Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials

by Francesca Lia Block

  “I’m so sorry I said that shit. It scared me that you were the only person I’ve ever loved like this.”

  “Who was that man?”

  “He was our fear,” says Angel Juan. “My fear of love and yours of being alone. But we don’t need him anymore.”

  I feel the tight grainy cut-glass feeling in my throat and my eyes fill up. Crying for the mannequin children and how we had to learn.

  “Don’t cry,” Angel Juan says, but it looks like he is too. “You’ll get tears in your ears. Don’t cry, my baby. You saved me.”

  Then I feel Angel Juan’s lips on mine like all the sunsets and caresses and music and feasty-feasts I have ever known.

  It’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. But it’s not the only good feeling. I kiss Angel Juan back with all the other good feelings I can find inside of me, all the magic I have found.

  When we go downstairs to see Mallard and Meadows it’s kind of late.

  Mallard throws open the door letting out steamy, fresh-baked-bread-and-cinnamon-incense-air into the hall. “There you are,” he says. “Meadows, she’s fine.”

  “This is Angel Juan,” I say as we come inside to the candlelit apartment lined with magic carpets.

  Mallard and Meadows shake his hand. “Happy New Year,” they say.

  Happy New Year? Angel Juan and I look at each other. When did that happen?

  “We lost track of time,” I say.

  “Well, it’s New Year’s,” says Meadows. He smiles. “And Christmas too.”

  Mallard points to some packages. “They came for you in the mail.”

  We sit on the carpet eating cranberry bread while I open my packages.

  There’s film for my camera.

  I take a picture of Mallard and Meadows on either side of Angel Juan in front of a wall with a magic carpet on it.

  There’s also a big black cashmere sweater and warm socks that I make Angel Juan take for himself.

  From Weetzie there’s a collage she made and put in a gold-leaf frame painted with pink and blue roses. The collage has pressed pansies, rose petals, glitter, lace, tiny pink plastic flamingos and babies, gold stars, tiny mirrors and hand-colored cutout photographs of my family. In the center there’s a picture of me and a picture of Charlie Bat goofing in his top hat and it looks like we’re holding hands. Something about our smoky eyes and skinny faces makes us look like a real grandfather and granddaughter.

  There’s a letter from Weetzie too.

  Dear Witch Baby,

  Happy Holidays! We all miss you so much. We’re sending you a ticket to come home on the second. I hope you have found everything you are looking for.

  After you left I thought a lot about why I couldn’t dream about Charlie. I think it was because I was holding on and trying too hard. But somehow knowing you were in his apartment bringing new life there I could let go of him. I realized how I miss you, honey, and I can see you. Charlie’s gone. I made this collage of you and him and that night I dreamed about him. He seemed very peaceful and happy in the dream and it was so real.

  I’m also sending you this other package that came in the mail.

  We are all going to be there to pick you up from the airport.

  We love you.

  Weetzie

  The other package is from Vixanne. I know right away but I don’t know how I know. I open it.

  The girl is staring with slanted dark-violet eyes under feathery eyelashes. Her hair is black and shiny with purple lights, every strand painted so you can almost feel it. Her neck and shoulders are bare and small painted with creamy paint and there is a hummingbird hanging around her throat. She’s in a jungle. Thick green vines and leaves. You can almost hear the sound of rushing water and feel the air all humid. On the girl’s left shoulder is a black cat with gold eyes. On her right shoulder is a white monkey with big teeth bared. The scary clutch monkey is playing with her hair. Perched on top of her head are butterflies with wings the color and almost shape of her eyes.

  “It’s you,” says Angel Juan.

  It’s weird because I guess it really does look like me but I didn’t recognize myself. The girl is strange and wild and beautiful.

  I think about Charlie like the black cat and Cake like the white monkey and how they are both parts of me and about butterflies shedding the withery cocoons, the prisons they spun out of themselves, and opening up like flowers.

  Angel Juan just puts his arms around me. Mallard pours all of us some sparkling apple cider.

  “How was your ghost?” I ask.

  “He’s fine now. His daughter and he just had to let each other go. She had to believe…”

  “That he’s inside her?”

