Adele Stackhouse finally gets her Descendents of the Glorious Dead meeting with Bill, and she's holding it at a church. It goes swimmingly, as Bill has had 150-something years to perfect his public speaking skills, although Sookie's dumping of Bill after last week's police-glamouring hijinks provide a bit of weirdness. Of particular interest in attendance are Andy Bellefleur's brother Terry (an Iraq vet who's won over based on Bill's experiences in the Civil War) and three random hicks who act like idiots. Hoyt and his mother continue to be adorable and hilarious respectively, and a good time is had by all.
Particularly Jason, who spends the episode a tripping darling thanks to the little square of blotter V given him by Lafayette as a necessary inoculation for what's clearly coming: enjoying the life force in all things, touching people idiotically like he's on E, telling Hoyt and Rene how much he loves them, and declaring his newfound eternal adoration for the bewildered and permanently pissed off Tara Thornton. Then he fucks a newly divorced ho behind the bar and rubs garbage on her, because he has lost the plot entirely.
While everybody else is at Merlotte's celebrating first contact -- or, in Lafayette's case, busting the rednecks' asses ninja style for being homophobic assholes, in a truly amazing display of the power of a "V plus how angry you get being gay and black in a small southern town" cocktail -- Bud and Andy visit Bill at his home, where memories of his siring and subsequent loss of his family have been awakened. He allays their suspicions for the murders, and scares the piss out of them in the meantime.
Sam and Sookie go on a date after the meeting that ends up going sour after he gets jealous and possessive about her history with Bill. He's like a dog with a bone! Sookie ends up taking a cab... And slipping around in the blood of the third murder victim when she gets home. We'll miss you, Gran. Rest in peace.
Hopefully.
Bill and Sookie arrive at the Stackhouse house, some awkward and short but not short enough time after their experience with the cop last week. There's Tuvan throat singing accompanying the first shot, which is a creepy kind of haunted thing, which will make sense by the end. They sit in the car for awhile before Bill starts justifying himself. Which he can't really do, because the truth is too deep and touches on too many icky things about power and powerlessness, so he just sounds like a rationalizing rationalizer: "We've had a difficult relationship with law enforcement for many years. The man provoked me! I could've done much worse." Sookie points out that that's hardly comforting, and floats the idea that Bill would've just killed him he she wasn't around. Bill is offended, like, why would she even go there -- him being a centuries-old killer and all -- but can't deny that even if he didn't kill the cop, he would have fed on him, probably, a little bit.
"See, that's just crazy! You would've fed on him, then tossed him aside like an old chicken bone!" And you wouldn't even have called the day! Bill superzooms around the car and opens her door for her, giving her a little tiny wiggins, and Bill repeats his mantra from last week, that he's trying to mainstream. "Suckin' the blood from a police officer is not mainstreaming! Neither is hosting orgies! Or listening to crazy Chinese gargling!" Bill explains about the Tuvan throat singing, which Sookie doesn't even bother to think about before blowing it off; it's cool because overtone singing is all about weird things you didn't think the human body, or at least your human body, was capable of doing, and now there's Bill who has a vested interest in what mysteries the human body is still capable of manifesting and Sookie who has a vested interest in disinterest at this moment as far as learning new things. "Tuvan? I don't even know where that is."
Bill calls to her, whining that it's a terrible thing to be frightened of "everything you don't know in this world," and Sookie replies that her world, such as it is, is opening up "mighty fast," and though it's boring, it's safe. Which, between the creepy orgies at Bill's house and the creepy orgies at Eric's bar, "sounds pretty good about now." She tells him to fuck off and stop helping, basically, that she can get to the door herself, and all of a sudden he's all, "I won't call on you again." That's all it took! The scene feels like it's longer, but it's not: she just tells him that being threatened with death a billion times, watching creepy people have creepy sex all over the place, and then having Bill act like a total fucking freak: that's the line. He gets back in the car to leave, and the music goes all insane! Because that stupid dog! Is watching Sookie fish for her keys in her purse!
After the credits get done doing bad things with you, lo there is a great shaking and pounding at Lafayette's door, to which he responds as usual by picking up a baseball bat. Because it's a TV show we only see it when it's important but I like to imagine that Lafayette's entire day is just people knocking wildly at his door, and him responding with suspicion. Like right before this, ten random people showed up pounding on his door, one after the other, and he had tell them basic shit about living life. How does he get any sleep? Anyway, Tara comes walking in and immediately starts hurling everything she can get hands on at his head. He bats them away easily: "Bring it on, hooker. I was all-parish in high school."
Lafayette's cousin Tara freaks out on him for dealing V -- "get your ass killed" is a representative phrase -- and he tells her that frankly she could use of the perspective it provides, but he's just being cute. He asks if she's more angry that he's dealing this particular drug among all the drugs he deals among all the illegal revenue streams he generates, or if this is about Jason Stackhouse. It is always about Jason Stackhouse. "Givin' vampire blood to Jason Stackhouse is like givin' HoHos to a diabetic! You know he can't control himself." Lafayette points out that he couldn't have been more clear about how to use the incredibly potent drug -- which is sparingly -- and Jason couldn't have been more adorably retarded by overdosing. "I had to take him to the ER. They drained his penis with a needle the size of an ice pick. Twice. It was the most disturbing shit I've ever seen in my entire life!" He tries to calm her down, but it's the tone when she says, "He suffered, Lafayette," that gets him. He promises to check on Jason later, and as he lights a Swisher asks WTF point there is in coming to his house at 3AM to throw things. "It! Makes! Me! Feel better!" He smiles: valid.
A few hours later it's morning, and some crazy lady is haranguing Gran on the phone while she makes breakfast, all, "Shame on you! A vampire is a perversion of humanity and you, vampire lover, are perverting our community by bringing one into the open! I don't care what sort of wretches you keep in your own home, but when you bring freaks and abominations into our churches in front of our children, you will..." Adele, interested in neither talking shit about Sookie nor about Bill Compton, tries to calm the bitch down and tells her to hear what he has to say before picking up her pitchfork and calling a lynching, but you know how people are when they're afraid. Sookie comes in looking for some breakfast, and the lady's yelling at Adele about how she's going to hell, and Adele hangs up: "All right, same to you. Bye, now!"
She tries to put a brave face on things, spinning the constant phone ringing as "excitement" about the big DGD meeting tonight and not pants-shitting angry fear. Gran segues into asking about Sookie's non-date last night, and Sookie snorts. "Am I really that much of a lost cause, you gotta pin all your hopes for me on a vampire?" Instead of telling her to stop being a bitch, Adele just says that Bill's a nice man. Sookie hisses that he's neither. "I know that if I had a chance to know somebody who'd experienced the world differently, I'd see it as a blessing and not something to be scared of. Or hate." Man, she's awesome. But between that hilarious phone signoff a second ago and this little speech now, I'm thinking there's a bell tolling somewhere. Oh no, it's right here: the phone ringing and ringing even as Sookie's saying, "I don't hate him, I just don't want to be his girlfriend." Adele pretends she can't hear it, and then when Sookie insists that it's actually ringing, assures her the machine will get it.
It's interesting because both of these scenes are saying the same thing, which is: your world is getting bigger. You are getting bigger. The only scary part is the doing; the world on the other side is pretty much just like right now, only slightly awesomer. If you've seen American Beauty and/or watched Six Feet Under, marshal those forces now, because we're about to watch two different shows. One of them, the show I'm comfortable watching, takes place in a world where nothing is scary, just unknown. Drugs in and of themselves are not evil, because that's just some shit Nancy shoved down our throat she didn't even believe herself, so she'd feel like less of a hypocrite about her husband selling our country and our world for magic beans. Sex is not in and of itself evil, etc. There are a million ways the human body can be employed that we don't know about yet, and I'm not interested in trying most of them, but I can't see why it matters what somebody else does and if I'm okay with that.
