The restaurant is hidden on a narrow winding side street. We come in out of the cold.
This place is like somebody’s enchanted living room. There’s flowered paper on the walls. If you look close you can see tiny mysterious creatures peering out from between the wallpaper flowers and the lavender-and-white frosted rosette-shaped glass lights strung around the ceiling blink on and off, making it look like the creatures are dancing. On every table there are burning towers of wax roses that give off a honey smell. The music isn’t like anything I ever heard before. It’s crickety and rivery. The waitress has a dreamy-face, long blonde curls and a tiny waist. She is wearing a crochet lace dress. She serves us tea that smells like a forest and makes my headache go away. Then she brings huge mismatched antique floral china plates heaped with brown rice and these vegetables that I’ve never seen before but taste like what goddesses would eat if they ate their vegetables. Miso-oniony, golden-pumpkiny, sweety-lotusy, sesame-seaweedy. The food makes me stop shaking.
“How did you find this place?” I ask.
“We try everything but this is the best,” says Meadows.
“This food helps us write better,” says Mallard. “We commune better when we aren’t digesting animals.”
“What do you write?” I ask.
Mallard looks at Meadows. Then he says, “We write about…phenomena. Supernatural phenomena.”
“Ghosts,” says Meadows.
“Like what my family’s movie is about.”
“Really?” says Mallard. “That must be why they sent you here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe they thought you’d find a ghost here.” Mallard chuckles.
“But you won’t,” Meadows says. “We haven’t found a single ghost in our building.”
The waitress brings more tea and a cart of desserts that she says are made without any sugar or milk stuff. Mallard and Meadows and I share a piece of creamy you-wouldn’t-believe-it’s-soy-curd tofu pie, a piece of scrumptious yam pie and a dense kiss piece of caroby almond cake. The carob reminds me of the walk Angel Juan and I took before he left when we stepped on the St. John’s bread pods and they cracked open and smelled like chocolate.
Why aren’t you here? I think. Why aren’t you here, Angel Juan?
We’re sitting on cushions in Mallard and Meadows’s apartment listening to Indian sitar music. If I close my eyes I can see a goddess with lots of arms and almondy eyes moving her head from side to side like it’s not part of her neck, hypnotizing a garden of snakes. Maybe she’s hiding behind the veils that hang from the ceiling.
“Feel better?” Meadows asks.
“Yes, thanks for dinner. I’ll take you guys out tomorrow night.”
“We have to go on a trip, Lily,” Mallard says. “We leave tonight.”
“It’s for our book,” says Meadows. He turns his head to me. He isn’t wearing his glasses and suddenly his eyes catch the light. I have this feeling that he can see. “We are visiting a house in Ireland where a woman’s father keeps appearing.”
“Except he’s dead,” says Mallard.
“Except he’s about this big,” says Meadows, holding his hands a few inches apart. “Sitting on her teacup.”
“If you want you can stay at our place instead of upstairs while we’re away,” says Mallard. “It might be more comfortable.”
He looks very serious and I wonder if he’s thinking about how Charlie Bat died up there. I hadn’t even thought about it last night because I’d been so tired and crazed about Angel Juan: Charlie Bat probably OD’d in the same corner where I slept. But I kind of like being in my almost-grandpa’s place.
I try not to show how I feel about my new friends going away, how I know tonight with its macro-heaven dinner and goddess music will fade, leaving me just as empty as before, loneliness attacking all my cells like a disease.
“Thanks but I’ll be okay,” I say.
“Did you sleep all right last night?” Meadows asks.
“I didn’t even dream.”
“We’ll leave keys to our place,” says Mallard. “In case you change your mind. Use the phone anytime and whatever is in the fridge.” Then he goes, “I’m sorry we won’t be with you for Christmas.”
“But we’ll be back New Year’s Eve day,” says Meadows.
When I leave he hands me the meaty white lily Mallard picked.
