Dangerous Angels with Bonus Materials

by Francesca Lia Block

  “I scored a whole pack this time,” Pup said, as if he were explaining it.

  Dirk looked at Pup, far away behind a cloud of blue smoke, moving farther and farther away. Tracey and Nancy were twisting, snaking, shaking and skanking all over the floor. When “Los Angeles” by X came on they butted heads and collided into each other, working their elbows and knees in all directions.

  “Punk rock,” Tracey shrilled.

  Punk rock, Dirk thought as a boy jumped off the carpeted bench along the mirrored wall and began slamming with invisible demons. With his stiff sunglass-black Mohawk, rows of earrings and black leather boots, the sweat and strength of his body, he made Tracey and Nancy’s version look like hopscotch.

  Dirk could almost feel Pup’s heart slamming inside of him as he watched the boy. Dirk knew, seeing that dancer, alone and proud, tormented and beautiful, that he had found something he wanted to be. The boy reminded Dirk of Wild Animal Park.

  When he was little Fifi had taken him on the wild animal safari. You had to keep the windows rolled up so the animals couldn’t get in. Dirk wanted to get out of the car and run around with them. They were fierce and wise and easy in their skins. That was what the dancing boy reminded Dirk of.

  “That dude has some hell of cool boots,” Pup said, flicking ashes.

  Tracey and Nancy danced over. “She told you this wasn’t a disco,” Nancy said.

  “I think punk is gross,” said Tracey.

  When they left the club that night Dirk saw Mohawk and three other boys with short hair and black clothes leaning against a turquoise-blue-and-white ’55 Pontiac in the parking lot, smoking.

  “My grandmother drives a car like that,” Dirk said. “A red-and-white one.”

  He looked back at the boys as Tracey Stace drove away.

  “Want to come over?” Tracey asked.

  “I’m feeling kind of burnt,” Dirk said. “You can just drop me off.”

  Pup didn’t come by Dirk’s house the next day. Dirk felt like his stomach was a roller coaster as he rode his skateboard to school. At lunchtime he looked for Pup. He was sitting with Tracey Stace and Nancy Nance.

  “What’s up?” Dirk asked.

  “Not much,” Pup said. “You should have hung with us last night. We drove up to Mulholland.”

  “Where were you this morning?” Dirk asked.

  He saw Pup’s upper lip curl slightly. “Tracey gave me a ride. We were out all night.”

  For three days Pup didn’t come by Dirk’s house. When Dirk finally called and asked him what he was doing that night Pup said, “I’m seeing Tracey.” That was all. He didn’t ask Dirk to join them.

  Dirk saw Pup and Tracey walking on campus with their hands in the back pockets of each other’s jeans and knew that he had to do something. If he didn’t tell Pup his feelings he thought he might go slamming through space, careening into everything until there was nothing left of him but bruises wilting on bone. He caught up with Pup in the hall after school.

  “Are you free today, man?” Dirk asked.

  Pup looked like a startled animal caught in the beam of headlights in the middle of a road.

  “I’m seeing Tracey,” he said. It didn’t sound mean, just sad, Dirk thought.

  “Just meet me at the tree this afternoon.” Dirk walked away.

  He didn’t really expect Pup to be at the tree where they had first met. It was a warm day but he kept his Wayfarer sunglasses on, kept his sweatshirt on. He practiced skateboard tricks on the sidewalk under the olive tree where Pup and he had put their footprints once when the cement was wet. He was skateboarding over the black stains of smashed olives and the footprints when he heard the thud of rubber Vans soles on cement, and there was Pup with leaves in his hair just like the first day.

  “Hey,” Pup said.

  “Hey,” said Dirk, flipping his skateboard into the air and catching it. He gestured with his head and started walking. Pup walked much more slowly than usual. Dirk could smell his scent—clean like salt water and honeysuckle and grass.

  “Want to stop by the house?” Dirk asked.

  Pup shrugged. They were silent the whole way to the cottage.