The other is a show I'm less interested in watching, which is one in which sex, death and drugs are so terrible and unnatural and ugly that we can't even talk about them, or look at them in a particular context or from a particular angle, because they all mean the same thing, for everybody, for all time. What Jason Stackhouse needs most is a horse to ride, through the wilderness, because what he is, is terribly sad and terribly afraid, and walking takes too long. Lafayette knows that he needs a horse, and knows the perfect solution to the question that is plaguing Jason. Because what Jason's never, ever done, in the midst of all that fucking, is understand why we do it.
I firmly believe -- like Bill, like Adele, like Lafayette -- that anything sufficiently known is incapable of being scary, because to know sufficiently is to love. So when I say Lafayette is the guide, and the only character who is always right, that's what I'm talking about. The cruelest and the wisest thing anyone can do is remove your training wheels. All story but particularly this story is about removing as many things from the bicycle as possible: training wheels first, and then the seat can go, and who needs handlebars, and those gears never did you any favors, and pretty soon the wheels themselves are gone, and soon you'll be flying. Lafayette is sinister to the degree that drugs are sinister, which are sinister to the degree that freedom is sinister and terrifying, which is a lot.
Jason slowly slides a meat thermometer all the way through a sausage, staring intensely at Lafayette; the last centimeter or so are a sudden jerk. "Yeah. Just like that. And no anesthesiar, either. First, I get hauled in by the cops, then I gotta let a dude drain my johnson." They talk about how much they love each other and Jason starts lecturing Lafayette that he better stop selling V, because it's entirely possible that somebody else will be completely retarded and take a whole shitload of it before going into police custody and wouldn't that be sad if it happened again, and Sherriff Dearborne thinks he's some kind of sex maniac (Lafayette is like, "You are!") and now things are fucked up with Tara. Whose spot Lafayette completely blows, as some kind of random craps throw: "She'll get over it. The girl's been lost in love with you since she was eight." Jason is stunned for like five seconds, because he had no idea, and that makes it worse, because when your identity is based on being desired, those who do are simultaneously more and less important than everybody else, so now Tara loving him makes her more important than her utility. "Gah! My life sucks so much ass! And it's all because of your fuckin' V!"
"Listen, don't blame the Ferrari just because your ass can't drive. You're gonna have to learn how to ride the high, boyfriend." Soon you'll be flying. Jason's story is being offered the things the rest of us are looking desperately for, and completely missing that they're there. Lafayette offers you transcendence and you see it as something to get fucked up on; Tara offers you her love and you fuck Maudette Pickens, of all people. Jason continues to blame the Ferrari; he has no idea anyone knew how to drive, or how they learned. "Go fuck some other people up with that shit! You broke me." Not yet, but soon. Then it can start. "If you can learn to control it, V will open up your mind to everything you're missing around you. That's what's gonna snap you out of all this shit." Hear that? We know, but in the context of the narrative there's no explanation for that last bit. Snap him out of what? Feeling sorry for himself, not knowing how to drive the Ferrari. Thinking the Ferrari is the point, and not where it takes you. "If done right..." Lafayette sips his coffee, seductive, and offers to teach him to drive.
Lafayette lays out paper towel blotter squares on the coffee table, and explains the workings of the universe. You could call them mysteries, or secrets, but they're neither. "This is the life force of a vampire. They're just blood in a skin casing, ain't a whole lot different between a vampire and a boudin sausage, except for the blood. Our blood sustains life. This blood is life." He's hypnotic, poetic, frighteningly into it. It doesn't seem like patter. "One drop, that's all you need. Can't be greedy. Billions of molecules of pure, undiluted, twenty four-karat life. You take this in, and you take in a piece of the vampire it came from. Trick is, you have to let it take you deep." Jason stares, mouth open as Lafayette sniffs the dropper and squeezes drops onto the squares; he nods. Ordinarily phrases like "life force" are a little tricky, but there's honestly no better phrase: it's the difference between a dead body, without passions or hungers or pains or fears, and a very much animated body, full of them all. And we, who are already alive?
Lafayette pops a drop into his mouth, and Jason's eyes go wide, like a little kid. Lafayette savors it, closing his eyes, and Jason asks what kind of vampire it is; what the qualities of the vampire are. Lafayette's eyes are hard to open. "He's new. So the blood is still a little wild? I can feel him in my muscles, making me strong..." Lafayette dances, waving softly back and forth in the wind, across the table; Jason stares, grinning. Everything is sex if you look at it right. "But you might get another side of him. The same V could affect you in a whole other way..." his breathing is labored as it comes on. "But I guarantee you'll see the world with new eyes." He slides a square across the glass, and Jason hesitates just a moment before placing it on his tongue. Jason can't believe he's doing it again, after the whole johnson-draining issue last night, but this is a different day. The sun came up on a different world today. A bigger world, and a more intimate one: This isn't a sale, it's not a pitch or a demo. Lafayette does things in a particular way, with a particular stance and a particular voice and a way of doing things; he keeps the vials in the refrigerator and demands cash up front. His personal stash, Lafayette's V, that he's sharing with a friend? This isn't a drug deal, it's communion. "Oh no, man. You're doing it for the first time."
Sookie spills ketchup on her hand at work and Arlene cracks a joke about Bill "getting a rise" out of seeing it on her skin; Sookie's response tells her all she needs to know. "Vamp club not all it was made out to be, huh? A lot of freaks, I hear. And people from Arkansas." Heh. She starts to get all defensive about Bill possibly getting "all handsy" with Sookie, but she reminds her friend she can take care of herself. "And no," she tells Arlene and the suddenly very attentive Sam Merlotte, "I won't be goin' out with him again." Arlene and Sam share a glance, and Sookie admits that Fangtasia -- which, I really appreciate the lengths everybody's going to in order to avoid saying the word out loud, because that's the kind of shit you can write in a book but hell to say out loud -- was "kinda freaky." But, she points out, the world is getting bigger. "How are you ever gonna know until you go see for yourself?" Sam avoids the issue, and Arlene sweetly says, "I'm sorry it didn't turn out like you'd hoped, but ... Better it happens now than before you end up hurt, or dead." That's like the most reasonable I think Arlene has ever been.
Sookie stares at her as she goes, and -- because she is no longer dating the vampire and who knows when they're going to hook back up, so he better take his chance -- Sam comes over and asks her out while everybody's watching: Descendants of the Glorious Dead meeting tonight, and then coffee after. Needless to say, he is adorable and nervous and more than a little intense while the transaction is going down, and then because it must happen in every episode, Sookie notices everybody staring at her and being part of the audience for her big romantic moment of the day. When Sookie points out that everybody's watching -- with fuckin' Andy Bellefleur right there in the middle of the shot -- Sam goes beyond hot into some kind of infrared area: "I know! You better say yes!" There's no way to do anything other than say yes to that. He gets a little taller, and orders everybody's eyes back on their plates, shooting her a shy grin even as he's growling at everybody else. She loves that bit.
Sookie brings Andy one of the ketchup bottles she's just married, and he awkwardly segues to her brother's fake affair with Tara. "Tara who? Tara Tara?" She laughs it off and tells him that there's nothing going on, and he silently gloats. (I knew it. Tara ain't bangin' Stackhouse, bitch lied to me.) Sookie tells him to watch his mouth, metaphorically, and he's shocked into literally telling himself what's going on while it's happening, for our benefit. (I know I didn't say anything, but I did think it! And you heard it! That means it's true, you can hear what people think...) Sookie bounces back to grab some tea for him, and asks Sam where Tara is. He sends her to the ladies', a tiny amount of nervous about what happens .
When Sookie walks in, Tara immediately asks why she didn't tell her she was going out with Sam. "Because it ... just happened?" She asks how Tara knew, and Tara's deadpan is hilarious as usual: "Arlene. She works fast." I love that, because there's literally no way that any of this could have happened, in the time that it took her to exchange two sentences with Andy, and it's time for this blatant fable to just come out and say so.
