Read Online Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block - Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    Dirk looked at his father’s body in the black turtleneck and jeans. Dirby’s frame was just like Dirk’s with the broad shoulders, narrow hips and long legs, but Dirk weighed at least fifteen pounds more and was lean himself.
    “When my father died and I saw my mother’s hair turn suddenly white I decided I was going to be like the clouds passing over the moon or the waves sliding up and back or the birds putting sounds together. That was the only way I could go on, accepting the way life was, being in the world.
    “Then one night when I was sixteen I hitchhiked down into Topanga Canyon. I loved it there—the wild of itso near the sea, the thickness of trees and the smell of salt water all sharp and clean. I had to get away from the sugar smell in Fifi’s kitchen and the roses; as much as I loved her I felt like I couldn’t breathe—like it wasn’t my world in any way.
    “I walked inside this canyon bar and for the first time in my life I felt at home with walls around me. There was a cat onstage playing saxophone and chicks in black stockings sitting around watching him. There was beer and smoke—not just cigarettes, the kind of smoke that helps ease you into trees and wind. I knew I’d be coming back here.
    “I came back all the time—every chance I could get away. All I needed was my thumb and my poetry journal. I also got a black turtleneck from my father’s closet and a black beret from a thrift store so I’d look like the other cats hanging there in the mystic smoke and swinging sax night.
    “One night a skinny old guy wearing shades asked me what I was writing in that journal all the time and I told him poetry.
    “'You’re a baby. What do you know about poetry?’ he said, all languid-like.
    “'I know enough,’ I said.
    “'Yeah. I bet you know some nursery rhymes. Little Bo-Peep come blow your horn the cat’s in the meadow the chick’s in the corn. That’s poetry, right?’
    “I tried to walk away from him but he called after me, That’s poetry, right, Bo-Peep?'”
    “After that everyone called me Bo-Peep. Until the night I got up on that stage, sat down on a stool in the moon of light and read what I’d been writing all those nights.
    “Everyone got still, especially that old man. They leaned in close to dig the words.