Suburban Vampire

Greatness requires obsessive normalcy

Photo illustrations by Mark Wynne

I once stayed in a desperately normal suburban home, friend of a friend, while on a road trip to Austin. The couple had two kids and the dad liked Dragonball Z and the mom liked sangria.

After a few, they, to my great surprise, pulled out vials of blood that were hanging around their necks. “We’re vampires,” they told me. “Our master is very powerful. He lives in the cul-de-sac over.” They, apparently, never told anyone about this dark secret, but they trusted me. I wondered if it would be possible to change the subject back to Dragonball Z. “So, yeah, Vegeta is an interesting character…”

I left as soon as I woke up, passing a hundred homes exactly like theirs, as they faded back into the repeating patterns, lost in bleak anonymity. I could not find these people again if I had a gun to my head.

There’s a sort of truism that goes something like “If you think everyone is boring, it might be you.” More to the point, if you pay real attention to people, they will, almost without fail, shock you with their weirdness. It is the reason truth is stranger than fiction – you can’t, as it were, make this stuff up. If I hadn’t witnessed the opening scene, I would think it was “not believable” enough for a story like this. So it goes…

I hope you will notice that you are also not an exception to this rule: Everyone thinks they hold the most reasonable set of public beliefs and yet have a few secret beliefs they believe everyone is simply not “enlightened” enough to understand. What we fail to notice is that this pair of beliefs – light and shadow – are not independent, but a reflection of each other. Greatness demands their open war.

And here, I think, we land on the heart of the issue: If you, for example, live in a soul-crushing suburb that denies the reality of transcendence and instead only fulfills the bodily desire for comfort and physical security, you will act out the reality of transcendence in a negative way by worshipping some weird vampire lord of the HOA, who is heavily implied to be sleeping with everyone’s wives.

That is to say, for one, we all demand to take part in a great struggle of the age. In fact, I find, the more “normally” you have managed to shape yourself, the greater the cry for transcendence and the weirder the ignored call twists you.

Did you know Jack Kerouac, the famously anti-suburban rambling man of white-hot authenticity, lived for long stretches with his mother in the suburbs?

Here, we have the same heartbreaking normalcy as our vampire couple, but the by-product is wildly different. Kerouac started an entire movement – the tone of a generation of beatniks as a result of his shadow’s revolt against the brutal regularity of his homeland. He, for whatever reason, resisted the temptation to fall into some rinky-dink sex-taboo fixation that might have wasted his powers. His lust, more than for most, instead came out as great sentences organized into a wild book, which takes decades of practice and restraint.

This, I think, outlines the great chasm between Jack Kerouac and the rest of us: the ability to consciously wiggle our shadow behaviors and beliefs into the light, in the guise of a life’s work. It speaks to two things at once: It gives an explanation for why “normal” people tend to hide such strangeness, and it also means that this exact strangeness is greatness, misused. Kerouac transmuted the shadow into sentences. Most of us transmute it into private browser tabs.

This is the sad but also hopeful fate of the vast majority of people. Sad because nearly everyone wastes away their vitality by the twin songs of porn and envy, both of which are increasingly available on their phones. They scroll and scroll, unwilling to reveal to anyone what they spend the vast majority of their day peeping at, knowing in their bones that it is shameful, but finding great relief by that exact reveling in taboo, but therefore draining all the blood from their public persona, which becomes hollower, shallower and “nicer” all the time.

These days, taking the time to go to a suburban vampire meeting would be an enormous improvement over the mind-melting ubiquity of porn (and by this I mean broadly anything that you would be ashamed to have show up in your history) and otherwise looking at things that make you envious, by no coincidence, slowly hunching you over your glowing precious.

Hopeful, though, because, if you want to know where all the greatness you once hoped for yourself has gone, it’s clearly been sucked into your phone. It is not because of the phone, though. The phone just capitalizes on age-old spiritual masturbation by making it as frictionless as it has ever been.

This is an unbearable realization, because if you try to stop, you will realize that you can’t. Your persona can’t survive without its shadowy twin, and so both must die and be reborn. Practically, that means you have to relearn almost everything you do, like a stroke victim. Like the smoker who “can stop whenever he wants,” but actually can’t. Our public persona – even though it feels independent right now – actually depends on the shadow to exist and therefore both would change beyond recognition if integrated. The only way forward is to learn, little by little, to suffer withdrawals and, in the midst of the pain, feed the beast a scrap of something new – write that book or look into seminary. It takes time.

What emerges is work and a life that 1) does not elicit shame and 2) is still so authentic that it makes the sneering inner vampires fully quenched in their bloodlust. Something that makes people go, “Wow, I’ve always felt this way, but I could never express it.”

Being obsessively normal does not, then, mean living repressed in a suburb (or whatever sort of hell “normal” may or may not mean to you). That would only serve to make you secretly stranger. Being obsessively normal means, instead, to bring full-force authenticity to every mundane act of your life, and thereby make it mundane no more. If you’re a teacher, say, making each lesson somehow both terribly strange and yet infinitely recognizable, and so brand-new again. You gain the energy to do that by aggressively guarding yourself against any beliefs or behaviors that you yourself know to be shameful.

Once you set your teeth to do this – and you know this if you’ve ever really tried – you find that it is impossible. You need help. So, you also have to learn to ask for it. It’s even more humiliating than it sounds, actually, but at least then we know in which direction greatness lies. That alone is a great relief.

In short, greatness means bringing your inner suburban vampire into the light. What will rise from the ashes will not be another vampire, though, but a bird.