Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials Page 17

  I remember the time when I was a kid and I first met the little black-haired boy named Angel Juan. He was the first person that made me feel I belonged—like I wasn’t just some freaky pain-gobbling goblin nobody understood. Then he had to go back to Mexico with his parents, Marquez and Gabriela Perez, and his brothers and sisters, Angel Miguel, Angel Pedro, Angelina and Serafina. I didn’t see him for years. But it was okay. I had myself. I knew that I could feel things. Not just smashing anger and loneliness. But love too. It was inside of me. And then on my birthday a few years later Angel Juan came back.

  Now it’s different because he doesn’t have to go away. He wants to. And also we’ve done it—the wild love thing. So I feel like I need him to put me back together every night. After his kisses and hugs it feels like without them my body will fall apart into pieces.

  I get up and take the shoe boxes out from under the bed. They are filled with newspaper clippings I used to have on my walls—before Angel Juan. “Whales Die in Toxic Waters.” “Beautiful Basketball God Gets Disease.” “Family Burned in Gas Explosion.” “Murderer Collects Victims’ Body Parts.” Even after Angel Juan I cut them out when we had a fight or something but I’d always hide them under my bed. Pictures of all the pain I could find. A pain game.

  “What a world!” says the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz before she melts.

  The only way I used to be able to stand being in this world was to hold it in my hands, in front of my eyes. That way I thought—it can’t get me or something. But when I had Angel Juan I only wanted to touch and see him. He was the only way I’ve ever really been able to escape.

  Now it’s the pain game again.

  Night.

  Across the garden my family is together eating vegetarian lasagna, edible flower salad and fruit-juice-sweetened apple pie. They are laughing in the beeswax candlelight, talking about the next movie they are going to make and looking out over the ruins of the magician’s castle through stained-glass flowers. I wonder if they wonder where I am. They probably think I’m having a picnic at the beach in the back of Angel Juan’s red pickup truck. Or maybe by now they all know that Angel Juan is gone. Maybe he told them before me.

  There is a knock on my door.

  It’s him. He’s back. I made this whole thing up. He is here with his pickup truck full of blankets and Fig Newtons for a moonlight picnic.

  But then I hear my almost-mom Weetzie Bat’s voice.

  “Honey-honey,” she says. “Aren’t you going to eat tonight?”

  I don’t move. It’s like I’m a statue of me.

  Weetzie opens the door slow. I didn’t lock it this morning. Should have. She’s carrying the lamp shaped like a globe that I gave to my dad a long time ago. She plugs it in and the world lights up.

  Weetzie looks around at the torn-up pictures of Angel Juan and the scattered newspaper clippings. Then she sits down next to me on the floor. The blue oceans make her shine.

  Suddenly remember. Lifted into the light. Somebody playing piano. Vanilla-gardenia. Weetzie’s white-gold halo hair. It’s the day I was left in a basket on the doorstep and Weetzie found me like those changeling things in stories, the ones that fairies leave in baskets, strange kids with some mark on them or the wrong color eyes. My eyes are purple. In a way I want Weetzie to lift me up into the light again. But more I want to sink back into the darkness where I came from. I want to drown under the newspaper pain and the shreds of Angel Juan.

  “Go away,” I growl at Weetzie. But she knows me too well by now. And I feel too old and weak to bite and scratch the way I did when I was a little kid before Angel Juan came. So she just sits there with me not touching, not talking for a long time. I wonder if she can see the bruises on my arms.

  Finally she says, “I wanted to bring you something magic that would make everything okay.” She must have already heard about Angel Juan. “But now I know that magic’s not that simple. I wish I could give you a lamp with a genie in it to make all your wishes come true. But you’re a genie. Your own genie. Just believe in that.”

  Supposedly a long time ago Weetzie wished on her genie lamp and that’s how she met my dad and how her best friend Dirk McDonald met his true love Duck Drake and how they all ended up living together. Weetzie thinks life’s so slinkster-cool as she would say because all her wishes came true.

  But right now I don’t believe in that magic crap. I don’t believe in anything. All I want is to find Angel Juan.

  “I want to go to New York,” I say. My voice sounds gritty. My throat hurts like my voice is made of broken glass.

