Beautiful Boys (9 page)

“You mean he needs to not just be my pounceably beautiful boyfriend who I take pictures of and write songs about.”

“Yes.”

“It might be even hard for him to be made into stuff by me until he starts making stuff of his own.”

“Yes.”

I take the strip of photos out of my pocket and try to look into Angel Juan’s eyes behind the sunglasses.

While I’m standing in front of the pedestal boy looking at Angel Juan I hear something behind me.

“Do you wish that you could turn him into stone? Make him a mummy? Keep his heart in a jar?”

Another talking statue? But this time the voice makes me feel cold like marble. I turn around.

No statue but that man—the one in the white coat, the one from the park.

He slithers behind a wall painted with flower garlands and demon masks.

I run after him.

“Witch Baby!” Charlie calls.

I don’t stop. My footsteps echo through the rooms. The blank eyeless marble eyes are all around.

But when I get to the lobby the man is gone and I am still marble-slab cold.

“Who was that ghoulie guy?” I ask the Bat Man back at the apartment.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But you shouldn’t go chasing after that kind of people. Maybe you should take some pictures.”

“Of what. Of you?”

“I’m not very photogenic. You’re going to take pictures of you.”

“What?”

“Look in the trunk.”

I jiggle the lock and the leather trunk opens right up. I choke on stink-a-rama mothballs and dust.

Inside is a bunch of stuff. Clothes. Wigs. Masks. I figure either Charlie got off dressing up weird when he was alive or they were for his plays. Either way the trunk is filled with stuff to make me into all my dreams and all my nightmares.

I turn into Nefertiti in a gold paper headdress and collar with cool kohl eyes and a pout of my lips.

I wear a curly blonde wig, a wreath of plastic leaves and a toga sheet and do a Greek-dude-statueon-a-pedestal thing.

I keep on the wig and attach the magpie-market wings to my back for a Cupid look holding a rickety bow and arrow from the trunk.

I put my hair in a topknot and wear an old silk kimono and be Buddha cross-legged and meditating.

I find a really ugster monster rubber monster mask. I don’t even want to touch it. It looks like some leper-monster’s shed skin all shreddy at the edges. Just like the one Charlie had in Brooklyn. But I put that on too and take a picture of my face with the eyes
staring out of two holes gouged in the rubber.

I slick back my hair, put on my dark glasses, bandana, hooded sweatshirt, leather jacket, Levi’s and chunky shoes.

Me as Angel Juan.

Click. Click. Click.

I stay up all night. The sky is starting to get pale.

The black top hat that Charlie was wearing when we first met is in the trunk too and I put that on with a black tuxedo jacket, dark eyeliner circles under my eyes: the ghost of Charlie Bat.

“Do I look like you, Charlie?”

“You are a lot like me, especially the way I used to be. Even without the costume. You’re more like me than Weetzie and Cherokee. I think you are my real blood granddaughter.”

I wonder if he knows how slink that makes me feel. How I feel warm for the first time since I’ve been in this city, I mean really warm. From the inside out.

I hear his crackly voice. “We both believe in monsters. But all the ghosts and demons are you. And all the angels and genies are you. All the kings, queens,
Buddhas, beautiful boys. Inside you. No one can take them away.”

“So then that means nobody can take you away from Weetzie and me even though you’re—”

“Yes, I guess you’re right.”

Why doesn’t he let me finish?

“You should get some sleep now,” he says.

Suddenly I’m so tired. I collapse onto the carpet with all the costumes all around me.

I wake up with a cold. One of those bad almost flu-y things where you feel all your nerve endings splitting on the surface of your skin and your ears ring like you’ve been playing a tough gig at a loud smoky club all night. I’ve slept for hours—it’s dark. When I go to turn on the globe lamp nothing happens. I try the bathroom switch. Nothing. Electricity out. And you know what it is? Christmas Eve.

In Los Angeles my family is all together feasty-feasting in a house lit with red and green chili-pepper lights. There is a big blazing tree. After they eat they are going to make home movies of each other dancing and opening their presents.

