Beautiful Boys Read online

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  Finally he coughs, clears his throat and says, “You’re my baby’s witch baby and you are witnessing a spectacular spectral spectacle sort of.”

  I try to look deeper in the mirror but it’s like a smog-mirage in L.A. when the heat ripples and blurs like water or like looking into the Pacific Ocean so dull with crud it’s like a smoggy sky. I can’t see too well but I know it’s him.

  Charlie B., Chucky Bat, C. Bat, Mr C. Bbbbb-b-Bat. My almost-grandpa-Bat Charles.

  He’s a lot like he was in the pictures Weetzie showed me but if he didn’t look healthy then he really doesn’t look so well now and he’s not in color anymore.

  What do you say to a ghost? “I’m not Weetzie’s real kid.”

  “You look real to me.”

  “I don’t feel like it lately.”

  “Neither do I.” He laughs soft. I think about the pop in the film before a Charlie Chaplin movie starts. “We have some things in common.”

  “Yeah. I mean besides the unreal thing. I take pictures which is kind of like making movies. And you made things up in your head.” I stop. Do you say made or make to a ghost?

  “Make,” says Charlie, smiling a little.

  “Make. I do that.”

  “Something else, Witch Baby.” I wonder if he has curly toes. But he says, “I was by myself a lot too. I played the pain game.”

  So am I going to end up like him, alone and losing it because I don’t find Angel Juan? I wonder. I remember the made/make thing. I hope he can’t always read my mind.

  “You don’t have to,” he says. “End up like me.” Oh well for secrets.

  All of a sudden I wish he was real. I wish he was my real grandfather or even my almost-grandfather but alive with his heart beating and sending warmth through his body—warmth that would turn into hugs and those plays he wrote. I wish he could pick me up and hold me. I’d smell coffee and cigarettes on his collar. We’d eat hot cinnamon-raisin bagels together and walk all over the city. I’d play my drums for him. He’d make everything okay.

  “Do Mallard and Meadows know about you?” I ask.

  “They are very nice gentlemen but they ignore the ghost closest to them.”

  “They’d get a kick out of you. Right in this city. In their building.”

  “They travel all over but this city is full of its own surprises,” Charlie says. “Things pop out of the darkness like elves and fairies in a rotten wood or ghosts in a ruined house. I could show you if you want, the way I showed Weetzie and Cherokee.” His voice cracks on their names and his face fades a little in the mirror.

  “I am here to look for somebody,” I say.

  “Well you’ve found me. And I’ve found you.”

  “No. I mean I’m here to look for my boyfriend Angel Juan. He went away and wrote me one letter and…”

  But Charlie twinkles out of the mirror—a light again.

  “Charlie?”

  The light disappears inside a crack in the old leather trunk.

  I try to open the trunk—tugging at the straps and wedging my gnawed fingertips against the buckles. It’s still all locked up. Charlie is gone.

  What a slam-a-rama dream!

  But it wasn’t. Or I’m still dreaming now. Because the first thing I hear when I wake up at almost noon is that singing again. This time it’s “Witch Baby, Baby” to the tune of “Louie, Louie”: “We gotta go now.”

  Go where? “Charlie?”

  The light is by the window. “Take a picture,” he says.

  “Of what?”

  “Of me.”

  I reach for my camera and focus on the light. But through the lens I see all of Mr. Bat again like in the mirror. He is looking out the window at the gray day, one bony hand pressed against the cloudy glass. He’s so so thin, his jacket and pants just hanging on him like if you dressed one of my charm-bracelet skeletons in a suit. He turns and grins at me but only with his mouth not his eyes. His shoulders are hunched like two people at a funeral.

  “Do you know how many versions of ‘Louie, Louie’ there are? It’s unbelievable. Hundreds. No one knows what the real lyrics are.”

  Oh. “You don’t have much to eat here,” he says.

  “You eat?”

  “No, but it’s the idea. Like when I used to write about people traveling in space and battling monsters. We should go out.”

  “I’m going to go look for Angel Juan in Harlem today. He wrote me that he ate breakfast there.”

