“I came back all the time—every chance I could get away. All I needed was my thumb and my poetry journal. I also got a black turtleneck from my father’s closet and a black beret from a thrift store so I’d look like the other cats hanging there in the mystic smoke and swinging sax night.
“One night a skinny old guy wearing shades asked me what I was writing in that journal all the time and I told him poetry.
“‘You’re a baby. What do you know about poetry?’ he said, all languid-like.
“‘I know enough,’ I said.
“‘Yeah. I bet you know some nursery rhymes. Little Bo-Peep come blow your horn the cat’s in the meadow the chick’s in the corn. That’s poetry, right?’
“I tried to walk away from him but he called after me, ‘That’s poetry, right, Bo-Peep?’”
“After that everyone called me Bo-Peep. Until the night I got up on that stage, sat down on a stool in the moon of light and read what I’d been writing all those nights.
“Everyone got still, especially that old man. They leaned in close to dig the words. But it was more than words. Something was happening. There was this bottle of red wine and four glasses on the table next to me and they started dancing, I mean really dancing, doing some kind of tango-fandango number. Then the shades on the face of the old man jumped right off and started floating in the air, moving just out of his reach when he grabbed for them. I saw his eyes with the pinpoint pupils and red whites and knew why he wore those shades but there was nothing I could do about what was going on. I just kept reading. They were all digging it more and more, even the old guy. More stuff kept going on. My beret flew off my head and went slinging across the room onto the head of this beautiful chick. She had short hair like a boy’s, almond-shaped eyes and breasts that were the shape of one of those stiff padded bras but I could tell, even from the stage, that she wasn’t wearing one. She was wearing a black dress and black fishnet stockings on the longest legs I’d ever seen. She laughed and put her hands to her head where my beret had landed. Her girlfriend handed her a joint but it didn’t stay between her long fingers. It flew right out of those fingers and across the room, landing in my hand. I swear this is all true, buddy. Not that it sounds like the truth but it was.”
Dirk was less stunned by the thought of his father’s words making wineglasses dance than by what he saw hovering behind Dirby. When he saw her he remembered the way her long eyelashes had felt, ticklish as butterflies against his skin, he remembered the smoke of her voice and the patchouli smell in her hair, her long glamorous legs in black stockings. She was more beautiful than any girl in a magazine, she the boyish goddess. She was Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy and Bowie and like his father she was James Dean too. Just Silver. Mother. While Dirby kept talking she did a slow rhythmic dance, hands over her head, torso moving with sinuous snakey charm.
“Mom,” Dirk said.
“After, I stopped reading my poetry, things settled down,” Dirby went on. “I mean no more dancing wineglasses or flying joints, but everyone went wild.
“The old guy came up onstage—he had his shades again—and said, ‘This, my friends, is Be-Bop Bo-Peep, beat guru.’
“I wanted to get out of there fast but the beautiful chick reached for my arm when I passed her table and put the beret back on my head. She smelled like incense and patchouli and orange blossoms. The light caught the big silver hoops she wore in her ears.
“‘I dug that, Be-Bop,’ she said.
“I just nodded the way I’d seen the hipsters do when someone dug them.
“‘My name is Just Silver,’ she said. ‘Just Silver with a capital J capital S. The Just is because I renounced my father’s name.’
“‘Are you a model?’ I asked.
“She was. An actress too. She had done little theater and had a tiny part in a Fellini film once.
“‘You are very, very beautiful,’ I told her. I knew I sounded more like Bo-Peep than Be-Bop talking like that but I felt she had dug right into my heart.
“She asked if I’d read Siddhartha. It was my favorite book. She told me I reminded her of him.
“‘Come home with me,’ she said.
“She drove me in her black convertible VW Bug to her apartment above the Sunset Strip. There was no furniture in the apartment—just rugs. Just Silver’s family had traveled all over India and the Mideast purchasing rugs when she was a child. She lit some Nag Champa incense—flowers turned to powdery stick stems, turned to clouds of smoke petals—put on some Ravi Shankar and made her head move from side to side on her neck like an Indian goddess. Then she cooked vegetable curry with rare saffron that was the color of poppy pollen.
“‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked, showing me a dancing metal goddess holding a severed head and wearing a necklace made of skulls.
“‘I might think twice about getting into her car if I was hitching,’ I said.
“‘Would you really? I don’t believe you.’
“‘You’re right. I’d get right in. She is beautiful.’
“‘She’s Kali, the blessing, dancing goddess. She’s also death. In the East those things can go together.’
“I knew what she meant. She danced for me for a while and then we lay on her mattress and made love all night.
“After that I didn’t feel any less lonely, only that Just Silver had joined me in the wild blue windscape of my loneliness.
“‘I’m pregnant,’ she said one night as I felt her draw me inside of her like a mouth on a pipe full of a burning dream-plant.
“‘What? Just this second?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘How do you know?’
“‘I am very in touch with my body.’
“‘I can tell.’
“‘What are we going to do?’ She said we, knowing somehow that I wasn’t going to leave even though I reminded her of Siddhartha.
“‘I never had a dad,’ I said.
“‘I’m sorry. What happened?’
“‘Well I had him for a while but he died when I was five. He knew he was going to die so even when he was alive he kind of ignored me.’
“Just Silver kissed the angles of my face. Her hair smelled like Nag Champa and marijuana. Her eyelashes were so long they looked like they hurt her. Her legs were as long as mine when we lay hip to hip and measured. Steep thighs.
“‘So you don’t want a baby,’ Just Silver said. ‘I mean, because of your dad.’
“‘No. I want a baby because of my dad. I want a baby so I can be a dad for him.’
“‘Or her,’ Just Silver said.
“‘I think we will have a boy.’
“‘Why?’
“‘I’m very in touch with our bodies.’
“‘I can tell.’
“So we decided to have you, buddy. We almost named you Siddhartha but Fifi convinced us it was not going to be fun for a little boy to grow up with a name like Siddhartha, and Sid didn’t have the right feeling. Fifi liked the name Dirk because of the sound of Derwood and Dirby and so we agreed, although your mother didn’t see much difference between Dirk and Sid.
“Fifi loved your mom as if she were her very own daughter. She was so happy to see me with a friend. I had really never had any friends. Now Just Silver and I went everywhere together. I would recite my poetry and she would do her interpretive dancing on the stage. The wineglasses danced with her. I had expected things to stop moving around when I fell in love but I was just as telekinetic as ever. Maybe more so. Instead of grounding me, my love sent me spinning even deeper into the center of loneliness that was the stars and the night and the wind. I didn’t feel that my love was anything to do with the planet I had been born on. I wanted to fly away with Just Silver.
“Then you were born. You presented me with this problem. How was I supposed to keep living this abstract way, trying to be like music from a horn, like sweat, like the dark skin of night peeling back at dawn? Although I’d wanted a baby so I could love it the way my father hadn’t been able
to love me, when I saw you with your eyelashes and toes and everything, I realized what a big responsibility you really were. I had to care in a way I had never had to care before. I read you poetry and played my guitar. I made your toys fly around the room like planets in space. But I was drawn more and more to the waves and the wind. You made my heart hurt too much. It ached so much I thought it would stop pumping like my father’s had.
“Your mother and I would leave you with your grandmother and go driving for hours. We liked to take Sunset all the way to the sea. We kissed in the furious Santa Anas that felt like jewel dust whirling around us as the sun went down.
“The night we gave up on life, I can’t say it was a conscious decision. But we didn’t struggle against it either. That was the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed. In a way I think it was all too much for us—this world.”
Dirk thought of his parents on the precipice, wanting to sink into the cavern of night and wild coyote hills, away from the hammering headlines and screaming TVs and the death of fathers.
“That’s why I want you to be different, Dirk,” said Dirby. “I want you to fight. I love you, buddy. I want you not to be afraid.”
“But I’m gay,” Dirk said. “Dad, I’m gay.”