  Jimi Hendrix on the stereo. Pup slouched on the floor in Dirk’s room while Dirk unscrewed the bedpost and took out what he had hidden there. He shook the pot into the paper and rolled and licked the way the boy who had sold it to him had done. Then he lit the joint and handed it to Pup. Pup took a deep hit and handed it back. Dirk breathed in smoke like the green and golden afternoon light. Maybe it would make him brave.

  “Nancy really likes you,” Pup said after his second hit. “She’s a babe.”

  “She is,” said Dirk.

  “You should’ve gone with us up to Mulholland.”

  Dirk wanted a magical plant to grow inside of him, making him proud and at ease. He and Pup smoked some more. Jimi’s guitar burned with music.

  “I just wanted to tell you. I’ve been pretending my whole life. I’m so sick of it. You’re my best friend.” Dirk looked down, feeling the heat in his face.

  “Don’t even say it, Dirk,” said Pup.

  Dirk started to reach out his hand but drew it back. He started to open his mouth to explain but Pup whispered, “Please don’t. I can’t handle it, man.”

  He got up and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “I love you, Dirk,” Pup said. “But I can’t handle it.”

  And then before Dirk knew it, Pup was gone.

  That night Dirk stood in the bathroom looking at his reflection. He didn’t see the fine angles of his cheekbones, the delicate bridge of his nose, the tenderness of his lips. He didn’t see the sparkle of his dark eyes that seemed to shine up from the deepest, brightest place. He saw a scared boy who was in love with Pup Lambert and who hated himself.

  Dirk took a razor and began to shave the sides of his scalp. The buzz vibrated into his brain. How thin was the skin at his temples, Dirk thought. Just skin stretched over pulse. He thought about the punk rock boy at the dance club. There was something about that boy that no one could touch. Dirk took the hair that was left on his head and dyed it with black dye so that it was almost blue. Then he formed it into a spikey fan. He smoothed it with Fifi’s gel and sprayed it with her Aqua Net so it stood straight up like the hair on top of Kaboodle’s head.

  At school Dirk wore all black and his Mohawk. Everyone turned and stared. But no one had questions in their eyes about what it was all hiding underneath. The disguise worked. There was some fear, some admiration, some jealousy, but no one despised Dirk the way he knew they would if he revealed his secret.

  Also, no one questioned why Dirk and Pup didn’t share a lunch on the same bench anymore, why they didn’t play basketball together. It all seemed because of the Mohawk, the big boots Dirk had started to wear, the Germs and X buttons on his collar. That seemed like enough. No one knew that it was because of a glance in a Jacuzzi, a joint shared like a kiss and then turned to ash, a shock of love.

  Dirk and the Tear Jerks

  Fifi watched Dirk and his Mohawk more closely now. Her blue eyes looked always ready to spill. Dirk wanted to tell her, how he wanted to tell her, but what if the tears spilled, blue onto her cheeks? What if he hurt the one person who had loved him his whole life? What if she said, “It’s just a phase,” and he had to tell her, “It’s not just a phase, Grandma Fifi. It’s who I am.”

  And why did he have to tell? Boys who loved girls didn’t have to sit their mothers down and say, “Mom, I love girls. I want to sleep with them.” It would be too embarrassing. Just because what he felt was different, did it have to be discussed?

  On Dirk’s sixteenth birthday Fifi called him into the kitchen.

  “Where’s Pup?” Fifi asked. “I thought you were going to invite him over.”

  “He’s busy,” Dirk said. “You know that. You ask me every day.”

  Kit came and sat on Dirk’s lap. Kaboodle covered his eyes with his paws. Pet and Mini did a tragic ballet in their cage.

&n
bsp; Fifi had baked Dirk a chocolate raspberry kiwi cake. The candles made her shine like the Christmas tree angel she put on her pink-flocked tree each year. Dirk closed his eyes and blew the candles out. He didn’t make a wish. There were no wishes inside of him anymore.

  “I have something for you, sweetie,” Fifi said.

  Kaboodle winked at him and licked frosting off his fingers.

  Dirk followed Fifi outside, Kaboodle bouncing at their feet so that his tongue swung with each step. Fifi’s red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible was parked in the driveway. It had a huge red ribbon tied around its middle.

  “I know it’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Fifi said. “I would have gotten you a new car if I could have.”

