Think of today’s original fiction piece as a tacky movie pitch for Adam Sandler’s next direct to Netflix movie or perhaps even TV series. It’s absurdly silly, it requires an extreme amount of linguistic overacting, and it’s a straight up comedy – all perfect for Sandler. Also, it would be a hard “R” rated horror-comedy, which would diversify his movie portfolio nicely. So if you are reading this, Mr. Sandler (or anybody else with wads of disposable funds that you would like to throw at me), and you like it: email me – I’ll write the hell out of this movie for you! We could co-write the movie together, how awesome would that be? Plus, Sandler already has the Dracula voice down pat, so it would be a slam dunk as far as characterization is concerned. So, keep good ol’ Adam in mind as you read the absurd new adventures of Diabetic Dracula!
The Birth of Diabetic Dracula – a Brief Exploration of Monster Sized Problems of the Human Kind
By: Packy Smith
It was a cool and foggy evening. The sun had set three hours ago, but Dracula couldn’t be bothered to wake up at the crack of moon. He wasn’t an early evening monster. He tapped the screen on his iPhone to initiate the snooze feature which muted the obnoxiously loud blaring of a snippet from Bauhaus’ cult classic tune, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which served as an alarm as it was usually just annoying enough (given the theme) to wake him up.
“Vuck off!” the vampire master hollered with his thick Romanian accent from inside his luxurious coffin that was well hidden within his secret crypt. “Can’t choo see I’m trying to vrest, dammit!” And with that he threw his phone at the bottom of his coffin, striking his bare right foot sharply. “Ow, dammit that vucking hurt!” he snarled
The dreaded alarm went off once more and startled the dark lord so much so that he banged his head against the roof of his coffin. “Vuck’s sake that hurt. Dammit, vhat the hell… I’m avake, I’m avake already!” He summoned the phone into his hand with his vampire superpowers and then turned the alarm off as he flipped the lid of his coffin wide open. Sitting up, he sighed, ”can’t sleep vorth a vuck anymore. Son of a vitch.”
The erstwhile impaler stood up in his coffin and stretched his body, hands reaching towards the ceiling. A subtle, yet nagging pain swelled across his forehead. “Ow, that vreally hurts.”
Thinking that he may have cut himself when he bumped his noggin, he looked into a mirror only to be reminded like a noob that vampires cannot see their own reflection. “Son of a vitch!” He exclaimed in frustration. He then took out his iPhone and snapped a selfie using an app that allowed vampires to be photographed in a sort of refracted ultraviolet light kind of way. Eager to see the cut before it healed up due to his supernaturally fast healing, he looked at the photo only to find that there was no cut as it was in fact a bruise.
“Vhat is this crap?” The centuries-old blood monger scoffed. “I don’t vruise? Vhis must be some kind of prank!” Dracula took a handkerchief from his pocket and vigorously rubbed it across his forehead, in hopes that some other monster had for some inexplicable reason smeared shoe polish on his brow, but that was simply not the case. “Vhis can’t be happening!”
Dracula looked in the mirror again and cursed, “DAMMIT!” at the top of his lungs, failing once more to see his own reflection. He hung his head low in defeat and noticed the same marking on his right foot. He had a bruise from where he had thrown his phone earlier. “Vhis simply can’t be,” he thought to himself.
“I’m gonna go drain the guano,” Dracula said with a heavy sigh, “and choo vuckers better be gone by the third shake of my vittle bat head.” The lord of the vampires went to the bathroom and donated blood for the better portion of 30 seconds, but as he glanced down the bruise was still there. In fact, it had swollen up even larger than beforehand which caught him well off guard, so much so that he shook his little bat head a wee bit too hard and got some blood on his white velvet pajama pants. “Vuck me… that’ll never come out. I vruin more pants that vay.”
Dracula got dressed, poured whipped creme on a person that was in a vampire-induced trance and then dined on them, urinated again, drank again, and then pottied one more time, and still, the bruise was still there. “Vhis is impossible. I don’t get vruises. I vust go to the doctor!” He declared.
