My Friday the 13th Date with Kevin the Vampire

Plains, Friday, January 13th, 2017

It's my second date with Wagner the Music Major, who I picked up in the Student Union earlier this week.  We're seeing Hairspray at the University Theater -- in the first row, of course.  I always sit in the first row, when possible.

At intermission I look around the audience.  No one I know, which seems strange -- I know lots of theater buffs.

Then suddenly, about 10 rows back, I see Kevin the Vampire!

 "That's impossible!" I exclaim.

"What?"

"My old boyfriend from San Francisco. I haven't seen him since -- um, 2003.  Nearly 14 years ago.  What would he be doing here?"

I look back again.  No Kevin.

 When we met in San Francisco in 1996, Kevin the Vampire was in his 30s, tall and buffed, with pale skin, a hairy chest, and a Satanic goatee.  We dated for almost a year, although I didn't care for his elitism, his smoking, or his exhausting  bedroom calisthenics.

"Why do you call him Kevin the Vampire?  Did he like biting you on the neck?"

"No, but he had weird paranormal powers.  He could control people's minds..  He could get hookups by going up to a cute guy and saying ''You want to come home with me, don't you?'"

"That's a nice power to have," Wagner says.

"And he could make himself invisible.  You couldn't drop by for a visit -- if he wasn't expecting you, his apartment was impossible to find.  But he wouldn't just show up on the Plains."

I've been posting stories about him on my blog, most recently in December.  Could that have summoned him?

No -- just my imagination!

After the musical, as we are walking out to the parking lot, Kevin is suddenly standing beside me! He doesn't walk up -- he just appears, like Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

"Um...hi, Kevin," I say, pretending to be nonchalant.  "Nice to see you again."

It's been nearly 14 years, but he doesn't look any different.  I guess vampires don't age.

"Wonderful to see you, too, Boomer!"  He wraps me into a hug.  His body is cold, as if he's been running around outside without a coat.  "You have no idea how difficult it was to track you down!  Florida to Ohio to Upstate New York to Philadelphia, and now to this charming little town on the Plains."

"Why didn't you just get my email address from David?"

 "And who is your very attractive companion?: Kevin asks, ignoring my question. "If this is an example of the beefcake on the Plains, I'll be scanning the real estate ads!"



"Beefcake is very common here, and readily available."

He shakes hands with Wagner.  "How long have you and Boomer been an item?"

"This is our second date."

"Oh, my, the second date, a pivotal moment in a new romance!  I wouldn't dream of interfering.  Boomer, let's meet tomorrow to catch up.  I'll be at your apartment at -- say 10:00 am?"

And he vanishes.  He doesn't walk away -- he's just sort of not there.

"I see what you mean," Wagner says.  "Appearing and disappearing like that is kind of creepy."

"But fun," I say with a bit of sad nostalgia.

Saturday, January 14th

Kevin appears at my apartment at 10:00 sharp.  I take him to the gay-friendly coffee house for brunch -- vegetarian quiche for me, only coffee for him.  Vampires don't eat.

He is noncommittal about what he'd been up to since 2003.  "Oh, I puttered around, bought books, went to beer busts, invited men into my bed.  You know what life was like in Gay Heaven: we were busy all the time, but nothing really happened.  Every moment was an eternal now."

"So...what do you want to do during your visit?  Anything special you'd like to see?  Want me to arrange a hookup for you?  I know some guys, or I can go on Grindr."

"Sampling the cornfed beef of the Plains?  That does sound tempting, but I'd really rather have some time alone with you. After all, our relationship was one of the most important in my life -- perhaps the most important -- and I couldn't bear the idea of shuffling off this mortal coil without holding you in my arms again.  If Wagner doesn't object, that is."

I know Kevin --  no quick blow jobs for him!  Exhausting two hour sessions involving weird oils, massage,  licking and sucking everywhere, Tantric edging, multiple positions, multiple orgasms, leaving you drenched with sweat and other fluids, ruining the sheets.

But he has mind control powers.  How can I refuse?

We spend the day sightseeing and cruising, have dinner with some gay guys from the Unitarian church, and then return to my apartment.  We go into the bedroom and start kissing and fondling.

I kneel and go down on Kevin -- he's bigger than I remember, a Bratwurst+, cold and hard as iron.  Then he pulls me onto the bed.  He lies atop me, chest against chest, thigh against thigh, mouth against mouth.  His body is cold and hard, too.   His aroused penis goes between my legs.

