Bloodsucking fiends: a love story by Christopher Moore

shouted, "Sir, can you spare a quarter for some eyeliner?"
    Tommy dug in the pocket of his jeans and handed the kid all of his change. No one had ever called him "sir" before.
    "Oh, thank you, sir!" the kid gushed in a high feminine voice. He held the fistful of change up to the others as if he had just been handed the cure for cancer.
    Tommy smiled and walked on. He figured that panhandlers had cost him about ten dollars a day since he had come to the City – ten dollars that he really couldn't afford. He didn't seem to be able to look away and walk on like everyone else. Maybe it was something you developed after a while. Maybe the constant assault of despair callused your compassion. A plea for money for food always made his stomach growl, and a quarter was a small price to pay to quiet it. The plea for eyeliner appealed to the writer part of him, the part that believed that creative thought was worth something.
    Yesterday he had heard a tourist tell a homeless man to get a job.
    "Pushing a shopping cart up and down these hills is a fucking job," the homeless guy had said. Tommy gave him a buck.
    It was still light when Tommy reached Enrico's on Broadway. He paused momentarily and looked over the few customers who were eating on the patio by the street. Jody wasn't there. He stopped at the host's station and reserved a table outside for a half hour later.
    "Is there a bookstore around here?" he asked.
    The host, a thin, bearded man in his forties, with perfect anchorman-gray hair, raised an eyebrow, and with that small gesture made Tommy feel like scum. "City Lights is one block up on the corner of Columbus," the host said.
    "Oh, that's right," Tommy said, batting himself on the forehead as if he'd just remembered. "I'll be back."
    "We are giddy with anticipation," the host said. He spun curtly on one heel and walked away.
    Tommy turned and started up Broadway until he was accosted by a barker outside a strip joint, a man in a red tailcoat with a top hat.
    "Tits, slits, and clits. Come on in, sir. The show starts in five minutes."
    "No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."
    "Bring the little lady back with you. This show can turn a maybe into a sure thing, son. We'll have her sitting in a puddle before you leave."
    Tommy squirmed. "Maybe," he said. He hurried along until the barker two doors up, this one a buxom woman wearing leather and a ring in her nose, stopped him.
    "The most beautiful girls in town, sir. All nude. All hot. Come on in."
    "No, thanks. I have a dinner date in a few minutes."
    "Bring her -"
    "Maybe," Tommy said, walking on.
    He was stopped three more times before he reached the end of the block, and each time he declined politely. He noticed that he was the only one who stopped. The other pedestrians just walked on, ignoring the barkers.
    Back home, he thought, it's impolite to ignore someone who is speaking to you, especially if they call you "sir." I guess I'm going to have to learn City manners.
    She had fifteen minutes before she was supposed to meet Tommy at Enrico's. Allowing for another bus ride and a short walk, she had about seven minutes to find an outfit. She walked into the Gap on the corner of Van Ness and Vallejo with a stack of hundred-dollar bills in her hand and announced, "I need help. Now!"
    Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing – their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead .
    "I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me."
    They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.
    Tommy sat at a patio table with only a low brick planter box