Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith

head. “Angela, I can’t.”
    “You get a hard-on when I kiss you.”
    “That’s involuntary.”
    “They’re
all
involuntary.” Then she laughed softly, saying, “Until you reach the age of sixty, and then you’ll do anything to get one,
     including —”
    “I can’t” — I shook my head no — “I can’t do this.”
    “Come with me.” In the unearthly light of the club, her voice was quiet, smooth, as electric as the bands of neon that wrapped
     the stage. It intermingled with the sound of the grating, pulsating music and the low, slurred voices of the men who were
     drunk on the sight of naked women.
    Angela tugged at my hand, and I resisted, saying, “Really, Angela, thank you, but —”
    She led me into a small dark room with tiny booths and sat me down on a chair, throwing her legs over my lap and wrapping
     her dark arms around my scrawny white neck.
    “Angela,” I said, “don’t.” She had slipped a hand up the front of my shirt, lifting it away from my skin, even pushing her
     fingers down the front of my pants.
    “Angela,”
she said back, mocking me,
“don’t.”
She breathed against my neck, her lips soft and warm.
    I tried to squirm away, but she wouldn’t let me. “There are people,” I whispered.
    “Of course there are people, you alien. This is Earth.”
    “People watching.”
    They weren’t, really. It was too dark back here, and there were partitions anyway.
    “Let them.” Her hand made it all the way into my pants and her cool fingers curled around my penis.
    I took an involuntary breath.
    She hissed, “I want you to fuck me, Angel.”
    “But not here,” I said, relenting. “Not right here, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Tonight.”
    “Fine,” I said. “But not —”
    “You promise?”
    I waited in the neon darkness of the Velvet Mask for what seemed like an eternity. It was actually five hours, until two in
     the morning. I waited while Angela, there known as Cassandra, took the stage in a continuous rotation with the others — Jennifer,
     Sandy, Tiger, Victoria, Ashley, Katrina, I had learned all of their pseudonyms — waited while she gave intermittent dances
     to the Japanese salarymen and drugstore clerks, the ad guys on commercial shoots, Midwestern conventioneers, and other assorted
     assholes, until finally she abandoned her own car and came home with me in the Cadillac.
    ______
    In my parents’ old house in Beverly Hills, there was a room that, as far as I know, no one ever entered but me. The walls
     of this room were lined with shelves, and the shelves were stacked with volumes of books that had been bought all at once,
     not because they were interesting but because they were decorator items. There was a full set of classics, from
The Scarlet Letter
to
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
There was the
Compleat Works of William Shakespeare,
of course,
Goethe’s Writings,
and, most impressive of all,
The Great Books of Western Civilization,
which included Darwin’s
Origin of the Species,
Newton’s
Principia Mathematica,
and Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
There were also two guide volumes, a
Syntopicon,
that came with the set and that led a would-be reader through the complex concepts of these significant works.
    On the spine of the first of the two guidebooks were the words
Angel to Love.
On the spine of the second guide book were the words
Man to World.
    For some reason these titles fascinated me.
    “Angel to Love,”
Angela repeated now. She reached across the gray leather interior of the Cadillac and placed a hand on my leg. I couldn’t
     remember doing it, but at some point I must have told her about those books. “That’s you,” she said, laughing, “you’re my
Angel to Love.
”
    As a kid, I would actually touch my pink fingers to the gold-leaf lettering on their spines and repeat those titles silently,
     my blue lips moving.
Angel to Love, Man to World.
    I guess I wanted to be the
Angel to Love.
    But who was the
Man to