Under The Lovely Bloody Rainbow

         I don't really know much about anything. I can't point out where I come from on a map. I can't do your taxes. I don't know much about growing crops. My life has been very sheltered, you see. I never really had the chance to go out much. When I did, it was just for a quick bite and then I came back. I don't want to say I'm shy or anti-social, but if I am, it's genetic.

         You see, growing up as a Vampire has some serious drawbacks. I would even go as far as to call it a handicap. We're not at all what you read about or see in the movies. Do you think we could afford a castle like Dracula? I grew up in a studio apartment in Queens with my parents. I was home schooled to the fullest extent of their knowledge, but they worked nights and slept days so to say the least I was left on my own for education. I was to follow in the family business, whether I wanted to or not. My father wanted me to join him in working the graveyard shift at our neighborhood 7/11. I've never really been much for serving people. Plus, running home at 5 in the morning to escape the sunrise wasn't my idea of a good career choice.

         Growing up, I had a lot of free time to think and ponder the meaning of my existence. In other words, I spent a lot of time drinking the blood of high teenagers outside my father's 7/11 late at night and it made me feel like a prophet. It really gave me a craving for dorritos and other chips, too. What's so strange about that is that my family follows a strict, traditional, Vampire diet consisting of mainly blood and meat. I never had much exposure to processed food. Sometimes, I would float down in front of the Burger King drive-thru and scare the customers into giving me their food. I would say something like, "Your food or your blood, fool!" They always gave me the food. Well, most of them.

         I wasn't totally useless, though. I didn't know much, but I could dream. I wanted to become more than what was expected of a young vampire. I always wanted to break away from the life my family had planned for me. The whole vampire thing just didn't have much potential. You can laugh at this if you want, but my dream was to become a cowboy. I spent most of my teenage years watching old western movies on tv while my parents were at work and I wanted to be the cowboys. To be on horseback in the open range with the sun filling the horizon was a life I would never be able to live, despite anything I could dream. Being young as I was, though, I'd had enough of my life and decided to take off. One night shortly after my 18th birthday, I left a note and walked out the door.

         I won't tell you how I got there, but I made it to Montana. I'll just tell you that getting there with no money required doing some things that are beyond embarrassing. I'll save that story for another time. I started working at a ranch where my main responsibility was doing the bitch work no one else wanted to do. I got fired when I didn't show up on the first morning I was supposed to work. I told you it would be hard to become a vampire cowboy. I didn't give up hope, though. Eventually I found a 24/7 ranch that was run by humans in the day and vampires at night.

         I fit right in with my crew. It was almost as if I had been born to work on a ranch. Sometimes, the humans played pranks on us and left piles of horse and cow droppings to be cleaned up. When this happened, we just laughed and drank the humans' blood while they slept. Nothing says, "got'cha!" like waking up as a member of another species. The ranch owner put an end to our prank wars when we converted most of his day staff to vampires.

         I didn't sleep much during my time at the ranch. I would stare out my window during the afternoon and watch the humans work. I wanted so badly to be out there with them, riding horses around the ranch and sweating under the sun. One afternoon, I witnessed a good downpour. The ranch hands returned to their quarters and I watched the animals cool off under the rain. The sun returned from behind the clouds and left this breath-taking beam of colors in the sky. In all the history of my people, we have been afraid of the light. For good reason, too. But this light was amazing. I followed the shape from where it began at our ranch and tried to imagine how long it could be, and what could be at the end of it. I imprinted its size and location in my memory. I was going to find the end of the light.

         That night, I left the ranch with our best horse and followed the trail of the light by memory. I rode for hours and the horse hated me for it. It threw me off a couple times so it could rest. I'd never bitten a horse and was considering it, but was afraid of starting a new superior race of hybrid flying, blood-drinking horses. Finally, when I felt that I had reached the end of the trail, I got off the horse and began to look around. After hours of searching, I gave up and started to make camp.

         I heard noise coming from the woods, and emerging from it was a small, delicate, and beautiful creature. Her green hat matched her jacket. She was far too well-dressed to be a homeless person. My presence surprised her, and she stared at me in confusion.

         "Are you here for the gold?" She asked.
         "The gold?" I replied. "I've been following a beam of light. Do you know of it?"
         Her face brightened and she beamed a smile towards me. I was beginning to forget more and more about the light. I'd found what I had been looking for for so very long.
         "Of course I do, silly," she laughed at me. "It's my rainbow and you've found it. No one ever comes looking for me these days. We are real, you know. I'm not like the Easter Bunny. I've got a lot of gold in this pot here. It's all yours now, sugar."
         "What if I want something else?" I asked her, gazing deeply into her green eyes.
         She placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head. "Now what else could you want?"
         I paused and began to approach her. I reached down to hold her little hand.
         "You."

         Ok, I know what you're thinking right now. I admit that falling in love with a leprechaun is destined for failure no matter what species you are, even if you're a leprechaun. There were some serious flaws in my logic back in the day. But go to hell. I was a vampire in love. We left together later that week. I hadn't realized it during my trip, but I had crossed the Canadian border while searching for the end of the rainbow. When we went through customs to re-enter the United States, I had to smuggle my new lady love in one of my duffel bags. Rather than becoming intimate with each other throughout our trip, my beaming and beautiful bride to be spent our first couple of days together in my bag wrapped in my intimates and dirty socks.

         Love is an adventure, but settling down is a chore. My mini-lover and I found a quiet town in South Carolina where we could be together in peace. By peace, I mean we were constantly receiving death threats and bricks through our windows. Our relationship was what some people would call an abomination. We weren't allowed to marry. My ittie-bittie-amore wanted to move up north to Massachusetts. We weren't gay, I had to remind her. We were just of different species.

         We lived off of her gold for a few years until it began to run out. Desperate, my slight and slender lady friend found a job as an elf at Santa's Village in the local mini-mall. During the winter, she worked overtime taking pictures with children and Santa. Defeated, I found work at a local 7/11. I first tried my luck as a stand-up comic, but no one found the musings of a destroyer of lives to be very humorous. Because of our work hours and my fatal reaction to sunlight, our relationship suffered. In public, my teeny-tiny sweetheart constantly had to prove her age to keep me from becoming a registered sex-offender. The public stigma of our relationship kept us inside for most of the time.

         Again, the world felt like a prison to me. I began to think more often of the ranch and being a cowboy. This wasn't why I left home. I didn't leave to work the graveyard shift at a 7/11 and sleep with a pretty but puny honeybun. To tell you the truth, we rarely slept together. Like I mentioned before, the scheduling conflicts of our lifestyles made it all very difficult. She got us into marriage counseling. Let me tell you what was wrong with that idea. First, we weren't married. We got thrown out of our first marriage counseling session and had to re-schedule to be seen for "couple counseling." Four weeks later we saw the same man. Second, it hurt me to go to those sessions. I mean that literally. You would think that venturing out during the middle of the day was enough to prove my love to that microscopic midget.

         I'd like to tell you that it had a happy ending. I'd like to tell you that we reconciled and everything is perfect. I'd rather tell you that we ended up back at the ranch and I followed my dream of becoming a cowboy. We ran into an unexpected problem shortly after we began counseling. You see, I didn't think that different species could reproduce, so safe sex wasn't really my thing. Nine months later, my dwarfish devil of a lady gave birth to a hybrid vampire/leprechaun. You may read that and think it's very cool, but let me tell you it's not. My son really got the worst of both worlds, being a runt of a blood sucker. When he began teething, he turned my little leprechaun into a shrimp sized vampire. I don't know, maybe that is kind of a happy ending after all. At least we can finally spend some time together now.