Sookie points out that it's not exactly a giant sex date, considering it involves attending a boring lecture about Our Racist Legacy with old people -- with Maxine Fortenberry, for God's sake -- in a church, and asks why she should even be justifying it in the first place. "I'm entitled to know what my girl's up to, ain't I?" Sookie nods and closes the door. "Yeah, about that. Why does Andy Bellefleur think you're seein' my brother?" Tara explains about her alibi/fake affair thing with Jason, and tells Sookie she only did it because they both know he's innocent, both of the crime and generally, and can't be trusted not to talk himself into trouble with the cops. Name me a way that Jason Stackhouse differs substantially from
">Starbuck, I dare you. With Lafayette for his Leoben, leading him gently by the hand down the rabbit hole of all the scary things he's been forgetting.Tara gets incredibly shifty and suspicious-acting for no reason, leading Sookie to ask why she's being incredibly shifty and acting so suspicious, but when she tries to read her mind, all she hears is, excellently, "LALALALALALALALALALA." Which is better than "You're going on a date tonight with the same werewolf or whatever the hell he is that I just boned like yesterday, which is sort of creepy," but what makes it hilarious is the dead serious look on Tara's face as she's staring Sookie down, combined with the ridiculous sound of the voiceover. Try to be completely still and deadpan and intimidating while going "LALALALALA," you can't do it. But Sookie's entitled to know what her girl's up to, isn't she? Apparently not. Tara stomps away with a great stomping, all, "not every detail of everyone's personal life is your business!" and ordering Sam to keep Sookie away from her. I calculate that this fight will last three more seconds.
Sookie immediately runs to Andy Bellefleur -- sorry, "Detective" Bellefleur -- to completely change her story and say that in fact she was asserting a mistaken truth before and that she has noticed Jason and Tara "kind of sneakin' around lately," which is such an in-your-face contradiction that Andy's offended by her assumption that he's dumb enough to believe it. (Now she's coverin' for him too? Shit, don't look her in the eye...) Sookie suggests that Andy eat a dick, basically, and at least accuse her of lying "out loud." Which points to a greater flustration because she's flustered enough to exercise prior restraint, like, what makes it an accusation is saying it out loud, which he has not done, but also brings us to a more interesting and subtler place, which is: Sookie Stackhouse just came out.
The world is now sufficiently big enough, and there are things in it alien enough, that her little gift and the ways she can use it are less of a threat. Pretending to be something other than what you are is another kind of training wheel, and getting tired enough of waiting on the world to change around you that you stop worrying about it, stop looking at yourself through the filter of everybody else's eyes, and just be who you are. That's learning to drive. Listen: "Either way, I'm gonna hear you whether you look me in the eye or not." Out loud, like that: today.
She compares the relative scarcity of ideas in his head to mice in a cage, and tells him she's sympathetic to his "grasping at straws" in the murder investigation, but warns him not to drag Jason down with him. Which is... pretty much exactly what the situation called for, because that's exactly what he's doing. I hate Andy Bellefleur for many reasons, but I can't shake this idea that he's so into closing the case and getting applause for solving the problem that he'd be okay with a dubious or wrong suspect, if it came down to it.
Hoyt's handing out programs at the church when his mother Maxine calls his name: she's yanking desperately at the crucifix at the head of the church, on the altar. She doesn't have the software for this yet, and she's doing her best: "Our guest of honor is a vampire. Adele plumb forgot that little fact when she booked the church for tonight. What do you think's gonna happen when he comes out and sees a giant cross?" Nobody knows, but Maxine's looking forward to Bill sizzling up like hybrid breakfast food "fatback bacon," a thing that exists to the same extent that vampires do. Hoyt steps up toward her to help, and is adorable some more: "Quit jerkin' on it!"
Or, okay, how about this. Did you ever think about antihistamines? Like, what they are? Your body is working overtime to protect you, getting all insane and trying to expel everything that comes inside, which results in misery, because your body has stopped being able to tell what's okay and what's worth hating. So you take antihistamines, right, to stop your body from doing its job. But that doesn't mean that being protected is bad, or that your allergic reactions don't serve a function, or that they aren't necessary in other circumstances. Your body knows what it's doing, but that doesn't mean you can't fine-tune it a little more. Teach it to hate more efficiently.
What Adele Stackhouse is trying to do here -- what Lafayette, and Bill, and Sam in his way are trying to do -- is perform an inoculation. A little bit of allergen, so your immune system knows how to deal with it, without overreacting and hurting you more than the thing would. But it doesn't mean you're not careful, it doesn't mean you don't hold onto that kernel of hate and remember and honor it, because the world is never going to be sufficiently large that you'll be entirely safe, no matter how much love you harbor in you for all the things in it. That's like turning off your immune system entirely, and breathing deep. Which is just as lazy and dogmatic as going the other way, and I think what Jason's going to be engaged in doing for the foreseeable future: letting greed drive is just as bad as fear.
"Hi there, munchkins!" Adele reckons Arlene's children the youngest "history buffs" she's ever had at a DGD meeting, and Rene represents, as he will throughout the episode, the rubberneckers of the world, who look out at the trees and weeds and flowers through the glass; the ones that stay inside, with their allergies and secrets. "They wouldn't stay home for nothing -- the minute they heard a vampire, they had to come." The Mayor approaches Adele , asking if everybody's safe. She does that Gran thing where she pretends not to know what he means, because it's just too appalling to be true, and ends up telling him she's more worried about what their asses are going to do to Bill, not what Bill's going to do to their children. Bill sits in the kitchen of the church with a bottle of TruBlood, as still as a statue, not even blinking, listening to them: their chatter, their casual bigotry, the excitement of the crowd, their heartbeats, the blood in their veins.
Inside the chapel, Hoyt's on all fours on the altar, having no luck with the cross. It's a funny image but a good one, because what Hoyt's trying to do is give the church antihistamines. They've redefined this space as civil, not religious, for tonight, and yet the church stubbornly goes on being a church. I'm not a religious man, exactly, but I'm pretty grossed out by the idea of so casually moving that cross around like that, like, "Sorry God, not tonight. Could you come back later?" I mean, it's well-intentioned and underinformed and sweet, and God knows I love Hoyt Fortenberry, on all fours or otherwise, but it's still backwards and kind of fucked up.
Bill listens to Adele welcome Sookie and her date, Sam Merlotte. He doesn't move, but somehow flinches anyway.
Flinching more visibly: the appalled and staring -- and very much alone in this room, by the way, considering where they are and why -- Tara, watching the men hang up the Dixie flag. Word. I already said my piece about the "Glorious Dead" and the whole Civil War thing, but just to be clear: it's not okay. The little meeting is not okay. This little club? Not okay. Dixie flags? Not okay. Regardless of what you think or say it means to you or your family, put that shit away. We don't want to see it, and we don't want to make the assumptions about you -- that you are ignorant, ill-bred, hateful and aggressive trash -- that you're forcing us to make. The fact that you're wearing it proves those assumptions are correct, and you're looking for the fight. There are places where irony doesn't go, and symbols of hate are among them. You can't wear a swastika ironically without it proving you're an aggressive dick, and the same applies here, and you know it, and please spare me the complaints about that, too: wearing Dixie shit and reacting with that disingenuous shock when you're called out for being a racist tool is like hanging a rainbow flag outside your house and complaining that people keep treating you like a fag. Stop acting like a fag and they won't, you Nazi.
Sam, Tara and Sookie have a three-way awkwardfest for three different reasons, and eventually they join her on the pew. "Come on in. Could always use more white people." I would just want the buffer, because how fucking fucked up would it be to sit there and like ... I would just spend the entire time wondering, like, "What if something happens and they suddenly get so excited about how white they are or how much they secretly hate black people and they just kind of ... go crazy and kill me?"
