Rage (7 page)

But those few generally don’t actually attack people in the night and bite their necks, the self-described vampires I met told me. Instead, they usually depend on friends and each other to supply them with blood.

I asked a psychologist friend of mine who deals with teenagers on a regular basis why some of them dressed up like vampires, rather than, say, cowboys or pirates. “That’s an easy one,” he told me. “Cowboys and pirates were real and can be judged in historical context; since no real vampires ever existed, they can’t be judged—as a result, these kids are free to make up their mythology as they go along.”

He’s right.

“Besides,” he adds, “cowboys and pirates are just people, with all the frailties that implies. Vampires are magical beings, which some kids who are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from the larger group find extra appealing.”

He thinks about it a bit longer and says, “who knows, it could have been cowboys or pirates if some kids started dressing that way—but it was vampires.”

He’s talking about the Goth movement that came out of England in the early 1980s. If you aren’t aware of Goths, you’re in a distinct minority. For almost 30 years, legions of kids have been dyeing their hair black, wearing black often anachronistic clothes, putting on heavy makeup and listening to doom-and-gloom music.

Although most sources tell me there aren’t as many of them as there once were, it’s hard to find a high school in Europe, North America, or Australia that doesn’t have at least a few.

Canada, and Toronto in particular, seems to have a disproportionate number. It started, I’m told by a number of sources (including Goths themselves, music journalists, police, mental health professionals and others), with a group of kids who hung out on Toronto’s Queen Street West in the middle 1980s. Trends tend to hit Canada later than they do in Europe and the United States, and aficionados of what was then called “new music”—punk, new wave, new romantic and just about anything other than what’s now called “classic rock”—were few in number, not very popular in the mainstream community, and they tended to seek each other out. Before long, they began meeting informally on Queen Street—primarily between University and Spadina. The location offered lots of foot traffic for panhandling (some of them were homeless and many more jobless) and many bars with live music and cheap draft beer. Because passersby often referred to them as “freaks,” the Queen Street kids took the name as a badge of honor.

As more and more teens became fans of alternative music—thanks in a large part to Queen Street’s own live music venues and the MuchMusic music TV network, whose storefront headquarters had been located at Queen and John since 1984—the Freaks grew in number and splintered into various sets. By 1987, the Goths, with their vampire-like fashions, were frequenting their own hangouts and eventually had their own bars and nightclubs.

The movement peaked after a dance club called Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar opened in September 1992. Fashionably, it was located on Queen Street across from a Centre for Addiction and Mental Health facility. The club imposed a strict “Goth dress only” entry requirement. It was consistently very popular and drew many from the Toronto Goth scene, including those too young to get into clubs farther east on Queen, on the other side of Bathurst. Demand for a place to “be” became so strong among teenagers that the club also opened for underage Goths twice a week. The money lost on liquor sales was more than recouped by gate receipts, once a cover charge was installed.

But the Goth scene began to decline in numbers in the mid-1990s. Some cite unfavorable media coverage, while others say that Goth culture was co-opted by more mainstream acts like Marilyn Manson. Still others say that these days, Goths spend more time on the Internet than they do at nightclubs. As other bars in the Queen West area began offering “Goth nights,” Sanctuary closed its doors.

In a move that infuriated the area’s Goths, Sanctuary’s owners sold out to the giant Starbucks coffee shop chain in 2000. When the coffee bar opened a few months later, the owners held an opening night gala in which they invited customers to “come dressed in your best Goth attire” to try some free coffee drinks.

But a significant vestige of the Goth district remains around Queen and Bathurst. It now consists of three dedicated dance clubs (ironically, two of them—Savage Garden and Velvet Underground—share names with decidedly non-Goth bands), some boutiques and a few dozen kids dressed in black hanging around outside them all.

In an effort to better understand Goth, vampires and the forces that molded Tim Ferriman and people like him, I visited them all, interviewed people on the street and online and even opened up a few history books.

The original Goths were a tribe of people who emerged from the east to attack the Roman Empire circa 263 A.D. What they did before that and where they came from are a matter of mystery and conjecture. After meeting up with, and raiding the edges of, the weakening Roman Empire, the Goths set up a nation-state of sorts in Dacia (modern-day Romania), which the Romans had abandoned as unprofitable a few years earlier.

They developed a more-or-less friendly trading relationship with the nearby Byzantines. After Byzantium was conquered by the Romans, becoming Nova Roma (New Rome), and then Constantinople (known today as Istanbul, Turkey), the Goths became increasingly Romanized. Most of them spoke at least a little Latin, they adopted the rudiments of Roman-style government and dress and their state religion, Christianity.

The Goths divided themselves into two distinct groups—the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Although the Romans thought the names meant “eastern Goths” and “western Goths,” both “ostro” and “visi” basically meant “good” in the Gothic language, so a modern translation would be more like “excellent Goths” and “awesome Goths.”

Under severe pressure from another proto-European tribe, the Huns, the Ostrogoths asked the Romans for permission to cross the Danube and settle in the Empire under Roman protection. In exchange for land and grain, the Ostrogoths were expected to act as a buffer zone between the Romans and the Huns.

It worked out pretty well for both sides until a major famine hit the Empire in 376. The Romans cut the Ostrogoths’ grain rations to nothing, but continued supplying the Roman garrisons in the area as usual. When the starving Ostrogoths appealed to the garrisons for help, they were offered dog meat in exchange for female slaves.

