Metal Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

talk like that!” The man, who was as young and thin and overbred as Mercedes himself, started to flush and moisten at the eyes. “He was beautiful, you hear what I’m saying? Beautiful.”
    â€œSure. Nice buns, huh?”
    â€œIt wasn’t like that!”
    The little slut looked ready to attack. The man sitting next to him placed a hand on his arm, and the bartender said gently, “Hey, buddy, don’t go getting yourself upset. It ain’t worth it. If it was an angel, why would he be walking? He had big wings, why didn’t he fly?”
    â€œCome on, chill out,” said the other drinker. “Hey, what’re you having? I’ll buy you one.”
    Mercedes got up and headed toward the ladies’ room, where he used the john lid to inhale a line of low-grade cocaine. He doubted the ladies’ was ever used for much else. Women never came into this place, not even dykes. They knew they weren’t welcome.
    When Mercedes came back, the drunk had capitulated. “Okay, okay,” he was saying tearfully to the bar, “maybe it was just a nice ass in fake wings. Okay.” The other barsitter had his arm around him, and the bartender stood by with his brow wrinkled like a spaniel’s. Mercedes put his back to the three of them and watched the door, waiting, the way some people waited for their prince to come, though in his case he knew things were different. He was the prince. He awaited a disciple who would recognize him.
    Mercedes’s ambitions were simple and mystic: He wanted to be God. Translated into secular terms that meant being big, very big, in Hollywood, because he who is glorified in Hollywood is deified all over the world. He would be colossal, and it didn’t much matter how, whether in movies, on TV, in music, maybe playing kickass guitar or fronting the ultimate band—Mercedes embraced all these possibilities, and knew one of them would open itself to him, because he believed in himself. It did not trouble him that his talents were mediocre. In fact he did not think in terms of talent at all. What was necessary, he knew, was to meet the right person, his own anointed John the Baptist, someone to prepare the way for him. Therefore he risked humiliation, going to exclusive parties where he was sometimes stopped at the door, careful to wear the right clothes, careful (if he got in) to look mildly amused at everything and appear ready to leave at any moment, careful to seem bored and interesting. So far only unimportant people had paid attention to him, but someday (to this article of faith he adhered with apostolic fervor) he would be a star.
    More than a star. A sun. The sun. It would happen, Mercedes knew, because his motives were pure: To hell with fame and money; he wanted to be a media messiah. He wanted to found a religion of himself. He wanted to be worshiped.
    From time to time there had been friends and lovers who seemed to like him for a while but did not take him seriously enough. They were not offering him devotion the way they were supposed to. A prophet hath no honor in his own country. And L.A. was, he knew, Mercedes Kell country. Back in Kickapoo, Illinois, where his parents had adored him until they found out he was gay, where he had always taken the lead in the school plays and everyone had known he was special, he had nevertheless felt like a stranger, as if he had happened there by mistake, stolen from some more distinguished cradle. But arriving in L.A., leaving behind forever his family and his lower-class given name, he had felt himself coming home. Yet so far nobody had made his apotheosis happen.
    The inebriate who had seen the angel and the man who had bought him a drink were going out together. Mercedes watched, warming himself by imagining where they would go, what they would do and in what sequence. He thought of picking up someone himself, then dismissed the thought. Sometimes he settled for what he got. But most times,