Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  Dirk looked at Weetzie. Weetzie looked at Dirk.

  “I have a present for you, Miss Weetzie Bat,” Grandma Fifi said.

  She went to the closet and brought out the most beautiful thing. It was a golden thing, and she put it into Weetzie’s hands. Then she kissed Weetzie’s cheek.

  As Weetzie and Dirk left Fifi’s cottage, Weetzie looked back and saw Fifi standing on the porch waving to them. She looked paler and smaller and more beautiful than Weetzie had ever seen her.

  When she got home, Weetzie set the thing on her table and looked at it. Despite the layers of dust she could see the exotic curve of its belly and the underlying gleam.

  “I’ll just polish you up,” Weetzie said.

  So Weetzie took out a rag and began to polish the thing.

  But before she knew it, steam or smoke started seeping out from under the lid. A wisp of white vapor that smelled like musty cupboards and incense poured out and began to take shape there in the room.

  Slinkster Dog whined and Weetzie gasped as they saw a form emerging. Yes, it was more and more solid. Weetzie could see him—it was a man, a little man in a turban, with a jewel in his nose, harem pants, and curly-toed slippers.

  “Lanky lizards!” Weetzie exclaimed.

  “Greetings,” said the man in an odd voice, a rich, dark purr.

  “Oh, shit!” Weetzie said.

  “I beg your pardon? Is that your wish?”

  “No! Sorry, you just freaked me out.”

  “I am the genie of the lamp, and I am here to grant you three wishes,” the man said.

  Weetzie began to laugh, maybe a little hysterically.

  “Really, I don’t see what is so amusing,” the genie sniffed.

  “Never mind. Okay. I wish for world peace,” Weetzie said.

  “I’m sorry,” the genie said. “I can’t grant that wish. It’s out of my league. Besides, one of your world leaders would screw it up immediately.”

  “Okay,” Weetzie said. “Then I wish for an infinite number of wishes!” As a kid she had vowed to wish for wishes if she ever encountered a genie or a fairy or one of those things. Those people in fairy tales never thought of that.

  “People in fairy tales wish for that all the time,” the genie said. “They aren’t stupid. It just isn’t in the records because I can’t grant that type of wish.”

  “Well,” Weetzie said, a little perturbed, “if this is my trip I think at least you could say I could have one of these wishes come true!”

  “You get three wishes,” the genie said.

  “I wish for a Duck for Dirk, and My Secret Agent Lover Man for me, and a beautiful little house for us to live in happily ever after.”

  “Your wishes are granted. Mostly,” said the genie. “And now I must be off.”

  “Don’t you want to go back into your lamp?” Weetzie asked.

  “Certainly not!” the genie said. “I’ve done my duty. I owed Fifi one more set of wishes, and she used them up on you. I’m not going back into that dark, smelly, cramped lamp. Farewell.”

  The genie was gone in a puff of smelly smoke.

  “What a trip!” Weetzie said. “I’d better call Dirk. I wonder if someone put something in my drink last night.”

  Before Weetzie could call Dirk, the phone rang.

  “I have good news and bad news,” Dirk said. “Which first?”

  “Bad,” Weetzie said.

  “My Grandma Fifi died,” Dirk said.

  “Oh, Dirk.” Weetzie felt her heart stealing all the blood in her body.

  “We knew she wasn’t going to live very long,” Dirk said.

  “I know, but I never really thought she was going to die! That’s a whole different thing,” Weetzie said. The only death she had known was a dog named Hildegard that had belonged to Charlie Bat. The dog was the same tobacco color as Charlie and followed him everywhere, walking with the same loping stride. When Hildegard died, Weetzie saw Charlie cry for the first time.

  “But, Weetz, there is good news. I feel a little guilty about good news but I know Fifi would be really happy.”

  “What?”

  “She left us her house!” Dirk said.

  “Oh, my God!” Weetzie said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Fifi’s house was a Hollywood cottage with one of those fairy-tale roofs that look like someone has spilled silly sand. There were roses and lemon trees in the garden and two bedrooms inside the house—one painted rose and the other aqua. The house was filled with plaster Jesus statues, glass butterfly ashtrays, paintings of clowns, and many kinds of coasters. Weetzie and Dirk had always loved the house.

