Beautiful Boys

by Francesca Lia Block

  When the ride is over you and the ghost go down to the weedy muddy slushy place and grope around in the dirt. You kick and pick through some stuff and after a while your friend spotlights the string of skeletons all quiet in the weeds. You pick them up and they start to shimmy, and underneath them you see what you probably most want in the whole world—or a picture of what you want most in the whole world anyway: his face three times in black and white. The boy you love caught in three photo-booth clicks. He looks very serious and older. And something else. There’s a man sitting next to him. You can only see the man’s mouth and chisel chin and his white shirt—the rest of him is cut off. You wonder who the man is and how you could have found this and what it means. You look into the dark of your angel’s sunglasses like they are his eyes trying to see clues but there aren’t any. You put the strip of pictures of his face into your pocket along with the card.

  You see a photo booth and for a second you have the crazy thought that the boy whose face is in your pocket three times might be in there, sitting behind the dark curtain waiting for the shot.

  You throw back the curtain with a negative of his smile flashing behind your eyes. But it’s empty.

  You sit down. “This is where Weetzie and Cherokee and I took our picture,” says the ghost. “Maybe you could send her this one.” He sits next to you reflected in the glass but you both know there will just be empty space when the photo comes out.

  Three. In one you smile sickly sweet as cotton candy. In one you grimace like a little grumpster demon. In one you are just you—Witch Baby—looking straight out at yourself.

  This is Brooklyn. This is the station and these are the people walking with their heads down and their hands in their pockets.

  The rows of brownstones all look kind of the same at first until I notice the little piece of lace in a window, cat on a piano, the Big Wheel bike on the front step, the raggedy dead geranium plant waiting for spring. Some bearded guys in long black coats and fur hats walk by separate from the rest of the world like prayers in a book. Kids playing basketball, slammin’ the way kids do, into it, not thinking about anything except the game. Pregnant teenagers with strollers.

  I think about what it would be like if I had got pregnant with Angel Juan. Brown baby twins with curly cashew nut toes and purple eyes. Kid Niblett and Señorita Deedles. With no dad now.

  Charlie’s been quiet this whole time. Now he goes, “Would you like to see how it was?”

  “Charlie, I just want to go home,” I grunt. “Every time I get closer to Angel Juan you want to take me off in some other direction.”

  “I’m not taking you in any other direction. You tell me where we should go next.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “We’ll go home soon. I really want to show you this. Over here.”

  He turns onto an empty street, looking like a sunbeam that decided to hang out a little longer than the rest. It’s creepy-quiet and I wonder where everybody is. The sky is starting to get purplish.

  “Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

  I look. But instead of him I see this little boy wearing short pants, bruised knees sticking out. He’s black and white, shadows and light like Charlie.

  “This is me when I was a kid,” he says in a kid’s voice.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s one of the things I can do now. Like climbing trees and walking through fences and dancing.”

  I hope he can’t read my mind about the dancing.

  “Besides, I used to be a special effects man,” he says. “Come on.”

  I cross the street and stand next to him in front of a chunkster brownstone with dead rosebushes clinging to the sides. One time Angel Juan and I stole roses from the neighbors’ gardens and put them on a cake we made but nobody would eat the cake because they were afraid of the bug spray (not ’cause of the stealing—they thought we asked) so we ate it all ourselves and got high maybe from the sugar or maybe from the bug spray or maybe because it was our special secret stolen thing.

  Charlie points to a window on the top floor.

  “That’s where we lived when I was growing up.”

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  I turn around and hold up my camera. A little girl is standing in the street but she’s not a real little girl. She’s like Charlie, like her own movie without a projector.

  “That’s my sister Goldy,” I hear Charlie say. He runs over to her and they start throwing a shadow ball back and forth. Then after a while I hear somebody calling their names from the window. I can’t see anything but a champagne-colored glow until I hold my camera up and then I see the flickery face of a woman.

  “That’s my mother.” Charlie’s voice clicks a little. “She makes hats.”

  Charlie and Goldy run inside the building and I follow their echoing laughter upstairs into a deserted apartment that looks like nobody but maybe skulky rats have lived in for a long time.

  “Look through your camera,” Charlie says.

  The apartment changes. It’s suddenly warm and full of ghosty chairs and couches printed with cabbagy roses, crochet blankets, lamps with slinky silk fringe. There’s a table covered with laces and ribbons, a sewing machine and a bunch of mannequin heads wearing huge hats decorated with flowers, fruits and vegetables, tiny birds’ nests, butterflies, fireflies. I can smell onions cooking. The door opens and a man comes in. He’s tall and his eyebrows grow together making him look kind of scary.

