Power Play

By Bruce Robinson

MICKI GRAHAM is heading for a courtroom instead of a classroom this fall, and she’s taking Santa Rosa Junior College with her. A popular biology professor at the JC for the past two years, Graham was abruptly dismissed last spring, over the vehement objections of her departmental colleagues, who were joined in their protests by many other faculty and students.

In addition to depriving the college of a talented and well-liked instructor, supporters say, her case has also raised troubling questions about gender equity on campus, the administration’s alleged inclination to manipulate personnel procedures, and the college’s commitment to maintaining academic standards.

“We were all in support of her staying,” says colleague Chris Christopher, incoming chairman of the Life Sciences Department. “Nobody ever wanted her dismissed.”

In a lawsuit filed Aug. 13 with the state Public Employees Relations Board, Graham accuses the SRJC administration of fraud, sex discrimination, defamation, inflicting emotional distress, negligence, and violations of the state labor code. She also has filed a separate civil action in Sonoma County Superior Court, seeking $2.5 million in damages and lost wages.

The legal charges, as well as a wave of activism that swept the campus last spring in support of Graham, stem from a supposedly botched tenure review in which Graham appears to have been caught up in the cross-currents of some tangled academic politics that had polarized participants long before she came to the institution. Her case galvanized an upwelling of support from faculty, staff, and students angered by the expensive expansion of the instructional administration under SRJC President Robert Agrella, and the apparent concurrent rise in the number of complaints and legal actions by aggrieved members of the college community.

“With the exception of Proposition 187 [the 1994 anti-immigration initiative], the students have not rallied around anything as much as this,” says Jennifer Branham, the new associated student body president, who sat as the student representative to the SRJC board of trustees during the last school year. “It wasn’t just another protest. They were compelled to come out and show their support for her.”

WHEN GRAHAM was hired in 1994, after completing her Ph.D. in environmental ecology at the University of California, she was chosen to fill the first tenure-track opening in the SRJC Life Sciences Department in more than 20 years. “She’s a really inspiring teacher,” says Brian O’Brien, a 22-year veteran of the same department who was part of the hiring committee that selected Graham and also chaired her Tenure Review Committee. “Our department hadn’t had the opportunity to hire a full-time position since I came. We wanted to have a woman who would be inspiring to women and a role model. She did just exactly what we hoped she would do.

“You could see the women gathering around her after class and hear the remarks they would make.”

Adds Charles Apel, a re-entry biology student who was Graham’s student assistant in three courses last year and has since transferred to UC Santa Cruz: “She’s a brilliant biologist and an exciting teacher. She’s really hot, really contemporary, really connected with her students. Everyone really loved her.”

Over her first two years, Graham received strongly positive evaluations from both students and other faculty observers. “Something like 85 percent of her student rankings and evaluations were of the highest order, outstanding or above average,” O’Brien reports. “All her numbers add up to A’s or a B; she doesn’t even get a C, [yet] she gets a failing grade [from the administration]. It defies logic, that’s for sure.

“If you did this to a student, you’d be fired.”

O’Brien was Graham’s strongest advocate in the four-member Tenure Review Committee, but he insists that the others–life sciences professors Steve Barnhart and Bob Rubin, and Rosemary Darden, the college’s assistant dean for science and applied technology–all agreed that Graham should be retained for the second two-year probationary period before she would become eligible for tenure.

“We never discussed terminating this woman. The agreement in all our meetings was that she be rehired,” O’Brien says. “The discussion was how strongly we indicated she needed improvements.”

The standard forms used in such reviews give the committee the choice of “suggesting” or “requiring” improvements of rehired tenure-track faculty. O’Brien says the committee split over that decision. “The dean was holding out for the requirement that she [Graham] have some improvements,” he says.

Dean Darden also insisted on including in the committee’s deliberations the complaints of five students who had taken a summer biology class from Graham, despite the fact that the summer class was not supposed to be a part of the tenure evaluation process. “There was never an evaluation of that class. No one ever came to observe, nor were student evaluations solicited, yet those few students that complained about their grades were used in such a way as to completely overshadow the many, many other students and student evaluations which were extraordinarily positive,” Graham objects.

