Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (9 page)

What with the formality, the capital letters, the numerous exclamation marks, the incongruous smiley face emoticon, and the threat of a painful death, how could I refuse?

Despite the menacing tone of his missive, Mr. Vollmer—like his fellow vampire, Mr. Sutcliffe—is as gracious a dinner partner as one could hope for. Better yet, he’s painfully honest and has a fine memory of his brief period as a Beatles-worshipping Exi.

JÜRGEN VOLLMER:
We fancied all five of the boys, but we fancied Stu the best because he was the most interested in what the Exis were all about. He and I had long talks in the Kaiserkeller’s piddling little dressing room about Sartre, and Heidegger, and Jaspers, and Stoker … although he didn’t know I was a vampire, so my lengthy forays into the hidden meaning of
Dracula
probably confused the hell out of him.

I knew he was at ease with the otherworldly beings—if you’re with John Lennon and Paul McCartney twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, you’d
better
be comfortable with the inhuman—but I still didn’t want to spring my vampire life on him. I mean, if your bandmates are zombies, you might be hesitant to become a friend to a Child of Osiris, because, let’s face it, how much inhumanity can one person take? But that all changed when Stu started falling for Astrid.

I’ll freely admit it: I was jealous; I was the odd man out, so how could I not be? John and Paul gravitated toward Klaus because he had an aptitude for music, and Astrid was trying to seduce Stu, and Pete was always trying to score with girls, and George was off doing whatever a zombie who’d taken too many amphetamines does at three in the morning, so I didn’t have a Beatle to call my own. I tried to ingratiate myself, believe me, but outside of Stu, they simply weren’t all that interested. In retrospect, I feel it had a lot to do with
the fact that I was too quiet, but I couldn’t help it. I was exhausted, as good blood was at a premium.

One night while Stu and Astrid were kissing in the corner of the club, I got fed up with the whole situation, so I grabbed Stuart by the collar of his leather jacket and hauled him back to the dressing room. I carried him like he weighed nothing, and I could tell he was taken aback by how strong I was. I held him against the wall by his neck and gave him a brief history of vampires, everything from revenants of the twelfth century to good old Vlad Tepes to the falsitude of bat transformation to the enlightened vampire colony that was already forming in Ibiza. I purposely didn’t mention what is going to happen in Swaziland in 2028, because a prophecy of vampire-based genocide would likely have soured him on the concept of me giving him a nibble on the neck, wouldn’t you say?

After I released him and he crashed to the floor, he told me the thought of immortality was suddenly appealing now that he’d met the girl of his dreams. He told me that John and Paul weren’t going to zombify him because he wasn’t a good enough bass player. He told me that at first, the thought of living forever sounded kind of daunting, but now with Astrid in the picture, it sounded farkin’ good.

I said, “I’m glad to hear that, Stuart, just thrilled.” Then I asked him if he wanted to share my life.

Stu looked at his hands and asked, “How do you think Astrid will feel about the whole thing?”

I told him that never once in the years we’d known each other did she say anything disparaging about vampirism, and that she was an all-embracing woman who would spend time with Negros, Orientals, Christians, Jews, vampires, zombies, or werewolves, so long as they brought something interesting to the table.

He asked me, “So let me get this straight: with this vampire
thing, unless somebody jabs a stake into your chest, you’re immortal?”

I told him that was more or less the case.

He stood up and gently kicked Paul’s guitar case. “To tell you the truth, mate, I don’t know if I’m long for this band. Paulie doesn’t like having me around. John loves me, but he doesn’t like having me around as a musician. And I miss painting. And I love Astrid. I love her a lot, mate.”

I told him she loved him a lot, too.

We spent the next few minutes talking about vampire logistics, then Koschmider poked his head in the door and said, “Sutcliffe, get onstage,
mach schnell, mach schnell
!”

Stu looked at me and said, “Okay, Jürgen. Let’s do it. Tomorrow at sundown.”

I couldn’t have been more pleased. Stu was going to be my friend for life.

STUART SUTCLIFFE:
The choice was simple, really. I loved Astrid, and Astrid loved me. Jürgen was a good, kind man, and as much as I loved John, well, let’s just say, if he was a moody cunt in 1960, imagine what he’d be like in 2060 or 2160 or 2260. So Jürgen did his thing, and here I am.

Paul and Pete were deported that December. The cover story we came up with was that they got sent back home because they set fire to a johnny-hat in the Kaiserkeller dressing room, then were thrown in jail. The real reason they went home was that John Q. Law got wind of John W. Lennon’s plot to go to Magdeburg and dig up Hitler’s brain as a laugh. (The cops watched our every move, and who could blame them? At the time, Germany had the smallest per capita zombie population in the world, so they didn’t know
what
John, Paul, or George might do.) After Jürgen turned me out, Astrid
and I went underground for a while; then in ’62, when the Hamburg cops decided they wanted to rid the city of vampires, Astrid and I staged my funeral, and it was off to the Spanish islands.

Jürgen spends his winters here in Ibiza, and his summers in Munich, and he’s still my best mate, and when he’s in town, we’re inseparable. As for Astrid, I get to see her maybe six or seven weeks out of the year. See, she had to continue her life in Germany as if I was dead, so in ’67, she married a nice bloke named Gibson Kemp. I’d bet most of your readers won’t know that he’s the drummer who replaced Ringo in Rory’s band.

Like I said, Gibson’s a nice bloke, but I’m sure when they were together he touched Astrid in places where I’d prefer she not be touched by anybody but me. That being the case, given the opportunity, I’d fookin’ suck him dry in a heartbeat.

A
quick backtrack:

In the months before German law enforcement officers sent the Beatles back to the UK, the lads made an interesting discovery: Rory Storm was a Fifth Level Ninja Lord.

A Liverpudlian singer who had a head of hair to die for, Storm (who was born Alan Caldwell and passed away in 1972, found dead next to his equally dead mother; some say they were both mistakenly killed by a confused low-level yakuza lackey) always had an affinity for the world beyond the world, so much so that in 1958, he named his first band Dracula and the Werewolves. Rory considered the Quarrymen as rivals, and even though he would’ve been thrilled to be undead, he refused to approach Lennon or McCartney with his zombification request, telling anybody who’d listen, “Fook the Quarryboys. I want to have me own bag.”

Enter
.

A Sixty-sixth Level Ninja Lord,
—
which loosely translates to Badass Ninjutsu Dude—relocated to Liverpool in 1955, partly because he was fed up with the bureaucracy of the Iga Ueno Ninja scene, and partly because he had an inexplicable affinity for drab cities and lousy restaurants.

In 1958,
quietly opened up a secret-but-not-as-secret-as-a-Ninja-should-be dojo on Molyneux Road, right by the Mersey River. He didn’t do any advertising, per se, and how Rory Storm heard about it is anybody’s guess. But hear about it he did, and Rory became
’s first British student.

Aside from evolving into a solid but unspectacular Ninja Lord, Caldwell was a marketing genius, and when he realized his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, simply didn’t have the firepower of Lennon and McCartney’s crew, he decided to sprinkle some Japanese flavor into his skiffle stew. But we’re not talking a tinge of Japanese music—that would’ve been tough, as kotos, biwas, and samisens weren’t easy to come by in Liverpool—but rather a sampling of Ninja demonstrations in between songs.

was less than pleased with his disciple, taking the understandable stance that Ninjas and rock ’n’ roll shouldn’t share the same stage. The old hurts are still there, a fact that was made abundantly clear when I spoke with the then-305-year-old warrior at his home near the top of Mount Omoto in February 2004.