Baby Be-Bop

Author:Francesca Lia Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Gay
ISBN: 9780062035929
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1995-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Be-Bop Bo-Peep

A nd that was when the guitar in the corner began to play by itself.

Dirk opened his eyes. The guitar seemed to be floating on its side, strings trembling with music. Strands of smoke were flying out of the golden lamp and whirling around the guitar.

“Daddy,” Dirk said out loud, remembering something he had lost a long time ago.

And Dirk’s daddy Dirby McDonald’s face appeared out of the smoke just above the guitar, as handsome as James Dean, not much older than Dirk, eyes soft with love like a lullaby behind his black-framed glasses. Lullaby eyes.

“Dirk,” his father said, “hang on now.”

Dirk nodded. He could taste blood in his mouth like he’d been sucking on a dirty metal harmonica.

“You came back,” Dirk said.

“You want a story. A wake-up story. A come-back story.”

“Yes. Please,” Dirk said. “Please tell me who you are. I’ve always wanted to know. I feel like I don’t exist. I feel like I’m spinning through space losing atoms, becoming invisible, disintegrating. I …”

“Shhh, now,” Dirk’s father said. His voice was gentle. It was like his guitar. Like his eyes. Dirk thought, His eyes are guitars.

“What do you want to know?”

“What you felt. Who you were. Why you died.”

“I always felt lonely,” Dirby said. “It was just who I was born to be. I felt more like a part of nature than like a boy. Do you know what I mean?”

Dirk wasn’t sure.

“I’d look at the stars in the sky or at trees and I’d want to be that. I worried Fifi. She was always trying to get me to be normal—play with the other kids, laugh more. She took me to her bungalow on the studio lot and showed me how she made the limbs of creatures move by drawing them again and again on clear sheets with light shining through. One of her projects was a story about herself and my father. The fireflies had devilish grins, the ladybugs had long eyelashes, the honeybees sang like Cab Calloway and the spiders danced like Fred and Ginger. She tried to get me to laugh, but I just asked questions about howbutterflies hatched from cocoons and how spiders made their webs. I wanted to walk in the hills at night and get as close to the moon and stars as I could. I wanted to lie in the dark grasses of the canyon and listen to the wind play them like the strings of a guitar. I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn’t make sense to my teachers. They didn’t rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets’ motion, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn’t think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. My forehead was lined before I was sixteen and I was always thin no matter how much Fifi tried to feed me.

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