Beautiful Boys Read Online Free PDF

garbage and Chinese food and cannolis and steaks and drug dealers and paintings and subways and cigarettes and mannequins and a million other things and I am looking for one kind-of-small boy who left me. As if I know where he would be. As if he wanted me to find him. Why am I here at all?
    I see men crumple-slumped in the gutters like empty coats and women who hide their bodies and look like their heads hurt. I see couples of men that look older and thinner than they should and kids that look harder than everybody pretends kids look. Everything vicious and broken and my eyes ache dry and tearless in my sockets. I can’t even take pictures.
    Subway.
    In Angel Juan’s letter: I close my eyes underground to try to see you jammin’ on your drums, your hair all flying out like petals, beat pulsing in your flower-stem neck.
    I go down, tilting my roller-skate wheels into the steps and holding on to the rail so I don’t free-fall.
    The trains are all I can hear burning through the emptiness inside of me like acid on a cut—no music. There aren’t any boys playing guitars down here, their eyelashes grazing their cheekbones to protect them from the fluorescent light, their bodies shivery like guitar strings.
    I get on a train and stand in between all the padded people with puffy faces and blind eyes.
    I climb up the subway stairs with my skates still on, using my arms to hoist me.
    On the street I see a scary-looking girl with jungle-wild hair and eyes and then I see it’s me reflected in a stained oval mirror that’s propped against some trash cans. I drag the mirror back to the apartment holding it away from me so I don’t have to see my face.
    I’m thrashed and mashed—starving and ready to cry again. My arms and legs are shaking and I can hardly make it up to the ninth floor carrying the mirror, even with my skates off. My head is full of wound-pictures, my camera is empty and I feel farther away from Angel Juan than ever.
    On the door of Charlie Bat’s apartment is a note.
    Lily: Meet us in the lobby for dinner at 6:00. Your benevolent almost-almost uncles, Meadows and Mallard.
    I would rather collapse in the pomegranate garden of the Persian carpet and go to sleep forever, but I make myself wash my face and go downstairs.
    Mallard and Meadows are waiting for me in the lobby wearing their tweed coats.
    “How was your day?” Mallard asks.
    I shrug.
    “You look tired. Did you eat anything?”
    “We are going to buy you a nice big dinner,” Meadows says.
    They walk on either side of me like tweedy angels or like halves of a pair of wings as we go through the streets past the meat-packing plants. Meadows’s cane taps on the cobblestones. Some six-foot-tall skulkster drag queens wait in the shadows flashing at the passing cars. Mallard picks a wildflower that grows up between the stones. It’s a strange-looking lily and I wonder why it’s growing here in the middle of the meat and dark.
    The restaurant is hidden on a narrow winding side street. We come in out of the cold.
    This place is like somebody’s enchanted living room. There’s flowered paper on the walls. If you look close you can see tiny mysterious creatures peering out from between the wallpaper flowers and the lavender-and-white frosted rosette-shaped glass lights strung around the ceiling blink on and off, making it look like the creatures are dancing. On every table there are burning towers of wax roses that give off a honey smell. The music isn’t like anything I ever heard before. It’s crickety and rivery. The waitress has a dreamy-face, long blonde curls and a tiny waist. She is wearing a crochet lace dress. She serves us tea that smells like a forest and makes my headache go away. Then she brings huge mismatched antique floral china plates heaped with brown rice and these vegetables that I’ve never seen before but taste like what goddesses would eat if they ate their vegetables. Miso-oniony, golden-pumpkiny, sweety-lotusy, sesame-seaweedy.