Vampire Girl: Chapters 33-37
- Johnny Payne
- Apr 11
- 16 min read
Read Chapters 28-32 of Vampire Girl here to get caught up on your identity politics with Mayra, a female vampire protagonist!
Chapter 33
Uber
By a certain measure, Mayra belonged in Las Vegas. She had become a nymphomaniac in danger of drinking herself to death on human blood, showgirl by day, predator by night, far from the Human Resources woman scrolling through new yoga Meetups she would never attend, while an employee decided whether to use HMO or PPO. Catherine Deneuve was no longer her reference point, so much as Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas, although Tobias, who seemed well adjusted to life in a netherworld, didn’t make for a very good Nicholas Cage.
Her acid reflux had gotten worse. There was no end to her feasting. Sometimes she walked around in early daylight, her mouth smeared with blood, occasioning no remarks except the occasional person who catcalled that she needed to be a little less liberal with the lipstick, or a caustic remark about a sloppy blowjob.
There had been a backlash to the short-lived “be a vampire” movement, as so often is the case with such fads, and Congress had declared vampirism illegal in some states. For once, Congress listened to the climate change people when they said vampirism could contribute to overpopulation, thus deforestation and depletion of other natural resources, if enough people didn’t die off regularly. Congress had tried to ensure quicker mortality in general by giving tax cuts to corporations and the rich, and cutting off virtually all social services to the poor, such as Medicare and Medicaid—ironically, it never occurred to them that birth control would keep numbers down—but all that good work would be in vain if people kept living forever, using up what remained of Social Security.
Many of the Las Vegas habitués didn’t seem surprised by anything, and were accustomed to stepping over corpses, or crossing the street to avoid someone bleeding profusely, calling for help. Many probably assumed that vampires killing, like prostitution, was legal. Some vampire activists trying to unionize had confused the issue by referring to themselves as “blood workers” and gotten the sympathy of the ACLU. Mayra’s blood work, if it could be called that, had gotten sloppy. The hard Las Vegas men, even the tourists, had a tendency to fight back, sometimes with the help of cocaine, to the extent that Mayra had to leave many of them writhing on the street, her job undone, fangs aching from an unexpected pullout when she got punched in the groin. One guy pulled out a pistol and shot her three times in the leg. Wearing Uggs and a shiny foil top hat she’d donned to fit in with the tourists, Mayra ran down a side street, to distance herself from the relative carnage and called an Uber. There was a taxi one minute away, quicker really than an ambulance. As she greeted the driver with a smile, hurrying into the back seat, gushing blood onto the floor mats, which were covered prudently by a garbage bag, it occurred to her that wounded people could save a fortune using a $5 Uber instead of a $900 ambulance, with better and faster service.
In a last-minute act of conscience, Mayra asked the Uber driver to pick up her victim and though he complained and charged $3 extra under the table, he complied. He said he was a Pakistani immigrant and was living close to the margin. On their brief ride to the hospital, as Mayra’s victim howled and groaned and begged her to kill him with one of the bullets remaining in his pistol, which was a perfectly legal concealed weapon, the Pakistani driver told her that he was a poet specializing in pantoums (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/pantoum-poetic-form)
who had been threatened with imprisonment by the regime for his accusing verses, so he had to flee his country, leave his wife and child behind and learn how to write free verse. Before they could get deeper into the literary conversation they arrived and he wished her good luck with everything.
Mayra dragged her victim into the emergency room. They were taken in right away, as the attending nurse thought this was a failed murder-suicide between lovers, which she found romantic and Mayra did not contradict her. The attending physician saw Mayra foaming at the mouth, the man’s deep gashes, the pistol in his hand and Mayra’s gunshot wounds and put two and two together. But congruent with his Hippocratic Oath, and also out of abject fear, he asked no questions and prepped Mayra for surgery while he sent the man up to ICU to be triaged to another doctor. After he got Mayra on the table, forceps in hand, her leg began to tremble. As the holes in her leg spontaneously started to close, the bullets shot out of her flesh, hitting the wall behind the surgeon. Had he stood six inches to the right, one would have pierced his heart. Mayra had always been a quick healer. In the meantime, the police, who had been notified, arrived on the scene. They listened to the doctor’s account, looked at Mayra, saw her intact leg and weren’t sure what to do. Mayra was tempted to say, “Don’t you know who I am? I headline at the Bellagio.” But she did not want to prevail on her celebrity status and get off based on that. She preferred to be like James Franco, a normal person.
“Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” said the first cop. “It doesn’t add up. There’s no actual gunshot wound. It makes me doubt the whole story.” “Too bad the surgeon wasn’t wearing a body cam!” At this, both policemen laughed so hard that their caps flew off. “Yeah. Well, she isn’t black. We should let her off. There are lots of people out there who still need to be arrested tonight.” More laughter. The cops left and so did Mayra, without the aid of a wheelchair.
Back at the hotel, the Trampire was out, no doubt with her political groupies. Mayra drank a fifth of whiskey, not so much out of desire to get shit-faced as because that’s what Nick and Liz would have done under the circumstances. When she threw up, it was, for the first time in forever, clear liquid followed by dry heaves that felt like a thousand deaths.
Get drunk with your friends and watch Leaving Las Vegas. See which parts of the film apply to your life, test how much dialogue you can remember after six or seven strong drinks, and quote precisely. The next morning, with a hangover, write a pantoum about your overall experience. Here is the first stanza from one by Marilyn Hacker, written during World War II, to get you started:
Said the old woman who barely spoke the language:
Freedom is a dream, and we don’t know whose.
Said the insurgent who was now an exile:
When I began to write the story I started bleeding.
Chapter 34
Kickstarter
The next morning, Mayra sported the hangover of her life. She couldn’t remember the name of the peculiar verse form the taxi driver had mentioned. She knew it wasn’t a sonnet. The floorboards of their extended-stay casino hotel room trembled as if a portal to Hell were opening up. There sat the Trampire, maddeningly fresh, in a cute flowered jumper, girlish as Cameron Diaz before she became a whore, with a smug expression, looking healthy from her commitment to sexual and substance abstinence. She handed Mayra a can of seltzer water. “Girl, you have got to rein it in. Otherwise, we’re going to be playing the leads in A Star is Born, with me as Barbra Streisand and you as Kris Kristofferson.” “I have no idea who those actors are.” “Didn’t you say you studied history in college?” “No, sociology.” “No matter. I have good news. I recently Followed the President’s Twitter feed and asked him to text me privately. He’s always on there, so he got back to me in like five minutes. First, he threatened that he was going to send all transgender people to Gitmo, but I ignored his bluster. Eventually he forgot what he was talking about. He is willing to consider reversing the Gadsden Purchase, as long as I let him grab me by the pussy so he can see whether it feels as smooth as an actual woman’s. But he is insisting that we buy a larger part of the Southwestern U.S. He said he wants to get rid of the “brown zone.’” “What? The brown zone? That is degrading to 40% of the population. Degrading to 100%, actually.” “Whatever. Let’s get him off our backs. It will be no worse than the breakup of the Soviet Union.” “Where are you going to find the money?” “I already got going a Kickstarter campaign. We’ve raised 20 million dollars in a week.” “Are you kidding? You’re a genius. But still—that can’t be near enough.” “He asked for 28 million dollars, less than he paid for the Plaza Hotel. He pretends to be a brilliant negotiator, but he totally lowballed us on this one.” “Can he—can he actually sell that land? Doesn’t it belong to millions of citizens and/or the government and/or corporations and ranchers and agribusiness in general?” “Most likely. But he seemed confident he could put together a package. He said that in a sense he owns the entire country, so it was more the details he had to work out.”
