Dangerous Angels Read online

  The film was quite a success, and it brought Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and their friends money for the first time. They bought a mint 1965 T-bird, and Weetzie went to Gräu and bought a jacket made out of peach and rose and gold silk antique kimonos. They had enough to go to Noshi for sushi whenever they wanted (which was a lot because Weetzie was addicted to the hamachi, which only cost $1.50 an order). They also ate guacamole tostadas at El Coyote (which had, they agreed, some of the best decorations in Hollywood, especially the painting with the real little lights right in it), putting the toppings of guacamole, canned vegetables, Thousand Island dressing, and cheese into the corn tortillas that were served between two plates to keep them warm. Weetzie also bought beads and feathers and white Christmas lights and roses that she saved and dried. She decorated everything in sight with these things until the whole house was a collage of glitter and petals.

  “I feel like Cinderella,” Weetzie said, driving around in the T-bird, wearing her kimono jacket, while My Secret Agent Lover Man covered her with kisses, and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog crooned along with the radio.

  Everything was fine except that Weetzie wanted a baby.

  “How could you want one?” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “There are way too many babies. And diseases. And nuclear accidents. And crazy psychos. We can’t have a baby,” he said.

  They had hiked to the Hollywood sign and were eating canned smoked oysters and drinking red wine from real glasses that My Secret Agent Lover Man had packed in newspaper in his backpack.

  “But we could have such a cool, beautiful baby,” Weetzie said, sticking her toothpick into an oyster. “And it would be so happy and we would love it so much.”

  “I don’t want one, Weetz,” he said. “Just forget about babies—you have enough already anyway: me and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog. And you’re just one yourself.”

  Weetzie stood up, shoved her hands into the back pockets of her Levi’s, and looked out over the top of the Hollywood sign. My Secret Agent Lover Man and Weetzie had spray-painted their initials on the back of the “D” when they first met. Beneath the sign the city was only lights, safe and sparkling, like the Hollywood in “Hollywood in Miniature” on Hollywood Boulevard. It didn’t look like any of the things that My Secret Agent Lover Man was talking about.

  The next day, My Secret Agent Lover Man came home carrying a cardboard box that made scratching, yipping sounds. “I brought you a baby,” he said to Weetzie. “This is Go-Go Girl. She is a girlfriend for Slinkster Dog. When she grows up, she and Slink can have some more babies for you. We can have as many puppy babies as you want.”

  Slinkster Dog wriggled with joy, and Weetzie kissed My Secret Agent Lover Man and held Go-Go Girl against her chest. The puppy’s fur had a pinkish cast from her skin and she wore a rhinestone collar. She would make a perfect girlfriend for Slinkster Dog, Weetzie thought. But she was not a real baby.

  “We’ll have a baby with you,” Dirk said.

  He and Duck had come home to find Weetzie alone on the living room couch among the collage pillows, which were always leaving a dust of glitter and dried petals. She was crying and blowing her nose with pink Kleenex, and there were wadded up Kleenex roses all over the floor.

  “Yeah,” Duck said. “I saw it on that talk show once. These two gay guys and their best friend all slept together so no one would know for sure whose baby it was. And then they had this really cool little girl and they all raised her, and it was so cool, and when someone in the audience said, ‘What sexual preference do you hope she has?’ they all go together, they go ‘Happiness’. Isn’t that cool?”

  “But what about My Secret Agent Lover Man?” Weetzie said.

  “Nothing has to change,” Dirk said. “We’ll just have a baby.”

  “But he doesn’t want one.”

  “It might not be his baby,” Dirk said. “But I’ll bet he likes it when he sees it, and we’ll all go to a doctor to make sure we can make the perfect healthy baby.”

  Weetzie looked at Dirk’s chiseled features and Duck’s glossy, tan, surfer-dude face and she smiled. It would be a beautiful slinkster girl baby, or a hipster baby boy, and they would all love it more than any of their parents had ever loved them—more than any baby had ever been loved, Weetzie thought.

  When My Secret Agent Lover Man came home that night he looked weary. His eyes looked like glasses of gin. Weetzie ran to kiss him, and when she put her arms around him, he felt tense and somehow smaller.

