Beautiful Boys (19 page)

Duck and Bam-Bam went to the beach and slept on the picnic tables. In the morning Duck surfed while Bam-Bam sat on the sand and sketched him. Duck made them coffee, boiling water over the campfire.

“Do you like L.A.?” Duck asked.

“It’s okay I guess. It’ll be better when I get my shit together. I design furniture.”

“Like what?”

“Well for now it’s just drawings.” Bam-Bam opened his sketch pad. He showed Duck pictures of tables made from surfboards and other ones covered with a mosaic of bottle caps and broken glass and china. There was some neo-Flintstone-style furniture made from broken slabs of stone and boulders, and some shaped like dinosaurs.

“You fully rip,” Duck said.

Bam-Bam smiled so the gap between his teeth showed.

“So where do you live?” Duck finally asked.

“Sometimes I can find a squat. Sometimes I go to the shelter. When I have money I get a motel with
some other kids. Why, you looking for a place?”

“Today I’m going to go look for an apartment,” Duck said. “If you want you can stay with me for a while.”

“How much?”

“It wouldn’t cost you anything. And you could get off the streets.”

Bam-Bam looked suspicious. Duck hoped he hadn’t hurt his feelings. “I just don’t know anybody out here,” he added. “You could kind of show me around. You could design me a table. Just don’t use my surfboard for a table!”

Duck and Bam-Bam found a one-bedroom apartment on Venice Beach. Duck surfed every morning and worked at the shop all day. At night he took an acting workshop but he was always too shy to present anything. After a while the teacher, Preston Delbert, just gave up and ignored Duck. But Duck kept going, sitting in the back, wondering if he would ever find a voice inside of him or something to say with it.

Bam-Bam stayed home painting murals of the ocean on the walls, designing furniture and making omelettes or peanut butter sandwiches for him and
Duck to eat. He cut Duck’s hair short so that it looked like the petals of a sunflower. Duck suggested that maybe Bam-Bam should take a class in furniture design at a city college or go to beauty school but Bam-Bam said he wasn’t ready. He stopped going out altogether. He said he was afraid that he’d get caught back up in street life. At night, Duck and Bam-Bam slept in the same bed holding each other but they didn’t make love. Bam-Bam said he didn’t feel like it and Duck was too shy and inexperienced to push him. Duck wondered if he would ever know what it was like to make love to a boy he loved. Sometimes he wanted to go back to Rage or do something wild in a men’s room or cruise in a park but he was afraid. He felt that he had to be responsible too, and set a good example for Bam-Bam.

One day Duck came back from work and saw that Bam-Bam’s things were gone. There was a picture of an angel, like the chalk one on the sidewalk, painted above Duck’s bed. Under it was written, “I love you, Duck. You will find your true angel. I am a dangerous one. Bam-Bam.”

Duck sat on the bed and cried. He wasn’t sure
why he was crying so hard. I didn’t know him that well, Duck told himself. He was a street kid. He couldn’t stay inside with me forever. He wasn’t my boyfriend, he didn’t even want to make love with me. But still Duck cried. He was crying for the first person who knew his secret and for the painter of angels and for the warmth of those thin, cigarette-burned arms and maybe for something else—a premonition of what would happen later.

After Bam-Bam left, Duck went out every night, prowling the streets, maneuvering through them as if he was surfing perilous waves. He never talked to the men he touched in bathrooms and parks and cars. Is this what it means to be gay? Duck wondered. He missed the clean, quiet beaches of Santa Cruz, the softer sun and the sparkling, swirling colors of the waves and sky, the cathedral forests of redwood trees and the way he saw rabbits or long-legged baby deer who hopped like rabbits and heard the soft motorcycle hum of quail in the woods near his house. He missed being cleansed by the ocean he had practically grown up in, hiking home with his smiling sunlit
dogs, sitting in the reeds by the pond listening to the frogs as evening slowly settled. He even missed the skinned-looking yellow slime banana slugs on the forest paths. Mostly, though, Duck missed his mother and his little brothers and sisters. He thought he could hear them squeal, “I’m not delirious, I’m in love!”—the words Duck felt he could never say. I guess I deserve this, Duck thought, holding a man in a cold-tiled, sour-smelling men’s room. In the dark he could not even see the man’s face and he was glad because he knew the man couldn’t see him either.

Where are you? he called silently to his soul mate, the love of his life whose name he did not yet know. By the time I find you I may be so old and messed up you won’t even recognize me. Maybe this is what I deserve for wanting to find a man. Looking for you always, never finding you, poisoning myself.

Then the lights from a passing car revealed the eyes of the man whose hands were on Duck. The eyes were like tile. Duck shivered.

