Dangerous Angels Quotes

The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood. They didn't even realize where they were living. They didn't care that Marilyn's prints were practically in their backyard at Graumann's; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer's Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and beam and hot dog and pastrami at Oki dogs; that the waitresses wore skates a the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor's; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter's, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers. There was no one who cared. Until Dirk.

Slinkster Dog's stomach gurgled with pleasure. He was very happy because Weetzie was so happy now and her new friend Dirk let him ride in Jerry as long as he didn't pee, and they gave him pizza pie for dinner instead of that weird meat that Weetzie's mom, Brandy-Lynn, tried to dish out when he was left at home.

One day, Weetzie and Dirk brought Grandma Fifi tomatoes from the Fairfax market and prune pastries from Canters. As they were leaving, Fifi called them back.

"You look sad," she said.

"We want Ducks," Dirk said.

Fifi looked them up and down. Then she pointed to her canaries in their cage.

"They are in love. But even before they were in love they knew they were going to be happy and in love some day. They trusted. They have always loved themselves. They would never hurt themselves," Fifi said.

A kiss about apple pie à la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.

The film was quite a success, and it brought Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and their friends money for the first time. They brought a mint 1965 T-bird, and Weetzie went to Gräu and bought a jacket made out of peach and rose and gold silk antique kimonos. They had enough to go to Noshi for sushi whenever they wanted (which was a lot because Weetzie was addicted to the hamachi, which only cost $1.50 an order). They also ate guacamole tostadas at El Coyote (which had, they agreed, some of the best decorations in Hollywood, especially the painting with the real little lights right in it), putting the toppings of guacamole, canned vegetables, Thousand Island dressing, and cheese into the corn tortillas that were served between two plates to keep them warm. Weetzie also bought beads and feathers and white Christmas lights and roses that she saved and dried. She decorated everything in sight with these things until the whole house was a collage of glitter and petals.

Weetzie was pregnant. She felt like a Christmas package. Like a cat full of kittens, Like an Easter basket full of pastel chocolate-malt eggs and solid-milk-chocolate bunnies, and yellow daffodils and dollhouse-sized jelly-bean eggs.

Shangri-L.A. was a remake of Lost Horizon, except that in the movie the horizon was a magical Hollywood where everyone looked like Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo, Bogart, or Garbo, everything was magic castles and star-paved streets and Christmas lights, and no one grew old. Weetzie played a girl on her way to the real Hollywood to become a star. The bus on which she is traveling crashes, and when she regains consciousness she and the other passengers find themselves in the magic land. Weetzie falls in love with the Charlie Chaplin character from Shangri-L.A., and he tells her she can stay there with him and never grow old. She doesn't believe him and insists that they leave together. They fix the bus and drive away, but he immediately ages and dies, leaving her caught in the real Hollywood. "

Hell-A," My Secret Agent Lover Man said.

Making the movie was like dreaming twenty-four hours a day. Weetzie styled her blonde hair in Marilyn waves, and wore strapless satin dresses and rhinestones. She made fringed baby clothes and feathered headdresses for Cherokee and tutus and gauze wings for Witch Baby. Dirk had grown out his Mohawk into a ducktail, and he wore sparkling suits and bolo ties. Duck, in leather, squinted his face up, pretending to be Jimmy dean. And My Secret Agent Lover Man, in a baggy suit, walked toes out, his eyes like charcoal stars. They drove around in the T-bird eating ice cream and filming. In the movie, they got to be a rock band. Dirk and Duck played guitar, My Secret Agent Lover Man bass, Valentine and Raphael drums. Weetzie and Cherokee and Witch Baby and Ping sang. They performed "Ragg Mopp," "Louie-Louie," "Wild Thing," and their own songs like "Lanky Lizard," "Rubber-Chicken Strut," "Irie-Irie," "Witchy Baby," and "Love Warrior."