  “You’re giving me your car!”

  He stroked the cherry red, the vanilla white, the silver chrome. It was like a sundae, like a valentine, like a little train, a magic carpet.

  “Well, if you want it. Now that you can drive I thought it would be a good present. It’s very safe. They made those things sturdy back then. And I’m getting a little too old to drive.”

  “I’ll be your chauffeur. I love it, Grandma,” Dirk said.

  Then he noticed something different about the car. Mounted on the front was a golden thing.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a family heirloom. A lamp. It comes off the car, but for now I thought it looked splendid as a hood ornament.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “When you are ready you can tell your story into it,” Fifi said. “You can talk about Pup—whatever you want to say. Secrets. Things you can’t tell anyone.”

  “I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Someday you may. Someday it might help.”

  Dirk looked at the golden thing. He was afraid of it. He wanted Fifi to take it back. But what could he do? Anyway, he had the car and that’s what mattered. With the car he didn’t need Pup; he didn’t need anybody. He could drive through the canyons with the top down, race along Mulholland’s precarious curves, looking at the city glistering below. He could feel the breeze kissing his naked temples, more tender than any lover. Go to punk gigs by himself. Slam in the pit with the boys until the pain sweated out of him, let the pain-sweat dry up and evaporate in the night air as he drove and drove.

  But Dirk didn’t go out that night. Instead he lay alone in the darkness. His hands kept wandering over his body wanting to touch himself the way someone would rub a magic lamp in a fairy tale to make a genie appear. But Dirk pulled his hands away. He wanted to cut them off. He wanted to turn off his mind. He tried to think about Nancy Nance but all he could see was Pup Lambert.

  Dirk remembered what Fifi had said to him. How could he tell his story, he wondered? He had no story. And if he did no one would want to hear it. He would be laughed at, maybe attacked. So it was better to have no story at all. It was better to be dead inside.

  He looked up at the billboard models looming above like hard angels in denim as he drove down the Sunset Strip one night. I would rather have no story at all, Dirk decided. I want to be blank like a model on a billboard. I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside. But he thought of the stuffed dog he and Pup had seen on the Venice boardwalk, so long ago it seemed now—a rigor mortis display. Without a story of love would he become only that?

  Dirk was going to see X at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. He had a fake ID he had made himself using his new driver’s license. He had a black leather motorcycle jacket covered with zippers that he had found at a musty dusty cobwebs-and-lace thrift store for only ten dollars. He had his warrior Mohawk. Kaboodle was sitting next to him on the front seat with gel in his shock of hair and his big paw resting on Dirk’s leg.

  The dark club was full of pierced, painted boys with shaved heads. They were slamming in the pit in front of the stage, throwing their bodies against each other in a wild-thing rumpus. Dirk felt that he fit in here much better than at school. Exene wove around with her two-tone hair hanging over her eyes and her arms and legs sticking out of her little black dress like the limbs of a doll that had been thrown around too much. John Doe’s face looked even whiter against his black hair as he twisted it into expressions of torture and ecstasy, baring his teeth or pouting like James Dean. Billy Zoom’s platinum ice devil smile never left his lips as he played his guitar at crotch level. The music made Dirk think of black roses on fire. He wanted to leap onstage and dive into the crowd the way some of the boys were doing. He wanted to play music that would make the boys in the pit sweat like that. Maybe that was how those boys cried, Dirk thought. Maybe he would start a band called the Tear Jerks. For a moment he remembered sitting in his room with Pup, Pup holding the guitar, but he let the drums beat the thought away. His own band. Dirk and the Tear Jerks. Tear Jerk Dirk.

  His throat and heart felt tight, constricted with dryness, so he bought a beer and gulped it down. Then he went and stood at the edge of the slammers. Some boys behind him were moving up and down in place, jostling him forward. Finally he flung himself into the writhing body mass. It was like surfing in a way, fighting to stay up above seething waters that wanted to consume you, part of you wanting to be consumed, to vanish into radiance.

  “The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss,” X sang.

