Son of Dracula (From the Book of Autumn)

I was the pale boy with spindly arms, the undernourished bookworm dressed in baggy hand-me-downs (plaid shirts my father wouldn’t wear, cut down and sewn by my mother), old shoes in tatters, squinting all day for need of glasses that no one would buy.

At nine, at last, they told me I could cross the line to the adult part of the library, those dusty classic shelves which no one ever seemed to touch.

I raced down the aisles, to G for Goethe and Faust.

I reached up for Frankenstein at Shelley, Mary (not pausing at Percy Bysshe!). 

And then I trembled at lower S to find my most desired, most dreamt-of — Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula! His doomed guest! The vampire brides! His long, slow spider-plot of coming to England to drain its aristocratic blood! His power over wolves and bats and vermin! To be himself a bat, or a cloud of mist! To sleep all through the classroom day!

This was the door to years of dreams, and waking dreams of dreams. I lay there nights, the air from an open window chilling me, waiting for the bat, the creeping mist, the leaping wolf, the caped, lean stranger.

Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false sharp scuttle of scraping leaves, I knew the night as the dead must know it, waiting in caskets, dressed in opera-house clothes that no one living could afford to wear.

But I was not on London! Not even close! The American river town of blackened steeples, vile taverns and shingled miseries had no appeal to Dracula. Why would he come when we could offer no castle, no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets from which to pluck a victim?

My life — it seemed so unimportant then — lay waiting for its sudden terminus, its sleep and summoning to an Undead sundown. How grand it would have been to rise as the adopted son of Dracula!

I saw it all: how no one would come to my grave to see my casket covered with loam. My mother and her loutish husband would drink the day away at the Moose Club; my brother would sell my books to buy new baseball cards; my teachers’ minds slate clean forgetting me as they seemed to forget all who passed beneath and out their teaching. (Latin I would miss, but would Latin miss me?)

No one would hear the summoning as my new father called me: Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu!

And I would rise, slide out of soil like a snake from its hollow. 

He would touch my torn throat. 

The wound would vanish. 

He would teach me the art of flight, the rules of the hunt, the secret of survival.

I would not linger in this awful town for long. One friend, perhaps, I’d make into a pale companion, another my slave, to serve my daytime needs (guarding my coffin, disposing of blood-drained bodies) — what were friends for, anyway?

As for the rest of this forsaken hive of humankind, I wouldn’t deign to drink its blood, the dregs of Europe.

We would move on to the cities. To Pittsburgh first, of course, our mist and bat-flight unnoticed in its steel-mill choke-smoke. The pale aristocrat and his thin son attending the Opera, the Symphony, mingling at Charity Balls, Robin to his Batman, cape shadowing cape, fang for fang his equal soon at choosing whose life deserved abbreviation.

A fine house we’d have (one of several hideouts), a private crypt below, with the best marbles, the finest silk, mahogany, brass for the coffin fittings. Our Undead mansion above filled to the brim with books and music.

I waited, I waited — but he never arrived.

At fifteen, I had a night-long nosebleed, as though my Undead half had bitten me, drinking from within. I woke in white of hospital bed, my veins refreshed with the hot blood of strangers. I had not been awake to enjoy it! I would never even know from whom it came.

Tombstones gleamed across the hill, lit up all night in hellish red from the never-sleeping iron furnaces. Leaves danced before the ward-room windows, blew out and up to a vampire moon. I watched it turn from copper to crimson, its bloating fall to treeline, its deliberate feeding on corpuscles of oak and maple, one baleful eye unblinking.

A nurse brought in a tiny radio. One hour a night of symphony was all the beauty this city could endure — I held it close to my ear, heard Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony: the gallows march, the artist’s Undead resurrection amid the Witches’ Sabbath — my resurrection.

I asked for paper. The pen leaped forth and suddenly I knew that I had been transformed. I was a being of Night now. I was Undead since all around me were Unalive.

I had turned the sounds of Berlioz's Witches Sabbath into words, and in the words, the images of night winds, witch sarabandes, wizard orgies, and a hilltop of animal-demon-human frenzy.

The Vampire Father never had to come. I was my own father, self-made from death's precipice.

I saw now what they could not see, walked realms of night and solitude where law and rule and custom crumbled. I was a poet. I would feed on Beauty for blood, I would make wings of words, I would shun the Cross of complacency. 

A cape would trail behind me always.