That's seriously where my thoughts would go, immediately. I hope some weird unforeseen mob mentality mojo doesn't suddenly grip everyone post-hypnotically, or caves deep under the church don't release some kind of toxic hallucinogenic anger gas, or I hope the sun doesn't line up with Jupiter and like the Rukbat system far away in space, and that's it: I'm a goner. Even though I know all of these people and that sort of bizarre event has never actually happened in all of human history without at least a little warning. But on the other hand, what if they all know something or operate on shared assumptions I wouldn't even know about, and I'm not in on the white joke, there's a white joke and I'm not in on it, so when they signal each other that it is time for my murder I won't even know it, or maybe they got here a half-hour earlier than they told me to come, so they could plan out their ambush, or what if all these meetings aren't even about Civil War memorabilia but in fact about how they are aliens who have infiltrated Renard Parish and I'm the last one that needs to be put in an alien pod and lose my personality to aliens, or else I'm the only person on earth and everybody else is robots. That is so fucked up, I can't even believe that, if it's true.
"If you can learn to control it, V will open up your mind to everything you're missing around you." Jason stands outside the church and hears the voice of his guide. The flowers on the tree -- magnolias? -- shine with life, throwing sparks everywhere. It is beautiful, a rare moment: to see the life in a single flower, and to feel connected to it and through this moment come to the realization that you are connected to everything else in a deeply felt and unexpressible way, and that we are only the movements of God through time, expressing Himself through us, and His name is only love. Or else Jason's just all fucked up on drugs.
Some trash guys come in; you can tell that they are bad guys because they are smirky, wearing mesh caps and a thousand other signifiers that indicate their class and intellect, and the lead one is blonde and a bit of a beard. They bitch about how it's less like a vampire show and more like a zombiefest, due to all the old racists in attendance -- "More like Descendents of the Walking Dead," awesomely -- and they use the word "pick-'em-up" and generally act the way somebody from like Maryland thinks southern trash acts; they sit further back. Tara continues to wonder if white people are an elaborate prank, when the punchline walks in, staring right at her.
I know a Bonnie Raitt song about sparks flying out across "the wilderness between me and you," which is a metaphor I love, obviously, and I recently wrote a recap that used the image of sparks in at least as many ways as this episode does, so I'm saying it's impossible to extricate from this episode my own recent thoughts and obsessions, and I have no idea about the title or where the song comes in, but I do know I'm quoting this for the second time in a month: "Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards." It's such a strange, beautiful little image; normally you think of certainty in terms of gravity, but sparks do fly up. And Jason was born unto trouble for real, just like anybody else. I don't know, but it's from the book of Job, which is a story about pretty much the exact same thing: What if the entire world were an elaborate prank?
Jason watches -- and hears -- the sweat run down her neck, endorphins and adrenaline, water, sparks. There are certain kinds of crazy and a lot of drugs that imbue a relevance to things that they don't usually have. Things are more themselves; they have significance unto themselves, like the images on Tarot cards: The Dixie Flag. The Old Racist Bitch. The Girl With A Fan. The Sweat On Your Neck. The Feeling Of Walking. The Slow Motion. It's the first sweat and the last sweat that anybody ever sweated, in all the world it's a thing he's seen but never really seen. It runs wet, like blood, but it reminds him of sex, sweat on skin, and maybe he loves her back. Maybe he's in love with her, and always has been, but the world conspired to keep this knowledge away from him by distracting him with hobags and ADD and Alabama Thunderpussy, whatever that might be, and all the bullshit that keeps us apart, and keeps us from expressing that essential union between people, between spirits, that is divinity meeting itself, saying "Hello," and "I remember," and "I know you," in a single kiss. Or else Jason's just all fucked up on drugs.
Jason's eyes are throwing sparks as he grins wildly at Tara, and sits beside her; his glassy look falls on everything at once, beautiful and significant and powerful and good. She courteously avoids from darting a glance at his dick, which I would not be able to do if I'd been through what they've been through: How are you and your penis doing today? She asks how he's feeling, and he answers honestly: "Oh, strong." She stares at him and he grins. "Alive." The world is good and all the things of and in the world are good. He's breathing deep, without an immune system.
Maxine's solution was to drape the flag over the cross, which is disturbing in about sixty ways but mostly reminded me of this thing Edith Wharton wrote to somebody (Google says Barrett Wendell, July 19, 1919) that I've been obsessing on lately. It's not really that insightful about today's world, more like redundant, but it gives me the shits that she said it almost a hundred years ago: "How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be 'American' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?" I'll take this purely meaningless object that we imbue with meaning and drape it over this other purely meaningless object that we imbue with meaning, and somehow I have done something. And meanwhile, Bill's fangs are like a snake, he's a bucket of blood in a shapely sausage casing, and the only thing special about him is that his blood carries some kind of virus or something that makes you awesome. The Flag, The Cross, The Stranger.
Sookie's sad when Sam tells her to sit back, and relax, because she's never known how to do that. I like how pro-powers Sam is, I like that he's her advocate for that, even if he doesn't really understand it. Or, as we'll see, the concept of self-control. Adele welcomes the congregation to the meeting; Jason smiles around at them all, completely in love with each one. She starts the procedure.
"Now, our guest tonight is a gentleman who, despite what you might have heard, is one of us. His family was among the first to settle in Bon Temps, and he bravely fought for Louisiana in the War For Southern Independence. Let us welcome one of the original sons of Bon Temps back to the town that he helped build. I give you First Lieutenant William Thomas Compton." The applause is better than you might think; Sam doesn't join in. He watches Bill take the stage; he doesn't take his eyes off him.
"Thank you, Mrs. Stackhouse. If you'll pardon me for a moment..." Bill flourishes The Flag off The Cross and puts it back on its pole as he speaks. Jason pretty much transcends all time and space for a second, as that one gesture manages to encode so much meaning, about men and gods and nations, wars, the unfortunate miscegenation between the two that results in fundamentalism and large-scale acts both religious and secular based less on love than hate and profit, or about the ways in which the ties that bind us and the shared ground beneath our feet will always be stronger than the forces that try to pull us apart, that no matter who we marry or whether or not we're immortal at least we're all Americans, and isn't that the point, or does that truth hide something deeper within it, like a Cross below a Flag, or else he's fucked up on drugs. Everybody else gasps, and all the charming from last week just drains out of old Bill. I hate smug. I hate Smarmy Bill more than anything besides Zach Braff. "As a patriot of this great nation, I wouldn't dream of putting myself before Old Glory." Sookie's impressed; their entire breakup was based on an allergy flareup, and here he is trying to administer the meds.
He smiles nervously as he takes the pulpit (Lectern? Ambo? Ambo is the best word ever): "As you can see, I did not burst into flames. We vampires are not minions of the Devil. We can stand before a cross, or a Bible, or in a church, just as readily as any other creature of God." In a sufficiently large world, he's saying, you understand that everything that exists, exists with the consent of its Creator. Vampires are creatures of God by virtue of the fact that they are natural beings, because all we have is nature. And if you can stop sneezing long enough to notice that, you can be a part of the world too; you can drive the Ferrari if you're brave enough to admit that it exists.
"I am honored to stand before you tonight. Vampires have traditionally been very private, perhaps to our detriment. But I believe, if we reach out to one another, that we can coexist, and even thrive together." This last comment directed right at Sookie, all intense and vampirical, like "I'll thrive all over your face." Bill served in the 28th Louisiana Infantry, formed in Monroe in 1862 under Colonel Snoozefest Boringfuck, and it was in the war that Bill and his fellow soldiers learned the value of human life, "and the ease with which it can be extinguished."
Bud's all, "That son of buck's been killing since the 1860s, why stop now?" But Andy points at Pamie's Friend & Modern-Day Keanu Reeves Todd Lowe: "That don't prove anything. My cousin Terry killed twenty Iraqis in Fallujah. You saying we should lock him up?" Bud responds that Terry should be locked up regardless, and Andy's hilarious face is like, "Huh? ...Well, probably, yeah."
