Baby Be-Bop (3 page)

Dirk took a razor and began to shave the sides of his scalp. The buzz vibrated into his brain. How thin was the skin at his temples, Dirk thought. Just skin stretched over pulse. He thought about the punk rock boy at the dance club. There was something about that boy that no one could touch. Dirk took the hair that was left on his head and dyed it with black dye so that it was almost blue. Then he formed it into a spikey fan. He smoothed it with Fifi’s gel and sprayed it with her Aqua Net so it stood straight up like the hair on top of Kaboodle’s head.

At school Dirk wore all black and his Mohawk. Everyone turned and stared. But no one had questions in their eyes about what it was all hiding underneath. The disguise worked. There was some fear, some admiration, some jealousy, but no one despised Dirk the way he knew they would if he revealed his secret.

Also, no one questioned why Dirk and Pup didn’t share a lunch on the same bench anymore, why they didn’t play basketball together. It all seemed because of the Mohawk, the big boots Dirk had started to wear, the Germs and X buttons on his collar. That seemed like enough. No one knew that it was because of a glance in a Jacuzzi, a joint shared like a kiss and then turned to ash, a shock of love.

F
ifi watched Dirk and his Mohawk more closely now. Her blue eyes looked always ready to spill. Dirk wanted to tell her, how he wanted to tell her, but what if the tears spilled, blue onto her cheeks? What if he hurt the one person who had loved him his whole life? What if she said, “It’s just a phase,” and he had to tell her, “It’s not just a phase, Grandma Fifi. It’s who I am.”

And why did he have to tell? Boys who loved girls didn’t have to sit their mothers down and say, “Mom, I love girls. I want to sleep with them.” It would be too embarrassing. Just because what he felt was different, did it have to be discussed?

On Dirk’s sixteenth birthday Fifi called him into the kitchen.

“Where’s Pup?” Fifi asked. “I thought you were going to invite him over.”

“He’s busy,” Dirk said. “You know that. You ask me every day.”

Kit came and sat on Dirk’s lap. Kaboodle covered his eyes with his paws. Pet and Mini did a tragic ballet in their cage.

Fifi had baked Dirk a chocolate raspberry kiwi cake. The candles made her shine like the Christmas tree angel she put on her pink-flocked tree each year. Dirk closed his eyes and blew the candles out. He didn’t make a wish. There were no wishes inside of him anymore.

“I have something for you, sweetie,” Fifi said.

Kaboodle winked at him and licked frosting off his fingers.

Dirk followed Fifi outside, Kaboodle bouncing at their feet so that his tongue swung with each step. Fifi’s red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible was parked in the driveway. It had a huge red ribbon tied around its middle.

“I know it’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Fifi said. “I would have gotten you a new car if I could have.”

“You’re giving me your car!”

He stroked the cherry red, the vanilla white, the silver chrome. It was like a sundae, like a valentine, like a little train, a magic carpet.

“Well, if you want it. Now that you can drive I thought it would be a good present. It’s very safe. They made
those things sturdy back then. And I’m getting a little too old to drive.”

“I’ll be your chauffeur. I love it, Grandma,” Dirk said.

Then he noticed something different about the car. Mounted on the front was a golden thing.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a family heirloom. A lamp. It comes off the car, but for now I thought it looked splendid as a hood ornament.”

“What’s it for?”

“When you are ready you can tell your story into it,” Fifi said. “You can talk about Pup—whatever you want to say. Secrets. Things you can’t tell anyone.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Someday you may. Someday it might help.”

Dirk looked at the golden thing. He was afraid of it. He wanted Fifi to take it back. But what could he do? Anyway, he had the car and that’s what mattered. With the car he didn’t need Pup; he didn’t need anybody. He could drive through the canyons with the top down, race along Mulholland’s precarious curves, looking at the city glistering below. He could feel the breeze kissing his naked temples, more tender than any lover. Go to punk gigs by himself. Slam in the pit with the boys until the pain sweated out of him, let the pain-sweat dry up and evaporate in the night air as he drove and drove.

But Dirk didn’t go out that night. Instead he lay alone in the darkness. His hands kept wandering over his body wanting to touch himself the way someone would rub a magic lamp in a fairy tale to make a genie appear. But Dirk pulled his hands away. He wanted to cut them off. He wanted to turn off his mind. He tried to think about Nancy Nance but all he could see was Pup Lambert.

Dirk remembered what Fifi had said to him. How could he tell his story, he wondered? He had no story. And if he did no one would want to hear it. He would be laughed at, maybe attacked. So it was better to have no story at all. It was better to be dead inside.

