Pink Smog (8 page)

“I'm sorry.” It was the first time I had stopped thinking about myself that afternoon.

“But then I realized that the whole thing is bullshit—this parent-child thing. Some people are lucky to have it but a lot of them don't. You just have to make your own family, your own life. Whatever. Even when you're a kid and it feels too hard. That's the only way. You have to figure out how to take care of yourself before anything else will work out.”

I nodded and watched him squinting into the tangle of foliage around us.

“This is beautiful,” he said. “Here. That's another thing you've got to do. You've got to see the beauty whenever you can and take what you can get. Otherwise you just get old.”

“Like Charlie,” I said. “He got old. And my mom, too.”

Winter tossed his hair out of his eyes and leaned back in the swing, stretching his arms up behind him and cracking his knuckles. “They all do. But not me. I'll never get old.” There wasn't teenage invincible, live-forever bravado in his voice—he sounded a little melancholy, almost.

The day seemed to get darker and cooler all at once. A blackbird cawed ominously in a tree overhead and I wanted to leave. I had seen the beauty in things before, when I was a kid, but I wasn't so sure about it anymore. Even the prettiest flowers were toxic. I wondered if thinking like that would make me old at thirteen.

Winter stood up and reached for my hand. My skates were unsteady in the sand.

“He'll call,” Winter said. “Just make sure you answer the phone.”

We got back to our building and he looked at me for a moment before we said good-bye. The sadness on his face was back, like the real Winter revealed under a warrior's metal mask. I wanted to hug him but I didn't. It would have been impossible for me to let go.

“Get that phone, Weetzie Bat,” he said.

When it rang that night while we were watching TV, I pounced on it. My mom was dozing in her chair and didn't notice.

“Daddy?” I almost screamed it before he had even said hello. There was a long silence. Then the sound of a man clearing his throat.

“Hi, baby.”

My mom stirred in the chair and moved her hands around as if she were swatting at an imaginary fly. “Who is it?” she slurred, but her eyes were half closed.

“Just a friend from school.” I whispered into the phone, “I'm going to pick it up in my room. Don't hang up. Don't hang up, okay?”

He made a soft sound.

“Okay?”

“Okay, Weetz.”

I placed the phone down and ran into my room. He was still there.

“What are you doing?” I saw that my hands were shaking with adrenaline but they didn't even feel like mine. “Why did you leave without telling me? Where are you? You didn't call!”

“I tried,” he said softly. His voice was hoarse. “I'm sorry, Weetzie.”

It was the sound of him saying my name that broke me into little pieces. Tears burned in my sinuses.

“Sweetie?” He waited while I took a breath, rough as if my throat were corrugated. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said. “I miss you. I want to go with you.”

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. You can't go with me.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm in New York. You need to stay and take care of your mother.”

I picked up the Empire State Building paperweight he had left behind. I had known he was there all along. Where else would he be? I squinted my eyes and saw a tiny Charlie and a tiny Weetzie waltzing inside of the glass ball. She was gazing up at him like he was a shining monument.

“Take care of her?” I said. “She's supposed to take care of me. So are you.”

“I will, honey. I'll send money. I have to straighten some things out.”

“Like what?” I wanted to scream at him but I kept my voice soft so my mother wouldn't hear. “Like how to bring your new girlfriend and her kids with you? Your buddy Winter and his crazy sister? Is that it?”

“Weetzie? What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I'm stupid? I'm not a little kid. I know what it looks like.”

“What things look like is not necessarily what they are.” He sounded so sad. I imagined him resting his head in his hand, stroking his stubbled chin with his palm. He cleared his throat. “Weetzie, I'm not with anyone right now, all right? I had to get away from everything and get my head straight.”

I heard a click and my mom's voice. “Hello? Are you still on the phone, Louise? Who is it?”

And then, with that, Charlie was gone.

The first thing I wanted to do was run over to number 13 and knock on the door, wake that woman, shake her, and scream at her for ruining my life. But what I really wanted was for her son to answer and hold me in his arms and give me the comfort my father no longer could.