She believes that the substance of those complaints was not the real issue. “For reasons that had nothing to do with those students or their complaints, they turned out to be a convenient vehicle,” she says grimly. “There were administrators, or at least an administrator, who really picked up on that and then used them to completely smear me professionally.”

Angered by the inclusion of the disputed complaints, O’Brien split from the other three committee members and submitted his own minority report, strongly recommending that Graham be rehired. The majority report contained the same overall recommendation, he claims. But in the final draft prepared by Darden, a sentence was inserted near the end of the seven-page document stating, “We recommend that [Graham] be rehired for one year.” That seemingly innocuous statement is what accomplished Graham’s dismissal, which was announced last March.

“The deal here is very clear. Rosemary [Darden] knows that the one-year option is not an option,” O’Brien fumes. “She knows the contract and she knew this would throw some kind of a jammer into the works.”

And it did. Academic Vice President Ed Buckley rejected the recommendation, and in the absence of consensus among the divided Tenure Review Committee, concluded that Graham should be dismissed, a decision that was affirmed by SRJC President Robert Agrella. “I believe the committee clearly understood the implications of the situation and chose to leave the final recommendation in the hands of the academic vice president,” Agrella later wrote to Richard Rose, president of the SRJC Academic Senate.

“Did the administration ‘overturn’ the Tenure Review Committee’s recommendation?” Agrella asks rhetorically in the same letter. “The answer to this is no.”

But the intentions of the committee clearly were reversed.

“Every member on my tenure review committee except the administrator has personally assured me they never intended nor understood my dismissal to be a consequence of their summary review,” Graham wrote to Agrella. “I am concerned that they were misled. I am concerned that an administrator who deals with tenure constantly would not know that what was being suggested would not be acceptable.”

Graham added that she believes that “an investigation will reveal that the district office had already been informed of my impending dismissal” before Buckley’s decision was revealed.

The cloud over the proceedings darkened further at the May board of trustees meeting. The Academic Senate and the All Faculty Association, the campus instructors’ union, believed they had worked out a compromise agreement with Agrella, which he would take to the trustees for ratification at the meeting. The compromise would have had Graham reinstated, but subject to more frequent evaluations over the next two years, to be done by a new Tenure Review Committee.

Yet, when the meeting was held, the board emerged from its closed personnel session with the curt announcement that nothing had changed. “President Agrella represented to the union that I would be reinstated” in accordance with the proposed compromise, Graham contends, “but when it actually came to the day to do that, he didn’t do that at all. He broke his word to them.”

Based on her subsequent conversations with trustees, Graham charges that “Dr. Agrella didn’t mention the union compromise and never indicated to the board that he had made an agreement with the union.”

Because personnel issues are, by law, allowed to be discussed out of public view, there is no record to indicate if Agrella even mentioned the suggested settlement to the board. And that shield of confidentiality is another sore point.

Graham objects that all of the key decisions regarding her future were made at meetings from which she, her allies, and the public were all excluded. “I’m not interested in holding confidentiality about these issues pertaining to me because it definitely is not in my best interest,” she says bluntly. “Confidentiality and secrecy only work for those people who are doing something they shouldn’t be doing.”

“A lot of people are hiding behind this thing on confidentiality,” echoes Sandy Lowe, a member of the Faculty for Tenure Equity Committee from the philosophy and religious studies department. “But it’s there to protect the person who’s on review, not somebody else.”

SO WHY was Micki Graham fired? The administration is not talking. President Agrella refused to meet with this reporter, Dean Darden did not return repeated phone calls, and Buckley declined to comment and referred all queries to the college’s attorney, who in turn referred them to Graham’s lawyer.

Meanwhile, the campus is rife with speculation.

“You can assume either malevolent intervention or breakdown of the process, or both,” says Johanna James, a computer science instructor at SRJC and a member of the FTE Committee, which was formed in response to Graham’s firing. “But then it gets back to the question of why this was going on [in the first place]. Why was the administration so entrenched and adamant about defending that position?”