  Weetzie felt terrible about her wish, but Dirk said, “You didn’t wish for that house or to get it that way. And she was sick anyway. And she wanted us to have the house. She even wanted you to have her dresses. She told me that a million times.”

  “I don’t know,” Weetzie said, chewing her fingernails with their Egyptian decals.

  “Now, look at these dresses,” Dirk said, opening the closet.

  Weetzie had never seen such great dresses—a black dress with huge silk roses sewn on it, a cream chiffon dress embroidered with gold sequins, a gold lamé and lace coat, a white fox fur, a tight red taffeta dress.

  “Lanky lizards.” Weetzie sighed. “They are so beautiful.”

  “She’s lucky she had you, because I know she wouldn’t want them to go to a stranger. And I know she secretly wished that I was a girl, but you serve the same purpose.”

  “Oh, Grandma Fifi, thank you,” Weetzie said.

  Duck

  “I met the best one!” Dirk said. “The perfect Duck. But what is so weird is that this Duck calls himself Duck. Now that is hell of weird!”

  “Lanky lizards!” Weetzie said.

  “What now?”

  Weetzie could not believe how wild it was.

  Duck was a small, blonde surfer. He had freckles on his nose and wore his hair in a flat-top. Duck had a light-blue VW bug and he drove it to the beach every day. Sometimes he slept on picnic tables at the beach so he could be up at dawn for the most radical waves.

  Dirk met Duck at Rage. Duck was standing alone at the bar when Dirk came up and offered to buy him a beer. Duck looked up at Dirk’s chiseled features, blue eyes, and grand Mohawk. Dirk looked down at Duck’s freckled nose and blonde flat-top. The flat-top was so perfect you could serve drinks on it. It was love at first sight. They danced the way some boys dance together—a little awkward and shy at first but with a sturdy ease, a rhythm between them.

  Dirk’s heart was pounding. He didn’t even feel like finishing his drink.

  He imagined the feel of Duck’s skin—still warm and salty from the afternoon sun. Duck grinned and looked down at his feet in their white Vans. His teeth and his Vans glowed in the dark. His long eyelashes looked so soft on his tan cheek, Dirk thought.

  “I haven’t asked anyone home in a long time,” Dirk said. “And we don’t have to do anything. I don’t know….”

  “I’d love to,” Duck said solemnly, looking straight at Dirk.

  Weetzie was happy that they had their house. She was happy that Dirk had a Duck. Duck moved in with Dirk—into the blue bedroom. Weetzie had the pink one. They were a threesome. A foursome if you counted Slinkster Dog. They went surfing together, dancing together. They all sat together on Jerry’s front seat. They had barbecues and ate hamburgers and watermelon. They were a threesome all day (a foursome with Slinkster Dog included).

  At night, Dirk and Duck kissed Weetzie on the cheek and went to bed. Weetzie got into her bed with Slinkster Dog. Sometimes she heard muffled giggles and love noise through the walls. Sometimes she heard music drowning out any sounds.

  Weetzie couldn’t help wondering why the third wish hadn’t come true.

  Jah-Love

  Weetzie was working as a waitress at Duke’s. One day a tall Rastafarian man, a tiny Chinese woman with black hair tipped in orange and red like a bouquet of bird of paradise, and a baby wi
th skin the dusty brown of powdered Hershey’s hot-chocolate mix came in for breakfast. The family came in often, and pretty soon Weetzie became friends with them. The man’s name was Valentine Jah-Love and the woman’s name was Ping Chong. They had met in Jamaica while Ping was looking for new ideas for her spring fashion line. She had gone to Valentine’s house in the rain forest to see the fabrics he silkscreened, when suddenly the sky cracked and rain poured down.

  “Jah!” cried Valentine, lifting his stormy face up in the greenish electric light. “You’ll have to stay here. It will rain for seven days and seven nights.”