  “That’s my father,” Charlie says to me. “He came from Poland on a ship when he was a little boy. They couldn’t understand his name so they put down ‘Bat’ because of his eyebrows. His father was a fisherman. In Poland in the spring they filled their cottage with lilacs and covered the floor with white sand.”

  Charlie’s dad goes over to where Charlie’s mom is setting the table with china plates and he puts his arms around her. She pushes him away like playing but he spins her and lifts her up onto his wing-tip shoes and starts dancing with her like that, two grainy black-and-white images twirling like they got bored of staying inside their movie.

  “Not tonight.” Charlie’s mom is out of breath. “It’s the sabbath. Now stop that.” She tries not to giggle.

  Charlie and Goldy dance too, like the ghosts in the haunted house at Disneyland. Angel Juan’s favorite. He wanted to dance in the ballroom with me and see if the ghosts would go through our bodies.

  “Now stop,” Charlie’s mom says.

  She pulls away from their grinning goofster dad and straightens her apron. She goes over to the table and puts a piece of lace on her head. Everybody else sits down while Charlie’s mom lights some candles. She says a prayer with sounds from deep inside her throat. Then she serves baked chicken, peas, carrots and pearl onions. I’ve never seen a movie that smells this good.

  “We light the candles for your grandparents in a few days.” Charlie’s mother passes a loaf of braided bread.

  “When does the angel visit?” asks Goldy.

  “Elijah doesn’t come until Passover,” Charlie’s father says.

  “And he’ll drink the wine out of Papa’s cup,” says Goldy.

  “Maybe someday Charlie will write a play about angels,” Charlie’s mother says.

  “Charlie just writes about monsters,” Goldy says. “He scared me again today, Papa.”

  “It was just a mask.” Charlie holds up a rubber monster face. Goldy screams.

  “Charlie, don’t scare your sister,” his father says. “Your mother’s idea is good. You could write something about Elijah.”

  Charlie whispers to me, “The candles we lit once a year for the dead didn’t mean much to me then. Until my mother got sick and then she died and the candles meant something and nothing at all. I decided when I grew up I wouldn’t fast, light candles for the dead or pour wine for angels since none of it helped her stay alive.”

  Then he gets up from the table and goes over to his mother. He throws his arms around her all of a sudden so clu
tch tight. Even though he’s a kid he’s almost bigger than she is.

  “Charlie?” she says. “What is it, bubela?”

  Charlie just keeps holding on. Then he kisses her cheek, lets go and sits down again.

  “They’re all gone now,” he whispers.

  I look at Charlie’s hat-making braided-bread-baking beautiful phantom mom. I think about how it must have been for him when she died. And for his sister and his father with the bat eyebrows. Now they’re all dead. And I feel like it’s hard for me to unclutch Angel Juan!

  The Bat family is starting to fade. So is all the furniture in the room and the dinner smells. I press my eye to my camera trying to keep the picture but it’s almost all gone. And then it is—gone. Just a deserted apartment about to be filled with night.

  “Charlie!” I almost shout. Scared he’s going to leave with them. I put down my camera searching for the light. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t want to come here with you.” I look at the photo booth strip of me and not-Charlie.

  Then, “Over here, honey,” calls a voice from the doorway. Honey like salt in my throat making me want to cry. He’s here. “We’d better go,” he says.

  We’re back in the Village. I am sitting on the floor eating a rice cake.

  “Couldn’t you put something on that thing?” Charlie says. “It tastes—I mean it looks like you are eating cardboard.”

  I shrug. “I like it plain.”

  “You’re getting so skinny.”

  Because I want him to enjoy my meal a little I go and get some peanut butter.

  “Charlie, how did you deal when your mom died?” I ask.

  “I wrote. I was okay as long as I was writing. Whenever anything hurt me I wrote, but after a while I couldn’t anymore. I just stopped. It was like the sadness stopped filling me up with stuff to turn into art. I was just empty.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  “Make yourself keep taking pictures and the pictures will start filling you up again. And isn’t there something else you like to do? Come on.”

  We go out of his apartment into the silent, shadowy hall. It seems like nobody else even lives in the whole building. We start down the stairs.

  That’s when I hear them. There on the eighth floor. The drums.

  The sound makes me want to play so bad I have to stop and chew my nails. It’s African drums in waves breaking again and again taking me out of my body.

  A door is open and inside lit by pale winter sun from a big window dancers move in tides toward the drummers. The dancers wear batik sarongs—burnt-orange skies, jade-green jungles, violet-blue flowers—and shell belts that shiver on their hips. Their feet beat the floor like hands on a drum and their hands are bound by invisible ropes behind their backs, then turn into birds as they leap free. There are two little girls, and a woman with braids to her waist and a high dark gloss queen’s forehead holds their hands and leads them down the room, her solid feet talking each step so that even though the kids probably just started walking a little while ago they are getting it. The drummers are men with bare chests and rainbow ribbons around their muscly arms. Some have dreads. Everybody in the room is sweating like it’s summer and the music is setting free their souls into the air so I feel like I can almost see them.

