I don’t even want to think of those lyrics, but he’s singing them.
I don’t even want to think of his hands, but I’m hearing them.
I don’t even want to think of his fingers, but I’m imagining them.
I don’t even want to think.
But.
“Dude, I just remembered something.”
“What’s that?”
“We can’t go tonight. Tomorrow’s my birthday. I promised Darby I’d celebrate.”
“What hey, Rocketman, you want a candle on a cupcake?”
“No, I’m going swimming in the ocean, it was Darby’s idea, we were going to do it together, we planned it all out.”
Darby said.
You know what’s fun? You take like ten hits of acid, and drink a six-pack of beer and you go to the Santa Monica Pier, there’s a bridge there that goes nowhere, ’cause they’re supposed to lower it for boats, and you can go out to the end and jump o f, right? And you can swim, and it’s so great ’cause it’s dark, you know, and you can just swim and it doesn’t matter if you live or die or anything, just swim and swim, and you feel the fish nibbling at your feet.
Blitzer says we can’t leave right this minute anyways, not if we’re going that far. We need some camping gear.
Like a sleeping bag.
I want to ask, Just one?
But do I?
No.
“Jacked? From a store?”
Yes and no, he’s got his mind’s eye on a van he saw parked on Fountain, one of those maxi-vans without side or back windows, the favored habitat of the American rhymes-with-dippy.
“Longhairs always got camping gear, everybody knows that.”
I can kick it here while he checks. Or go with. Though maybe I should wait.
“I hate waiting.”
“You hate everything.”
“But not everybody.”
He moves my cigarette towards my lips not saying a word, his hand guiding mine moves closer closer closer and my lips open open but not for my smoke for.
First one then two of his fingers instead.
Then he drops to the bricks of the planter and he’s gone like a song.
5
But next thing you know.
Another song.
Sung by chicks, coming up the steps. And even when I con the dots from the sweet home Alabama sound of one of them I’m all, What the fuckety-fuck indeed, because I’ve heard “Pretty Vacant” on the streets around here lately and that awful Voulez-vous coucher avec moi song and even “My Way,” but nothing like this.
Flies in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo,
Flies in the buttermilk, shoo fly shoo,
My fly’s open, how about you?
Strip to my Lou, my darling.
Squid and Siouxsie. I go down to meet them and when they all-fall-down on the tiles laughing I wonder if they’re faced on Mad Dog again, but Siouxsie’s all cheeky-cheeky and plants a big wet one and all I smell’s Chap Stick, plus something spicy, not like perfume, more like incense.
“It’s not fair,” she yells up to the Jell-O gods, like the steps are the stage at the Greek Theatre and she doesn’t want tight-wads up in the trees past the fences to miss a single word, she doesn’t want heshers headbanging at the Hollywood sign to miss a single word, she doesn’t want homies in fuckin South Pasadena to miss a single word, “You’re a boy. And your skin’s softer than hers.”
Then Squid brushes her fingers on my cheek and tells Siouxsie she’s whorely mistaken, it’s fuzz, not skin, I’m fuzzy as a Georgia peach, only Jaw-ja is how she actually says it, she ran away from Tuscaloosa after her wicked stepmother got into her record collection and subbed Tony Orlando for Talking Heads and Debby Boone for Lydia Lunch.
“Darlin’, he’s still a virgin, a Norelco virgin.”
Siouxsie says, “Unlike a certain you-know-what-bian I know,” and before you can say Steve and Melody live at the Hollywood Tropicana they’re in female mud-wrestling mode, Squid pins her on the tiles and the tag-team tickling lasts till there’s just enough breath left between them to start singing again, second verse, tweaked as the first.
Lost my partner, who’ll I screw?
Lost my partner, who’ll I screw?
Back door’s open, guess it’ll do
Strip to my Lou, my darling.
