Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [101]
As Rice’s first vampire book opens, for instance, a mortal enters a vampire’s room, rather than the reverse. The young man has been enticed there for something illicit, thrilling: a story. The vampire promises it will be a good one. By all rights, the young man should be terrified. After all, he is alone in a room with an intense stranger he just met in a bar, a predator driven to drink human blood. But instead, the boy is utterly intrigued by this elegant, articulate character, the vampire Louis.
When I moved to San Francisco in 1985, the year the second book in the series came out, the fact that I hadn’t yet read the first earned me a joking reprimand from my new roommate, Rich: “Bad, bad homosexual!” as if I were a puppy who’d not been housebroken. He gave me a copy of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire along with another essential work I’d yet to read, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, deeming this one of his cultural duties as a gay man who’d lived in the Castro for more than a decade. The two books were night-and-day versions of life in San Francisco. Tales was a delightful breeze, set in the 1970s, pre-AIDS, while the lush, dense, and tragic Interview, though it had been published in 1976, seemed to have been written expressly for San Francisco of the mid-1980s.
The story of Interview, with its brilliantly simple setup, struck a chord with me at age twenty-four. It read like a cautionary tale about dating during an epidemic. In Louis you meet a supernally attractive, urbane man who says he just wants you to know him. He wants to know you. He invites you back to his place. You go, though you know this guy is dangerous. But he is so irresistible. You spend the night together, locked in a profound intimacy. Oh, the things you talk about. Well, he does most of the talking, but that’s okay. You get to stare into those amazing eyes, all the while knowing that if you’re not careful, if you let your guard down, he can infect you with what infects him.
I could appreciate Daniel the interviewer’s risk-taking for the sake of an extraordinary story. But I also understood Louis’s motivation. Though the safety of all vampires lies in each one’s silence, for now he doesn’t care. A power beyond him has turned him into something he loathes, a monster, and he knows he can never change. He consents to the interview for a deeply human reason, to purge himself of his secrets. For myself, as a young man who had just horrified his parents by telling them I was gay and moving to San Francisco—“You might as well commit suicide” was my father’s bon voyage—I saw in Interview something instantly familiar. It was a vampire’s coming-out story.
Early on in the book, Louis tells Daniel of the anxious final moments of his first night as a vampire. As dawn approached with its killing rays, he’d accompanied Lestat, the vampire who’d “made” him, to a room in New Orleans. Accommodations were spare, so the two men would have to bed together. “I begged Lestat to let me stay in the closet,” Louis recalls, but the elder bloodsucker just laughed, exclaiming, “Don’t you know what you are?” Lestat slid into the narrow coffin first, then pulled Louis down on top of him and shut the lid. The two would sleep face-to-face. The following evening Louis would awaken and take his final step in crossing over. He’d hunt for the first time and drink the blood of another man.
THE DESIRE OF THE UNDEAD TO SUCK AND SWALLOW MOUTHFULS of liquid life has more to do with hunger than with thirst. The blood drive is the sex drive in the world of vampires. In ours, conversely, sex