Bill's explaining how back in the day, soldiers were uneducated and didn't understand the political and ideological conflicts that lead to them getting shot in the head and dying before they get the chance to live a completely life. Glad it's not like that anymore. Arlene's kid remarks on his dead-guy pallor and she shushes him: "No darlin', we're white. He's dead." Rene laughs at that. It's so awesome to be full-on white, surrounded by other white people, and then talk about how fucking white you are. I don't know if you know about it, but white people do that constantly. They're called board meetings.
Zoom in on Jason, the blood beating in his veins and his temples, the V in him, changing him, putting in the action. It's as though Bill is speaking directly to him, explaining that going to war what not a choice for them, because it's a choice for nobody: when the war starts, you are called to action. When the war starts, Jason, you have to be ready. You have a calling to fulfill. You have a destiny, it has been handed down to you, from above: drink of us as we drink of you, and you will be sacrificed, and you will become one with all nature, without time or space or the need for any symbolic meaning beyond the simple and profound experience of existence itself. (Starbuck! I'm not kidding!) You are a meaningless object imbued with rich symbolic significance; you are a bucket of blood in a shapely sausage casing; you are prey. Your body is your enemy, your body is your weapon, your body is your currency, your body is your darling, your body is a world that's getting bigger, your body is a world you watch from outside and never inhabit, your body is a meaningless object without intrinsic significance, your body is part of all nature because all we have is nature. You are a creature and a child of God.
"God forbid should any of our men become wounded or injured. Often the only recourse for a serious injury was amputation..." The rednecks pull out a garlic press; the cute blonde one presses the shit out of some garlic, like viciously and in Bill's direction, which is hilarious because like, in what drawer of the kitchenette in your trailer home do you keep your garlic press, sir? Sookie watches, unimpressed: she is them. She shares their allergies, and she hurt his feelings on purpose, because she got scared and for no other reason. And all her self-righteous platitudes and judgy-judge and open-mindedness went out the window the second she saw him in a certain light, and realized her world wasn't big enough to contain his every angle. Which is what he spent four episodes testing her on: first you check if they can hang with your friends, then you take them to club and see how they do, and then you make a cop piss himself in front of them. We have all done these things.
As Bill drones on and on about the totally boring shit these people want to hear about, answering such questions as "Did amputation exist" and "Was there weather back then," Hoyt is being cute as hell in the location of the kitchen, cleaning out the fridge and happening on a bottle of TruBlood. He stares at it, fascinated, and then slowly reaches for it, smiling to himself and looking around all shifty before unscrewing the cap and taking a quick sniff. He nearly giggles as he's replacing it on the shelf. I have a fear that Hoyt is going to have a really bad day, some point soon. He's too awesome to survive this show.
Some Colonel Sanders lookin' dude asks about a particular Glorious Dead from whom he Descends, and yes, Bill did happen to know that guy, and here's a totally pointless story about that, because Bill knows as well as you and I and Adele do that at some point in the last five episodes this went from being a historical curiosity to a civil necessity, that Bill needs to be formally introduced to the town where he's making his home, that he must perform perfectly in front of them, that he must manipulate and hypnotize them into not lynching him in the daylight, that the great leap forward that humanity's still trying to accomplish even after two years has come to Bon Temps. That it's no longer a choice: when it starts, you are called to action. When the world gets bigger you have to be ready.
Bill flashes back to a battle about twenty miles north, in which "the Federals" outnumbered the good guys five-to-one, and had better guns, and everybody was dying. And this kid was lying injured, out in the field, under the sun, fourteen or younger, calling to him and this guy's Glorious Dead Ancestor, all day long. This was back before Bill's short-bus haircut, back when he was totally hot and had really great hair. So anyway, Bill thought about how probably he should shoot the kid, to put him out of his misery, but Ancestor Tolliver told him that was murder, not war. It wasn't that the kid was beyond help so much as the fact that they couldn't get to him, across that open space, and bring him back to their location. Tolliver looked across that field and saw The Boy; he got a message from God to get him. Bill pled with him not to do it, specifically offering, note, what would hold him personally back, the thing he loves and misses most, his family. But the thing that animated Bill is not what animated Tolliver, and Tolliver headed out to do his duty to God and the boy. He died instantly, of course, just as he reached the kid, and blood went everywhere.
"And then, after a while, the boy started screaming again." The boy is Jason. Lost in the wilderness and bullshit that keeps us apart, under the sunny sky. Screaming, alone. It's not that he's beyond help so much as the fact that they won't be able to get to him, across that open space, when it's time; that they won't be able to get him home in one piece, once he starts wandering. Or probably he's just all fucked up on drugs.
"What happened to the boy?" Maxine asks, in the silence. She's a mother. The boy lived. She is moved, and across the aisle Terry Bellefleur starts to freak out a little bit, because war is like a gin and tonic: pretty much the same no matter where you drink it. The rednecks are unimpressed by this boring story about the boy, but everybody else is all over Bill's jock at this point. Mayor Norris hobbles up and hands Bill an old tintype from the archives that says Mr. W.T. Compton and family on the back. The question Mayor Norris wants to ask is whether this is a picture of Bill, because if so, that is extremely fucked up because Bill is standing right there. Bill's voice cracks. "This... This is a remarkable photograph. I remember the day we gathered to have this taken." Sookie's touched by the depth of feeling he's hiding. She can't hear his thoughts but she knows him better than anybody in this room; she probably knows his face better than any other face because of all the skills she's had to use with him, it follows, for the first time.
"When was the last time you were with them?" Maxine asks. Everyone but Sam is moved by the idea that not everybody made it, through time; that he's the last man standing. "When I went to war in 1862. I... My human life ended before I had a chance to come back home." Rene asks if he became a..." (is this a situation where you use a euphemism or is there some kind of politically correct hyphenate or is it even offensive or has he reclaimed the word or is it just a word, a meaningless utterance imbued with meaning through connotation and context, and if I offend him will they make me leave, because this is totally interesting, okay fuck it) "...A vampire after that, right? Couldn't you go back to your family then?" The sadness in his eyes is bottomless; he puts a handkerchief to his eyes so that they won't see him crying, because if they see him crying their allergies will kick in: "No. No, that wouldn't have been possible." Maxine and everybody cry along with him; Sookie looks about ready to do him right there in church. "This is not a subject I'm very comfortable speaking about. But thank you for the photograph, Mayor. Brings back many memories for me." He smiles; Sookie nearly weeps for him. He palms the handkerchief, hiding the tears. They are made of blood.
Adele says goodbye to everybody, and Terry Bellefleur throws his arms around Bill without prelude. "They don't understand, man. None of them will ever understand." There are little Dixie flags on all the tables; somebody's playing it on the piano. Normally that would be overkill, production-wise, but honestly that's what this event is all about. Bill realizes what's going on with Terry, and holds him for a moment. The Brother. Maxine and Hoyt, whose entire face lights up at this point whenever he's around Bill, take a photograph with him (Bill is happy to disprove the myth about mirrors and pictures); Bill is more human in this moment than I've ever seen him, so of course effin' Sookie walks up with Sam Marlotte in tow. She doesn't take her eyes off Bill's the entire scene; she introduces them and Bill's voice is gentle. "Yes. You're Sookie's employer." Sam nods, but notes that they're off-duty right now. "No," Bill says all nerdy, "Legally you still are." Sam is like, "Um okay weirdo," because that was hilarious and dorky. Frankly, Bill should be with Sookie for the free Not Acting Totally Weird lessons alone.
Sam tosses a few zingers and vague threats Bill's way about how like Bill may think he's got everybody fooled but not Sam Merlotte no sir, he will keep hating on Bill until they dig up every bone he ever buried, and Bill can go fuck himself and vampires suck and whatever. Sam finally forces her eyes away from Bill's by literally sticking his giant beautiful face in her face: "We're gonna grab a cup of coffee before we call it a night." Bill's like, "Coffee. Sounds delightful." But what he means is, "I hope that it contains poison and that you die when you drink the coffee with poison in it, because you suck and vampires rule." Sookie is tired of all their shit and takes off, hugging Adele and smiling at Bill. "He seems nice," Bill says with nearly zero discernable emotion, and Adele is about half dotty and half put out by the boy drama so she just goes, like, "Ungh?"
