Weetzie goes over to her 1920’s dressing table with the round mirror and the lotus-blossom lights. The little genie lamp is sitting there—still gold but empty of genies and wishes now. Weetzie takes an old photo album out of a dressing table drawer. It’s so old that almost all the pile of the pink velvet has worn down around the gold curlicues and cupids. It’s so old that it was probably red velvet once, a long time ago. Weetzie sits on her seashell-shaped love seat that is the same velvet pink as the photo album and pats it for me to sit next to her. I climb up the side and perch, looking over her shoulder instead. Inside the photo album is a picture of a tall skinny man with sunken eyes and bones like the guys in those old black-and-white silent movies. Kind of like Valentino but a lot thinner and not so healthy-looking. The man has his arm around a little blonde woman with a big lipsticky smile and slidey gold mules on her feet. They seem really in love standing in front of this cherry yellow T-bird clinking champagne glasses: Weetzie’s mom and dad when they were young. Before Brandy-Lynn and Charlie and the champagne glasses and the T-bird got smashed. Before Brandy-Lynn kicked Charlie out and he went to New York and died there.
Weetzie shows me a picture of her and her real daughter, my almost-sister Cherokee, with Charlie from the time when they went to visit him just before he died. It was taken in one of those photo booths. Cherokee was just a baby then with little tufts of white hair like a Kewpie doll or something. Weetzie looks exactly the same as she does now—elf mom—maybe a little skinnier and her hair was a little shorter, kind of spiky. But Charlie doesn’t look much like a silent-movie star anymore. He looks more like a ghost. There’s a spooky light around his head and his eyeballs are rolled up. Weetzie has her arm around him really tight and her fingers pressed into his shoulder.
She’s never held on to me like that.
Not that I’d let her.
“I think people leave here before we think they’re gone,” Weetzie whispers as she looks at the picture. “And when you’re with them you know it. Part of you knows it—that they’ve left. But you don’t let yourself really accept it. And then later you think about it and you know you knew.”
I can see her going back to that time, trying to find her dad.
“We had to walk up eight flights of stairs to his apartment in the dark and every time he whistled ‘Rag Mop’ to us—you know, ‘R-A-G-G M-O-P-P Rag Mop doodely-doo’ to make us laugh. But that time he was quiet. When we got to the apartment he went and stood by the window and shut his eyes, listening to the echoes of kids playing outside way down there in the distance, and he said, ‘It sounds like when I was a little boy in Brooklyn and we ran around the streets in the twilight, hoping it would never get all the way dark so we’d have to go in. Kids playing sound the same wherever you are. They sound so happy. They don’t know what’s in store for them.’
“I said it could still be happy, like kids playing in the street before they have to go in for dinner. My friends and I, we live like that. Come live with us. But he was far away already.” Weetzie closes her eyes. It’s real quiet for a minute and I can hear the canyon tossing her hair and her wind-chime earrings clinking like Charlie and Brandy-Lynn’s champagne glasses in the photograph.
I wonder what it would be like to talk to Charlie Bat. I bet he would get it. He died from drugs all alone. He was an artist but he didn’t make pretty things. Weetzie says he wrote movies and plays about monsters, but they were really about the monster feelings inside.
“I miss him so much. But I can’t even dream about him,” Weetzie says.
What she says reminds me of Angel Juan. Sometimes it almost feels like Angel Juan is dead too.
It’s like Weetzie’s reading my mind for a second. “You really need to look for him, don’t you?”
I am busy with my cuticle gnaw. “Can I go see Charlie Bat?” I mumble.
Weetzie stares at me like she’s seen a ghost. “Lanky lizards,” she whispers.
“I mean Charlie Bat’s—his place,” I say.
Weetzie nods, looking at her photo album.
In a way I’m glad she’s into letting me go. But another part of me wishes she didn’t want me to. It seems like she’s thinking more about Charlie Bat than about me.
Dear Angel Juan,
Why haven’t you written again? It’s been three weeks one day and three hours since the last time I saw you in the fog.
