My First Secret Agent

By Laura Schiller

Based on: the Weetzie Bat series

Copyright: Francesca Lia Block

Daddy, why did you leave?

He simply looked at me, transparently pale in his black tuxedo and top hat, with that burnt-out look his eyes used to have, and vanished. I found myself sitting up in a pink-satin hotel bedroom, alone, staring at the spot where he he had been. Just a dream. I never got an answer to my question.

I could more or less understand it the first time. When you live in a city you hate, which you see as nothing but shiny-slick illusions and greed, and when the laughing blonde starlet you married is hurling accusations and champagne glasses in your face, of course you will want to get away. Even if you know your twelve-year-old daughter will miss you fiercely. You can still come back and take her out to the Tick Tock Tea Room, or show her around the sights of your home city, New York. But the second time? That, I never understood.

I love to live. I unwrap every day like an Easter egg full of candy – maybe not the candy I wanted, but still. No matter what happens to me, I've always held on to that philosophy as best I could. And I've never understood what made my Daddy leave this crazy-beautiful world by taking sleeping pills in his apartment.

He's always reminded me of a cigarette, tall and pale and smoky-eyed. Like someone out of the old movies we loved, where smoking looked glamorous and people didn't care how unhealthy it was. Maybe he reminded himself of a cigarette, too – poisoning us.

He used to make horror movies – things about mummies, about monsters, but really about the monster feelings inside. I never could stand to watch them. If I had, would I have understood him better? Was it the monsters he created which caught up with him in that dingy little apartment? Or was it simply being alone?

I remember I asked him to come back to LA. To live with My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk, Duck, Cherokee, Witch Baby and me in our cherrywood cottage by the canyon, to watch his granddaughters grow up. He said no. It was the last time I saw him.

I never told him he was the first, best friend I ever had. Before Max, even before Dirk, there was Charlie Bat.

My first 'secret agent', who kept his secrets to the last.