The ass cheeks of Randi Sue, how they do sway, like a flag fluttering in the wind. Randi Sue is maybe the grossest person ever on this show, besides Maudette Pickens and I guess the Coroner's fangbanger Assistant. Hoyt is all over it, and full of bravado and gender performance. "Man, this place is crawling with hot chicks and we're just sitting here like our balls are stuck together!" Hello to the imagery, which is actually kind of confusing. Rene points out that his chère, such as she is, works at the very establishment in which they are sitting, and Jason casually unsnaps his entire shirt and starts giving the table a massage, as if to say he gets laid so constantly and consistently that he's having sex right now, as we speak. Hoyt floats the idea that they should order some TruBloods, grossing Rene out, but cops to being totally fascinated by Bill and wanting to try some things. "I go to the dog races, you see me eating Alpo?" Fair point, rubbernecker. Hoyt stands by it, though: "Well, I just thought he was pretty cool, was all."
Jason looks at Tara, working behind the bar, and she turns into an actual Tarot card, pouring water into the river, day-glo green leaves plaited into her hair and a manic grin plastered on her goddess's face. The Beloved, the Star. He stands up to get the pitcher, still completely high and weird and giggly: "Yup, I'll get it. I love you guys." Hoyt's pleased, then does a double-take. I wish Jason were like this all the time but I don't want him to get stuck here either. I think I might love Jason the most, you guys. That's really weird. I know that I identify with and love his storyline the most, because it's about all the shit I'm coincidentally into, such as hard drugs and filthy sex, but also: the true things that come up when you are intoxicated, the increased Jason-ness of Jason, is wonderful. He wants to make you happy, and he almost has a plan about how to do that, like... Jason Stackhouse would fuck the entire world if he could, like as a favor, to make us smile. And that is a beautiful thing. He's like the Fucker in the Rye, in that respect. When I was saying that he brought Dawn flowers and a boner it was kind of a joke, but I don't think that anymore. I think he was actually bringing her flowers and his dick, and that was his apology. I mean, he's dumb as hell but he is good, and I really just think good is more important than smart. I think smart is way overrated most of the time.
When he touches Tara's arm, he jumps. "Whoa! You feel that? Every hair on your arm is shooting sparks into my hand!" The only reason Jason wants to fuck the world is that he can't handle the tragedy of acknowledging that nobody ever really knows anybody else; that his sister's the only person that can truly come into your body and be one with you, on the other side of the skin; inside his skin, where he is trapped. Where he is lonely, and alone, forever. It's not your skin he wants, but the sparks on the other side of it, and sex is the closest and the furthest thing from this. It's why he got carried away with Maudette, why it gets rough sometimes: spread yourself as thin across the body of a person as you want, you're still not getting in there. You still can't touch the sparks. And to a beast like him, or Sam, that's got to be the saddest thing, because it's not like he can intellectualize it, or get inside people that way, with a brain. "You know those electric fences they use to pen horses? It feels like I just pissed on one!"
Tara's like "Jesus H! Seriously?" Jason swears he's not high, immediately admits that he's super fucking high on drugs, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether his feelings are legitimate or real. "For the first time, I can see clear. All these years, I was blinded by the bullshit that keeps people apart. It's you, Tara. It's been you all along." She's like, um, I have known you since I was six. WTF are you talking about? How cruel can you possibly be, to tell me this now? When does the sad part come? How are you going to disappoint me this time? How does my world get bigger this time? Why take off the training wheels, when all I wanted was for you to stay inaccessible?
"It's taken me all this time to admit it. Come here," he says, leaning in. She grins easily, conspiratorially, like she's known him since she was six. "This bar might be filled with beautiful women, but you're the one who took care of me when I needed it. You showed me love, Tara. And that's the most beautiful thing of all." Oh, Jason. His empty eyes are like an overbred hound, glassy and unfocused and very, very excited and pleased about nothing in particular. It's so fucked up when he does that, it freaks me out every time. And he's doing it all the time. Tara tells him to come back when he's sober, and they can discuss it for real. He gets all palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss on her, folding his fingers through hers, breathing softly, adoring her with those empty, borderline-retarded eyes. She's like, "For fucking real?" He kisses her fingers. "Just give me a chance, I'll prove it to you. Everything I'm feeling..." He breathes, deep. His immune system is gone. "...I want to feel it with you. One chance. That's all I'm asking." Her mouth forms the beginnings of words but she doesn't successfully complete the mission; she pulls her fingers out from his and wanders away, shell-shocked.
Also romantic: eating pie with Sam Merlotte at a restaurant, after coffee. She offers him the last bite, and he cuts it in half. He starts in about her powers again, all, "Guess you saw this comin'," and "Do you ever listen to my thoughts like I keep telling you to do?" She admits that she's done it. "...To be honest, it's a little weird. You don't think the way others do. Most people, it's whole sentences or images. With you, sometimes there's words? But other times, I just get these sounds, like, waves of emotions." And sometimes it's just like, "Snausages! Snausages! Snausages! SnausagesSnausagesSnausagesSnausages!"
Sam tries to play it off about how maybe he's just a freak, and she says what's freaky is how mysterious he is, which he finds flattering. "How come nobody knows anything about you? I never hear you talk about where you're from, or your family, or anything." He explains that the people who raised him have little or nothing to do with who he is now, not to mention that he basically raised himself. We call that Raised By Wolves in my circle, because a lot of us grew up that way, but it seems particularly appropriate for this circumstance I think. "Is that why you spend so much time alone?" Sam explains how that's probably more due to his general hatred of people. Sookie laughs that he certainly chose a strange business to buy if he hates people that bad, and he says he was really just looking to meet pretty waitresses. She laughs, adorably: "...Too bad you got yourself a couple of crazy ones in the bargain!"
He gives her a come on look, and goes back to commanding her to have more self-esteem. You're not crazy, you're magic! Way better! "There's nothing wrong with you. I can't understand why you'd wanna fix, or change, or ... hide anything. I wouldn't want you any other way..." Sookie looooves that, of course, because it's what everybody should get to hear sixty reps a day, not just a few in a lifetime. "You're just trying to get on my good side." He asks how he's doing, and she smiles, looking down. They geek out about the pie some more, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces like some Xeno paradox about infinite regress, and I'm sorry but I just keep thinking that I would not want to lose my virginity to a werewolf. I don't know that Sookie is ready for that jelly.
Arlene brings a hamburger back to the grill and looks at Lafayette tiredly. He asks if there's a problem, and she says it's just some drunk rednecks (Guess who? Good thing this small southern town only has three rednecks, because that's totally realistic.) "What did they say, Arlene?" After five times, she finally answers the question: "He said ... the burger ... might have AIDS." I'm sorry, but that's hilarious. And if Lafayette didn't have V coursing through his veins and in his muscles, making him strong, he ... Well, probably he still wouldn't find it funny, and actually he would throw this exact same party. Never mind. Lafayette cocks his head sideways, like, "Oh yes?" and then takes off his earrings. (My second-favorite thing of all things that people do! Right after whenever somebody bangs their face against a car window because they forget it's rolled up. That is the highest form of comedy to me.) Arlene regrets telling him as he very deliberately removes his apron and takes the plate off the counter, heading toward what I like to call an Opportunity To Educate.
"Excuse me. Who ordered the hamburger ... with AIDS?" The other two laugh, because obviously it's the cute blonde one who is going to be receiving the wrath here. The blonde says, all attitude, that he ordered the hamburger deluxe, and sparks fly out of Lafayette's eyeballs as he slowly morphs into Tracy Jordan. "In this restaurant, a hamburger deluxe comes with french fries, lettuce, tomato, mayo... and AIDS!" People get a little quieter and watch what happens. The guy makes a very strange argument that I don't quite follow, basically that, as an American citizen, he has a say in who makes his food. What does that mean? You have your choice of restaurants and may exercise it as will, but that's not what you're doing. It's like... Well, it's like bitching about the fact that you can't bitch about a website on that website, like your civil rights are being violated, when you have the entire internet to say whatever you want. Dumb as shit to a degree that's always confused and frightened me, and I can't even tell if that's where he's going with it because I don't speak stupid that fluently. Lafayette, though, is a bridge-builder.
