Beautiful Boys

by Francesca Lia Block

  Yo Te Amo, Niña,

  Angel Juan

  “Where did you get this?” I ask the man, almost screeching.

  “I don’t know. Found it.”

  “Where did you find it?” I growl, pulling feathers out of the wings.

  He shrugs. Then he says, “Somewhere down on Meat Street. It was lying in the gutter like somebody dropped it on the way to the mail.”

  “Meat Street?”

  “The meat-packing district. Somewhere around there.”

  I know I’m not going to get anything else out of him. But here in my hand is a postcard from the Metropolitan Museum addressed to Witch Baby Wigg Bat, stamped, ready to be mailed and written by Angel Juan Perez.

  I know where I’m going tomorrow.

  I slip the postcard into the pocket next to my heart with the other card and the photo booth strip, sling the wings over my shoulder and try to skate the shakes out of my knees. Charlie twinkles near my ear like a whistling diamond earring.

  Today Charlie and I go up the steps where people from all over the world are huddling in their coats with Christmas shopping at their feet. They’re eating hot dogs and salt-crystaled soft pretzels. The pretzels smell good. Buttery, doughy. But I’m not going to spend any money on food today even though Charlie keeps telling me I am too skinny and I have to eat.

  We go into the big entry that’s high and bright like a church. Perfume and flowers. Voices echo. Warm bodies. Cool marble.

  Egypt first.

  There is so much here I feel like, How am I supposed to even start? Rooms and rooms of glass cases. Mummies. Real bodies inside there. High lotus foreheads. Painted tilted fish-shaped eyes. Smooth flat jewel-collared chests. Lanky limbs. Long desert feet. I bet inside they don’t look like that. Jars with the heads of baboons or cats or jackals for holding the organs like Angel Juan said.

  Cases and cases of tiny things. Secret scarab beetles. Why did the Egyptians have this thing about dung beetles? Mud love. Sludge and mud. It reminds me of me when I was a little kid covering myself with dirt. Slinky cats with golden hoops in their ears. Chalky blue goddesses missing their little arms or legs. Where did the lost parts of them go? Maybe they reminded Angel Juan of me because they’re broken.

  “You know, you look like a little Egyptian queen,” Charlie says. His reflection ripples like water next to mine in the glass case.

  We come out of the dim tomb rooms and at first I can’t see—it’s so flood-bright. The glass walls let in the park and the ceiling lets in the sky. And in the center is this whole temple—this huge white Egyptian palace with the lotus-head people carved on the sides and a shallow pool of water all around full of penny wishes.

  Charlie sighs. “This was Weetzie’s favorite place in the whole city. She did like the dancing chicken in Chinatown too.”

  Could you please stop bat-chattering about when Weetzie visited you.

  I think it and I don’t even care if he can read my mind.

  “I’m sorry, Baby. I’m trying not to be such a clutch pig. Isn’t that what you say? A lankster lizard?”

  I sit down on a bench facing the temple and pretend that I’m in Egypt. I wear a tall headdress, a collar of blue and gold beads and a long sheer pleated tunic. I pray in a gleamy white temple. I ride on the Nile in a barge and play drums. I carve pictures of my family on stone walls. I have a slinkster cat with a gold hoop in its ear that sits on my shoulder and helps me understand mysteries. When I die I’ll be put in a tomb and my organs will be put in jars. If somebody finds me centuries later they will know exactly where my heart is.

  On the way back through, Charlie leads me into a tiny room. Nobody else is here. I’m blind after the brightness of the temple. The darkness feels like it’s seeping into me, drugging me like spooky smoke, mystery incense taking me into an ancient desert.

  Then I see the hipster king and queen from the postcard standing together with their organ jars next to them, staring out at me like, Hello, we are perfect twins and who are you?

  “Hello, we are perfect twins and who are you?”

  “Did you say something, Charlie?”

  “Not me.”

  “Well don’t tell me they said it.” I lower my voice, hiss-whisper. “Charlie, what’s going on?”

