Pink Smog

by Francesca Lia Block

  That night I lay in bed staring at the note. What did it mean? It seemed like a clue of some sort but I had no idea how to read it. I wasn’t anybody’s fairest and who was Factor anyway? I tucked the note inside my pink ballerina music box and closed my eyes, hoping I’d dream about Charlie that night.

  When my dad used to get upset and I asked him why, he didn’t talk too much about my mom. He usually blamed Los Angeles.

  He said, “Once there at least was noir and sorcerers and cults and jazz and poetry and citrus orchards, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin. Now there are just cars and freeways and vapid teenagers who don’t even know what noir means. And the music! No one has heard of the Stooges or the Velvet Underground. The singer/songwriters lock themselves up in their canyon mansions wishing for the sixties to come back. I’m sick of the heat. I’m sick of the lack of culture. I have to get out. Someday I’m moving back to N.Y.C.”

  What he didn’t say was L.A. had something else, something that didn’t exist in New York City.

  L.A. had his daughter, Weetzie. L.A. had me. In a way, L.A. was me. I hadn’t known anything else and I didn’t think I ever would.

  Even with the smog alerts, L.A. had never seemed that bad to me. I liked the light. It was always filtered by smog but I didn’t think about that. It was dull and golden. My dad said it made people lazy and passive, that light. It lulled you into a stupor. It made you dumb as a pink plastic flamingo, my dad said.

  But there was Hollywood Boulevard, starred with the names of my idols. There was the Chinese Theater like a magic pagoda. There was the Sunset Strip winding beneath the giant billboards and lined with places like Tower Records, where I liked to find all the scariest or sexiest album covers in the bins. Along the Strip were restaurants like The Source and Carney’s and Butterfield’s. The Source was an old shack of a hippie place with wood-paneled walls and an outdoor patio. They served veggie burgers and sprouts and hibiscus lemonade. Carney’s was a hot-dog place inside an old train car. Butterfield’s was a sunken garden at the bottom of the stairs, like someone’s run-down mansion where you could have elegant brunches with quiche, fresh fruit, and champagne among lacy trees. There was Jerry Pillar’s, where you could get really cheap designer clothes—there were just rooms and rooms stuffed with piles of crazy jeans and embroidered T-shirts and racks of dresses and shelves of boxes filled with platform sandals and high-heeled suede boots.

  And L.A. wasn’t only a city. There were canyons and mountains and wonderful parks. On weekends we went to Ferndell in Griffith Park and I played in the shallow water that trickled among rocks down the side of the green hill. The lush plants made a canopy and I felt like I was exploring secret islands. We rode the carousel on top of the hill. The paint was peeling and the colors faded on the horses and murals. The calliope had a haunting sound as I went around and around, up and down, trying to catch sight of myself in the mirrors. Next were the pony rides where my pony would always stop on the dusty track and I refused to hit him with the whip. My dad had to come and lift me off when I started to cry. At Travel Town on the other side of the park we explored the old trains parked on the deserted tracks and rode the miniature one that went around two times while the conductor in the striped hat and overalls rang the bell. The little train passed an even tinier group of buildings half hidden in the grass. I wondered, at the time, if elves lived there.