Instead, I lay in bed and thought about being in the yellow VW Bug with Winter. We would have the stereo on and the sun was shining in and sometimes as we drove through the tangled, green canyons and along the shore pulsing with blue ocean light he would look over, smile, and put his hand on my thigh in its jeans.

“I'll take care of you,” he would say.

That didn't happen. The touching part or the thing he said. But Winter did take me for a drive in his VW one day.

It was Saturday and there was a knock on the door. I answered without thinking. I was wearing cutoffs and my pajama shirt and my hair was a nest for rats.

Winter was standing with his skateboard tipped up by one foot. He shook his hair out of his eyes but it fell back immediately.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I gulped. I could feel my face turning the color of my pink flannel pajama shirt.

“What's up?”

“Uh. Not much. Just waking up.” I looked down at my outfit.

“Sorry. I was just wondering if you wanted to go for a drive or something. Where we could talk.” He peered behind me, toward the living room, and I knew he was thinking about my mom, wanting to avoid her.

“Uh. Sure. Yeah. Hang on.”

“I'll meet you downstairs,” he said, grabbed his skateboard, and disappeared so fast that it made me wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

I washed and dressed quickly, to the rhythm of my pounding heart, praying it was real and that if it were he wouldn't leave. Shower. Secret. Jeans. T-shirt. Lip gloss. Bye, Mom. Gone.

He was waiting for me, leaning against the Bug like a boy in a movie. At that moment it was as if nothing sad had ever happened to me. It is so strange the way the chemicals in our brain can work like that—erasing all the sorrow with one rush of joy, even if it isn't really real.

We drove east, not talking, just listening to the cassette he played, a woman's raspy voice singing over raucous chords. She was whispering something about horses again and again. I'd never heard anything like it.

Finally, I asked who she was.

“Patti Smith. Isn't she cool?” He handed me the cassette. It had a picture of a gaunt, androgynous person in a white shirt, a string of black tie hanging loose around her neck. I wondered if I should try wearing one of Charlie's ties.

“Your dad likes her,” he said.

My dad? A little drumbeat of jealousy shook me from inside. Why was my dad talking about music with this boy? He had never even mentioned Patti Smith to me. I scratched at the denim encasing my thigh. How stupid was I for getting excited about going out with Winter? He'd never be interested in me. This was all arranged by my father.

Winter turned north up Beachwood. The houses spilled down the hillsides with their gardens of avocados, plum and lemon trees that you could live off of if you had to, their high walls and windows overlooking the city beneath the Hollywood sign.

The sign used to read Hollywoodland my dad had told me. Hollywoodland. Holly Woodlawn, the famous transsexual who was part of Andy Warhol's Factory. Holly Golightly, Truman Capote's character from
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, played by Audrey Hepburn in the movie, standing in the rain kissing George Peppard and squishing Cat between their wet trench coats. Holly and Ivy, plants and names of two of my dolls who had burned in the cottage fire. Hollyberries for which the land was named. I let the words run through my head so I wouldn't have to think about what was happening. Why was Winter taking me out with him on a Saturday? If this beautiful boy wasn't interested in me, what did he plan to do? In a beat, the music sounded ominous, even sinister. I imagined the headline: Teen Girl's Body Found at Base of Hollywood Sign: Skateboard Killer At Large. I thought about Peggy Entwistle, the blonde actress who had jumped to her death from the sign in 1932. She had died of multiple fractures to her pelvis. I wondered how long it took her to die and if the coyotes got to her. The day she'd died she had received a letter informing her that she had gotten the lead part in a play, playing a woman who kills herself in the first act. I wondered if the news would have made her reconsider.

We wound higher and stopped where the road ended at a fire road gate. Winter got out. I followed him like a puppet with a wooden stick for a spine and strings attached to my arms and legs. I realized that I didn't care that much what happened to me. I suddenly just felt really tired.

