Pink Smog Read online

  PINK SMOG

  Becoming Weetzie Bat

  FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK

  Dedication

  FOR MY FAMILY,

  GILDA AND IRVING BLOCK (TOGETHER IN MEMORY)

  GREGG MARX, JASMINE, AND SAM

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Slam

  The Girl on the Stair

  Winterish

  Mousette

  Dream Invaders Starring Hypatia Wiggins

  The Blows

  Who-Do Voodoo? You-Do Voodoo

  Halloweetzie

  The Magic of Forgetting

  Winter in L.A.

  I Heart L.A.

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Weetzie Bat

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  SLAM

  The day after my dad, Charlie, the love of my life, left, and an angel saved my mom from drowning, I woke up with a slamming headache and a wicked sunburn.

  When I checked on my mom she was asleep, breathing normally in the bed with the blue satin quilted headboard, so I got myself a bowl of Lucky Charms. The pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers ached my molars as the milk turned rainbow colors. I made my lunch, brushed my teeth, and put on my roller skates. The pavement rumbled, rough under my feet and up through to my heart, as I skated to school past the palm trees that my dad said looked like stupid birds, under a smog-filled Los Angeles sky.

  Miss Spinner sat on her stool with her long legs wrapped around each other three times as if they were made of rubber. She hissed at us to be quiet as she handed back our papers about summer vacation. Mine was called “Pink Smog.” I had written about the pink sunset that we watched from the balcony where my parents drank their evening cocktails. They drank too many and stumbled around the condo fighting like a cat and a dog. Miss Spinner had written on my paper in red ink that fighting like a cat and a dog was a cliché and that the whole thing was “a bit much” but she made me read it out loud anyway.

  “Louise,” she said, “please stand up and read for us. Class, Louise’s paper is an example of overwriting. Most of you under-write. I do not want you to overwrite either.”

  “Weetzie,” I whispered. “My name’s Weetzie.”

  My mom had named me for the silent movie star Louise Brooks, but it always felt too formal and mature for me. My dad called me Weetzie for no particular reason except that it was a diminutive and just sounded right, better for me than Lu or Lou-Lou or Weezie or Weez. Maybe because I am little and scrawny and it sounded a bit like my favorite cartoon character, Tweetie Bird. Teenie Weenie Tweeting Louise: Weetzie. Weird, but it fit.

  There were a lot of things about me that might seem weird to people. I wondered why I hadn’t written about going to Disneyland or something normal for Miss Spinner, even though my family hadn’t even been to Magic Mountain or any other amusement park for that matter. We had just spent the whole summer at the pool, with my parents drinking and fighting and now the fighting had turned into a war and my dad was A.W.O.L. I wished I had just made something up about Disneyland and under-written it. As I read, the blood rushed to my face and it made my sunburn sting and my head pound even more.

  “‘In L.A. the sunsets are pink,’” I read. “‘When the sun goes down and the sky flares it is really beautiful, like magic. However, the lush-plush-peony-rose of the L.A. sky is a by-product of something that may be killing us all, little by little. Smog! And smog is like sadness. It slips stealthily inside of you, with every breath, poisoning you before you realize it, kind of like the witch’s apple in “Snow White,” except even more discreet.’”

  Staci Nettles, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, rolled her eyes and flipped her hair back over her shoulders. Then, when Miss Spinner turned away, Staci blew the biggest bubble-gum bubble I had ever seen, snapped it back in, and showed her perfect little white fangs with a smile that looked as if she had never been sad in her whole life.

  Mr. Adolf was known for always starting his seventh graders off with a unit about World War II and whenever he talked about Hitler he got really excited and practically started jumping up and down. Spittle flew out of his mouth and he smoothed down the lock of greased hair that kept falling into his face as he told us about how the Jews were taken for “showers” when actually they were getting gassed to death. I sat there in the back of the class where the kids who wanted to disappear tried to hide, doodling pictures of my dad’s convertible yellow Thunderbird with my pink pen, until Mr. Adolf told me to pay attention. I knew my problems were nothing compared to the Jews in Hitler’s Germany but that thought did not cheer me up at all—the idea of Hitler’s Germany was enough to depress even the happiest person. I thought of raising my hand and telling Mr. Adolf that my dad’s grandmother had probably died in a concentration camp but I decided not to—he already didn’t seem to like me very much.

