Anachronism
Meet a gangster who's out of time . . .

            I miss the goddamn 1930’s.

            I also miss the 1920’s, but it was the 30’s that were truly golden for me.  As a matter of fact, they were so golden that I never really recovered from them when they were over.  Even now, sitting in this little L.A. diner with a cigarette in one hand, a newspaper in another, and a cup of coffee in front of me, I look down at myself, wondering why there isn’t a bloody, gaping wound in my guts.  There should be.  Something that hurts like this needs to have a corresponding wound, after all.  I ought to be bleeding all over the starched white shirt I’m wearing under my natty black jacket.  My neat black tie should be blown to bits, along with my broad chest and the immortal half-vampire’s heart that beats within it.

            Yep, I’m a half-vampire, and that means that not only am I as eternal as any full-blooded vampire, but it also translates into immunity from the sun.  Though some might argue with me on it, I’d say half-vampires got the better end of the stick, because we not only get to live forever, but we don’t have to give up the daylight hours.  I don’t know how many sunny mornings Eddie and Sam and I all sat down to breakfast and chuckled over what chumps full-blood vampires were to have to go hide in the dark whenever the sun rose.  All three of us were half-vampires, and we were way up on the totem pole of Salieri family organization in Chicago.  While the Great Depression affected even other vampires with its crippling lows, we lived like kings and never worried about anything.  We rolled high, drank blood, busted heads, and in the process helped turn Don Salieri’s organization into a machine that even made Capone shake in his shoes.  We thought were invincible.

            But not long after Adolf’s panzers rolled into Poland and changed the world forever, so did ours, and by the time it was over, Eddie was dead by Sam’s hand, Sam was dead by mine, and I was left adrift in a world that kept changing so quickly that I gave up trying to keep up with it.  Besides, what was the point?  The world that I had been meant for was gone, and there was no going back to it.  My two best friends were dust and bones, and the Salieri family wanted me dead, and would never take me back. 

For you see, it was Salieri family business that broke up our trio, and it was the sort of business that didn’t just get swept under the rug.  Eddie and I had taken to doing some business of our own on the side, to build up our nest eggs and eventually amass fortunes that would last centuries, setting us up for the rest of our eternal lives.  We were also doing it to cement our own places in the mafia hierarchy, as both Eddie and I wanted to be more than the Don’s high-end henchmen.  We wanted to run the show.  Sam, bless his soul, wasn’t interested in that.  Sam was one of those guys that was content to follow, and was loyal as they came, which was our ultimate undoing.

What Eddie and I hadn’t counted on was that while Sam was like a brother to us and would have taken bullets for us both, his loyalty to Salieri came first.  In the early 1920’s, Sam had been a clumsy fledgling half-vampire, abandoned by his creator and threatened endlessly by full-blooded vampires, that Salieri caught trying to heist one of the organization’s fancy new cars.  Instead of having him killed on the spot, Salieri told Sam that he admired his chutzpah and wanted to offer him a job.  This was simply unheard of, because the Don himself was a full-blooded vampire, and even to this day, most vampires outside of Los Angeles treat half-bloods with the same love and respect that the Ku Klux Klan routinely shows to black folks.  However, Salieri was a forward-thinking vampire, and he wanted to get several loyal half-vampires under his hire, which would give him a definite edge on the other crime families vying for the biggest piece of the pie.  Salieri’s first recruit was Sam, and for not only sparing his life but also giving him an entirely new one, Sam was forever loyal to the Don, even above the friends he’d brought into the family several years later.

Believe it or not, Eddie and I understood that, which is why we didn’t let Sam in on any of our plans.  When the time came to take Salieri down, we were going to do it on the sly, probably setting it up to look like one of the family’s enemies did it, without Sam being the wiser.  That way we Eddie and I would have gotten everything we wanted without compromising our friend’s loyalties.  That’s how it was supposed to go, anyway.