  It rained and rained. The house smelled moist and muddy. Valentine carved huge Rasta-man heads, animals, and pregnant women out of wood. The second night, Ping got out of the bed she had been sleeping in and got into the cot beside Valentine. They slept together every night after that until the rain stopped on the seventh night. In the morning, Ping took an armload of fabrics silkscreened with snakes and birds, suns and shells, and went out into the steamy hot hibiscus air of Jamaica. After she had flown back to L.A., Ping found that she was pregnant. She wrote to Valentine and said, “I am having your child. If you ever want to see us you can find us here.”

  Valentine came to L.A. with an old leather bag full of fabrics and carvings. He arrived at the door of Ping’s Hollywood bungalow looking like an ebony lion. He said he had come to live with her.

  The child they had was a boy named Raphael Chong Jah-Love. They all lived together and wore red and ate plantain and black beans, or wonton soup and fortune cookies, and made silkscreened clothing they sold on the boardwalk at Venice beach. Weetzie loved Valentine and Ping and Raphael. They took her to the Kingston 12 to hear reggae music and drink Red Stripe Jamaican beer and they gave her sarong mini skirts and turbans they made and told her about Jamaica.

  “In Jamaica there is night life like nowhere else—your body feels radiant, like orange lights, like Bob Marley’s voice, when you dance in the clubs there. In Jamaica we climb the falls holding hands and the water rushes down bluer than your eyes. In Jamaica. In Jamaica it is hot and wet, and the people are hot and wet, and the shells look like flowers, and the flowers look like shells, and when you drive down some roads men come out of the bushes wearing parrots on their shoulders and flowering bird cages on top of their heads.”

  Weetzie said, “Maybe in Jamaica I could find My Secret Agent Lover Man. I can’t seem to find him here.” At night she dreamed of purple flowers and babies growing on bushes.

  One day she was driving Valentine and Ping and Raphael to the L.A. airport to fly to Jamaica for a few weeks. Driving south on La Cienega, past the chic restaurants and galleries, down by the industrial oil-field train-track area, was a wall with graffiti that said, “Jah Love.”

  “Jah Love,” Valentine said. “See that. Jah Love. That is a sign.”

  “Jah Love,” Weetzie said wistfully.

  “You need a man,” Ping said. “But just you wait. I know you’ll find your Jah-Love man.”

  “Coffee, black,” he said.

  It was a Sunday morning at Duke’s.

  “Anything else?” Weetzie asked.

  “I’d like to put you in my film. My Secret Agent Lover Man.” He put out his hand to shake.

  “What?” Weetzie’s eyes widened. She had been mistaken for a boy before and was a little sensitive about it. All she needed now was some gay man trying to pick up on her!

  “My Secret Agent Lover Man’s my name.”

  Weetzie was relieved that he hadn’t been calling her his Secret Agent Lover Man, and that My Secret Agent Lover Man was…

  “Your name!” she shrieked.

  “Yeah. I know it’s a little weird.”

  “Dirk put you up to this.”

  “Who’s Dirk?”

  “Lanky lizards!” Weetzie said, sitting down at the booth, knees buckling. “No way! I mean this is the wildest!”

  “I know my name’s weird but that’s no reason not to give me a chance,” he said.

  A man at the next table was grumbling.

  “I’ve got to go,” Weetzie said.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man came every day to see Weetzie. He was her height and wore a slouchy hat and a trench coat. He was unshaven and had the greenest eyes Weetzie had ever seen.

  “I really want you to be in my film,” My Secret Agent Lover Man said. “It’s about a girl who comes to L.A. to be a filmmaker, and she’s always taking home movies of everything, and by accident she gets some footage of a guy, and she goes around searching for him because he’s the man of her dreams. She has to search in all these places like the Hollywood Wax Museum and Graumann’s Chinese and Farmer’s Market and Al’s Bar. It’s all black and white and dim and eerie and beautiful. And then at the end you realize a guy who is obsessed with the girl has been filming her all along.”

  My Secret Agent Lover Man took out his home-movie camera and started to shoot Weetzie in her waitress apron while she stood waiting for his order. She put her hand over the lens. She had always wanted to be a star, and, yes, he looked like her Secret Agent Lover Man, but she was afraid to believe this was real. She couldn’t handle another disappointing Duck.

