in the city. When I reached the corner, I stood there for a moment, taking it all in. The people were of all shapes, ages, races, and sizes. Their smells, the thumping of their hearts, the buzzing of many voices talking at the same time, the clip-clop of horses carrying mounted policemen, and the astonishing beauty of their humanity overwhelmed me a bit, as it always did whenever I encountered a crowd. I allowed myself to get lost in the overstimulation of my senses for a moment, closing my eyes and letting it all wash over me—smell, sound, and taste.
My reverie was interrupted when someone brushed against me, muttering, “Sorry.”
I opened my eyes, smiling as the woman weaved her way up Bourbon Street. I forced my mind to start filtering the overload to something manageable. The massive Bourbon Orleans Hotel across the street had the doors to the two side-by-side bars on its first floor wide open. The one on the left, Napoleon's Itch, was a gay bar and was blasting diva disco music. There was a Lucky Dog vendor on the opposite corner from me, in his red-and-white-striped shirt. He was handing a pair of foot-longs covered in chili, cheese, and onions to a couple of sexy straight boys in their midtwenties who looked like they'd been drinking for a while. A gaggle of young women wearing tight T-shirts and denim miniskirts checked them out as they walked past, carrying forty-eight-ounce Styrofoam cups full of daiquiris. “Hotel California” was blaring from a bar to my right, a few doors down from the corner. I dodged around the dancing hand grenade and could see the couple who'd passed me getting new drinks inside. I smiled and nodded at the hand grenade but didn't go inside. A loud whoop across the street made me look in that direction, and I saw a group of college-aged boys standing in a circle while one of them chugged a beer in the center.
He was wearing a Beta Kappa shirt, and I froze for a moment.
There are Beta Kappa chapters at LSU and Tulane and Southern Mississippi,
I reminded myself.
They don't have to be from Ole Miss, and besides, you don't recognize any of them.
I stood behind a man wearing a sandwich board advertising BIG ASS BEERS $4 while I searched their faces.
No, I didn't recognize any of them.
That would have sucked,
I thought as I started walking toward the corner at St. Ann and Bourbon.
Bad enough I already ran into Jared today—and look how that turned out.
But I pushed that negative thought out of my head. No sense in worrying about what to do with him until I'd fed and was back at 100 percent.
“The gay bars are all down around the corner at St. Ann and Bourbon,” Jared had told me at that Mardi Gras a million years ago. “You can't miss them—they have rainbow flags and everything. That's where you need to go.”
Jared had
always
been a good friend to me. I felt a lump forming in my throat but took a deep breath and forced it back down.
Jared and I had been pledge brothers. We'd met during Rush Week. It was hard not to notice him—he was so damned good-looking; you had to be blind not to notice him. One of the brothers—I think it was Clark Newton, but I'm not sure—was explaining to me what a “great idea it was for pledges to go ahead and move into the house” when I saw Jared standing on the other side of yard. He was wearing a blue suit with a yellow shirt and a red tie, and was smiling at the two brothers talking to him. He had a name tag outlined in red stuck to his jacket, which meant he was a prospective, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. Clark or whoever it was ceased to exist in that moment, and all I could do was stare at this gorgeous young man.
I'd had a crush on Bobby Stovall since the sixth grade, but Bobby was not in this guy's class.
Not even remotely.
Somehow, I managed to get up my nerve to introduce myself to him, and he was so nice and funny. We ended up spending pretty much the whole night hanging out. The next night, we met in front of the Beta Kappa house. We went around to some of the other houses, but neither one of us cared for any of the others. Within two hours, we were back at Beta Kappa, and the next night we both took bids.
We moved into the house over the weekend. I was really glad to get out of the dorms—my roommate was overweight and smelled bad, apparently allergic to soap, water, and deodorant.
My parents hadn't approved of my joining Beta Kappa—they didn't approve of anything that remotely sounded fun. I was incredibly naïve when I went to Ole Miss. All I really knew of life, of the world, was my little corner of redneck Fayette County in northeastern Alabama, where everyone's lives revolved around church. We were Church of Christ (pronounced as one word:
churchachrist
), which took great pride in being the only denomination of Christianity that worshipped Christ correctly. Anyone who worshipped differently was a blasphemous sinner with a one-way ticket straight to hell. The Church hated everyone who wasn't white and straight—and women must be subservient.
Growing up in that environment made me feel like I'd already died and gone straight to hell.
I'd always been more interested in boys than girls—and was convinced I was the only one in Fayette County (if not the world) who felt that way.
I'd chosen Ole Miss instead of the University of Alabama as a means of escaping Fayette County. University of Alabama was in Tuscaloosa, a mere forty-minute drive from my parents' house, and I thought that was way too close for comfort. Ole Miss was far enough away that they couldn't just drop in unannounced or intrude on my life, but not so far away they couldn't be talked into letting me go there—and at that, it was a long, hard-fought battle.
I was confident once I'd gotten away from them I'd be able to break away from the life they'd already mapped out for me. I didn't want to go back to Fayette County and teach at the same rural high school where so many of my relatives also taught. I didn't want to get married and have sons to carry on the family name and tradition of football, hunting, and Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior.
But they tried to hold on. My father called the preacher at the Oxford Church of Christ, to let him know I was coming there, and the Sunday after Rush, that's where I was on Sunday morning, being introduced to other college-age kids and being pressured into joining a college group called Rebels for Christ.
The umbilical cord from Fayette County apparently could stretch all the way to Oxford, Mississippi.
