The fog crept in like a sleek black cat, clouding Salem's Point in a dense, noxious pea soup, a funeral shroud which muffled the sounds of automobiles in the streets and distorted the blue and brimstone red neon lights of the gas station.
"Baseball Cap" Joe sighed as he pulled his beaten 87 sky blue Buick Skylark into the service station. He flipped open the gas cap and shoved the hard nozzle of the gas pump into the eager orifice of the car's gas tank. An eerie wind whispered through the maples that lined Elm Street; their skeletal boughs not yet bare of leaves that were now red and orange --candy corn that shivered in the cold and crisp October wind.
Joe leaned back against his car as the cold, hard nozzle gushed fluid into his hungry gas tank, pulling his Buccaneers coat tight against his tall, taut, muscular frame. The gas station, with its warm neon lights was comforting like a cashmere sweater. Joe had many times to buy gas, smokes and JD, to hang with his home boys and pick up hoochies. In fact, Joe knew the place so well, he worked there.
Its comfort was lost on Joe tonight, though, just as Joe was lost in thought. He thought of the strange changes coming over him just as the mist spread over the gas station. Joe worked as a coach for the local high school softball team, the Salemsville Sinners. Every time the boys scored, he would slap them on their buttocks. At first it was a quick and chummy slap, but he slowly found his hand being more and more prone to incorporate a friendly squeeze into this bonding ritual, his eyes more and more likely to stray over their smooth, lithe, nude frames as they washed and cajoled and brushed up against one another in the locker rooms. It was like a phantom slowly possessing his body. A gay homosexual phantom who was very scary. The boys were beginning to notice; he could tell by the way their ripe young globes tensed as his hand drew over them.
"Cold as th' devuhl t'night." An eerie voice observed from behind Joe.
Joe, not expecting the voice to come behind him as he had been deep in thought about his own sexual orientation, jumped and spun around, looking for the source of the phantom voice. A wizened old man stood at the pump behind him, gassing up his Subaru. He had whispy white hair, a crooked nose, and a wrinkly face. Bushy brows that hid two sickly yellow eyes that regarded Joe with cold, sardonic amusement. His cracked lips were set into a stolid scowl, and there was a scar or birthmark or possibly a cancerous mole on his chin. He wore a black trenchcoat that ruffled in the screaming October wind, and white socks.
"Yeah cold." Joe muttered.
"Not a night t' be caught out. No sir. Not fer man ner beast!" The old man's voice was nasal and raspy in a gravely sort of way. He seemed to have an accent, as though he were from Hungary or possibly Lithuania. He was also chewing tobacco, which he spit, which was a bad habit. Joe was suddenly glad he didn't smoke or chew tobacco, and that he wasn't fat. The old guy also had an eyepatch.
"Yeah." Joe muttered.
"Y' know they say that on nights like this, right 'round Hallereen, that the Foog creeps inter Salem's Point."
"The Fog?" Joe asked.
The old man cackled. His wizened old hand darted up to wipe some of the chaw juice off his chin. It was disgusting, and Joe was really glad that even though he might be gay, he was at least not into cigarettes or chaw. "You ain't nevuh heard o' it, boy? Well, let Ol' Bruce tell ye. Thirteen years ago t' this night, Reg'nuld Braflofski wuz livin' in the very same apartment up on Bates Avenue that yer livin' in terday! He was gettin' involved in sum hanky-panky with his man-friend in the bathtub when a water main blew, shootin' boiling hot water on to them both.
"Now I ain't no religious type, but I do listen to Billy Graham and Pat Rober'sin and send them all my soshil secur'ty money. I know that gay homersexyals don't go to neither heaven ner hell, but are doomed to walk th' urth 's the undead! Vampeers! Y'know boy that they kin change into bats and fog! It was said that 's they lifted Reg'nuld's nude, mangled corpse they hurd him say 'Because of yer incomputint plumbin' and lack of confermince t' the city building code, I will be back to haunt 'n forever change all who stay in this room!'
"Then he keeled o'er dead and then turned into a foog and flowed away out th' window. Others say he was buried. Ever since then, though, nobody goes out on foogy days in October, and nobody who stays in them apartments lives long. Y'see, they cover it up, boy! Don't think they want yer knowin' boot the hauntin' of Reg'nuld?" He laughed. "They'd ne'er let out th' apartment agin!"
Joe had purchased his sexy bachelor pad for a very low price, and had heard nasty, whispered rumors regarding the nasty deaths of former tenants who had lived in his apartment from his neighbors. The office always faked epilepsy when he tried to bring the history of the apartment up after finding strange stains in the bath tub that looked like they could have been blood, but he had never suspected any cover.
He looked back, and saw that the old man had disappeared into the eerie foggy night as mysteriously as he had appeared.
"What took so long?" Asked Bambi Petumpki, Joe's cosmetologist girlfriend who had been waiting in the car while Joe pumped gas and contemplated his sexual orientation and talked to imaginary old men.
"Nothin'." Joe said putting on his safety belt as he always did. "Let's go back to my place and make out, baby."
