The Trouble With Hairy, page 37
part #2 of West Hollywood Vampires Series
“Why do they all have to go to the same German barber?”
Becky looked at him blankly for a second. “German? It’s owned by two lesbians from Pasadena… Oh!” She giggled as the reason for Grant’s question became clear. “It’s not German. They named it after a song from Cabaret. And…” She looked at him sternly. “They like to be called stylists. Call one of ’em a barber and she’ll take a trimming shears to something you might still want to use.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” Guy grinned.
“No.” Becky smiled, feeling like a high school girl at the prom, “We wouldn’t.”
Guy leaned back in his chair and his shirt, already open at the collar, parted even further and revealed the large bandage he’d used to cover the wound Louis had made in his throat. Becky’s eyes widened.
“What the hell did you do to yourself?”
Guy lowered his eyes, trying to seem embarrassed. “Nothing.”
“Pretty big nothing,” Becky said and pushed her chair back and stood up. “Lemme take a look.”
“Don’t bother,” Guy said. “It’s kind of silly actually. I… uh…” Becky sat and waited, patiently.
“I was kind of trimming the hair on my chest and the telephone rang.”
“You were what?” Becky looked at him in disbelief.
“Well, I was shedding the other day,” Guy explained. “When you had to keep spitting out hairs. So I thought I’d clip it.”
“I liked your chest,” Becky protested.
“Good. Because I’m not gonna try it again. I reached for the telephone and the razor slipped.”
“You cut yourself?”
Guy nodded. “Took out a big swathe of hair. I look like I’ve got a patch of mange.” He hoped he’d assuaged her curiosity so that she wouldn’t insist on inspecting the damage. If he’d manage to inject enough embarrassment into his voice, he knew she wouldn’t pursue the matter. “I’d really just like to ignore it, if that’s okay?”
Becky choked back laughter, trying not to let Grant see how amused she was by his little accident.
“Okay,” she agreed.
“And I think I caught a little cold,” he added.
“I noticed,” Becky replied. “You’re doing a better Tallulah Bankhead than Troy does.”
“Ta-who?” Guy asked, having no idea what she was talking about.
“I keep forgetting,” Becky sighed, “…what it’s like to talk to a straight guy.” Grant frowned and Becky quickly added, “Thank God.”
“Damned straight!” Guy said emphatically and, when his unconscious pun registered, the two giggled companionably.
Becky reached out and stroked his hand. “You know, this is pretty great. Being here with you, I mean.” She frowned suddenly as her fingers felt and odd roughness around her lover’s wrist.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Guy said quickly. “I spilled hot coffee on myself. It’s been a day full of accidents. I’m covered with Band-Aids.”
“Nothing too serious,” Becky asked with concern.
“Nah,” Guy said, dismissing his injuries. “This one’s the worst.”
He pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a muscular forearm, marred by the reddish welt at the wrist.
“See?” he said. “It’s almost gone already. Just the same…” he paused and did a masterful job of imitating disappointment. “I’m hoping we could skip this afternoon? It doesn’t hurt, but it looks awful.”
“I don’t mind,” Becky said, looking deeply into his eyes.
“I do,” Guy replied. “I wouldn’t want to be anything less than perfect for you. I’ll make it up to you next time. I promise.” His smile this time held more than a hint of studied lasciviousness.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Becky promised in return. She reached out and took his hand again, glancing down at the faded burn. “Funny,” she mused, almost to herself, “It’s healing weird. Where have I…?”
Guy snatched his hand away before she could get a closer look and, to distract her, leaned forward across the table, plastered his lips to hers and pushed his tongue forward, searching. A few minutes later, he broke the clinch when someone cleared his throat loudly. Looking up, Becky blushed when she realized that the waiter had been waiting, pencil poised above his pad, for at least a minute while she and Guy had been necking like teenagers.
“Uh…bread pudding,” she stammered. “With extra whisky sauce and double whipped cream.”
