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

But it was more than words. Something was happening. There was this bottle of red wine and four glasses on the table next to me and they started dancing, I mean really dancing, doing some kind of tango-fandango number. Then the shades on the face of the old man jumped right off and started floating in the air, moving just out of his reach when he grabbed for them. I saw his eyes with the pinpoint pupils and red whites and knew why he wore those shades but there was nothing I could do about what was going on. I just kept reading. They were all digging it more and more, even the old guy. More stuff kept going on. My beret flew off my head and went slinging across the room onto the head of this beautiful chick. She had short hair like a boy’s, almond-shaped eyes and breasts that were the shape of one of those stiff padded bras but I could tell, even from the stage, that she wasn’t wearing one. She was wearing a black dress and black fishnet stockings on the longest legs I’d ever seen. She laughed and put her hands to herhead where my beret had landed. Her girl friend handed her a joint but it didn’t stay between her long fingers. It flew right out of those fingers and across the room, landing in my hand. I swear this is all true, buddy. Not that it sounds like the truth but it was.”
    Dirk was less stunned by the thought of his father’s words making wineglasses dance than by what he saw hovering behind Dirby. When he saw her he remembered the way her long eyelashes had felt, ticklish as butterflies against his skin, he remembered the smoke of her voice and the patchouli smell in her hair, her long glamorous legs in black stockings. She was more beautiful than any girl in a magazine, she the boyish goddess. She was Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy and Bowie and like his father she was James Dean too. Just Silver. Mother. While Dirby kept talking she did a slow rhythmic dance, hands over her head, torso moving with sinuous snakey charm.
    “Mom,” Dirk said.
    “After, I stopped reading my poetry, things settled down,” Dirby went on. “I mean no more dancing wineglasses or flying joints, but everyone went wild.
    “The old guy came up onstage—he had his shades again—and said, ‘This, my friends, is Be-Bop Bo-Peep, beat guru.’
    “I wanted to get out of there fast but the beautiful chick reached for my arm when I passed her table andput the beret back on my head: She smelled like incense and patchouli and orange blossoms. The light caught the big silver hoops she wore in her ears.
    “'I dug that, Be-Bop,’ she said.
    “I just nodded the way I’d seen the hipsters do when someone dug them.
    “'My name is Just Silver,’ she said. ‘Just Silver with a capital J capital S. The Just is because I renounced my father’s name.’
    “'Are you a model?’ I asked.
    “She was. An actress too. She had done little theater and had a tiny part in a Fellini film once.
    “'You are very, very beautiful,’ I told her. I knew I sounded more like Bo-Peep than Be-Bop talking like that but I felt she had dug right into my heart.
    “She asked if I’d read
Siddhartha.
It was my favorite book. She told me I reminded her of him.
    “'Come home with me,’ she said.
    “She drove me in her black convertible VW Bug to her apartment above the Sunset Strip. There was no furniture in the apartment—just rugs. Just Silver’s family had traveled all over India and the Mideast purchasing rugs when she was a child. She lit some Nag Champra incense—flowers turned to powdery stick stems, turned to clouds of smoke petals—put on some Ravi Shankar and made her head move from side to side on her neck like an Indian goddess. Then she cooked vegetable currywith rare saffron that was the color of poppy pollen.
    “'Do you know what this is?’ she asked, showing me a dancing metal goddess holding a severed head and wearing a necklace made of skulls.
    “'I might think twice about getting into her car if I was hitching,’ I said.
    “'Would