By VERNICIOUS KNID
I pleaded, I begged, I even tried to board a plane to Canada; however, Stone Cold Steve Awesome has a cousin who works for the TSA and Mr. Buttfist was flying the plane so that went a fat lot of nowhere.
And then when I got home Eddie Pissrex took a .44 out of his pockets and shot my bike tires (seriously?? Who the f**k carries a .44 anymore?! F**king hipsters).
And so, as I perfumed the air with my garlic-scented sighs, I resigned myself to completing this current assignment.
Vampires.
Goddamnit.
Luckily, this one has to do with some real vampires—the really f**king metal, pre-WWII kind who feed on infant blood and do a buncha freaky gothic shit like speak Romanian and drink absinthe.
Not at all like our current vampires, who are either sparkly little shitheads who can’t be killed or the f**knuts you see on TV who aren’t actually vampires, but “metaphors” or “symbols” or some other sort of enfranchised marketable shit instead.
Anyways.
Last week, archeologists at the University of Moscow discovered Nosferatu’s and Countess Báthory’s (aka the Blood Countess, the original vampire hot mess) remains in an unmarked Hungarian tomb.
Clutched in Nosferatu’s undead fist was a list of all of his living descendants, only one of whom still survives: that’s right, our very own Tonald Rhombus.
First, there was a long and painful battle with the legal system. Apparently, Richard Nixon was the primary executor of Nosferatu’s will, but, “he wasn’t available for comment,” Neckz ‘n’ Throatz, Nosferatu’s legal rep, confirmed. “So we put the job up for sale on the black market.”
H30, the American television network most known for the show “The Nopranos,” won the post.
“We were very pleased to work with President Rhombus,” the H30 PR peon said. “He not only is the heir to the oldest vampire’s fortune, but he is also the CEO of a proliferation of corporate interests, the most prominent of which includes the acclaimed TV sex-fest ‘False Blood’ and the fan fiction conglomerate formerly headed by Anne Rice.”
“I was bitten in grad school,” our president admitted to me in a late-night (duh) interview last Fangsday. “It fits, you know? I’m a Victorianist and being a vampire is about as Gothic you can get. So I’m pretty happy about that. Actually, I ran into Edgar Allan Poe the other day—”
“—Nevermore that,” I interrupted, impatient. “Do you have your own head-canon for the Nosferatu character?”
“What’s a head-canon?” he asked, momentarily nonplussed.
“This is probably one of those times when I’m speaking English except it’s from the Internet, so you don’t understand it.”
“Oh, OK. I don’t own a head cannon but that sounds super Gothic! Where can I get one and how many trustees can it fit?”
“Wut,” I said eloquently.
“I’ll add it to the budget for the ONE of a Kine program. You know, the Master Plan where we raise a shit-ton of cattle and then slaughter them for the harvest?”
There was an eerie red light coming into Rhombus’s eyes so I noped the f**k out of there in order to talk to some of the fans.
“Like, he totally has his own head-canon!” squealed Brittney Brittney, sophomore liberal studies major. “He thinks that vampires used to hang out with like Odysseus and Tennyson and shit and they have a home at the end of the rainbow. At least that’s what I thought he said in his Commencement speech.”
“That’s not what his Commencement speech was about, like, AT ALL. There were exactly zero vampires in that speech,” I gently reminded her.
Brittney Brittney rolled her eyes. “Mmkay, whatevs. I’m totally going to find one of their covens by my senior year.”
Brittney Brittney is not alone in her fervor for Rhombus’s vampire fandom.
The Asian Studies department has a vampire cosplaying party every other month, and Sweatlands, the sex and sexuality magazine, will feature selfies of people wearing granny panties and cheap plastic fangs. Even the English and Religion Departments have joined in on the fun.
“It’s so exegetical,” religion professor Mundungus Filcher said of their weekly fan fiction club.
“And,” added English professor Higglety Pigglety, “it’s very post-modern; very much a step forward for New Media Studies. We’re a little tired with post-colonialism and this seemed to be the easiest way to simultaneously lower our standards and explore new dialects of English.”
“Uhh…you just split an infinitive,” I said.
Pigglety beamed. “Now you’re bitin’ what I’m advertisin’!”