At the end of Shangri-L.A., Weetzie played a scene in which the starlet shoots up so she can get back to the dream city. After she dies of an overdose in her apartment, she is transported back. In the final scene, she is reunited with the Charlie Chaplin bass player, and the band performs "Love Warrior" in a Casablanca nightclub filled with fans, fronds, and fireflies. Then darkness.

"When I was a kid my mother brought me to Hollywood," Brandy-Lynn said."We lived at the Garden of Allah. She left me alone all day and I went around the pool with my cute little autograph book. It said 'Autographs' on the cover in gold. Clark Gable even signed it! Everyone was so gorgeous. I used to walk to Schwab's and have a hamburger and milkshake for dinner, and I'd swivel around and around on the barstool reading Wonder Woman comics and planning how it would be when I became a star. But what I really wanted was a Charlie Bat. I always loved that man. What happened, Weetzie?"

Dirk drove to Chinatown and walked around the streets that were already emptying as the restaurants closed and the shop owners brought in the porcelain vases, the parasols, kites, screens, jade, and rose quartz and locked their doors. Flyers for Chinese films flapped in the wind. There were carcasses of birds strung up in the windows. Dirk zipped up his leather jacket and walked with his head down but his eyes kept sight of everything around him, of every person he passed. He moved like a piece of blown paper through the windy, hilly Chinatown streets.

Witch Baby had seen sugar skulls and candelabras in the shapes of doves, angels, and trees. She had seen white dresses embroidered with gardens, and she had seen paintings if a dark woman with parrots and flowers and blood and one eyebrow. She liked tortillas with butter melting in the fold as much as candy, and she liked hot days and hibiscus flowers, mariachi bands and especially, now, Angel Juan.

After school, the Goat Guys would run, bicycle, and roller-skate home to play basketball or, when Angel Juan got back from the restaurant wearing his white busboy shirt that smelled of soup and bread and tobacco, they would all ride to the beach in his red truck and surf or play volleyball on the sand until sunset. At night they rehearsed.

She was a pale, thin girl without any outer layers of fur or bone or feathers to protect or carry her. But she could dance and sing, there on the stage. She could send her rhythms into the canyon.

Vixanne powdery-pink and sparkle-platinum as Jayne Mansfield chomp-gnawing off a cluster chunk of crystally-white dry-ice rock candy. Vixanne lounging in a fluorescent green jungle tied up in her own jungle-green writhe-vine hair. Dressed in milky apple blossoms and holding a grimacy shrively monkey-face apple. Wreath of giant blue and orange butterflies around her head. With a rainbow-jeweled-scaled mermaid tale. Vixanne with black roses tattooed on her naked chest. All the the Vixannes staring at me with purple eyes.

Morning. Strawberry sky dusted with white winter powder-sugar sun. And nobody to munch on it with.

Meadow and Mallard and I share a piece of creamy you-wouldn't-believe-it's-soy-curd tofu pie, a piece of scrumptious yam pie and a dense kiss of caroby almond cake.

Charlie tells me to order saffron-yellow vegetable curry with candy-glossy chutney, rice and lentil-bread.

Then he starts scooping and mixing and whirring until he has made this amazing thick frosty snowy whipped-cream-topped vanilla milk shake. He puts it in a tall parfait glass, plops on one of those poison red candied cherries Weetzie won't let us eat, sinks in a straw and sets it on the counter. Then he presses raw meat into a patty and slaps that onto the sizzling grill. I haven't eaten a hamburger in a long time because no one at my house is into meat anymore but that meat smells pounceble. I feel dizzy. I skulk over to the milk shake on the counter and take a sip. You know those cold-headaches you get from eating ice cream too fast when you are a kid? That happens. But the sweet milkiness is like warm kisses at the same time so I just keep inhaling on that straw even with my head and chest frozen and hurting. The man finished the hamburger, slides it onto a fat sourdough bun, adds lettuce and onions and a juicy slab of tomato, stabs the whole thing with a toothpick and sets it in front of me on a plate. I almost fall on top of it. I can taste the meat before my teeth plunge in.

