Authors: Francesca Lia Block
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 finding 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.
I want to take photographs for the first time since Angel Juan left. But I don’t. I won’t use my eyes for anything except finding Angel Juan.
I try to picture Weetzie coming here, a long time ago with Cherokee tucked in her arms, all excited to show her new baby to her dad. She must have felt kind of weird though, standing in front of this building in the middle of the meat-packing district. Maybe that’s when she decided to stop eating meat when she saw the dead cows unloaded from the trucks. She must have been freaked about Charlie living here all alone. I wish I got to come meet Charlie too. I wonder if he would have thought I was his real granddaughter like Cherokee.
Inside the lobby is dark and musty-dusty. There is an elevator but it has an “Out of Order” sign on it so I find the stairs.
The stairs are even darker. As I walk up I think I hear somebody whistling a tune. What is it? Sort of silly but also sad, like whoever is whistling wants to stop but can’t or like a circus clown with a smile painted on.
I stop on the third floor and knock. A gray-haired slinkster man answers. He is one of the men in the tweed coats I saw on the street.
“I’m Witch Baby.”
“Witch Baby! Come in. Weetzie has been calling all day to see if you’ve arrived. Come in.”
The little warm apartment is covered—floor, walls, ceiling—in faded Persian pomegranate-courtyard-garden carpets. There are lots of velvety loungy couches and chairs that make me feel like curling up like Tiki-Tee does in the bend of my knees, lots of overstuffed tapestry pillows and bookshelves stuffed with old leather books. See-through veils hanging from the ceiling. Tall viny iron candlesticks blooming big candles frosted with dripped wax. What it makes me think about mostly is crawling inside that genie lamp Weetzie has at home—what it would be like in there.
The man who walked with a cane is arranging the flowers in a golden vase that almost looks like the genie lamp.
“Meadows, Charlie Bat’s grandchild has arrived,” says the first man. The man named Meadows comes over and holds out his hand. He has a sweet boy-face even though he is probably almost as old as the other man and he is still wearing his dark glasses.
“That’s Meadows and I’m Mallard,” the first man says. “For some reason your mother thought that my name was funny. Something to do with ducks. I didn’t get it.”
In my family duck means a pounceable guy who likes guys, which is what Mallard is—a very grown-up gray duck—but I don’t know how to explain it. “In my family names are a kind of weird thing,” I say.
“I can tell,” says Mallard. “Now where did they come
up with Witch Baby? You are much too pretty for that. She looks like a skinny, boyish, young Sophia Loren hiding under a head full of tangles.” He turns to Meadows, who smiles and nods.
I sure don’t think I look like any gorgeous Italian actress with a big chest. “Weetzie tried to name me Lily but it never stuck,” I say.
“Lily sounds right for you,” says Meadows. “May we call you Lily?”
“Sure.”
Mallard says, “You must be exhausted, Lily. Would you like to sleep on our couch? It might be more comfortable than your grandfather’s apartment. There isn’t any furniture there.”
“He wasn’t really my true grandfather,” I say. “He was my almost-grandfather. He’s Weetzie’s dad and she met my dad when she was working at Duke’s because she had wished for him on the genie lamp that Dirk—that’s her best friend—Dirk’s grandma Fifi gave her and she also wished for a duck for Dirk and a house for them to live in and Fifi died and Dirk met Duck and Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man—that’s my dad’s name—all moved into Fifi’s cottage but then Weetzie wanted a baby and my dad didn’t want one so she had Cherokee with Dirk and Duck and my dad left and met Vixanne Wigg who is a lanka witch and stayed with her but then he came back to Weetzie and one day Vixanne brought me and left me on the doorstep in a basket and Weetzie and my dad and Dirk
and Duck made me like part of the family but in a way I’m not.”
“Very confusing,” says Mallard. “Sometime you must draw us a family tree.”
“Okay. But I’ll be okay at Charlie’s.”
“What have you brought with you?” Mallard is looking at the globe lamp.
“Weetzie thinks it’ll be good luck.”
Meadows nods all solemn. “Apotropaic.”
“What?”
“It means something to ward off evil. You will be comfortable wherever you sleep. Can you have dinner with us tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
Mallard hands me a set of keys on a big silver ring. My wrist is so skinny it could almost be a bracelet.
“We know a macrobiotic place with the best tofu pie,” Meadows says.
Soybean-curd pie doesn’t sound so great to me but I don’t say anything.
“Meanwhile, you must take some of our groceries.” Mallard goes to the kitchen and comes back with a paper bag full of food.
“That’s okay.”
“You must. You have to eat and it’s not a great idea to be running around alone at night. I’ll show you up to Charlie’s place.”
I say good-bye to Meadows and walk up seven flights
of stairs with Mallard, the keys, the food and a stack of blankets to Charlie Bat’s apartment.
Mallard opens the door and lets me in. “No one’s lived here for a long time,” he says. “We take care of it and we tried to make it as nice as possible for you but still…”
The apartment is smaller than the one downstairs and it’s cold and empty except for an old trunk thing made out of leather. The paint on the walls is peeling. But there is a view of the city, not a speck of dust-grunge anywhere and a Persian rug like the ones downstairs on the floor. Suddenly I feel so tired I want to fall into the garden of the rug, just keep falling forever through pink leaves.
“Now you’d better eat something and get right to bed,” Mallard says, putting down the blankets. “We thought you’d be safe and comfortable on the rug. There’s no phone but you just run downstairs anytime if you need anything.”
He hands me the groceries. “Remember dinner tomorrow. Good night.”
As he closes the door I feel loneliness tunnel through my body. I look inside the bag of food and there’s granola, milk, strawberries, bananas, peanut butter, bagels, mineral water and peppermint tea. I sit on the old trunk and eat a banana-and-peanut-butter bagel sandwich to try to fill up the tunnel the loneliness made. Then I try to open the trunk but it’s locked. I go stand by the window.
New York is like a forbidden box. I am looking down into it. There’s the firefly building on Angel Juan’s card and
the dark danger streets. All these sparkling electric treasures and all these strange scary things that shouldn’t have been let out but they all were. And somewhere, down there, with the angels and the demons, is Angel Juan.
I plug in the globe lamp and lie down on Mallard and Meadows’s carpet under the blankets in a corner.
“Apotropaic,” Meadows said.
I hold on to the globe like it is my heart I am trying to hold together. But my heart isn’t solid and full of light like the lamp. It’s cracked and empty and I just lie there not trying to hold it together anymore, letting my dry no-tear sobs break it up into little pieces, wanting to dream about Angel Juan—at least that.