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One time it got so bad, my chest started smokin', and So
Another tough thing to get used to was the cravings. God Almighty, did I wa
Yet, having all the money in the world enables you to get creative—which is where the drug rumors started. I decided that I'd just have my good friend Dr. Nick inject me with blood once every coupla days or so. It beat the hell out of suckin' blood, and it allowed me to prevent turnin' anybody else into a vampire, something that would be a pain in the ass for someone without my resources.
Only problem with the injections—aside from the drug rumors—was that it made me get all bloated after a bad transfusion a few years back. You think I didn't know I'd gotten fat, baby? You think if it was just a matter of cuttin' back on the cheeseburgers I wouldn't a done it? C'mon, give the King some credit. The blood transfusions took a toll, but it was the only way I could avoid eatin' some poor bastard, so I kept on doin' it—whether it made me fat or not.
But now I'm just complainin'; feelin' sorry for myself. Truth is, for a while there, the whole vampire thing was great. I was lookin' lean and mean, losin' weight faster than a hooker loses her panties, and I experienced an increase in my physical abilities. I mean, let's face it: before I was turned into a vampire, I wasn't exactly the world's greatest karate master. Yeah, I tried hard, and practiced all the time (and paid Ed Parker and Kang Rhee a shitload of money to make me an eighth-degree black belt), but you look at those pictures where I was tryin' to show my stuff— pictures like Blue Hawaii or Speedway—and you can tell: I wasn't exactly a natural.
Now take a look at the concert footage of my acts in Vegas—after I'd been "turned:" I'm like a whole different cat out there, baby. I'm the Tiger Man. I'm nimble and fast and able to bend my legs one way and my torso another and my arms still another. My strength and dexterity were superhuman. Literally. And for a year or two, I was grate ful to be a nosferatu.
The Colonel knew the only way to keep the gravy train rollin' was to find some way for me to perform to a crowd in a controlled environment, where I'd be out of the sunlight, and able to stay indoors all day if necessary.
Sound familiar?
You said it, bubba: Viva Las Vegas! indeed.
It was perfect, really. Like my hairdresser, Larry Geller, used to say: Necessity is the mother of invention.
We woulda never played Vegas for all those years if it wasn't necessary for me to stay out of the sun. I'd a probably made another thirty pictures, and never had that great second-to-last (that's "penultimate" for all you college boys out there who think I don't have me a good vocabulary) chapter of my life before the infamous fall from grace. So, I don't know, even though my time in Vegas eventually brought me a bad case of the bloodsucker blues, I'm still grateful for the bumps in the road that led me there. And even though it was the whole vampire thing that led to my early demise, I'm still sorta glad for the experience.
The shows themselves? They were Fuckin' Great with a capital Fuckin'. Go look at the tapes—you'll see. Long as we made sure my microphone wasn't made of silver and room service didn't put no garlic on my burgers, I was a pelvis-gyratin', lei-wearin', kiss-givin', sexy sonuvabitch. A pure hunka hunka burnin' love if ever there was one.
But ... a fu
This Spidey sense—it was real odd: I'd be doin' my thing up onstage, and all of a sudden I'd start gettin' this ... this . . . buzzing feeling. Like I'd just drank a pot of coffee on an empty stomach. I'd have to stop movin' my hips for a minute to get my balance, and the first time it hit me, I happened to look out into the crowd, and I focused in on a pack of scumbags sittin' in the cheap seats. They smiled at me kinda knowingly-like—
And that's when I noticed their fangs.
Now, just so you know, I was not into the whole fang thing. Talk about puttin the brakes on the Pussy Express. Lemme tell you: fangs? Not attractive, baby. Not in the least. So along with doing my hair and personal grooming, Larry Geller also started filing my teeth down every two or three days. Again, like everything else, it was no big deal, and we just sort of made it part of our normal routine: hair, manicure, pedicure, teethicure. We found that a really coarse stock of sandpaper did the trick, and if we were really in a pinch, using a nail file also worked.
But these vampires in the cheap seats? They were livin' the vida vampira and they were damned proud of it. They made no attempt to hide their fangs—least, not from me—and even though I quickly realized they meant me no harm, I was troubled to read the papers the next day. Turned out a group of teens had been found murdered, their necks ripped open as if attacked by wild animals, their bodies drained of blood.
I knew those bloodsuckers I saw at my show were responsible, and it made me feel guilty about bein' one myself. I began to wonder if there was something I coulda done to save those poor kids.
I tried to put it out of my mind and carry on with the shows. But my Spidey sense (or "vamp vibe" as me and the boys started callin' it) would always remind me of the life I was leading. It would come and go depending on how close I was to a vampire or how many of them there were, but—just like my martial arts training—the more I studied the sensation of the vamp vibe, the more in tune with it I became ... until I realized that there were vampires all around us all the time.
A whole army of bloodsucking nosferatus.
A vampire nation, if you will.
Like all things in life (especially for yours truly), after a while the Vegas routine got a little . . . stale. Even aside from my increasing awareness of vampires, there was some dark undertone to the gigs after a while. In a nutshell with chocolate on top? I got bored, baby.
The whole thing started to feel a little bit empty. Sure, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liberace and Tom Jones and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson and Brian Wilson and Muhammad Ali and all those celebrities a few rungs down the ladder from me would come and hang out and pay their respects and sing with me back in the penthouse after the show (none of'em remotely aware that I was a bloodsucker), but... I don't know... it just got... well.. .old.
I began to resent the life bein' a vampire had forced me into. I yearned to quit the Vegas gig, maybe make another picture or two out in some exotic locale, and then play a game of football with the boys in the lawn behind Grace-land, the afternoon sun baking our skin into a golden brown.