Maybe if we’d been more careful, things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did.  Maybe if we’d let Sam in on things before they’d gone too far, and had discovered just how deep his loyalty to Salieri ran, we would’ve backed out and gone another way. Then again, maybe if we’d just been happy with what we had . . . there are times when you shouldn’t fuck with a good thing.  We got greedy, and we paid the price for it.  Eddie and Sam lost their lives, and I lost my two best friends and had been in a personal hell for over 60 years now.  All of us owed Salieri a great deal, and Eddie and I forgot that, while Sam remembered until the very end.  But even after I’d betrayed his savior, even after he’d tried to kill me, and even after I shot him straight through the heart, Sam was still my friend, and his last words were, “Business is business.  No hard feelings, pal.”  Those words had haunted me for six decades; the 30’s were over, my golden age was at an end, but I became a ghost trapped in time.  The world kept changing around me, even though in my eyes it had ended that sunny October afternoon in Chicago.

I couldn’t get back into the world of organized crime, because sooner or later the Don would have found me out; I’m not even two centuries old, while Salieri’s got several under his considerable belt, and even if I set up shop on the other side of the world, his connections would find me.  So I just drifted under the radar, moving here and there, still dressing and talking like I did back in that golden time, unable to let it go.  Many of the most successful vampires reinvent themselves periodically, updating themselves as the years go by, remembering who they are but keeping themselves contemporary, so as not to lose touch.  I’ve had many suggest to me that it might be time for me to update myself, but I don’t want to.  I may have been born in the 1850’s, but the time for me was the 1920’s and 1930’s, when everything in the world was right for me.  If I’d made it out of the 30’s with my friends and my life with Salieri’s organization intact, I probably wouldn’t have any trouble changing with the times, or if I did, I’d have two friends to stay backdated with me.  But I screwed up, and though I still lived, I felt like I’d been cut loose from the world.

There was this vampire kid named Steele who’d taken an interest in me, as he had quite an interest in Depression-era crime organizations, and we talked off and on, mostly about the 30’s.  He liked listening to my stories, and I was flattered that he had such an interest in them, especially since he wasn’t actually a kid and had been around for damned near 2000 years now.  He had stories that completely threw me for a loop, and he’d seen and done so many things that it would’ve taken him a century to tell me all about them, but he was more interested in hearing about my stories working with the mob.  That was part of the reason I thought of him as kid, even though I wasn’t even an infant compared to him.  The other reason was because he just carried himself as a kid.  If you looked at him, his eyes were sharp and intense, he always seemed to have a smirk on his face, and you couldn’t see any weight on his shoulders at all.  He may as well have been 20 years old and completely ignorant of the world’s hard knocks.  I’d commented on that to him, and that’s when he told me about vampires regularly reinventing themselves to fit their current era.  He said he’d gone through a major reinvention in the early 1960’s, totally immersing himself in the culture of the era until he may as well have been born in 1947 instead of two millennia ago.  He told me he went through minor updates every decade or so, keeping pace with the world, and that it helped him deal with his long years immensely.  Though he still very clearly remembered all of his hundreds of years, he told me he never really felt older than 30 or so, which I found amazing, because I wasn’t even 150 years old yet, but I felt every year of it.

Steele offered to walk me through my first reinvention, as he said I was badly in need of one.  I asked him why, and he said because I was an anachronism, a being out of time to a dangerous extent, and that it was only going to get worse as the years wore on.  I argued that there were other vampires out there that were more anachronistic than me, but Steele told me that they weren’t as miserable as I was, and all the ones he knew were gleeful in their anachronism, while I shuffled through my life like a zombie.  He’d looked at me earnestly and had offered to kill me, which had shocked the hell out of me.  I’d demanded to know what the hell he meant, and he’d shrugged as though it was no big deal, telling me that if I was just going to wander through life in a haze of guilt and regret with no desire to get out of it, I may as well be put out of my misery.  It was then that I realized that I very much wanted to live, despite everything, and I told Steele as much, informing him that I had no desire to just let somebody kill me like a little sissy, to which he nodded.  Though privately I had no idea why I wanted to stick around, because there wasn’t anything for me in life anymore.  Maybe I was just too used to living to want to die, I don’t know, but I didn’t like the thought of letting the kid cash in my chips just like that.  Steele hadn’t broached the topic with me again, but I knew he was watching me, though I wasn’t sure what he was looking for.  I suppose I’d be the first to know if he found it.

            I finished my cigarette and paper and left enough cash on the table to pay for fifty cups of coffee; the waitress had been nice and I didn’t really use my money for much of anything else.  I gave her a nod and a smile as I passed her, and she bid me a cheerful good-night, as she always did; the fact that I was a great tipper probably had something to do with that.  A few of the other regular night-owls at the diner gave me little waves and smiles on the way out, and I reciprocated.

