I recently found a treasure chest of online videos… a stockpile of episodes of the old seventies soap opera… Dark Shadows. You know the one, featuring our favorite fanged fiend, Barnabas Collins… a sexy New England vampire. Watching a few of those episodes threw me right back to my early adolescence. Not that I ever spent much time watching Dark Shadows… that was a special treat that only seemed to happen while visiting my older cousin, Lulu, who was a die-hard fan (pun intended).
But what it brought to mind were all the Saturday afternoons spent down at the Garden Theater, watching double feature vampire movies. All the kids from school seemed to have the same idea. Our parents probably thought it was a good idea, too… getting rid of the kids for four hours at a crack for really cheap… I think it cost 30 or 50 cents to get in back then. My, how times have changed.
My memories of those Saturday afternoons are somewhat fuzzy, but I can recall with crystal clarity the taste of the many root beer barrels and lemon drops that I consumed in that old-fashioned theater… not to mention boxes of hot buttered popcorn.. with real butter, no fake coconut oil that the concessions staff have to tell you each time you ask for butter that the coconut oil tastes just like butter. If it really did, they wouldn’t have to keep telling you that. I guess, these days, they figure, if they just say it often enough, we’ll eventually believe that it’s true. After all, it works for George Bush.
But I digress. They were always vampire movies. Two vampire movies, back to back, week after week, and we never got tired of them. My favorite one was called, “The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth are in My Neck.” When I saw that movie, I think that was the first time that I ever saw garlic that didn’t come out of a jar. The villagers were wearing big strings of garlic bulbs around their necks to ward off attacks from vampires. Since then, I’ve always enjoyed buying garlic by the bulb and chopping my own for stir fries.
I couldn’t really tell you what the appeal of all those vampire movies was, but I must admit, they got into my blood, and I ended up reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Quite the gothic horror, that. Imagine how surprised my young mind was to discover that it was a love story of sorts. Imagine trying to make sense out of that at the tender age of thirteen or fourteen… right about the time when blood takes on a huge significance in the lives of young girls who are getting their first period. Finding a man who likes to drink our blood would eventually take on a whole nuther significance, but at that time, we just saw it as a vague hope of getting out of gym class.
Fast forward a few decades, to where I had left my interest in vampires far behind, or so I thought. Then, I started dating a man, an artist who seduced me by showing me my own reflection (I guess he was trying to avoid having me look for his). Yes, he seduced me by showing me my own reflection, by liking me and admiring me for all the things that I had always wanted someone to recognize in me… the things that I had always wanted someone to love about me… by seeing who I really was, and celebrating that.
And no sooner had he succeeded in seducing me, and in winning my heart...than he took that heart and ripped it out of my chest and left me for dead. He shattered the mirror that he had created. Now, everything that had reflected back at me so beautifully was just so many shards of glass floating in a bucket of muck. The things that he had so recently admired in me became the objects of his ridicule and scorn. He reveled in his own cruelty.
But this man had many mirrors at his disposal, and he hurried to replace the old one so that I would not be left with nothing to remind me of him. The new mirror that he held up to me was cloudy and spattered with mud and the shredded bits of my own heart, still palpitating in sorrow for the loss of my beloved illusions. His supply of crystal clear mirrors seemed to be infinite, but I knew that I would never gaze upon my own reflection in one of those mirrors again. Those were reserved for the new women in his life.
And each time he unveiled one of those crystal clear mirrors to a new lover, he secretly wrote her name on its clouded and vile counterpart. I saw him do this many times from my new vantage point of “friend,” until one day, when I relayed my tale to a friend, she gasped and said,
“He’s a vampire.”
I smiled my confusion.
“Oh, yes,” she continued. “He’s a vampire, alright. But he’s not after your blood. He’s after your energy. He can’t live without it. And when he’s drained you of all your energy, he goes and looks for it somewhere else. This man will never be satisfied with anyone.”
Well, I have to admit, it struck a chord. Hadn’t I stopped eating for two weeks after he shattered my beloved mirror? Hadn’t I almost died as a result? And after I revived myself, no thanks to him, didn’t he keep chipping away at me until I no longer knew who I was or believed that anyone could ever see the things in me that he had seen… the things I used to be able to see in myself before he ever came into my life?
I became curious about vampires all over again. I wanted to understand the correlation between the mythic, bloodsucking creatures that inhabited the fog and gloom of misty mountain villages in Transylvania and the real-life, energy sucking creatures that inhabit the fog of my self-image in the misty nether regions of my consciousness. I still had that same copy of Dracula that I had read so many years ago. I read it again, and I began to understand.
I had been surrounding myself for years with people who drained my energy. It was no wonder I was always depressed… always running on empty. I had nowhere to go and get recharged, and if I did, I worried that I might be doing the same to others… Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, right?
I can’t even begin to say that I’ve eliminated the energy vampires from my life (although I did give the boot to that artist about 8 years ago), but at least now I’m able to recognize them sooner rather than later. But perhaps not soon enough. After all, since coming to Prague, I’ve met and lived with so many different people… the people who have peopled the pages of this blog. Some of them have been pirates, and some of them have been vampires. You know who the pirates are… they have pirate names… Pegleg, Sinbad, Jolly, Ms. L, Cabin Boy (not quite up to pirate rank, but in the same general category), and Molly Bly. You can probably guess who the vampires are… the Transformer, and the Fugitive. But they didn’t get vampire names, because I didn’t recognize them as such until just now. I really should carry a mirror around with me at all times.
There’s yet another character, who has played a double role in my life… half pirate, half vampire. But that’s the subject of the next post…
