Vampires, pt. 1

Note:  I am prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.  While the two are closely associated, I have to distinguish between the two.  When I say exaggeration, I mean adding some things that didn’t happen to make a story funnier.  When I say hyperbole, I mean saying something is “the best/worst/craziest thing ever.”  I say this first to acknowledge this, and so that I can be honest when I say this story is 100% true and the craziest thing that has ever happened to me.  This story is true.  I have changed the names of places, and that’s it.  And this is part one of an inconsistent yet ongoing series of posts I will do about how much I hate vampires.

I was going to write a post on real vampires vs. movie vampires and then how much I hate vampires.  I was going to compare the ever popular Edward Cullen to Phil the Vampire, but then I remembered…not everyone knows Phil the Vampire.  As I have moved back home and left my college life behind me (sadly), I have a whole new set of friends to whom I can tell this story.  And now that I (sort of) have a new Internet community of friends (seriously, I’m AWESOME on Twitter), I have a whole new audience to share this story with.  So, here goes.  The story of Phil the Vampire.

As a junior in college, I got a job.  I have worked a lot of different jobs, and almost all of them were terrible.  This job was no different.  I was a cook at a late night chicken wing delivery place.  This was bad for several reason.  One, because the hours sucked.  Two, because it gave me unlimited access to free chicken wings.  The owner may or may not have not allowed that, but he also may or may not have wound up going to jail for a bunch of illegal tax evasion stuff.  Three, a vampire worked there.

See, the day after I started working, we hired a new guy.  His name was Phil, and he had just moved to Oxford, Mississippi, from Utah.  Phil was actually a very nice guy.  He told us his story – he had met this girl online and he decided to move to Oxford to live with her.  Cohabitation aside, it seems like a fairly reasonable deal, right?  Wrong.  There were details that were revealed later that…well…just made the whole thing weird.

Like the fact they both lived with her mother.  In a trailer.

There is no shame in living in a trailer, working as a delivery driver, or living with your parents.  I just say these things to introduce you guys to Phil, because that list of things is the most normal stuff about him.

Phil said and did a lot of weird things.  He took pictures in graveyards and tried to find orbs and shapes of things.  He told us things about his…um…personal life that we didn’t really want or need to know.  But perhaps the weirdest thing came one night in a conversation that came at closing time.  I was cleaning up around the kitchen area, because when you deal with raw chicken, you get blood everywhere.  But one day, Phil was watching me clean this blood up.  And he made this comment:

“I really like blood.  A lot.”

And then he walked away.

Remember earlier when I said that I tend to exaggerate things?  I started joking around with some friends that I worked with a vampire.  That quote is pretty much proof positive, right?  But there’s more.

A few weeks later, a co-worker told me that Phil would be on an A&E documentary the Friday before Halloween.  Phil claimed that after this documentary, he would become famous and we would probably never see him again.  My first thought was “that’s stupid.  Nobody ever gets famous off A&E.”  My second thought was “…wait, what?”  I made a mental note and then promptly went about living my life.

Then the Friday before Halloween hit.  I was at a friend’s house in Columbus, Georgia, and pretty much everyone else left except for me and my friend Taylor.  We were sitting there, playing Madden or something, and I thought to myself “self, why don’t you see what is on A&E, since this is the night Phil said would make him famous?”  So I turned on A&E.  And sure enough, there was a special called Modern Vampires.  After watching the first hour of the special, I was starting to feel a little more at peace.  A little more like what I knew was going to happen wouldn’t happen.  But then…at the beginning of the second hour…this happened:

In case you didn’t watch the video, it contains Phil (whose vampire name is Terran), Phil’s girlfriend (whose vampire name is something else…I won’t even attempt to spell it), them talking about being vampires AND THEM BITING EACH OTHER AND DRINKING THEIR BLOOD.

Let me say that in a different way…THEY WERE BITING EACH OTHER AND DRINKING THEIR BLOOD OMG OMG OMG WEIRDEST THING EVER.

So after seeing this, I ran outside (it was the only place I could get cell service) and called the restaurant and freaked out.  I said some things that ought not be repeated (seriously…how would YOU react if your co-worker was a vampire?) and then went about the rest of the night.  There’s really no way you bounce back from that.

The week after, when I went back to work, there was – I kid you not – a “Vampire FAQ” on the break table.  I perused it.  The only question that really stuck out was this (and again, I promise I am not making this up):

“Q: What does it feel like to be a vampire?

A: A lot like dancing naked in a warm summer rain.”

After that, I quit.  It was a combination of many things, but the fact that there was a guy who thought he was a vampire that worked there was a major part of the decision to quit.

But now that this introduction is out of the way, I can now compare TV/book/movie vampires to real life vampires.  So…be prepared.

To be continued…