I try to dream about you but I can’t. The harder I try to find you, the farther away you get. Instead I dream about my real mother Vixanne Wigg.
There’s a knock on the shed door and I think—Angel Juan—and open it. But it’s a tall lanky lanka in a blonde wig. She has purple crazy eyes. And they are the same as mine. She’s my mother. I try to close the door but she shoves herself inside. Her wig falls off. Long black hair pours down wrapping me up like vine arms. She forces apples down my throat and needles into my fingers.
I wake up choked, prickly. It’s one thing to read fairy tales when you are a regular kid but what about when your mother is a real witch? Or maybe it’s the same for all kids these days. People really do inject apples with needles full of poison and hand them out at doorways. The good thing about fairy tales, though, is that there is always a fairy godmother and/or a prince to take the curse away.
Sometimes when this same dream used to wake me up in the middle of the night, you said, “The curse is broken,” and put me back to sleep with lullaby kisses.
Maybe Vixanne can help me find you.
I get up, put on my cowboy-boot roller skates and go out into a fog as green as the fog was green on the night before Angel Juan left.
I haven’t been to the big pink house in the hills for years but somehow I know exactly how to get back there. The way our dog Tiki-Tee keeps going back to where he was born, the place my family uses as a studio now. He slinks out and trots through the canyon down the street named for the newest moon all the way to the cottage. Whenever he’s missing, we know we’ll find him there curled up in between the stone gnomes under the rosebushes.
Just like Tiki-Tee finds the cottage, I find the place where I was born. It blooms out of the fog. It’s all falling apart now. The driveway is empty and the windows are caked with dust. Maybe Vixanne moved away.
I take off my skates, creep up to the door and knock. No one answers. The door swings open by itself and I slip in, skidding on my socks.
There’s the hallway lined with mirrors where I freaked myself once. Now I know they’re me but I want to smash my reflections. So in the mirror I’ll look like I feel. Pieces. But if you break a mirror there are just more whole little yous in every piece.
I go into the dusty sunken room. Empty. Cold air burns in the empty fireplace. There are squished tubes of paint and canvases everywhere. And lots of big portraits of Vixanne Wigg in colors like tropical flowers—almost glow-in-the-dark.
Vixanne powdery-pink and sparkle-platinum as Jayne Mansfield chomp-gnawing off a cluster chunk of crystally-white dry-ice rock candy. Vixanne lounging in a fluorescent green jungle tied up in her own jungle-green writhe-vine hair. Dressed in milky apple blossoms and holding a grimacy shrively monkey-face apple. Wreath of giant blue and orange butterflies around her head. With a rainbow-jewel-scaled mermaid tail. A ripple-haunched horse from the waist down. Vixanne with black roses tattooed on her naked chest. All of the Vixannes staring at me with purple eyes.
I go up to the one with the tattoo. Pain-ink flowers. Meat-eating roses in a demony garden. The paint is rich and smooth like batter. I wish Vixanne would paint me:
Angel Juan’s name tattooed on my heart in a wreath of black roses.
Something rustles. Heavy crunched silk. I turn around.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” says a voice. She sounds tired.
Vixanne’s long dark hair that she used to wear under the Jayne Mansfield wig is hacked short and kind of uneven like she did it herself. It reminds me of me when Cherokee cut off my hair with toenail scissors when we were babies. Vixanne wears a b
lack silk dress with watery patterns in it. She is so different from the glam lanka I remember.
“Remember those photographs you gave me?” she says.
When I found her the first time, I gave her some pictures I took. An old woman shaking her fist and screaming at the sun. A man who was too young to be dying. Me looking like a little lost loon waif thing. I wanted my mother to have something when I left. I wanted her to see.
“At first I put them away and didn’t look at them but I kept thinking about you. You were so little skating around with that camera seeing all the pain.”
Her eyes roll in her head. I want to leave but instead I sit down and start playing with the paints on the table. It feels good to squeeze the tubes of paint. Smell the stinkster turpentine. Vixanne sits down next to me. I want to paint a picture of Angel Juan. As big as life. A boy that will never leave.