So I tell them I get it now, back door action, woo hoo hoo and boo hoo too for you and you, but they’re all, No no no, that part was strictly V-word as in verbal. And they say the scene itself was strictly hetero, though when I finally get the play-by-play of the play-for-pay it’s not exactly what that Crystal Cathedral dude would call the straightest story ever told, now is it. They score the trick on Sunset by the IHOP and first he takes them up to C. C. Brown’s ice cream parlor on Hollywood Boulevard, where the cashier sits reading the Book of Revelation at the register and the waitresses are all grannies on steroids who’ve worked there since the Age of Steam. And they let him know the peter meter’s running, but he’s set on buying them banana splits, and except for telling them to smack their lips every now and then while they chew the Chiquita there’s no real clue to how he floats his battle wagon till they get to his apartment on Franklin afterwards, and there’s a sandbox in the living room.
And a Playskool record player complete with carrying handle and a stack of rainbow-colored 45’s beside it on the coffee table, nursery rhymes and Mousketeer anthems and teddy bear marches, all on the Magic Kingdom label.
And shrink-wrapped packs of white cotton panties, junior miss size large.
So they change into their fresh new undies, in the powder room he calls it, since naturally he’s the kind of old-school gentleman who wouldn’t dream of watching, heaven fuckin forbid.
Named Louie, what else.
And then he spreads a towel on the sofa and strips to his Y-fronts and sits there playing DJ with one hand and hammering his hamster with the other while his two little you-know-what-bians skip around the sandbox jiggling their titties and follow the bouncing balls, belting out smutty changes on kindergarten’s greatest hits.
For an hour.
For two hundred bucks.
And there’s more where that came from if they’ll dye their hair normal and wear it in pigtails.
“Five bills,” Squid says. “And he doesn’t even touch us.”
Cat’s in the cream jar, ooh, ooh, ooh,
Cat’s in the cream jar, ooh, ooh, ooh,
Slice of hair pie, I’ll take two,
Strip to my Lou, my darling.
I tell them they should make a demo, add a rocking beat and send it to Rodney, they’re girls, he’ll play it.
“But Rockets darlin’, where to find a rocking beat, no one wants to be a drummer.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re all hot and sweaty after a gig and nobody fucks ’em,” Siouxsie says.
“There’s always Rory Dolores.”
And they bust up, last year they helped Malissa make those DON FOREVER, RORY NEVER buttons we all wore after Darby kicked Don Bolles out of the Germs and went to London for a month with Amber and told Pat Smear and Lorna Doom to teach Rory how to drum while he was gone. But Rory has the lifetime ban from the City of Hope when it comes to musical talent, no sense of rhythm at all, I heard him practicing in Gerber’s garage and it was even worse than Belinda first trying to sing when the Go-Go’s formed. So Pat and Lorna just gave up, and that was roll the credits black the screen on the Germs.
And there’s a child’s garden of theories why Darby checked out, there’s the Bowie theory based on that song “Five Years” and the way Darby told all his friends in ’75 he’d be dead in five years, and the homo theory that Darby knew he’d done the Dr. Frankenstein thing with all the new hardcore kids from the beaches taking over the scene, and he was afraid they’d beat him up or kill him when word got out he liked boys, and part of that theory says Darby kicked out Don for wearing a dress onstage at a gig because it was bound to raise suspicions. And then th
ere’s the jack-off fuckboy self-destruction derby theory that with somebody like Darby it was just a matter of time until the zero hour.
And zero’s just another circle when you think about it.
But theories make my head hurt, so I just guess.
That Darby split the Germs over Rory and when he came back from England he had his Adam Ant look and his Mohican and he did the Darby Crash Band and basically all us year one little babies gave our tonsils air to spare, we yawned till dawn, it wasn’t the same anymore, and that just made it take-the-scissors-saw-the-head for him when he got back together with Pat and Don and Lorna for the Germs reunion at the Starwood a few nights before the so-called suicide pact that Casey Cola woke up from but Darby didn’t.
Because we all opened wide again that night but cheering not yawning, the Germs were back and better than ever, they could play their instruments and keep the beat and Darby even sang into the mic.
But that was for us. Maybe for Darby it was more like he tried to go beyond the Germs and he was back to circle one, trapped in this thing he’d made, and he wanted out and the only way out he saw was all the way out.