James sees Graham as “a bright, independent woman” who was “operating in a hostile environment with a couple of her colleagues, due to gender issues, lifestyle issues,” and whose strong feelings about environmental issues and animal rights may have irked other faculty members.

Possibly more significant was Graham’s presence as an open, if not activist, lesbian in a predominantly male department. “Micki violates some of the traditional notions of how a woman should look and act,” James contends. “She was not being held to the same standard a male colleague would be. If a man had been running around in slacks and a shirt, that would never have been an issue.”

Even so, “they knew all this when she was hired,” says Sue Carrell, the gender equity coordinator at SRJC the past two years. From Carrell’s perspective, old and hard-set attitudes are a big part of the problem. “I very much get the sense that it’s still a white-male bastion,” she adds, offering figures that show that 54 percent of the part-time and 59 percent of the full-time SRJC faculty are men, even though women typically make up a 58-60 percent majority of the student body.

“A specific complaint by a few students is quite typical and usually goes no farther than the department chair,” adds Marty Bennett, a social sciences professor and co-founder of the FTE Committee. In Graham’s case, “that complaint found its way to the assistant dean and into [Graham’s] personnel file. Would that have happened to a male?”

Carrell also believes that Graham was held to a higher standard than male tenure candidates have been, but she realizes “the only way you can prove it is if you go back through the files of all the men who went through the same process and had more grounds to be booted out but were still rehired and eventually got tenure.”

Of course, she adds, “those records are all sealed. The only way you can get into them is by filing a lawsuit.”

Graham believes–and her lawsuit contends–that she was punished for filing a grievance over the way the tenure review was conducted, an action she took back in February. “It was not until after that that there was any discussion of the remote possibility that I would not be retained,” she contends. “Maybe they would have fired me anyway, but it’s curious that no one ever said a thing about it until after the grievance was filed.”

The grievance process is still slowly moving forward, with a hearing before an arbitrator as the next step. Asked when it might be scheduled, Bob Henry, the attorney representing the college in the proceedings, says he is “hoping for the month of October,” but acknowledges that the arbitrator has not yet been selected.

Under the college’s contract with the All Faculty Association, such arbitration hearings are not binding, but Graham says the Academic Senate has asked that the board of trustees and President Agrella follow the results of the arbitrator, and not push this into the courts. “And I hope that’s what they do,” she says. “It’s not in anyone’s best interest to force lawsuits in a situation like this. It’s an incredible waste of public money to adopt that strategy.”

But that has been the district’s strategy in other disputes. Although the details are buried in budget line items not included in the generalized budget summaries that are published each year, the campus grapevine has been buzzing with stories of administrators unhappily “retreating” to teaching positions or seeking other forms of redress. Henry Bell, the former associate dean of the SRJC campus in Petaluma, reportedly boasted of the six-figure settlement he received when he left the district for undisclosed reasons.

THE EXPANSION of the SRJC administration in the six years since Robert Agrella took the helm has also been costly, and is deeply resented by some faculty members. In a letter widely circulated on campus last May, one professor complained that “the addition of a new layer of mini-deans” not only was implemented “to isolate Dr. Agrella from the concerns of the faculty,” but was “imposed against the wishes of the faculty and at a time when there were insufficient funds for instructional needs.”

Although exact figures are not available, the annual salaries and benefits paid to six assistant deans and their support staff are believed to represent more than half a million dollars in the administration’s annual budget.

But the cost alone is not what upsets the faculty members who must deal with the new assistant deans. “It’s not a broadening, but a deepening of the administration,” objects Johanna James. “You’re one more person removed from process and input.”

Marty Bennett agrees: “It’s another layer you have to go through between the faculty and the administration. The actual decision-making about what goes on in the classroom is being taken away from the faculty.”

Worse, the people who are filling those positions tend to be bureaucrats, some of whom have little experience or understanding of academics. “We’ve gone from a system where the administrators rose from the ranks of the teachers and were familiar with the problems of the classroom, who had a discipline themselves and understood what it was to build a body of knowledge in a subject, who understood what it was not just to teach, but to be connected to your students,” Graham observes, “to a system of managers, many of whom have seen little or no time in a classroom and perhaps are not trained in an academic discipline.”