  L.A. had the beach! When I was younger we used to go to Malibu sometimes, to visit Irv Feingold, the producer my dad had worked with. Irv and his wife, Edie, lived in a big, glass and redwood house right on the sand. I thought at the time that the ocean was the best backyard anyone could ever have—so vast and alive and musical, always changing colors, always singing different songs. We ate little pieces of raw fish and candied ginger and my parents had cocktails and wine. We sat out on the deck watching the waves break and then shiver up the sand. I went down the wooden staircase to the beach and chased gulls and dug for sand crabs. Once I was stung by a jellyfish and the pain felt just like that thing looked—gelatinous and cold and veined with hurt. Once a crab caught hold of my toe and wouldn’t let go. I felt the little pincers and I couldn’t shake them off. My dad had to do it for me. It still hurt and he rinsed off my foot in the outdoor showers and took me back out to play in the water. He wore shorts and kept his shirt on. His skin looked very white—he wasn’t used to the sun. My mom spent the whole time lying on a chaise lounge on the deck working on her tan. She told me that without a tan her skin looked green—I wondered if I looked green to her so I started tanning, too. We used Johnson’s baby oil and then a few years later we switched to Bain de Soleil, which smelled like coconuts and was supposed to be better for you. When I came back up from the beach, there were thick, black tar stains on my feet. We needed to clean them off with rubbing alcohol in the producer’s glamorous bathroom with the sunken pink marble tub. The producer’s wife, Edie, wore hand-painted silk chiffon dresses with handkerchief hems. She was much younger than he was and my mom got really agitated around her, fussing with her hair and reapplying lipstick all the time. We drove home from the producer’s house late at night and sometimes I think my dad had too much to drink but I still slept peacefully in the car, lulled by the dark and the cooling heat on my shoulders and the sound of my parents’ voices gently arguing and the sound of the radio.

  I loved the radio. I would lie in the dark with my ear to the speaker listening to the popular songs. There was a song I liked called “Seasons in the Sun.” I knew it was cheesy, especially compared to the “serious” music my dad liked but I liked it anyway. It was about a boy who was dying, saying good-bye to the girl he loved. It made me cry. I closed my eyes and saw a boy and a girl running on the beach. The light was gold and dangerous. The boy was going to die. It was Los Angeles light.

  The gentle arguing escalated to screams of broken glass. We hadn’t been to the private beach in Malibu in a while. I heard Edie, the young wife in hand-painted silk chiffon, had left Irv, the producer. The boy in the song was probably dead.

  My dad was gone.

  You must not be afraid, the man in the Mercedes had said.

  But I always kind of was.

  WINTERISH

  The next day there was a green spiral notebook on my desk in Miss Spinner’s class. My heart started pounding so hard I thought it would slam through my chest. The notebook turned out to only be someone’s English journal, left behind from the last class, but after that, everywhere I looked I thought I saw that slam book following me around. I wondered what they were going to write about me. It made me sweat no matter how much antiperspirant I used. L.A. didn’t seem beautiful to me anymore. The air was always hot like the city was on fire.

  When I came home from school, three red dogs were sitting in front of our door. They were sitting so close together that they looked like one dog with three heads. I vaguely remembered a story my dad had told me about a three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell. My mom was always getting mad at my dad for telling me scary stories but I liked them. And I wasn’t usually scared of dogs—I loved dogs. I walked the ones in the neighborhood to make extra money and I loved them all. The little, snippety ones and the shy, fat ones and the strong, proud ones. I begged my parents for a puppy all the time. But now I was afraid.

  The dogs growled at me and licked their chops. They had sharp ears and teeth and angry curling tails. I backed away. That was when I heard the cackling sound. It was the girl again. She was standing behind me with her arms crossed over her chest. She wore the same childish dress and shoes.

  “What’s wrong?” she said in that voice like an angry bird’s. “Don’t you like my chow chows?” The dogs growled and she clicked her tongue at them.

  “Your dogs are in front of my door,” I said.

  “Oh, really? Just like I was the other night. How funny.” She began to laugh.

  “Please move them.”

  “Sure!” She bent over and clapped her hands. “Come on, boys,” she said. “Go
get her!”

  The dogs tensed, and sniffed the air, then leaped up and tore down the stairs toward me. I took my roller skates off my shoulder and stood ready to hurl them at the vicious red fur faces. I don’t remember anything more about that moment except the sound of a whistle behind me. The dogs stopped and put their heads down, began to whimper.

  The boy, the one from the pool, was standing there.

  “Anna,” he said. “What the hell are you doing? Get them out of here!”

  The girl stared at him and opened her mouth like she was going to say something, but he raised his hand—his pale blue eyes were a command. She called the dogs and huffed off daintily with her nose and butt in the air.