Enraged, the Ostrogoths marched to the nearest major Roman city, Marcianopolis in what is now Bulgaria. Many of their sick, children, elderly and even healthy adult women died along the way, leaving them largely a band of very angry and desperate young men. When they arrived at Marcianopolis, they were barred from the walled city, and the local governors clumsily attempted to assassinate the Ostrogoths’ leaders at a hastily arranged summit meeting.

At that point, the Ostrogoths decided the Romans were their enemies, and that they had nothing left to lose. Avoiding the undermanned Roman garrisons in the area, the Ostrogoths raided and looted the countryside at will, taking everything they could from the largely defenseless local people. When the Romans stood idly by, the Goths were encouraged by their success and drew reinforcements from locals eager to get rid of their Imperial overlords. The rebellious Ostrogoths managed to occupy much of what is now Bulgaria, Eastern Greece and the European part of Turkey.

The Romans sent a military expedition under the command of Emperor Valens himself to put down the revolt. It didn’t work. At the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the combination of a strong Gothic cavalry charge and a group of over-eager Romans who attacked before they were ordered to do so led to an impressive rout by the Goths. Valens, abandoned by his guards, was killed in the ensuing massacre.

The very idea of a barbarian tribe defeating a Roman army—let alone killing the Emperor—was absolutely unthinkable, and the area collapsed into chaos. The Ostrogoths and their allies began to ravage the Balkans, killing Roman administrators and destroying Imperial infrastructure.

The Romans eventually responded, pushing the Ostrogoths to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Valens’ successor Theodosius in 382. But the Ostrogoths had made a powerful point. The so-called barbarian tribes surrounding the Roman Empire had gained enough technology, discipline and will to take on the Romans and win—it was the beginning of the end of the Empire.

After the peace agreement, the Ostrogoths were ostensibly allies of the Empire again, but mutinies and looting raids against the Romans became commonplace. Eventually the Ostrogoths allied with other tribes—including the fearsome Vandals, Huns and Alans—to commit opportunistic, small-scale invasions around the Empire’s edges.

Emboldened by the success of his distant relatives, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, attacked Italy. Although he was defeated in battle twice by the legendary Roman general Flavius Stilicho, he survived and remained a threat to the Empire. The Emperor Honorious actually moved the Empire’s capital from Rome to the distant city of Ravenna out of fear. Foolishly, he also had Stilicho executed on trumped-up charges of plotting a coup. With his formidable adversary out of the picture, Alaric invaded Italy and his men laid siege to Rome in 410. Rather than fight, Honorious offered to pay the Visigoths to leave. Alaric accepted and gave the Romans 300 slaves as a sign of goodwill.

The Romans accepted the slaves and then refused to pay. In a move as cunning as the more famous Trojan Horse ruse, the Visigoth “slaves” then fought their way to the Salarian Gate and let their allies into the walled city—and the sack of Rome began. The Visigoths looted Rome for three days.

Although they didn’t take all that much, the Visigoths’ raid had a profound effect on the Empire. Rome, the Eternal City, had been safe from invaders for 800 years. But after its sacking by the Visigoths, barbarian raiders started pouring in and the Empire started to disintegrate.

However, the Goths had their own problems. Constantly attacked by neighboring tribes, they struggled to survive. The Ostrogoths were eventually defeated and absorbed by the Longobards in Italy in 568, while the Visigoths were beaten and dispersed by the Ummayyads in Spain in 711.

Later Europeans, particularly in Spain and Sweden, claimed to be descendants of Goths, but they really didn’t exist as an identifiable people after the eighth century.

While the Goths undeniably have a place in history for their part in the fall of the Roman Empire, few people really identify with them anymore. It’s not as though teenagers dress up in barbarian finery when they call themselves Goths. In fact, the word “Goth” was for many centuries an insult, suggesting a lack of refinement or intellect—a barbaric mentality, quite the opposite of how today’s “Goths” like to view themselves.

The word’s meaning has changed over the centuries, like many do, as a result of ignorance and, in this case, something of a scam. Horace Walpole was an eighteenth century English nobleman, politician, poet and architect. He called his broad, strong architectural style “gothic,” to differentiate it from the much more detailed neo-classical style that was popular in his time. His style didn’t have much in common with what the Goths actually built (virtually none of which still existed by his time), but few people questioned the authenticity of the term. Besides, Walpole’s buildings looked old, and gothic was a cool, old-sounding word, so it stuck.

Walpole had clearly grown attached to the name, because when he wrote his first novel,
The Castle of Otranto,
in 1764, he described it as “gothic.” Walpole said he had found a long-forgotten Italian manuscript dating from 1529 in a library of an “ancient Catholic family in the North of England.” He said he had meticulously translated the story, which itself was a retelling of a far older story from the days of the barbarians, and released it as a “gothic” novel. A long, violent tale that involved prophecy, ghosts, monsters and other supernaturalia,
The Castle of Otranto
was also heavily laden with eroticism and sexual innuendo.

Not surprisingly, it was a huge success and went into many printings. Although Walpole later relented and admitted he had written the book, it didn’t make much difference. The addictive blend of supernatural violence mixed with subtle eroticism had already become known as the gothic style.

Walpole’s success launched countless imitators and, even centuries later, many are inspired by his style. But the best known gothic novel is, of course, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
.

An Irish immigrant, Stoker worked hard and eventually became business manager of the world famous Lyceum Theatre in London. While there, he earned extra money and became quite well connected by writing sensational novels—what we’d call pulp fiction today. While researching his books, Stoker became quite interested in Eastern European legends, particularly that of the vampire.

Although stories of the dead rising to eat the flesh and blood of the living are commonplace in most Western cultures, including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the vampire legend we know today originated in Southeastern Europe, including Transylvania—the northern part of Romania, where it borders Hungary.