Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials Read online

  After Bam-Bam left, Duck went out every night, prowling the streets, maneuvering through them as if he was surfing perilous waves. He never talked to the men he touched in bathrooms and parks and cars. Is this what it means to be gay? Duck wondered. He missed the clean, quiet beaches of Santa Cruz, the softer sun and the sparkling, swirling colors of the waves and sky, the cathedral forests of redwood trees and the way he saw rabbits or long-legged baby deer who hopped like rabbits and heard the soft motorcycle hum of quail in the woods near his house. He missed being cleansed by the ocean he had practically grown up in, hiking home with his smiling sunlit dogs, sitting in the reeds by the pond listening to the frogs as evening slowly settled. He even missed the skinned-looking yellow slime banana slugs on the forest paths. Mostly, though, Duck missed his mother and his little brothers and sisters. He thought he could hear them squeal, “I’m not delirious, I’m in love!”—the words Duck felt he could never say. I guess I deserve this, Duck thought, holding a man in a cold-tiled, sour-smelling men’s room. In the dark he could not even see the man’s face and he was glad because he knew the man couldn’t see him either.

  Where are you? he called silently to his soul mate, the love of his life whose name he did not yet know. By the time I find you I may be so old and messed up you won’t even recognize me. Maybe this is what I deserve for wanting to find a man. Looking for you always, never finding you, poisoning myself.

  Then the lights from a passing car revealed the eyes of the man whose hands were on Duck. The eyes were like tile. Duck shivered.

  “Faggot,” the man said. “How much do you hate yourself, faggot? Enough to come to piss stalls in the night? Enough to die?”

  Duck tried to wrench away but the man had fingers in his arm like needles. He tried to scream but no sound came out of his throat to echo against the walls of the empty men’s room.

  “It is only a whisper now,” the man hissed. “But it is coming. It is in your closest friend. Maybe it is in you, too.”

  That was when a light filled the doorway. In that radiance Duck was surprised to recognize something of himself. In that moment pulsing with a diffused rainbow mist of tenderness whispering, whispering, “Love comes, love comes,” Duck was able to pull away and into the night. He felt as if he was surfing on a magic carpet and he thought he heard a voice calling to him, “Do you have a story to tell?”

  When he got home Duck looked at his face in the mirror and saw that the bay windows in his eyes had clouded over and there was a roughness about his chin now. What story do I have to tell? Duck wondered.

  The next night in his acting class Duck asked Preston Delbert if he could perform a monologue. Preston Delbert looked suspicious.

  “I’d forgotten all about you, Duck,” he said. “I don’t think invisibility and muteness are very good traits for an actor.”

  “I know,” said Duck. “But I have something to say now.”

  Duck got up in front of the class. His hands felt like they were covered with ice cream. He started to sit back down. Then he heard the voice asking if he had a story to tell. So Duck told the class the story of his mother and father and brothers and sisters. He told the story of Harley and Cherish Marine. And then Duck told the story of Bam-Bam. The class was silent. Some people had tears in their eyes. Duck felt as if his heart was an angel. Bam-Bam’s sidewalk angel—that light, that full of light.

  Soon Duck will meet his love. When Duck sees his love he will know that the rest of his story has begun. It will not be too late for either of them. The sweetness and openness they were born with will come back when they see each other in the swimming, surfing lights.

  And we are still young, Duck will think. I wish I had met you when I was born, but we are still young pups.

  They will still be young enough to do everything either of them has ever dreamed of doing, to feel everything they have always wanted to feel.

  When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world.

  And the story was over. Dirk felt he had lived it. Was it a story told to him by the man in the turban who now sat watching him from the foot of the bed? Had he dreamed it? Told it to himself? Whatever it was, it was already fading away leaving its warmth and tingle like the sun’s rays after a day of surfing, still in the cells when evening comes.

  “Who are you?” Dirk asked the man, his voice surfing over the waves of tears in his throat. “Who is Duck?”

  “You know who I am, I think. You can call me by a lot of names. Stranger. Devil. Angel. Spirit. Guardian. You can call me Dirk. Genius if I do say so myself. Genie.

  “Duck—you’ll find out who he is someday.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Think about the word destroy,” the man said. “Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That’s re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.

  “You set some spirits free, Dirk,” he went on. “You gave your story. And you have received the story that hasn’t happened yet.”

  Dirk knew he had been given more than that. He was alive. He didn’t hate himself now. There was love waiting; love would come.

  He was aware, suddenly, of being in a dark tunnel, as if his body was the train full of fathers speeding through space toward a strange and glowing luminescence. He wanted that light more than he had wanted anything in his life. It was like Dirby, brilliant and bracing; it was a poem animating objects, animating his heart, pulling him toward it; it was a huge dazzling theater of love. On the stage that was that light he saw Gazelle in white crystal satin and lace chrysanthemums dancing with the genie, spinning round and round like folds of saltwater taffy. Dirk also saw the slim treelike form of a man in top hat and tails, surrounded with butterflies. When he looked more closely Dirk saw that they were not regular butterflies at all but butterfly wings attached to tiny naked girls who resembled young Fifis. Grandfather Derwood, Dirk thought. And Dirk saw Dirby too, Be-Bop Bo-Peep, tossing into the air wineglasses that became stars while Just Silver, balanced on the skull of death, held up her long ring-flashing hands and moved her head back and forth on her neck. He wanted to go to them. But there was one thing they were all saying to him over and over again.

  “Not yet, not your time.”

  Dirk McDonald saw his Grandma Fifi sitting beside him, her hair cotton-candy pink as the morning sun streamed in on it.

  “Grandma,” Dirk whispered. He looked around. White walls. The smell of disinfectant. Liquids dripping in tubes, into him.

  “Where are we?”

  “The hospital,” Fifi said. “How do you feel?”

  “Better.”

  “The doctor says you’re going to be just fine.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Oh, quite some time now. We’ve been telling each other stories, you and I, Baby Be-Bop. Past present future. Body mind soul,” and Grandma Fifi squeezed Dirk’s hand, knowing everything, loving him anyway.

  Dirk closed his eyes. There was no tunnel but there was light—a sunflower-haired boy riding on waves the ever-changing colors of his irises.

  Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

  Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Gilda Block, Lydia Wills, and all the people who contributed to this edition.

  Excerpt from PINK SMOG

  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.