“I know you are, buddy,” Dirby said. And his lullaby eyes sang with love. “Do you know about the Greek gods, probably Walt Whitman—first beat father, Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg, even, maybe, your number one hero? You can’t be afraid.”
“Maybe it’s too late,” Dirk said. “Dad, am I alive now?”
“Yes. Still. Fight, Dirk.”
“Mom?”
And then his mother, still dancing behind Dirby, all eyelashes and legs, spoke with that dream-plant smoke voice, “Tell us your story, Baby Be-Bop.”
Genie
“One night when he was little Dirk McDonald woke to the sound of the telephone and his Grandma Fifi’s voice,” Dirk began.
“He had never heard a voice sound like that. Dirk looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Grandma Fifi had pasted on the ceiling for Dirk’s father when he was a little boy. She had told Dirk they would keep nightmares away. But that night Dirk thought nothing would ever keep him safe from nightmares.
“Grandma Fifi ran into the bedroom and took Dirk in her arms. Her bones felt as light as the birdcage that hung in her kitchen. She wrapped Dirk in a coat that smelled sour from mothballs and lilac-sweet from her perfume.
“Dirk sat huddled next to his grandmother in her red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible and felt as if the night was going to eat him alive; he wished it would. Fifi hadn’t taken time to put the top back on. She ran through red lights. Dirk had never seen her do that before.
“When they got to the hospital a doctor met them in the hallway and led them back into the waiting room. Fifi took Dirk on her lap. Dirk could never remember, later, if the doctor had ever said the words, but he knew then that his parents were gone. He pressed his face into the velvet collar of Fifi’s coat and their tears mingled together until they were drenched with salt water.
“Dirk listened for his parents’ voices in the wind sometimes. But soon he forgot what they had sounded like. All he could hear was his Grandma Fifi whistling with her canaries in the kitchen or calling to him to come out and play in the yard or asking the pastry dough what shape it intended on taking this afternoon or singing him lullabies.”
Dirk went on to tell the story of life in Fifi’s cottage, the fathers in the shower, the story of Pup Lambert and the magic lamp. He told the story of Gazelle and the stranger, Fifi and Derwood, Dirby and Just Silver. All his ancestors’ stories were also his own.
Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.
“Dad?” he asked the darkness. “Mom?” but Dirby and Just Silver were gone.
He picked up the golden lamp. It was heavy with stories of love. It was light with stories of love. It could sink to the bottom of the sea, touch the core of the earth with the weight of love. It could soar into the clouds like a creature with wings.
Just then he saw that the lamp had begun to smoke—vapors writhing out from it like snakes. And Dirk saw emerging from that mist the face and then the whole body of a man. There was a piece of sapphire silk with golden elephants on it wrapped turban-style around his head. Dirk knew that beneath the turban, the man’s scalp was shaved; he was the stranger who had come to Gazelle’s door with the very lamp out of which he was now materializing.
“Come with me,” the man said.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
The braid rug on the floor of Dirk’s room began to quiver. Then the corners furled off the wooden floor and the rug lifted from the ground, bringing with it Dirk in his bed. Dirk closed his eyes the way you do on a roller coaster, wind and gravity forcing lids down, forcing him to grip the brass posts as the bed levitated. Eyes still closed but he knew he was outside now careening through star-flecked space on warm wind, part of him wanting to scream, wake from the dream, part of him letting this be, this journey to wherever, this journey on the voice of the man.
Beneath him the city the way it looked from inside the Japanese restaurant on the hill where waitresses in flowered silk kimonos brought starbursts and blossoms of sushi maki and champagne in silver ice buckets. A platter of gleaming wineglasses and luminous liqueurs, main courses served on polished plates, towering flaming desserts, candlelit birthday cakes. And on to the edges where it was darker and on to the sea that broke against the shore in seaweed black against iced jade pale. Dark waves becoming pale foam like the banks of wild dill and evening primrose growing along the highway. Ancient stone creatures emerging from the sea. Fields full of cattle. Some were there to die. He saw a bull mount a cow like a wave of life in the midst of static death. Fields full of farmworkers, sweat stories hidden behind the clustering clean sea green, sea purple of the grapes they picked. Redwood groves purple shadows light fallen like pollen through high leaves. Sea going so far it looks like sky. Just blues forever. Sky like a field of lupine and white wildflower fluffs. Sheer rivulets of water a skin of light over the sand. On and on. Where was he going?
