And I’m all, Really?
There?
“Oh, darlin’, the look on your face, if you could only—”
“I said neck, not crotch,” Siouxsie breaks in. “You know, cleavage.”
But I don’t.
She takes my hand and guides it there.
The breathe-in rise and breathe-out fall. Surrounding softness, somehow familiar, why? I’ve never.
Ever.
Why?
I don’t know.
Have I never been curious, or always been scared?
About girls, of girls.
About this? Of this?
I say, “Cool.”
Then.
“No, warm.”
They giggle.
My hand there on its own now, unheld, waiting for me, Siouxsie waiting too, for what though?
She likes girls. So this, to her, doesn’t feel?
Nice?
Just neutral?
And what about, if?
My fingers.
Cup.
The heaviness.
Like this.
I don’t say what I want to, What’s the difference, to you and only you, my hand there, or Squid’s hand there, shell game, blindfolded, could you tell?
I say, “Damn. Big.”
Just like a regular guy.
But irregulars too, what do they say, hands on heaviness, Stickboy’s, Tony’s?
Damn. Big.
It’s just the human fuckin condition.
10
Squid’s got the craves for a pack of Djarums, thanks to the malingering aroma on yours coolly, but the closest store with cloves is the 7-Eleven on Santa Monica east of Highland, across from that transvestistas place where the Mexicans just can’t get enough of pulling off each other’s wigs and catfighting on the sidewalk, and she’s tired of walking, she bruised her ankle earlier, banged it hard on the coffee table during “Strip to My Lou.” So with me as Siouxsie’s bodyguard in case she stirs up pussy envy among the queñas, we head out, after Squid swears she’ll do whatever dirty deeds it takes to keep Blitzer on the scene if he shows while we’re gone.
“Don’t you worry, darlin’, I’ll laugh at his jokes, admire his belly button, anything.”
And next thing you know we’re walking up the boulevard, north side, arm in arm against the traffic, the full punk couple on their Sunday night stroll, too bad we don’t have a little punk baby.
Then, just east of Orange, south side, snap-crackle-cops a bullhorn.
We freeze and put up our hands. There’s more static, then nothing. The engine revs. The tires roll. But not our way. And no siren action like they’re in a hurry somewheres else.
I guess they figure they’ll catch us later.
Siouxsie grips my arm.
“They won’t shoot us?”
“No way. We’re white, they’d just beat us up.”
“It was like a movie. I thought it was happening.”
“What?”
“Death.”
“Death?”
“Didn’t you ever dream of dying in the barbed wire escaping from a concentration camp, in those bright lights from the guard towers?”
“Never.”
But she says she does, all the time, she likes blood, the idea of losing it, movies like Torso, mass murder films, real low budget, murder and rape, plot check, plot check, her all-time faverave gore-fest, Last House on the Left, two girls go to the big city to score some drugs and get kidnapped, raped, and killed. Then the killers go to the house of the parents of one of the girls, by chance, and the parents take care of them, one of the killers they drag out in the woods and cut apart piece by piece while he’s still conscious, the first time she saw it she was like seven.
“It made me want to live to die. It made me live to be killed, I based my whole life on being killed in the woods.”
“So if someone tried to kill you, you’d just let them?”
“It depends on who they are. I might just lie there and enjoy it too much to move.”
And if that isn’t drugs talking, I don’t know what is.
But everybody says death rock is happening hard as time for violent crime.
It’s supposed to be the next rockabilly.
And trends are for terminal morons, I don’t follow them at all, like for example last year’s top-drawer trend, the one before ska, was being bisexual. Which on-fire fags like Tony the Hustler were down for completely, because they were the first ready, able, and more than willing dudes who came to mind to all these clueless vals and surf boys who wanted in on the latest. Though what I heard from those in the two-way know was double your pleasure in theory, double your trouble in practice.