  “What’s wrong, honey-honey?”

  “I wish I could stop listening to the news,” he said.

  Weetzie kissed him and ran her hands through his hair.

  “Let’s take a bath,” she said.

  They lit candles and incense, and made Kahlua and milks, and got into the bathtub in the pink-and-aqua-tiled bathroom. Weetzie felt as if she were turning into steam and milk and honey. She massaged My Secret Agent Lover Man’s pale, clenched back with aloe vera oil and pikake lotion.

  “If I was ever going to have a baby, it would be with you, Miss Weetzie,” he said after they had made love. “You would make a great mom.”

  Weetzie just kissed his fingers and his throat, but she didn’t say anything about the plan.

  One night, while My Secret Agent Lover Man was away fishing with his friend Coyote, Weetzie and Dirk and Duck went out to celebrate. They had received their test results, and now they could have a baby. At Noshi, they ordered hamachi, anago, maguro, ebi, tako, kappa maki, and Kirin beer. They were buzzing from the beer and from the burning neon-green wasabe and the pink ginger and from the massive protein dose of sushi. (“Like, sushi is the heavy protein buzz,” Duck said.)

  “Here’s to our baby,” Dirk said. “I always wanted one, and I thought I could never get one, and now we are going to. And it will be all of ours—My (your) Secret Agent Lover Man’s, too.”

  They drank a toast and then they all got into Dirk’s car, Jerry, and drove home.

  Weetzie changed into her lace negligée from Trashy Lingerie and went into Dirk and Duck’s room and climbed into bed between Dirk and Duck. They all just sat there, bolt upright, listening to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

  “I feel weird,” Weetzie said.

  “Me too,” Dirk said.

  Duck scratched his head.

  “But we want a baby and we love each other,” Weetzie said.

  “I love you, Weetz. I love you, Dirk,” Duck said.

  “‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’” the Beatles said.

  And that was how Weetzie and Dirk and Duck made the baby—well, at least that was how it began, and no one could be sure if that was really the night, but that comes later on.

  When My Secret Agent Lover Man came back from fishing with Coyote he looked healthier and rested. “I haven’t seen the paper in three weeks,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table with the Times.

  Weetzie took the paper away. “Honey, I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Weetzie was pregnant. She felt like a Christmas package. Like a cat full of kittens. Like an Easter basket of pastel chocolate-malt eggs and solid-milk-chocolate bunnies, and yellow daffodils and dollhouse-sized jelly-bean eggs.

  But My Secret Agent Lover Man stared at her in shock and anger. “You did what?

  “The world’s a mess,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “And there is no way I feel okay about bringing a kid into it. And for you to go and sleep with Dirk and Duck without even telling me is the worst thing you have ever done.”

  Weetzie could not even cry and make Kleenex roses. She remembered the day her father, Charlie, had driven away in the smashed yellow T-bird, leaving her mother Brandy-Lynn clutching her flowered robe with one hand and an empty glass in the other, and leaving Weetzie holding her arms crossed over her chest that was taking its time to develop into anything. But My Secret Agent Lover Man was not going to send Weetzie postcards of the Empire State Building, or come visit every so often to buy her tur
key platters at the Tick Tock Tea Room like Charlie did. Weetzie knew by his eyes that he was going away forever. His eyes that had always been like lakes full of fishes, or waves of love, or bathtub steam and candle smoke, or at least like glasses of gin when he was sad, were now like two heavy green marbles, like the eyes of the mechanical fortune-teller on the Santa Monica pier. She hardly recognized him because she knew he didn’t recognize her, not at all. Once, on a bus in New York, she had seen the man of her dreams. She was twelve and he was carrying a guitar case and roses wrapped in green paper, and there were raindrops on the roses and on his hair, and he hadn’t looked at her once. He was sitting directly across from her and staring ahead and he didn’t see anyone, anything there. He didn’t see Weetzie even though she had known then that someday they must have babies and bring each other roses and write songs together and be rock stars. Her heart had felt as meager as her twelve-year-old chest, as if it had shriveled up because this man didn’t recognize her. That was nothing compared to how her heart felt when she saw My Secret Agent Lover Man’s dead marble fortune-teller eyes.

