What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  “You were always like the mascot. The kid. Way the fuck back at the Masque. I guess I kind of quit looking at you or something. Then tonight—”

  He comes to a present-arms halt and huggy-bears me down to the grass in the strip next to the sidewalk and puts his lips next to my ear and whispers, “Tonight you opened my eyes.”

  He’s holding his weight off me with his elbows so he doesn’t crush me. But I want him to. I wrap my legs around his waist and force him down on me with my wrists crossing at the small of his back and all my bruises hurting hurting and we start this gentle rocking and he says, “Because you know what my problem is? You know what my fuckin problem is? I’m blind! I’m so fuckin blind I should be out there reading waffle irons with my fingers someplace.”

  And he kisses me, hard on the lips and deep deep past them, hard and long and let me, let me.

  Darby said.

  Let me teach you how to hold me and don’t ever stop.

  “You touched me first.”

  “Yeah, but when I came back, man. When I came back! You fuckin hit the bull’s-eye!”

  Darby said.

  You don’t aim for the eye of the target when you’re holding a machine gun.

  “But that’s not all. You’re smart! I mean I didn’t think you were stupid, how could I, but you fuckin know the score. And my friends outside, outside Circle One, they’re dragging me down, they can’t get anything right. Like you went up there to Bill’s tonight and it was fuckin Plan 9 from Outer Space to you, but you did the job and did it right and he gave you his card. That means he wants you back! And he barely ever does repeats, he told me. ’Cause they don’t have any brains, all they’ve got’s a dick, and they get bored with Merv and start waving it around. And that’s the opposite of what he wants, you’re not the star, you’re the audience. It’s pretty fuckin obvious if you pay attention, but most kids don’t, I get three bills off him every month, it’s like an income. While they’re out working alleys for twenty-five a pop when they need the green, and they always fuckin need the green. You live like that you might as well die.”

  “You never talked about this shit before, Blitzer.”

  “Since Darby checked out I’ve talked to nobody about nothing. Nobody I like. Nobody I—”

  “Darby said—”

  “Forget what Darby said.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Remember, then, don’t you ever hate him for, don’t you remember Rockets, don’t you remember how he was, I don’t know, he made you do things, things you didn’t want to, you know what I’m talking about, but he made you think you did, and he had, he had ideas, what I didn’t like about Darby was how he had ideas about people, he had his ideas and if the ideas didn’t match the people anymore, or maybe even if they never did, he stuck with his ideas.”

  He’s talking so fast.

  “He had an idea about you.”

  Breathing so hard.

  “He always said you were pure.”

  Ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump thump thump.

  “He said you were uncontaminated.”

  “By what?”

  “Ugliness.”

  17

  I have to get up. The back of my T-shirt’s soaked through from the grass. The air’s freezing now. It’s even colder than Holy Cross.

  “Take it off and tie it,” Blitzer says. “Wear my Circle One. I’ll just zip my leather.”

  After he hands me his shirt he rolls one of my nipples between two fingers then squeezes hard. I start to pull away then realize how good it feels. Better than good. He does it to the other one, longer, harder. I stand feeling it everywhere, I keep telling him harder, harder.

  “What hey, maniac!”

  He stops and I make myself step back, I don’t want to be a walking Subhumans song, there’s plenty slave-to-my-dick types around here already. We start giant-walking down the hill again and I ask if he’ll tell me something.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Did you tell that newspaper you weren’t really, you know, with Darby?”

  “Dude—”

  “I just asked if you’d tell me. You don’t have to. But you know I’ll believe you if you do.”

  “And you know I’ll tell the truth.”

  “Because it’s no fun lying when it’s easy.”

  He laughs his own laugh, not the borrowed rockabilly one, it’s soft and shy-sounding, like he’s trying to keep it to himself, in case nobody joins in. Then he says he’s not proud of it, but he said it.

  “Why?”

  “Because my brother’s a priest, that’s why. And he reads that paper.”

