Baby Be-Bop

by Francesca Lia Block

  Duck was the only one who never talked about his crushes since his crushes were on boys and Duck knew Darlene wouldn’t understand at all. He thought it was strange because of how free she was about other things. Once she tried some pot brownies that Peace made but she said they just made her depressed and unable to stop giggling. She let Crystal’s boyfriend sleep over and she had told all the girls that when they were ready to have sex she would take them for birth control. But when it came to Duck’s secret he knew she wouldn’t accept it. He had heard her talking to her best friend Honey-Marie about Honey-Marie’s son Harley. Harley was a few years older than Duck, and Duck had always admired him from afar. He looked like he was born to play Prince Charming with his fistfuls of curly dark hair, flashing dark eyes and ballet dancer’s body. He spoke in a soft rich voice and wore baggy cotton trousers with Birkenstocks and color-ful socks. Harley was a waiter at a café in Santa Cruz but he really wanted to go to San Francisco and perform Shakespeare. Finally, just before he left, he told Honey-Marie that he was gay. She was devastated. Duck heard her tell his mother, “My heart is broken.”

  Then he heard his mother say, “It could be worse. He could have something really wrong with him.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief on the other side of the kitchen door.

  “Something is wrong with him,” Honey-Marie said.

  Then Duck’s mother said, “I guess you’re right. I’d probably feel the same way if it was my own son.”

  After that Duck tried. He took Cherish Marine to the prom and bought her a huge corsage of pink lilies. He even rented a tux (although he would not put his feet in weasel shoes and wore his Vans instead). Cherish Marine was a bathing suit model and all the boys wanted to be her date but she liked Duck with his lilting surfer slur and teenage-Kewpie beauty. They danced all the slow dances and Duck felt Cherish Marine’s bathing-suit-model-breasts pressing through her peach satin prom dress. They went to the pier with a group of other kids and shared a bottle of champagne which Cherish Marine liked to drink with a straw. They sat next to each other on the roller coaster, Cherish Marine’s slender thigh pressing against Duck’s leg, her hands grabbing his knee as their light bodies were thrown from side to side of the car,bruising, the metal bar hardly enough to keep them from being flung into space. But when the evening was over Duck walked Cherish to her door and kissed her good night on her smooth peachy cheek. She looked into his eyes waiting for something more but he only said, “You are a total babe. Thank you for being my date,” and left.

  Cherish Marine was stunned.

  Duck went surfing because it was the only thing that comforted him. When he surfed he felt as aqua-blue and full and high as the waves but he also felt lost, a small human who could as easily be washed away as his father Eddie had been. Even the other surfers were separate from each other in their own tubes of water. Once in a while he’d see a guy holding his girlfriend and once he had seen a guy surfing with a pig on a leash. Duck wanted a boyfriend he could surf with, someone he could tell his secret to, someone who had the same secret inside. He wanted to reach inside his lover and touch that lonely secret with his own.

  Duck decided to leave Santa Cruz. He drove his light-blue VW Bug along Highway 5 listening to the B-52s. He opened the windows and let the wind run its fingers through his shoulder-length hair that was bleached white from years of surfing in sun and salt water.

  I am finally free, Duck thought, and then he thought about his brothers and sister and his mother telling them not to get sand all over everything and please be quiet so I can do my yoga, Duck could you please pick up some tofu patties for dinner, you look just like your daddy I miss him so much he would have been so proud of you the way you rode that wave. The soaring free feeling was mixed with a sadness as Duck realized how alone he really was now. It was kind of like surfing—but then, Duck thought—everything was kind of like surfing.

  Duck got to Zeroes at night and built a fire at the campground. He heated up a can of beans and watched the waves, nodding with encouragement at the good ones like a proud father, watching the sun drop into the sea. He thought of how his father had died in the ocean and how instead of hating the water or being afraid of it he loved it even more. He didn’t understand why that had happened to his dad but now he knew that his dad’s spirit was there in the waves protecting him. He wondered if his father would understand about how he loved boys. Somehow he thought that if his dad were alive his mom wouldn’t have agreed with Honey-Marie. She would have been too happy basking in her love for Eddie Drake. Around Eddie Drake everyone just basked—they felt safe, they didn’t judge. Duck had never heard his dad say a negative thing about anyone’s personal choice—just about things like the Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King and what was happening to the oceans. Even now after his death, he was like the sun—falling into the waves, rising again every morning—still with Duck like a god in an ancient myth.

  Duck slept on top of a picnic table that night with his arm around his surfboard. He looked up at the stars and wondered if the future love of his life was looking up at them too. He couldn’t have known about the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of a room where a boy lay wishing for Duck.

  Duck waxed his board and surfed-in the dawn; he felt as if he was pulling the sun up behind him as he rode the waves. Then he rinsed at the outdoor showers. He wanted to stay out by the water forever but he knew that if he was going to live in Los Angeles he would have to try to get work.

  He applied at a surf shop in Santa Monica. He had worked at one in Santa Cruz and he knew a lot about boards. Plus there was something about Duck that made people like him right away—his grin and the innocent openness in his blue bay-window eyes. The owner of the shop told him he could start the next day.

  When evening came Duck drove into town—to Santa Monica Boulevard. He had never seen so many gay men all at once. He felt the buzz of desire making them all beautiful. Everything was sexy here—hamburgers and ice cream and books and boots and even supermarkets became sexy. There was even a billboard advertising gay cruises. The men on the billboards were all tan and muscular and the men on the streets looked like they hadstepped off the billboards. Music thumped out of bars, and through the doors Duck saw strobe lights pulsing. He wanted to dance. He had never danced with another man. Some men came out of a club with their hands in each others back pockets. Sweat was pouring down their necks and arms. Someone whistled at Duck. He was afraid to look at who it was.