  “Sylvia’s is in Harlem. That was Weetzie’s favorite. Come on,” Charlie says on the other side of my camera lens. “How often do I have the chance to watch my grandchild eat breakfast? Sweet-potato pie. Grits.”

  Maybe it’s him calling me his grandchild or the grits like in Angel Juan’s card or maybe just his moons-before-the-rain eyes but how can I not go with Charlie Bat? I put down my camera and he’s a light again, ready to lead me out into the city.

  We go down into the subway. It’s so different today. Charlie—he’s a dazzle at my shoulder like rhinestones splitting up the sun—whispers in my ear which way to skate.

  An old woman with a shopping cart full of fish and bursting flowers made out of bright-colored rags. She’s sitting on a bench sewing like she’s in her living room or her little shop, sewing fast like she can’t stop, more and more tropical finned flower fish and exotic polka-dot flowers, like if she stopped the subway would turn real.

  Three boys with guitars. One has a blonde bristle flattop, one is small with a long braid, one is tall with brown skin and ringlets. They are all wearing white T-shirts, torn jeans, steel-toed boots and strands of beads and amulets—peace signs, ankhs, crystals, scarabs. Their music reminds me of what Angel Juan and I heard in Joshua Tree. Celestial. Turning the subway into an oasis or a church. I wonder if they have wings, matted feathers folded up under their T-shirts.

  A little farther along the air shimmers with the silver steel drum slamster sound. Some Rasta men with long swinging dreadlocks play. Makes my whole body ache for my drums for the first time since Angel Juan left.

  The train comes, biting up the music. They should make subway trains that sound like steel drums.

  Charlie and I get on. No music here or flowers or fish. I hang on to the hand rail feeling my skate wheels roll at every stop and start like they want to take off, slam me down the aisles. What if I let go and let them? Would anybody even look up?

  I use one hand to look at Charlie through my camera. He’s sitting next to me jiggling his legs. The woman on the other side of him sneers. I guess she thinks I’m taking her picture. She’s already growly ’cause I wouldn’t let her sit in Charlie’s seat. Charlie starts to whistle like trying to calm me down.

  What song is it? Not “Rag Mop.”

  “‘Papa’s gonna buy you a hummingbird,’” Charlie sings. I don’t think those are the right words. But the way he sings them is like a real grandfather would to a baby they love.

  Harlem.

  One thing good about Charlie being a ghost and not a guy is he can keep up with me on my skates and I’m jamming through the crowds of people like a hell bat. I feel like the whitest white-thing around except for Charlie, and he’s a vapor.

  I remember how I always wanted to slip inside of Angel Juan’s brown skin. It seemed safer than mine. Now especially.

  The sky is still gray and flat like stone, but when we go inside Sylvia’s, sun pours through the windows. Sylvia’s is warm and glinty with tinsel and it smells like somebody’s kitchen.

  “I brought Weetzie here,” Charlie says.

  “You talk about her a lot,” I say. A woman at the next table rolls her eyes at her friend and I remember who I’m talking to and cough.

  “She ate everything on the whole menu. And she was such a skinny bones. I don’t think her mother fed her properly when she was growing up. How is she, Witch Baby? What’s your life like now?”

  I whisper so nobody takes me away for talking to myself. “We built
a house in the canyon out of windows we collected. We play music and make movies. We eat a lot. Vegetarian. Weetzie’s happy I think mostly. She misses you though.”

  “I wish I had talked to her about more things before I died. She shouldn’t be missing me so much anymore. It’s been a long time. But I miss her too,” he says. “Maybe it’s my fault.”

  The waitress comes over. I wish I was her color—maple-sugar-brown, darker than Angel Juan. And I wish I was big like that. The kind of body people want to snuggle with, not dangle on a plastic bracelet with other dancing skeletons.

  “Yes?” the waitress says.

  My stomach feels scratchy like it’s filled with gravel so I just order coffee.

  “That’s it?” she says. “A little white child coming all the way to Harlem just for coffee?”

  “That’s it?” says Charlie.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Not hungry? At Sylvia’s? Smell.” I can almost see Charlie sniffing the air like when Tiki-Tee sticks his nose out the window of Angel Juan’s pickup truck on the way to the sea.