My own magic. Maybe magic is just love. Maybe genies are what love would be if love walked and talked and lived in a lamp. The wishes might not come true the way you think they will, not everything will be perfect, but love will come because it always does, because why else would it exist and it will make everything hurt a little less. You just have to believe in yourself. Look your demons right in the eye. Set you Angel Juans free to do the same thing themselves.

I might not see Angel Juan for a while. But we'll see each other again. Meet to dream-rock-slink-slam it-jam in the heart of the world.

Like we always do.

If Dirk ever cut himself playing, Fifi broke off a piece of the thick green aloe vera plant she called Love and a gel oozed out like Love's clear, thick blood. Fifi put the gel onto Dirk's cut and stuck a Peanuts Band-Aid over it; the cut always healed by the next day, skin smooth as if it had never been broken.

That morning Dirk told Fifi he was especially hungry so when he opened up his lunch there was one sandwich with cheese, avocado, lettuce, pickles, artichoke hearts, olives, red onion and mustard and one with peanut butter, raspberry jam, honey, bananas, and strawberries, both on home-baked bread.

"You're giving me your car!"

He stroked the cherry red, the vanilla white, the silver chrome. It was like a sundae, like a valentine, like a little train, a magic carpet.

"No longer prisoners, we went out into the city that had been forbidden to me for so long. We walked up and down the hills until our legs ached, then rode the trolly car to feel rushes of salty, misty air. We had picnics and fed the swans on the lake under the flowering terra-cotta arches, drank tea and ate pastries in rooms with cupids and rosebuds painted on the walls, strolled through the park, green-dazzled, fragrance-drunk, gasped at treasures gleaming gold in the half-lit glass cases of the museum. Then we'd return with slices, fruits and vegetables from Chinatown, seafood and baguettes from the wharf."

"That's what the bug ambulances are about, I guess," Dirk said. "When Grandma Fifi finds an insect in the house she gets an old yogurt container or something and makes this siren noise. She puts the bug into it and takes it outside. She calls it a bug ambulance."

In the evenings, Derwood came calling with honey from his bees. It tasted like nothing less than nectar made for the love of a golden queen by a hundred droning drones. We slathered it on homemade bread, drizzled it over rice pudding, let big shining drops fall into our teacups and blended it into sauces for the salmon we ate on Fridays.

Instead of grounding me, my love sent me spinning even deeper into the center of loneliness that was the stars and the night and the wind.

But by the end of the evening, and after three beers, she had eaten some yellowtail, slurped a salty, jiggling, orange sea urchin, and even rigorously chewed a piece of white-and-purple octopus, just like when she was young and omnivorous.

On Weetzie's doorstep was a silver tray. She brought it inside and took off the heavy silver cover. There were slices of honeydew, cantaloupe, watermelon, pineapple, mango; there were blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and grapes. There was also a huge oat-bran muffin as big as a cake, two perfectly poached eggs, oatmeal, freshly squeezed orange juice, and yellow tea roses in a vase.

She had ordered fruit ices, because after the fright she'd suffered, she decided she deserved-and needed-a bit of sugar for comfort. There were six little scoops-watermelon, mango, peach, lemon, lime, and pineapple. They were decorated with wafer cookies and springs of mint. There was also a bottle of water, a glass of ice, a silver spoon, and pink tea roses in a vase.

She felt like a ladyfinger that had been dunked in rum, while her daughters were chilled cucumbers, ready to be sliced for tea sandwiches.

She took a few pink packets of sugar and crunched the granules in her fingertips, thinking that she would take them back to her room to mix with moisturizer and use later for a facial scrub. If Charlie were here, he would make free lemonade for her, the way he used to do, adding lemon slices and sugar to the ice water.