I carry the lily in front of me up the dark staircase like it is a lantern. And then a creepster thing happens. Light does start coming out of the flower. At first I think from the flower but then the light starts jumping all over the walls in front of me lighting the way. Someone is whistling somewhere. No, the light is whistling.
I get to the top of the stairs on the tenth floor. The light goes out and the whistling stops. I must have imagined it because I’m tired. Maybe I’m going crazy.
I think that all of me is broken. Not just my heart which cracked the night Angel Juan told me he was going away. Not just my body slammed with the sadness I see with no one there to put me back together in bed at night. Now it feels like my mind too.
In Charlie’s apartment I put the flower in a teacup and look at myself in the mirror I found on the street. I can hardly stand to see my face. Pinchy and hungry-looking. I don’t need a hummingbird around my neck for people to see I am searching for love.
I wrap the mirror in a sheet and hit it with a hammer I found in a kitchen drawer. Feeling the smooth whole thing turn into sharp jags shifting under the sheet, spilling out all bright and broken. I don’t even care about seven years’ bad luck.
But then I look into the jags and there I am—still all one scary-looking Witch Baby in every piece.
I just want to disappear. Everything to stop.
That’s when the whistling flower lights up again. I sit staring as the light jumps out of the flower, all around the apartment and lands inside the globe lamp, making it day all over the world. And instead of whistling the light starts singing a song—soft and snap-crackly like an old reel of film.
“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P, Rag Mop doodely-doo.”
Lanky lizards, as Weetzie would say. Maybe I am cracking up.
“Who are you?”
The voice doesn’t answer. Only keeps on singing—“R-A-G-G M-O-P-P.”
Why would somebody write a whole song about a mop made out of rags? And why would they spell it?
The light dances out of the globe lamp and all over the walls to the tune it is whistling. It’s jiggling doing a jig.
Then it flashes in a piece of broken mirror and I go over to look but instead of me I see this guy.
He’s black and white and flickery like an old movie; he’s wearing a rumpled black suit and a top hat like a spooky circus ringmaster. Light is filling him up like he swallowed it and it is coming through his pores, making him kind of fidget-dance around in the mirror like one of the plastic skeletons on my charm bracelet. His eyes are ringed with dark shadows like the negatives of two moons before a rain. He wrinkles his forehead, moves his hands and opens and closes his mouth.
“Who are you?” I ask.
Finally he coughs, clears his throat and says, “You’re my baby’s witch baby and you are witnessing a spectacular spectral spectacle sort of.”
I try to look deeper in the mirror but it’s like a smogmirage in L.A. when the heat ripples and blurs like water or like looking into the Pacific Ocean so dull with crud it’s like a smoggy sky. I can’t see too well but I know it’s him.
Charlie B., Chucky Bat, C. Bat, Mr C. Bbbbb-b-Bat. My almost-grandpa-Bat Charles.
He’s a lot like he was in the pictures Weetzie showed me but if he didn’t look healthy then he really doesn’t look so well now and he’s not in color anymore.
What do you say to a ghost? “I’m not Weetzie’s real kid.”
“You look real to me.”
“I don’t feel like it lately.”
“Neither do I.” He laughs soft. I think about the pop in the film before a Charlie C
haplin movie starts. “We have some things in common.”
“Yeah. I mean besides the unreal thing. I take pictures which is kind of like making movies. And you made things up in your head.” I stop. Do you say made or make to a ghost?
“Make,” says Charlie, smiling a little.
“Make. I do that.”
“Something else, Witch Baby.” I wonder if he has curly toes. But he says, “I was by myself a lot too. I played the pain game.”
So am I going to end up like him, alone and losing it because I don’t find Angel Juan? I wonder. I remember the made/make thing. I hope he can’t always read my mind.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “End up like me.” Oh well for secrets.
All of a sudden I wish he was real. I wish he was my real grandfather or even my almost-grandfather but alive with his heart beating and sending warmth through his body—warmth that would turn into hugs and those plays he wrote. I wish he could pick me up and hold me. I’d smell coffee and cigarettes on his collar. We’d eat hot cinnamon-raisin bagels together and walk all over the city. I’d play my drums for him. He’d make everything okay.
“Do Mallard and Meadows know about you?” I ask.
“They are very nice gentlemen but they ignore the ghost closest to them.”
“They’d get a kick out of you. Right in this city. In their building.”
“They travel all over but this city is full of its own surprises,” Charlie says. “Things pop out of the darkness like elves and fairies in a rotten wood or ghosts in a ruined house. I could show you if you want, the way I showed Weetzie and Cherokee.” His voice cracks on their names and his face fades a little in the mirror.
“I am here to look for somebody,” I say.
“Well you’ve found me. And I’ve found you.”
“No. I mean I’m here to look for my boyfriend Angel Juan. He went away and wrote me one letter and…”
But Charlie twinkles out of the mirror—a light again.
“Charlie?”
The light disappears inside a crack in the old leather trunk.
I try to open the trunk—tugging at the straps and wedging my gnawed fingertips against the buckles. It’s still all locked up. Charlie is gone.
What a slam-a-rama dream!
But it wasn’t. Or I’m still dreaming now. Because the first thing I hear when I wake up at almost noon is that singing again. This time it’s “Witch Baby, Baby” to the tune of “Louie, Louie”: “We gotta go now.”
Go where? “Charlie?”
The light is by the window. “Take a picture,” he says.
“Of what?”
“Of me.”
I reach for my camera and focus on the light. But through the lens I see all of Mr. Bat again like in the mirror. He is looking out the window at the gray day, one bony hand pressed against the cloudy glass. He’s so so thin, his jacket and pants just hanging on him like if you dressed one of my charm-bracelet skeletons in a suit. He turns and grins at me but only with his mouth not his eyes. His shoulders are hunched like two people at a funeral.
“Do you know how many versions of ‘Louie, Louie’ there are? It’s unbelievable. Hundreds. No one knows what the real lyrics are.”
Oh.
“You don’t have much to eat here,” he says.
“You eat?”
“No, but it’s the idea. Like when I used to write about people traveling in space and battling monsters. We should go out.”
“I’m going to go look for Angel Juan in Harlem today. He wrote me that he ate breakfast there.”
“Sylvia’s is in Harlem. That was Weetzie’s favorite. Come on,” Charlie says on the other side of my camera lens. “How often do I have the chance to watch my grandchild eat breakfast? Sweet-potato pie. Grits.”
Maybe it’s him calling me his grandchild or the grits like in Angel Juan’s card or maybe just his moons-before-the-rain eyes but how can I not go with Charlie Bat? I put down my camera and he’s a light again, ready to lead me out into the city.
We go down into the subway. It’s so different today. Charlie—he’s a dazzle at my shoulder like rhinestones splitting up the sun—whispers in my ear which way to skate.
An old woman with a shopping cart full of fish and bursting flowers made out of bright-colored rags. She’s sitting on a bench sewing like she’s in her living room or her little shop, sewing fast like she can’t stop, more and more tropical finned flower fish and exotic polka-dot flowers, like if she stopped the subway would turn real.
Three boys with guitars. One has a blonde bristle flat-top, one is small with a long braid, one is tall with brown skin and ringlets. They are all wearing white T-shirts, torn jeans, steel-toed boots and strands of beads and amulets—peace signs, ankhs, crystals, scarabs. Their music reminds me of what Angel Juan and I heard in Joshua Tree. Celestial. Turning the subway into an oasis or a church. I wonder if they have wings, matted feathers folded up under their T-shirts.
A little farther along the air shimmers with the silver steel drum slamster sound. Some Rasta men with long swinging dreadlocks play. Makes my whole body ache for my drums for the first time since Angel Juan left.
The train comes, biting up the music. They should make subway trains that sound like steel drums.
Charlie and I get on. No music here or flowers or fish. I hang on to the hand rail feeling my skate wheels roll at every stop and start like they want to take off, slam me down the aisles. What if I let go and let them? Would anybody even look up?
I use one hand to look at Charlie through my camera. He’s sitting next to me jiggling his legs. The woman on the other side of him sneers. I guess she thinks I’m taking her picture. She’s already growly ’cause I wouldn’t let her sit in Charlie’s seat. Charlie starts to whistle like trying to calm me down.
What song it it? Not “Rag Mop.”
“‘Papa’s gonna buy you a hummingbird,’” Charlie sings. I don’t think those are the right words. But the way he sings them is like a real grandfather would to a baby they love.
Harlem.
One thing good about Charlie being a ghost and not a guy is he can keep up with me on my skates and I’m jamming through the crowds of people like a hell bat. I feel like the whitest white-thing around except for Charlie, and he’s a vapor.
I remember how I always wanted to slip inside of Angel Juan’s brown skin. It seemed safer than mine. Now especially.
The sky is still gray and flat like stone, but when we go inside Sylvia’s, sun pours through the windows. Sylvia’s is warm and glinty with tinsel and it smells like somebody’s kitchen.
“I brought Weetzie here,” Charlie says.
“You talk about her a lot,” I say. A woman at the next table rolls her eyes at her friend and I remember who I’m talking to and cough.
“She ate everything on the whole menu. And she was such a skinny bones. I don’t think her mother fed her properly when she was growing up. How is she, Witch Baby? What’s your life like now?”
I whisper so nobody takes me away for talking to myself. “We built a house in the canyon out of windows we collected. We play music and make movies. We eat a lot. Vegetarian. Weetzie’s happy I think mostly. She misses you though.”
“I wish I had talked to her about more things before I died. She shouldn’t be missing me so much anymore. It’s been a long time. But I miss her too,” he says. “Maybe it’s my fault.”
The waitress comes over. I wish I was her color—maple-sugar-brown, darker than Angel Juan. And I wish I was big like that. The kind of body people want to snuggle with, not dangle on a plastic bracelet with other dancing skeletons.
“Yes?” the waitress says.
My stomach feels scratchy like it’s filled with gravel so I just order coffee.
“That’s it?” she says. “A little white child coming all the way to Harlem just for coffee?”
“That’s it?” says Charlie.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Not hungry? At S
ylvia’s? Smell.” I can almost see Charlie sniffing the air like when Tiki-Tee sticks his nose out the window of Angel Juan’s pickup truck on the way to the sea.
I remember what he said about the idea of eating. And the air does smell like browning butter and maple. “Okay, okay. I’ll have eggs, grits and sweet-potato pie,” I say. I look at the spark of Charlie-light. “Is that enough for you, Mr. Bat?” The waitress cocks her head at me and squints.
It’s the best breakfast I’ve ever had and my stomach feels better. Every once in a while I pick up my camera to see Charlie. He’s sitting across the booth dreamy in a halo of breakfast steam, his eyes half closed.
The waitress comes over to bring the bill and fill my coffee cup. She looks at me different for a few seconds, thinking. “You okay?” she asks.
I want to show her a picture of Angel Juan but they are all ripped up so I just say, “I’m looking for somebody. A cute Hispanic boy? He dresses like this.” I am wearing my hooded mole-man sweatshirt with the hood sticking out of my leather jacket and a red bandana around my head.
“That sounds familiar.” The woman squints again, this time at the shine of sunlight on tinsel which is really Charlie. “He liked my grits.”
Angel Juan’s card is in the pocket next to my heart. The part about the grits and how I eat like a kitten dipping my chin. “That’s him,” I say.
“Well, a lot of people like my grits. If it was him he hasn’t been here for a few weeks.”
She walks away. I wish I had on sunglasses. I can tell my eyes are turning darker, bruise-purple with tears I won’t let escape. It’s like all of a sudden Angel Juan is so close and more gone than ever.
But the waitress stops and turns around. “There was one thing kind of strange.” She looks at me and shrugs like, This child talking to herself in my booth won’t mind strange. “He had leaves in his hair. I told him and he laughed and said it was ’cause he was living in the trees.”
Dangerous Angels Page 19