“I like to be alone,” Vixanne says. “I’ve started painting. I’m not anyone’s slave now.”
I listen to the sound of her voice and feel all the twilight purple eyes watching me while my hand moves by itself in the shadowy room.
Maybe hours go by.
“I look things right in the eye now. That’s the best way. Right in the eye and without anything to make it easier,” says Vixanne.
I look down and drop my paintbrush. It skids across the floor. Instead of Angel Juan I’ve made a picture of a man with big teeth eating a cake that drips icing all over his face and hands. It gives me a creepy-crawly-heebee-jeebee feeling.
I pretend the goose bumps studding my arms are ’cause I’m cold.
I take black paint and wipe out the man with the cake like he was never there. “I don’t want to look at anything or anybody except for Angel Juan.”
Vixanne shakes her head. Then she says, “You have to leave now, Witch Baby. You can come back after your journey.”
She goes to the door with me and I put on my skates. I wonder how I will ever make it home and then all the way to New York. The parts of my body feel held together by strings you could cut with a scissors.
“Remember to look in the eye. That’s what you taught me,” Vixanne says. “Look at your own darkness.”
I leave my mother all complete in a gnarly snarly forest of herself, and the puppet parts of my body skate away into the fog.
I am going to leave.
I think that Weetzie misses her dead dad more than she will miss me.
Vixanne is busy painting pictures of her own face.
The rest of my family is working on their movie. It’s about ghosts but if anybody knows about being haunted it’s me.
In the shed by the light of the globe lamp I pack up my bat-shaped backpack. Angel Juan has taken my mind and my heart away and his ghost is trapped in the empty places that are left. Not so I feel like he’s with me. Just like always remembering that he’s not. So it’s not like I can just sit around here waiting. I have to go find him.
I am going to take a cab to the airport because everybody’s too busy to drive me. My dad is in the desert by himself meditating about the new movie. Weetzie has a yoga class that she hates to miss.
Just before I leave I go into the kitchen. Blue and yellow handpainted sunflower tiles. Stained-glass sunflower skylight. Reminds me of the bruises I gave myself when Angel Juan left.
Weetzie puts out a glass of honey lemonade and a stack of pumpkin pancakes for me but I can’t eat anything.
“New York makes my nerves feel like this,” she says, sliding something down the butcher-block table to me. “Maybe if you wear it yours won’t.”
It’s a skeleton charm bracelet. I pick it up and the skeletons click their plastic bones. Weetzie usually gives people stuff with cherubs, flowers and stars. I guess witch babies get bone things.
“I’m sorry I can’t take you to the airport,” she says. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
I roll my eyes and don’t talk. I’m afraid I’ll start to cry like some watery-knee weaselette.
“Well, remember, Mr. Mallard and Mr. Meadows will give you the key to the apartment and they’ll help you if you need anything.”
The cab is honking outside. Weetzie tries to kiss me but I am out the door already. Maybe she should have been a little more clutch like in that picture of her and her dad Charlie Bat where she looks like she’ll never let go.
Dear Angel Juan,
I’m on a plane. I imagine you out there on a cloud, playing your bass and grinning at me, wearing chunky black shoes and Levi’s with rips at the knees. I imagine the rest of the band and it is one heavenly combo—Jimi and Jim and John and Bob and Elvis—all the dudes you are into.
All those guys are dead.
So I think about you down on the ground with me.
We are at the movies. The air-conditioned air on our bare arms and the crackle and smell of the popcorn and the crackle of the film in between the previews that is the same sound as the popcorn almost. And we’re holding hands and we know we’ll hold hands on the way to the truck and even while we’re driving home in between clutch shifting and then we’ll get into bed together and hold each other in our sleep and wake up together in the morning and slurp fruit shakes and munch jammy peanut-butter-banana sandwiches.
It’s summer. We’re on the wooden deck. We’ve been in the sun all day and just had a hot tub. You’re playing bass and I’m playing my drums. Our music weaves together like our bodies in the night. The lanterns are lit and the air smells like honeysuckle, barbecue smoke and incense. The dark canyon is rustling with heat around us.
