Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  “When I was a kid my mother brought me to Hollywood,” Brandy-Lynn said. “We lived at the Garden of Allah. She left me alone all day and I went around the pool with my cute little autograph book. It said ‘Autographs’ on the cover in gold. Clark Gable even signed it! Everyone was so gorgeous. I used to walk to Schwab’s and have a hamburger and a milkshake for dinner, and I’d swivel around and around on the barstool reading Wonder Woman comics and planning how it would be when I became a star. But what I really wanted was a Charlie Bat. I always loved that man. What happened, Weetzie?”

  Weetzie hugged Brandy-Lynn. She felt greasy from the suntan oil and her shoulders felt very small.

  “He loved you too, Brandy-Lynn,” Weetzie said. “Now that’s enough.” She took away the bottle of vodka. “Let’s go out for some health food.”

  “Did he really?” Brandy-Lynn said. A blurry lipstick smile showed through her blue-mascara-tinted tears. “I haven’t been a very good mother, have I?”

  “You are a wonderful mother.”

  “He was the man of my dreams….”

  At the end of Shangri-L.A., Weetzie played a scene in which the starlet shoots up so she can get back to the dream city. After she dies of an overdose in her apartment, she is transported back. In the final scene, she is reunited with the Charlie Chaplin bass player, and the band performs “Love Warrior” in a Casablanca nightclub filled with fans, fronds, and fireflies. Then darkness.

  “This film is dedicated to the memory of Charlie Bat,” it said on the screen.

  Love Is a Dangerous Angel

  One day, Duck came home crying. Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and even Dirk had never seen Duck cry before, except when Charlie Bat died. They all sat very still and looked at him. Then Dirk got up from the couch and tried to hug him, but Duck pulled away, ran to the blue bedroom, and shut the door.

  “Ducky. Duckling. Rubber Duck,” Weetzie called.

  Dirk got very quiet and kept knocking on the door.

  Cherokee and Witch Baby began to cry and My Secret Agent Lover Man took them in his arms.

  Duck would not come out. They said they were going to Mr. Pizza and then rent Casablanca on VHS, but he would not come out. They said they were going surfing in the morning, but he would not come out. Finally, after midnight, Dirk tried the door and found it was unlocked. He got into bed next to Duck and looked at the sweatshirt with the picture of Howdy Doody (Duck wore it backward because, otherwise, he said, it kept him awake), and at the blonde hair and the boxer shorts with ducks on them that he had bought for Duck for Valentine’s Day, but he didn’t touch Duck. It was as if they were far away from each other and he didn’t know why. Dirk watched Howdy Doody rise and fall with each sleep breath until Dirk fell asleep, too.

  In the morning, Duck wasn’t there. Dirk jumped out of bed, his pounding heart making him dizzy. He ran outside in his boxers and saw that Duck’s bug was not there. He ran back inside and saw a note on the table:

  Dear Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Cherokee, Witch Baby and my dearest, most darling Dirk,

  I found out yesterday that my friend Bam-Bam is sick. He is really sick. The world is too scary right now. Even though we’re okay, how can anyone love anyone when you could kill them just by loving them? I love you all too much. I’m going away for a while. I will never forget you. And Dirk, I will always love you more than anyone.

  Duck

  Dirk grabbed his clothes and keys and ran outside and jumped in Jerry. He drove all over the city that day and Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man called all their friends and the restaurants, bars, and stores where Duck hung out. Valentine and Ping made flyers and had them posted all over the city. But there was no trace of Duck.

  Dirk came home the next morning unshaven and with dark circles around his eyes. He had been driving around all night.

  “I went to the picnic tables on Zuma Beach where we used to sleep, and I went to Rage and Revolver and Guitar Center and El Coyote and Val Surf, and I called everyone. I went to the hospital where Bam-Bam is. No one knew anything. No one’s seen him,” Dirk said in a monotone. He collapsed on the couch.

  Weetzie made tea and rubbed his back, and My Secret Agent Lover Man told him Duck would come back soon, that Duck was just facing this for the first time and it would be okay. But Dirk hardly felt Weetzie’s hands on his back or heard My Secret Agent Lover Man’s words. His muscles felt like water, his eyes were blurry; he felt as if someone had cut him and he was losing blood. He thought of his lover and his best friend and his date—his Major #1 Date-Mate Duck Partner.