Interfemoral -- my favorite position!  We never did this while we were dating!

He puts his arms around me and thrusts while we kiss, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth.  I grab his butt.  We finish at the same moment.

Apparently Kevin is still the same age as he was in 1996, but I'm 20 years older, and one orgasm per evening is enough.  I soon fall asleep.

Sunday, January 15th

When I wake up, Kevin is gone.  No note, no phone number, nothing.  He vanished.

I feel a little frisson of dread.  Did I imagine the whole thing?

No -- the sheets are definitely soiled with bodily fluids.

Wait -- what life "was" like in Gay Heaven.  It "was" an important relationship.  Shuffle off the mortal coil.  Cold skin.  Vanishing even more abruptly than when we were dating...

Was Kevin a ghost?  A ghost vampire?

I rush to my computer and start emailing people.  David. Zack.   Kevin's ex-boyfriend Seth.  His former best friend Marius.

The responses trickle in.  No one has seen Kevin or talked to him in years.

Desperate, I think of the number Marius gave me in 2003.  It didn't work then...

I find it in my old address book, and call.

This time it works -- Kevin answers!  "Boomer, what a surprise!  Did I leave my underwear in your apartment?  I've just arrived back in San Francisco, so I'm afraid you'll have to keep it as a souvenir."

"Um...no, no.  I was just wondering...you left so abruptly... if you were angry or upset."

"Oh no, not at all.  I simply had a plane to catch!  Well, there's the BART.  It was wonderful seeing you again -- I'll be sure to stop by the Plains next time I'm flying across the country."

Kevin is not a ghost. He's not a vampire.  He's just an ordinary guy, a bit eccentric, like everyone lucky enough to live in Gay Heaven.

Or maybe....

See also: Desperately Seeking Kevin the Vampire.; The Sunday Morning Orgy; I Go Home with the Amazing Invisible Boy.

My Date with the Vampire

When I was living in San Francisco, a newcomer showed up in church one Sunday: mid 30s, very tall and pale, with a long face, long hair, and a weird Satanic goatee.  He was wearing sunglasses, but otherwise dressed normally, not like a vampire.

He didn't join in the singing, but that wasn't unusual: many former Catholics and Lutherans didn't care for the rousing, evangelical-style hymns at MCC.

During the coffee hour after the service, he adopted the "stand and model" procedure of a cruise bar.  That wasn't unusual, either.  Lots of newcomers tried to cruise in church.

What was unusual was his approach: he walked up to me and said, without preliminaries, "I would like very much to f___ you."

My mouth dropped in shock.  "Um...but I don't even know you."

"My name is Kevin, and life is too short for trivial small talk.  I would like very much to f___ you."

I stared.

He took off his glasses.  His eyes were very dark blue, almost purple.  Creepy.  "You find me attractive, don't you?"

Not at all.  Tall, pale, long faced, with a potty mouth, definitely not my type --  but I found myself saying "Of course.  But shouldn't we have dinner first?"

He sighed.  "If you're intent on pursuing bourgeois courtship rituals, I suppose we can stop for a hamburger on the way."

No way was I going home with this guy!

But I found myself following him out the door.

Kevin took me way up to the Richmond District, 45 minutes from the Castro, to a place called Bazaar.  It served nouvelle cuisine Japanese-Italian synthesis sandwiches that left me hungry.

I admit that he was interesting to talk to.  We were both into the paranormal, and he had a wide repertoire of stories about ghosts, aliens, and the Illuminati, rumored to be controlling human history behind the scenes.

But he dismissed nearly everything else as "bourgeois" or "infantile," and when he kissed me, his mouth tasted of cigarettes and booze.  I nearly gagged.

After lunch we walked down to the Green Apple Bookstore on Clement, where Kevin bought Jung's Psychology and Anarchy and Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger.  I had my eye on some gay comix, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I bought Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.

Then he said, "Now that we've satisfied your infantile need for preliminary social activity, I believe we have an appointment to f____."

Kevin was unattractive, elitist, creepy, and vulgar.  No way was I going home with him!

But I did.

You're probably expecting a weird ghost house with walls panted black, but it was an ordinary apartment near the Green Apple, with a very bright dormer window and prints of French impressionist painters.

Kevin was impressive beneath the belt, but still, the f___ was unpleasant.  Lots of oils and weird-smelling incense and Tantric sex rituals (look it up).  And he smoked and drank throughout.  Kissing him was like kissing a bar at last call.