The master of plasma dressed in his usual black and white tuxedo, replete with ornate gold medallion and then transformed into a bat and flapped his cute little wings over to the nearest 24-hour emergency clinic. In a fancy poof of smoke, Dracula appeared in front of the sign in desk and demanded, “bring me to choor first available doctor vright now!”
The nurse chewed her gum, and without even looking at Vlad, “sign these forms and a doc will be with you as soon as possible.”
“Vhat?!? Vhis is an emergency!”
“Everyone here has an emergency,” the nurse responded, “hence, emergency clinic. Duh.”
Dracula tapped his fingers on the counter obnoxiously, then took the clipboard full of paperwork and filled them out. As he handed the paperwork back to the nurse he told her, “choo should get choor affairs in order. I’m just saying, I have a list and choo just made number vw-one, but that’s all I vill say for now.”
“Whatever whackadoo,” the nurse said after popping a bubble with her bubblegum.
42 minutes later, although for the bat man it felt like an eternity in which he drained 2 people and went to the bathroom 3 times, Doctor Harker greeted his patient, “Hello Mr., uh… Dracula? Huh. What seems to be the problem?”
“Vell, I got a vruise and that simply isn’t possible.”
“OK then, come back with me and let’s take a look at your bobo,” the doctor said with much confusion in his voice. After making it to the room, the doctor examined both the patient’s head and foot and came to the same conclusion, “those are in fact bruises.”
“I know, vright?”
“Bruises aren’t that uncommon Mr. Dracula,” the doctor assured his patient. “People get them all the time. They take a few days to clear up. I mean, it’s not like they disappear in mere minutes or anything.”
“Vhey do for me! As a vampire, I heal hella fast. Ve’re talking 45 seconds for a gunshot voond. A vruise should disappear in like 10 seconds flat!”
“OK, any other unusual things going on with you today?”
“Vell, now that choo mention it, I seem more vhirsty than choosual,” Dracula recalled. “I have also choosed the potty quite a vit more than choosual as vell.”
“Let me get this right, you are a vampire whose wounds are healing slowly, is very thirsty – even more so than usual, and has urinated with higher frequency than normal.”
“Nailed it,” Dracula said in a sing-song voice.
“Sounds like you might have diabetes,” the doctor stated.
“Is that vad?”
“It’s not good, it means that your blood sugar is potentially out of whack and it’s causing your body to go through changes. If you do have diabetes, it could mean that until we can regulate your blood sugar, you may be more thirsty, have to pee more, or find yourself falling asleep at odd times. There are a number of symptoms, and each case is unique to the patient. I’d say we could run some tests, but your skin is cold as the Antarctic, probably because you’re already dead, and as such all bets are off. I’m not sure any of our standard tests would actually work on you. Do you have any idea what might be causing your blood sugar to fluctuate? Do you eat anything other than blood?
“Oh!” Dracula chimed in, “I do eat vhat choo might consider people food, like cake and donuts and ice cream and candy vars, ooh and marshmallows, I love marshmallows.”
“You only eat sweets?”
“Hey, I have a sveet tooth,” the tuxedoed vampire interjected.
“You may only be borderline diabetic, so I’m going to suggest that you stop buying and eating the sweets for a while and see if that helps your blood sugar levels normalize,” the doctor suggested.
“I never buy… sveets, I make them,” Dracula stated.
The doctor raised an eyebrow as he tried to reconcile the pale man in front of him.
“Vhat? I like to bake sveet things, it calms me.”
“Well, if I can’t convince you to give up the sweets, then it looks like you’re going to need to start baking things with Splenda,” the doctor advised his patient.
“Vhat the Vuck is Splenda?” the baron of blood inquired.