  “To find him or to find you?” Weetzie asks.

  Why is she asking me stuff like this like she thinks she knows so much? I want her to leave me alone.

  I look at the globe lamp. If somebody said to me, You can go all over the world by yourself looking at everything—all the death and all the love—or you can sleep inside the globe lamp with the echo of the oceans as your lullaby and the continents floating around you like blankets with Angel Juan beside you, I would choose to sleep with Angel Juan in a place he can never leave.

  To find him.

  Niña Bruja,

  The building on the front of this card looks like a firefly tree at night.

  The acoustics in the subways are good for playing music. I close my eyes underground to try to see you jammin’ on your drums, your hair all flying out like wild petals, beat pulsing in your flower-stem neck.

  I have breakfast in Harlem. You would love the grits. You eat like a kitten dipping your chin.

  I built a tree house in the park. I think the trees have spirits living in them but the one in this tree doesn’t seem to mind me being here.

  Being in the trees helps me see outside of myself. So does riding the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. Coney Island is closed in the winter but I met a man who knows how to get in.

  I saw a saint parade with all these little girls wearing wings. Remember the wings you used to wear? I thought the little girls were all going to float off their floats into the sky. Afterwards one came over to me and handed me this little silver medal with St. Raphael on it. He is a wound healer. He is riding on a fish. I hope he watches over you.

  In Mexico people wear hummingbird amulets around their necks to show they are searching for love. Here people pretend that they aren’t. Searching.

  I hope that you are being sweet to yourself. I wish that I could comb the snarl-balls out of your hair and hear you purr.

  I don’t have an address yet but I’ll write to you again soon.

  I love you.

  Angel Juan

  Dear Angel Juan,

  You used to guard my sleep like a panther biting back my pain with the edge of your teeth. You carried me into the dark dream jungle, loping past the hungry vines, crossing the shiny fish-scale river. We left my tears behind in a chiming silver pool. We left my sorrow in the muddy hollows. When I woke up you were next to me, damp and matted, your eyes hazy, trying to remember the way I clung to you, how far down we went.

  Was the journey too far, Angel Juan? Did we go too far?

  School’s out pretty soon. Can’t wait. I hardly talk to anybody there. Sometimes I feel like I come from another planet. Planet of the Witch Babies where the sky is purple, the stars are cameras, the flowers are drums and all the boys look like Angel Juan. When I’m at school I wish I came from my own planet. And I want to go back.

  I’ve got some money from The Goat Guys, the movie my dad directed about the slam-jam band my almost-sister Cherokee and her soul-love Raphael and me and Angel Juan are in. Were in—before. In the movie we all played us.

  The angel medallion that came in the mail sleeps in the hollow part of my neck. I can’t send a letter telling that or anything else to Angel Juan.

  I don’t know where he is. But I’m going to look for him.

  The only thing is where to stay in New York. So I ask Weetzie about Charlie Bat’s place.

  Weetzie’s dad Charlie Bat died a long time ago
before I was born. But Weetzie begged her mom Brandy-Lynn not to let go of his old apartment in the Village. It’s like she doesn’t want to admit that he’s dead.

  Weetzie is sitting in the room with the dried roses and painted fans all over the walls and the stained-glass pyramid-palm-tree windows that look out on the canyon. From here you can see a few blue pools like the canyon’s eyes and the waves of palm, eucalyptus and oleander like the canyon’s swirly green hair. The canyon talks in different voices. In the day she growls with traffic, but real early or late at night she sings with mockingbirds and you can hear her wind-chime jewelry. Angel Juan and I used to sneak over garden walls and swim in the pool eyes at night. We used to climb the trees, tangling in the braids of leaves, and Angel Juan told me he was going to build us a tree house someday. His dad Marquez, who makes frames and furniture, taught him how to build tree houses.

  In our house that feels like a tree house sometimes—deep in the canyon, nested in leaves—Weetzie’s working on the script for the next movie she and my dad are making. It’s a ghost story.

  “I’m going to New York,” I say. “Could I stay at Charlie Bat’s?”

  “Are you sure you want to go to New York, honey?”