  Dirk felt the bitterness and anguish making his lips tingle. He raged arms and legs akimbo into the fury. He was carried forward by the whirlpools of the crowd to the stage. On the stage. Blinded sweat tears lights. Howling. Panic. Pandemonium. Pan, hooved horned god. Flinging himself off into space. Waiting for the fall, the hard smack, unconsciousness.

  No. Buoyed up. Thrilling sweat-slick biceps. Cradled for a moment. Father. Father. Objects in flight around the room. Fragments of poetry. Lost eyes far away. Eyes like boats drifting farther and farther away.

  He was back on his feet again. The crowd had caught him. He had felt their respect and admiration. He wiped off sweat with the back of his hand and went to get another beer. As he walked through the crowd he felt some bodies move back to give him room, witness his strength, others brush against him to feel it. The lights caught zipper metal and raven hair. Sweat on tan skin like beer drops brown glass glisten.

  After the show Dirk gave Kaboodle some water and walked him until he peed. A boy and girl with matching burgundy hair that stood straight up on their heads like flames smiled at them.

  “Mohawk dog,” the boy said. “You’re twins.” Dirk and Kaboodle smiled back.

  They got in the car and drove by Oki Dogs on Santa Monica Boulevard. Punks, kids with long greasy hair and junky-bulky veins in shriveled arms, tall men with big cars and sharp teeth, sat on the scarred benches under fluorescent lights that buzzed like flies or fat cooking. Dirk stopped the Pontiac and got out. The man at the counter shouted at him, “Okay okay,” so he just said, “Oki Dog and a Coke.” The Oki Dog was a giant hot dog smothered with cheese and beans and pastrami slices and wrapped in a tortilla. Dirk ate a few bites. It tasted salty greasy rich dark danger like the night. He was so hungry.

  Then he saw a shrink-wrap swastika earring. It was dangling from the ear of a girl with spikey hair. The girl was drinking a Coke and giggling with her friends. She could have been Tracey or Nancy with a punk haircut.

  “Do you know what that earring means?” Dirk said. He had never spoken out like this but suddenly his nerves felt huge, fluorescent, explosive. Maybe from the music still in his head. Maybe from the symbol.

  The girl giggled. “It’s a punk thing.”

  “Do you know who Hitler was?” Dirk asked.

  “Yeah sure.”

  “Really? You know about the concentration camps?”

  “Kind of. I guess. Why?”

  “Hitler massacred innocent people. I’m sure you heard about it sometime. That was his symbol. The swastika.”

  “I got it at Poseur. It’s cool.”

  “It is so uncool. You can’t even believe how uncool it is,” Dirk said.

  The girl lower
ed her eyes. She looked to her friends and back to Dirk.

  Dirk left Oki Dogs and got in his car. Kaboodle kissed his face and Dirk gave him the rest of the Oki Dog. As they drove away Dirk saw the girl pull the earring out of her ear and look at it.

  So maybe it wasn’t what he thought, this scene. But it was a wild enough animal safari that his own beastliness might go unnoticed.

  He drove over the city’s shoulders tattooed with wandering, hungry children and used car lots, drove past hanging traffic light earrings into beery breath mist, up and up above the city, trying to shed it like a skin. On the city’s shaved head was the crown of the Griffith Observatory. The viewing balcony was closed, but the star Dirk had come to see was the bronze bust of James Dean on its pedestal. He gazed into its light and would have exchanged his soul for that boy’s if he could.

  Because he couldn’t give his soul to James Dean, Dirk kept going out. Just keep going out, he told himself.

  The Vex was a club in an old ballroom. Dirk drove into the parking lot under a freeway, concrete shaking like an earthquake. Inside there was a long curved bar and columns and balconies and chandeliers but everything looked ready to crumble from age and the freeway vibrations. Dirk watched a boy and girl slamming. The boy threw the girl down on the ground. She was wearing a lot of metal that shocked against the wood of the floor. He started hitting her in the face. Finally some guys broke it up but to Dirk it seemed like it went on forever. There was blood the color of her lipstick on the girl’s face.

  Dirk felt the piece of pizza he had eaten for dinner hot in his throat and ran into the bathroom. When he looked up under the greenish-white chill of the lights, his head felt as if he had slammed it against porcelain.