I’m living right next door to an angel,
And I’m gonna make that angel mine
Neil Sedaka is singing. It’s 1994, spring in Los Angeles, the waxed and buffed droptops spinning down La Cienega and along Wilshire, shining in the sunlight, their radios tuned loud to KOLD, those golden oldies, to Rosie and the Originals:
Angel baby, my angel baby,
Oo-oo I love you, oo-oo I do
An angel sits at a light idling in a nineteen-sixty Cadillac convertible, the finish gleaming like glass. Black shades shield the angel’s eyes. A pack of Luckies are rolled into the sleeve of its tee-shirt, and smoke curls around its head. Shelley Fabares is singing:
Johnny Angel,
How I love him,
And I hope to heaven he loves me
Dolores, who is forty-nine and will never grow any older, stabs the pavement with a spike heel there at the curb, tapping away impatiently waiting for something, anything, to happen until suddenly she picks up the blessed beat of the Crests, and then her foot falls in with theirs, one, two, three, four:
The angels listened in,
And they heard me sayin’,
The angels listened in,
And they heard me prayin’
and thirty-three years slide right off her shoulders, down her back and legs and drain off into the ashdry catchbasins of Hollywood Boulevard, as the door to the solid gold Cadillac convertible like in Hud with longhorns on the hood swings open and the Crests believe it’s 1961:
Please send me someone to love —
Someone that I’m dreamin’ of —
My darling, the angels sent you
Dolores climbs in beside the angel, quivering, wordless. The Caddy slides into traffic. The angel has Vitalised its hair fiercely in place, spit curls spilling onto its forehead, the sides rising across the ear like the curve of a cello, rising toward the back of the head to meet the other side and break downward into a perfect duck’s ass. Dolores can’t believe it and neither can Bobby Vee:
Devil or angel, dear, whichever you are,
I love you, I love you, I love you
The angel inhales all the way down to its snow-white snap-jacks and flips the cigarette into the street. It blows a smoke-ring that somehow hovers for something more than an instant over its head before it is swept away by the slipstream. “Hey,” says Dolores.
The angel seems to look at her through the shades, then sings in a perfect mimicry of Neil Sedaka:
Hey, little devil,
I’m gonna make an angel out of you
“Hey,” says Dolores again. With exquisite grace the angel sweeps off the shades, and she sees that its eyes are faceted like diamonds; she all of a sudden notices that there are wings bulging beneath the tee-shirt; two hundred voices — the Mormon Tabernacle Choir accompanied by E. Power Biggs on the Tabernacle organ — break from its throat, singing the Kyrie eleison from Mozart’s Requiem; and Dolores is certain that something is happening here, that this guy is a special someone: nothing in her life will ever, ever be the same again.
March, 2011, ©
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