"You can join us," Peri said. "We might go to New Orleans next. There's a big old Victorian house in the middle of a graveyard that takes people like us in."

"I've always wanted to go there," Weetzie said. "New Orleans. But I don't think I can."

"It has a pool with selkies," Bean said. "And there's a warlock who gives fencing lessons."

After she had eaten a piece of cake that looked like part of a miniature white palace, tasted like a kiss, and was certain not to give her indigestion of any kind, Weetzie left the tent and crossed the lawn.

Weetzie was born at Kaiser Hospital and went to Hollywood High School on Sunset. When she was little, her daddy took her to see Mary Poppins at the Cinerama Dome and he spent the whole second half of the movie chasing her in circles around the aisles. They liked to eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory, slurping up huge plates of noodles with marinara sauce in red-velvet Victorian train car seats. When Weetzie was older and Charlie moved to New York, she searched for someone to run through theaters and eat spaghetti with. She wore butterfly wings to the Palladium and stood alone in the darkness, listening to the band, hoping to find him. She played billiards next to rude eighties TV heartthrobs at the Hollywood Athletic Club. She drank martinis on the patio at the Cat and Fiddle pub abs ate cheap vegetarian Indian food at Paru's, but if he was there too, he didn't recognize her. He did not discover her eating strawberry ice cream sundaes with marshmallow topping at Shwab's, but she did find her prom dress at the vintage clothing shop that opened up in it's place, before that place became the Virgin Megastore.

Stepping into that world of music and darkness and smoke and beer, where you could forget who you were because you hadn't been it for that long anyway, where you could be a real artist, a stranger, dead movie star, broken doll, ghoul, gay boy, devil, princess, warrior, imagining you found your muse, best friend, healer, beloved. Going home alone.

On the second floor, a large pair of doors opened into the room with the pink-and-green parquet dance floor surrounded by tables covered in white linen tablecloths and pink-and-white stargazer lilies. Hundreds and hundreds of white balloons and an endless stream of soap bubbles hovered around a mirrored disco ball on the ceiling. There was an ice cream sundae cart, a cappuccino cart, a clown making animal balloons, and another clown painting people's faces. The boom band was playing on a low stage in the back, and the guests were dancing to their hypnotic music with wild abandon. Some were doing cartwheels and handsprings around the dance floor. They were dressed for proms and for their own weddings and for every party they had ever dreamed of attending and had not been invited to attend.

My dad took me out again the next day and we went shopping at a mall. I don't know how he had the money but I didn't question it. He bought me some Clinique face powder and blush in their little pale-green marbled plastic cases and a bottle of Jontue perfume with the unicorn on the box. He even bought me a new pair of Kork-Ease since the pale suede shoes of mine were dirty and the beige leather straps had turned a soiled dark brown. They weren't really the high ones but they weren't the flat ones either. I felt greedy, like I wanted to gather up every last bit of pretty to remind me that he had been here, that he cared. In the same way, I ate a double-scoop pistachio-and-cherry ice-cream cone and then had popcorn and a large Sprite at the movie theater where we saw Young Frankenstein for the second time. My dad guffawed but I just sat there chomping on popcorn and rolling my eyes along with Igor. But I still wanted more. I didn't want it to be over. After the movie we went to Café Figaro for dinner. It was dark and there was sawdust on the floors and we ate bread and soup and the waiters were very beautiful young men in white button-down-shirts.

I imagined that when I got back to school in the fall I would have new friends, really cool friends like Skye and Karma Grier, but ones who would never leave me. I closed my eyes and saw a tall, dark, handsome boy who looked scary but was really quite shy and gentle and a cute blond surfer boy with a funny, snorty laugh and the easiest shoulders. I imagined a boy with dreadlocks and a girl with hair like flowers. And I thought of a boy in a fedora hat and a trench coat, like a funny detective, like a secret agent man, with green eyes that were full of mystery and familiarity at the same time.

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive.