Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  “‘You see,’ I said, ‘you must hold on.’

  “Her art school teacher sent her work to an animation department in Hollywood. They wanted to hire her.

  “‘I don’t want to leave you, Mama,’ she said. ‘I stayed alive so I could be with you and Dirby.’

  “I told her she had to go. ‘There are groves of orange trees—you can pick your breakfast every morning—fountains in the hillsides, starlets in silk stockings driving colorful jalopies with leopards in the passenger seats, sunshine all the time. The sun will be good for Dirby. He’s as pale as his old grandmother.’

  “‘You should come with us,’ Fifi said, but I couldn’t. I was afraid to travel and besides, what if my stranger returned and I was gone?

  “So they prepared to leave, Fifi and Dirby with Martin and Merlin in a big old automobile with the glitter-and-paint dance backdrops of swans and heavens and circuses and fairylands fastened to the top.

  “I gave Fifi the stranger’s lamp as a good-bye gift. I still didn’t believe I had a story to tell. A self-imposed shroud of silence had covered me long before the real shroud of death made it impossible for me to speak. But my daughter would have a story, I thought; Fifi would fill the lamp.

  “She didn’t want to take it from me but I made her promise. Just before she was to leave, the story that I still did not believe was mine came to an end.

  “And now it’s time for you to dance with me,” Gazelle said softly.

  Dirk stood up slowly, aware of how light he felt, and held out his arms. She was like Fifi’s feather boa—not only that weightless but she brushed his skin with ticklish flicks of softness. She smelled like his grandma too—cookies baking, roses, almonds. Gently, gently Dirk and his Great-Grandmother Gazelle danced around the room while the peach tree tapped at the window and the moon made a shadow forest on the floor. Dirk saw the story of her life repeated now with the sway of the white dress, the pleatings and swishings of satin.

  “Thank you, Dirk,” Gazelle said, when the dance was over. “Bless you. You listened. You listened.”

  Death came for me, Dirk thought. She was fading away as she had come and he thought he would dissolve with her, molecules shifting without substance into veil of spirit.

  Be-Bop Bo-Peep

  And that was when the guitar in the corner began to play by itself.

  Dirk opened his eyes. The guitar seemed to be floating on its side, strings trembling with music. Strands of smoke were flying out of the golden lamp and whirling around the guitar.

  “Daddy,” Dirk said out loud, remembering something he had lost a long time ago.

  And Dirk’s daddy Dirby McDonald’s face appeared out of the smoke just above the guitar, as handsome as James Dean, not much older than Dirk, eyes soft with love like a lullaby behind his black-framed glasses. Lullaby eyes.

  “Dirk,” his father said, “hang on now.”

  Dirk nodded. He could taste blood in his mouth like he’d been sucking on a dirty metal harmonica.

  “You came back,” Dirk said.

  “You want a story. A wake-up story. A come-back story.”

  “Yes. Please,” Dirk said. “Please tell me who you are. I’ve always wanted to know. I feel like I don’t exist. I feel like I’m spinning through space losing atoms, becoming invisible, disintegrating. I…”

  “Shhh, now,” Dirk’s father said. His voice was gentle. It was like his guitar. Like his eyes. Dirk thought, His eyes are guitars.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What you felt. Who you were. Why you died.”

  “I always felt lonely,” Dirby said. “It was just who I was born to be. I felt more like a part of nature than like a boy. Do you know what I mean?”

  Dirk wasn’t sure.

  “I’d look at the stars in the sky or at trees and I’d want to be that. I worried Fifi. She was always trying to get me to be normal—play with the other kids, laugh more. She took me to her bungalow on the studio lot and showed me how she made the limbs of creatures move by drawing them again and again on clear sheets with light shining through. One of her projects was a story about herself and my father. The fireflies had devilish grins, the ladybugs had long eyelashes, the honeybees sang like Cab Galloway and the spiders danced like Fred and Ginger. She tried to get me to laugh, but I just asked questions about how butterflies hatched from cocoons and how spiders made their webs. I wanted to walk in the hills at night and get as close to the moon and stars as I could. I wanted to lie in the dark grasses of the canyon and listen to the wind play them like the strings of a guitar. I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn’t make sense to my teachers. They didn’t rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets’ motion, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn’t think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. My forehead was lined before I was sixteen and I was always thin no matter how much Fifi tried to feed me.”

