You Suck: A Love Story

imprisoned a sentient, feeling being in a shell of bronze, even if he is an evil dick-weed from the Dark Ages? But they couldn’t let him out. He’d kill them for sure if they did. Really kill them, too, a complete death, the kind with no nooky.
    Suddenly Tommy was angry. He’d had a future. He might have been a writer, a Nobel Prize winner, an adventurer, a spy. Now he was just a foul dead thing, and the furthest his ambition would reach was his next victim. Okay, that wasn’t really true, but still, he was pissed off. So what if Elijah was trapped in bronze shell forever. He’d trapped them in these monstrous bodies. Maybe it was time to do something monstrous.
    Tommy picked up Jody’s statue and threw it over his shoulder and, despite his great vampire strength, followed it over backward as it clanged against the floor. Okay, it had taken the two bikers and a refrigerator dolly to get the statues up here, maybe a little planning was in order.
    It turned out he could move the statue pretty efficiently if he slung it over his back and let one of her feet drag, and so he did, down the steps, half a block down the sidewalk, and back up the steps of the new loft. Bronze Jody looked happy in the new place, he thought. The turtle took half as long. She, too, looked pleased with the surroundings.
    As for Elijah, Tommy figured what was the point of being in a city on a peninsula if you didn’t take advantage of the water now and then. And Elijah evidently liked the ocean, since he’d come to the City on his yacht, which Tommy and the Animals had managed to blow to smithereens.
    The vampire statue was even heavier that Jody’s, but Tommy felt energized by the idea of getting rid of it. Just a short twelve blocks to the sea and that would be that.
    “From the sea ye came, and to the sea ye shall return,” Tommy said, thinking that he might be quoting Coleridge, or maybe a Godzilla movie.
    As Tommy dragged the bronzed vampire down Mission Street, he considered his future. What would he do? He had a lot of time to fill, and after a while, figuring out new ways to jump Jody would only fill up a part of his nights. He was going to have to find a purpose. They had money-cash the vampire had given Jody when he turned her-and what was left of the money from the sale of Elijah’s art, but eventually that would run out. Maybe he should get a job. Or become a crime fighter.
    That’s it, he would use his powers for good. Maybe get an outfit.
    After a few blocks Tommy noticed that Elijah’s toe, the one that was dragging on the sidewalk, was starting to wear away. The bikers had warned Tommy that the bronze shell was pretty thin. It wouldn’t do to unleash a claustrophobic and hungry ancient vampire when you were the guy who had imprisoned him, so Tommy stood the vampire on the corner for a minute while he dug through a trash bin until he found some heavy-duty plastic Big Gulp cups, which he fitted on the vampire’s dragging foot as skid protection.
    “Ha!” Tommy said. “Thought you had me.”
    A couple of guys in hip-hop wear walked by as Tommy was fitting the cups on the vampire’s feet.
    Tommy made the mistake of making eye contact and they paused.
    “Stole it from a building on Fourth,” Tommy said.
    The two nodded, as if they were saying, Of course, we were just wondering, and proceeded to move
    down the sidewalk.
    They must sense my superior strength and speed, Tommy thought, so they wouldn’t dare mess with me.
    In fact, the two had confirmed that the white boy in the ghost makeup was crazy-and what would they do with a four-hundred-pound statue anyway?
    Tommy figured he’d drag the statue to the Embarcadero and toss it off the pier by the Ferry Building. If there was anyone around, he’d just stand at the rail like he was there with his gay lover, then shove the statue in when no one was looking. He felt enormously sophisticated about the plan. No one would ever think a guy from Indiana was pretending to be gay. That kind of thing just wasn’t done. Tommy had known a kid once in high school who had gone up to Chicago to see the musical Rent and was never heard from again. Tommy reckoned he’d been disappeared by the local Kiwanis Club.
    When he got to the Embarcadero, which ran all along the waterfront, Tommy was tempted to just chuck Elijah in the Bay right there and call it a night, but he had a plan, so he dragged the vampire that last two blocks to the promenade at the end of Market Street, where