But Tony and Stickboy are starting a band, and they need a singer, they told me they want a death-rock chick like Dinah Cancer in 45 Grave. So who knows, maybe Siouxsie?
“Can you sing?”
“I can dance.”
“If you’re cool with Tony and Stickboy, you could maybe front their band.”
“Do I get to bleed?”
“It’s no joke band. They want to get signed.”
“Sounds like a joke to me, hustlers fronted by a whore, that’s pretty funny.”
“You could be a fuckin star. Like Exene.”
I tell her Blitzer saw Exene at the El Rey Theater last Saturday, she had on rhinestone ankle bracelets. And that closes the circuit finally, I hear blue sparks in her voice almost, saying Exene’s cool, multiple cool, and do I know why?
I say I do.
Because she looks like Death. And then I tell her she’s crazed, fully crazed.
Her head leans sideways next to mine, almost on my shoulder.
“I want to tell you something, Rockets.”
“Sure.”
“I meant what I said. I might let it happen.”
Tip-tap goes my droogie stick, stepping along, one two three, four five six.
“Enjoying it. Really.”
Our hair spikes touch, move apart, rewind-repeat, step again, touch again.
“Rockets?”
“Yeah?”
“When that happened with the cops last week, with you and Rory, did you sort of like it?”
“Like what?”
“What they did to you.”
“They beat us up! Not all to fuck or anything but—”
“You’re always feeling those bruises.”
“It’s to see if they still hurt.”
“Do they?”
“A little.”
“You have to touch them to know?”
“I guess. It’s like a habit.”
“You get this look on your face.”
“What kind of look?”
“Dreamy. Like you’re remembering something. Something you liked.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Maybe you don’t realize.”
“There’s nothing to realize.”
“But if there was—”
“Fuck!”
“Listen! If you did really like it, I don’t think it’s sick or anything. You know, you could tell me. I’d understand.”
“Is that why you said that, back on the steps? I hit you, and it felt like a kiss?”
But it’s words from a song. She thought I got it. She can’t believe I didn’t. Me. And it does sound way punk. Though it’s not, she says, more like power pop, old-school power pop, back in the beach party day, it’s hard to believe, but do I know what?
She doesn’t care if I do.
What?
Believe her.
About anything but this: I can tell her, when I’m ready.
What I can’t tell myself.
She squeezes my hand and I just say, “Cool.”
And we walk on up the boulevard like that, holding hands, the only people out, just us and all those cars all stuffed with eyes, mostly guys alone, looking down the side streets, looking in their rearview mirrors, looking at us, but they don’t look long, Siouxsie laughs about it, she
says it’s more of a glance, it’s so different walking with a chick. I mean, sometimes I walk down Santa Monica from Oki Dog on weekend nights with Tony or Stickboy and the air’s just electric, like at a really good gig, there’s the audience and there’s the performers and you can feel the excitement, you get seen by thousands of people, tens of thousands, and some of them never forget you, I’ve met dudes who remembered me from back in the day. But tonight I might as well be walking some nowhere street in the Valley, nobody even slows down, I could care, I don’t, we just talk about bands, we talk about songs we could write, songs about death and dying, and makeup we could wear so we look like corpses, Siouxsie knows all about makeup, one time at Oki Dog she held my hand and showed me how to put on eyeliner, right as rain on the plane to Spain, so it won’t run when you sweat.
11
Back to black, as in cherry, and maybe even popping, depends on who did the dropping, there’s a pleasure trail of opened Trojan packets leading from the sidewalk up the factory steps and Siouxsie’s all, Vice check, vice check, but where’s the versa?
“Nobody here but us Squidleys, boss.”
And half a dozen blown-up condoms, knotted like balloons.
“What the fuck?” Siouxsie says.
Squid says some social worker laid them on Blitzer, and since he’s not exactly the baby-making—
“Where is he?” I say.
“He said he’ll be back in twenty or thirty. I know, I promised. But he’s closing some deal where we’ll all be like tour guides tonight. For a couple of out-of-towners he met.”