It was nearly dusk when I finally left Kevin's apartment: the unpleasant f___ and cuddling afterwards took three hours. No way was it going to happen again!

But it did.

Every three or four days, Kevin called out of nowhere and said "I would like very much to f___ you."  Then somehow I found myself at his apartment for three hours of oils, incense, Tantric sex rituals, and cigarette breath.  We sometimes went out to dinner or a movie first, "since you're so hung up on bourgeois dating rituals."

In retrospect, I could have easily said "No, thank you" or "I'm busy just now."  But instead, I dropped everything, cancelled plans, and went over.

Once he knocked on my door at three a.m.  I let him in.

It was like I was hypnotized.

Some other weird things about Kevin that I didn't think about until later:

1. I rarely saw him eat anything. When we went out to dinner, he ordered an appetizer and just picked at it.  His refrigerator contained nothing but soda and beer, seltzer, and cream for his coffee.

2. I rarely sleep, either.  When I spent the night, we cuddled for awhile, and then he turned on the light and picked up a book.  In the morning, he awakened me with a cup of coffee.

3. I've never needed an alarm clock.  I wake up at 6:00 every morning, regardless of when I go to bed or what I was doing the night before. But after spending the night with Kevin, I slept until 8:00, 9:00, or even later.

4.  He talked about his childhood, his coming out story, his family, and his job, but afterwards I didn't remember any of it.

5. People couldn't see him unless he wanted them to.  When he saw someone attractive approaching us, he stood perfectly still, and instead of walking around, the guy would slam right into him!  "It's a good way to sneak a grope in," Kevin said with a grin.

Unattractive, elitist, vulgar, and invisible!

If I couldn't break up with him, I could scare him away.  I tried the scariest thing I could think of: meeting the relatives.

"My parents are flying out for a visit.  I'd love for you to meet them."

"I'd be happy to," Kevin said.  "You'll introduce me as The Man I'm F__ing, of course."

Ok, then, how about commitment:  "Isn't it about time we moved in together?"

"Certainly, if you wish.  Perhaps that would assuage your bourgeois guilt over f___ing for its own sake."

Wait -- Kevin wanted me to move in with him?

Before I knew what was happening, we had been "dating" for six months.  I was being asked "How's the boyfriend?" about ten times a day, and anyone who invited me anywhere said "And Kevin, too, of course."

If I wasn't careful, we'd be attached for life!

My First Kiss, from Greg the Boy Vampire

Rock Island, October 1969

I'm pretty sure that I kissed the boy next door when we got married  in the first grade, but it was a purely ritualistic kiss, necessary to seal our bond.  My first unscripted kiss was in the fall of 1969, in fourth grade.  But not with my boyfriend Bill

I used to rush home from school to catch most of Dark Shadows (1966-71), the Gothic soap opera about tortured vampire Barnabas Collins. Bill didn't like it -- he only liked science fiction -- so he would sit in the bedroom reading comic books until it was time for Cartoon Showboat, or else come over after.  So I invited Greg, a fourth grader who was taller than me, with brown hair and braces, well-built but preternaturally pale, as if he had never been in the sun.

Greg liked science, like Bill and me, but he was also a fan of the paranormal: haunted houses, Bigfoot, UFOs, fairies, demons.  He had a painting of Lucifer falling from heaven on his bedroom wall.

He first introduced me to Greek mythology by lending me one of his books.  I remember a picture of a hairy satyr with goat legs and horns, his arms wrapped around a muscular teenager who was playing a five-reeded flute. They were both naked. (I think it was this famous statue of Pan and Daphnis.)

One day Greg and I were watching Dark Shadows alone -- Bill was coming over later -- when suddenly he jumped up and ran into the bathroom. He returned with a bath towel tied around his neck like a cloak. He raised his arms like vampire claws and exclaimed “I am Barnabas Collins!"

"You'd better be!" I said.  "If my mom catches you with that towel, you're dead!"

"I am a vampire!" Greg continued.  "See my fangs?"  He opened his mouth to reveal sharp chiseled canines.

Fake fangs! I thought. He must have gotten them from the Dark Shadows game, which came with a set of "real' Barnabas fangs. But they looked real.

“If you’re a vampire, why can you go out in the daytime?” I said, trying to play along, but also somewhat disturbed. Part of me was wondering if Greg really could be a vampire.