  “Sorry, mister,” Weetzie said.

  “Then at least let me take you out for a drink after work.”

  “Some drink after work!” Weetzie said.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man had driven her to the beach on the back of his motorcycle and pulled a bottle of pink champagne out of his trench coat. They were sitting on the sand by the sea. My Secret Agent Lover Man uncorked the champagne and handed the bottle to Weetzie. He got out his camera and filmed her taking a swig.

  “I said no film!” Weetzie said, scowling into the camera.

  “That’s beautiful!” he said.

  Weetzie splashed champagne at the camera lens, but My Secret Agent Lover Man kept filming.

  Suddenly, the tide came in. It came up over them, spilling over Weetzie’s skinny legs, spilling over My Secret Agent Lover Man’s legs in the slouchy trousers.

  “Lanky lizards!” Weetzie shrieked.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man laughed and laughed and kept filming her.

  “Stop it!” Weetzie shouted, trying to grab the camera away.

  My Secret Agent Lover Man took her wrists in his hands. Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man sat there covered with salt water staring at each other. Weetzie had never noticed how pretty My Secret Agent Lover Man’s lips were.

  He kissed her.

  A kiss about apple pie à la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.

  And there were a lot more of those kisses after that. On the motorcycle, in the restrooms of nightclubs, in the bathtub, in the pink bedroom. In between kisses My Secret Agent Lover Man made films of Weetzie putting her hands and feet into the movie-star prints at Graumann’s, serving French toast at Duke’s, dressing up in Fifi’s gowns, roller-skating down the Venice boardwalk with Slinkster Dog pulling her along, Weetzie having a pow-wow and taking bubblebaths. Sometimes he filmed her surfing with Dirk and Duck, or doing a reggae dance with Ping while Valentine and Raphael played drums.

  “My Secret Agent Lover Man is very cute and cool,” Dirk told Weetzie.

  “Your Secret Agent Lover Man?”

  “No, I mean your Secret Agent Lover Man. Where did he get such a weird name?”

  Weetzie just smiled beneath her feathered headdress.

  And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.

  Weetzie Wants a Baby

  “What does ‘happily ever after’ mean an
yway, Dirk?” Weetzie said. She was thinking about buildings. The Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s with the roller-skating waitresses had been torn down. In its place was a record-video store, a pizza place, a cookie place, a Wendy’s, and a Penguin’s Yogurt. Across the street, the old Poseur, where Weetzie and Dirk had bought kilts, was a beauty salon. They had written their names on the columns of the porch but all the graffiti had been painted over. Even Elvis Land was gone. Elvis Land had been in the front yard of an old house on Melrose. There had been a beat-up pink Cadillac, a picture of Elvis, and a giant love letter to Elvis on the lawn.

  Then there were the really old places. Like the Tiki restaurant in the Valley, which had gone out of business years ago and had become overgrown with reeds so that the Tiki totems peered out of the watery-sounding darkness. Now it was gone—turned into one of the restaurants that lined Ventura Boulevard with valets in red jackets sitting out in the heat all day waiting for BMW’s. And Kiddie Land, the amusement park where Weetzie’s dad, Charlie, had taken her (Weetzie’s pony had just dawdled, and sometimes turned around and gone back to the start, because Weetzie wouldn’t use the whip, and once Weetzie was traumatized by a plastic cow that swung onto the track); Kiddie Land was now the big, brown Beverly Center that Weetzie would have painted almost any other color—at least, if they had to go ahead and put it up in place of Kiddie Land.

  “What does happily ever after mean anyway?” Weetzie said.

  She was still living in Fifi’s cottage with Dirk and Duck and My Secret Agent Lover Man. They had finished their third film, called Coyote, with Weetzie as a rancher’s daughter who falls in love with a young Indian named Coyote and ends up helping him defend his land against her father and the rest of the town. They had filmed Coyote on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Weetzie grew her hair out, and she wore Levi’s and snaky cowboy boots and turquoise. Dirk and Duck played her angry brothers; Valentine did the music, and Ping was wardrobe. My Secret Agent Lover Man was the director. His friend Coyote played Coyote.