“What kind of tour?” Siouxsie says. “What kind of out-of-towners?”
“Blitzer said, and I quote, ‘totally nonsexual.’”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
“Well, it would be for us at least, sweetie. It’s not just a couple of dudes, it’s a couple, period. No, make that comma. A flamer couple. How did Blitzer put it? ‘Flamers with cash in the capital of trash.’ So I said yes. I’ve never done any of the tourist things. Like the wax museum. And they’re paying.”
So Siouxsie’s all, Then we might as well start playing, do some MDA, trip up in the crib for a while. And she says we means me too. But after all it is the love drug. And I bet what they really crave is a private round of les-be-friends, so I just say I’ll kick it where I am, waiting for Blitzer.
But I hate waiting.
And while they’re climbing the planter behind me I back-plant on the tiles and realize the food’s making me sleepy and the egg-crate foam would be way more relaxing and I almost jam after them.
Not quite, though. And then I guess I do drop off, it’s like I was sleeping and now I’m awake, but if this is a dream, no no no it can’t be a dream, in the dreams he never talks, it’s Darby’s voice, but he’s a ghost, and ghosts don’t talk, Rory Dolores told me he was walking up Vista the day after Darby died and he saw his ghost, his leather zipped up past his neck to his chin, standing up on a wall in a cactus garden. He said Darby stared at him with this completely pale ghost face and tried to talk, but couldn’t.
“You’ll only know them when you need them.”
It’s Darby’s voice, I’m sure it is.
Know who, I wonder.
Or what.
I bet the words is what he means.
For Blitzer. For me to sing to Blitzer. Because he sang to me. He sang “Sex Boy.” And now I owe him.
Yeah.
Big-time.
Oh, yeah.
And thinking of Blitzer I more than think, Siouxsie’s right, my hands are cold, but all of me isn’t, and I warm them up, one at a time, slow and easy, waiting but good waiting, the best kind of waiting really, I’m so waiting is there anyone so waiting, the more I wait like this the more I want to wait some more, the more I wait the more I want the more the more the sound his yes, now, Blitzer’s, the sound his boots, the touch his knees, Squid’s right, his shirt pulled up the silky soft the spiraled ridge I think he knows, Darby’s right, you’ll know them when.
Tell them that I’m your gun
Pull my trigger I’m bigger than.
He lets out a low slow moan.
“How did you know?” he whispers.
“The words? From ‘Forming’?”
“To touch me there.”
My tongue follows my finger and this electroshock shiver powers through him crop up top to steel toe below and he pulls me up by my armpits so we’re face-to-face.
“The crib,” he says.
“Squid and Siouxsie went there.”
“Then the doorway. Where the planter juts out.”
He leads me with his fingers wrapped around my wrist and pulls me hard against him with his back to the alcove wall. We stand statued with our legs twined together but our faces apart and the heat between us rising and then his fingers then his shirt then my lips and then our hands, panicking together unbuttoning his jeans as he arches his back and then comets no comets are ice, meteors burning, showering burning, meteors, fingers, his fingers, my fingers, holding me holding him circling me circling him, his fingers, hot slick, uncircling, blunt thick, his fingers, my lips, my tongue, his taste, his lips his tongue, my back too, now me too, his throat, swallowing.
Before he pulls up his jeans he lets me lay my head in his lap and he rakes his fingers through my hair like he did in Citrus Alley.
“You didn’t find that spot,” he says. “You knew already. How did you know?”
I raise up a little and trace the flat skin surrounding with my fingertip. Then the raised round rim. Then the snail curve of the ridge inside.
“It’s a circle, Blitzer. That’s how.”
the walk of fame
12
“Girls! Try it all! Lights! Glamour! Action!”