  You are my blood, he thought.

  “I’m going to search for him,” Dirk said the next day. “Jerry and I are going to find him.”

  “But how will you know where to go?” Weetzie asked. “Maybe we should hire someone to help us.” But she knew that Dirk had to go. She kissed him and packed bags and picnic baskets and thermoses and Spiderman lunch pails full of bagels, string cheese, chocolate-chip cookies, milk, apples, and carrot sticks. My Secret Agent Lover Man slipped some cash and a Dionne Warwick tape into Dirk’s pockets. They all hugged and kissed, and Cherokee and Witch Baby cried.

  “I’ll let you know,” Dirk said, before driving away in Jerry.

  You are my blood, Dirk thought over and over to himself as he drove north on Highway 5 in the startling mirage of heat. Everything was the same for miles—dry and yellow—the earth, the sky. He passed a herd of cattle waiting to be slaughtered. The smell made his stomach grip like a fist. He stopped at McDonald’s but kept thinking of the cows and ordered a Filet o’ Fish and a milkshake. The tourists stared at his black-dyed hair, his torn Levi’s, round sunglasses. Some of the sunburned, blinking faces reminded him of raw meat.

  Dirk got back into Jerry and drove some more. He felt as if the road were pulling him along and he followed it—he felt like blood in the road vein. He thought of Duck—seeing the blue eyes full of summer, the tan, freckled shoulders, the surfer legs gilded with blonde hair.

  Dirk arrived in San Francisco at night. The lights shone and he smelled the cold, bread baking, gasoline. He drove around the Haight where people all wore leather and ate burritos. In a bar where everything looked blue, he felt like a fish in an aquarium as he watched Billy Idol videos next to a man in a muscle T-shirt. On Polk Street there were fewer men than he remembered from the last time he had been there with Duck—fewer men dressed in chains, less swaggering in the strides of the men. It was quieter on Polk Street. The ice-cream store was crowded.

  Where are you, my Duck? Dirk thought, looking at the faces of the men eating ice cream as if it would ease some pain.

  Dirk drove to Chinatown and walked around the streets that were already emptying as the restaurants closed and the shop owners brought in the porcelain vases, the parasols, kites, screens, jade, and rose quartz and locked their doors. Flyers for Chinese films flapped in the wind. There were carcasses of birds strung up in the windows. Dirk zipped up his leather jacket and walked with his head down but his eyes kept sight of everything around him, of every person he passed. He moved like a piece of blown paper through the windy, hilly Chinatown streets.

  It was very late when Dirk went to Hamburger Mary’s. Everyone looked drunk under the old Coca-Cola signs in the rooms that smelled of meat, onions, and sawdust. Dirk remembered when he had come here with Duck and how they had held hands the whole time they ate their hamburgers, not even worrying, for once, about what people would think. He put money in the jukebox and pressed “Where Did Our Love Go” by the Supremes, but he left Hamburger Mary’s before it played.

  Dirk crossed the street to the bar called the Stud. The place was packed and steaming; Dirk could hardly breathe. He went and stood close to the bar while everyone pressed in around him—the leathered, studded, mustached men in boots, the little surf boys with LaCoste shirts, Levi’s, and Vans, the long-haired European-styled model types in black. Dirk stood there looking around and then his heart began to beat very quickly and th
en he felt like crying.

  Who was that beautiful blonde swaying drunkenly on the edge of the dance floor and smoking a cigarette. Who was that beautiful blonde boy?

  Love is a dangerous angel, Dirk thought. Especially nowadays.

  It was Duck.

  Out of all the bars and all the nights and all the people and all the moments, Dirk had found Duck.

  Dirk went up to him and looked into his eyes. Duck dropped his cigarette and his eyes filled with tears. Then he fell against Dirk’s shoulders while the lights fanned across the dark dance floor like a neon peacock spreading its tail.

  “How did you find me?” Duck asked as Dirk led him out of the Stud.

  “I don’t know,” Dirk said. “But you are in my blood. I can’t help it. We can’t be anywhere except together.”

  “I love you so much,” Duck said. “I’ve been so afraid. I’ve been to all the bars just watching and getting wasted. And I know people are dying everywhere. How can anyone love anyone?”

  Dirk put Duck into Jerry and he drove them to the hotel where they had stayed another time they had visited San Francisco. Dirk ran the bath and undressed Duck and helped him into the hot water. He soaped Duck’s back and made Duck’s hair into Mohawks and Kewpie-doll curlicues with shampoo before he rinsed him off. Then they got under the pressed hotel sheets and held on to each other.

  “It’s so sick,” Duck said. “I nicked myself shaving that last night at home, and I saw my own blood and I thought, How could I live in a world where this exists—where love can become death? Even if the doctor says we’re okay, how could we go on watching people die?”

  Duck buried his face against Dirk’s shoulder and the streetlamp light shone in through the window, lighting up Duck’s hair.

  Dirk stroked Duck’s head. “I don’t know. But we’ve got to be together,” he said.

  In the morning, Dirk drove Duck home down Highway 5. They sang along with Dionne Warwick. They stopped for all-you-can-eat pea soup at Anderson’s Pea Soup. Dirk made plans for when they got home—they would start working on My Secret Agent Lover Man’s new movie (called Baby Jah-Love and starring Cherokee and Raphael as a brother and sister whose parents have been separated because of racial prejudice but who are reunited by their children in the end); they would take a trip to Mexico and drink tequila and lie in the sun and play with Cherokee and Witch Baby in the water. They would start having jam sessions and write new songs, start training to run the next L.A. Marathon; they’d become more politically active, Dirk said.

  Dirk talked and talked, the way Duck usually talked, and Duck was quiet, but he laughed sometimes, sang along to Dionne, and took off his shirt and opened Jerry’s windows to get a tan.

  When they got home, it was a purple, smoggy L.A. twilight. Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl and the puppies Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee were waiting on the front porch drinking lemonade and listening to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” as the sky darkened and the barbecue summer smells filled the air.

  Weetzie ran up to them first and flung her arms around Duck and then Dirk. Then all six of them held on to one another in a football huddle and the dogs slunk around their feet.

  That night, they all ate linguini and clam sauce that My Secret Agent Lover Man made, and they drank wine and lit the candles.

  Weetzie looked around at everyone—she saw Dirk, tired, unshaven, his hair a mess; he hardly ever looked like this. But his eyes shone wet with love. Duck looked older, there were lines in his face she hadn’t remembered seeing before, but he leaned against Dirk like a little boy. Weetzie looked at My Secret Agent Lover Man finishing his linguini, sucking it up with his pouty lips. Cherokee was pulling on his sleeve and he leaned over and kissed her and then put her onto his lap to help him finish the last bite of pasta. Witch Baby sat alone, mysterious and beautiful.

  Weetzie’s heart felt so full with love, so full, as if it could hardly fit in her chest. She knew they were all afraid. But love and disease are both like electricity, Weetzie thought. They are always there—you can’t see or smell or hear, touch, or taste them, but you know they are there like a current in the air. We can choose, Weetzie thought, we can choose to plug into the love current instead. And she looked around the table at Dirk and Duck and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Cherokee and Witch Baby—all of them lit up and golden like a wreath of lights.

  I don’t know about happily ever after…but I know about happily, Weetzie Bat thought.

  BOOK TWO

  Witch Baby

  Upon Time

  Once upon a time. What is that supposed to mean?

  In the room full of musical instruments, watercolor paints, candles, sparkles, beads, books, basketballs, roses, incense, surfboards, china pixie heads, lanky toy lizards and a rubber chicken, Witch Baby was curling her toes, tapping her drumsticks and pulling on the snarl balls in her hair. Above her hung the clock, luminous, like a moon.

  Witch Baby had taken photographs of everyone in her almost-family—Weetzie Bat and My Secret Agent Lover Man, Cherokee Bat, Dirk McDonald and Duck Drake, Valentine, Ping Chong and Raphael Chong Jah-Love, Brandy-Lynn Bat and Coyote Dream Song. Then she had scrambled up the fireplace and pasted the pictures on the numbers of the clock. Because she had taken all the pictures herself, there was no witch child with dark tangled hair and tilted purple eyes.

  What time are we upon and where do I belong? Witch Baby wondered as she went into the garden.

  The peach trees, rosebushes and purple-flowering jacaranda were sparkling with strings of white lights. Witch Baby watched from behind the garden shed as her almost-family danced on the lawn, celebrating the completion of Dangerous Angels, a movie they had made about their lives. In Angels, Weetzie Bat met her best friend Dirk and wished on a genie lamp 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.” The movie was about what happened when the wishes came true.