  Nine months is not very long when you consider that a whole person with fingers and toes and everything is being made. But for Weetzie nine months felt like a long time to wait. It felt especially long because she was not only waiting for the baby with its fingers and toes and features that would reveal who its dad was, but she was also waiting for My Secret Agent Lover Man, even though she knew he was not going to come.

  Dirk and Duck were wonderful fathers-in-waiting. Dirk read his favorite books and comic books out loud to Weetzie’s stomach, and Duck made sure she ate only health food. (“None of those gnarly grease-burgers and NO OKI DOGS!” Duck said.) They cuddled with her and gave her backrubs, and tickled her when she was sad, to make sure she got enough physical affection. (“Because I heard that rats shrivel up and die if they aren’t, like, able to hang out with other rats,” Duck said.) Whenever Weetzie thought of My Secret Agent Lover Man and started to cry, Dirk and Duck waited patiently, hugged her, and took her to a movie on Hollywood Boulevard or for a Macro-Erotic at I Love Jucy. Valentine and Ping and Raphael came over with fortune cookies, and pictures and poems that Raphael had made. Brandy-Lynn called and said, “I don’t approve…but what can I get for you? I’m sure it’s a girl. She’ll need the right clothes. None of those feathered outfits.”

  Weetzie was comforted by Dirk and Duck, Valentine, Ping, Raphael, and even Brandy-Lynn, and by the baby she felt rippling inside of her like a mermaid. But the movie camera and the slouchy hat and baggy trousers and the crackly voice and the hands that soothed the jangling of her charm-bracelet nerves—all that was gone. My Secret Agent Lover Man was gone.

  Weetzie had the baby at the Kaiser on Sunset Boulevard, where she had been born.

  “Am I glad that’s over!” Duck said, coming into Weetzie’s hospital room with a pale face. “Dirk has been having labor pains out there in the waiting room.”

  “What about you?” Dirk said to Duck. “Duck has been moaning and sweating out there in the waiting room.”

  Weetzie laughed weakly. “Look what we got,” she said.

  It was a really little baby—almost too little.

  “You can’t tell who it looks like yet,” Duck said. “It’s too little and pink.”

  “No matter who it looks like, it’s all of ours,” Dirk said. He put his arms around Weetzie and Duck, and they sat looking at their baby girl.

  “What are we going to name it?” Duck said.

  They had thought about Sweet and Fifi and Duckling and Hamachi and Teddi and Lambie, but they decided to name her Cherokee.

  When they left the hospital the next day, Weetzie looked down Sunset Boulevard to where Norm’s coffee shop used to be. Weetzie’s dad, Charlie, had waited all night in that Norm’s, drinking coffee black and smoking packs until Weetzie was born. Weetzie had always thought that when she had a baby its father would wait in Norm’s for her, looking like her secret agent lover. But Norm’s was torn down and My Secret Agent Lover Man was gone.

  Weetzie and Dirk and Duck brought Cherokee home and the house felt different, lighter and more musical now, because someone was always opening a window to let in the sun or putting on a record. The sun streamed in, making the walls glow like the inside of a rose. But even in the rosy house, Weetzie felt bittersweet; bittersweetness was like a liqueur burning in her throat and dripping down slowly into her heart.

  Then one morning, Weetzie woke up feeling different, not bittersweet, but expectant the way she used to feel on the morning of her birthday. She opened her eyes and saw the flowers—there were flowers heaped on top of the quilt. Big, ruffly peonies, full-blown roses, pink-spotted lilies, pollen-dusty poppies. Weetzie blinked in the sunlight and saw My Secret Agent Lover Man standing over her and Cherokee. He looked very pale and hunched in his trench coat, and his eyes were moist.

  Weetzie put out her arms, and he came and sat on the bed and held her very tight. Then he looked at Cherokee.

  “Whose is she?” he asked. “She is so completely perfect.”

  “She looks like Dirk,” Weetzie said. “Because of her cheekbones.”

  My Secret Agent Lover Man’s mouth twitched a little.

  “And she looks like Duck,” Weetzie said. “Because she is blonde…And her nose.”

  My Secret Agent Lover Man wrinkled his brow.

