BY John Manuel Arias
No one really knew if they’d ever met a real vampire before, let alone one named Lulú (that was too sweet a name for a bloodsucker). And especially one with a dead husband named Saturnino. It wasn’t hard to imagine, though—those are pretty vintage names, if you want to call them that. Vampires usually have hundred-year-old names. Something you’d find on a grandparent’s birth certificate, yellowed and tattered at the edges.
The first thing the waitress did when she sat us down was confide that she was an ex-Jehovah’s witness. Rather, she’d been excommunicated from her sect. Pera, my ex-best friend (go figure that I’d be surrounded by exes), and I could only gawk at the waitress’s makeup. Her eyeliner Sharpie-thick, circling her entire socket like in one of those cartoons—you know which ones I’m talking about—ending with a square line, the black jutting out to her temples like comforting fingers. Much later, as Pera and I whispered over crisp pupusas, we decided she was the Salvadoran incarnation of Cleopatra.
“They called a meeting,” the waitress said, somewhere between a hiss and a sigh.
We couldn’t look away from her lip liner, either.
“The elders told me I’d been excommunicated for celebrating my fiftieth birthday.”
“¿Really?” Pera and I dipped our dumbfounded heads.
“Yup,” she said, more sigh than hiss this time. “My family ignores me. My texts, my calls, my letters. I don’t exist anymore.”
“That’s intense,” I said.
“Mhm. They say blood is thicker than water. But that’s only if the water isn’t holy.”
“Huh,” Pera said. Then she whipped out her iPhone to surely open her Notes app. She’s a writer, so a sentence like that she’d definitely use in a story.
“¿What’ll you both have?”
“A margarita,” I said.
“I’ll have one too,” Pera said without looking up, still typing the waitress’s now-stale revelation.
“¿How would you like them?”
“Regular,” I said.
Pera answered, “frozen.”
“¿With or without salt?”
“With.”
“Without.”
I’d been to Lulú’s often. It was this sort of surreal Salvadoran restaurant in Mt. Pleasant; its décor reminded me of Costa Rica. All Central American dives did. The whole place was wood. Flags from every Latin American country poured from the walls, the windows, and the ceiling. The lights were always either barely on, or seizing like a discotheque’s. Never an in-between. A dance floor sat in the middle of the place, scuffed from Thursday-night parties of rancheras and bachata. Then a bar lurked towards the kitchen, and overseeing it were paintings and photographs of the owner—Lulú.
It was very Dorian Gray. A woman frozen in the 80’s when she’d opened the place. Back when you couldn’t walk around without a bullet greeting you at the corner. And with her eyes having looked dead on at the painter or photographer (maybe dead themselves now), it was if she was perpetually guarding the restaurant, even when she wasn’t in the last booth counting her cash. I had no idea how she had so many bills to count. The restaurant was always empty when I brought friends.
In forty-five minutes, Mario would arrive. He was still best friend to us both, so that meant Pera and I had less than an hour to work out our three-year silence. She’d recently stepped off a bus from New York, here to D.C. for her father’s funeral. In fact, it had been this morning. The old man had had a stroke in his bathroom. They found him after three days, in a pool of dry, sticky beer, and dry, sticky blood from having hit his head. The dogs had had a field day with his face. Closed casket.
“How are you feeling?” I asked. That was always a stupid question. I knew exactly what she was feeling—I’d seen it the whole day, the shards of her heart pumping throughout the rest of her body. Every pulse like glass. But, you tell me, what other kind of question is there when your ex-best friend’s dad dies? You try not to be nostalgic with the conversation, or they’ll burst out in tears. You try not console them, because who the Hell has ever felt better from being consoled?
“Fine,” she said, sipping her frozen margarita through a cardboard straw, both beginning to melt. I licked the salt from the rim and slurped my own fast, because the ice stung my teeth.
Pera’s hair was a different color from when I first met her, back at University in New York, our sophomore year. We’d both happened to take a Latin American Studies course—LAS 319: Magic and the Spirit World—and we paired up with each other to make a documentary about ayahuasca. Her third cousin was a curandera who facilitated those rituals back in La Fortuna in Costa Rica. I was a city boy from San José, so I took her lead as she explained the process to jot down into a script. Always for gringo tourists, she said, because Costa Ricans won’t actually do it—psychotropic brews are too much. Too devilish. Besides, spiritual awakenings happen on church pews back home.
After an extensive interview with her cousin over Skype, Pera narrated our footage, and I edited the video. We got an A. Pera suggested we go back to do ayahuasca together, in the jungle’s cool night air, and I told her Hell no. I could hardly handle weed—and she thought I’d opt to throw up all over myself and hear jaguars’ roars in a trance? Absolutely not.