As a result, she theorizes, these administrators tend to “see the college as a service institution. The students or their parents pay the fees and the institution’s job is to provide them with a passing grade and ultimately a degree, so they can go out and get a job. So any kind of [student] performance becomes acceptable performance. [The administrators] really don’t have any idea what it is, for example, to be a mathematician and have the understanding that you can’t just pass students along.”

Math is not an idle example. Another controversy among SRJC faculty as school resumes this fall involves a bitter dispute between the math and applied technology departments over the latter’s creation of a course that math professor Jim Spencer says effectively bypassed the math department’s prerequisite requirements, but allowed students to acquire key transferable general education credits needed to graduate from a four-year California state college.

“Students who didn’t meet the prerequisites in our department or who failed a prerequisite would be able to go over there and take the course,” Spencer says. “They’ve even taken students who have failed basic arithmetic, but are able to pass this transferable four-year requirement course.”

When protests to the curriculum committee, the Academic Senate, and the administration all were shrugged off, math faculty members wrote a letter detailing their concerns directly to the California state University Chancellor’s Office, which subsequently dropped the disputed applied technology course from its list of transferable credits.

A furor ensued in the SRJC Academic Senate, which passed a resolution last May censuring the math department for its “unprecedented action of going beyond approved district policies” and charged that the “math department’s action challenges the district’s integrity and reputation.”

A series of sanctions are pending, including a ban on new math courses and the exclusion of math professors from membership in any curriculum committees for three years.

Now, Spencer says, the dispute is likely to become an issue for the accreditation committee that is due to make its twice-a-decade report on SRJC during the coming school year.

And the math course is not an isolated incident, faculty members charge. “It goes to the whole question of lowering standards,” says Brian O’Brien. “We have had a number of alternate courses offered at the JC. They offer a class in the nursing department now, something that nobody does anywhere else, basic microbiology for nurses, a substitute class that was much easier than the one that I teach” in the Life Sciences Department.

O’Brien charges that Assistant Dean Rosemary Darden, who also oversees the math department, “played a big role in a very tricky scheme to get this approved by the curriculum committee and resist our efforts to get it reconsidered.” He speculates that the fallout from that battle, in which Darden prevailed, may have poisoned the workings of Micki Graham’s Tenure Review Committee.

After months of reflection, Graham has come to the conclusion that she was only a minor player in the drama of her dismissal. That decision, she now feels, “was a combination of an individual administrator who has some kind of vendetta for reasons that are not clear and a system that does not support academic freedom nor an educator’s right to advocate strong positions.

“I’m also basically subject to a system in which management wants absolute control, in the way management in industry has control, which is something professors are not going to take very kindly to,” she adds.

But as in all other aspects of her case, even these conclusions are open to second-guessing. “I wish it was clear,” sighs Sandy Lowe. “There’s something in it that really stinks bad, but I’m not sure where the stench is coming from.”

From the August 22-28, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1996 Metrosa, Inc.

Interview with the Vampires

Photos of Third Street vampires by Janet Orsi.

Role-playing bloodsuckers invade Sonoma County

By David Templeton

NIGHT HAS FALLEN completely over Third Street in downtown Santa Rosa. The sky is black and moonless. The streetlights glow dully, casting cottony shadows upon the walk, as four chattering moviegoers bound from the neon innards of the nearby theater. Nodding cordially to a threesome of diners who have just exited the restaurant next door, they are now joined noiselessly by a uniformed, homeward-bound cashier from an ice cream store down the street.

Without ceremony, barely aware of one another’s presence, this unofficial group all proceed together toward a common destination: the cavernous parking garage only a few short yards behind the theater. Stepping into the narrow corridor that leads to the Comstock Mall courtyard, the pedestrians begin to move across the alley and into the garage. Suddenly, they freeze in their tracks.

“What the hell is that?” mutters one of the theatergoers, as a tall, black-caped phantom, pale of face and graceful in movement, steps out in front of them, bowing formally.