Mayra sipped her seltzer, trying not to gulp it down. “We can found a Vampire Republic. Is that what you want, Trampire?” “It’s the only way this thing will work. We’re riding high for a while, but the American public is turning against us, after we outed ourselves nationally with the beauty pageant. Now they’re passing laws against us. Pretty soon those state laws making us illegal will become federal law and may get ratified by the Supreme Court. Josephine Baker, where are you?” “I never should have agreed to participate in that beauty pageant. You and I should have stayed in Mexico and bought a taco truck. It’s always been a fantasy of mine.” “Don’t blame yourself, Mayra. This is what had to happen. We can’t stay in the shadows forever.” “Um, I thought that was like the oldest definition of a vampire.” “Shadows were never a physical need. It’s folklore. We stayed in the shadows because we didn’t want to be seen. Now we have a solution; our own country. People are tribal. It’s human nature to want to separate off into your own kind.” “But I’m an integrationist. That’s what I’ve been dancing for, to reach all people; to dissolve borders.” “Just because you date and/or kill men of different races and persuasions, don’t kid yourself that you’re the same as them. They can’t help putting you in a box.” “You mean a literal box, like a coffin?” “Hilarious. No, a metaphorical box that they will nail shut with their pieties and bad attitudes. You’re a romantic, Mayra. That’s what I love about you. But romanticism can’t rule the world, no matter what the poets say. I tried to be soft, but all I got for it was thrown up against a wall and smacked.”
Below, use the linked “racial dot map” as a point of departure.
Then, take a box of crayons and free-hand your own “brown people” map, based on accurate sociological data, deciding which states you would be willing to sell to Mayra and the Trampire for the agreed price. Use different colors of crayon to correspond to each race. You do not have to base your sales decision only on the preponderance of brown people in a given state. You can designate other races as reasons. Add up the various non-white races in each state and see what percentage they are of the overall population. You may be surprised.
Chapter 35
Make-a-Wish
As it turned out, the President did own the entire country, except for a few survivalist enclaves in Idaho which had seceded quietly without anyone realizing. His taking possession of the geographical expanse of the US of A had happened due to the inattention of a few hundred million people in reading their contracts brokered by Keller-Williams Realty and believing the laughable Zestimates on Zillow.
"What is a Zestimate?" article - https://www.zillow.com/zestimate/
The President hadn’t paid any money to anyone yet, but his name was on all the titles, alongside that of various banks. Somehow Congress had approved the secession of the white-flight survivalists and skinheads in Idaho, believing that they were actually approving deep drilling rights in sensitive natural habitats, when in fact the relevant language applied to the militia drills conducted every morning by said survivalists. “So we’re going to buy now?” asked Mayra. “We still need $8 million. We tapped out our Kickstarter.” “What about the vampires who are going to live in this republic? Did they chip in already?” “Give me a break. They are the last ones to contribute. I don’t know what it is. You do a vampire fund-raiser for a field trip or macular degeneration, and you end up donating your own money to cover the whole thing so you won’t look like a fool. Come here and give me a hug, so some of that innocent optimism will rub off on me. The people who gave to my Kickstarter campaign are the same people who want to get into Cuba and set up hotels.”
“In other words, investors.” “You could call them that. Right now, they’re angels. There’s no quid pro quo. For the remainder, we’re going to have to tap into the white liberals. You know, Occupy Wall Street type people, but ones with a job and money, not the ones who live in a tent for months supposedly to protest but in truth have nowhere to go because their parents kicked them out and they flunked out of college. We need white donors like you, the ones who check off the Nature Conservancy when their workplace uses peer pressure and implied job insecurity to force them to give to United Way.” “What do you mean, white? I don’t think I’m white.” “Aren’t you? I’d say whiter than a soft-boiled egg that got a skin peel. The rest of the money is going to have to come from your people.” “Hey. I don’t like you using the phrase ‘your people.’ Aren’t we about overcoming these assigned categories?” “Up to a point. Although Popeye was kind of right when he said ‘I yam what I yam.’” “Why are you pigeonholing me? Why can’t I be who I want to be?” “Let me ask you this. At the supermarket, when the cashier asks you if you want to deduct a dollar from your debit card to give to the cause du jour, like homelessness, or cancer research, or Make a Wish, or the middle school band, what do you say?” “I usually give. It’s a dollar.” “Bingo. Guilty white liberal. It never occurs to you that if the grocery store wants to provide money to charity, they should just do it, rather than get you involved by hitting you up at the cash register right after you helped them make a profit.” “I hate you. I thought you were sweet and sensitive.” “Mmmm—sometimes. That’s why I do your hair free of charge. So, go find your people. We need the remainder. The clock is ticking. The President could change his mind at any time.” Mayra sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
What would you do with eight million dollars? Give it to the poor? Don’t lie, you would not give them eight million; at most you might donate $100. As for the rest, list the indulgences you have in mind. Go ahead and put “Buy my mom a house,” because everybody says that right away, it’s a cliché of the genre, like when somebody wins the lottery, it’s the first words out of their mouth, even though only 30% actually do buy their mom a house afterward.