  “In a way. You know, Lily, you might make a good ghost hunter someday.”

  I just smile and we clink our glasses watching the tiny fountains of amber bubbles.

  “Happy New Year.”

  Outside the window is New York city with its subways and shining firefly towers, its genies and demons. It is waiting for Angel Juan to sing it to sleep.

  I look at Angel Juan. My black cashmere cat, my hummingbird-love, my mirror, my Ferris wheel, King Tut, Buddha Babe, marble boy-god. Just my friend. I know I’ll be leaving him in the morning.

  At home I’ll skate to school and take lots of pictures. I’ll take pictures of lankas, ducks, hipsters and homeboys. When I look through my camera at them I’ll see what freaks them out and what they really jones for, what they want the most in the whole world and then I’ll feel like they’re not so different from me. I’ll send copies of my New York pictures to the hip-hopscotch girls, the beautiful lanks and their Miss Pigtails, the African drum-dancers. I’ll take more pictures of me too, dressed up like all the things I am scared of and the things I want. One will be of genie-me in a turban doing yoga next to the globe lamp with smoke all around me. Maybe Vixanne would like to see my pictures.

  I’ll play drums with The Goat Guys and write songs about New York and my family and me. I’ll help with my family’s movie about ghosts. I think they should call it The Spectacular Spectral Spectacle. It could be about a ghost of a man who helps a girl free herself from an evil demon ghoulie ghoul and how the girl lets go of her dad and sets his spirit free.

  I might not see Angel Juan for a while. But we’ll see each other again. Meet to dream-rock-slink-slam it-jam in the heart of the world.

  Like we always do.

  BOOK FIVE

  Baby Be-Bop

  PART I

  Dirk and Fifi

  Dirk had known it since he could remember.

  At nap time he lay on the mat, feeling his skin sticking to brown plastic, listening to the buzz of flies, smelling the honeysuckle through the faraway window, tasting the coating of graham cracker cookies and milk in his mouth, wanting to be racing through space. He tried to think of something he liked.

  He was on a train with the fathers—all naked and cookie-colored and laughing. There under the blasts of warm water spurting from the walls as the train moved slick through the land. All the bunching calf muscles dripping water and biceps full of power comforted Dirk. He tried to see his own father’s face but there was always too much steam.

  Dirk knew that there was something about this train that wasn’t right. One day he heard his Grandma Fifi talking to her canaries, Pirouette and Minuet, in the teacup-colored kitchen with honey sun pouring through the windows.

  “I’m afraid it’s hard for him without a man around, Pet,” Fifi said as she put birdseed into the green dome-shaped cage.

  The canaries chirped at her.

  “I asked him about what the men and ladies on his toy train were doing, Mini, and do you know what he said? He said they were all men taking showers together.”

  The canaries nuzzled each other on their perch. Pet did a perfect pirouette and Mini sang.

  “I guess you’re right. It’s something all little boys go through. It’s just a phase,” Fifi said.

  Just a phase. Dirk thought about tho
se words over and over again. Just a phase. Until the train inside of him would crash. Until the thing inside of him that was wrong and bad would change. Until he would change. He waited and waited for the phase to end. When would it end? He tried to do everything fast so it would end faster. He got A’s in school. He ran fast. He made his body strong so that he would be picked first for teams.

  That was important—being picked first. The weak, skinny, scared boys got picked last. They got chased through the yard and had their jeans pulled up hard. Sometimes other kids threw food at them. Sometimes they went home with black eyes, bloody noses or swollen lips. Dirk knew that almost all the boys who were treated this way really did like girls. It was just that girls didn’t like them yet. Dirk also knew that some of the boys that hurt them were doing it so they wouldn’t have to think about liking boys themselves. They were burning, twisting and beating the part of themselves that might have once dreamed of trains and fathers.

  Dirk knew that the main thing was to keep to himself and never to seem afraid.

  Every Saturday afternoon his Grandma Fifi took him to see a matinee, where he could hide, dreaming, in crackling popcorn darkness. They saw James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. That was who he wanted to be. He practiced squinting and pouting. He turned up his jacket collar and rolled his jeans. He slicked back his hair, carefully leaving one stray piece falling into his eyes. James Dean was beautiful because he didn’t seem afraid of anything, but when Dirk looked into his eyes he knew that he secretly was and it made Dirk love him even more.