  Dirk looked at his father’s body in the black turtleneck and jeans. Dirby’s frame was just like Dirk’s with the broad shoulders, narrow hips and long legs, but Dirk weighed at least fifteen pounds more and was lean himself.

  “When my father died and I saw my mother’s hair turn suddenly white I decided I was going to be like the clouds passing over the moon or the waves sliding up and back or the birds putting sounds together. That was the only way I could go on, accepting the way life was, being in the world.

  “Then one night when I was sixteen I hitchhiked down into Topanga Canyon. I loved it there—the wild of it so near the sea, the thickness of trees and the smell of salt water all sharp and clean. I had to get away from the sugar smell in Fifi’s kitchen and the roses; as much as I loved her I felt like I couldn’t breathe—like it wasn’t my world in any way.

  “I walked inside this canyon bar and for the first time in my life I felt at home with walls around me. There was a cat onstage playing saxophone and chicks in black stockings sitting around watching him. There was beer and smoke—not just cigarettes, the kind of smoke that helps ease you into trees and wind. I knew I’d be coming back here.

  “I came back all the time—every chance I could get away. All I needed was my thumb and my poetry journal. I also got a black turtleneck from my father’s closet and a black beret from a thrift store so I’d look like the other cats hanging there in the mystic smoke and swinging sax night.

  “One night a skinny old guy wearing shades asked me what I was writing in that journal all the time and I told him poetry.

  “‘You’re a baby. What do you know about poetry?’ he said, all languid-like.

  “‘I know enough’ I said.

  “‘Yeah. I bet you know some nursery rhymes. Little Bo-Peep come blow your horn the cat’s in the meadow the chick’s in the corn. That’s poetry, right?’

  “I tried to walk away from him but he called after me, ‘That’s poetry, right, Bo-Peep?’”

  “After that everyone called me Bo-Peep. Until the night I got up on that stage, sat down on a stool in the moon of light and read what I’d been writing all those nights.

  “Everyone got still, especially that old man. They leaned in close to dig the words. But it was more than words. Something was happening. There was this bottle of red wine and four glasses on the table next to me and they started dancing, I mean really dancing, doing some kind of tango-fandango number. Then the shades on the face of the old man jumped right off and started floating in the air, moving just out of his reach when he grabbed for them. I saw his eyes with the pinpoint pupils and red whites and knew why he wore those shades but there was nothing I could do about what was going on. I just kept reading. They were all digging it more and more, even the old guy. More stuff kept going on. My beret flew off my head and went slinging across the room onto the head of this beautiful chick. She had short hair like a boy’s, almond-shaped eyes and breasts that were the shape of one of
those stiff padded bras but I could tell, even from the stage, that she wasn’t wearing one. She was wearing a black dress and black fishnet stockings on the longest legs I’d ever seen. She laughed and put her hands to her head where my beret had landed. Her girlfriend handed her a joint but it didn’t stay between her long fingers. It flew right out of those fingers and across the room, landing in my hand. I swear this is all true, buddy. Not that it sounds like the truth but it was.”

  Dirk was less stunned by the thought of his father’s words making wineglasses dance than by what he saw hovering behind Dirby. When he saw her he remembered the way her long eyelashes had felt, ticklish as butterflies against his skin, he remembered the smoke of her voice and the patchouli smell in her hair, her long glamorous legs in black stockings. She was more beautiful than any girl in a magazine, she the boyish goddess. She was Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy and Bowie and like his father she was James Dean too. Just Silver. Mother. While Dirby kept talking she did a slow rhythmic dance, hands over her head, torso moving with sinuous snakey charm.

