Beautiful Boys (4 page)

I drink some tea, get my camera and go out into the bright cold.

As soon as I start skating I get the sick empty feeling in my stomach again. But it’s worse this time. How am I ever supposed to find Angel Juan in this city? It is the clutchiest thing I have ever tried to do.
What made me think I could find him? Here is this whole city full of monuments and garbage and Chinese food and cannolis and steaks and drug dealers and paintings and subways and cigarettes and mannequins and a million other things and I am looking for one kind-of-small boy who left me. As if I know where he would be. As if he wanted me to find him. Why am I here at all?

I see men crumple-slumped in the gutters like empty coats and women who hide their bodies and look like their heads hurt. I see couples of men that look older and thinner than they should and kids that look harder than everybody pretends kids look. Everything vicious and broken and my eyes ache dry and tearless in my sockets. I can’t even take pictures.

Subway.

In Angel Juan’s letter:
I close my eyes underground to try to see you jammin’ on your drums, your hair all flying out like petals, beat pulsing in your flower-stem neck.

I go down, tilting my roller-skate wheels into the steps and holding on to the rail so I don’t free-fall.

The trains are all I can hear burning through the emptiness inside of me like acid on a cut—no music. There aren’t any boys playing guitars down here, their eyelashes grazing their cheekbones to protect them from the fluorescent light, their bodies shivery like guitar strings.

I get on a train and stand in between all the padded people with puffy faces and blind eyes.

I climb up the subway stairs with my skates still on, using my arms to hoist me.

On the street I see a scary-looking girl with jungle-wild hair and eyes and then I see it’s me reflected in a stained oval mirror that’s propped against some trash cans. I drag the mirror back to the apartment holding it away from me so I don’t have to see my face.

I’m thrashed and mashed—starving and ready to cry again. My arms and legs are shaking and I can hardly make it up to the ninth floor carrying the mirror, even with my skates off. My head is full of wound-pictures, my camera is empty and I feel farther away from Angel Juan than ever.

On the door of Charlie Bat’s apartment is a note.

I would rather collapse in the pomegranate garden of the Persian carpet and go to sleep forever, but I make myself wash my face and go downstairs.

Mallard and Meadows are waiting for me in the lobby wearing their tweed coats.

“How was your day?” Mallard asks.

I shrug.

“You look tired. Did you eat anything?”

“We are going to buy you a nice big dinner,” Meadows says.

They walk on either side of me like tweedy angels or like halves of a pair of wings as we go through the streets past the meat-packing plants. Meadows’s cane taps on the cobblestones. Some six-foot-tall skulkster drag queens wait in the shadows flashing at the passing cars. Mallard picks a wildflower that grows up between the stones. It’s a strange-looking lily and I wonder why it’s growing here in the middle of the meat and dark.

The restaurant is hidden on a narrow winding side street. We come in out of the cold.

This place is like somebody’s enchanted living room. There’s flowered paper on the walls. If you look close you can see tiny mysterious creatures peering out from between the wallpaper flowers and the lavender-and-white frosted rosette-shaped glass lights strung around the ceiling blink on and off, making it look like the creatures are dancing. On every table there are burning towers of wax roses that give off a honey smell. The music isn’t like anything I ever heard before. It’s crickety and rivery. The waitress has a dreamy-face, long blonde curls and a tiny waist. She is wearing a crochet lace dress. She serves us tea that smells like a forest and makes my headache go away. Then she brings huge mismatched antique floral china plates heaped with brown rice and these vegetables that I’ve never seen before but taste like what goddesses would eat if they ate their vegetables. Miso-oniony, golden-pumpkiny, sweety-lotusy, sesame-seaweedy. The food makes me stop shaking.

“How did you find this place?” I ask.

“We try everything but this is the best,” says Meadows.

“This food helps us write better,” says Mallard. “We commune better when we aren’t digesting animals.”

“What do you write?” I ask.

Mallard looks at Meadows. Then he says, “We write about…phenomena. Supernatural phenomena.”

“Ghosts,” says Meadows.

“Like what my family’s movie is about.”

“Really?” says Mallard. “That must be why they sent you here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe they thought you’d find a ghost here.” Mallard chuckles.