I wish I was home with all of them and Angel Juan having a jammin’ jamboree, playing music and sharing a stolen-roses cake in front of the fireplace.

“Charlie?” I say.

No song. No light.

I light candles and wrap up in my sleeping bag and some of Mallard and Meadows’s blankets on the
carpet. I remember that my heart is a broken teacup. I remember the feeling of my own heart shredding me up from the inside out. I think about the dream.

“Charlie!”

“Are you all right?” he asks flickering in a corner.

“I had a bad dream about Angel Juan. I have to go out and look for him.” I try to stand up but I have Jell-O knees.

“You look like you have a fever,” Charlie says. “You can’t go out.”

“But Charlie, I think that man in the museum wants to hurt Angel Juan.”

“Just rest now, Baby.” His voice is like a lullaby.

I feel creepy-crawly. I shiver back into a fever-sleep.

When I wake up this time my skin feels sore—like it’s been stretched too tight or something—and hot. Outside the firefly building is shining in the night.

Then I remember my dream again and I feel splinters of ice cracking in my chest. Now what? All I know is that I have to go out no matter what Charlie thinks.
I’m so sick of him telling me what to do, keeping me from finding Angel Juan. And he’s hiding in his trunk now anyway. There is something I have to do.

I get up and dress in baggy black. I put my hair back under a black baseball cap, grab my camera and roller skates.

When I get down to the street I put on my skates and take off into the darkness. My hands are frozen inside my mittens and my frozen toes keep slamming against the pointed cowboy-boot toes. My nose is running and my chest aches. Fog is coming in and the air smells salty and fishy. A few glam drag queens in miniskirts and high heels are strutting in the shadows cooing and hollering. Sometimes a car drives by, stops and picks one up.

It’s freaky. I kind of know exactly where I’m going. Or I don’t know but the roller skates do. They just seem to carry me along over the cobblestones. I can feel every stone jolting my spine but not enough to jolt the fear out of me. Driving it deeper in.

The place where the roller skates want to take me is the meat-packing district down by the river.

Meat Street, I think, remembering what the junkie
said.

In between the big meat warehouses on the cobblestone pavement is a little fifties-style hot-dog-shaped stainless-steel diner-type place lit with tubes of buzzing red neon that make the shadows the color of raspberry syrup. The neon sign reads “Cake’s Shakin’ Palace.”

And standing there in the window of the empty diner is Angel Juan!

I think it is really him. Not so much because I feel tired and spooked and sick but because I just want it to be. I want him to be all right.

But this is a mannequin. It has Angel Juan’s nose and cheekbones and his chin, his dark eyes and hair and even the tone of his brown skin under the raspberry-syrup light. He’s dressed like a waiter with a white shirt and a bow tie and a little cap and there’s a tray with a plastic milk shake and burger in one hand. I am standing here on a dark street in New York in the middle of the night in front of a window looking up at my boyfriend offering me a hamburger but his body would be cold if I touched it and if I held a mirror up to his face no breath would cloud it. His
eyes are blind. But for some reason I have the feeling that this really
is
Angel Juan. I can’t explain the feeling except that it is the scariest thing I have ever felt. I think I will be sick right here on the street, dry heaves because my stomach is empty.

Then I hear something behind me and I turn around shivering like somebody just slid some ice inside my shirt down my spine. There’s this guy standing there.

He is tall and he has white hair and you can almost see the blood beating at his temples because his skin is so thin and white. He has those eyes that look like cut glass and those pretty lips and he’s wearing that white coat. He is probably the most gorgeous human being I have ever seen in real life and the most nasty-looking at the same time.

He’s the mannequin in the boutique window and the man in Central Park and at the museum.

“It’s kind of late for you to be here, isn’t it?” he says. He has a very soft voice. Something about his voice and the dry sweet smoky powdery champagney smell of his cologne and the way his hands look in his white gloves makes me want to sleep. “I don’t open for a few
more hours.”

“I was just kickin’ around,” I say.

He glances up at Angel Juan in the window of the diner. “Would you like something to eat?” he asks me. “You look hungry.”