One thing that I still prided myself on was that no matter how morose I got, I was still a personable guy.  It was something that had worked greatly to my benefit during my days working for Salieri, and it still got me good treatment no matter where I went.  Steele had told me that that quality was one of the main reasons that he wanted to help me out: he said that a nice guy like me shouldn’t have to wander through life like a lost zombie, and that he wished that there was some way that he could give me what I wanted.  I’d shrugged at that.

I’ll definitely say that I’m personable, but I’ve got some serious doubts as to whether I actually qualify as a nice guy.  After all, genuinely nice guys don’t shoot their friends, even if it’s over business, did they?  As I stepped out onto the sidewalk and let the warm L.A. night wrap around me, I sighed.  Shit, I didn’t know what the hell I was anymore, and sometimes I wondered why I even bothered trying to figure it out.  Letting that train of thought neatly derail, I lit up a new cigarette and stuffed my hands in the pockets of my coat, not really sure where I was headed and not really caring.  All I knew for sure was that I missed the goddamn 1930’s.

I turned down a deserted little side-street and meandered my way down the concrete for a time, and just as I flicked my spent cigarette aside, a raspy voice sounded from behind me.  “Johnny?  Johnny Jacobs?”

I frowned, irritated; I wasn’t in the mood to be interrupted.  “Who wants to know?” I asked, stopping and turning around to see two broad-shouldered men dressed in dark trenchcoats and fedoras standing barely three feet away from me.

The taller of the two held up a sawed-off shotgun, aimed it directly at my chest, and said, “Mr. Salieri sends his regards.”  Before I had a chance to respond, both barrels went off at once, ripping through my shirt and flesh, tearing my heart to ribbons.

As I fell to the sidewalk I could feel my rent flesh tingling and burning in the particular way that told me the slugs had been specially prepared with a poison that affected vampires; I knew exactly what it was, as I used to add the stuff to my bullets all the time.  It had been poisoned bullets that had killed Sam, just as he’d used the same kind of bullets to kill Charlie.  Now it’s my turn, I thought as I hit the sidewalk like a slab of beef, the life spilling out of me faster than my vampire body could regenerate it.  Even without the poison in the slugs, the massive damage done to my heart would have been enough to do me in.  Those two boys knew exactly what they were doing.

They looked down at me as lights started to come on in the windows of the shabby tenements on either side of the street, and the shorter one, a clean-shaven guy wearing a nice suit under his coat, leaned over and flashed his fangs at me.  “Sorry, buddy, nothin’ personal, but Mr. Salieri can’t let old debts go unpaid.  For what it’s worth, he said to tell you that he’s sorry it had to come to this.”

            I nodded.  “Omerta,” I said, blood oozing out of my mouth as I spoke the Italian word that meant so much to those in the world of organized crime.  “I understand.  Tell Mr. Salieri that . . . I’m sorry, too.”

            “Can do, pal,” said the other vampire, and he and his friend disappeared into the shadows, just as Charlie and Sam and I always used to whenever we conducted a hit.

            I let my head fall onto the sidewalk with a soft thud, the strength needed to hold it up rapidly disappearing as a pool of blood formed around me and grew larger with each second.  Though the neighborhood I was in was dimly-lit and mostly dark, the city itself wasn’t, and the light nearly drowned out the stars overhead with an orange haze of illumination.  But I could see a few of the brightest, and that was enough for me.

I heard a few people shouting and rustling around in the apartment buildings, apparently agitated by my execution.  That didn’t concern me, because it was as though every drop of blood that I lost was replaced with peace, and for the first time since my world had blown to bits, I felt at peace.  I was finally bleeding, and I didn’t mind a bit, because the last loose end had been tied up at last.  Sam had avenged our disloyalty to Salieri, I had avenged Charlie, and Salieri had avenged Sam.  The business had been taken care of, nice and neat.

As I gazed at the stars, the world starting to blur around the edges, I caught sight of a shadow peering down at me from the top of one of the apartment buildings, and it waved at me.  It was Steele.  I weakly waved back at him, and gave him a broad, bloody smile.  As my hand fell to the pavement and everything started to go black, I rasped, “Thank you.”