  “Maybe you should introduce yourself.”

  “Oh right. Okay. My name is Witch Baby. I shouldn’t be surprised that statues are talking to me. I’ve already seen tree spirits and my best friend almost-grandpa is a ghost. This is Charlie.”

  “Hello, Witch Baby. Charlie.” Two voices—a drum and a flute, one song.

  I look at the pair of statues with their matching smooth golden faces, high eyebrows, far-apart eyes, small noses, graceful necks. Part of me wishes that that was me and Angel Juan—together forever with our hearts in jars. Better than not knowing where his heart is.

  No. Shut your clutch thoughts up, Witch Baby. You don’t wish that.

  “You are alive. Remember. As long as you are alive you’ll know where his heart is. It will be in you.”

  “Like Charlie will always be alive in Weetzie and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charlie, did those statues really talk to me?”

  “I’m not in a good position not to believe that, being myself a…well you know. Anyway, you heard what you needed to hear. Maybe I did too.

  “Shall we try China?”

  In China there is a room full of beamy-faced people doing yoga. They make a wreath around me, flower children breathing peace. The Egyptians were so much in the world with all their gold and stuff but these guys are like from some other world. They don’t have wings but they remind me of angels.

  In a room with a high ceiling I stand at the solid feet of a massive Buddha dude. His stone robes are covered with petals and they fall like silk. His hands are gone. I wonder what happened to them.

  He has a topknot, droopy earlobes and a gentle mouth. He is gazing down at me like, Everything will be all right, Baby, no problem.

  “Everything will be all right.”

  “Charlie!”

  “If any statue could talk it would probably be him. Why don’t you ask him something?”

  “Why are your earlobes like that?”

  “Witch Baby, that might not be the best question.”

  “Well it’s hard to think.”

  “I used to wear big earrings when I valued material wealth.”

  “What am I supposed to do about Angel Juan?”

  “Let go.”

  All of a sudden I know just how his hands would be if they were there. One would be held up with the thumb and third finger touching and the pinky in the air. One palm would be open.

  Next Charlie and I go to Greece. In the airy echoing room of dessert-colored marbles we stand in front of a pale boy, so beautiful on his pedestal but so white. The marble muscles mold marble flesh. There are even marble tendons, ridges of marble veins, so real they look like if you pressed on them they’d flatten out for a second. I wonder how the real boy who posed for the statue felt. If he felt like the statue took his soul away, like all that mattered was his pretty body.

  The statue seems to be looking at me like…

  Yes, it’s happening again:

  “Your friend needs to go make music by himself.”

  “You mean he needs to not just be my pounceably beautiful boyfriend who I take pictures of and write songs about.”

  “Yes.”

  “It might be even hard for him to be made into stuff by me until he starts making stuff of his own.”

  “Yes.”

  I take the strip of photos out of my pocket and try to look into Angel Juan’s eyes behind the sunglasses.

  While I’m standing in front of the pedestal boy looking at Angel Juan I hear something behind me.

  “Do you wish that you could turn him into stone? Make him a mummy? Keep his heart in a jar?”

  Another talking statue? But this time the voice makes me feel cold like marble. I turn arou
nd.

  No statue but that man—the one in the white coat, the one from the park.

  He slithers behind a wall painted with flower garlands and demon masks.

  I run after him.

  “Witch Baby!” Charlie calls.

  I don’t stop. My footsteps echo through the rooms. The blank eyeless marble eyes are all around.

  But when I get to the lobby the man is gone and I am still marble-slab cold.

  “Who was that ghoulie guy?” I ask the Bat Man back at the apartment.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “But you shouldn’t go chasing after that kind of people. Maybe you should take some pictures.”

  “Of what. Of you?”

  “I’m not very photogenic. You’re going to take pictures of you.”

  “What?”

  “Look in the trunk.”

  I jiggle the lock and the leather trunk opens right up. I choke on stink-a-rama mothballs and dust.

