Modern Vampires

When I was in my twenties, I dated a girl (whom for the sake of everybody’s privacy I will call Gilly, in case she is still alive somewhere) from a strange family.  They were a timid bunch, and I found out why when I met Gilly’s mother.  She was a large woman, with a presence about her that went beyond size.   When she was in the room, she seemed to bend space around her, like some spiritual black hole.  Her husband and children were terrified of her, and careful what they said about her even when she wasn’t there, as if she could hear them from afar.

To say that Gilly’s mother hated me from the start is probably not too strong a statement.   It began with the cat.  My family had cats, and cats are not supposed to be on kitchen counters.  If one jumped up there and you were in the vicinity, you knocked it off.  The cat would land on its feet, none the worse for the knock, and it learned that it shouldn’t go on the counter when people were around.  Of course, at night, all bets were off, so you didn’t leave anything out to tempt them. 

Gilly’s mother had cats, Persians, one of which jumped onto the kitchen counter as I was being introduced to her for the first time.  I instinctively reached across and swept the cat off.  Not really a knock, just a sweep.  This was met by a gasp from Gilly and a cold stare from the Mother.  Apparently, the cats had free run of the counter, and I had broken an unwritten rule by touching one of them. Later, Gilly admitted that she had cheered silently when I did it, and confessed to some rather grisly fantasies as to what she really would like to do to those cats.   Given the symptoms on display, I probably should have broken off the relationship at that point, but Gilly was pretty and sexy, and I was an idiot male in my twenties.

As I became more involved with Gilly’s family, I noticed that almost everything that happened in that house revolved around the needs and ego of the Mother.  I suspect that there was physical abuse, but no one ever admitted to it happening, so strong was her hold on them.  Once, I brought Gilly home late after “parking”, as we quaintly called make-out sessions in my tiny Datsun sedan.  The Mother was waiting to ambush us in the front hall, demanding to know where we had been.  Gilly, in an unusual act of defiance, told her exactly what we had been doing, while I nervously lit a cigarette.  This was apparently the last straw, and the woman slapped me across the face, knocking the cigarette onto the floor.  In response, I pushed the Mother against the wall and told her that I was not one of her children, or her husband, and if she ever slapped me again, she would be very sorry.   

After that, she stayed out of my way (and I out of hers, I have to admit).  But her hold on the family, if anything, grew stronger.   Even I began to feel the woman’s pull:  I would find myself considering my every action, even actions that had nothing to do with Gilly, in light of the Mother.  My own (real) family faded to unimportance in my calculations.  It sounds silly in retrospect, but I started to feel as if my essential “me” was being sucked out, and I was being turned into another member of the Mother’s… disciples?  Slaves?  Larder?  

Things finally came to a head when Gilly announced that she was moving out.  She would live with her brother across town, moving far enough (we hoped) from the miasma of bad feelings and fear choking that house that she would be able to breathe.  By this point, it felt like the conflict between me and the Mother had become an actual battle for souls, mine and everybody else’s in the family.  Planning for the inevitable clash, I talked to all of her siblings to enlist their aid in breaking Gilly out, and spent a number of very weird hours drinking coffee with her father in the local diner.  He told me things that he had probably never told anyone in his life, and I learned some of the strange history that had brought him to this point.  The woman he had married, the mother of his children, was the daughter of Nazi sympathizers, and their collaboration had caused them to be driven out of their little European town after the war.   How he had become enamored of her, I couldn’t understand, but he was an artist, and such folks are driven by urges and needs that us common folk may not get.   Or possibly, she had just been pretty and sexy in those days, and he just an idiotic male in his twenties.       

After several confrontations, Gilly finally succeeded in moving out, demonstrating that the Mother could be defied.   The younger siblings (I think) benefitted from the lesson:  From what I heard in later years, they were able to leave the nest without major complications.  Oddly, with the Mother’s reign broken (if it was), Gilly’s and my relationship began to fizzle.   It felt empty, as if the battle had been won, but the Mother had been the focal point of our relationship for so long that there was nothing to replace her.   Even the absence of Mother left a distortion in our lives.  At any rate, despite some talk of marriage (which had never been in my plans, to be honest), Gilly and I went our separate ways.

I don’t know what became of Gilly and her siblings.  I hope that they were able to establish themselves as independent souls, or at least that they ended up orbiting a more stable gravity well, one that did not threaten to absorb them.  But I think that I now know where the legend of the vampire comes from.  There are entities disguised as human beings that feed on the essences of others, for which blood is a perfect metaphor.  Their needs are simple and paramount:  If you won’t feed me willingly, I will eat you.  Calling it a psychological disorder minimizes the entity, making it sound like something that can be cured with the right drug combination.   I prefer to call it evil.  There are evil people in the world, and evil can be catching.  An entire nation caught it from Hitler, and maybe some of that evil remained after Hitler was gone, and ensnared the daughter of Nazi sympathizers.  In turn, she became a monster, a mortal monster to be sure, but a monster nevertheless.   She maimed six human souls that I know of, and possibly many others that I don’t.

Which brings me, of course, to Donald Trump.  If ever there was a cesspool (or black hole, if you will) of self-interest, greed and hatred more well-defined than Trump in American history, I cannot think of one.  Compared to Trump’s feckless evil, Richard Nixon looks merely rude.  Trump has made the unspeakable speakable, the unthinkable thinkable, and hate acceptable.  That is his sole contribution to our culture:  It is okay to hate. Hate was there before him, but it was tamped down by shame.  Along come Trump and says “It’s okay!  I am President, and I agree with you!”  And you get the Proud Boys, thugs and Nazis of various stripes, and evil can come to full flower.  His might even be the same evil I encountered in the Mother, resurrected by circumstances and a willing host. 

How do vampires make new vampires?  In the legend, by draining their blood, so all that is left is a soulless shell.   I remember Rudy Guiliani as a reasonably decent person, who after 9/11 took on the job of leading a wounded city and succeeding.  Once he entered Trump’s orbit, he was reduced to the travesty that we see today.   How many others, famous or unknown, have been destroyed in the same way?   I pity Trump’s children, because I see in them what I saw in Gilly’s family, victims of a monstrous hunger. 

I used to think that Trump only trashed anything he touched.   Now, I suspect it is something much darker.  He takes people that were once good, or at least willing to try, and re-makes them as smaller, emptier reflections of himself.