“Barnabas goes out in the daytime!” Greg said in an impatient tone. Vampires aren’t magic! They just suck blood.” He flounced atop me and knelt on my lap. “I’m going to suck your blood right now!”



Before I could protest, Greg’s mouth was clamped down against my neck. I felt his lips, the hard plastic of the fangs, his tongue -- and shoved him roughly aside.  "Get lost, Spazz! If you suck my blood, we can’t be friends anymore.”

Pouting, Greg returned to his seat.  “Barnabas sucks Willie’s blood. It doesn’t hurt. It feels groovy – like a kiss!”

“Boys don’t kiss!”

“Sure they do. Like this.” Greg took out his fake fangs, leaned forward and kissed me briefly on the mouth.  It was cool and hard, but still exciting.  My heart was pounding.  

I pushed him away and yelled "Knock it off!"

Apparently discouraged, Greg didn't try to kiss me again, though we continued to be friends until his family moved away, shortly after we visited A Little Bit O'Heaven in sixth grade.

And when I tried to kiss Bill, he always pulled away,  so I got his cheek.  I didn't succeed in kissing anyone on the mouth until junior high.

Gay Ghosts, Vampires, Aliens, and Paranormal Bogies

I love the paranormal. Alien abductions, mysterious disappearances, time slips, vampires, ghosts.  Those few paranormal experiences I've had in real life can usually be explained as misinterpretations and exaggerations, but still they're fun, suggesting a world beyond the fields we know.

Childhood

1. The Naked Man at the Crossroads.  Ok, this happened to my great-grandmother, not me, but it was still a spooky story, especially hearing it in a house trailer in the deep woods of Indiana, late at night, with the wind howling outside.

2. The Naked Man in the Peat Bog.  My Uncle Paul always told us to never go near the peat bog, because a naked man lived there, and he would eat us.  But one day we went to the peat bog anyway, and sure enough, a naked man wearing a weird mask chased us.  Maybe it was Uncle Paul's friend, trying to scare us.  Maybe not.

3. Greg the Boy Vampire gave me my first real kiss.  At least he said he was a vampire.

4. The Naked Indian God.  At the annual Pow Wow in Rock Island, Bill and I saw an Indian youth, one of the dancers, peeing in the woods.  Or doing something else.  When he saw us, he vanished.  Are you starting to notice a pattern here?  Sublimated same-sex desire is visualized.

High School

5. Davenport House, where the first European settler to the Quad Cities lived, has a reputation for being haunted.  When we were in high school, we decided to check.

College

6. The Ghost Artist in the Basement. I didn't like going down to the basement, where the previous owner kept an art studio.  It hadn't been touched since he died; I kept thinking that he was just upstairs getting a drink of water, and he would be back  One day I saw him hunched over his easel, drawing pictures of naked men.

7. The Bell Tower at Augustana: if a virgin was kissed there, the bell would ring.  I tried to kiss Adam, the bookstore manager, but we were detained.

8. Getting Intimate in the Haunted House. Joseph from the Gay Student Association at Indiana University asked me to help him help clean out his great-aunt's house.  We got intimate in his old room.







California

9.  West Hollywood was oddly bereft of the paranormal, unless you count my date with Richard Dreyfuss, which was actually more about discussing the paranormal.

10. But San Francisco was overbrimming with ghosts, bogies, and the unexplained, like Kevin the Vampire.

11. And I went home with the Amazing Invisible Boy, who no one could see except me, and who vanished before we can get into the bedroom.  Maybe he just left, but then why was my apartment door locked from the inside?

12, And when David and I were driving home from the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and we saw a UFO.  Or maybe it was the planet Venus.

New York

13.  New York was full of paranormal experiences, too, like the exorcism of the homophobic demon.

14. And the Man in Black who cruised me on Christopher Street.  I still think he was an alien, not a priest.

15. Sometimes you couldn't tell if a guy was a paranormal entity or just eccentric, like the time traveler from the 1930s.

16. And at our 20th class reunion, Erik told me about his encounter with a naked Icelandic god.

17. Ozzie tells how he met John F. Kennedy, Jr. at a bathhouse.  On the day he died.











Florida

18. I'm going to count the gay psychic angel, who told me about my past lives. I'm pretty sure he wasn't an angel, just a very cute guy.

Upstate

19. The Satyr.  Was he just a name-dropping bear with a priapic Kovbasa++++, or a mythical being who transcended time and space?