We’re in Joshua Tree. We sit on a huge flat rock still warm from the day and you comb the tangles out of my hair and it doesn’t even hurt. We eat honey-nut Guru Chews and watch the full moon rise. The moon makes my insides stir. Then we hear something. You stop combing my tangles. Music. Pouring from somewhere in the empty desert. It’s like fountains in the sand or sky islands. “Celestial music,” you say. No one else hears it.
I tell myself I have to stop thinking words like celestial and heavenly. And angel. But that last one is hard.
I load the cab with the globe lamp, my camera, my roller skates and my bat-shaped backpack. The angel medallion is around my neck. As the cab drives along the highway from the airport into Manhattan I shake my wrist so that the skeletons on my charm bracelet do their bone jig. Looking up at all the big buildings and seeing the crowd scurrying along, I know what Weetzie meant about her nerves and the skeletons. New York is not a Weetzie-city. Weetzie is a kid of the city where movies are made and it’s always sunny, where Marilyn’s ghost rises up out of her spiky birdy footprints to dance on beams of light with red lacquer dragons in front of the Chinese Theater, and James Dean’s head star-watches with you at the observatory like a fallen star somebody found and put on a pedestal; a city where you can only tell the seasons by the peonies or pumpkins or poinsettias at the florists’.
But me, maybe I fit in a place like this. Maybe the cold inside of me will seem less cold in this winter. Maybe the tall buildings will make the brick walls I build for myself seem smaller. Maybe the noises in my head will quiet down in the middle of all the other noises. Or maybe my cold and walls and noise will get worse.
It looks frosty out and the store windows are filled with red velvet bows, white fur, plastic reindeer with long eyelashes and flaming Christmas trees and for the first time I realize that I won’t be with my almost-family for the holidays. I was so busy thinking about finding Angel Juan that I didn’t even realize that before.
“Where are you from?” the driver asks after a while. He has a beautiful island voice and it makes me feel warmer just hearing it. For a second I think about Angel Juan and me sharing a ginger beer on the rocks behind a fall of see-through water and ruby-red flowers that he keeps catching and sticking in my tangles.
Another cab swerves into our lane and my driver slams the brakes. I’m jolted out of Jamaica.
“Los Angeles.”
“Oh, Angel City. You won’t be findi
ng too many of those here. Especially in the meat district.”
I look out the window at the meat-packing plants lining the cobblestone streets by the river. Men are unloading marbly sides of beef from a truck. There isn’t much sign of Christmas out here.
“Of what?” I ask.
“Angels,” he says.
“I just need to find one,” I say.
We pull up to the brownstone building where Charlie Bat lived and died. The driver says, “Well, if you’re looking for angels in New York, at least this is a good place.”
“What?”
“I’ve heard things about that building, that’s all,” he says, helping me unload. “Magic stuff. Good luck.”
I zip up my leather jacket and hand him his money. “Thanks,” I say, thinking he is just trying to be nice about the angel thing. But when I see how he is staring up at the brownstone I wonder what he meant. He has this look on his face—kind of wonder or something. Charlie’s building doesn’t look magic to me though. Just old and ready to crumble. A few of the windows are cracked. It reminds me of an old vaudeville guy who wears baggy dirty suits and can’t dance anymore, and somebody beat him up and smashed his glasses.
I stand on the curb and watch the cab drive away. It’s dark now. When did that happen? No time for sunset here. Just a fast change of backdrop like in a store window display.
Some dancer girls colt by. They look like their feet hurt but they don’t care because they’ve been dancing. A woman holds on to her kid in a different way from how parents hold kids where I come from. She is gripping the little mittened hand and the kid’s face looks pale and almost old. Two men in tweed coats and mufflers go into the building. One walks with a cane and wears sunglasses even though it’s night and the other is carrying a bag of groceries. I can see French bread and flowers sticking out of the top. The flowers look like they are wondering what they are doing in this city like they flew here by mistake and saw these two men and decided that their bag was probably the best place to land.
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