  “Do you have some money for food?” a boy asked him. The boy had huge brown eyes. Duck gave him a couple of dollars even though he hadn’t had dinner himself.

  “Thanks, man,” the boy said. He was different from some of the other guys around there—really young with a sweet mouth. When he smiled Duck saw that he had a gap between his front teeth. On the sidewalk in front of him was a huge chalk drawing of a beautiful blue angel.

  “You new around here?” he asked.

  Duck shrugged, not wanting to admit that this was his first time. His mouth felt dry and his heart was like the music coming out of the bars. “That’s a good drawing,” he said to change the subject.

  “Thanks. Want to go to Rage?”

  “Sure,” Duck said.

  The boy stood up and wiped his chalky hands on his jeans. Duck followed him into the bar that was crowded with men. A lot of the men knew the boy.

  “Hey, Bam-Bam!”

  “Is that you?” Duck asked.

  The boy cocked his head. “Bam-Bam, yeah. Why?”

  Duck started laughing. “My name is Duck,” he said.

  “Well at least it’s not Pebbles.”

  Bam-Bam was a wild dancer, flinging his arms around and around over his head, gyrating his torso and hips. Duck found out later that sometimes he worked as a go-go boy when he could get a gig. Unfortunately it didn’t pay much and most of the time Bam-Bam was out on the streets spare-changing or doing whatever else street kids did for some quick burger bucks.

>   “Where are you from?” Bam-Bam asked Duck over some beers that a guy in leather chaps had bought for them.

  “Santa Cruz.”

  “And this is your first time out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Out. Coming out.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” said Duck. “I mean no.”

  “It’s cool,” Bam-Bam said. “Everyone has to have a first time.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m from all over. I was in Frisco last. I just keep moving. I’m a mover. I’m not from anywhere.”

  Duck nodded. He figured that wherever Bam-Bam was from—everyone had to come from somewhere, right?—it wasn’t a two-story white frame house full of crystals and waffles and laughing golden children.

  Maybe Bam-Bam really did come from nowhere. Duck had noticed some cigarette burn marks on Bam-Bam’s bare, thin arms. Parents that did stuff like that to you had to become nothing nowhere in your head-if you were going to make it out alive.

  Duck and Bam-Bam went to the beach and slept on the picnic tables. In the morning Duck surfed while Bam-Bam sat on the sand and sketched him. Duck made them coffee, boiling water over the campfire.

  “Do you like L.A.?” Duck asked.

  “It’s okay I guess. It’ll be better when I get my shit together. I design furniture.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well for now it’s just drawings.” Bam-Bam opened his sketch pad. He showed Duck pictures of tables made from surfboards and other ones covered with a mosaic of bottle caps and broken glass and china. There was some neo-Flintstone-style furniture made from broken slabs of stone and boulders, and some shaped like dinosaurs.

  “You fully rip,” Duck said.

  Bam-Bam smiled so the gap between his teeth showed.

  “So where do you live?” Duck finally asked.

  “Sometimes I can find a squat. Sometimes I go to the shelter. When I have money I get a motel with some other kids. Why, you looking for a place?”

  ‘Today I’m going to go look for an apartment,” Duck said. “If you want you can stay with me for a while.”

  “How much?”

  “It wouldn’t cost you anything. And you could get off the streets.”

  Bam-Bam looked suspicious. Duck hoped he hadn’t hurt his feelings. “I just don’t know anybody out here,” he added. “You could kind of show me around. You could design me a table. Just don’t use my surfboard for a table!”

  Duck and Bam-Bam found a one-bedroom apartment on Venice Beach. Duck surfed every morning and worked at the shop all day. At night he took an acting workshop but he was always too shy to present anything. After a while the teacher, Preston Delbert, just gave up and ignored Duck. But Duck kept going, sitting in the back, wondering if he would ever find a voice inside of him or something to say with it.

  Bam-Bam stayed home painting murals of the ocean on the walls, designing furniture and making omelettes or peanut butter sandwiches for him and Duck to eat. He cut Duck’s hair short so that it looked like the petals of a sunflower. Duck suggested that maybe Bam-Bam should take a class in furniture design at a city college or go to beauty school but Bam-Bam said he wasn’t ready. He stopped going out altogether. He said he was afraid that he’d getcaught back up in street life. At night, Duck and Bam-Bam slept in the same bed holding each other but they didn’t make love. Bam-Bam said he didn’t feel like it and Duck was too shy and inexperienced to push him. Duck wondered if he would ever know what it was like to make love to a boy he loved. Sometimes he wanted to go back to Rage or do something wild in a men’s room or cruise in a park but he was afraid. He felt that he had to be responsible too, and set a good example for Bam-Bam.

  One day Duck came back from work and saw that Bam-Bam’s things were gone. There was a picture of an angel, like the chalk one on the sidewalk, painted above Duck’s bed. Under it was written, “I love you, Duck. You will find your true angel. I am a dangerous one. Bam-Bam.”

  Duck sat on the bed and cried. He wasn’t sure why he was crying so hard. I didn’t know him that well, Duck told himself. He was a street kid. He couldn’t stay inside with me forever. He wasn’t my boyfriend, he didn’t even want to make love with me. But still Duck cried. He was crying for the first person who knew his secret and for the painter of angels and for the warmth of those thin, cigarette-burned arms and maybe for something else—a premonition of what would happen later.

  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 menhe 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 eyesof 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 w
hen 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 ofthanks, 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.”