The Plains

20. The Plains is all windswept prairie, tailor-made for weird revenants.  Like Phil the Truck Driver, #20 on my Sausage List, who looks exactly like my Dad's best friend from the Navy -- 50 years ago.

21. The Hookup with the Hobbit.

Edward's Hookup with an Angel or Demon

This story happened to my roommate Edward, the art appraiser I lived with in the East Village.  When I knew him, from 1998 to 2001, he was in his late 50s and early 60s, tall, husky, tanned, white-haired, slightly feminine, and eccentric.

But back in 1958, he was Eddie, a 18-year old high school boy growing up in Houghton, on the isolated Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Not aware that he was gay yet -- not even aware that same-sex desire existed.

But he knew that he was different: he was in the drama club and the musicale, he loved painting and sculpture, and he especially loved looking at the semi-naked men in muscle magazines like Physique Pictorial.

He tried to get intimate with girls, twice.  The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.

When he graduated from high school, his father insisted that he join the military Maybe the all-male environment would make a man out of him.

He was fluent in German -- his parents fled Nazi-occupied Austria when he was four years old -- so he was stationed at an air force base near Kaiserslautern, West Germany, and given a job as a translator.

One evening his friends talked him into walking to a popular tavern on Kindsbacher Street, where they would meet some hübsche Mädchen.  He was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of Mädchen, hübsche or not, so after about an hour, he wandered off into the night.

He was not drunk -- I repeat, not drunk.

He started walking north and west, until he was on a country road, now the L363, on the way to Steinwenden.  Open fields broken by an occasional groves of trees.  There were no streetlights, but it was a clear night, with a very bright full moon.

Suddenly a shape burst up from a new field and flew across the night sky.  It swooped down so close that Edward instinctively threw himself to the ground and rolled into a ditch.

A bomb?  No.  A bird?  Maybe -- but enormous -- he estimated the wing span at ten feet.

A condor?  A hawk?  How big did hawks get in Germany?

It swooped down again, this time more slowly, its wings fanning the air.  It hovered over his prostrate body.

It was a human!  A man, about 5'5" tall, Caucasian, hairless, very muscular. His wings were like eagle wings, with feathers. They were vibrating but not flapping -- apparently he didn't need them to fly.

"How did you see such detail in the dark?"  I asked.

"The moon was very bright. But still, I couldn't see everything.  I couldn't make out a facial expression."

Edward tried to scream in terror, but no sound came out of his mouth.  The winged man hovered only a few feet over him.  His gigantic penis -- easily 10" soft -- hung down.  It was uncircumcized.

"You could tell that it wasn't circumcized, in the dark?"


Lower, lower.  Edward tried to scramble out of the way, but he couldn't move.  The fanning wings -- had they paralyzed him?  He had just seen The Horror of Dracula (1958) with Christopher Lane.  Was this a vampire, getting ready to feed?

Lower, lower. The winged man had beautifully sculpted muscles and a Kovbasa+++++.   Edward was terrified, but also aroused.  He unzipped, pushed down his pants, and displayed his own erect penis.  It was big by human standards -- all the guys at the base admired it -- but tiny compared to the winged man's.

"Wait...you said you couldn't move!"

"Who's telling this story, me or you?"

Lower, lower.  They were only inches apart.  Edward still couldn't make out a face, but he felt the winged man's penis, now erect, a rod of iron, brushing  against his legs, then pushing against him, between his thighs.  He thrust over and over and over, wordless, savage.

Edward tried to scream.  The pressure was tremendous.  But he was also elated, hot with passion for the muscles, for the penis.  He wished he could move his hands to hold the winged man, draw him close.

The winged man shuddered with an explosive orgasm.

Then, without a sound, he flew off.

Edward lay there, drenched, waiting to see if he would return.  After awhile, he finished off himself, cleaned up, and walked home.

He returned to the spot where he saw the winged man many times over the years, most recently in 1990.  But he never saw it again.

He kept the handkerchief that he used to clean himself off with, a memento of the moment he realized that he was gay.

"Wow, quite a dream!"

"It wasn't a dream.  I was wide awake.  I remember every moment."

My friend raises his glass in a toast.  "You win!  That's the best coming out story I've ever heard!"

It certainly beats my coming out over John Travolta in Grease.

"Next I'll tell you about me and the Romanian vampire-hunter...."

See also: The Football Player Who Got Unstuck In Time.