Free Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block Page A

wild coyote hills, away from the hammering headlines and screaming TVs and the death of fathers.
    “That’s why I want you to be different, Dirk,” said Dirby. “I want you to fight. I love you, buddy. I want you not to be afraid.”
    “But I’m gay,” Dirk said. “Dad, I’m gay.”
    “I know you are, buddy,” Dirby said. And his lullaby eyes sang with love. “Do you know about the Greek Gods, probably Walt Whitman—first beat father, Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg, even, maybe, your number one hero? You can’t be afraid.”
    “Maybe it’s too late,” Dirk said. “Dad, am I alive now?”
    “Yes. Still. Fight, Dirk.”
    “Mom?”
    And then his mother, still dancing behind Dirby, all eyelashes and legs, spoke with that dream-plant smoke voice, “Tell us your story, Baby Be-Bop.”

Genie
    O ne night when he was little Dirk McDonald woke to the sound of the telephone and his Grandma Fifi’s voice,” Dirk began.
    “He had never heard a voice sound like that. Dirk looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Grandma Fifi had pasted on the ceiling for Dirk’s father when he was a little boy. She had told Dirk they would keep nightmares away. But that night Dirk thought nothing would ever keep him safe from nightmares.
    “Grandma Fifi ran into the bedroom and took Dirk in her arms. Her bones felt as light as the birdcage that hung in her kitchen. She wrapped him in a coat that smelled sour from mothballs and lilac-sweet from her perfume.
    “Dirk sat huddled next to his grandmother in her red-and-white 1955 Pontiac convertible and felt as if the night was going to eat him alive; he wished it would. Fifi hadn’t taken time to put the top back on. She ran through red lights. Dirk had never seen her do that before.
    “When they got to the hospital a doctor met them inthe hallway and led them back into the waiting room. Fifi took Dirk on her lap. Dirk could never remember, later, if the doctor had ever said the words, but he knew then that his parents were gone. He pressed his face into the velvet collar of Fifi’s coat and their tears mingled together until they were drenched with salt water.
    “Dirk listened for his parents’ voices in the wind sometimes. But soon he forgot what they had sounded like. All he could hear was his Grandma Fifi whistling with her canaries in the kitchen or calling to him to come out and play in the yard or asking the pastry dough what shape it intended on taking this afternoon or singing him lullabies.”
    Dirk went on to tell the story of life in Fifi’s cottage, the fathers in the shower, the story of Pup Lambert and the magic lamp. He told the story of Gazelle and the stranger, Fifi and Derwood, Dirby and Just Silver. All his ancestors’ stories were also his own.
    Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.
    “Dad?” he asked the darkness. “Mom?” but Dirby and Just Silver were gone.
    He picked up the golden lamp. It was heavy with stories of love. It was light with stories of love. It could sink to the bottom of the sea, touch the core of the earth with the weight of love. It could soar into the clouds like a creature with wings.
    Just then he saw that the lamp had begun to smoke—vapors writhing out from it like snakes. And Dirk saw emerging from that mist the face and then the whole body of a man. There was a piece of sapphire silk with golden elephants on it wrapped turban-style around his head. Dirk knew that beneath the turban, the man’s scalp was shaved; he was the stranger who had come to Gazelle’s door with the very lamp out of which he was now materializing.
    “Come with me,” the man said.
    “Where?”
    “You’ll see.”
    The braid rug on the floor of Dirk’s room began to quiver. Then the corners furled off the wooden floor and the rug lifted from the ground, bringing with it Dirk in his bed. Dirk closed his eyes the way you do on a roller coaster, wind and gravity forcing lids down,