“Good evening,” he whispers, and with flurry of his cape, folds himself around a corner, disappearing once more into the darkness. In the shadows beyond, similar figures are visible now, moving about mysteriously in the gloom.

“Vampires,” coughs the cashier.

“Vampires?” laughs one young woman. “Jesus!”

“They come downtown on Sunday night,” explains the cashier with a weary nod. “You kind of get used to it.”

VAMPIRES. In Sonoma County. Hundreds of them. It’s true. The cultural progeny of novelist Anne Rice, their numbers have been growing steadily for over a decade. They have kin in San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Pleasant Hill, Los Angeles, San Diego, and across the world. Many of these vampires are unrecognizable as such, they look like you or me, while others are more, shall we say, conspicuous.

A varied lot, they are enthusiastic slaves to the peculiar tenets of un-dead culture and gothic kitsch. Most of them are in their teens or early 20s. The serious ones observe a dress code: black tights, black cape, frilly collar, white-face optional, half-inch fangs a definite plus. Some are mere dabblers, “weekend vampires,” as it were. Among these are the fangy exhibitionists described earlier, a group of 80-plus young people that gathers each week in various locations around the county, participating in a complex, internationally popular vampire-themed role-playing game. It has become so popular, in fact, that the imposing bunch was politely asked by the city of Santa Rosa to relocate from their long-held Courthouse Square location. Eager to please, they relocated to the Comstock Mall, one street over, where they are now free to role-play in relative obscurity.

Falling between these two poles of Dracula-like existence are myriad murky gradations of otherworldly behavior, including certain artists and musicians, vampires of the mind who, in a spirit of whimsical social displacement, are the authors of some remarkably creative works of art. There is vampire poetry, vampire fiction, and vampire true confession. There is vampire dancing, vampire painting, vampire performance art, and vampire rock and roll. There are vampire rituals, vampire support groups, vampire dentists, and vampire shopping networks. Even the Internet has been invaded, with upwards of a thousand websites and chat groups devoted to all things .

It must give one pause. Though the myth of vampires is nothing new–the immortal little bloodsuckers have been a part of humankind’s folklore for centuries–it is only recently that vampires have become bona fide role models.

Has the world really become this weird?

The only appropriate answer is, well, yes, it has.

SMITTY WAS ALREADY dead,” smolders Cisco McKeever, dressed in rags and hungry for blood. “He never asked to be brought back from the dead, only to be killed again. He never asked to be chased down the street and then have his heart ripped out!” McKeever, enthusiastically consumed with revenge, is playing the part of an influential member of the vampire clan Malkavian, one of seven major clans described in the guidebooks for the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf Publishing).

McKeever is petitioning a group of fellow vampires to join her in an attack on poor Smitty’s destroyer, a fellow who, we are told, is part werewolf and who clearly does not want to die. Surrounded by Malkavians, Brujahs, Ventrues, Nosferatus, , and Toreadors, the werewolf battles fiercely for his life against a small army of attackers, a battle that takes the elegant form of . . . rock, paper, scissors. (He loses, but after a formal protest, is resurrected, no doubt to rip more hearts from the chests of unsuspecting un-dead people.)

The one-eyed Vampire Prince, played with dashing flair by Daniel Franco, glides up to find out what the fuss is about. “Well,” he says, observing the virtual carnage before us, “carry on then.”

As the prince wanders off again, one onlooking vampire comments, “This isn’t a democracy, you know. This is Roman fucking darkness.”

Without warning, a magic-using vampire, known as a Tremere, appears before us. Played by Pete Magnetti, the founder and organizer of the Sonoma County Vampyre group, he commands immediate respect from the players nearby, all of whom bow their heads before him. “Thunderstorm!” Magnetti shouts at one vampire. “If I don’t make it I lose 10 mental traits, but if I do I’ve got one kick-ass storm.”

He holds out a fist, as does the other. One, two, three. Magnetti’s paper beats his opponent’s rock. “Why did that Tremere just make a storm?” wonders Chris Piazzo, as Magnetti disappears.