  At PE I dragged myself around the track for-what-felt-like-ever while Coach Pitt yelled at me. My legs are so spindly and knock-kneed, what did she expect? The only thing worse than running around and around in the smog was taking showers in public. Staci Nettles stood next to me with her hands in the air, wrapping a towel around her head, her big boobs in my face, her mouth in a Bonne Bell cherry-flavored lip-gloss smirk. I didn’t waste time drying off—it meant being naked longer—so I struggled to pull my dress over my still-damp, pancake-flat chest as fast as I could. It is hard to not have breasts when everyone else seems to be growing them, especially when your mom looks like a Jayne Mansfield pinup like mine.

  At lunch I sat alone as I had for the last week, since seventh grade started, watching the clock and eating the lunch I’d made—an apple and a pack of orange cheese spread and crackers. At least being alone was better than trying to be friends with mean girls. The ones who seemed nice were mostly sitting alone like I was and I felt too shy to go over to any of them, although I did smile at Lily Chin who was gnawing greedily on an apple and had a faint layer of dark down all over her body, like a baby animal. She smiled back shyly as if she was trying not to show her teeth.

  I hadn’t always been alone. Up until the end of sixth grade I’d gone to a cute little school in the canyon, called Wonderland. My best friends were twins named Skye and Karma Grier. They had moved away to Oregon because their mom, a singer/songwriter, and their dad, an artist, didn’t want them to have to face the atrocities of public junior high school. Karma and Skye were tiny and brown-skinned with light hazel eyes and huge blonde Afros. We used to spend hours and hours playing in their organic vegetable garden, running through the sprinklers, baking granola cookies with their mother, Joy, gathering wildflowers to fill the house, making clothes out of scraps of old dresses, rags, leaves, tinfoil, and tissue paper and helping Marvin tile the patio with broken pottery, coins, and bottle caps. I loved being with Skye and Karma—it was almost like having siblings. I never felt alone.

  But it had all changed overnight. Junior high was like the bad kind of Wonderland in Alice where people are mean and crazy, everything is backward, and you’re growing (hips) and shrinking (self-esteem) all the time.

  In Mr. Gibbous’s math class my skin hurt, my head hurt. The sunburn raged where the back of my thighs touched the plastic seat. I couldn’t stay still. Mr. Gibbous stomped around, stammering loudly at us to stop fidgeting and be quiet while he scratched his head so that chunks of dandruff snowed onto his shoulders. He would have been a handsome man but he wore really weird, thick glasses and polyester pants that were short enough for a flood, and there were sweat stains under his arms, and the dandruff, of course. A walking target for
junior high school kids. I wished I could find a way to tell him. He had been pretty nice to me so far, although he got exasperated and out of breath when I missed a problem, which had already happened kind of a lot.

  Staci Nettles (I was blessed with having her in three classes!) kicked my foot under the desk and handed me a green spiral notebook. I put it on my lap and opened it. Slam Book. There were all kinds of questions and answers. Someone had written, Who ate a whole lasagna and barfed it up on their living room floor? and someone had answered, Lily Chin smells like vomit. Someone else had written, Lily’s chin smells like vomit. And there was this one: Lily Chin’s eyes pop out of her head because she makes herself throw up so much. It was so mean that I felt like throwing up, myself. I saw one question that read, Who is GAY? and next to it about five people had written about Bobby Castillo. Bobby Castillo is a fag. Bobby Castillo takes it in the… That sort of thing.

  Bobby Castillo was the most beautiful boy in school. I had a crush on him from the first second I saw him, and everyone else, boys and girls, probably did, too. He had tumbling brown curls, perfect amber skin, white teeth, and almond-shaped cat eyes like green, cut glass. They’re just jealous, I thought. And scared of their own feelings.