  “Mom,” Dirk said.

  “After, I stopped reading my poetry, things settled down,” Dirby went on. “I mean no more dancing wineglasses or flying joints, but everyone went wild.

  “The old guy came up onstage—he had his shades again—and said, ‘This, my friends, is Be-Bop Bo-Peep, beat guru.’

  “I wanted to get out of there fast but the beautiful chick reached for my arm when I passed her table and put the beret back on my head. She smelled like incense and patchouli and orange blossoms. The light caught the big silver hoops she wore in her ears.

  “‘I dug that, Be-Bop,’ she said.

  “I just nodded the way I’d seen the hipsters do when someone dug them.

  “‘My name is Just Silver,’ she said. ‘Just Silver with a capital J capital S. The Just is because I renounced my father’s name.’

  “‘Are you a model?’ I asked.

  “She was. An actress too. She had done little theater and had a tiny part in a Fellini film once.

  “‘You are very, very beautiful,’ I told her. I knew I sounded more like Bo-Peep than Be-Bop talking like that but I felt she had dug right into my heart.

  “She asked if I’d read Siddhartha. It was my favorite book. She told me I reminded her of him.

  “‘Come home with me’ she said.

  “She drove me in her black convertible VW Bug to her apartment above the Sunset Strip. There was no furniture in the apartment—just rugs. Just Silver’s family had traveled all over India and the Mideast purchasing rugs when she was a child. She lit some Nag Champa incense—flowers turned to powdery stick stems, turned to clouds of smoke petals—put on some Ravi Shankar and made her head move from side to side on her neck like an Indian goddess. Then she cooked vegetable curry with rare saffron that was the color of poppy pollen.

  “‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked, showing me a dancing metal goddess holding a severed head and wearing a necklace made of skulls.

  “‘I might think twice about getting into her car if I was hitching’ I said.

  “‘Would you really? I don’t believe you.’

  “‘You’re right. I’d get right in. She is beautiful.’

  “‘She’s Kali, the blessing, dancing goddess. She’s also death. In the East those things can go together.’

  “I knew what she meant. She danced for me for a while and then we lay on her mattress and made love all night.

  “After that I didn’t feel any less lonely, only that Just Silver had joined me in the wild blue windscape of my loneliness.

  “‘I’m pregnant’ she said one night as I felt her draw me inside of her like a mouth on a pipe full of a burning dream-plant.

  “‘What? Just this second?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘How do you know?’

  “‘I am very in touch with my body.’

  “‘I can tell.’

  “What are we going to do?’ She said we, knowing somehow that I wasn’t going to leave even though I reminded her of Siddhartha.

  “‘I never had a dad,’ I said.

  “‘I’m sorry. What happened?’

  “‘Well I had him for a while but he died when I was five. He knew he was going to die so even when he was alive he kind of ignored me.’

  “Just Silver kissed the angles of my face. Her hair smelled like Nag Champa and marijuana. Her eyelashes were so long they looked like they hurt her. Her legs were as long as mine when we lay hip to hip and measured. Steep thighs.

  “‘So you don’t want a baby’ Just Silver said. ‘I mean, because of your dad.’

  “‘No. I want a baby because of my dad. I want a baby so I can be a dad for him.’

  “‘Or her’ Just Silver said.

  “‘I think we will have a boy.’

  “‘Why?’

  “‘I’m very in touch with our bodies.’

  “‘I can tell.’

  “So we decided to have you, buddy. We almost named you Siddhartha but Fifi convinced us it was not going to be fun for a little boy to grow up with a name like Siddhartha, and Sid didn’t have the right feeling. Fifi liked the name Dirk because of the sound of Derwood and Dirby and so we agreed, although your mother didn’t see much difference between Dirk and Sid.