  I remember what he said about the idea of eating. And the air does smell like browning butter and maple. “Okay, okay. I’ll have eggs, grits and sweet-potato pie,” I say. I look at the spark of Charlie-light. “Is that enough for you, Mr. Bat?” The waitress cocks her head at me and squints.

  It’s the best breakfast I’ve ever had and my stomach feels better. Every once in a while I pick up my camera to see Charlie. He’s sitting across the booth dreamy in a halo of breakfast steam, his eyes half closed.

  The waitress comes over to bring the bill and fill my coffee cup. She looks at me different for a few seconds, thinking. “You okay?” she asks.

  I want to show her a picture of Angel Juan but they are all ripped up so I just say, “I’m looking for somebody. A cute Hispanic boy? He dresses like this.” I am wearing my hooded mole-man sweatshirt with the hood sticking out of my leather jacket and a red bandana around my head.

  “That sounds familiar.” The woman squints again, this time at the shine of sunlight on tinsel which is really Charlie. “He liked my grits.”

  Angel Juan’s card is in the pocket next to my heart. The part about the grits and how I eat like a kitten dipping my chin. “That’s him,” I say.

  “Well, a lot of people like my grits. If it was him he hasn’t been here for a few weeks.”

  She walks away. I wish I had on sunglasses. I can tell my eyes are turning darker, bruise-purple with tears I won’t let escape. It’s like all of a sudden Angel Juan is so close and more gone than ever.

  But the waitress stops and turns around. “There was one thing kind of strange.” She looks at me and shrugs like, This child talking to herself in my booth won’t mind strange. “He had leaves in his hair. I told him and he laughed and said it was ’cause he was living in the trees.”

  Living in the trees. “Come on, Charlie.”

  Outside.

  It’s overcast again. I look for trees where Angel Juan might be living but there aren’t too many around here.

  I skate past the Apollo Theatre and Charlie whistles for me to stop. I look into the glass of the ticket booth, Charlie reflected next to me. He takes off his top hat, rests it on his chest and bows his head.

  “I used to make pilgrimages here from Brooklyn when I was a little boy. I wanted to move in,” he says. “All the greatest of the greats played the Apollo. James Brown. Josephine Baker dressed up like a chandelier or a peacock. Weetzie’s mother was always dressing up in things like that when I met her. And then Weetzie started with the feathers.”

  I look at the theater. I try to imagine the music steaming out and the people rushing in, the dancing, sweating, the lights like jewel rain glossy on everybody’s skin. But it just looks like a run-down theater to me. I wonder if Angel Juan saw the Apollo, if he felt sad or if he could imagine everything the way it was. Maybe he doesn’t need me around to see beauty the way I need him to see it.

  “Charlie, I need to go now.”

  Some little girls are sucking on pink sticky candy and playing hip-hop-hopscotch in front of the theater to the ghetto blaster blasty blast.

  “That might make a good picture,” Charlie says.

  I hold up my camera not really planning on taking anything. But through my lens I see they are mini flygirls with skin like a dark pony’s velvetness. They are doing the Running Man and Roger Rabbit, Robocop and Typewriter in the chalk squares. There is something so complete about them. Like they don’t need anything or anyone else in the world. I wish I felt like that.

  “Go ahead,” Charlie says.

  I take their picture and they give me dirty looks at first but then they start getting into it showing off their moves.

  “Hey,” they say. “Hey. Yo.” And I snap more and more hip hop-hopscotch shots. Sometimes I can see Charlie workin’ it in the background looking kind of gawky and funny and rhythmless trying to dance with them.

  “You going to make us famous?” one of the girls asks.

  “Maybe so,” I say.

  After a while they stop and stand around me. They’re as tall as I am. One stares at my hair.

  “You could have some white-girl dreads if you wanted,” she says. My hair is so tangled it does almost look like dreadlocks sometimes.

  “What are you doing up here?” another says.

  I’ve forgotten for a little while. It was so cool watching them. “I was looking for somebody.”