He looked up at the billboard models looming above like hard angels in denim as he drove down the Sunset Strip one night. I would rather have no story at all, Dirk decided. I want to be blank like a model on a billboard. I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside. But he thought of the stuffed dog he and Pup had seen on the Venice boardwalk, so long ago it seemed now—a rigor mortis display. Without a story of love would he become only that?

Dirk was going to see X at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. He had a fake ID he had made himself using his new driver’s license. He had a black leather motorcycle jacket covered with zippers that he had found at a musty dusty cobwebs-and-lace thrift store for only ten dollars. He had his warrior
Mohawk. Kaboodle was sitting next to him on the front seat with gel in his shock of hair and his big paw resting on Dirk’s leg.

The dark club was full of pierced, painted boys with shaved heads. They were slamming in the pit in front of the stage, throwing their bodies against each other in a wild-thing rumpus. Dirk felt that he fit in here much better than at school. Exene wove around with her two-tone hair hanging over her eyes and her arms and legs sticking out of her little black dress like the limbs of a doll that had been thrown around too much. John Doe’s face looked even whiter against his black hair as he twisted it into expressions of torture and ecstasy, baring his teeth or pouting like James Dean. Billy Zoom’s platinum ice devil smile never left his lips as he played his guitar at crotch level. The music made Dirk think of black roses on fire. He wanted to leap onstage and dive into the crowd the way some of the boys were doing. He wanted to play music that would make the boys in the pit sweat like that. Maybe that was how those boys cried, Dirk thought. Maybe he would start a band called the Tear Jerks. For a moment he remembered sitting in his room with Pup, Pup holding the guitar, but he let the drums beat the thought away. His own band. Dirk and the Tear Jerks. Tear Jerk Dirk.

His throat and heart felt tight, constricted with dryness, so he bought a beer and gulped it down. Then he
went and stood at the edge of the slammers. Some boys behind him were moving up and down in place, jostling him forward. Finally he flung himself into the writhing body mass. It was like surfing in a way, fighting to stay up above seething waters that wanted to consume you, part of you wanting to be consumed, to vanish into radiance.

“The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss,” X sang.

Dirk felt the bitterness and anguish making his lips tingle. He raged arms and legs akimbo into the fury. He was carried forward by the whirlpools of the crowd to the stage. On the stage. Blinded sweat tears lights. Howling. Panic. Pandemonium. Pan, hooved horned god. Flinging himself off into space. Waiting for the fall, the hard smack, unconsciousness.

No. Buoyed up. Thrilling sweat-slick biceps. Cradled for a moment. Father. Father. Objects in flight around the room. Fragments of poetry. Lost eyes far away. Eyes like boats drifting farther and farther away.

He was back on his feet again. The crowd had caught him. He had felt their respect and admiration. He wiped off sweat with the back of his hand and went to get another beer. As he walked through the crowd he felt some bodies move back to give him room, witness his strength, others brush against him to feel it. The lights caught zipper metal and raven hair. Sweat on tan skin like beer drops brown glass glisten.

After the show Dirk gave Kaboodle some water and
walked him until he peed. A boy and girl with matching burgundy hair that stood straight up on their heads like flames smiled at them.

“Mohawk dog,” the boy said. “You’re twins.” Dirk and Kaboodle smiled back.

They got in the car and drove by Oki Dogs on Santa Monica Boulevard. Punks, kids with long greasy hair and junky-bulky veins in shriveled arms, tall men with big cars and sharp teeth, sat on the scarred benches under fluorescent lights that buzzed like flies or fat cooking. Dirk stopped the Pontiac and got out. The man at the counter shouted at him, “Okay okay,” so he just said, “Oki Dog and a Coke.” The Oki Dog was a giant hot dog smothered with cheese and beans and pastrami slices and wrapped in a tortilla. Dirk ate a few bites. It tasted salty greasy rich dark danger like the night. He was so hungry.

Then he saw a shrink-wrap swastika earring. It was dangling from the ear of a girl with spikey hair. The girl was drinking a Coke and giggling with her friends. She could have been Tracey or Nancy with a punk haircut.

“Do you know what that earring means?” Dirk said. He had never spoken out like this but suddenly his nerves felt huge, fluorescent, explosive. Maybe from the music still in his head. Maybe from the symbol.

The girl giggled. “It’s a punk thing.”

“Do you know who Hitler was?” Dirk asked.

“Yeah sure.”

“Really? You know about the concentration camps?”

“Kind of. I guess. Why?”

“Hitler massacred innocent people. I’m sure you heard about it sometime. That was his symbol. The swastika.”

“I got it at Poseur. It’s cool.”

“It is so uncool. You can’t even believe how uncool it is,” Dirk said.

The girl lowered her eyes. She looked to her friends and back to Dirk.