"Baby, it's too late for that. Faggots been breeding your cows, raising your chickens, even brewing your beer, long before I walked my sexy ass up in this motherfucker. Everything on your goddamn table's got AIDS." I wish every episode were just Lafayette talking, because I never have much to add because he is so wonderful. They sit there, in the midst of all that AIDS, and consider their circumstance. Blondie says another retarded thing about how "You still ain't makin' me eat no AIDS burger," which ... who the fuck is making you do anything? I'm so confused. It's like this whole stop hitting yourself thing that he's doing, like he's playing an elaborate prank on the world, looking for a fight and too dumb to justify it like the rest of us.
But again, Lafayette understands what he means. He picks up the top of the bun and licks off some mayonnaise, slowly and delicately, and proceeds to do the very thing Blondie did not want: forces him to eat some AIDS by slamming the licked bun in his face, going ninja on the two other guys faster than the human eye, and punching Blondie in the face a couple times. "Bitch, you come in my house, you're gonna eat my food the way I fucking make it! Do you understand me?" He tosses the plate in Blondie's lap and holds his hand in the air as though to suggest that, in another time and place, he would be snapping his fingers in your face. It's a gesture that suggests, rather than embodies, like slang for slang or the generation of a phrase. "Tip your waitress," he says, heading back toward the kitchen. His brother-in-V Jason Stackhouse is having a fucking ball, slapping him five and dancing to his own special giggly music.
Coming out of the restaurant, Sam's ready to take the step. He's grateful she can't hear all his thoughts, he explains, because then she would I guess know that his tongue was aiming for her throat. That's certainly where it finds itself at this time. She kisses him back, and he starts getting way into it, and she finally takes a second to breathe. She's like, "We are going too fast, we are not going too fast, we are should not be kissing, we should be kissing, I need everything to stop."
"Trust me, I want to. It's just kind of... too much right now, and a little too soon since..." He takes a second asking sweetly what she means, and then jumping back in a rage. "Goddamn it, Sookie!" She apologizes, because she's kind of new to dating because she never met any monsters until lately, and he frets about how taking her to the DGD meeting was the killing blow. "It's not him. Just stop it. I just can't go jumping from kissing one man to the so quickly..." Sam starts shaking and thinks about peeing on her, all, "YOU KISSED HIM?" Not your business. "What else did you do?" Really not your business. "Is this a contest for you? Whatever he did, you have to top it?" Sam tells her that's not fair, but as usual she's twice as good at conversation as anybody besides Tara: "You know what's unfair, is you waiting 'til someone else shows an interest before you decide to kiss me." He whines that she has no future with a vampire, and she rocks: "They don't die! I've got nothing but a future with one." Advantage Stackhouse!
"Aw, just like Dawn had a future? Like Maudette Pickens had a future?" Dawn, fucking her way towards death, across the wilderness; Maudette fucking in the garbage. She points out that Bill didn't kill those ladies, but that's not the point he's making. As we all know, women who enjoy sex with vampires deserve death, and secretly want it. He backs her up, against the car, voice harsh and breath hot. "There's nothing that I will not do to keep that thing from hurting you. They're not like us. They could turn on you." Sookie, getting scared, points out that "people" can, too: "You're doing pretty good right now." That's what it looks like, now, from this angle, with the pieces missing. I don't know the whole story, and neither does Sookie. These are the parts of Sam we don't know yet, this is what it looks like across the wilderness from me to you: alien, angry, frightening, inhuman, irrational. He realizes he's being a creep/freak but doesn't apologizes, just offers to take her home and end the date. She shoves past him back into the restaurant to call a cab, and the anger rises up again, throwing sparks.
Randi Sue ... ugh, she's just so fucking tragic and unpleasant. Anyway, she dances drunkenly, and Hoyt wanders up grinning and lost, doing a weird little dance-like movement that involves pretending to ride a horse with a hat on, and she's like, "Watcha doin', baby?" I'm curious about that as well, to be frank. "You know, keeping it real. Partyin'." White people actually are kind of an elaborate prank, aren't they? Randi Sue is celebrating her divorce, which is now final; her high-five is so vigorous that it hurts his hand. Aww, Hoyt! I will high-five you tenderly! It won't ever hurt! He gives her this great look, like, "You are so fucking wasted, awesome," and she says her ex was a jerk. "He shot my car," she says, as though that explains it all. It ... really does, though.
She backs her nasty self into his crotch and, across the bar, Jason Stackhouse is all fucked up on drugs; he and Rene watch Randi's antics together, amazed at how totally grody she is. "It's like watching Animal Planet, yeah? Any second, she gonna bite his head off, I swear." Jason believes him for a second, because here, in this place right now, all anybody's thinking about is sex, sex, sex. Love, love, love. Two things held apart like magnets until today, when the world got big enough to contain them both. It's like watching Animal Planet; it's always been like watching Animal Planet. Jason watching Jason fuck the animal planet. But today he climbed through the glass; he's on safari, for the first time: part of all nature, because nature is all we have. Or probably he's still fucked up on drugs. Hoyt comes back to them eventually, across the wilderness and back to his people: he didn't feel it. "That spark," he didn't feel it with Randi Sue. He thought he did, but that was a tiny little love bite from one of her pubic lice. They drink blood.
Tara brings Hoyt his TruBlood, no refunds, warmed to the usual 98.6, and giggles at how gross the few minutes of his life are going to be. She glances down at Jason, who is still not home even though the lights are on, and walks away. Hoyt is totally grossed out by his TruBlood, obviously, and Rene's like, "It tastes. Like. Blood. That is the point." Hoyt whines that he thought it would be awesomer. "I thought it was supposed to be some sort of life force, or something..." And Jason, dancing to the rhythms of the spheres, jumpy and wild and beautiful, explains sagely while staring into space: "Aw, TruBlood don't do nothing. The real life force is V." Rene explains V to Hoyt, and Jason dances himself into a flirty little chair-dancing frenzy: "All our blood belongs to the universe. They take some from us, we take a little from them." Rene prefers to say no to drugs. Drugs and doilies: non, merci. Jason doesn't drop it, though: "It might give you the will to seal the deal with that girl," he says, raising and cocking his finger-guns, "Only thing holding you back is you." Hoyt sends some finger-guns back Jason's way, and they all toast to how Hoyt is just being a pussy because clearly Randi Sue is a whore. He kisses the bottom of his TruBlood bottle as a tribute to her, sending the toast her way, and she's full-on creeped out. Randi Sue, you have no fucking room to talk. They all laugh anyway.
Bill stood across the field from the old Compton place, and saw his family on the porch, waiting for him to come home. Waiting for him to cross back over that last bit of wilderness, to welcome him in again. His son spotted him, in the darkness, and when his mother asked what he saw, the boy said just one word. "Papa."
He is his own descendent, basically, because he never dies, which is why the second we get vampires we really need to look at the estate tax, and this is and was his house, I think: Not ancestral, but literal. He is the Glorious Dead. This wasn't about reclaiming his roots, it's about reclaiming the parts of himself that are still human, and seeing if the ghosts are gone. Sad.
Bud and Andy surprise him, standing there, remembering his family and a remarkable photograph; he invites them in immediately. Into his home. Inside, he stokes the fire even though it's totally hot outside and he himself is room temperature, so that when he leaves to get Andy Bellefleur a Fresca, which sounds so good right now I could cry, they can look at the sharp and dangerous looking implement near the hearth, which he informs them is not a weapon but an olde-tyme device for toasting bread. They discuss Maudette and Dawn, neither whom he knew, and Bud asks if he knew that they'd both had sex with vampires at some point. "I was not. But it's more common than you would think," he says, and they are weirded out, because he fully intended to weird them out, because he's serious about hating cops.