  Inside is a bunch of stuff. Clothes. Wigs. Masks. I figure either Charlie got off dressing up weird when he was alive or they were for his plays. Either way the trunk is filled with stuff to make me into all my dreams and all my nightmares.

  I turn into Nefertiti in a gold paper headdress and collar with cool kohl eyes and a pout of my lips.

  I wear a curly blonde wig, a wreath of plastic leaves and a toga sheet and do a Greek-dude-statueon-a-pedestal thing.

  I keep on the wig and attach the magpie-market wings to my back for a Cupid look holding a rickety bow and arrow from the trunk.

  I put my hair in a topknot and wear an old silk kimono and be Buddha cross-legged and meditating.

  I find a really ugster monster rubber monster mask. I don’t even want to touch it. It looks like some leper-monster’s shed skin all shreddy at the edges. Just like the one Charlie had in Brooklyn. But I put that on too and take a picture of my face with the eyes staring out of two holes gouged in the rubber.

  I slick back my hair, put on my dark glasses, bandana, hooded sweatshirt, leather jacket, Levi’s and chunky shoes.

  Me as Angel Juan.

  Click. Click. Click.

  I stay up all night. The sky is starting to get pale.

  The black top hat that Charlie was wearing when we first met is in the trunk too and I put that on with a black tuxedo jacket, dark eyeliner circles under my eyes: the ghost of Charlie Bat.

  “Do I look like you, Charlie?”

  “You are a lot like me, especially the way I used to be. Even without the costume. You’re more like me than Weetzie and Cherokee. I think you are my real blood granddaughter.”

  I wonder if he knows how slink that makes me feel. How I feel warm for the first time since I’ve been in this city, I mean really warm. From the inside out.

  I hear his crackly voice. “We both believe in monsters. But all the ghosts and demons are you. And all the angels and genies are you. All the kings, queens, Buddhas, beautiful boys. Inside you. No one can take them away.”

  “So then that means nobody can take you away from Weetzie and me even though you’re—”

  “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  Why doesn’t he let me finish?

  “You should get some sleep now,” he says.

  Suddenly I’m so tired. I collapse onto the carpet with all the costumes all around me.

  Dear Angel Juan,

  I dream about you for the first time since you left. You are wearing the magpie-market angel wings and standing on a street corner playing your guitar, singing for a crowd of people. You look so happy and free.

  But who’s that? There is someone hiding in the crowd watching you that shouldn’t be there. Someone in the rubber monster mask from Charlie’s trunk. They want you to belong to them. They want to lock you up in a tomb so you can’t breathe, so no one else can ever touch you, so you can’t sing anymore.

  I wake up with a cold. One of those bad almost flu-y things where you feel all your nerve endings splitting on the surface of your skin and your ears ring like you’ve been playing a tough gig at a loud smoky club all night. I’ve slept for hours—it’s dark. When I go to turn on the globe lamp nothing happens. I try the bathroom switch. Nothing. Electricity out. And you know what it is? Christmas Eve.

  In Los Angeles my family is all together feasty-feasting in a house lit with red and green chili-pepper lights. There is a big blazing tree. After they eat they are going to make home movies of each other dancing and opening their presents.

  I wish I was home with all of them and Angel Juan having a jammin’ jamboree, playing music and sharing a stolen-roses cake in front of the fireplace.

  “Charlie?” I say.

  No song. No light.

  I light candles and wrap up in my sleeping bag and some of Mallard and Meadows’s blankets on the carpet. I remember that my heart is a broken teacup. I remember the feeling of my own heart shredding me up from the inside out. I think about the dream.

  “Charlie!”

  “Are you all right?” he asks flickering in a corner.

  “I had a bad dream about Angel Juan. I have to go out and look for him.” I try to stand up but I have Jell-O knees.

  “You look like you have a fever,” Charlie says. “You can’t go out.”

  “But Charlie, I think that man in the museum wants to hurt Angel Juan.”

  “Just rest now, Baby.” His voice is like a lullaby.

  I feel creepy-crawly. I shiver back into a fever-sleep.