Dirk left Oki Dogs and got in his car. Kaboodle kissed his face and Dirk gave him the rest of the Oki Dog. As they drove away Dirk saw the girl pull the earring out of her ear and look at it.

So maybe it wasn’t what he thought, this scene. But it was a wild enough animal safari that his own beastliness might go unnoticed.

He drove over the city’s shoulders tattooed with wandering, hungry children and used car lots, drove past hanging traffic light earrings into beery breath mist, up and up above the city, trying to shed it like a skin. On the city’s shaved head was the crown of the Griffith Observatory. The viewing balcony was closed, but the star Dirk had come to see was the bronze bust of James Dean on its pedestal. He gazed into its light and would have exchanged his soul for that boy’s if he could.

Because he couldn’t give his soul to James Dean, Dirk kept going out. Just keep going out, he told himself.

The Vex was a club in an old ballroom. Dirk drove into the parking lot under a freeway, concrete shaking like an earthquake. Inside there was a long curved bar and columns and balconies and chandeliers but everything looked ready to crumble from age and the freeway vibrations. Dirk watched a boy and girl slamming. The boy threw the girl down on the ground. She was wearing a lot of metal that shocked against the wood of the floor. He started hitting her in the face. Finally some guys broke it up but to Dirk it seemed like it went on forever. There was blood the color of her lipstick on the girl’s face.

Dirk felt the piece of pizza he had eaten for dinner hot in his throat and ran into the bathroom. When he looked up under the greenish-white chill of the lights, his head felt as if he had slammed it against porcelain.

After that, Dirk drove along Sunset to the Carney’s hot dog train.

“Do you have a dollar?” The boy sitting in front of Carney’s looked like Sid Vicious. “I’m Sinbad,” he said.

He was really skinny so Dirk motioned for him to follow him in. But when they were sitting on the bench outside, Sinbad said he didn’t want the hot dog Dirk had bought.

“I’m a vampire,” he said.

“A what?”

“A vampire.”

He bared his teeth. He had fangs.

“They’re bonded on,” he said. “They really work. Want to see?”

“No,” Dirk said.

“Don’t you want to exchange blood with me?” He leaned closer on the bench.

“Get away from me,” said Dirk.

“You don’t know what might happen,” said Sinbad.

Two boys walked by, leaning against each other, sharing a frozen yogurt.

“If you ask me all those fags are going to die out,” said Sinbad.

As he got in his car, wishing he had brought Kaboodle for a kiss and a wink, Dirk thought of Sinbad’s eyes. They were familiar. Where had he seen them? Then Dirk knew he had seen those eyes in the mirror when he scrutinized his face for blemishes and imperfections, when he imagined that no one would ever love him.

Fifi was volunteering at a local hospital the next night. Dirk was home listening to his Adolescents album.

“I hate them all—creatures.”

The angry voice made Fifi’s collection of plaster Jesus statues shake as if there were an earthquake, or as if they were about to start slamming, Dirk thought. He imagined
a pit full of slamming plaster Jesuses. He didn’t like the thought.

Suddenly Fifi’s music box with the ballerina on top began to play, the ballerina going around and around on one toe. The china cabinet doors flew open and Fifi’s coaster collection spun out like tiny Frisbees. Dirk covered his head to protect himself. The clown paintings on the walls swung back and forth, and Dirk thought he heard them laughing evil clown laughter. Dirk had never liked the clowns. He turned away from their leering mouths and saw the plaster Jesus statues slamming. Dirk stared into the eyes of one of them. The eyes were glowing. The statue fell from the shelf and its head broke off but the eyes kept sizzling like fried eggs. Finally the Adolescents’ song was over and the house was quiet. Dirk heard an owl hooting in a branch outside the window and some cats screaming. He could have screamed like that. He plucked his wet T-shirt away from his sweating body and collapsed on the bed.

Fear, the band, was playing out in the valley. Dirk armed himself in chains and the leather motorcycle jacket. He rode the 101. The freeway made him think of loss instead of hope, stretching out under a hovering orangish buzz of night air, not seeming to lead anywhere. At night the valley felt deserted. Dirk drove down barren streets under tall streetlamps. The little houses looked
blank, as if they wanted to deny that anything unpleasant happened in or around them, but the way they were nestling under the crackling telephone wires, Dirk knew they were afraid.

Dirk got to the place where Fear was. Punks were hanging out in the parking lot drinking beers, smoking, grimacing—everything out of the sides of their mouths. White-bleached hair bright under the blue lights, black-dyed hair stiff with hair spray, ears and noses pierced with metal, backs covered with leather. Some boys were giving each other tattoos with ink and needles. One boy was burning his arm with a cigarette butt while a girl shrieked at him. Dirk couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.