  Grandma Fifi had two friends named Martin and Merlin who were afraid in a way Dirk didn’t want to be. They were both very handsome and kind and always brought candies and toys when they came over for tea and Fifi’s famous pastries. But as much as Dirk liked Martin and Merlin he knew he was different from them. They talked in voices as pale and soft as the shirts they wore and they moved as gracefully as Fifi did. Their eyes were startled and sad. They had been hurt because of who they were. Dirk didn’t want to be hurt that way. He wanted to be strong and to love someone who was strong; he wanted to meet any gaze, to laugh under the brightest sunlight and never hide.

  Dirk especially didn’t want to hide from Grandma Fifi but he wasn’t sure how to tell her. He didn’t want to disturb the world she had made for him in her cottage with the steep chocolate frosting roof, the birdbath held by a nymph and the seven stone dwarfs in the garden. There were so many butterflies in that garden that when Dirk was a little boy he could stand naked in a crowd of them and be completely covered. Jade-green pupas hung from the bushes like earrings. Fifi showed Dirk the gold sparks that would later become the butterflies’ orange color. Then the pupa darkened and stretched and finally a fragile monarch bloomed. Fifi and Dirk put flower nectar or a mixture of honey and water on their fingertips and the newborn butterflies crawled onto them, all ticklish, and practiced fanning wings that were like amber stained glass in the sun. In the garden there were also little butterflies that looked like petals blown from the roses with the almond scent. There were peaches with pits that also smelled and looked like almonds when you cracked them open. Fifi showed Dirk how to pinch the honeysuckle blossoms that grew over the back gate so that sweet drops fell onto his tongue. She showed him how to pinch the snapdragons’ jaws to make them sing. If Dirk ever cut himself playing, Fifi broke off a piece of the thick green aloe vera plant she called Love and a gel oozed out like Love’s clear, thick blood. Fifi put the gel onto Dirk’s cut and stuck a Peanuts Band-Aid over it; the cut always healed by the next day, skin smooth as if it had never been broken.

  Fifi had a cat named Kit who had arrived through the window one evening while an Edith Piaf record was playing and never left. Kit had pinkish fur like the tints Fifi put in her white hair. If Dirk or Fifi ever had an ache or a pain, Kit would come and sit on the part of the body that hurt them—just sit and purr. She was very warm, and after a while the soreness would disappear.

  “Kit is a great healer in a cat’s body,” Fifi said.

  Kaboodle the Noodle was Fifi’s dog. He had a valentine nose, long Greta Garbo lashes and a tiny shock of hair that stood straight up. When you were sad he kissed your hand and winked at you.

  Dirk and Fifi and Kaboodle went shopping at the fruit stands on Fairfax that were covered with pink netting to keep out the flies. Kaboodle sat out in front and waited. Fifi bought bags of asparagus and bananas, kiwis and radishes, persimmons and yams. There was a little Middle Eastern market where she bought bottles of rose water and coffee beans as dark as chocolate. Fifi made pastries shaped like shells, ballet slippers and moons, and salads full of vegetables cut into the shapes of flowers.

  Dirk knew that Fifi wanted great-grandchildren someday. She wanted to make pastries for them and teach them about how peach pits smelled like almonds, about butterflies that looked like flowers and about talking snapdragons. He knew he was her only chance. Worst of all, he knew she wanted him to be happy and how could he be happy in this world, he wondered, if what he knew about himself was true? So Dirk didn’t tell Fifi. He didn’t tell anyone. He kept to himself. He waited for the phase to end. Until the day he met Pup Lambert.

  Dirk and Pup

  The air smelled like lemon Pledge, sweet jasmine and mock orange. Bougainvillea grew thick up the fences like walls of paper flowers. Morning glories glowed neon purple, twining among the pink oleander. Nasturtiums shimmered along the ground like fallen sunlight.

