Beautiful Boys (7 page)

I look through my camera at the firefly tree. For just a second I think I see a ghost-a-rama—a whole bunch of them, like they jumped out of some black-and-white movie except for their sparkly golden eyes—sitting in the branches.

I am huddling in a corner holding my letter thinking about being right where Angel Juan was living and not finding him.

Charlie is doing spin-dive-dips in the air and humming that song “Green Onions,” trying to make me laugh but I don’t want to laugh. I wish he’d just shut up and go back into his trunk. I want to think about Angel Juan. How we went surfing ’til the sun set on a beach where the sand was all polished black rocks. I cut my feet on the rocks and he put Band-Aids on them. We were changing out of our bathing suits behind the truck and saw each other naked under our towels and climbed into the back of the pickup truck and didn’t leave ’til morning. Angel Juan pretended the salt water he dripped onto my cheeks when he kissed me was from the ocean but I knew it was his tears.

Finally Charlie settles on the trunk, stops humming and says, “Tomorrow I want to take you to the place I was born. I never got to take Weetzie there. I think about it all the time.”

“Charlie, I have to find Angel Juan. I’m not here on vacation.”

“Well, where are you going to go look?”

“I wanted to go to Coney Island but I think it’s closed in winter.”

“I can get you in. And I grew up right near there. We can stop on the way back.”

This is the train to Coney Island. This is the darkness roaring around me that seems like it will never end. This is what it might be like to be dead.

And then the train comes up into the light. And everywhere for as far as I can see are hunched gnome tombstones. I think about what my tombstone will look like. Wonder if I’ll be buried next to Angel Juan.

This is the darkness again.

This is the light.

This is Coney Island.

“I used to work here when I was a kid,” Charlie says. “I learned how to run the Ferris wheel.” He shows me a hole in a fence and we sneak through—well I sneak, Charlie’s light just kind of glides.

An amusement park in winter is like when you go to the places where you went with the person you love but they’re not with you anymore. Everything rickety and cold and empty. If you had cotton candy it would burn your lips and cut your throat like spun pink glass. If you rode the roller coaster you’d have to hold on tight to the bar to keep your whole body from being lifted right off the seat with nobody there to hang on to you except maybe a ghost. You used to always want to go fast—speed monster—faster than anybody but now if you rode the roller coaster you’d just keep wishing for it to be over. The bathroom is filthy, stinky so you don’t go, and you have to walk around holding it in. The booths are empty. No fur beasties for sale. Why are you here? You remember the card in your pocket. Your friend the ghost wants to cheer you up and runs the Ferris wheel while you ride it all by yourself thinking about the one on the West Coast where you and your pounceable boyfriend made the cart you were in swing and swing while you kissed and kissed above the ocean and the pier and the carousel, drenched in sunset, lips salty with popcorn and sticky sweet with ice cream, not sick at all. This
Ferris wheel is different. Here you are on the most coupley kind of ride in the world all by yourself. You never knew you were scared of heights before. You just grip the bar and wish you were down. If you thought you were empty inside from being alone you know that you for sure have a stomach anyway but it doesn’t want to stay in there. You also for sure have a heart which is beating hard and doesn’t want to stay where it is either. You look down trying to think about something else and you can see popcorn bags, scarves, mittens and some rotting stuffed beasties in the weeds below where they must have fallen when the wheel turned last summer. You hold on tight to the card in your pocket and the angel around your neck and the camera in your lap. You remember how the card said that thing about riding the Ferris wheel to get outside of yourself. You try to look out over the park and up into the sky. You try to get outside of yourself to someplace where you don’t feel so alone. The carnival booths are not tombstones, you tell yourself. But you think about the tombstones you saw from the train and how Charlie Bat is really dead and Angel Juan is gone. Then the plastic skeleton
bracelet slips off your wrist. You watch it fall down into the thing-graveyard under the Ferris wheel.