“Splenda is an artificial sweetener that was introduced to the market waaaaaaaaaay back in 1999,” Dr. Harker answered. “It was designed to be supplemented for sugar so that individuals, such as yourself with diabetes, could enjoy sweet flavor sensations without the drawbacks that are usually associated with actual sugar. Essentially, sweet stuff goes in, but your blood sugar doesn’t spike through the roof, capiche?”
“I vhink so. So, I just sprinkle vis Splenda stuff, and it’s all vixed?” The sometimes bat-winged menace asked.
“Well, no. It’s not just as simple as sprinkle some Splenda on your food and your instantly healed. It’s not magic pixie dust, it’s just an artificial sweetener designed to make things taste sweet. That’s all it does. You’ll still have to monitor your blood sugar, possibly take insulin shots, and regulate the types of food that you eat.”
“Vut… food doesn’t affect me,” Dracula argued.
“Vut… yes it does,” the doctor mockingly countered.
“No, seriously,” Dracula retorted. “I don’t even digest it, it just comes out like colorful clumps of rainbow candy, like choonicorn poop.”
“As fascinating as that sounds, and it doesn’t, your body tells a different story. You sleep more, you pee more, you drink more, and your body is not healing like it ought to. Face it old man, you’ve most likely got the ‘beatus,” the doctor assured his patient.
“How is vat possible?”
“How are you possible!” The doctor responded incredulously.
“Vat’s no answer. Vhere has to be a reason vhy it happened to me!”
“What do you want me to say?” The doctor asked in earnest, and after a brief awkward pause, he snapped. “OK, here’s my best guess: a butterfly flapped its wings in the rainforest, which made an orangutan fart, which caused a shift in wind pressure, that created a tsunami that devistatingly hit Japan, which in turn forced radioactive energy from a damaged nuclear power plant there to seep into the air and water all the way over 5000 miles to Los Angeles California, which then affected everyone here in the Golden State, which explains the weird half-naked dude holding the snake in Santa Monica all the time, and why an undead imaginary creature got diabetes and ended up in my hospital. Does that about cover it?”
“Choo impudent veasel! I should kill choo!” Dracula snarled.
“Go ahead… you’d be doing me a favor,” The doctor deadpanned. “I have nobody in my life and never have. My life is loveless. All of my pets have left me after less than 2 weeks, just straight up escaped one way or another. Plants in my apartment are dead. My last one night stand left me midway thru my third stroke… had to wrap that one up manually, if ya know what I mean. Is my inner Bob Ross painting you a vivid enough picture here? So do it! END ME!” The doctor finished with a pathetic yelp.
“Vuck that shit, too much drama,” the Hoover of hemoglobin lamented. “Let me buy choo a drink… I could use a new underling.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“More like do it to choo, but same diff,” the bloodsucker corrected his new minion-elect. Dracula put his hand around Harker’s shoulder and squeezed him tight, like you would a close friend, and said, “now let’s go take avay choor villpower and make choo my new play toy.”
“I like where your mind’s at,” Harker replied with a goofy grin.
The 2 left the doctor’s office together, content in each other’s company… and content is how they stayed up until the third stroke of passion (long story short: it had been a long time for both of them… also there were a lot of drinks with tiny little umbrellas involved) between the two men (Dracula tops… ‘natch). That was precisely when the ancient poster child for braces decided to end the sad and lonely doctor’s life. Ultimately, Harker was a miserable human being to be around, and his bad attitude was bringing ol’ pointy teeth down, even in the throws of passion and especially in light of the revolting human illness that Vlad had inexplicably somehow picked up with his supernatural sweet tooth. However, with diabetes in mind, Dracula sprinkled a pack of Splenda over Harker’s neck before he plunged his teeth in and exsanguinated his short-lived minion-elect.
“So good,” the type 2 stricken monster cackled. “I think I’ll have another!” Dracula tossed a couple packs of Splenda in his coat pocket and then immediately went hunting for his next artificially sweetened meat popsicle.
Thus begins a new reign of terror, the artificially sweet reign of DIABETIC DRACULA! (Cue lightning strike and ominous MOOG music)