Chapter 36
The Clubhouse
The Trampire and Mayra sat smoking Montenegro cigarillos on the patio of the Bellagio, watching a clown on stilts try to use an ATM machine. When Mayra asked her parents for money for Kickstarter, she had told them it was for a kind of kibbutz, even though she wasn’t Jewish. Her father asked her whether she was joining a cult. She said no, it was more like an interest group or club. “How much do you need?” “Um, eight million dollars.” There was a lengthy silence. “Is that the initiation fee?” “No, it’s for the—clubhouse.”
“I see. I guess it’s going to be quite nice.” To her surprise, he told her he’d made shrewd investments over the years, such as co-owning a string of charter schools, where the government paid a good chunk of the bill yet the students didn’t really have to learn anything, so they were cheap and easy to run. Without telling Mayra, he’d put away for her a nest egg of a million or so. He was saving it for when she really needed it, but if she wanted the nest egg now for this club, he’d transfer it to her account. He couldn’t cover eight million but it was a good start. Mayra was in shock and stuttered trying to thank him. Now she was in a real conundrum. Part of her wanted to take the sudden money and buy a hotel in TJ like the one she’d gone to with Jackie and Sheila. She could quit her job as a showgirl, because that’s what she had become—the HR position had been taken away and it was clear they weren’t going to tour anywhere else, as the Bellagio kept extending the run, and she was afraid they would become like Donny and Marie Osmond at the Flamingo, who were clearly vampires because they never aged, and therefore would perform eternally. Running a tourist hotel, she could invite the handful of people close to her to live there, yet she knew this was merely a fantasy and that if she were to cross back into Mexico, where they clearly hadn’t wanted her, she’d be dwelling in a No Man’s Land. The U.S. government would not let her cross back a second time, there would be no “do over.” So she decided to take her trust fund, put her money where her mouth was and sink it into a massive real estate deal. She’d never even owned a condominium.
As for the other seven million dollars, she used the supermarket trick the Trampire had mentioned. After each show, Mayra came out for a curtain call and implored the audience to donate a single poker chip, in denominations preferably of $100 up to $10,000, for a Vampire Homeland. White liberals, both humble and rich, donated in droves, and not only Bernie Sanders supporters, dropping chips into the bucket that was passed around. That simple technique was effective, and before long, the entire $28 million was raised. Now she and the Trampire were having a celebratory smoke while drinking a bottle of Perrier champagne and painting their nails, sticking cotton balls between their toes to dry them. “Sometimes life is exactly like a novel,” said the Trampire. “Something that seems entirely implausible happens because the author says so.” “Yeah, funny you should mention it. I’m writing a novel of my own, and this moment is going to go in it.” “I didn’t know you wrote.” "I’m an amateur. But I love those crazy plot twists that would never happen in real life. Isn’t it why we read novels? To escape?” “Amen. I want to read one where a super hot guy who is not even slightly gay, nor a married man who wants to bang you in the bathroom but is deep in denial that he’s a screwed-up thrill seeker, nor a man who is really awkward in bed because he thinks he wants a man but is afraid to get with an actual man so he gets with a woman who used to be a man because that feels safer, and then later on he also becomes transgender and finds his own man, but that man is not you, because you were the object of transition and he doesn’t want to be reminded of how uncomfortable you made him. I want to read a novel about a virile male who is not even a metrosexual, he wears beat-up, scuffed cowboy boots and ripped tight jeans, and a work shirt and a wide tooled leather belt and he has a handlebar mustache and thick black hair underneath his Stetson hat.” “In other words, he should look like one of the Village People?” “Yeah, kind of like that.” “Maybe I’ll write that romance as a sequel. But for now, let’s get this deal done.”