We became inseparable after that. We threw parties together, did each other’s assignments, popped pimples one another’s backs on those sweaty, New York summer nights. We returned here to D.C. to celebrate with each other’s families on holidays, birthdays, days for the Hell of it; adopted one another’s parents when our own broke our hearts; walked the Adams Morgan strip getting fucked up till dawn. Our best-friendship lasted for a decade. But, as any relationship, it wasn’t without problems.
“Shall we dive into it?” She asked, her voice like breaking the surface tension of water from a hundred-foot drop.
“In a minute,” I said. I hesitated both because I wasn’t ready, and because Lulú had just glided into the restaurant. Her dress the same as in the portrait above the center of the bar. Velvet, shoulderless.
“She’s a pretty cliché vampire,” I said.
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, look at her. She hasn’t aged.”
It was true—Lulú had zero wrinkles. Her hair shone as much as in the photographs. She might have been thirty then, posing with a child; and thirty more years had passed by without even thinking to touch her.
“She stalks the gym across the street,” I whispered.
Cleopatra arrived with those crisp pupusas, burnt cheese spreading across the ceramic plates. Their curtido was my favorite in the city, the cabbage perfectly marinated, slim slices of carrots still crunchy. When Cleopatra sashayed back into the kitchen, I continued.
“Yeah,” I said. “She pretends to lift weights, or break a sweat. But the undead don’t gain muscle, or even produce sweat. It’s the men she’s after. You know, all those muscular guys moving in now. The white ones with too much time on their hands and too little self-esteem to know when to stop. Gay, straight, she doesn’t care. She just likes a heart that beats with force.”
“That makes sense,” Pera said. Her name wasn’t meant to invoke a pear; it was just short for Peratrice, because of her mother’s illegible handwriting. I wondered how her personality would’ve turned out if her name had had its rightful ‘B.’
“She never smiles, so that you won’t see her fangs.”
“Does she come out during the day?”
“I don’t think so. But what I do know is that MPD’s Twitter is always reporting missing persons. All men.”
“Thirty years of muscular men,” Pera said, then got unreasonably quiet. Her father had been an amateur weightlifter.
—You’ve definitely got to get into vampire movies. Vampires in general, but vampire flicks are the best. Especially the ones from the 80’s. I mean, you’ve got Fright Night, and The Lost Boys, and even Vamp with Grace Jones… absolute classics. If there are monsters prowling everywhere around you, why not catch them in cinematic glory? At least then you’ll know how to kill them, or fuck them without them killing you.
But you haven’t seen anything until you’ve caught the Mexican versions from the 60’s—El vampiro, El mundo de los vampiros, Santo contra las mujeres vampiro. I love the 80’s ones because they’re bright neon: blue, orange, greenish, blinding sometimes; but the black and white films from the 60’s are so cool. The dialogue is great, the acting so-so, but you always get fangs. Always blood, no matter the tint. Always seduction.
By the way, if I nibble at your neck, it’s not because I’m a vampire. Don’t worry.
I’ll never tell you, because you can’t see it, but when I’m on top, and I’m inside you, and my face is resting between your neck and your shoulder, I smile wide and stick out my teeth. My tongue can feel your pulse, the excited pulse of your muscles. When I’m inside you, I understand why Lulú does it.—
Pera and I had spoken most of it over when Mario entered Lulú’s. It ended up like all other reconciliations between people who love each other: unfinished. Mario’s strut into the restaurant was a good enough ellipsis to end our incomplete thoughts. But we both knew that what loomed beyond those three dots would eventually end us.
Cleopatra must have had a third eye tucked away somewhere, because she brought Mario a gin tonic before he had the chance to hug us. And with her eyeliner so thick, when she winked, her socket became a black hole. A one-eyed Fate in a pupusería. Waitresses tend to be creatures of unnatural sight, ruled by ocular instincts that guide them to notice any and everything.
“She must be a vampire too,” Mario said, himself winking. By the looks of it, the gin tonic was too strong. “So, what’s going on in this bitch-eat-bitch world?”
Pera looked down, contemplating what to do. Sob, or smile, or pretend there was salt on rim to lick.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it this morning,” he said to her. “But look, I’m wearing black.”