“The same,” Guy said and leaned back, satisfied that Becky’s mind had been drawn away from his burns and onwards toward much baser matters. “I might,” he added pointedly, “be feeling friskier by tonight. Matter of fact, I’m sure I will.”
“It’s a date then,” Becky said.
“You’re sure?” Guy asked, doubtfully. “Your friends don’t need you to unpack or anything?”
“After last night?” Becky rolled her eyes heavenward. “They can live out of boxes for all I care!”
“Why? What happened?”
Becky realized she’d potentially opened up a topic that could, quite literally, get rather hairy, and sought to cover it over.
“Chris and I had a little car accident on the way over to Louis and Shanda’s. Nothing serious,” she lied, remembering the pieces of Cabriolet that probably still littered the garage in Chris’ apartment building. “We were all kinda shaken up.”
“Who’s Shanda?” Guy was quick to ask.
“Louis’ boyfriend,” Becky replied.
“I’m confused. I thought you said he was dating some Mexican guy.”
“He is,” Becky said as their desserts arrived. She took a huge forkful of bread pudding, dunked it into the whiskey sauce and dropped a gigantic dollop of whipped cream on top for good measure before shoving it into her mouth.
“He’s a drag queen,” she mumbled, trying to use her tongue to catch the dab of whipped cream that was stuck to her lower lip. “You’ll have to meet them,” she continued, after she’d swallowed. “One of these days.”
“One of these days,” Guy repeated in a tone Becky found to be oddly intent.
He took his own, smaller bite of the pastry before asking cautiously. “They live together? In that apartment you told me about?”
“Well, they were thinking about it but they…uh…had a cooking accident yesterday. God knows when they’ll be back in the bungalow.”
Damn, Guy thought. The hunt would have to resume immediately. Then again, Louis’ lover would have to stop back at his/her apartment sometime for some forgotten item. Maybe all Guy had to do was wait.
“You won’t be upset,” he said absently, while his mind was occupied with bloody images of the death he would bring to his cousin and his catamite, “if I’m a little late tonight?”
“Just as long as you show up,” Becky said with a smile.
Grant smiled in return but somehow, for the first time, her lover’s smile failed to cause a warm feeling inside her. For the first time, she noticed how white Grant’s teeth were. And, for the first time since she’d known him, she felt a vague feeling of unease. But, an instant later, he playfully dotted her nose with a smidgen of whipped cream and her disquiet vanished as she giggled girlishly.
Had anyone asked Christopher Driscoll whether or not he dreamed, he would have denied it, never realizing that he was telling a lie. Chris’ dreamlife was, in fact, incredibly complex, with more than two centuries of images and experience upon which his subconscious could draw. By no means did he dream every night, as humans do; his subconscious was activated only when necessary. Nevertheless, dream he did. However Chris’ nature was such that, upon waking, the memory of his dreams fled; only elderly vampires like his friend Sylvia could recall what they had dreamed during the previous day’s sleep, and then, only occasionally and after extreme effort.
Chris had never understood the few vampires he had known who had gone rogue. A gentle soul by nature, when he killed, it was only by necessity; wanton bloodshed was anathema to him. A rogue vampire who preyed on humans for sport was, in Chris’ book, just another bully — with fangs.
Chris and Sylvia, during one of their several missions to “put down” a rogue near the turn of the century, had discussed their theories about the forces creating these aberrations. Sylvia believed that vampiric insanity was a function of age; Chris disagreed. There were many, he said, who were far older than those who had to be disposed of who had not gone mad. But when Sylvia had pressed him for a theory of his own, Chris had merely shrugged, indicating that there were some things that God had given neither man nor vampire the ability to fathom.
The actual cause, in most cases, had either of the two friends been both older and able to speak calmly and rationally with one of the rogues, would have been readily apparent. Most of the vampires who had gone insane had indeed been of advanced age; but they had also, almost universally, had ceased to dream. It wasn’t that images from their pasts might not rise up to haunt them in their sleep; that was common. But, effective dreaming — with the accompanying subconscious symbolism and similar trappings — was denied them.
