I met Jesus years ago. My first year in college. I was looking for off the wall people for an art project I was doing and my roommate knew this group called the Nocturnia’s or Noctornians or something cheesy like that. They were a group of people who considered themselves vampires and were part of a subculture of goth subcultures. Since I couldn’t find any other people to work with I decided to go check them out.

Essentially it was this coffee drinking club that met at the Broadway Coffee House every week. They liked the walled off court yard where they could sit out in the darkness and say things like “The night speaks to me…. shhhh.. can you hear it?” (or maybe that is just a line from Near Dark). I’m not shitting you on that by the way. They really did speak like that. Especially if there was a new girl in the mix. Which makes sense since, most of them thought they were vampires.

When I pointed out that they were just rehashing old genre troupes about vampires that they gleamed from films and fiction they about threw me out on my ass. It was Jesus who told them to cool their jets and that I just didn’t understand. He invited me to hang out more with them and encouraged me to take the photos I needed for my project.

Back then he wasn’t a leader, he was just another guy hanging out in the ‘wear all black and eyeliner club’. He still had his shoulder length brown wavy hair and wore his Thors hammer pendant over the top of the chest hair that liked to peak up from his shirt. Total early 90s guru look, if the guru was wearing clothing that Hot Topic would be selling now.

Over the course of making the images I needed for my college project, I got to know the group pretty well. I’m not going to spend the time today writing up a theoretical talk about if “living vampires” are real. I’m going to leave you with this wiki link about the Vampire Lifestyle and then you can rabbit hole yourself to death researching it if you want (like this site here that is more directly related to the culture, Sanguinarius.org). 

*The above website link no longer works. It appears the founder of the site passed away in 2015 and soon after the site went down.

I find it interesting that not more websites are devoted to this niche culture, after all it was college bbs’s that really got people together. The N’s met because of that. Jesus did also, although he wasn’t looking for a community more than a vampire friendly food source. Which is why he wasn’t the leader of the group. It suited his purpose to just push them into more and more blood sharing. Making it look like it wasn’t him doing it. If I had been a member of that group I might of been so wrapped up in the culture of it that I could of missed it. Instead I was an outside observer and I watched as his control from the sidelines became absolute and then I called him out on it. In front of everyone.

Probably not the right thing to do in. Directly asking why he was taking in so much blood but never sharing his. I had pictures and pictures in my archive for the project of this trend. They turned on me, banning me from the group.

Bitches.

It turns out that by outing him I actually did him a favor. I ran into him a few years later, still in the black, still with the group but they didn’t have some shitty name anymore. They presented as any social group of friends would, just friends. He invited me back with his sexy smile and that direct eye contact that vampires have. I told him to fuck off and then something changed in him. He became obsessed with me.

“No one tells me to Fuck off.” he would say. So I’d tell him to fuck off again. Vampires can’t take no for an answer because they think they can bend everyone to their all mighty willpower. I didn’t know that then, I just thought he was being a dick, since I hadn’t realized he was not just a crazy person.

Let me be straight, those people who he was friends with, they were not really crazy even if they believed, or felt that they were a certain type of vampire. Eccentric is a good word, but not crazy. Jesus on the other hand was manipulative and socially controlling until he didn’t get his way, then he became obsessive. I had no clue at the time that actual vampires existed and I don’t think his group did either.

He started showing up at my work, at my house. Sometimes he’d be friendly, sometimes he’d be his true dickhead self. Then one night the he broke into my home and took me. Literally took me by force. Shoved me in the trunk of his car and drove me to Cliff Drive.

If you have never been to Cliff Drive before it’s this long rundown area of the city that used to be a glamorous park. Now it is an overgrown area where you can dump anything you would rather not see around. Every attempt to clean it tends to fail. When I was pulled from the trunk of the car by my fucking hair, the only thing I knew was that I saw trees above me. When he threw me on the ground I landed on broken glass, leaves, and a tire. That tire probably saved my life because he threw me so hard. I was like a child to him.

I quickly decided that he wasn’t on PCP, when he stood over me smiling that shit eating vampire grin that he has. Fangs out, Laughing. Then he said “I’m not going to give you the choice that I had”. All I could think about as he bit the hell out of me was that this monster, this vampire was misquoting vampire movies.

I’m fucking doomed to idiot monsters that are so high on being what they are that they regurgitated Hollywood.

I don’t remember much after that until the morning. He was gone, I was puking up the contents of my stomach as someone drug me up the hill. She stopped when she noticed I was awake and tried to give me some water. Instead she got a full face of bloody vomit.

That’s how I met Suzanne. She saved me from being turned into what Jesus wanted.

I’m fucking tired from being up all night, so I’m going to hit the sack. Maybe I’ll find time in the future to tell you how that all worked out. Obviously, I wasn’t turned into a vampire but at that point I knew they were real.

It set the course for my life for the next twenty years (give or take a few).

Vampires. Pieces of shit. all of them.