“But you won’t,” Meadows says. “We haven’t found a single ghost in our building.”

The waitress brings more tea and a cart of desserts that she says are made without any sugar or milk stuff. Mallard and Meadows and I share a piece of creamy you-wouldn’t-believe-it’s-soy-curd tofu pie, a piece of scrumptious yam pie and a dense kiss piece of caroby almond cake. The carob reminds me
of the walk Angel Juan and I took before he left when we stepped on the St. John’s bread pods and they cracked open and smelled like chocolate.

Why aren’t you here? I think. Why aren’t you here, Angel Juan?

We’re sitting on cushions in Mallard and Meadows’s apartment listening to Indian sitar music. If I close my eyes I can see a goddess with lots of arms and almondy eyes moving her head from side to side like it’s not part of her neck, hypnotizing a garden of snakes. Maybe she’s hiding behind the veils that hang from the ceiling.

“Feel better?” Meadows asks.

“Yes, thanks for dinner. I’ll take you guys out tomorrow night.”

“We have to go on a trip, Lily,” Mallard says. “We leave tonight.”

“It’s for our book,” says Meadows. He turns his head to me. He isn’t wearing his glasses and suddenly his eyes catch the light. I have this feeling that he can see. “We are visiting a house in Ireland where a
woman’s father keeps appearing.”

“Except he’s dead,” says Mallard.

“Except he’s about this big,” says Meadows, holding his hands a few inches apart. “Sitting on her teacup.”

“If you want you can stay at our place instead of upstairs while we’re away,” says Mallard. “It might be more comfortable.”

He looks very serious and I wonder if he’s thinking about how Charlie Bat died up there. I hadn’t even thought about it last night because I’d been so tired and crazed about Angel Juan: Charlie Bat probably OD’d in the same corner where I slept. But I kind of like being in my almost-grandpa’s place.

I try not to show how I feel about my new friends going away, how I know tonight with its macro-heaven dinner and goddess music will fade, leaving me just as empty as before, loneliness attacking all my cells like a disease.

“Thanks but I’ll be okay,” I say.

“Did you sleep all right last night?” Meadows asks.

“I didn’t even dream.”

“We’ll leave keys to our place,” says Mallard. “In
case you change your mind. Use the phone anytime and whatever is in the fridge.” Then he goes, “I’m sorry we won’t be with you for Christmas.”

“But we’ll be back New Year’s Eve day,” says Meadows.

When I leave he hands me the meaty white lily Mallard picked.

I carry the lily in front of me up the dark staircase like it is a lantern. And then a creepster thing happens. Light
does
start coming out of the flower. At first I think from the flower but then the light starts jumping all over the walls in front of me lighting the way. Someone is whistling somewhere. No, the
light
is whistling.

I get to the top of the stairs on the ninth floor. The light goes out and the whistling stops. I must have imagined it because I’m tired. Maybe I’m going crazy.

I think that all of me is broken. Not just my heart which cracked the night Angel Juan told me he was going away. Not just my body slammed with the sadness I see with no one there to put me back together in bed at night. Now it feels like my mind too.

In Charlie’s apartment I put the flower in a teacup and look at myself in the mirror I found on the street. I can hardly stand to see my face. Pinchy and hungry-looking. I don’t need a hummingbird around my neck for people to see I am searching for love.

I wrap the mirror in a sheet and hit it with a hammer I found in a kitchen drawer. Feeling the smooth whole thing turn into sharp jags shifting under the sheet, spilling out all bright and broken. I don’t even care about seven years’ bad luck.

But then I look into the jags and there I am—still all one scary-looking Witch Baby in every piece.

I just want to disappear. Everything to stop.

That’s when the whistling flower lights up again. I sit staring as the light jumps out of the flower, all around the apartment and lands inside the globe lamp, making it day all over the world. And instead of whistling the light starts singing a song—soft and snap-crackly like an old reel of film.

“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P, Rag Mop doodely-doo.”

Lanky lizards, as Weetzie would say. Maybe I am cracking up.

“Who are you?”

The voice doesn’t answer. Only keeps on singing—“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P.”

Why would somebody write a whole song about a mop made out of rags? And why would they spell it?

The light dances out of the globe lamp and all over the walls to the tune it is whistling. It’s jiggling doing a jig.