  “That’s it? You weren’t afraid of the HB boys finding out?”

  “Fuck, no!”

  He calls them rich kids playing dress-up. He says ten years from now they’ll be on the golf course with Alice Cooper. He says he could be like Darby, with a playacting girlfriend so those morons will keep on heroizing him. But he’s not.

  I say, In the end, though, Darby—

  “Was a total loser! He offed himself so he’d be all mythical and legendary and what day did he end up choosing? The day John Lennon got shot! No one outside LA even noticed. Or cared.”

  “They will someday.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Punk’s going to change everything.”

  “Punk is dying.”

  I can’t say it isn’t, so I don’t say anything, just remember.

  How Tony the Hustler talked with me sometimes about Darby when he wasn’t there, at Tony’s place on Orchid behind the Chinese, and we wondered if Darby knew what we were saying about him, whether he had powers like telepathy, because the force of his mind was so strong it was like that tidal wave that started from an earthquake six thousand miles away, in fuckin Alaska, and slammed that town up north so hard they had to build a coffin factory just to deal.

  And how Children’s Defective Services picked me up at the Oxford house the day Darby died and made me listen to this shrink who buddy-buddied me about all these ways to feel good about myself that didn’t involve drugs or sex or punk rock till finally I said I didn’t feel bad about myself anymore, I stopped. And he was all, Excellent news for the world and wanted the who what when where why, or thought he did anyways before I told him the who was Darby and the what was what he said and the when was the first time he saw me naked.

  Darby said.

  You’d have to be a painter to try and get it right, but even then you couldn’t.

  Back at the church on Selma Radar’s missing in action. But this kid I know from back in the day named Spanky walks up and says he’s kicking it back at their squat.

  Blitzer asks, “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “What hey, we’ve got business with him. He’s expecting us.”

  “Dude, V-13’s looking for you. These burly cholos hit me up in front of the Wilcox Hotel.”

  “When?”

  “Like an hour ago.”

  And that’s sketch-a-rama in Cinerama, oh most defiantly, because we were on that corner maybe ten minutes later. And V-13 are Venice gangsters who don’t cruise into Hollywood for anything but here comes trouble.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You must have said something.”

  “That I hadn’t seen you. In a long fuckin time.”

  I don’t know if Blitzer’s scared speechless but he is speechless, I know I’d be scared, actually I am scared, though I didn’t do anything and don’t even know what he did, and what I know most of all is Spanky better connect us with Radar, now more than ever.

  I say, “So where’s the squat?”

  “If you don’t know—”

  “Circle One.”

  And once I call it he’s got no choice, because that’s the thing, you don’t get a burn unless you swear you’ll do whatever someone else with one tells you to, whatever it is, anytime, anywhere, anyplace, for the rest of your life.

>   You’ll be there for them, and they’ll be there for you, it works both ways.

  So Spanky leads us, walking too fast for me though, till Blitzer tells him his legs are twice as long as mine and he slows down and sorries me all through that pimp and dope strip from Selma to Yucca, saying it’s been a long-ass time, he doesn’t see me on Hollywood Boulevard anymore, last time he saw me was in The Decline, last time he saw lots of people was in The Decline, where the fuck did everybody go?

  “I don’t know, the beach I guess.”

  We end up in this no-exit alley off Cherokee, close to back-door Canterbury, where back in the day lots of punks with rent money lived, the Masque was like a block away and you’d walk into the courtyard hearing music blare from every room, ranking music, a dozen different bands, and for once it wasn’t LAPD that finally made it history, it was black Muslim gangbangers in bikini underwear, with guns, how fun. We follow Spanky up steep covered steps that reek so hard of chemistry class I ask him if they’re cooking meth inside. But it’s fumes from the Mexican nail salon downstairs. He says the squat’s a vacant office for a wetback amnesty lawyer that Radar noticed from the street and unlocked with a stick through the mail slot.