Piazzo is the club’s official bookkeeper and, along with McKeever, is one of its earliest members. A full-time physics major at SRJC, he volunteers five to 10 hours per week to keep track of all the players’ successes and defeats, a job that cannot be simple.

As the evening develops, there are more battles and backstabbings as the Kindred jockey for more powerful social positions. At one point, it is announced that someone caused an explosion that has attracted the attention of federal agents, the leader of whom is played by Magnetti. While the agents argue with various people pretending to be vampires pretending to be people, dozens of players wander about with one finger pressed to their temple, a sign that they have made themselves invisible. Appropriately, everyone ignores them.

When a fellow with an outrageous Russian accent begins to murmur conspiratorially to a band of punkish-looking thugs, this reporter (apparently mistaken for a vampire who is pretending to be a reporter) is accosted by one of the thugs. When the vampire is told that the reporter is only observing, he points to the far side of the performance area. “Well,” he snarls, “you can observe better from over there!”

“He’s a Brujah,” McKeever explains later. “They’re supposed to act like that.”

Vampire: The Masquerade is the cornerstone of White Wolf Publishing’s immensely popular World of Darkness line of role-playing games. Launched in the fall of 1991 as a standard Dungeons and Dragons­type tabletop game, Vampire has quickly developed into the full-scale improvisational theater game that has made it one of the most successful gaming products ever, with dozens of books and related items. It even spawned a Fox TV series, the short-lived Kindred: The Embraced.

“Vampire, as soon as it came out, struck some kind of nerve,” says Kris Nelson of Fantasy Books and Games in Santa Rosa. Among the first merchants in the county to offer the Vampire line, Nelson now counts them among his better-selling products.

“I saw this as being something that could become very popular with the Anne Rice crowd,” he nods. “But I had no idea how big it would get. I mean, who would have guessed that this many people would want to be vampires?”

“The vampire is a very romantic figure,” explains Magnetti, a professional dental technician (he designs dentures, and yes, he will custom-design a set of removable fangs) when he’s not refereeing his complicated multicharacter storylines. “The vampire is a figure that is at once both monstrous and tragic. They are victims, set upon by the one who embraced them and made them vampires. Though you are a predator, at the top of the food chain, and though you commit acts that are barbaric and hellish, you remember your humanity still. You remember what it was like to have human values.”

Though Magnetti does not deny that playing a vampire is a major part of the thrill of the game, he points out another reason that Vampire is so popular. “Its a very social game,” he suggests. “Face it, we live in a vastly impersonal society. We do not hold up the same values of civility and respect for one another that we once did. Strangely enough, while pretending to be vampires, we are also learning to deal with one another through specific rules of social conduct. Respect for our elders, for instance, and your basic, all-important politeness. Vampires, if nothing else, are very polite. What develops then, is a specific social interaction in which real friendships can begin.”

This is borne out in the stories of over a dozen players, who describe friendships, job referrals, even true love that have blossomed amid all the ghoulish pageantry and convoluted mythology. Magnetti has repeatedly stressed the word pretend, making it clear that he does not encourage acting out of the less socially acceptable aspects of vampirism. “Sometimes,” he laughs gently, “I’ll see someone who has begun obsessing on the game, trying to take it into the real world, and I’ll have to take them aside and say, ‘Hey, man! What are you doing? Get a grip. There is no such thing as vampires!'”

IT IS APPROACHING midnight. A slight chill has just begun to infiltrate the midsummer warmth of the evening. Within the “sacred grove” located behind the eerie Sonoma ranch house of artist/musician Stephen Buchanan, a small bonfire is crackling, sending spirals of smoke into a star-filled sky. Around the edges of the circular grove, two dozen or so people have gathered to participate in Buchanan’s monthly full-moon ritual and potluck dinner. Their garb and basic appearance are familiar, with the requisite capes, tights, and pale, powdered faces. With but one or two exceptions, all of those gathered here tonight are vampires.