  When I wake up this time my skin feels sore—like it’s been stretched too tight or something—and hot. Outside the firefly building is shining in the night.

  Then I remember my dream again and I feel splinters of ice cracking in my chest. Now what? All I know is that I have to go out no matter what Charlie thinks. I’m so sick of him telling me what to do, keeping me from finding Angel Juan. And he’s hiding in his trunk now anyway. There is something I have to do.

  I get up and dress in baggy black. I put my hair back under a black baseball cap, grab my camera and roller skates.

  When I get down to the street I put on my skates and take off into the darkness. My hands are frozen inside my mittens and my frozen toes keep slamming against the pointed cowboy-boot toes. My nose is running and my chest aches. Fog is coming in and the air smells salty and fishy. A few glam drag queens in miniskirts and high heels are strutting in the shadows cooing and hollering. Sometimes a car drives by, stops and picks one up.

  It’s freaky. I kind of know exactly where I’m going. Or I don’t know but the roller skates do. They just seem to carry me along over the cobblestones. I can feel every stone jolting my spine but not enough to jolt the fear out of me. Driving it deeper in.

  The place where the roller skates want to take me is the meat-packing district down by the river.

  Meat Street, I think, remembering what the junkie said.

  In between the big meat warehouses on the cobblestone pavement is a little fifties-style hot-dog-shaped stainless-steel diner-type place lit with tubes of buzzing red neon that make the shadows the color of raspberry syrup. The neon sign reads “Cake’s Shakin’ Palace.”

  And standing there in the window of the empty diner is Angel Juan!

  I think it is really him. Not so much because I feel tired and spooked and sick but because I just want it to be. I want him to be all right.

  But this is a mannequin. It has Angel Juan’s nose and cheekbones and his chin, his dark eyes and hair and even the tone of his brown skin under the raspberry-syrup light. He’s dressed like a waiter with a white shirt and a bow tie and a little cap and there’s a tray with a plastic milk shake and burger in one hand. I am standing here on a dark street in New York in the middle of the night in front of a window looking up at my boyfriend offering me a hamburger but his body would be cold if I touched it and if I held a mirror up to his face no breath would cloud it. His eyes are blind. But for some reason I have the feeling that this really is Angel Juan. I can’t explain the feeling except that it is the sca
riest thing I have ever felt. I think I will be sick right here on the street, dry heaves because my stomach is empty.

  Then I hear something behind me and I turn around shivering like somebody just slid some ice inside my shirt down my spine. There’s this guy standing there.

  He is tall and he has white hair and you can almost see the blood beating at his temples because his skin is so thin and white. He has those eyes that look like cut glass and those pretty lips and he’s wearing that white coat. He is probably the most gorgeous human being I have ever seen in real life and the most nasty-looking at the same time.

  He’s the mannequin in the boutique window and the man in Central Park and at the museum.

  “It’s kind of late for you to be here, isn’t it?” he says. He has a very soft voice. Something about his voice and the dry sweet smoky powdery champagney smell of his cologne and the way his hands look in his white gloves makes me want to sleep. “I don’t open for a few more hours.”

  “I was just kickin’ around,” I say.

  He glances up at Angel Juan in the window of the diner. “Would you like something to eat?” he asks me. “You look hungry.”

  I know it is stupid to be standing here talking to this freaky beautiful man but somehow I can’t split.

  “I make great hamburgers.” He smiles. His teeth look really yellow next to his white skin, which is weird because the rest of him is so perfect. “Or milk shakes if you are a grass-eating vegetarian.”

  This is his place—the diner. And in the diner is a mannequin of Angel Juan. So what am I supposed to do? I stand watching him take out a set of keys like they are something that a hypnosis guy swings in front of your face to put you to sleep and I follow him inside.

  He puts on some lights and the spotless curved silver walls of the diner shine. The floor is black-and-white squares and the counter and swivel chairs are mint green. There are mirrored display cabinets on the walls full of fancy cakes that look like they are going to slide right down into your mouth. I feel a blast of sleepy heat filling the place.