What a trap though.
The best gig they ever played, fresh and fierce as fuck, Hellin Killer says it was better than the Pistols in San Francisco, so many youth of today have no clue that Sid Vicious saw the Germs there, watching from the wings.
At the Mabuhay, the night after that Pistols gig, the last one ever. Hellin told me all about it on those concrete stairs to nowhere inside the Masque, tapping out time with her fingers on my wrist, countdown, ignition, Rockets Redglare, you are there.
They start the set with “Circle One.”
There’s the first beat of the drum intro, before the roll that leads into the vocal.
Darby struts out.
Grabs Lorna’s beer off her amp.
Walks across the stage.
Drinks the beer.
Breaks the bottle over his head.
Carves a gigantic bloody circle in his chest with the broken glass.
Then comes in right on cue, in perfect time.
I’m Darby Crash, a social blast.
6
Squid wants to know if I’ve walked the walk around the block yet, and once I mention Arthur J’s they’re back in Playskool mode, a bawk-bawk here and a bawk-bawk there, here a bawk, there a bawk, everywhere a bawk-bawk, the only other hang in Hollywood that’s close in chickenhawks per capita is the Gold Cup up on Las Palmas, how else do you think Black Randy came up with the marriage-made-in-hell name for the house band at the Masque, Arthur J and the Gold Cups. And since they saw Blitzer leaving here, they figure he was with me there.
Squid says, “I reckon Blitzer’s looking more like a rooster to those daddies these days.”
I just ask how old she thinks he looks, if I all-clear things up it’s bound to lead to what happened in Citrus Alley, and Siouxsie’s so big-sisterly lately, I know she wouldn’t like me being in that dude’s car in the first place, not Napoleon Solo. And anyways it’s hard to explain, right afterwards I told Blitzer the trick was just trying to scare me, and show me I wasn’t as sly as I thought I was, and it was a good thing too, because I didn’t know about those credit card keys, and now I do, but all he said was too bad he couldn’t smash the dude’s skull instead of his windshield.
“I don’t know how old he looks, but he’s got sideburns, and sideburns equal Social Security on that corner,” Siouxsie says. “Sixteen’s past retirement age.”
I’m all, Same goes double for you with Mr. Slice of Hair Pie, you’d better punch the rhyme clock while you can. And she tells me not to worry my spiky little head none, they’ll be back in the sandbox before I can say Old Snatch-Donald had a farm.
And they’ll be rich.
And they’ll party down.
So I A the Q what they’re on tonight, anyways.
Squid says, “Just the teensiest bit of MDA.”
“Have some,” Siouxsie says, but I remember what Connie Lingus said at Tony the Hustler’s once, it’s like dosing hard on pure confusion. It was that time after Regi Mental and Johnny Valium rolled a dealer in Cosmos Alley outside the Gaslight and got an ounce of meth, a pound of MDA, and a syringe-type bottle of liquid with no label and one of those rubber tops you poke the needle through. They called it the Mystery Drug. And while they wrapped up grams and half grams of MDA in foil to sell that night at the Hong Kong Cafe where the Germs were playing they talked about who’d do it first. And Darby of course was the usual suspect, and after he shot it he all-fell-down on the bed beside me and cried out like a kid whose chocolate milk got jacked from his lunch tray on the first day of elementary school, “It’s angel dust! It’s angel dust!”
Everyone laughed but me, if you want the whole and nothing but I solemnly swear I think hard drugs are worse than Darwin and Communism combined. I got schooled in slamming Vitamin S way past hard living at Skinhead Manor after the PCP, everyone tweaked like Speedy Gonzalez on fast forward, talking nonstop and bleeding from scratching itches that weren’t really there, going crazy paranoid thinking it was the SWAT team when the mailman dropped the Pennysaver through the door slot. And I don’t know much about my parents except both of them were junkies, before and after I was born, they like to rewind-repeat shit like that in group homes so you don’t start convincing yourself there’s been some terrible mistake, you’re the soon-to-be-acknowledged love child of Schwarzenegger and Cher.
