Undead and Unwelcome

Chapter 3

Dear Myself Dude,

I can’t remember the last time I tried to write in a diary. This one will go the way the others went, I think. I’ll write like gangbusters for a week or two, then lose all interest in writing about my life and get back to living my life. But here I am again, starting a diary for the first time in over twenty years.

That’s a lie, of course. One of my psych profs told me in college that we lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The man knew his shit. I know exactly when I quit writing in diaries: it was right around the time I realized I had zero interest in girls, but plenty of interest in boys. I was fourteen, and kept waiting to grow out of it. Kept wondering what was wrong with me. Hoped it was just a phase. Prayed my father wouldn’t find out. Prayed no one in high school would find out.

The trouble with being a closeted homosexual is exactly this: you live with the agonizing fear you will be found out.

I hid until I was old enough to drink.

When I was sixteen, I tore up my last diary for the simplest and most cowardly of reasons: I didn’t want my dad to find it. Colonel Phillip P. Spangler’s only son a bum puncher? A faggot? A crank gobbler? He would have killed me, or I would have killed me, so best to stop writing things like “I wish Steve Dillon would dump that idiot cheerleader and blow me for an hour or two.”

So. Diaries. Specifically, new diaries. No chance the colonel will find this one; he’s in hospice, crankily dying of lung cancer.

It’s pretty rotten that I wasn’t sad when I heard. It’s worse that I reran his labs myself to confirm it. I was relieved. Poor excuse for a man’s only son.

My name is Marc Spangler. I’m a doctor, an ER resident at one of the busier Minneapolis hospitals, and I live in a mansion. No, I am not rich. Not yet . . . and probably not ever unless I specialize in cardiology, oncology, or face-​lifts. Fortunately, this is not the sort of job you go into in order to make money. Which is a good thing, because I found out (quite by accident) that when you break down my shifts into hourly rates, every receptionist in the building makes more money than I do.

But back to the mansion. My best friends are a vampire and the richest woman in the state of Minnesota (and, as Jessica herself would point out, not the richest black woman . . . the richest woman). In fact, they are my only friends. Once I left the shithole I grew up in, I never went back. And I never will.

I haven’t gotten laid in a while, but on the upside, I lead the most interesting life of anyone I know . . . except maybe for Betsy and Sinclair, the King and Queen of the Vampires.

Ooooh, Sinclair. Don’t get me started. Tall, broad-​shouldered, dark hair, dark eyes, long fingers, and when he and Betsy go at it, the entire mansion shakes. Those are usually the nights I go out and get drunk.

Mostly because I’ve always been wildly attracted to him, and partly because Betsy has unconsciously worked her charm on me . . . she’s about the only woman I’ve ever seriously considered sleeping with. And—don’t get me wrong, dude, because I love her to death—it’s just as well we didn’t hook up. What with the shoe shopping and the bitching about being stuck in a job she didn’t ask for and didn’t want, and the way she manages (quite unconsciously, I’m sure) to make everything about her . . . nope, nope, nope. If she was my girlfriend, I probably would have jammed a needle full of potassium into my heart before the end of the first week.

She has twenty-​eight pairs of black pumps. Twenty-​eight! I counted them myself. Then I counted again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, and got twenty-​nine. Those twenty-​eight or -nine pairs were maybe a third of her collection. Her love for fine footgear . . . it’s almost pathological.

Thing is, while I was debating trying sex from the other side of the fence, Betsy didn’t even know she was doing it. Getting into my head, inspiring me to wear a bit more aftershave than I usually do, making me want her . . . she did it completely unknowingly and by accident. My inner scientist wished I could have known her in life, so I could compare her premortem charisma with her “vampire mojo,” as she called it.

And why am I going on and on about Betsy’s unholy sex appeal? That’s not what I wanted to say at all.

Basically, I guess I’ve started another diary because things aren’t all happy-​happy-​yay-​yay, the-​good-​guys-​win anymore. I thought I’d learned that by the time I was in my fourth year of medical school, but I didn’t know shit about death back then.

I know a lot more, now.

People are dying. Good guys are dying. Friends are dying. And I just figure someone ought to be writing it all down.

Because one of these days, I’m worried they’ll be flying me in a private plane and I won’t be riding in first class, if you know what I mean.

The colonel might care. Might. I won’t be around to see it, so I guess it doesn’t matter.