“You are,” I cut in. It was hard to chastise him. As hard as it would be to reprimand a fairy, you know? Mario was akin to a mythical, flying being—he floated. On his toes, or the balls of his feet, somehow. But like effervescence in a flute, he brought life to places. Made it easier to be yourself. Dragged you by the wrist to the dancefloor, and you wouldn’t even be mad or insecure about it. You wanted to be around him, make him as happy as he made you. Even if he didn’t make it to your dad’s funeral.
I noticed that Lulú was no longer in the back booth. I wondered if she’d gone on the hunt. I tried to remember if the moon was out tonight, or if there was a CrossFit class across the street.
—Her story? I’m not really sure. You know, sometimes I have to go up to the bar to pay my tab, and I overhear those construction workers whispering to themselves as only men do on stools when protected by the dark. Raising their beer bottles to whichever one of Lulú’s photographs. Freezing whenever Cleopatra steps out to shine the wood with a wet towel. I try to gather as much as I can, because our accents are so different. But I’ve gotten pretty good at understanding their tongues.
I’ve definitely heard the Civil War mentioned. It makes sense, because Lulú opened this spot in the 80’s. A vampire refugee. Signing her asylum papers by night, making sure no mirrors were slapped onto the office walls. What’s the worth of an émigré without a reflection?
They say she was a high society broad-turned-guerillera. Or the mother of one, at least. The little boy in the largest portrait must have cradled a rifle twice his size. A vampire child solider. Disintegrated by a paramiltar’s silver bullet. That painting, then, she must have saved it from a fire like Dolly saved Washington’s. One of those tender things women do to keep history alive.
Saturnino, no one really knows about. I don’t even think that was her husband’s real name. It’s just one of those that you assign to someone mysterious; someone you imagine is ancient, even if they occupy a young, handsome body. Like a devil in whatever Testament we’re living in.—
Mario didn’t order a pupusa because he was going to bottom that night. I ate another because I was going to top. A top’s life is so much easier. Don’t get me wrong, I love to bottom. But I also love to eat.
Pera left to have a cigarette. Despite this years-long separation, I still knew her better than anybody. I knew she’d take a twenty-minute walk, circling the gargantuan blocks of Mt. Pleasant. She wouldn’t even realize if she was still smoking by the second lap; the momentum was what always saved her from crumbling.
Mario looked at me the way he did when he was ready to push my exposed, defenseless buttons. He had access to me like a decorated general with nuclear launch codes. He was a Cancer, and his pincers were showing.
He pointed to a water-colored poster board of Frida Kahlo overlooking our booth. I assumed it was painted by child, as to not judge the rendition too harshly. An original, it wasn’t.
“You know she was German,” Mario said. His smirk was kissable—had been kissable, I should say. Those years were far behind us.
“Yes, I know,” I replied. “Her father.”
Mario looked stunned. He’d laid out tasty bait—a sure thing in any other scenario—and watched as I ignored its temptation. Fighting wasn’t in me tonight. I instead wondered which lap Pera was on.
“Yes,” he continued anyway. “Her father was a German photographer and she was just a rich kid. She went to the best school in Mexico, and had zero ties with the Indigenous community she appropriated from.”
It was if he’d rehearsed the script. Instead of practicing a eulogy for Pera’s father, he’d generated instigating quips and responses, depending on the angle my logic adopted. He’d thought about me all morning, I thought. That’s why he was wearing the black turtleneck I gave him on a Christmas back in Costa Rica. That’s why his combativeness resembled the lonely eyes of a child.
“She missed you today,” I said. I was a Scorpio, and my tail was showing.
“Yeah, I can tell.”
Mario fingered the ice in his gin tonic until it became a whirlpool. I watched him with regret. I knew Pera’s father was the first person besides me and Pera he had come out to. Despite that big, muscular macho-man persona, her father had embraced Mario for five whole minutes. Mario tried to squirm out of that grip (he later told me he’d gotten an erection at the two-minute mark) but the old man wouldn’t let go. It’s impossible for straight men to communicate acceptance outright. A headlock is, for them, a love language.
The door to the restaurant swung open, and my head turned, hoping Lulú had returned, covered in still-warm blood and moonlight. But it was Pera, covered in stale smoke and light from the streetlamps reflected in the metal buttons of her coat. By her demeanor, the walk had helped. Enough that when she sat down, the urge to sob didn’t overtake her.
“¿When are they going to turn on the music?” Mario groaned, so loud you’d think there was an Alexa who would do as he said. “¡Give us some música Plancha!”
“Salvadorans don’t know what that means, Mario,” I said. “Only Ticos call it that. Besides, gay bars play that music.”