  “And she looks like me, of course, because she is so itsy-witsy and silly-looking,” Weetzie said, laughing.

  “But really, she absolutely has no one else’s eyes but yours, and your pretty lips. I think she’s all of ours,” Weetzie said. “I hope that is okay with you.”

  Dirk and Duck came into the room.

  “We missed you,” Dirk said. “And we hope you stay around and help raise our kid.”

  My Secret Agent Lover Man smiled. Weetzie held Cherokee against her breast. Cherokee looked like a three-dad baby, like a peach, like a tiny moccasin, like a girl love-warrior who would grow up to wear feathers and run swift and silent through the L.A. canyons.

  Witch Baby

  One day, there was a knock on the door of the silly-sandtopped house. Weetzie opened the door, and there stood a beautiful woman with long black hair, purple, tilty eyes, and a long body. She was the type of woman Weetzie and Dirk used to call a “Lanka.”

  “Is Max here?” asked the Lanka in a low voice.

  “Who?” Weetzie said. It came out like a screech, especially compared to the Lanka murmur, and she said again, “Who?”

  “Max,” the woman repeated. “I know he lives here. I’ve tracked him down.”

  “There is no one by that name here,” Weetzie said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

  “I insist on seeing Max,” the woman said, pressing on Weetzie’s chest with five taloned fingertips.

  Weetzie pushed the Lanka away and shut the door.

  “Curses on both of you!” the Lanka said.

  Weetzie looked out the peephole and saw her slink away down the front path in her long, black Lanka dress.

  At dinner that night, Weetzie said, “A crazy woman was here today. She kept asking for some man. She was a real Lanka—a mean Lanka, too. It was a little scary.”

  “There are a lot of freaks around,” Dirk said.

  “Yeah,” Duck said. “Next time something like that happens, call us.”

  “I can handle it,” Weetzie said.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man was unusually silent.

  The next night, My Secret Agent Lover Man came home early from the set where he had been working on his new horror movie about a coven of witches who pose under the guise of a Jayne Mansfield fan club. His skin was burning and he looked as if there was a heavy weight pressing on his forehead and his shoulders. Weetzie put him in bed and took his temperature, which was very high. She gave him aspirin and megadoses of vitamin C and sponged him off with cool towels.

  “You have been working too hard,” she said.

  My Secret Agent L
over Man gasped for air all through the night. Weetzie lay awake, watching him so hot and vulnerable, shivering with fever, and she wanted to hold on to him and never let go. It was as if he had no defenses, none of his usual guards up, as if they could merge together so easily.

  “I love you, Weetzie,” he said in the middle of the night. Then he twisted as if from a sharp pain.

  “I love you, I love you, My Secret Agent Lover Man, my wish list come true,” she said.

  In the morning, he was still sick. Weetzie brought him more aspirin and vitamin C, and made him drink grapefruit juice and herb tea, and she put on cartoons for him to watch.

  “I have to tell you something, Weetzie,” he said.

  “Not now; try to rest. I’m taking you to the doctor later.”

  But, in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door.

  Weetzie answered it without thinking, and there stood the Lanka.

  “Tell Max he had better see me or he will get worse,” she said.

  Before Weetzie could shut the door, she heard My Secret Agent Lover Man say, “Wait.”

  He had gotten out of bed and was stumbling toward them wearing his trench coat over his pajamas.

  “Max,” said the woman, “I must talk to you. Tell this girl to let me in. Or I will make her sick, too. I have a Barbie doll that will look a lot like her when I chop off all its hair, and I have plenty of pins to stick into it.”

  “Weetzie,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said, “can I please speak to her? I will tell you everything after.”

  Weetzie looked at him and at the Lanka and then back at him. He was really sick.

  “Whatever you need to do,” she said, going into the kitchen.

  A little while later, My Secret Agent Lover Man came into the kitchen, too. He looked better, as if the fever had broken. “She’s gone. Now I have something to tell you,” he said, sitting down beside her.

  “When I went away I was very confused,” he began. “I knew I was afraid of having a baby, and I hated myself for being afraid. And I was so jealous of you with Dirk and Duck that I couldn’t even think. I just had to leave.