Jared was from New Orleans—a city my parents always dismissed as a city of sin, and that made him even more exotic to me. He understood my need to never go back there, to get away from my family. He gently made it clear to me he was straight and not interested in guys, but in such a way that I knew I could confide in him when I was ready. It was our sophomore year when I felt comfortable enough to tell him the truth. He understood; it didn't make a difference to him, and he helped me keep it hidden from our fraternity brothers.
The closeted existence I was living at Ole Miss was making me miserable. I hated going to visit my family. I hated summer vacations. I hated sitting in the house listening to my parents rant against the “queers” and the “godless liberals” and all the other people of different racial backgrounds who were dragging the country into the toilet.
I didn't understand how my parents, who were so kind and loving and giving, could be so filled with hate at the same time, thinking nothing of making racist jokes, using racist epithets. I didn't understand how they reconciled what Jesus actually said in the New Testament with the vile, repressive hatred preached twice every Sunday at church. I was tired of dodging their questions about girls, of trying to get out of dates with daughters of other people at church. I was tired of the hideous boredom of life in rural Fayette County, where the highlight of every week was sitting in the heat and humidity on the banks of the Sipsey River, swatting mosquitoes while trying to catch catfish.
And the day of reckoning was coming—graduation was a date that seemed to grow closer all the time with an astonishing speed. I was going to have to tell them I wasn't coming back there. Maybe I wouldn't have to tell them about being gay—if I moved far enough away.
The thought had certainly crossed my mind any number of times.
Maybe becoming a vampire and faking my own death was an extreme way of escaping my old life, but I wouldn't go back for anything.
The great irony, of course, was I had simply traded one closet for another.
No one can ever know you're a vampire,
Jean-Paul had said,
because humans aren't evolved enough to coexist with beings they can only comprehend through the eyes of fear. They will
kill
you.
Being a vampire was no different, really, than being gay in rural Alabama.
One fear traded for another.
I shook my head when I reached the corner of Bourbon and St. Ann, trying to push all the memories away. I hadn't thought about any of this shit in years—I'd embraced being a vampire wholeheartedly. This Jared thing was making me remember all of this shit, I told myself. I leaned against the building on the corner and closed my eyes as another wave of nausea passed through me. I needed to feed and soon.
“How you doing, baby? Everything all right?”
I opened my eyes and forced myself to smile at the man standing there, friendly concern all over his face. He wasn't unattractive. He was older, overweight, and was wearing a flannel shirt tucked into a pair of Wranglers. He was holding a big plastic cup full of beer, and a couple of men around the same age wearing the same clothes were standing a few feet behind him. One had a look of impatience written all over his face.
“I'm fine, thank you.” I nodded at him, willing him to go away.
“All right.” He backed away, the friendly smile never wavering. “You might want to not have another drink for a while.”
“I think you're right.” I nodded. “I thank you.”
He nodded back at me before rejoining his friends. I watched them as they walked across St. Ann to the other side and disappeared around the corner onto Bourbon Street.
You don't know what a close call you just had, buddy,
I thought as a beautiful young man walked past me and smiled. He had that thick bluish black hair I'd come to recognize as Cajun—well, French really. (Jean-Paul's hair was that same thickness and color.) He was wearing a tight red collared pullover shirt tucked into a tight pair of jeans—he had a beautifully shaped ass. He crossed Bourbon Street and went into Oz.
It was so much easier to feed inside the gay bars than in their straight counterparts on the eight blocks between St. Ann and Canal in the other direction. The gay bars were never well lit, favoring red or black lights. The dance floors always had flashing strobe lights that distorted everything. There was darkness everywhere inside the gay bars—in corners, bathrooms, and stairwells. And gay men were remarkably easy to lure into those dark patches. Gay men were remarkably trusting—willing to leave a bar with a total stranger whose name they didn't know and go to a place without telling anyone.
Often, they themselves didn't know where they were going with the total stranger.
This made them remarkably easy prey for vampires. Jean-Paul and the others had the ability to hypnotize humans with their eyes and the sheer force of their will. According to them, I was about fifty years away from developing that skill myself.
I was, as they always reminded me, just a
baby
vampire.
But that was fine, really. As long as I could find a dark gay bar, I could always find someone interested enough in my face and body to slip into an unlit corner with and feed from.
I laughed to myself. It was always about having to wait, wasn't it? It was the story of my entire life. I'd waited and waited to escape from Alabama and waited to graduate from Ole Miss, and then I became a vampire—the irony being that as a vampire, I still had to wait, but now decades rather than years.
The wave of nausea passed, and I walked over to the curb, looking across to the Bourbon Pub. The downstairs shutters were already closed, the velvet rope set out for people to queue up and pay their cover charge. A thickly muscled man stood in the open doorway to Oz directly across the street, his arms folded and sunglasses hiding his eyes. Behind him, I could see the defined legs and Day-Glo bikini of a stripper dancing on the bar.
What the hell,
I thought, making up my mind. I crossed over to Oz, paid my five dollars, and got a hand stamp.
It was still early in the evening for Oz to be crowded, but there was a decent amount of men inside. There were two strippers on the bar—the one I'd seen from across the street in the bright, glowing yellow bikini and one on the opposite side wearing white. The stripper in yellow had shoulder-length blond hair and a lean, smooth body, and he was kneeling, letting someone touch his smooth chest. He smiled at me over the man's head, and his left eye closed in a wink. I walked around to the back side of the bar and caught my breath.

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