He sat on the hillside under the sign and I sat, too. The grasses were parched, yellow, and scratchy around us and the city spread out below under that blue-gray layer of haze. Winter didn't look like a murderer. He didn't even have his skateboard to hit me over the head with. We stared out at the city. My dad always said that the best parts of L.A. were the high places, like the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory and Mulholland Drive, where you could look down at it and pretend the city was just a pretty expanse of lights and not a cultural wasteland full of broken dreams.

“Did you hear from him?” Winter asked as if he had read my mind again. It wasn't hard to figure out what I was thinking about, but still. I wondered if Winter had brought me all the way there just to ask me that.

I nodded. That was all I was going to give him.

“That's good. Right?” He looked over at me.

“Why are you doing this?” I turned on him. The woman's voice was still in my head.
Horses horses horses
.

“Doing what?”

“Why do you care about what happens with me and my dad?”

He was quiet for a little while. Then he said, “I'm trying to help.”

I stood and stamped my feet like a kid having a tantrum. “But why? Why do you care? Why should I even trust you at all?”

“Weetzie!” He leaped up beside me. It was the first time I'd seen him angry since he'd called the dogs off. But now he was angry at me. “I don't know why I tried to help you!” He kicked at some dirt with the toe of his shoe. “Let's get out of here.”

He was heading back down the hill.

“Wait!” I said. “I'm sorry.” I wanted to explain to him about all the things that had built up inside me. The loss of my trust in Charlie and my jealousy of Purple Woman and my crush on Winter that would never come to anything and how I wanted him to kiss me and how I had imagined he was going to kill me and throw my body off the top of the Hollywood sign. I couldn't say any of it. He already thought I was crazy.

He turned back to me. His voice was a little softer now but his eyes didn't focus on mine. “Listen. It was a bad idea, okay? I don't know why I brought you here. I need to get back now.”

I followed him the rest of the way, down into what my dad called the boneyard of broken dreams.

My dad didn't call again. My mother drank. I understood this more now, why she'd been drinking ever since around the time of that photograph in Winter's apartment. I understood it but I still didn't know what to do about it really, except to try to make food for her and hide the bottles whenever I could. I tried to accept my new haircut, even though it made me feel dorky and naked and seemed to overemphasize the exaggerated uptilt of my nose and the saucer shape of my eyes. I tried to concentrate in class but my grades were slipping. My skin broke out a little around my chin. I ignored Staci, Marci, and Kelli when they swept by me with their slack-jawed, evil-eyed boyfriends. I ignored it when Jeff Heller came up behind me in the hall and goosed me through my jeans, his fingers grabbing me so hard that I almost vomited. I ignored it when Casey Cassidy barked at me and Lily, although I wanted to flip him off. I ignored it when Rick Rankin passed me and my friends and growled, “The fag, the dog, and the freak,” even though Bobby flipped him off and Lily looked like she was going to cry. I tried not to think about Winter's sister or his perilously beautiful mother who had lured my father away from Brandy-Lynn or about the fact that now he had left us all.

Days just happened to me, and then nights.

I didn't hear from Winter and I didn't go looking for him but I thought about him every night before I fell asleep and sometimes I dreamed that he was sitting at my bedside telling me fairy tales like my dad used to. It felt so real that when I woke up I was startled Winter wasn't there.

I was lonely but not as much as the Lonely Doll was before she met the bears. I invited Lily and Bobby over to my place. My mom hardly noticed. Every afternoon we went into my room and sloshed around on my waterbed and crunched around on my beanbag chairs and ran our fingers through the plastic bead curtains that hung around my bed. We listened to Led Zeppelin and tripped out on the album cover art of the naked blonde kids scrambling over the psychedelic rocks. One day Bobby brought a joint. The smoke hurt my lungs and I didn't get what the big deal was but afterward we made Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies and ate the whole batch (well, Bobby and I did). I have to admit chocolate had never tasted so good. Then we went swimming in the pool in the light rain that had started to fall. When I saw Lily in her baggy one-piece navy-blue bathing suit I got scared because you could see almost every bone in her body like a plastic Halloween skeleton but I didn't want to think about it too much. I didn't want to hurt her feelings either. Some people were just skinny, right?