They start pushing again and he asks them straight up if the bodies were exsanguinated when they were discovered. Andy refuses to tell him, just on dickish principle, and he explains, licking his lips and going into that darker voice, that horny, breathing, hungry voice: "Because a fresh corpse... full of blood? Detective, that's something no vampire could resist. I dare say, not even I." Andy's like, "Glad you weren't there, then," and Bill points out it's not just him: "A vampire would have drained those girls of every last drop." He drops the voice and asks Andy how he's liking his Fresca, and apologizes for the temperature: he doesn't own a refrigerator. Plus, you know, the roaring fire on a hot summer night probably isn't helping. Outside, after leaving, Bud tells Andy to forget his pen, because they're not going back for it. And inside, Bill watches them go before taking off his jacket so he can have some memories.
Everything about this flashback is like a neon sign: You Are In A Gothic Fairytale Right Now: the mysterious house in the woods, the lonely magical widow alone in her house, the starving traveler. I love how completely the atmosphere is created, for this it's like a whole other show for a bit. So Old Human Bill knocks on the door for a while, because he's been walking away from the war for two weeks and now he's hungry and thirsty and tired and dying, and finally he cuts the rope that serves as a chain lock and lets himself in; the woman of the house holds a gun to his head and tells him not to move.
Of course, later he's drinking thirstily as Lorena cooks him food after food, including toast from the scary implement. They talk about how his company disbanded immediately, and how nobody knows that the war's over because there is no Anderson Cooper yet in this horrible primordial America. The past is so, so awful. Based on how much awesomer it is right now compared to any other time ever, I'm thinking the future is going to fucking rock. Anyway, his hair still looks totally cute, which is score one for the past, but still a billion for right now because there's nothing keeping him from having cute hair in all timelines. He tries to tell her some lie about how her husband probably stopped writing her letters because he's so busy buying her a pony or something, and she's like: "I'm totally cool with being a widow, actually. Oh, and let's fuck." Well, first she wipes all the blood off his face, and is like totally obsessed with it, and he kind of enjoys the feeling of skin against his skin and the cool water wiping away the blood and grime, and that's when she tries to fuck him. He's all, "Um, my wife and kids are my favorite thing in the whole world, actually, and I'd feel creepy if I fucked you and saw them right afterward, so chill." Chill she does not.
Lorena tells Bill to stop judging her, and he's like, "That's just how my face looks! I am nonjudgmental!" She doesn't care, and just tries to climb him some more, so he thanks her for her hospitality and tries to leave, but then it turns out that she is a vampire. And then it turns out that he is dead.
Later Lorena's watching him be almost entirely dead in her bed, wearing a corset, suddenly clean and regal and scary. She smiles down at him as his eyelids flutter open, and he's totally horrified because she has decorated her room in Late Guy, which she explains: "They all presented themselves as gentlemen. You can blame the war if you like. They proved to be no more than savages once I let them into my home. They deserve no better." He's like, "So I'm totally dead, right?" And she's like, no, I'm way sicker than that. She straddles him with about ten acres of petticoats getting tossed all over the place, and explains she's been waiting a long time for a man like Bill, with totally cute hair and no interest in boning her. I see women every day sabotaging themselves in just this way: find the one inaccessible guy, and that's the one you suck all the blood out of and turn into a creature of the night. Such a cliché. She tells him it's going to be awesome because his wife and children are still around and all he has to do is drink her creepy blood, but he's kind of resisting that because as she says it, she's totally slitting her own throat open. Damn, girl.
Lorena drips blood all over Bill's face -- Which she just cleaned all the blood off of! Argh! -- and finally that little tongue comes peeping out. Man, it's always the tongue. If Jason's penis is its own separate character at this point, how about Bill's goddamn tongue? Finally he gets after it, and she holds him to her neck, moaning as he sucks harder and harder, getting stronger. And her idea of dirty talk is really unnerving. "Take me in you. Feel me in you. We are together William, forever. You are mine..." Lorena is all about the postmodern irony of penetrating the penetrator while he's penetrating you and whatever. Sex, Sex, Sex; Love, Love, Love. Bill stares at his family on the porch, sees his son catch a glimpse of him in the night, and Lorena gloats behind him.
"Look. You know you can never enter. Do you wish to see them grow old? Grow feeble and die, while you remain the same year after year? They are as good as dead. If they are found harboring a vampire... I've brought you here, and now it's time for us to go." He stands there, weeping blood, and doesn't move; she draws her finger across the air above his shoulder, scratching him lightly, reminding him of the rules now. "Come." He moans, but follows, because he must. And then back in our time, he goes to town on the fireplace; sparks fly out. He really doesn't react well to authority, does he?
Tara brings the night's garbage out behind Merlotte's and hears a sound just around the corner: it's Jason, all hopped up on V, fucking Randi Sue with a giant grin on his face. Without stopping, he looks up at Tara's voice and lights up all over. "Hey, Tara! This is Randi Sue. Come join us. It's beautiful!" And it is. The world is sufficiently big that nobody holds anything against anybody else, because we are one. The sparks in the magnolia and the sparks just across Randi Sue's skin, you can see them: they are the same. What need is there to feel alone ever again, to try to fuck your way across the line, when you've discovered the secret of the universe is that you're already across the line. And they are in you, and you two are only parts of the universe meeting in a kiss, and saying in your pleasure, "I remember you. Welcome home."
"Fuck you, Stackhouse," Tara says, and opens the bag of garbage, emptying it on them even as he's continuing to fuck away. She doesn't mean it like he wishes. The garbage should smell bad: wrappers and that nasty beer water and food scraped from plates, mixed together over the course of the night, vegetables already wilting, meat beginning to break down, preparing to rot. It should smell bad; we have evolved with a sense of smell to tell us that some foods are dangerous, unpleasant smelling. It's part of the body's immune system, to tell us when parts of the world don't belong inside us, but outside us. You know the worst part about kids? The part where they play with their shit the first time, because they don't know how to interpret the smell; they can't filter it out from the constant onslaught of sights and sounds and other situations, so it gets lost. There's all kinds of examples of this kind of overload, and it's fine in context. But you have to be able to turn it off. This is HoHos to a diabetic: You shouldn't fuck in a pile of trash. That's something crazy people do.
When everything is beautiful, when everything's illuminated, you're not fucking in trash, you're touching God. Except of the three people in this scene, there's only one person who is seeing that; he picks it up in his hands, moaning and laughing while he fucks Randi Sue. He rubs it across her back. Everything is beautiful and significant, even the trash in Randi Sue's hair, even the smell of it on his hands and their skin; even as she's screaming at him not to stop. Dead matter against living skin: the secret is that there's no division at all, only love. That is a beautiful thing. In the blood there is life force, and there is truth. All blood is True Blood. This is the Ferrari and it always has been; he's only now learning to drive it, and learning where it takes you. Living skin, dead matter, separated by bullshit you can only see in context; all this matter and the sparks inside it are the point: they matter. They are significant and alive, whole in themselves, full of life and beauty. It's just nature, and nature's all we have.
Finally and for the first time Jason Stackhouse understands what sex really is: the secret, the way they are getting inside you the same time you're inside them, the way the sparks fly up and meet and burn. Eden, the home we're all looking for: it's right here, all around you, in the bodies and the garbage, in the beauty of knowing that it's all love, and that you're an essential part of it. Finally and for the first time Jason Stackhouse feels loved, and less alone inside his skin. He is a child of God.
He is all fucked up on drugs.
Sookie pulls up to her house in a cab and goes inside, taking off her sandals on the porch before entering on bare feet. Her feet slip as she reaches for the light switch, and Tina gives a plaintive yowl as Sookie looks down, sees the puddle she's standing in, and follows the blood to its source: Adele Stackhouse's body.
The world gets bigger.