  All I want to do is play drums. I know the dances from when my dad filmed some African dancers and I got to jam with them.

  When they take a break Charlie says, “Go ask him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Go on. How often do I have the chance to hear my witch baby play drums!”

  Why do I listen to this crazy ghost? I don’t know.

  My witch baby.

  I go over to the head drummer—a tall man wearing full batik pants. His dreadlocks must be as old as he is, thick and wired with his power. I feel like a pale weasel baby staring up at him.

  “Can I sit in?” I ask.

  He looks down at me frowning like, How can this will-o’-the-wisp white child think she can hang with this? “Can you play?”

  “I know Fanga, Kpanlogo, DunDunBa, Kakilamba…”

  He raises his eyebrows. “This is a fast class. If you’re not good it will be bad for everybody.”

  “You’re good,” Charlie whispers.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  The man’s still frowning but he points over to a little drum. It’s perfect. A little heart of the universe.

  They start again and it’s a dance to heal sick spirits. The women throw spirits out of their chests, tossing back their heads with each fling of their hands. Their backs ripple like lanky lizards while their arms reach into the air and pull the healing spirits down into them. It’s my favorite dance and so strong that while I play the drum I feel pain smacked out of me.

  When the class is over the head drummer shakes my hand in his big callused hand. Him doing that is like having a medicine man pull out any other evil spirits that might be left over.

  Charlie is waiting at the doorway, a pulsing golden light. “Yes!” he says. “Phenomenal. You are a beautiful drummer!”

  I feel glowy all over, almost as bright as he is.

  We go outside. I look up at Charlie’s building. I wish I could take off the front of it and look into all the rooms like you do with a dollhouse. From out here it seems almost deserted like you’d never guess that magic-carpet-collecting ghost chasers live here and a whistling ghost in a top hat and that dancers and drummers are flinging bad spirits out of their bodies in one of the rooms.

  I just wonder what my bad spirits look like and where all the flung-out bad spirits go.

  All up and down the avenue shivering junkies are selling things. Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. Where do they get this stuff? It’s a magpie Christmas market.

  “Look at that man,” Charlie says.

  I see a hungry face.

  “No. With your camera.”

  I look through my camera at the man and I can almost feel the veins in my own arms twitch-switching with wanting. In a way the junkies aren’t so much different from me or maybe from everybody.

  I guess in a way Angel Juan is my fix and I’ve been jonesing for him. If he were a needle I’d be shooting up just like these jittery junkies. I’d be flooding my veins with Angel Juan. When we made love it felt like that.

  And doing it can be about as dangerous as shooting up if you think about it.

  And I wasn’t the only one sad and lonely and freaked. There was a whole city of people. Some had to sell other people’s postcards on the street just to buy a needle full of junk so they wouldn’t shatter like the mirror I smashed with a hammer in Charlie Bat’s apartment.

  “Hey,” the man shouts, “I’ve got something for you.”

  The man’s sunken eyes are like Charlie’s. I go over to his table and he holds up a pair of droopy soiled white angel wings. I touch the medallion in the hollow of my neck and think about the saint parade Angel Juan wrote about in his card. The little girls in feathers. I want those wings.

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “Five,” Charlie whispers.

  “Five.”

  “Eight and I’ll throw this in.” He waves a wrinkled postcard in front of his face. It has a picture of two Egyptian mummies on it. They remind me of my walk with Angel Juan when we saw the head of Nefertiti-ti on the piano in the window in the fog once upon time. I wonder if that king and queen ever screamed at each other and cried in the night with pain and desire or if they always looked so sleek and lazy-lotus-eyed.

  I give the man eight dollars I was going to spend on food and he stuffs the bills into his pocket and licks his lips like he’s already feeling what it’s going to be like when the needle hits the vein. He could be a writer like Charlie Bat or a painter or a musician. He could have a kid like Charlie had Weetzie. And all people see is a junkie selling lost wings.

  I flip over the postcard and it’s like the dream I keep waiting t
o have but better because it’s real. Is it real? Those slanty letters scrunching up toward the bottom like all of a sudden realizing there’s no more space. I know those letters.

  It can’t be.

  But there it is—his name.

  Yo Te Amo, Angel Juan.

  Dearest Niña Bruja,

  I go to the museum and look at the Egypt rooms. The goddesses remind me of you. There are jars with cats’ heads that hold the hearts of the dead.

  This city is like an old forest or house that you think’s just rotting away and then you see there’s magic inside. I try to remember that about life and about my heart in me. I think by being by myself I am learning how to love you more and not be so afraid.