In a field at the edge of the sea was a white house with crystals and lace in the window. Trumpet vines grew over the trellis and picket fence in front. A hammock in the garden. On the porch were surfboards, sandals, sleeping golden retrievers.
Duck Drake and his family lived in the house that smelled of beeswax and lavender and home-baked bread. Duck’s mother Darlene had wide-apart green eyes, frothy yellow hair and petite tan legs. She liked to stand on the porch having long conversations with the mockingbird who lived in the garden. She was always asking Duck questions about what his favorite flower was and why and what was his favorite color and time of day and animal and what dreams did he have last night? Duck’s brothers and sisters, Peace, Granola, Crystal, Chi, Aura, Tahini and the twins Yin and Yang, were always careening through the house like a litter of blond puppies yelping, “I’m not delirious, I’m in love.”
Duck was the only one who never talked about his crushes since his crushes were on boys and Duck knew Darlene wouldn’t understand at all. He thought it was strange because of how free she was about other things. Once she tried some pot brownies that Peace made but she said they just made her depressed and unable to stop giggling. She let Crystal’s boyfriend sleep over and she had told all the girls that when they were ready to have sex she would take them for birth control. But when it came to Duck’s secret he knew she wouldn’t accept it. He had heard her talking to her best friend Honey-Marie about Honey-Marie’s son Harley. Harley was a few years older than Duck, and Duck had always admired him from afar. He looked like he was born to play Prince Charming with his fistfuls of curly dark hair, flashing dark eyes and ballet dancer’s body. He spoke in a soft rich voice and wore baggy cotton trousers with Birkenstocks and colorful socks. Harley was a waiter at a café in Santa Cruz but he
really wanted to go to San Francisco and perform Shakespeare. Finally, just before he left, he told Honey-Marie that he was gay. She was devastated. Duck heard her tell his mother, “My heart is broken.”
Then he heard his mother say, “It could be worse. He could have something really wrong with him.”
He breathed a sigh of relief on the other side of the kitchen door.
“Something is wrong with him,” Honey-Marie said.
Then Duck’s mother said, “I guess you’re right. I’d probably feel the same way if it was my own son.”
After that Duck tried. He took Cherish Marine to the prom and bought her a huge corsage of pink lilies. He even rented a tux (although he would not put his feet in weasel shoes and wore his Vans instead). Cherish Marine was a bathing suit model and all the boys wanted to be her date but she liked Duck with his lilting surfer slur and teenage-Kewpie beauty. They danced all the slow dances and Duck felt Cherish Marine’s bathing-suit-model-breasts pressing through her peach satin prom dress. They went to the pier with a group of other kids and shared a bottle of champagne which Cherish Marine liked to drink with a straw. They sat next to each other on the roller coaster, Cherish Marine’s slender thigh pressing against Duck’s leg, her hands grabbing his knee as their light bodies were thrown from side to side of the car, bruising, the metal bar hardly enough to keep them from being flung into space. But when the evening was over Duck walked Cherish to her door and kissed her good night on her smooth peachy cheek. She looked into his eyes waiting for something more but he only said, “You are a total babe. Thank you for being my date,” and left.
Cherish Marine was stunned.
Duck went surfing because it was the only thing that comforted him. When he surfed he felt as aqua-blue and full and high as the waves but he also felt lost, a small human who could as easily be washed away as his father Eddie had been. Even the other surfers were separate from each other in their own tubes of water. Once in a while he’d see a guy holding his girlfriend and once he had seen a guy surfing with a pig on a leash. Duck wanted a boyfriend he could surf with, someone he could tell his secret to, someone who had the same secret inside. He wanted to reach inside his lover and touch that lonely secret with his own.
Beautiful Boys Page 15