  I sat down on the bottom of my steps and rubbed the sides of my face. I was too freaked out to even be happy to see Angel Boy.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  He flipped his skateboard up with one toe and caught it. “Are you okay?”

  “Who are you? And why are you always here when I need you?”

  He shrugged. “You sure do need me a lot,” he said. Then he added: “He was right.”

  Before I could say anything else, he had skated away over the pavement, swiveling his hips slightly to steer the board. I didn’t even try to run after him, though I wanted to. Everything was just too weird.

  “Mom,” I said out loud, but barely. “I need help. I need you.” I knew she couldn’t hear me and that she probably wouldn’t come even if she could. “Mom? Dad?”

  Who was the boy? He had rescued me two times. He knew the girl, and the dogs. He seemed to know me, too. Maybe he really was my guardian angel. I wished he had stayed long enough for me to talk to him, although I wouldn’t have really known what to say. He was so cute that after I recovered from the shock of what had happened I would probably have started mumbling or stuttering and made a fool out of myself.

  All I wanted was for Charlie to call. I had no idea how to reach him. The only real friend he had was Irv Feingold and I didn’t have his phone number. Besides, what would I say—Have you seen my daddy? And he probably didn’t want to think about people leaving after what happened with Edie.

  Actually, I didn’t just want Charlie to call—I wanted him to drive up in the battered yellow T-bird and take me away. We would drive across the country, all the way to the East Coast. We would live in a tiny apartment in Manhattan and I would go to school there. I wouldn’t miss the sun. I wouldn’t miss the pink sky. I wouldn’t miss the palm trees or the diamonds in the pavement. I would see beauty again, everywhere I looked. I would paint the walls of my room pink and I’d paint the floor black with silver sparkles. My dad would take me to the Metropolitan Museum to see the huge Buddhas and the indoor pyramid and the van Goghs. I’d learn about all the weird, dark music that he had told me about. The Velvet Underground and the Stooges. I’d be someone else. No one would ever call me Louise again.

  I trudged upstairs, like I had huge boots on my feet instead of the shortest version of lightweight cork platform sandals, and threw down my backpack. My mom was watching TV.

  “Did you hear the dogs?” I asked her, but she didn’t answer so I asked again.

  “Dogs? What dogs? There aren’t any dogs in this building.”

  “Now there are,” I said. “Do you know about any new people who moved in?”

  My mom pulled her bathrobe over her pilling, pale yellow nylon negligee. She had streaks of mascara on her cheeks and her face looked bloated. Her voice sounded muffled, cottony. “What?”

  “There was a weird girl with three dogs. She tried to sic them on me. This boy stopped them.”

  “There aren’t any new people here.”

  “In Unit Thirteen.”

  “This building doesn’t have a thirteen. Bad luck.” She turned back to the TV. “And if it did, no one would live in it.”

  “He was the boy that saved you,” I said but she wasn’t listening. She had turned the TV sound up louder and was staring at the screen as if she could disappear inside if she stared hard enough.

  Then the phone rang and we both jumped. She got it before I could.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  She slammed the receiver down.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “They hung up. Wrong number probably.”

  School was not where I wanted to be either but it was better than home. Or was it? There weren’t any chow dogs after me but there was Staci Nettles and she was about as bad.

  “Hey,” she said. She and her friends, Marci Torn and Kelli Glass, were standing in front of me as I sat on the front steps putting on my skates. They flipped their hair in perfect unison. I noticed my neighbors, the twins Mary and Wendy Mendoza, were watching from a little distance away.

  “Hi, Staci.”

  “I saw you throw the slam book away.”

  I could hardly tie my laces under her stare.

  “We could have gotten busted. Luckily, Marci fished it out or you would have been in deep shit.”

  I realized I was holding my breath. Certain people can smell fear the way dogs do.

  “I strongly suggest you never do anything like that again,” Staci told me. “Stand up.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Stand up.” Marci and Kelli took me by the shoulders and lifted me into position, held me there.

  Then Staci stretched her gum out over her tongue and blew a giant pink bubble in my face.