  So first thing Radar did was upgrade the security, he’s thunking deadbolts and rattling chains inside from here to infirmity before he lets us in. And the door’s barely closed behind when Blitzer halts in front of me all screeching weasel wheels and says, “What the fuck is that?”

  “A python. It’s supper time.”

  And what’s on the main course menu?

  Live white mice.

  So no way are we waiting around for dessert.

  “We’re in a hurry, man,” Blitzer says, in this shake-and-break voice I hardly recognize. “Here’s the cash.”

  While Radar’s next-room-ward bound for the tabs he starts talking about feeder mice, how they’re really cheap because they’re the runts, and all deformed, missing legs or tails or whatever, so they can’t be sold as pets, and they’re all kept in a big box at the reptile store on Gower where they keep busy biting off their homies’ ears and gouging out their eyeballs, so every chow run for the snake is like a daily creature feature, only live and 3-D, how punk rock is that?

  And we’re all Fully and Totally and down the stairs in thirty seconds over spittle Tokyo, and Blitzer tries to puke in the alley but can’t, he hasn’t eaten anything today.

  And I puked tonight already or I would in sympathy.

  But while Blitzer’s bent double beside me dry-heaving and I’m holding up his forehead with the palm of my hand I get this idea, and when he’s finally breathing regular and sparking us smokes I ask him if that reptile store’s still open.

  “I think so. Till midnight probably. Why?”

  “I want to buy some feeder mice.”

  “What for?”

  “To set them free.”

  “In Hollywood? They’ll get squashed by cars.”

  “Later. When we go to the Hollywood sign. Up there.”

  “But there’s cats, raccoons, they’ll just get eaten anyways.”

  I tell him even being free for a few minutes is better than not at all. And he’s all, True enough, just so long as we do it fast, we got a date with tab-ulate, and speaking of fast.

  “Put out your hand.”

  Desoxyn. Pure methedrine in convenient tablet form. He says he took four earlier waiting at Bill’s.

  No wonder he jumped me afterwards. Everyone calls it the sex machine drug. Gerber always says she’ll do anything on Desoxyn.

  But she’ll do anything on Wednesday too.

  I down one plus one, hell fuckin na, I won’t be sleeping anyways. And by the time we’re on Sunset at Gower I start feeling it, just a little. On the sidewalk outside Reptile World Blitzer asks me how many mice I want, and at first I say I don’t care, just get the most fucked-up deformed ones you can, but when he’s pushing through the door one of those tweaker lights starts strobing faster faster faster inside my brain and I’m all, Wait!

  “I want three. Three blind mice.”

  18

  Tim’s voice comes through loud and queer a block away from Frederick’s, then they’re all on the frequency, playing hopscotch over Reagan’s star on the Walk of Shame, all max vol from doing MDA in the wax museum, where they got the boot finally for pretending to be part of the Rocky Horror exhibit and scaring Japanese tourists by coming to life and stalking them with air samurais, yelling “Banzai!” and “Hirohito!” and “Panasonic!”

  They don’t just tell us, we get the full demo and join in the fun fun fun, which starts a ministampede of rising-sun types here and now in the bluster and pow! even though we’re just dueling one another. What finally puts finito to Hirohito is a major shogun move by Blitzer that spills Trojan packets from the arm pocket of his leather and sends them skittering over the president’s twinkly, much to the walk in the amusement park of this passing black dude, he’s all, That works, considering what he’s doing to the country, but to the shock! and horror! of David, and Tim especially.

  “Ooooh!” he screeches, picking one up. “What are these for?”

  Blitzer says that’s what he asked the social worker prowling Lexington, bearing tidings of discomfort to boys.

  “Then I asked if he was from Covenant House and he got all offended, because they’re Catholics and the one thing they’re not passing out is rubbers, so in his book they’re like the dark side.”

  “What book’s that?” Siouxsie says. “Aleister Crowley’s?”

  “Fuck, no. Nothing that freaky. Planned Parenthood.”

  Siouxsie laughs.

  “Actually I think my parents belonged to the dark side of that. You know, Planned Un-Parenthood.”