“Faggot,” the man said. “How much do you hate yourself, faggot? Enough to come to piss stalls in the night? Enough to die?”

Duck tried to wrench away but the man had fingers in his arm like needles. He tried to scream but no sound came out of his throat to echo against the walls of the empty men’s room.

“It is only a whisper now,” the man hissed. “But it is coming. It is in your closest friend. Maybe it is in you, too.”

That was when a light filled the doorway. In that radiance Duck was surprised to recognize something of himself. In that moment pulsing with a diffused rainbow mist of tenderness whispering, whispering, “Love comes, love comes,” Duck was able to pull away and into the night. He felt as if he was surfing on a magic carpet and he thought he heard a voice calling to him, “Do you have a story to tell?”

When he got home Duck looked at his face in the mirror and saw that the bay windows in his eyes had clouded over and there was a roughness about his chin now. What story do I have to tell? Duck wondered.

The next night in his acting class Duck asked Preston Delbert if he could perform a monologue. Preston Delbert looked suspicious.

“I’d forgotten all about you, Duck,” he said. “I don’t think invisibility and muteness are very good traits for an actor.”

“I know,” said Duck. “But I have something to say now.”

Duck got up in front of the class. His hands felt like they were covered with ice cream. He started to sit back down. Then he heard the voice asking if he had a story to tell. So Duck told the class the story of his mother and father and brothers and sisters. He told the story of Harley and Cherish Marine. And then Duck told the story of Bam-Bam. The class was silent. Some people had tears in their eyes. Duck felt as if his heart was an angel. Bam-Bam’s sidewalk angel—that light, that full of light.

Soon Duck will meet his love. When Duck sees his love he will know that the rest of his story has begun. It will not be too late for either of them. The sweetness and openness they were born with will come back when they see each other in the swimming, surfing lights.

And we are still young, Duck will think. I wish I had
met you when I was born, but we are still young pups.

They will still be young enough to do everything either of them has ever dreamed of doing, to feel everything they have always wanted to feel.

When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world.

And the story was over. Dirk felt he had lived it. Was it a story told to him by the man in the turban who now sat watching him from the foot of the bed? Had he dreamed it? Told it to himself? Whatever it was, it was already fading away leaving its warmth and tingle like the sun’s rays after a day of surfing, still in the cells when evening comes.

“Who are you?” Dirk asked the man, his voice surfing over the waves of tears in his throat. “Who is Duck?”

“You know who I am, I think. You can call me by a lot of names. Stranger. Devil. Angel. Spirit. Guardian. You can call me Dirk. Genius if I do say so myself. Genie.

“Duck—you’ll find out who he is someday.”

“Why are you here?”

“Think about the word destroy,” the man said. “Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That’s re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.

“You set some spirits free, Dirk,” he went on. “You gave your story. And you have received the story that hasn’t happened yet.”

Dirk knew he had been given more than that. He was alive. He didn’t hate himself now. There was love waiting; love would come.

He was aware, suddenly, of being in a dark tunnel, as if his body was the train full of fathers speeding through space toward a strange and glowing luminescence. He wanted that light more than he had wanted anything in his life. It was like Dirby, brilliant and bracing; it was a poem animating objects, animating his heart, pulling him toward it; it was a huge dazzling theater of love. On the stage that was that
light he saw Gazelle in white crystal satin and lace chrysanthemums dancing with the genie, spinning round and round like folds of saltwater taffy. Dirk also saw the slim treelike form of a man in top hat and tails, surrounded with butterflies. When he looked more closely Dirk saw that they were not regular butterflies at all but butterfly wings attached to tiny naked girls who resembled young Fifis. Grandfather Derwood, Dirk thought. And Dirk saw Dirby too, Be-Bop Bo-Peep, tossing into the air wineglasses that became stars while Just Silver, balanced on the skull of death, held up her long ring-flashing hands and moved her head back and forth on her neck. He wanted to go to them. But there was one thing they were all saying to him over and over again.

“Not yet, not your time.”

Dirk McDonald saw his Grandma Fifi sitting beside him, her hair cotton-candy pink as the morning sun streamed in on it.

“Grandma,” Dirk whispered. He looked around. White walls. The smell of disinfectant. Liquids dripping in tubes, into him.

“Where are we?”

“The hospital,” Fifi said. “How do you feel?”

“Better.”

“The doctor says you’re going to be just fine.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh, quite some time now. We’ve been telling each other stories, you and I, Baby Be-Bop. Past present future. Body mind soul,” and Grandma Fifi squeezed Dirk’s hand, knowing everything, loving him anyway.

Dirk closed his eyes. There was no tunnel but there was light—a sunflower-haired boy riding on waves the ever-changing colors of his irises.

Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free.