I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach’s Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along.
I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.
As for my strength, well, it was three times what it had once been. I could leap from the street to the top of a four-story building. I could pull iron gratings off windows. I could bend a copper penny double. I could hear human voices and thoughts, when I wanted to, for blocks around.
By the end of the first week I had a pretty female lawyer in a downtown glass and steel skyscraper who helped me procure a legal birth certificate, Social Security card, and driver’s license. A good portion of my old wealth was on its way to New Orleans from coded accounts in the immortal Bank of London and the Rothschild Bank.
But more important, I was swimming in realizations. I knew that everything the amplified voices had told me about the twentieth century was true.
As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:
The dark dreary industrial world that I’d gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.
People were adventurous and erotic again the way they’d been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times.
The men didn’t wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired.
And the women—ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they’d been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tuniclike dresses, or wearing men’s pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament—it didn’t matter. They curled their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.
For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who’ve always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past.
The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to graceful things.
Department stores had become palaces of near Oriental loveliness—merchandise displayed amid soft tinted carpeting, eerie music, amber light. In the all-night drugstores, bottles of violet and green shampoo gleamed like gems on the sparkling glass shelves. Waitresses drove sleek leather-lined automobiles to work. Dock laborers went home at night to swim in their heated backyard pools. Charwomen and plumbers changed at the end of the day into exquisitely cut manufactured clothes.
In fact the poverty and filth that had been common in the big cities of the earth since time immemorial were almost completely washed away.
You just didn’t see immigrants dropping dead of starvation in the alleyways. There weren’t slums where people slept eight and ten to a room. Nobody threw the slops in the gutters. The beggars, the cripples, the orphans, the hopelessly diseased were so diminished as to constitute no presence in the immaculate streets at all.
Even the drunkards and lunatics who slept on the park benches and in the bus stations had meat to eat regularly, and even radios to listen to, and clothes that were washed.
But this was just the surface. I found myself astounded by the more profound changes that moved this awesome current along.
For example, something altogether magical had happened to time.
The old was not being routinely replaced by the new anymore. On the contrary, the English spoken around me was the same as it had been in the 1800S. Even the old slang (“the coast is clear” or “bad luck” or “that’s the thing”) was still “current.” Yet fascinating new phrases like “they brainwashed you” and “it’s so Freudian” and “I can’t relate to it” were on everyone’s lips.