Baby Be-Bop Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 warriorMohawk. 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 hewent 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