Mario and I had met at a gay bar back in Costa Rica that played música Plancha—those 80’s/90’s ballads that our moms used to listen to on Sundays, when they dedicated the post-mass day to washing, drying, ironing, and folding laundry. The music brought back so many memories of smells: Joan Sebastian, my mother’s Estée Lauder perfume; Rocio Dúrcal, syrupy Gain detergent; José José, sun-dried sheets; Miguel Bosé, the must from those same sheets if it had rained; Isabel Pantoja, poppers and cum from the gay bar’s stalls. Mario and I had met that way, fucking to Isabel Pantoja.
“Oh Lord, they’re going to play rancheras, aren’t they?”
“Bachata,” Pera rejoined the conversation. She had decided to lick the rim as if there were salt, and smiled because there wasn’t.
“That’s not as bad as it could be,” Mario said. “I’ll go tell the bartender to start the party. I’m going to dance.”
“Like a shadow,” I said.
“Because of my clothes?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, while you two sulk there like real shadows, I’ll be shaking my ass and having fun.”
Mario downed his gin tonic, mostly water now. Pera and I ordered another round from Cleopatra. All three of us together again. The shadows of ourselves in a vampire’s bar.
Pera whipped out her phone and began typing. On the Notes app, I bet. Surely an idea for something special to write.
We all stumbled out with seven drinks in each of our bellies. Mario kissed Pera on the lips, and me on each eye, then strutted like Naomi Campbell up Mt. Pleasant street, eventually turning into the 7/11 to buy his own pack of Camels. I waited with Pera until her Lyft came. Her first driver cancelled, so those two minutes became six. Our pressure to have small talk tripled with just a ping of the app.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“I’ll stay the week, stay at my mom’s spot.”
“How are you two doing?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in over a year. But now that he’s gone? Seeing as I’m her only living family, I guess I’ll have to be there for her.”
“Did you inherit anything?”
“Just parking tickets,” she said, her cigarette balancing between her lips. She lit it with a Zippo. The one I’d given her for a birthday neither of us can remember.
“I’m working a lot this week,” I said. “But I’m free in the evenings. If you need someone to intervene between you and your mom, I can come by. Hang out, watch TV. Whatever.”
“That’d be nice. My mom always liked you better than she did Mario. You weren’t as queeny, I think was the quote.”
I slipped the cigarette out of her fingers and stole a puff. I coughed.
“You always smoked cigarettes like you did joints,” she said. “You can’t hold the smoke in that long. You gotta treat it like a regular breath.”
The Lyft arrived a minute early. The glowing sign on the dashboard was cartoonishly pink, like it was marketed by Mattel as one of Barbie’s dream cars.
“I’ll text you,” Pera said.
“Text me when you get home.”
Pera shut the door with a little less force than a slam. The Lyft sped off, determined not to lose the light.
Instead of heading east towards the Columbia Heights station, I walked west on Irving, admiring the houses on their hills along the street. Some of them still had Halloween decorations up, while others had swapped out their cats and ghosts for turkey paraphernalia. These next two months would only devastate Pera further. Her father had chosen the worst time of year to drop dead.
—As I zigzagged aimlessly through the streets, I heard you walking behind me. Had you been following me the entire time? You should’ve revealed yourself earlier. I would’ve introduced you to Pera and Mario, and even Cleopatra, because I know you think I’m exaggerating.
You said it before, that when I’m ready to tell a story, you brace yourself for Some crazy Latin American shit, and in a way, you’re right. These stories of mine are indeed Latin American, and maybe they can seem unbelievable. But you’re wrong in thinking that they’re crazy. Every story I’ve ever told you is true. The witches who braid horses’ manes to grip onto as they ride in the dead of night; my grandmother’s cousin’s niece who held her mother after her throat exploded; and now this, the vampire, Lulú. I can prove it to you whichever way you’d like—I’ll show you MPD’s Twitter, or the missing posters at the gym, or even take you to the restaurant. You’ll see for yourself that towards the back, above the bar and its seven, half-empty bottles, Lulú’s portrait stares out at the place. And to the left of the bar is her booth; and if she’s there, counting her inexplicable wads of cash, you’ll see for yourself that age has avoided her like the plague. That if you put her and the painting face to face, you’d think it was the only mirror in the world able to cast a vampire’s reflection.
John Manuel Arias is a gay, Costa Rican and Uruguayan writer back in Washington, DC after many years. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His fiction has found homes in Joyland Magazine, Akashic Books, Barren Magazine and the Acentos Review, with work forthcoming in F(r)iction. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines, including PANK, Platypus Press, Sixth Finch, the Journal, and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, with poems forthcoming in The Offing. He has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net three times. Before DC, he lived in Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.