When the ride is over you and the ghost go down to the weedy muddy slushy place and grope around in the dirt. You kick and pick through some stuff and after a while your friend spotlights the string of skeletons all quiet in the weeds. You pick them up and they start to shimmy, and underneath them you see what you probably most want in the whole world—or a picture of what you want most in the whole world anyway: his face three times in black and white. The boy you love caught in three photo-booth clicks. He looks very serious and older. And something else. There’s a man sitting next to him. You can only see the man’s mouth and chisel chin and his white shirt—the rest of him is cut off. You wonder who the man is and how you could have found this and what it means. You look into the dark of your angel’s sunglasses like they are his eyes trying to see clues but there aren’t any. You put the strip of pictures of his face into your pocket along with the card.

You see a photo booth and for a second you have the crazy thought that the boy whose face is in your
pocket three times might be in there, sitting behind the dark curtain waiting for the shot.

You throw back the curtain with a negative of his smile flashing behind your eyes. But it’s empty.

You sit down. “This is where Weetzie and Cherokee and I took our picture,” says the ghost. “Maybe you could send her this one.” He sits next to you reflected in the glass but you both know there will just be empty space when the photo comes out.

Three. In one you smile sickly sweet as cotton candy. In one you grimace like a little grumpster demon. In one you are just you—Witch Baby—looking straight out at yourself.

This is Brooklyn. This is the station and these are the people walking with their heads down and their hands in their pockets.

The rows of brownstones all look kind of the same at first until I notice the little piece of lace in a window, cat on a piano, the Big Wheel bike on the front step, the raggedy dead geranium plant waiting for spring. Some bearded guys in long black coats and fur
hats walk by separate from the rest of the world like prayers in a book. Kids playing basketball, slammin’ the way kids do, into it, not thinking about anything except the game. Pregnant teenagers with strollers.

I think about what it would be like if I had got pregnant with Angel Juan. Brown baby twins with curly cashew nut toes and purple eyes. Kid Niblett and Señorita Deedles. With no dad now.

Charlie’s been quiet this whole time. Now he goes, “Would you like to see how it was?”

“Charlie, I just want to go home,” I grunt. “Every time I get closer to Angel Juan you want to take me off in some other direction.”

“I’m not taking you in any other direction. You tell me where we should go next.”

“I don’t know!”

“We’ll go home soon. I really want to show you this. Over here.”

He turns onto an empty street, looking like a sunbeam that decided to hang out a little longer than the rest. It’s creepy-quiet and I wonder where everybody is. The sky is starting to get purplish.

“Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

I look. But instead of him I see this little boy wearing short pants, bruised knees sticking out. He’s black and white, shadows and light like Charlie.

“This is me when I was a kid,” he says in a kid’s voice.

“How’d you do that?”

“It’s one of the things I can do now. Like climbing trees and walking through fences and dancing.”

I hope he can’t read my mind about the dancing.

“Besides, I used to be a special effects man,” he says. “Come on.”

I cross the street and stand next to him in front of a chunkster brownstone with dead rosebushes clinging to the sides. One time Angel Juan and I stole roses from the neighbors’ gardens and put them on a cake we made but nobody would eat the cake because they were afraid of the bug spray (not ’cause of the stealing—they thought we asked) so we ate it all ourselves and got high maybe from the sugar or maybe from the bug spray or maybe because it was our special secret stolen thing.

Charlie points to a window on the top floor.

“That’s where we lived when I was growing up.”

“Hey, Charlie.”

I turn around and hold up my camera. A little girl is standing in the street but she’s not a real little girl. She’s like Charlie, like her own movie without a projector.

“That’s my sister Goldy,” I hear Charlie say. He runs over to her and they start throwing a shadow ball back and forth. Then after a while I hear somebody calling their names from the window. I can’t see anything but a champagne-colored glow until I hold my camera up and then I see the flickery face of a woman.

“That’s my mother.” Charlie’s voice clicks a little. “She makes hats.”

Charlie and Goldy run inside the building and I follow their echoing laughter upstairs into a deserted apartment that looks like nobody but maybe skulky rats have lived in for a long time.

“Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

The apartment changes. It’s suddenly warm and full of ghosty chairs and couches printed with cabbagy roses, crochet blankets, lamps with slinky silk fringe. There’s a table covered with laces and ribbons,
a sewing machine and a bunch of mannequin heads wearing huge hats decorated with flowers, fruits and vegetables, tiny birds’ nests, butterflies, fireflies. I can smell onions cooking. The door opens and a man comes in. He’s tall and his eyebrows grow together making him look kind of scary.

“That’s my father,” Charlie says to me. “He came from Poland on a ship when he was a little boy. They couldn’t understand his name so they put down ‘Bat’ because of his eyebrows. His father was a fisherman. In Poland in the spring they filled their cottage with lilacs and covered the floor with white sand.”

Charlie’s dad goes over to where Charlie’s mom is setting the table with china plates and he puts his arms around her. She pushes him away like playing but he spins her and lifts her up onto his wing-tip shoes and starts dancing with her like that, two grainy black-and-white images twirling like they got bored of staying inside their movie.

“Not tonight.” Charlie’s mom is out of breath. “It’s the sabbath. Now stop that.” She tries not to giggle.

Charlie and Goldy dance too, like the ghosts in the haunted house at Disneyland. Angel Juan’s
favorite. He wanted to dance in the ballroom with me and see if the ghosts would go through our bodies.

“Now stop,” Charlie’s mom says.

She pulls away from their grinning goofster dad and straightens her apron. She goes over to the table and puts a piece of lace on her head. Everybody else sits down while Charlie’s mom lights some candles. She says a prayer with sounds from deep inside her throat. Then she serves baked chicken, peas, carrots and pearl onions. I’ve never seen a movie that smells this good.

“We light the candles for your grandparents in a few days.” Charlie’s mother passes a loaf of braided bread.

“When does the angel visit?” asks Goldy.

“Elijah doesn’t come until Passover,” Charlie’s father says.

“And he’ll drink the wine out of Papa’s cup,” says Goldy.

“Maybe someday Charlie will write a play about angels,” Charlie’s mother says.

“Charlie just writes about monsters,” Goldy says. “He scared me again today, Papa.”

“It was just a mask.” Charlie holds up a rubber monster face. Goldy screams.

“Charlie, don’t scare your sister,” his father says. “Your mother’s idea is good. You could write something about Elijah.”

Charlie whispers to me, “The candles we lit once a year for the dead didn’t mean much to me then. Until my mother got sick and then she died and the candles meant something and nothing at all. I decided when I grew up I wouldn’t fast, light candles for the dead or pour wine for angels since none of it helped her stay alive.”

Then he gets up from the table and goes over to his mother. He throws his arms around her all of a sudden so clutch tight. Even though he’s a kid he’s almost bigger than she is.

“Charlie?” she says. “What is it,
bubela
?”

Charlie just keeps holding on. Then he kisses her cheek, lets go and sits down again.

“They’re all gone now,” he whispers.

I look at Charlie’s hat-making braided-bread-baking beautiful phantom mom. I think about how it must have been for him when she died. And for his
sister and his father with the bat eyebrows. Now they’re all dead. And I feel like it’s hard for me to unclutch Angel Juan!

The Bat family is starting to fade. So is all the furniture in the room and the dinner smells. I press my eye to my camera trying to keep the picture but it’s almost all gone. And then it is—gone. Just a deserted apartment about to be filled with night.

“Charlie!” I almost shout. Scared he’s going to leave with them. I put down my camera searching for the light. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t want to come here with you.” I look at the photo booth strip of me and not-Charlie.

Then, “Over here, honey,” calls a voice from the doorway. Honey like salt in my throat making me want to cry. He’s here. “We’d better go,” he says.

We’re back in the Village. I am sitting on the floor eating a rice cake.

“Couldn’t you put something on that thing?” Charlie says. “It tastes—I mean it looks like you are eating cardboard.”

I shrug. “I like it plain.”

“You’re getting so skinny.”

Because I want him to enjoy my meal a little I go and get some peanut butter.

“Charlie, how did you deal when your mom died?” I ask.

“I wrote. I was okay as long as I was writing. Whenever anything hurt me I wrote, but after a while I couldn’t anymore. I just stopped. It was like the sadness stopped filling me up with stuff to turn into art. I was just empty.”