Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials Page 23

  “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-statue-on-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.

  Dear Angel Juan,

  I dream about you for the first time since you left. You are wearing the magpie-market angel wings, and standing on a street corner playing your guitar, singing for a crowd of people. You look so happy and free.

  But who’s that? There is someone hiding in the crowd watching you that shouldn’t be there. Someone in the rubber monster mask from Charlie’s trunk. They want you to belong to them. They want to lock you up in a tomb so you can’t breathe, so no one else can ever touch you, so you can’t sing anymore.

  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 h
as a very soft voice. Something about his voice and the dry sweet smoky powdery champagne-y 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.

  When we get to the bottom of the stairs there’s a door. I can hear the music jamming louder now, making the door shudder but it isn’t Angel Juan’s song anymore. It still has a psychedelic sound though. Cake opens the door.

  Here’s this room with walls paneled in gold paint, mirrors and white velvet, white marble floors with red veins running through and huge red neon candles everywhere and all these kids sitting really still like statues. They are of all different races but they look kind of the same, I’m not sure why. They’re all in white. All their eyes are really big and their cheeks are sunken and the girls look like boys and the boys look like girls. Then I realize they are statues like the mannequin of Angel Juan upstairs in the diner, which seems so far away now. One of these mannequins is sitting on a big overstuffed red velvet thing shaped like a mushroom and he’s holding a long neon pipe. Real smoke is coming out of the pipe and filling the room and I wonder if the smoke is why I’m feeling drowsy. It smells like Cake. There’re these other mannequins sitting at a long table. On one end is this guy with a really big droopy red velvet top hat that covers his eyes and at the other end there’s this girl with white hair and buck teeth and in the middle of the table there’s this huge teacup about the size of a baby bed which is what it is I guess because there’s a baby mannequin sitting in it. Then there’s a dark-skinned boy curled up on the floor and grinning so big and hard it looks like it hurts him even if he is a mannequin, which he is. The whole thing is too much for me and I think how I can get out of here when Cake comes up and puts his gloved hand on my shoulder.

  “This is Cake’s real shakin’ palace,” he says. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Are you a runaway?”

  I shake my head. It’s hard to talk.

  He smiles, pressing his lips together and nodding like—right. “I see kids on the streets like you. It’s a crime the way they live. I feed them upstairs and then we come down here to play. They’re like my family.” He takes off his white coat. He is wearing a white double-breasted suit. “Will you dance with me?”

  Before I know it I’m letting him twirl me around. I feel like one of those ballerinas on music boxes going around and around like I can’t stop. My baseball cap flies off and my hair snakes out. I want to stop but Cake is still twirling me. Finally I fall against his white suit. I have a flash of dancing with Angel Juan at my birthday party once a long time ago. Feeling so safe inside those arms. Nothing could hurt.

  “Don’t be afraid, little lamb,” Cake whispers. Lamb. Angel Juan used to call me that. “You’re home now. Cake will take good care of you.”

  When I wake up I’m lying in the softest bed hung with white silk. I might be dead. Everything is so soft and quiet. The whole room is covered in white silk.

  I feel sore and muffled from my cold, which is a full-on flu by now. I try not to think about who put me in this bed. Then I remember Cake and the mannequin kids. I’ve got to get out of here.

  That’s when I hear the whistling. I have never loved that g
oofster song so much in my whole life. Whatever it means. “R-A-G-G M-O-P-P Rag Mop doodely-doo.”

  Charlie B., Chuck Bat, the Bat Man. The glowy glow is hovering like a hummingbird. I get up and reach for a huge heavy silver hand mirror by the bed.

  And there he is looking at me and waving his hands around all frantic.

  “What is it, Charlie?” I ask. “Are you okay?”

  He’s not okay. I mean even for a ghost. His eyes aren’t just sad. They’re like tormented. I think he wants to tell me something.

  “Do you want to tell me something?”

  He points at me, puts his finger to his lips, points to the door. Then he turns slowly in the mirror so his back is to me. Stuck to his back are the wings I bought on the street! He looks at me over his shoulder.

  “Angel?” I mouth.

  Charlie turns back around and points to his heart. Then he clasps his hands together. I think about the brother grip.

  “Angel Juan.”

  Charlie puts his finger to his lips again. I look toward the door. When I look back there’s an ugster monster in the mirror. It takes me a second to get that it’s Charlie wearing the rubber monster mask from the trunk. He takes it off and looks at me with those crazed eyes again.

  Charlie’s face in the mirror starts to blur. Then he flies out of the mirror like a comet. Out the door. I follow him.

  We go down a maze of red-veined white marble hallways that seem like they don’t lead anywhere. We pass mannequins half dressed in silk flowers and vines, sitting on garden swings that swing back and forth from the ceiling. Blonde boy mannequins on skateboards balanced on marble ramps. A glittery girl with blonde cotton-candy hair and a wand like Glinda’s from The Wizard of Oz. A huge fish tank with mermaid mannequin children and tropical fish. A tall angel with a very young glowy face riding on a statue of a fish with plastic kids kneeling all around him. And somewhere, behind one of these doors we pass—my grandpa’s ghost and me trying to be that quiet—is Cake sleeping with his pale eyes open. I hope Cake is sleeping. And maybe behind one of the doors ahead is Angel Juan.