It’s Froot Loops ripe from the Variety Pack all right. They’re parked waiting for us at the Mayfair on La Brea, and as soon as we all-aboard Squid and Siouxsie are on the goods in back like Here Comes Santa Claus on Christmas morning, jumbo Hefties of stale popcorn, mesh bags bulging with makeup jars and lipstick and eyeliner, stem to stern, floor to fuckin ceiling, Blitzer’s words exactly. It’s the van he saw on Fountain, but Tim and David aren’t anything like hippies.
They’re not like anything else period.
“That van outie looks like it couldn’t be filled with anything but nast cushions and Mexican blankets, you know, soaked in spilled bong water,” Blitzer told us walking over. “But innie it’s a whole ’nother story.”
And why, because they wanted to be famous. And what for, for being the first people to drive from Bumfuck, Minnesota, to the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, in a van filled with popcorn and cosmetics.
“They thought if they drove all that shit down South, took back roads all the way, stopped in every little white trash town to tell the rednecks what they were doing, and filmed it, the Coke people would make them into an ad campaign.”
The ad campaign.
It’s the Real Thing, take two.
But the boys in suits wouldn’t see them. Even with Tim dressed specially for the occasion. (And I’m clueless on both counts, hot pants and Nancy Sinatra boots, but Squid said trust her, ignorance is bliss.) So they decided on Hollywood instead.
And why?
“Because there’s always Max Factor!” Tim shrieks. “That’s why!”
He’s perched shotgun, facing back in the captain’s chair, clapping his hands and squealing exactly like that homo on Hollywood Squares every time he gets the answer right. Up front on the driver’s side David’s got a deeper voice but only thanks to Einstein, it’s all relativity, the valve’s wide open on the high-test helium line to his loafers too.
“I adore your look,” Tim says to me, third time in one young night and it’s either the harshmallow in the Sucky Charms or the surly fries in the box of Hacker Jax, you tell me. No new wave follow-up from this dude, though.
I bet he thinks it’s a hair product.
Then he tells us how right before
we showed he strolled into Mayfair to buy a pack of Kents and saw the most adorable to-die-for punker with a sleeveless shirt in the checkout line and he just couldn’t help himself, he had to ask, “Where did you get those muscles?”
And what did Mr. Adorable answer right back?
“From beating up queers.”
And Tim and David bust up even harder than we do.
I’ve never been around homos like this, not up close and personal. They’re not the Arthur J’s crowd, not even. Though I guess those dudes are mostly switch hitters, they really are daddies, a lot of them, with families, they’re divorced or separated because their wives found out, and here they are doctors and lawyers but with ratty little apartments in Palms or East Hollywood because all their money goes for child support, in two different versions. And they’ll be getting down with you,
and right at the magic moment they’re all, “Oh, Justin,” “Oh, Shawn,” the name of their kid, it isn’t pretty, it’s as vacant as it gets, you feel like a fuckin social worker, out there making coin preventing incest.
But Tim and David are the real thing, Coke or no Coke.
I mean, this is gay.
Really gay.
But I’m not like this at all.
Darby wasn’t either.
Well, maybe a little, sometimes.
And.
More than a little, other times.
They start name-checking sights they want to see, the Cocoanut Grove, the Brown Derby, some drugstore called Schwab’s, I haven’t heard of zip except the Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood sign. And neither has Blitzer, I can tell, but he’s like Tony the Tiger at faking it, he’s grrreat. So when the final breasting place of Marilyn Monroe comes up he’s all over it as the pick to click for starters, even though he says it’s not actually in Hollywood, and we’re down La Brea to the Santa Monica Freeway before I con the dots that the only cemetery Blitzer knows is the one in West LA where Darby’s buried, and that’s where we’re pointed like Marilyn’s perkies, with Tim going into on-ramp hysterics, “Mae West, young men!”
I don’t even know if cemeteries are open at night.
I kind of doubt it.
It’s not like Ralph’s.
And isn’t that amazing, what are the gates but rhymes-with-shocked when we get to Holy Cross Cemetery.
What We Do Is Secret Page 5