  “Fifi loved your mom as if she were her very own daughter. She was so happy to see me with a friend. I had really never had any friends. Now lust Silver and I went everywhere together. I would recite my poetry and she would do her interpretive dancing on the stage. The wineglasses danced with her. I had expected things to stop moving around when I fell in love but I was just as telekinetic as ever. Maybe more so. Instead of grounding me, my love sent me spinning even deeper into the center of loneliness that was the stars and the night and the wind. I didn’t feel that my love was anything to do with the planet I had been born on. I wanted to fly away with Just Silver.

  “Then you were born. You presented me with this problem. How was I supposed to keep living this abstract way, trying to be like music from a horn, like sweat, like the dark skin of night peeling back at dawn? Although I’d wanted a baby so I could love it the way my father hadn’t been able to love me, when I saw you with your eyelashes and toes and everything, I realized what a big responsibility you really were. I had to care in a way I had never had to care before. I read you poetry and played my guitar. I made your toys fly around the room like planets in space. But I was drawn more and more to the waves and the wind. You made my heart hurt too much. It ached so much I thought it would stop pumping like my father’s had.

  “Your mother and I would leave you with your grandmother and go driving for hours. We liked to take Sunset all the way to the sea. We kissed in the furious Santa Anas that felt like jewel dust whirling around us as the sun went down.

  “The night we gave up on life, I can’t say it was a conscious decision. But we didn’t struggle against it either. That was the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed. In a way I think it was all too much for us—this world.”

  Dirk thought of his parents on the precipice, wanting to sink into the cavern of night and wild coyote hills, away from the hammering headlines and screaming TVs and the death of fathers.

  “That’s why I want you to be different, Dirk,” said Dirby. “I want you to fight. I love you, buddy. I want you not to be afraid.”

  “But I’m gay,” Dirk said. “Dad, I’m gay.”

  “I know you are, buddy,” Dirby said. And his lullaby eyes sang with love. “Do you know about the Greek gods, probably Walt Whitman—first beat father, Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg, even, maybe, your number one hero? You can’t be afraid.”

  “Maybe it’s too late,” Dirk said. “Dad, am I alive now?”

  “Yes. Still. Fight, Dirk.”

  “Mom?”

  And then his mother, still dancing behind Dirby, all eyelashes and legs, spoke with that dream-plant smoke voice, “Tell us your story, Baby Be-Bop.”

  Genie
>
  “One night when he was little Dirk McDonald woke to the sound of the telephone and his Grandma Fifi’s voice,” Dirk began.

  “He had never heard a voice sound like that. Dirk looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Grandma Fifi had pasted on the ceiling for Dirk’s father when he was a little boy. She had told Dirk they would keep nightmares away. But that night Dirk thought nothing would ever keep him safe from nightmares.

  “Grandma Fifi ran into the bedroom and took Dirk in her arms. Her bones felt as light as the birdcage that hung in her kitchen. She wrapped Dirk in a coat that smelled sour from mothballs and lilac-sweet from her perfume.

  “Dirk sat huddled next to his grandmother in her red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible and felt as if the night was going to eat him alive; he wished it would. Fifi hadn’t taken time to put the top back on. She ran through red lights. Dirk had never seen her do that before.

  “When they got to the hospital a doctor met them in the hallway and led them back into the waiting room. Fifi took Dirk on her lap. Dirk could never remember, later, if the doctor had ever said the words, but he knew then that his parents were gone. He pressed his face into the velvet collar of Fifi’s coat and their tears mingled together until they were drenched with salt water.

  “Dirk listened for his parents’ voices in the wind sometimes. But soon he forgot what they had sounded like. All he could hear was his Grandma Fifi whistling with her canaries in the kitchen or calling to him to come out and play in the yard or asking the pastry dough what shape it intended on taking this afternoon or singing him lullabies.”

  Dirk went on to tell the story of life in Fifi’s cottage, the fathers in the shower, the story of Pup Lambert and the magic lamp. He told the story of Gazelle and the stranger, Fifi and Derwood, Dirby and Just Silver. All his ancestors’ stories were also his own.

  Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

  “Dad?” he asked the darkness. “Mom?” but Dirby and Just Silver were gone.