  “I’m going to New York,” I say. I start to nibble at my fingernails, chew my cuticles.

  Weetzie goes over to her 1920’s dressing table with the round mirror and the lotus-blossom lights. The little genie lamp is sitting there—still gold but empty of genies and wishes now. Weetzie takes an old photo album out of a dressing table drawer. It’s so old that almost all the pile of the pink velvet has worn down around the gold curlicues and cupids. It’s so old that it was probably red velvet once, a long time ago. Weetzie sits on her seashell-shaped love seat that is the same velvet pink as the photo album and pats it for me to sit next to her. I climb up the side and perch, looking over her shoulder instead. Inside the photo album is a picture of a tall skinny man with sunken eyes and bones like the guys in those old black-and-white silent movies. Kind of like Valentino but a lot thinner and not so healthy-looking. The man has his arm around a little blonde woman with a big lipsticky smile and slidey gold mules on her feet. They seem really in love standing in front of this cherry yellow T-bird clinking champagne glasses: Weetzie’s mom and dad when they were young. Before Brandy-Lynn and Charlie and the champagne glasses and the T-bird got smashed. Before Brandy-Lynn kicked Charlie out and he went to New York and died there.

  Weetzie shows me a picture of her and her real daughter, my almost-sister Cherokee, with Charlie from the time when they went to visit him just before he died. It was taken in one of those photo booths. Cherokee was just a baby then with little tufts of white hair like a Kewpie doll or something. Weetzie looks exactly the same as she does now—elf mom—maybe a little skinnier and her hair was a little shorter, kind of spiky. But Charlie doesn’t look much like a silent-movie star anymore. He looks more like a ghost. There’s a spooky light around his head and his eyeballs are rolled up. Weetzie has her arm around him really tight and her fingers pressed into his shoulder.

  She’s never held on to me like that.

  Not that I’d let her.

  “I think people leave here before we think they’re gone,” Weetzie whispers as she looks at the picture. “And when you’re with them you know it. Part of you knows it—that they’ve left. But you don’t let yourself really accept it. And then later you think about it and you know you knew.”

  I can see her going back to that time, trying to find her dad.

  “We had to walk up nine flights of stairs to his apartment in the dark and every time he whistled ‘Rag Mop’ to us—you know, ‘R-A-G-G M-O-P-P Rag Mop doodely-doo’ to make us laugh. But that time he was quiet. When we got to the apartment he went and stood by the window and shut his eyes, listening to the echoes of kids playing outside way down there in the distance, and he said, ‘It sounds like when I was a little boy in Brooklyn and we ran around the streets in the twilight, hoping it would never get all the way dark so we’d have to go in. Kids playing sound the same wherever you are. They sound so happy. They don’t know what’s in store for them.’

  “I said it could still be happy, like kids playing in the street before they have to go in for dinner. My friends and I, we live like that. Come live with us. But he was far away already.” Weetzie closes her eyes. It’s real quiet for a minute and I can hear the canyon tossing her hair and her wind-chime earrings clinking like Charlie and Brandy-Lynn’s champagne glasses in the photograph.

  I wonder what it would be like to talk to Charlie Bat. I bet he would get it. He died from drugs all alone. He was an artist but he didn’t make pretty things. Weetzie says he wrote movies and plays about monsters, but they were really about the monster feelings inside.

  “I miss him so much. But I can’t even dream about him,” Weetzie says.

  What she says reminds me of Angel Juan. Sometimes it almost feels like Angel Juan is dead too.

  It’s like Weetzie’s reading my mind for a second. “You really need to look for him, don’t you?”

  I am busy with my cuticle gnaw. “Can I go see Charlie Bat?” I mumble.

  Weetzie stares at me like she’s seen a ghost. “Lanky lizards,” she whispers.

  “I mean Charlie Bat’s—his place,” I say.

  Weetzie nods, looking at her photo album.

  In a way I’m glad she’s into letting me go. But another part of me wishes she didn’t want me to. It seems like she’s thinking more about Charlie Bat than about me.

  Dear Angel Juan,

  Why haven’t you written again? It’s been three weeks one day and three hours since the last time I saw you in the fog.