Then it flashes in a piece of broken mirror and I go over to look but instead of me I see this guy.

He’s black and white and flickery like an old movie; he’s wearing a rumpled black suit and a top hat like a spooky circus ringmaster. Light is filling him up like he swallowed it and it is coming through his pores, making him kind of fidget-dance around in the mirror like one of the plastic skeletons on my charm bracelet. His eyes are ringed with dark shadows like the negatives of two moons before a rain. He wrinkles his forehead, moves his hands and opens and closes his mouth.

“Who are you?” I ask.

Finally he coughs, clears his throat and says, “You’re my baby’s witch baby and you are witnessing a spectacular spectral spectacle sort of.”

I try to look deeper in the mirror but it’s like a smog-mirage in L.A. when the heat ripples and blurs like water or like looking into the Pacific Ocean so dull with crud it’s like a smoggy sky. I can’t see too well but I know it’s him.

Charlie B., Chucky Bat, C. Bat, Mr C. Bbbbb-b-Bat. My almost-grandpa-Bat Charles.

He’s a lot like he was in the pictures Weetzie showed me but if he didn’t look healthy then he really doesn’t look so well now and he’s not in color anymore.

What do you say to a ghost? “I’m not Weetzie’s real kid.”

“You look real to me.”

“I don’t feel like it lately.”

“Neither do I.” He laughs soft. I think about the pop in the film before a Charlie Chaplin movie starts. “We have some things in common.”

“Yeah. I mean besides the unreal thing. I take pictures which is kind of like making movies. And you made things up in your head.” I stop. Do you say made or make to a ghost?

“Make,” says Charlie, smiling a little.

“
Make
. I do that.”

“Something else, Witch Baby.” I wonder if he has curly toes. But he says, “I was by myself a lot too. I played the pain game.”

So am I going to end up like him, alone and losing it because I don’t find Angel Juan? I wonder. I remember the made/make thing. I hope he can’t always read my mind.

“You don’t have to,” he says. “End up like me.” Oh well for secrets.

All of a sudden I wish he was real. I wish he was my real grandfather or even my almost-grandfather but alive with his heart beating and sending warmth through his body—warmth that would turn into hugs and those plays he wrote. I wish he could pick me up and hold me. I’d smell coffee and cigarettes on his collar. We’d eat hot cinnamon-raisin bagels together and walk all over the city. I’d play my drums for him. He’d make everything okay.

“Do Mallard and Meadows know about you?” I ask.

“They are very nice gentlemen but they ignore the ghost closest to them.”

“They’d get a kick out of you. Right in this city. In their building.”

“They travel all over but this city is full of its own surprises,” Charlie says. “Things pop out of the darkness like elves and fairies in a rotten wood or ghosts in a ruined house. I could show you if you want, the way I showed Weetzie and Cherokee.” His voice cracks on their names and his face fades a little in the mirror.

“I am here to look for somebody,” I say.

“Well you’ve found me. And I’ve found you.”

“No. I mean I’m here to look for my boyfriend Angel Juan. He went away and wrote me one letter and…”

But Charlie twinkles out of the mirror—a light again.

“Charlie?”

The light disappears inside a crack in the old leather trunk.

I try to open the trunk—tugging at the straps and wedging my gnawed fingertips against the buckles. It’s still all locked up. Charlie is gone.

What a slam-a-rama dream!

But it wasn’t. Or I’m still dreaming now. Because the first thing I hear when I wake up at almost noon is that singing again. This time it’s “Witch Baby, Baby” to the tune of “Louie, Louie”: “We gotta go now.”

Go where? “Charlie?”

The light is by the window. “Take a picture,” he says.

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

I reach for my camera and focus on the light. But through the lens I see all of Mr. Bat again like in the mirror. He is looking out the window at the gray day, one bony hand pressed against the cloudy glass. He’s so so thin, his jacket and pants just hanging on him like if you dressed one of my charm-bracelet skeletons in a suit. He turns and grins at me but only with his mouth not his eyes. His shoulders are hunched like two people at a funeral.

“Do you know how many versions of ‘Louie, Louie’ there are? It’s unbelievable. Hundreds. No one knows what the real lyrics are.”