  Witch Baby’s almost-mother-and-father, Weetzie Bat and My Secret Agent Lover Man, were doing a cha-cha on the lawn. In a short pink evening gown, pink Harlequin sunglasses and a white feathered headdress, Weetzie looked like a strawberry sundae melting into My Secret Agent Lover Man’s arms. Dirk McDonald was dancing with Duck Drake and pretending to balance his champagne glass on Duck’s perfect blonde flat-top. Weetzie’s mother, Brandy-Lynn Bat, was dancing with My Secret Agent Lover Man’s best friend, Coyote. Valentine Jah-Love and his wife, Ping Chong, swayed together, while their Hershey’s-powdered-chocolate-mix-colored son, Raphael Chong Jah-Love, danced with Weetzie’s real daughter, Cherokee Bat. Even Slinkster Dog and Go-Go Girl were dancing, raised up circus style on their hind legs, wriggling their rears and surrounded by their puppies, Pee Wee, Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee and Tee Pee, who were not really puppies anymore but had never gotten any bigger than when they were six months old.

  Under the twinkling trees was a table covered with Guatemalan fabric, roses in juice jars, wax rose candles from Tijuana and plates of food—Weetzie’s Vegetable Love-Rice, My Secret Agent Lover Man’s guacamole, Dirk’s homemade pizza, Duck’s fig and berry salad and Surfer Surprise Protein Punch, Brandy-Lynn’s pink macaroni, Coyote’s cornmeal cakes, Ping’s mushu plum crepes and Valentine’s Jamaican plantain pie.

  Witch Baby’s stomach growled but she didn’t leave her hiding place. Instead, she listened to the reggae, surf, soul and salsa, tugged at the snarl balls in her hair and snapped pictures of all the couples. She wanted to dance but there was no one to dance with. There was only Rubber Chicken lying around somewhere inside the cottage. He always seemed to end up being her only partner.

  After a while, Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man sat down near the shed. Witch Baby watched them. Sometimes she thought she looked a little like My Secret Agent Lover Man; but she knew he and Weetzie had found her on their doorstep one day. Witch Baby didn’t look like Weetzie Bat at all.


  “What’s wrong, my slinkster-love-man?” Witch Baby heard Weetzie ask as she handed My Secret Agent Lover Man a paper plate sagging with food. “Aren’t you happy that we finished Angels?”

  He lit a cigarette and stared past the party into the darkness. Shadows of roses moved across his angular face.

  “The movie wasn’t enough,” he said. “We have more money now than we know what to do with. Sometimes this city feels like an expensive tomb. I want to do something that matters.”

  “But you speak with your movies,” Weetzie said. “You are an important influence on people. You open eyes.”

  “It hasn’t been enough. I need to think of something strong. When I was a kid I had a lamp shaped like a globe. I had newspaper articles all over my walls, too, like Witch Baby has—disasters and things. I always wished I could make the world as peaceful and bright as my lamp.”

  “Give yourself time,” said Weetzie, and she took off his slouchy fedora, pushed back his dark hair and kissed his temples.

  Witch Baby wished that she could go and sit on Weetzie’s lap and whisper an idea for a movie into My Secret Agent Lover Man’s ear. An idea to make him breathe deeply and sleep peacefully so the dark circles would fade from beneath his eyes. She wanted Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man to stroke her hair and take her picture as if they were her real parents. But she did not go to them.

  She turned to see Weetzie’s mother, Brandy-Lynn, waltzing alone.

  Weetzie had told Witch Baby that Brandy-Lynn had once been a beautiful starlet, and in the soft shadows of night roses, Witch Baby could see it now. Starlet. Starlit, like Weetzie and Cherokee, Witch Baby thought. Brandy-Lynn collapsed in a lawn chair to drink her martini and finger the silver heart locket she always wore around her neck. Inside the locket was a photograph of Weetzie’s father, Charlie Bat, who had died years before. The white lights shone on the heart, the martini and the tears that slid down Brandy-Lynn’s cheeks. Witch Baby wanted to pat the tears with her fingertip and taste the salt. Even after all this time, Brandy-Lynn cried often about Charlie Bat, but Witch Baby never cried about anything. Sometimes tears gathered, thick and seething salt in her chest, but she kept them there.