  “Can you dance?”

  I look down at my feet in the roller skates.

  “Any kid who can skate like you can dance,” Charlie says. “Come on, Witch Baby.”

  I give him a grumpy scowly scowl. But the girls are waiting with their arms crossed. I take off my skates, hand one of them my camera and hip-hop into the chalk squares while Neneh Cherry raps on the ghetto blaster. The girls jump around laughing. When I get to the end of the hopscotch I do it backwards. I feel better. I feel almost free.

  “Miss Thing! Now you can forget Homes, girlfriend,” one of the girls says, giving me my camera. “He’ll come back on his own. Just get yourself some tunes and a piece of chalk.”

  I put my skates back on. “I’ll send you the pictures.”

  One of the girls writes her address on the back of my hand.

  And I skate away, Charlie next to me, leaving them hip-hopscotching like maybe the next funky Josephines.

  By the time we get downtown it’s dusk.

  “I want to go look in the trees,” I say.

  “We’ll look tomorrow,” says Charlie. “It’s too dark now. Are you hungry?”

  “Charlie, I ate all that food before.”

  “Witch Baby, that was hours and hours ago and you danced a long time. This is the best market in town.”

  “Were you always so into food?”

  He’s quiet for a minute doing dips and circles in the air like a firefly. “Actually no. But if I were to do life again I’d probably enjoy everything a lot more. For instance, I never used to dance.”

  I could have guessed that. “Weetzie said you were kind of a grumpster.”

  “Grumpster? Maybe. You learn things.”

  The little market has piles of fruit out in front lit up so they almost don’t look real. Inside, the market’s warm and bright and jammed with single people buying their dinners. There’s a wild salad bar with Christmas lights all around and flowers frozen in the ice between the food. Charlie is flickering from the rainbow pastas to the stuffed grape leaves, from the egg rolls to the greens, between the beans, seeds, nuts, cheese, dried figs and dates and pineapple, muffins, corn bread, carrot cake, pastel puddings, fruit, cookies. He wants me to get everything but I just take a pink sushi roll and a fortune cookie.

  In the window of the store next door there are things like huge ostrich eggs and snakeskins and skulls. I press my face up to the glass to look at a human skull, trying to imagine what my own skull looks like inside my head and what Angel Juan’s looks like and
if our bones look the same.

  “Thoughts like that will mess you up,” Charlie says in my ear. I keep forgetting about this mind-reading thing.

  We cross the street to get to the subway. But I see a boutique—all chrome with high windows—and I want to stop. Boy and girl mannequins in black leather are kneeling around a man mannequin. He’s wearing a white coat with the collar turned up and white gloves. He has white hair and pale no-color glass eyes and girl’s lips.

  I feel so cold. I feel like one of those flowers in the salad bar frozen in ice. But I don’t want to move away from the window.

  “Witch Baby,” Charlie calls. “Come on.” His voice sounds nerve urgent. Maybe that mannequin freaks him out too.

  “You have to be careful,” he says. “There’s some nastiness around.”

  We go down into the subway where the noise and the dark are better than that plastic face.

  “How does it taste?”

  “Good.”

  “I mean really how does it taste?”

  I am eating my pink sushi roll on the carpet at Charlie’s place by the light of the globe lamp. I sigh. I wish he’d just let me alone to think about Angel Juan’s bone structure.

  “Seaweed, sesame, spinach, carrot, radish sprouts.”

  “Witch Baby, remember I’ll never get to eat another thing.”

  “Okay okay.” I close my eyes to get the tastes better. “The avocado’s silky and the rice is sweetish—that might be pink sugar or something. The ginger’s got like a tang. The horseradish burns right through my nostrils to my brain.”

  “Thank you,” he says. He sighs like he’s just eaten a big meal.

  Later he goes, “What about dessert?”

  I crackle open my fortune cookie and slip out the strip of paper from the tight glazed folds.

  Make your own wishes come true.

  Oh, really helpful. I crunch the cookie in my mouth and spread out the fortune so Charlie can read it. I sit cross-legged on the carpet.

  “Do you believe in genies?” Charlie asks.