  I rocked unsteadily backward on my wheels, caught myself. Staci took the wad of gum out of her mouth, examined it thoughtfully, and stuck it in my hair.

  The hair that I had finally, painstakingly grown out of its pixie cut. The hair that, though thinner and less shiny than Staci’s, Marci’s, or Kelli’s, still rendered me less vulnerable to the cruelty of junior high. Or so I thought. Hair was power. Think of Marilyn. Think of Elizabeth Taylor. Think of Bette Davis. They were defined by their hair.

  The blood rushed to my face and I reached to feel the sticky wad of saliva-soaked putty matting together the thin strands.

  Wendy and Mary Mendoza shook their heads at Staci. Then they waved their hands in the air in an odd gesture that looked as if they were summoning someone.

  “Not again,” I heard a voice say with a sigh.

  Staci, Marci, Kelli, and I turned around—there was a boy standing there, watching us. Mary and Wendy were gone.

  “Are you getting into trouble again?” the boy asked.

  The girls’ mouths hung open as they looked from him to me, and back again. Weetzie knew this guy? The cutest boy ever? An older boy?

  I didn’t want him to see me like this. Sweaty and upset and with gum in my hair. Cornered by the prettiest, meanest girl in my grade. Why was he here? “I don’t need your help.”

  Staci, Marci, and Kelli snickered. The boy moved closer to me. “You need to leave her alone.”

  “Come on, Weetzie,” he said, taking my hand, which immediately started to sweat. “I’ve got the Bug. I’ll give you a ride.”

  I went with him shakily on my skates and when we got to the yellow VW with the surfboard on top I leaned against the side for support. He opened the passenger door for me.

  “They’re still watching,” he said. “Do you want to get in?”

  “I don’t know you,” I replied. “You could be anyone, anyone at all.” When I was nervous or upset I sometimes spoke like someone out of an old movie.

  He squinted at me. He was wearing a pale blue cotton T-shirt the color of his eyes and off-white painter’s pants with the loop on the side for the paintbrush.

  “My name is Winter,” he said.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know Charlie.” He glanced over at the girls behind us. “They’re still watching.”

  I got in the car. He knew Charlie. He knew my dad.

  I was driving away from school in a yellow VW Bug with the cutest boy I’d ever seen up this close. I know Charlie, he’d said.

  “You okay?” he asked me, no
t looking over.

  “Did you say your name is Winter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last name?”

  “First name. My last name’s much weirder.”

  “There’s no winter in L.A.” I didn’t mean to be rude but another thing I did when I was nervous was to chatter randomly.

  “I know. I guess just winterish. I was born in late December.”

  I fingered the wad of gum in my hair. I wanted to tear it out. I wanted to take a shower and rinse away all of Staci’s spit from my body. I wish I had worn something cute. I had on my red Dittos from last year and they were a little too short in the leg and pulled at the crotch. Red wasn’t even my color. But since my dad left I just wore whatever I could grab in the morning and mostly it didn’t matter—there wasn’t anyone I wanted to impress anymore.

  “Besides, with a glass castle name like yours I wouldn’t be throwing stones.” He grinned good-naturedly. “Weetzie? Bat?”

  “How do you know Charlie?” I asked him. He punched a cassette into the car stereo. It was a woman’s voice—harsh but somehow seductive—it made me want to hear more.

  “You call him Charlie?”

  “I just started when I was little. I had this huge crush on Charlie Chaplin and it made me think of him when I said it. It made us feel closer, too, I think. Like our special language. Charlie and Weetzie instead of Daddy and Louise.” Why had I told him so much? Sometimes I just babbled on.

  “Louise?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was going to. Finally, he said, “When he left he asked if I’d look out for you.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. So much for my guardian angel theory. Or maybe not? “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell you.” He turned onto our street. It was that September late afternoon time when the light slants through the leaves casting purplish-blue shadows and the air is just beginning to crackle with the smell of autumn. “Don’t mention me to him.”