Living with a vampire roommate, I have learned many valuable lessons about my character. For example, I hate vampires. If I were on a date with a girl, and it was going really well -- like in the movies where crappy string music is cued in the background, and the murmur of other voices in the restaurant is hushed so you can hear the absurdly witty dialogue between the protagonists -- if a date were going that well, and then the girl admitted she was a vampire, I would probably play it cool, but then party with her all night, timing the end of our romp so that just as she is walking home, the sun rises, burning her to a crisp. That is how much I hate vampires.
It all started when Drake showed up at my house, conveniently looking for a place to rent just as I was on the search for a new roommate. Drake, by the way, was the homeless guy who put change in everybody's expired parking meters when I was down in LA. I obviously didn't recognize him at the time, because he was newly shaved and cleaned up. Turns out the bastard had been bitten by a vampire and had made enough money to get off the streets by killing folks in the dead of night and then stealing their money.
Anyway, he dropped that all on me later. At first, I thought he was just really weird. I only saw him coming and going at night, he refused to eat my homemade pesto, and when I invited him to visit Gilroy with my friends, he adamantly refused. I wasn't going to be one to judge, however, because I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Nietzsche always scares me into being accomodating to others, for fear that they turn out like Nietzsche. However, it started getting weird when he declined my invitation to eat at the Olive Garden, and then repeatedly slammed the "greasy Italians" for using too much garlic in their cooking.
I also have a Catholic (read: super-bloody) Jesus-on-the-cross sticker positioned for maximum ironic hilarity on my mini-fridge in my room. It is ironic because a refrigerator was the one thing that could have saved Jesus from the cross. Thus was the power of the refrigerator in biblical times that it could erase the pain of God. Anyway, I came home one day to find the eyes of Jesus scratched out! There was also a bowl of thick red liquid inside, but I was mostly just mad about the Jesus sticker. I confronted Drake about it, and he kind of mumbled, which I knew was how he tried to lie. One time he must have cut himself shaving, because there was blood all over the mirror in the bathroom, but when I asked him about it, he just mumbled, then ran into his room and tried to hide under the mattress.
So I was pissed about that, but then things came to a head when I cut my finger while chopping carrots for dinner. Drake came over and was unusually attentive to my finger, explaining that I needed to squeeze out as much of the blood as I could to "speed the healing process." I'm no pre-med, but this sounded like bunk to me, but then he started yelling "Feed Me!" and bit my finger, which gave me a sudden image of Rick Moranis for some reason. I pushed him to the ground and demanded a non-mumbly explanation. He broke down, and told me the whole story, including how he followed me back from LA because I drove away before he could put change in the parking meter for my car.
Thoroughly creeped out, I have let him stay, mostly because I don't know what to do with a vampire. Drake isn't like the leprechaun from earlier -- for example, he isn't trapped in a glass jar -- so for now I am just biding my time, and hoping that Drake is doing the same.
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