  Though Siouxsie at least got the silver-spoon sendoff, left in the ladies’ at Bullock’s Wilshire, while this little bundle of joy to the world ended up Napoleon Solo in an all-night Fluff ’n’ Fold on Western Avenue.

  It’s nothing to cry about, though, hardly anyone I know has parents. And the ones who do, or did, like Darby, I mean, he had his mom, and wished he didn’t, and at first he thought his dad was his sister Faith Junior’s dad, who got the boot from his mom when he was little. Then he found out in an argument that his real dad was this Swedish sailor who he never met, and tripped way past hard on it, so when he was like six he asked the guy in line to be his stepdad to marry his mom so he could have a dad. And the dude did the deed all right, but then he died before Darby was twelve.

  “Mine too, but having no one seems a lot cleaner,” I say.

  “You don’t have to keep it all straight.”

  Squid says the Planned Parenthood people aren’t managing too well with that themselves, are they, if they’re worried about the likes of Blitzer making babies.

  “What hey, that’s what I told him, ease your mind, dude. When I really felt like punching him, you know the way they sound, social workers, the way they try to make like they’re not talking down to you, when you both know they are.”

  Oozing feel-good grease from every syllable.

  “Blitzer the authority of course,” says Squid.

  On?

  “Feel-good grease.”

  Ooze it any way but hers or Siouxsie’s.

  A beat.

  Another.

  And maybe it’s me with Sid Sings tied around my waist, but it’s Tim singing “My Way,” oh most defiantly.

  And that settles it, Siouxsie says, in the wax museum Tim and David thought up the yelling on their own and now this, obviously they’re punks trapped in glam bodies, and tonight’s the night.

  To cut their hair.

  Starting with Tim’s, which is way too Bride of Frankenstein according to Siouxsie, and way too Barbra Streisand according to Squid.

  Especially considering his nose.

  And true it’s not the makeover that the senior class of the conjectural college might vote most likely to succeed. But there’s only one place to get the before-and-after sh
ow on the killrocky road, and that’s their room, so Blitzer and me, we fully agree, it’s the coolest concept since that old Eskimo found his pie in the northern sky, and put his name on it.

  I say we should bail anyways, the cops keep special watch on this particular star, everybody knows that.

  Siouxsie says it’s true.

  “Yesterday Trudie Plunger was standing here wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and they got her for soliciting.”

  David asks, “Just because of the shirt?”

  “Fully. We saw it happen. Sergeant Walking Penis called it a pervert act.”

  “Overt act,” Squid says. “It means the shirt is like a come-on.”

  “And speaking of come on,” Blitzer says.

  David’s too wasted to drive, so Blitzer plays chauffeur to one of those no-tell motels on Hollywood Boulevard east of the freeway, where the grin-dividuals at the desk charge the hourly rate on autopilot unless you say something. And from the slam of the driver-side door after we pull up I can tell he isn’t Mr. Happy Face about the Nast Western, he must be thinking that if they’re staying in a dive like this they probably spent all their money financing the Coca-Cola expedition, and so much for tonight’s fags-to-riches story in glamorous to-die-for Hollywood.

  But maybe they’ve been eating popcorn mostly and sleeping in the van. They’re bound to have a cash stash somewheres.

  Unless it’s already been jacked.

  Because when we get to the room the door’s open wide as the world of sports, and Tim and David remember it closed.

  They don’t remember the TV on.

  They don’t remember the locker room smell.

  They don’t remember the dude asleep on his back in the middle of the bed, naked except for his motor boots.

  “He’s all bruised,” says David.

  “He’s not a natural blond,” says Tim.

  “He’s Rory Dolores,” Siouxsie says. “We know him.”

  “You do?” Tim says. “He’s beautiful.”

  “More cute, actually,” David says.

  “That gutter punk?” Blitzer says. “Beautiful?”

  They hate each other on autopilot now, after fighting over Darby for like three years I guess they just can’t stop.