At some point in such an extended life, the repressions of society and the vampire’s nature became overwhelming. Nature had provided a release. Vampire dreams were hundreds of times more intensely vivid than those of mortal men. Thus, the vampire who might have controlled his violent streak for centuries, when the urge became overwhelming, was able to all but experience the actual fact of letting loose, becoming enraged and committing heinous acts.
For others who maintained close ties with various humans, the pain of loss was what was assuaged. In their dreams, they could visit with distantly lost friends and loved ones and, in so doing, the grief was numbed, the loss was slowly healed and, without conscious effort, the pain was lessened. As the vampire grew older, of course, the increasing accumulation of repression and loss was responsible for his being able to remember with effort during daylight hours, but, for one as young as Chris, memory faded within seconds of his awakening each sunset.
Every once in a while, something would happen in the waking world, something that triggered a wound long scarred over. It was at these times when Nature would seek to assuage the hurt by allowing the vampire to retain, not the memory, but a memory of a memory, of a particularly vivid past experience or to experience a dream encounter as a way of helping her undead children to cope with continued existence.
Chris’ discovery of Shanda’s illness, coupled with his recent melancholia and guilt over his anger at Troy, was just such a combination of factors. Becky’s comments had only brought up Chris’ fear of losing his own loved ones — Sebastian in part, and Troy in particular. He’d overreacted, perhaps, he’d thought as he climbed into the coffin; he shouldn’t have yelled at Troy for something as stupid as making a little noise. But, Troy tended to leap before looking, a trait which had, more than once in the past, placed the blond boy in mortal danger. Chris was not particularly brave, although his nature had freed him from concern over most mundane threats. However, more than anything else, he feared losing his lover. As a defense mechanism, his tenderer emotions had shut down for a moment and anger and pique at Troy had been the result. He’d retreated to his coffin, too embarrassed to apologize, too angry at himself to risk blowing up at Troy once again, and feeling incredibly guilty. For a vampiric psyche, the combination was irresistible. And so now, tucked safely into his coffin, his breathing stopped and Chris’ subconscious kicked in.
First, it was Martha Driscoll he saw. He stood beside his mother’s bed, clutching her hand as she looked up at him, smiled and exhaled for the last time. The funeral, he recalled, had been dismal. A twilight service, mandated by his mother’s will so that her son could attend. It had rained — a scene that was an eerie precursor to the Gothic romance movies of which Troy was so fond. He stood by the grave, accompanied only by his hated Uncle and his mother’s gentleman friend and wished, for the first of many times, that his nature allowed him tears.
Decades passed in an instant and Chris’s dream self was once again in North Carolina with Sammy-Ray Calhoun, a blue-eyed Virginia lad who had been Chris’ second lover during the unpleasantries between the American North and South. Chris knelt in the Carolina dust, cradling Sammy-Ray’s head in his lap as the unconscious young man’s blood poured out of the shattered remains of his leg and cursing God for the unfairness of his loss.
He remembered the harrowing journey to Berlin with Sylvia, his meeting with his friends Hanna and Gustav, and shuddered at how close Sylvia and the Jewish couple had been to being burnt alive in a Nazi oven. He mentally traveled backwards in time, recalling the poet who had been his third lover, relived his decision to bring the young Stephen Abercrombie into his life and his shock at returning to New York in 1910, only to find that Stephen had gone to his grave the previous winter from a combination of pneumonia and an overdose of laudanum.
He recalled other friends he’d lost and, suddenly, each pair of eyes was blue, each strand of hair was wheat-yellow, each face was Troy’s. Chris screamed silently as, time and time again, Troy was taken from him by disease, accident or violence. His dream self shed the tears that Chris could never shed while awake until finally, he saw Troy standing before him once again, alive, smiling that particular Troy-ish smile, love shining from his eyes.
As Chris moved forward to take Troy into his arms, the melancholia vanished. Isn’t it odd, he thought as the dreaming paused, that of all the faces you saw, not one was Sebastian’s? Chris’ subconscious was satisfied; the dreams ceased. Had anyone been gazing on his sleeping form, the only sign of life they would have seen would have been a small, relieved smile playing about the corners of his lips.