  I try to dream about you but I can’t. The harder I try to find you, the farther away you get. Instead I dream about my real mother Vixanne Wigg.

  There’s a knock on the shed door and I think—Angel Juan—and open it. But it’s a tall lanky lanka in a blonde wig. She has purple crazy eyes. And they are the same as mine. She’s my mother. I try to close the door but she shoves herself inside. Her wig falls off. Long black hair pours down wrapping me up like vine arms. She forces apples down my throat and needles into my fingers.

  I wake up choked, prickly. It’s one thing to read fairy tales when you are a regular kid but what about when your mother is a real witch? Or maybe it’s the same for all kids these days. People really do inject apples with needles full of poison and hand them out at doorways. The good thing about fairy tales, though, is that there is always a fairy godmother and/or a prince to take the curse away.

  Sometimes when this same dream used to wake me up in the middle of the night, you said, “The curse is broken,” and put me back to sleep with lullaby kisses.

  Maybe Vixanne can help me find you.

  I get up, put on my cowboy-boot roller skates and go out into a fog as green as the fog was green on the night before Angel Juan left.

  I haven’t been to the big pink house in the hills for years but somehow I know exactly how to get back there. The way our dog Tiki-Tee keeps going back to where he was born, the place my family uses as a studio now. He slinks out and trots through the canyon down the street named for the newest moon all the way to the cottage. Whenever he’s missing, we know we’ll find him there curled up in between the stone gnomes under the rosebushes.

  Just like Tiki-Tee finds the cottage, I find the place where I was born. It blooms out of the fog. It’s all falling apart now. The driveway is empty and the windows are caked with dust. Maybe Vixanne moved away.

  I take off my skates, creep up to the door and knock. No one answers. The door swings open by itself and I slip in, skidding on my socks.

  There’s the hallway lined with mirrors where I freaked myself once. Now I know they’re me but I want to smash my reflections. So in the mirror I’ll look like I feel. Pieces. But if you break a mirror there are just more whole little yous in every piece.

  I go into the dusty sunken room. Empty. Cold air burns
in the empty fireplace. There are squished tubes of paint and canvases everywhere. And lots of big portraits of Vixanne Wigg in colors like tropical flowers—almost glow-in-the-dark.

  Vixanne powdery-pink and sparkle-platinum as Jayne Mansfield chomp-gnawing off a cluster chunk of crystally-white dry-ice rock candy. Vixanne lounging in a fluorescent green jungle tied up in her own jungle-green writhe-vine hair. Dressed in milky apple blossoms and holding a grimacy shrively monkey-face apple. Wreath of giant blue and orange butterflies around her head. With a rainbow-jewel-scaled mermaid tail. A ripple-haunched horse from the waist down. Vixanne with black roses tattooed on her naked chest. All of the Vixannes staring at me with purple eyes.

  I go up to the one with the tattoo. Pain-ink flowers. Meat-eating roses in a demony garden. The paint is rich and smooth like batter. I wish Vixanne would paint me:

  Angel Juan’s name tattooed on my heart in a wreath of black roses.

  Something rustles. Heavy crunched silk. I turn around.

  “You’ve been gone a long time,” says a voice. She sounds tired.

  Vixanne’s long dark hair that she used to wear under the Jayne Mansfield wig is hacked short and kind of uneven like she did it herself. It reminds me of me when Cherokee cut off my hair with toenail scissors when we were babies. Vixanne wears a black silk dress with watery patterns in it. She is so different from the glam lanka I remember.

  “Remember those photographs you gave me?” she says.

  When I found her the first time, I gave her some pictures I took. An old woman shaking her fist and screaming at the sun. A man who was too young to be dying. Me looking like a little lost loon waif thing. I wanted my mother to have something when I left. I wanted her to see.

  “At first I put them away and didn’t look at them but I kept thinking about you. You were so little skating around with that camera seeing all the pain.”

  Her eyes roll in her head. I want to leave but instead I sit down and start playing with the paints on the table. It feels good to squeeze the tubes of paint. Smell the stinkster turpentine. Vixanne sits down next to me. I want to paint a picture of Angel Juan. As big as life. A boy that will never leave.