California Gold

I meet Carl at Voyager in Santa Maria which is along the coastline north of Santa Barbara. Carl lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and two children, but has to commute more than two hours every other day to Santa Maria, driving by the Solvang ostriches, which study his pickup truck as he passes. Why Voyager couldn’t open a clinic in Santa Barbara is beyond his comprehension, but Carl tends to just go with the flow of the universe. From our discussions, he was apparently like this as a teenager, so it had nothing to do with his conversion.

Santa Maria is the first of a five city circle route including San Diego, Palm Springs, Bishop, and Redding. Carl and I have lunch after his morning shift and before my afternoon session.

“How are things running at the clinic and for you, Carl?”

“Things are fine… I can’t complain…”

“Well, I am here to hear your complaints, so you can definitely complain. How is the commute going? It looks like it takes a couple hours round-trip.”

“Yes, as much as three hours if traffic is bad. I am thinking we should move to Santa Maria, but the kids are happily in school and my wife likes the Santa Barbara boardwalk and is taking classes at UCSB. So it doesn’t seem like a good trade.”

“Has anyone explained why there isn’t a clinic in Santa Barbara itself?”

“There is a clinic, but it is run by Remigius. Apparently they have their own clinics along with making the machines that Voyager uses.”

“Could you shift to that clinic?”

“No, there is some kind of exclusive contract that prevents vampires from changing providers. Remigius will not respond to my emails or visits to their clinics. I think this would be considered ‘hiring collusion’ and is illegal in California at least, but undead don’t have the right to complain or sue.”

“That is apparently one of our mottos. I am not sure it is true, but I understand where you are coming from.”

“Other than the drive, and the fact that I have a shift schedule I don’t like, I have nothing to complain about. I just wake up at 3 a.m., get in the car, and eventually get home at about 2 p.m. Maybe I should drive for Hoyst: you said you do that?”

“Yes, but not for the money. With gas at current prices, each trip is basically a net loss.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Primarily to help dialysis patients that can’t manage or afford their own transport. I should also tell you about a project I am working on…”

By the time I leave Santa Maria heading south for San Diego, I believe I have Carl on my team. The desire for more control and meaning is enough to overcome his apathy. He may also be able to get a college friend, Hod, to help him when the time comes.

I meet Patrick at Regenius in Hillcrest, San Diego Patrick lives a few blocks away, so he can just walk to work. On his days off, he can walk to one of the best zoos in the country and numerous other attractions in Balboa park. Patrick appears extremely happy:

“So everything is going well in this clinic? How does it compare to others you have been in?” I ask him during our lunch at Khyber Pass before his 2PM shift. It is Afghani food, which I have no memories of, but the cherry lamb is supposed to be excellent. Neither of us will ever know.

“Yes, this is a very nice clinic. Probably among the best I have worked in.”

“You were originally from San Francisco?”

“Yes, I lived in San Francisco until the late 1990s” I was given background on Patrick and he was one of the earliest conversions during an epidemic that took everyone important to him in just a couple years. “Regenius moved me around a lot, which I enjoyed as a way to forget everything I lost. I just focused on the work and Regenius projects. They had me do a lot of projects for them.”

“Projects?”

“Yes, influencing of innumerable people I could easily get to where others failed. I am able to travel in certain social circles and am much

more gregarious than vampires usually are. I was depressed for a while, but came out of it when I focused on the work”

“But you aren’t doing any projects now?”

“No” He snaps as his eyebrows pull together and he looks intensely into my eyes. We are apparently more similar than I thought, but his emotions are more visible I believe.

“So is San Diego kind of retirement for you?”

“Yes” He snaps again, but with a little less emphasis. After a sigh, Patrick continues “I was no longer delivering what Regenius needed but I was still able to do my core function. So I was retired to here. Pleasant, but the gap between the haves and have-nots is disturbing: our neighborhood homeless population seemed to double when the city kicked them out of downtown. Shows we aren’t actually solving any problems, just moving them around”

“Would you like to help solve problems again? Ones that really matter?” Patrick had propped the door wide open by this point, so I just walked through it.

My next stop is Palm Springs where I meet Bruce in the Palm Desert clinic. The first thing that hits me about Bruce is that he is a visibly devout person. For many of us, our religious beliefs and affiliations tend to be exorcised from us by the phrase “you are no longer alive”. But Bruce took his death in stride and became a more devout Catholic. Bruce is also Filipino, which enables him to have a much tighter relationship to the many dialysis technicians and nursers who are from the Philippines originally as well.