  In the book there was also plenty of stuff about Mr. Gibbous, who tended to get very excited and upset when we wouldn’t listen. Is that a banana in Mr. Monkey’s pocket or is he just glad to see us? it said. I slammed the book closed and held it in my lap. I wanted to rip it to shreds, burn it, but I didn’t. I just sat there. I was too scared. Finally, when the bell rang I walked past the trash can. And threw that slam book inside.

  I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was all swollen from my sunburn and my eyes were bloodshot from chlorine and getting to sleep too late the night before. My hair was a mess and I wanted to take a scissors and chop it off right there. My arms and legs were like twigs, my shoulders hunched, and then there was the problem of my nonexistent breasts. I wondered what people had written about me in the slam book, or what they were going to write. I wondered if they would find out that my dad had left and my mom drank too much and that they had been screaming at each other so that everyone in our building could see and hear.

  The girl in the mirror wasn’t who I wanted to be and her life wasn’t the one I wanted to have.

  Whose father left? the slam book would read.

  Louise’s father left. Weetzie’s would never really leave. Would he?

  But he had left. This is what happened the day before the slam book:

  There was a smog alert at school and we missed PE. That part of it was okay—I hated having to change into those pilling, striped T-shirts and polyester shorts in front of the girls with breasts and I was embarrassed by my weak arms that couldn’t do pull-ups and my skinny legs that couldn’t get me around the track as fast as the jock girls. But the smog was worse. Maybe the smog was part of the poison, I don’t know. The smog and the martinis, in their icy green glasses, not to mention my dad’s other “substances” as my mom called them, whatever they were exactly.

  I came home from school. I was wearing Kork-Ease beige suede-and-leather platform sandals but they weren’t the cool, high kind that Staci Nettles had. They were the little mini versions that the unpopular girls wore. I also had on hip-hugger jeans and a blouse I had made from old embroidered linen handkerchiefs stitched together. I had blow-dried my long brown hair with a round brush to make wings on either side of my face. Even though it is thin, it felt really hot and sticky on my neck that day.

  I ran inside. My mom was sitting in front of the TV, as usual. Her dark roots were eating up the blonde hair and she had on her worn-out pink bathrobe. It was the one she’d stolen from the hotel where she and my dad went on their honeymoon. I said hi and she looked up at me with glassy eyes.

  “Did Charlie call yet?” I asked her. We hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. That happened every so often but this time I was more worried about it than usual because the last fight had been so bad.

  She shook her head. I could tell by the look on her face that I shouldn’t ask any more questions.

  I went into my room, put on my bathing suit, which was a two-piece that sagged at the chest and around the butt and was infinitely less sexy than the macramé string bikini I really wanted, and grabbed my mom’s Vogue magazine and a bottle of Bain de Soleil. On my way to the pool I got a can of Tab, sleek and sweaty with cold. The sun was shining on the water, making long, bright squiggles on the blue. I lay on the plastic lounge chair and slathered myself with the suntan lotion. I drank my Tab. It tasted like sweet liquid metal. I closed my eyes and the sun on the water made sparkling patterns through my eyelids. The sun was like a drug. It burned the sad feeling out of my bones, the feeling that came when I thought of my parents fighting, my dad leaving for days at a time, the empty bottles of alcohol strewn around the apartment. I turned over on my stomach and fell asleep.

  I woke up at sunset with my skin tingling. I knew I was burned—I’d be the color of the sky. The air was getting cool so I wrapped up in a towel and went back upstairs. My mom was still in front of the TV. I heated up some frozen mac and cheese for us and sat next to her while we watched Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter. The raised pile of the cheap blue velveteen couch irritated my burned legs but I distracted myself from thinking about that or about my dad by listening to canned sitcom laughter and imagining riding on the back of the Fonz’s motorcycle.