Unlike their role-playing brethren, whom Buchanan and friends deride as “wannabes,” these individuals regard the title “vampire” with the utmost seriousness. One look at Buchanan’s permanently capped and pointed fangs, the result of his dentist’s specialized artistry, and you will know that he is not just playing a game. “I’m the real thing,” he smiles. “I am a vampire.”

Buchanan is the founder/director of , a highly regarded experimental theater group that is exclusively devoted to vampire-themed works. Last year, Buchanan staged his sensation-causing play Nosferatu before unsuspecting audiences in several countries. His next production, titled When Madness Is Salvation, is being readied for its October debut at the Valley of the Moon Winery, a recurrent spot for NeoDanze performances.

A painter, poet, and sculptor, as well as an actor and musician, Buchanan has reflected a vampire’s sensibility in his work since he was “converted” to vampirism about six years ago. His house is deliriously gothic, decorated with gargoyles and candles, huge shackles and chains adorning the walls, a terrarium with a pair of black widows. Then there is his artwork, giant paintings of draped and brooding men and women, all fanged and full of fun.

“I wanted a central theme that would tie all my art together,” he says, now gazing affectionately across the grove at his assembled companions. “When I found the vampire thing, it just sort of fit. It’s completely international, it’s completely ageless. It’s erotic and sensuous and very appealing.”

What is it, exactly, that Buchanan finds erotic about being a vampire? Is it the darkness of it, the danger of it? The promise of immortality?

“Yeah, it’s the darkness and the danger,” he nods. “And it’s also about biting somebody. Tasting their blood. There’s a powerful feeling in that. As for immortality, if you are an artist you already have that.”

He grins agreeably, the sharp points of those fangs just visible in his smile. Speaking of those fangs, Buchanan points out that the man who gave him his special bite is also his partner in an entirely different artistic venture.

“Every Wednesday I go to Alameda,” he explains. “And we do a cable access television show. My dentist is the producer. I’m the director. It’s called Canvas Cavity. It’s a combination of professional wrestling, dentistry, and vampirism.”

That’s must-see TV for darn sure. “Its the weirdest show you ever saw in your life,” he laughs, adding that the wrestling aspect has made it so popular that it is seen in 26 markets and five countries.

The moment of the full-moon ritual draws closer. Resembling a performance art piece with music, the ritual will consist primarily of the reading, in English and German, of a variation on an old druidic text, preceded by the clashing of swords and culminating in a loud, joyous yelp at the moon. But first, a casual mingling among the guests, many of whom are resting on prop coffins from Nosferatu, reveals several others who share Buchanan’s vascular notions of eroticism.

“The only people I drink from are willing participants, with similar interests,” explains one tall and slender fellow dressed in black, wearing a prominent crucifix around his neck. “People hear that and kind of freak out,” he shrugs. “But it’s not like I drain them dry or anything. Just a few ounces.”

At moments like this, one wonders if it is best to change the subject or to go ahead and ask the questions that are leaping to mind. Questions like, “Are you pulling my leg?” and “Aren’t you worried about blood-transmitted diseases?,” or even short ineloquent questions like “Why?”

“Why do I drink blood?” the tall man repeats as if the answer should be obvious. “Probably because we are not supposed to. Its a sin, right? And there is tremendous erotic power in the breaking of taboos. The taking of blood can also be a very sensuous, very loving thing.”

“Something else that is very important,” Buchanan interjects, “is the whole concept of light and dark. The balance between the two. We all hold them both within us. I am the darkness, as a vampire, but I am also the light, as a vampire. We hold the beast at bay.”

It’s true then. Undeniably so. The world has grown stranger.

And perhaps that is just the point, unconscious or not, that these unconventional souls are attempting to make. By meeting on lonely hillsides beneath the luminant moon, by flashing an occasional sharp-toothed grin, or by parading downtown in full view, they are saying, in effect, “Look up. Look around. The world is stranger than you think.”

Then again, any vampire worth his or her salt will quickly add that the world has always been weird, weird to the core. Weirder, wilder, and more beguiling than most poor mortals will ever know.

From the August 8-14, 1996 issue of the Sonoma Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1996 Metrosa, Inc.