“Sugar, you are out of your mind!”
Shanda was reclining on one of Burman’s sofas wearing a lacy white negligee and a pale peach satin dressing gown. Burman had insisted that Carlos take the day off to recover from the attack the night before, assuring him that she and Louis could cope with the two hundred some odds and ends that needed to be cleared up prior to the upcoming weekend’s parade. He had used the time wisely, donning his Shanda persona and had spent most of the morning giving himself a facial and experimenting with various shades of nail polish and lipstick.
“I’ve been attacked by that thing once. No matter what Jacqueline Suzanne says, once is quite enough.” At the moment, Shanda was examining four or five boxes of Clairol, wondering if, perhaps, blonds really did have more fun and, if so, which shade would suit her best.
“I’ll be there to protect you,” Troy protested and then tried a different tact. “Anyway, we’re not doing it for us, we’re doing it for Louis.”
Shanda looked at him, knowingly. “Just because you’re having marital problems is no reason for my husband to end up a widower.” She picked up one of the boxes of hair color and eyed it critically. “Ash blond is definitely out, don’t you think?” She sighed with regret and set the box aside. “I don’t have the skin tone for it.”
Troy sighed in turn, not quite ready to admit defeat, but getting closer by the minute. He’d arrived at Burman’s an hour earlier and, with irrefutable Troy-esque logic, had set in to explaining why he and Shanda should be the ones to capture Guy Chartreuse, show up the others and modestly accept the accolades of victory that were certain to follow. Shanda, however, had not been as easy to convince as Troy had at first thought.
When Troy presented his plan, she’d immediately realized that something deeper was behind it and had wormed out of him the details of his problems with Chris, using the strategism of lending a sympathetic ear and making commiserating comments and muted exclamations of empathy, a technique which was, in Troy’s opinion, totally unfair. Drag queens, at least in Troy’s experience, were not supposed to be so astute, nor so subtle.
“It’ll be totally safe,” Troy promised. “I’m not so easy to kill.”
“But I am,” Shanda replied. She looked at Troy, envy in her eyes. “You have such lovely hair,” she said wistfully. “What color is that, anyway?”
“My own,” Troy snapped. He was losing patience. “I’m telling you,” he insisted, “it’s the only way. Will you stop worrying about your coif, Mary, and listen to me!”
Shanda put aside all thought of Harlow Gold and considered Troy’s plan, silently, for a moment. It had holes of course, but it was offbeat enough and so totally without artifice that it just might work. Put simply, Shanda was to return to her apartment, as if nothing had happened, to act as a decoy. Troy would also be in attendance, hiding out, ready to leap from his cache spot, figurative lance in hand, to pounce on and defeat any unlucky werewolf who tried to attack her.
The decoy portion of the plan, much to Shanda’s dismay, seemed workable. The first run in the stocking cropped up when they got to the point where Troy was to play the Lone Ranger. Looking at Troy, dressed in his habitual cut offs with a sleeveless T-shirt, torn into strips and threaded through multi-colored beads from nipple level down, Shanda was inclined to believe that, the only way Troy could possibly defeat Guy Chartreuse, was if the poor werewolf would drop dead of a heart attack from the fashion risk Troy had taken.
Nevertheless, the plan had a certain charm, not the least of which was that, if they were successful, Louis, relieved that Shanda had been so bravely willing to sacrifice herself on his behalf, would simply have to propose. Shanda had marriage on the mind; she was certainly not going to lose sight of that. And, though Louis had been suitably distraught last evening, her ring finger, despite a multitude of hints, still itched.
“All right,” she said decisively, “I’ll do it. But only under two conditions,” she added as Troy’s face lit up with eager anticipation.
“What’s that?” he asked cautiously.
“First, we wait until tomorrow night.”
“Why?”
“They’re coming over tomorrow to replace the telephone. If we get into trouble, we’re calling for help. No arguments…”