  “Please get me another gin and tonic,” my mom said, holding out her glass regally without looking at me.

  I went to the bar and made her drink, minus the gin.

  “And what is this, Louise?” She called me Louise when she was mad.

  “My name isn’t Louise,” I said. “And it’s tonic, Mom.”

  “I didn’t ask for this.” She glared at me and tapped fake red fingernails on the glass. “Louise.”

  “I don’t want you to drink so much,” I said.

  “Stop telling me what I can and cannot do. You are not the parent.”

  But the thing was, neither was she. She didn’t act like one anyway. I wanted a mom who would act like one, who would ask me how my day was and smooth the hair out of my eyes and rub sunscreen on my shoulders with cool hands.

  The walls of my room were painted teeth-grinding yellow. There were beanbag chairs and the waterbed had beaded curtains hanging around it. My mom had put up a few posters of David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman with their baby faces and shaggy hair and skinny chests but I wasn’t that into them. I guess she wanted me to seem like a normal teenager in case anyone came over—she had done all this as a surprise the summer before I started junior high. But I missed my peony-pink room at the canyon cottage where we had lived before it burned down.

  I was at home with my mom when the electric wires sparked and the sparks caught a tree by the front door on fire. It turned out that the squirrels had eaten through the wire insulations.

  “Squirrels love to sharpen their teeth on those,” the firemen said later.

  My mom picked me up, still clutching the book she was reading to me, and we ran outside. I screamed and cried for my plush bear, Mink, and my doll Petal Bug as if they were my children. My mom handed me to a neighbor and ran back in. She grabbed Mink and Petal Bug and brought them out to me. By the time the firemen got there, flames were leaping out of the windows, the air was black with ash, and almost everything inside was gone.

  My mom had been brave that day. Strong and brave and sober. But she started to drink when we moved to the Starlight Condominiums where we live now.

  I still have Mink and Petal Bug—even though I am thirteen I actually still sleep with them at night and hide them under the bed in the day in case my mom gets drunk and goes on one of her rare cleaning sprees in which she throws out everything in sight. I still have the book we’d rescued, too.

  The Lonely Doll has a pink-and-white-gingham-checked cover and black-and-white photos of a doll named Edith a
nd the father teddy bear and baby bear she lives with. Edith reminds me of a devious Goldilocks who had gotten her secret wish—to take Mama Bear’s place. Edith and Baby Bear always get into mischief and Father Bear has to discipline them in a stern but loving way. As a kid I was a little disturbed, but also intrigued, by the way he put Edith over his knee and spanked her.

  I knew I was way too old for this book now but I read it in secret when I needed comforting. Sometimes I pretended to be Edith, even with the spankings. I never wanted to end up alone.

  That night I took a cool shower, put lotion on my sunburn, and lay down on my sloshy bed and read The Lonely Doll until I passed out, holding on tight to Mink and Petal Bug.

  The shouting was so loud it woke me. They had been shouting at each other a lot but this time their voices sounded a little different. I opened the sliding-glass door and went out on the balcony. They were standing by the pool under the lights, like they were on a stage for everyone to see. I don’t remember exactly what they said and it doesn’t matter. My mom had a drink in her hand and even from the balcony in the night I could see that she was shaking in her pink robe. I could smell chlorine, so strongly that it felt like I had swallowed some pool water. I wanted to dive into the pool from the balcony where I stood, dive down into the water where I couldn’t hear them shouting at each other, just like our goldfish, Garbo, immune in her bowl with the porcelain mermaid and the tiny castle.

  Then I saw my mom throw her drink into my dad’s face. He staggered back and reached out and grabbed her by the wrists. He took the glass out of her hand and threw the rest of the drink back at her. I’d seen them fight before but they had never gotten physical with each other like that.

  My mom teetered on her gold mules. For a moment, everything was still. You could only hear the pool cleaner chugging and spitting, the water gurgling. Then my dad let go of my mom and turned and walked away. I watched her standing there, watching him go. She didn’t even scream anymore. She looked very small from above.