“So you speak and understand Tagalog? That must be helpful in feeling like part of the team in the clinic” We are sharing two bacon flights at Cheeky’s after Bruce finished his overnight shift.

“Yes, the team is great and I can talk with them during the night. It is a long shift and most people are sleeping. I tend to be the only patient awake during the night, so they are happy to have someone else to talk to.”

“Sounds great!” “Yes… but…”

The conversation shifts to the meaning of life and our purpose for being here, especially given how long we are likely to be around.

“So you are happy but not happy?”

“«No one may claim the name of Christian and be comfortable in the face of hunger, homelessness, insecurity, and injustice found in this country and the world»”

“That is your maxim?”

“That is a quote, but yes, it is also one of my maxims”

“Can I help you decrease your discomfort?”

The drive to Bishop is interesting because it is on the eastern side of the Sierras and I chose a route that descends into the lowest and hottest place in North America: Death Valley. It is actually quite beautiful, and the lack of water and shade is not a problem for my kind. We certainly wouldn’t be able to find anyone around to bite if we needed to: the valley is deserted during the summer. But I guess neckbiting doesn’t work anyway.

In Bishop I meet Henry, a longtime resident of Owens Valley and member of the Paiute tribe. The Paiute name for Owens Valley is Payahuunadu, which apparently means ‘place of flowing water’. This correctly describes Owens valley, if ‘flowing’ means flowing straight to Los Angeles. It quenches a third of Los Angeles’s thirst by draining that watery valley into an arid wasteland. Where Death Valley is a natural hell, Owens Valley is manmade.

We are having some ‘High on the Hog’ ribs for an early supper after Henry’s shift: they remind me of the time I spent in Austin, which was probably the owners’ and chef’s intent given they named the place ‘Holy Smoke Texas Style BBQ’. Henry is a vampire, but he has decided not to tell even his closest family. He simply returned from his stay at Pine Mountain Hospital in Los Angeles, and continued as if nothing had changed. He immediately started working at the local dialysis clinic, which the community desperately needed more capacity from. He also appears to everyone to be a patient at the clinic, and his whole family offered to help him with the dialysis treatment: transport, sitting with him, recovery, and the like. But he turned them away and didn’t reveal anything about what really happened to him at Pine Mountain or what he was dealing with now.

“Paiute don’t believe in vampires in any mythical or religious sense” Henry starts. “So I don’t think I would be stigmatized for it. Mostly I was worried telling anyone would risk providing dialysis for the area: I am the only vampire here now, so we only have one shift of twelve

patients. Pine Mountain allowed me to return to Bishop and by doing so, I can support a local clinic.”

“I thought there was a clinic here when you returned?”

“Yes. There were two vampires, so we could support a single shift every day. During the end of my training, my trainer passed a second time. It felt as if she handed me the baton. The other vampire passed his second time last year.”

“How does a vampire pass with a clinic running? You didn’t have enough patients?”

“Partially: we had a fluctuation of patients, and they gave me all the regulars because I was so young. Over time, they were running low on patients and blood replenishment. And they didn’t want to live a life away from their families. So they chose to simply pass again versus sharing patients or any other solution. It is as if their time had come… in their eyes. They also became very depressed and lethargic as they had less and less blood circulating. By the end we couldn’t reason with them at all and Pine Mountain ER was just too far away for us to reach when they passed out. Maybe by helicopter we could have reached it, but not by pickup truck.”

I chose not to ask what happens to a vampire’s body when they pass the second time. Instead I focus on the needs of the community. “So you are the only vampire service all of Owens Valley?”

“Yes, the other clinics are several hours away, down by Palm Springs or up north.”

“Can’t Pine Mountain send you more vampires to help?”

“They don’t seem to care about our community. I can only imagine it is the distance and the money: we have a lot of the first, and none of the second. We used to have a lot of water too, but somehow the rights to that were taking away from us.”

“How about any of the other hospitals. You know I am out of Amasa: have you contacted them?”

“I have tried, but no one will take my calls”

“I may have a way to fix that problem”

I chose to go all the way up by Lake Tahoe to get to Redding. You can cross the Sierras westward into Yosemite valley, which is very beautiful but also very time consuming. The Yosemite route is also