I don’t even know if they’re still alive.
My parents, I mean.
But Darby isn’t, and I know this, heroin took him down. Leaving the Masque one night I remember he had a rig and he was trying to get water out of a puddle and Kickboy saw us and went off on Darby with all these cusswords in French, then said, “I’m not knocking you, guy, I’m into shooting, too, but people have pissed and shit in this!”
And he made Darby hand over the syringe and they went into Boardner’s across the street and got some clean water. That’s when I think I knew for sure that Darby hardly cared at all about what you might call the basics.
Like for example he never even talked about Bowie anymore.
So I’ve got eyes in the back of my head, and I mean peeled like bananas, watching out for Mr. Monkey. I tell Siouxsie maybe later on the Major Drug Activity, but I hope she forgets it.
“Later when you’ve got company, you mean?”
“I’ve got company now.”
“Not the kind of company you want for the Love Drug, darlin’.”
Squid says I know the kind of company.
With sharp, sharp sideburns.
Muscled legs.
Eyelashes that aren’t even fair, out to there.
And that belly button too.
“It’s spiraled inside like a snail. And he’s always lifting his shirt up. I think he knows it’s sexy. I think that boy’s showing it off.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And I don’t know how Squid’s voice does this reach-out-and-touch thing, mostly it’s with Siouxsie but sometimes she turns it on for me, it’s low and warm and you can feel it on your skin like the ghost of her hand or something, ghost because it’s not physical, it’s not even the vibration of the words barely lapping through the air between you in the tiniest waves, it’s more the way the sun moves on you when you’re sitting still by a window with a grate and the cool of the shadows comes and goes in different places and you can fall asleep like that and dream you’re not alone even though you really are.
“But you know who, darlin’, don’t you?”
I breathe in black cherry for a while and count backwards from the year 2000 to myself to know how old I’ll be if I live that long, not too fuckin likely, now is it.
“I guess.”
She says they watched Blitzer do a singin’ in the rain dance down the factory steps. And he hardly even smiles anymore. So there must be a reason.
“He wants to go somewhere. With me.”
Siouxsie says, “Rockets,” all Harsh Vader, and I know she likes Blitzer less than she used to, I just don’t remember why.
But Squid stops her, with a look I guess, she doesn’t actually say anything, they do this couples thing. It’s like Siouxsie’s the foreground one, and Squid’s more in the background, but she kind of clears the decks to keep Siouxsie on her same-old course, without capsizing, she’s always been one of the down-we-go-cradle-and-all chicks, back in the day she wore a bloody chicken’s foot pinned to her jacket, she was the one who’d kick in a window on the street when no one else would, or else put her fist through it, we called her Stitches, because she had so many. And it’s still like a trademark of the scene, the way Darby cutting himself was, Siouxsie passed out cold on the floor after a gig or a party, or Siouxsie dumping a pot of spaghetti all over somebody’s house, or Siouxsie squatting over the punch bowl peeing, but since she met Squid there’s someone to keep her from going too far, with nothing said and no hard feelings, Siouxsie’s lucky, Darby wasn’t.
“And I said I would.”
Siouxsie puts a bindle in my hand and curls my fingers over it.
“For later.”
“Thanks.”
“Your hand’s cold.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe yours is warm.”
“Maybe.”
Squid leans towards me too.
“Darlin’, we heard Blitzer’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“With some people. The wrong people.”
Siouxsie just sighs.
“You be careful,” Squid says.
“I heard that once tonight already.”
7
Squid and Siouxsie bail for Oki Dog, to chow on french fries and maybe maybe pretty pretty please with Heinz Hot Ketchup on it bring some back for me. They went into hysterics practically when I told them I’m waiting on Blitzer, he might score us a sleeping bag, they don’t think guys fooling around together is disgusting, they just think it’s hilarious, especially guys they know. But if I made fun of them rubbing their smoothies together, they’d probably kick my ass.
What We Do Is Secret Page 3