Name your seven most passionate white liberal causes. You do not have to be white or liberal in order to have some. People of all races and creeds can be concerned for the plight of others less fortunate, such as shelter animals and eradicating plastic from the face of the earth. You can be black, Latino, or Acoma, Green Party, Democrat, or Republican, and exude quiet support for Black Lives Matter in conversation, without actually doing anything about it. However, if you are more comfortable excoriating whites for their boujee compassion and terminal, borderline genetic lack of humanity, you may feel better eschewing this exercise altogether.
Chapter 37
Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson
When the Trampire called the President of the United States of America, who owned the country, to make the offer, he said, “There’s been another offer.” “What? You gave your word you were going to sell the entire Southwest to us.” “I say a lot of things. Often I don’t remember what I said the next day. But your competitors’ offer is higher than yours. “Who are these phantom investors?” “I promised them I wouldn’t say. But the principal’s name begins with L and she was in the beauty contest.” “Lestatia offered to buy the Gadsden Purchase?” “Well it wasn’t that African woman. It’s a solid group. Sting, Mark Cuban, Wang Jianlin, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, and Snooki.” “From Jersey Shore?” “Yeah, that one. She turned out to be good at buying high-risk mortgages ten cents to the dollar and reselling later.” “How much did this group offer? Maybe we can top them.” “9.3 billion.” “But—you were going to sell to us for $28 million.” “I meant to say $28 billion. I misspoke, which I often do. I was just going to see how far you’d go.” “Will you give us a week to come up with $10 billion?” “I can do whatever I want. But I’m pretty sure they’ll come back with a bigger sum. Wang and Thor have deep pockets and Sting will do it on a bet.” “I thought you hated Mark Cuban.” “I did, but it turns out he’s not actually Cuban.” “Where will my people go? What will be their homeland?” “I don’t have a hard heart. I might be able to set you all up on a smallish reservation, like the Navajo and the Acoma, build some big, beautiful electrified fences, which you know I love to do, and then we’ll come in and try to steal your drilling rights, negating our own treaty with you, and it will all end up at the Supreme Court, which could be good for you, except I just named a tie-breaking justice who grew up playing cowboys and Indians and would pretend his broom was a semi-automatic weapon and he was blowing the Indians away, until his dad bought him a real semi-automatic weapon at age fourteen for his birthday, only by then he was more interested in blowing away the cool kids at school, except one day he was watching Court TV, it’s really a sweet story, and he fell into a trance and realized that if he truly wanted to keep people down, the law was the way to do it, so he forgot about doing a school shooting, and hit the books—I don’t really understand that part about wanting to read all the time—but he got into Harvard in spite of being white, because he’s really intelligent, like me, and now he’s on the Supreme Court. Isn’t that incredible?” “But why would he decide against us? We’re not Indians.” “He doesn’t know the difference.” “I don’t think my people would be too excited about living on a reservation surrounded by electric fences. I guess there’s nothing to be done.” “Look, I don’t want to go back on my word, in spite of all. If in the next week you can come up with $40 billion, I’ll give you the Southwest. I won’t even let the other guys counter-offer, because I truly do hate Mark Cuban.” “I don’t think it’s going to happen. It was hard enough getting to $28 million.” “I knew that. I only said it to torture you. But sincerely, why don’t you all leave the Bellagio and move your girlie show over to my casino? I do get a cut already, since you were morally my property for the pageant, but it irks me to see your names on their marquee. All my performers get $500 per week guaranteed, as long as they sign a long and complicated, airtight non-disclosure agreement in case I grab them by the pussy repeatedly.” “You do realize that we are currently getting $10,000 per week each?” “That much? You all are good, no question, but Mike Tyson only makes five thou for rambling about random stuff he thinks about.” “I guess this is goodbye, then.” “I guess so. Text me if anything changes, but to be sincere, I’m going to block your number as soon as this call ends.”
Did you know that Mark Cuban’s favorite book is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead? Did you know he used to work as a bartender before he became a self-made billionaire? If you believe in yourself and would like to also become a self-made billionaire, please go to https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/mark-cuban-6743.php to learn more facts about this famous person. Draw up your plan for success on a cocktail napkin while drinking in your favorite bar. Get in a race with the bartender serving your drink to see which of you will crack a billion first! In the words of self-made millionaire Steve Siebold, “Being rich isn't a privilege. Being rich is a right. If you create massive value for others, you have the right to be as rich as you want.”
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