"Okay." Laughed Bambi. Though as they drove closer and closer to the apartment, and the fog got thicker and thicker, she seemed to lose her nerve. "Joey, I'm scared." She said, folding her arms over her red turtleneck sweater. An ex-cheerleader, Bambi was blonde and very thin. She had tan skin, painted her toenails, and Joe could see the outline of her double nipple piercing right through her sweater. They had been going out for four months. Joe had just met her parents a week before, and he thought her father was a prick. "Maybe it's just my feminine intuition, but I don't like how thick this fog is. It's like it's reaching out, Joey. Reaching out for you! Let's turn around, Joey! We haven't seen anybody on the road since we started from the gas station."
"Ha ha! You are just imagining things." Joe laughed, though the hairs were standing up on the back of his thick football player's neck. It was indeed true that they hadn't seen a soul since they'd made the left on Elm Street. The way she folded her arms over her ample breasts made him horny.
"Joey," She said. "Let's go back to my parent's house and make out."
"I don't want to do that." Joe said, "Your dad is a prick."
"You are not the Joey I know." Bambi said. "Drop me off here and I will just walk home."
"C'mon babe!" He urged, "Let's go back to my place, make out on the couch, chug some brewskis, and just, y'know, hang out!"
"Drop me off here!" She insisted. With a sigh, Joe pulled over, and watched as she stepped out of the car and stormed up the hill towards her house.
"I'll pick you up tomorrow afternoon!" He said. "Promise!"
He shook his head. He didn't know what she was going on about. He drove the rest of the way down the hill to his apartment, and parked his car in the garage. As he stepped out into the parking lot, he found that the fog had grown even thicker. As he walked to the main entrance, he seemed alone in the misty fog, and in its solitude, his mind was filled with swimming images of nude showering boys, dancing among a sea of yellow daffodils. Elton John music played softly in the background, like a sexy cashmere sweater. Their hips lightly bumped as the virile young boys danced together. Their hands were intertwined.
He slammed the door to his apartment and sighed. Someone, probably the half-retarded maintenance repair guy, had left the window open, and the floor was carpeted with swirling fog. He went to fix himself a half caf skinny mocha red eye over ice when he suddenly realized he had no idea what that was.
Cap sank down on the couch, turning on a local sporting event to try to take his spinning mind off Broadway musicals and interior design.
Big Fat Rubbery Gay Vampire Bat Reginald was flopping about in the sky on the way to a Cher concert when he spotted young Baseball Cap Joe watching a televised sporting event in a small straight bachelor pad below. He could see him, of course, as he had sonar. Reginald swooped down to the patio and returned to fat vampire form. His purple sequined cape was very gay, as were his yellow hot pants and queer rhinestone boots. FWOOSH! He opened the patio door SHWOOP! and crouched behind the blinds CROUCH! He clandestinely sashayed across the room and hid himself beside the big straight pizza boxes and girly magazines on the coffee table SASHAY! He capered in front of the TV as Joe dipped his hand into a bag of straight Fritos and hid beside the couch. CARDAMON! Stealthily, Reginald pranced in front of the TV again and skulked behind a floor lamp on the other side of the TV. TINKYWINKY!
"VWA!" Said Big Fat Gay Vampire Reginald in a deep and ominous voice, pouncing ambiguously from his gay hiding place. Lightning flashed and there was a very scary musical sting. "VWA!"
Joe lept from his butt groove in abject heterosexual horror. "AIE! Is my heretofore unquestioned sexual orientation about to be compromised in some dastardly yet unquestionably arousing homosexual erotica?"
"Yes!" Replied Reginald. He loomed with ambiguous eeriness above Joe, feeling the raw heterosexual life force emanating from the young man, beckoning him like a queer cashmere sweater in a bargain bin at the yarn barn. "But first try this!" He held something out in the palm of his hand. It looked brown and crusty.
"What is it?" Cap asked.
"A raspberry cream truffle!" Reginald replied.
"No!" Cried Cap, "God no! Jesus in Heaven no! Someone please save me!"
"Shout as you like," Reginald said, "But in the fog no one will hear you! They have all run! Run away from the fog of homosexual conversion! And now you, Heterosexual Baseball Cap Joe, you will be converted, and will walk forever among the Queens of the Night!"
"You can't turn me gay!" Cap cried. "I'm in sports!"
"Yes I can sweetie." Reginald said reassuringly. "Think about it, men slapping each other in the butt, being manly men, standing around naked together under hot, soapy water. It was only a matter of time!"
Joe suddenly found himself entranced by this shimmering world of homoerotic bliss, where he could explore all the tantalizing, exotic fruits of the male body; slim calves, firm six-packs glistening like peaches in syrup. He sunk into a dark, warm underworld of tantalizing fantasy and freedom, where he could express his love of color coordination and gourmet cooking without fear of bitter reproach.
Reginald closed in slowly, casting Joe in his shadow, scooping his victim up in an intimate embrace. His lips brushed Joe's neck, and his teeth sunk into Joe's jugular. Blood rushed up like a metallic stream. Joe lingered on the edge of mortal sanity, savoring the nauseous feeling of utter release as his beating life rushed into his attacker's hungry mouth.
They got it on like monkeys, and Joe lived as a big fat gay vampire until he caught AIDs from a transexual and died from tonsillitis.