  As Dirk walked home from school he heard a whistle, and he looked up into an olive tree. In the branches sat a boy. He had brown hair with leaves in it, freckles on his turned-up nose and a Cheshire cat grin.

  “Hey,” the boy said.

  “Hey,” said Dirk.

  “Want to shoot some baskets?” the boy asked.

  “Sure.”

  The boy jumped out of the tree, landing lightly on the white rubber soles of his baby-blue Vans deck shoes.

  Dirk and the boy shot baskets in the driveway of the pale yellow house with the pink camellias growing in front. Dirk was taller, but the boy was light on his feet and had perfect aim. Dirk’s heart was beating fast like the basketball hitting the pavement again and again; he was sweating.

  When a car pulled into the driveway the boy grabbed the basketball and took off down the street.

  “Come on,” he shouted.

  Dirk stood still, looking at the boy and then into the car. A heavyset man got out. Dirk just had time to wonder how such a big man could have such a quick and slender son when the man said, “Scram! I told you not to hang around here anymore! I’ll call the cops!”

  Dirk ran after the boy. When he caught up with him, at the edge of a field of wildflowers, he was out of breath. The sweat was getting into his eyes.

  “I thought that was your house,” Dirk said.

  The boy grinned. “Nope.”

  They stood under the shifting sunlight, laughing. Dirk thought their laughter would look like sunlight through leaves if he could see it. A flock of poppies, with their faces toward the sun, moved in the breeze as if they were laughing too. Dirk noticed that the boy’s ears came to slight points at the top.

  “I’m Pup,” the boy said.

  “Dirk.”

  “Hey, Dirk. Next time we’ll borrow someone’s swimming pool.”

  Two days later Pup jumped out of the tree again. He and Dirk climbed the fence of an ivy-covered Spanish house with a terra-cotta roof, and stripped down to their underwear. Then they took turns diving into the aqua water. Pup did more and more elaborate dives—cannonballs and flips and flailing-in-the-air things—and Dirk tried to imitate him. They stayed in the pool until the tips of their fingers looked crinkled and crushed, and then they dried out on the hot cement. Pup had freckles on his shoulders and a gold dusting of hair on his arms and legs. With his wet hair slicked back Dirk thought he looked like James Dean.

  “Are you hungry?” Dirk asked Pup.

  “Starving.”

  Dirk and Pup went to Farmer�
�s Market where the air smelled like tropical fruit, chilled flowers, Cajun corn bread, Belgian waffles, deli meats and cheeses, coffee and the gooey sheets of saltwater taffy that spun round and round behind glass. The light filtered softly through the striped circus tent awnings. Wind chimes and coffee cups sang. Dirk looked for Pup but couldn’t find him. Then he heard a whistle. He followed the sound to a corner table where Pup was sitting behind a huge banana cream pie. He handed Dirk a fork.

  “Want some?”

  “Where’d you get that?” Dirk asked.

  Pup grinned his Cheshire grin.

  Nothing had ever tasted so good to Dirk as that frothy concoction—peaks of meringue and melts of banana—that Pup had lifted so slyly from the pie counter. But the next day Dirk asked Grandma Fifi to make a pie so Pup wouldn’t have to steal and invited his friend over for dinner.

  After school they went to Fifi’s cottage through the backyards of houses, leaping fences and climbing walls, patting dogs and dodging the lemons that one woman threw at them. Pup gathered avocados, roses and sprigs of cherry blossoms as he ran so that by the time he met Grandma Fifi at the front door he had almost more presents than he could carry.

  “This is Pup,” Dirk told her.

  “Pleased to meet you, Pup,” said Grandma Fifi. “Thank you for the alligator pears and the flowers.”

  “This is my Grandma Fifi,” Dirk said.

  “Hi,” said Pup. He seemed suddenly shy. He shook the tips of his hair out of his eyes. He lowered his eyelashes.

  “Come in for some snacks,” said Fifi.

  She brought out guava cream cheese pastries and a pitcher of lemonade. Pup gulped and swallowed as if he hadn’t had food in days.

  Then Dirk showed Pup the comics that he drew. They were about two boys who turned into the superheroes Slam and lam when there was danger.

  “You’re serious,” Pup said.