I know it is stupid to be standing here talking to this freaky beautiful man but somehow I can’t split.

“I make great hamburgers.” He smiles. His teeth look really yellow next to his white skin, which is weird because the rest of him is so perfect. “Or milk shakes if you are a grass-eating
vegetarian
.”

This is his place—the diner. And in the diner is a mannequin of Angel Juan. So what am I supposed to do? I stand watching him take out a set of keys like they are something that a hypnosis guy swings in front of your face to put you to sleep and I follow him inside.

He puts on some lights and the spotless curved silver walls of the diner shine. The floor is black-and-white squares and the counter and swivel chairs are mint green. There are mirrored display cabinets on the walls full of fancy cakes that look like they are going to slide right down into your mouth. I feel a
blast of sleepy heat filling the place.

“Sit down,” he says. “What would you like?”

“I’m okay,” I say. I don’t want to eat but all of a sudden my stomach starts making noises like I haven’t had food in it for weeks. Then I remember I really haven’t eaten anything except some rice cakes in a while.

He smiles like Miss Shy Girl Thing. He goes behind the counter and takes off his gloves. I can see the blue veins in his hands. Then he starts scooping and mixing and whirring until he has made this amazing thick frosty snowy whipped-cream-topped vanilla milk shake. He puts it in a tall parfait glass, plops on one of those poison red candied cherries Weetzie won’t let us eat, sinks in a straw and sets it on the counter. Then he presses raw meat into a patty and slaps that onto the sizzling grill. I haven’t eaten a hamburger in a long time because no one at my house is into meat anymore but that meat smells pounceable. I feel dizzy. I skulk over to the milk shake on the counter and take a sip. You know those cold-headaches you get from eating ice cream too fast when you are a kid? That happens. But the sweet
milkiness is like warm kisses at the same time so I just keep inhaling on that straw even with my head and chest frozen and hurting.

The man finishes the hamburger, slides it onto a fat sourdough bun, adds lettuce and onions and a juicy slab of tomato, stabs the whole thing with a toothpick and sets it in front of me on a plate. I almost fall on top of it. I can taste the meat before my teeth plunge in.

The man puts on the jukebox and it plays “Johnny Angel.” I am so drugged by my meaty hamburger that it takes me a while to realize that Johnny Angel and Angel Juan are the same song. Same name. The voice singing “Johnny Angel” seems to be laughing at me, the whole jukebox shaking with laughter like,
Look at this crazy girl following some stranger into his diner trying to save her boyfriend who isn’t even her boyfriend anymore because of some weird creepster dream
.

This is how people die. This is how kids are murdered. This is how you lose your mind and then your body and maybe this is how you lose your soul. Johnny Angel.

The man puts on a white waiter’s cap like the one
Angel Juan is wearing in the window and he leans over the counter staring at me with his no-color eyes.

“I am Cake,” the man says.

He looks up at the neon-rimmed clock on the wall.

“I’m late,” he says like the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland
, putting his gloves back on. “Come on. I have something to show you.”

I don’t know why I get up and go with him. But I keep thinking about my dream and the Angel Juan mannequin in the window.

Cake kneels on the floor behind the counter and lifts up one of the tiles. There’s a dark staircase going down. Cake moves his hand for me to go first. Cake smiles and he looks like a guy in one of those sexy jeans ads but all bleached-out.

I hear music coming from down below and I think I recognize it. It sounds like the tune to “Niña Bruja,” which is the song that Angel Juan wrote by himself when he was in Mexico. It has a kind of psychedelic sixties sound. I look up at Cake. Behind him, in the window of the diner, I can see the back of the Angel Juan mannequin’s head.

Then I take off my roller skates and squeeze down
through the trapdoor.

Cake follows me but it is more like I am following him even though I go first.

We walk down a few flights of stairs. Every once in a while there is a gold hand sticking out of the wall holding a neon candelabra with neon-tipped candles and you can see that the walls are red velvet but it is mostly pretty dark. I can still hear the music and I start to smell the sweet smoky smell, like what Cake is wearing only stronger and coming from ahead of us. I can feel Cake smiling behind me.