My New Neighbor May Well Be a Vampire

I don't write this column to alarm people, but anyone planning on a sleepover at my new neighbor's place might do well to catch up on a little of this CNN breaking news: bring a titanium neck wrap and your Visa card, unlucky campers. I have it on very good authority from my dog that this dude is a vampire.

Granted, I haven't known the man long enough to make a definitive call on the whole vampire identification, but Foghat is rarely wrong in such matters. True, he did think the mailman was a body-snatched pod-clone copy of our old mailman for about six months last year, but that was only because the guy had started going to one of those fake-and-bake tanning salons that's half tanning beds and half a video store. And you don't have to be the exorcist to know that shit just don't look right.

Astute readers might pick up a little inherent Bricks bias in that statement, owing to the failure of my "Omar Bricks' Tan-o-Mat" a few years back, and that's true enough. I still think buying out an old Laundromat and replacing all the fluorescent ceiling lights with tanning bulbs was a great idea. Where else can you get a luxurious, Caribbean tan while getting something productive done at the same time? And who wants to waste hours sitting in one of those giant George Foreman grills wearing speed-swimming goggles like some kind of creepy-ass Matrix baby?

Not me, nor my investors. But it turned out in the end that I should have invested a little more into the science end of the whole dealio, since it turned out spending too much time under those tanning lights can bleach the pigment out of your skin fast enough to turn Bernie Mac into an albino. At least that's what happened to the dude I hired to run the place, I don't remember what color he was when he started there, but by the end he could do that disappearing Preadator shit in white rooms and snowstorms. Plus, somebody on the city council said something about the Tan-o-Mat causing low-level cancer in anyone who even walked by the sidewalk out front. So it's probably a good thing that the business wasn't very popular for the three weeks that it was open, and in the end our "bring your own water" policy was really a business-killing hidden blessing.

But none of this has anything to do with my new neighbor, who's about as tan as an Irish spelunking enthusiast. I haven't seen too much of him, to be sure, but he has been popping in lately as they've been putting the finishing touches on his new house, like the roof and an exterior wall to close in the room where I've been throwing all my garbage. It's a pretty nice house; I have to say, though it's a little cold at night since they still haven't got the furnace fixed from when I was using the water heater to ferment homebrew. But it's definitely a big improvement on Dale's old house, which had a security system and smelled like burnt oatmeal all the time.

Ever since I got the undead tip from Foghat I've been trying to confirm the dog's suspicions, which is a project in and of itself. I considered quitting my gig at the commune to dedicate more time to spying on my neighbor, but in the end I realized that vampire identification just doesn't pay like it used to. So I've had to rearrange my home schedule to allow time for scouting runs around the vampire house with the huge mirror I found in the Goodwill donation bin tied to the roof of my new Panamobile.

It's a pretty sweet set-up, actually, I've got my side-view mirror angled up at the mirror bungee-corded to the roof, which is pointed at the guy's house, so if he ever comes outside while I'm making a pass and the mirror doesn't snap off and kill the guy, I'll get a pretty convincing visual confirmation. That is, if the weight of the giant oak bureau that the mirror's a part of doesn't collapse the roof of my car first.

But like they say in birth control class, timing is everything. Bricks Out.

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