What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  “Cute? He’s about as cute as my—”

  “There’s someone else,” Squid says. “On the floor, by the bed.”

  Someone dressed. Someone with a bald spot. Someone passed out on the carpet with a bottle of poppers in one hand and Rory’s ripped briefs in the other.

  “What hey, must have sniffed the undies by mistake. Pulse check, pulse check.”

  “Shhhh!” Tim says. “We don’t want to wake them.”

  “Why not? It’s your fuckin room. And anyways what the—”

  “It’s not our room,” David says. “The phone in our room’s avocado. This one’s harvest.”

  It’s light-years funnier than anything I heard on Merv tonight, whatever I told that dog groomer dude. And it’s Showtime all over again finding Rory like this, oh most defiantly. Because if there’s one Universal City ordinance in all punk rock it’s don’t pass out unless you’re locked up in solitary somewheres. Violate it and you’ll wake up with Magic Marker pyroglyphics all over you. Or a new unflattering hairstyle. Or no body hair at all. Or a plastic bag filled with poop in your mouth. Or worse. People get pissed on. Puked on. One time at the Canterbury this kid from Riverside got a pin-and-ink swazi tattoo in the middle of his forehead. Darby was sure he’d come to because it was right over bone, but he sawed Lincoln Logs right through it. And afterwards Gerber wanted to pierce his cheek with a safety pin, but somebody stopped her.

  I think it was Rory.

  Not that he wouldn’t be sitting at the table here and now if it was turned, powwowing on how to fuck with Sleeping Beauty.

  We could give him a sideways Mohican.

  We could shave his eyebrows.

  We could Krazy Glue his foreskin closed.

  Take off his boots and piss inside and put them back on.

  Magic Marker FOR and RENT on his butt cheeks.

  Make up his face like a geisha girl.

  Coat his tongue with Vaseline and crotch hair.

  Dump him in the bathtub with ketchup in the water so he comes to thinking it’s blood.

  Turn him facedown and lube his butt then lube the telephone handset too and smear some brown on the end and wedge it tight between his legs.

  I vote early and often for the last and nast but there’s no volunteer action for the number two. Siouxsie says to leave out that part. Blitzer says that God is in the details. They start arguing over whether touching Rory’s butt is dirtier than touching your own shit, and I figure it might be funniest of all if he wakes up to that discussion. So I sit down next to his legs on the end of the bed and when I hope no one’s looking I pull on some ankle hair, hard. It’s long and straight so I get a good grip but Rory doesn’t twitch a tendon. And I guess Tim and David do notice, because they whisper to each other and start moving in on him from the other side.

  “Go ahead and touch the merchandise,” Blitzer says. “Don’t be shy.”

  “Do be,” Squid says. “Please.”

  And that’s Squid for you, the sleazier the situation, the better her manners, once I heard her say “Please don’t” to this weenie wagger on the corner of Wilcox and Selma, right before Siouxsie threatened the jerk with a .38 vasectomy. But I’m with her a thousand frowns on the merchandise touching. I mean it’s one thing to play a joke, but another to.

  What?

  Be like Tar.

  We don’t have a Handycam or anything but still.

  Besides I guess I feel sorry for Rory. He was like the very first surf boy in the Hollywood scene, even though he didn’t look like one, and when I met him back in the day I thought he was a rich kid from the beach like they all are now, but then Hellin drove down there to help him get his stuff from his dad’s garage and I went too and found out the whole and nothing but. He did surf, and he came from that area, but more the low-rent inland part. The house was all drafty from busted windows and you tripped on beer bottles everywhere inside and the backyard was just bare dirt and head-high sticker weeds. And Rory’s dad was this lowlife on some kind of disability who came out and grabbed him from behind and held an ice pick to his chest until he gave him all the cash he had, ten or twelve bucks, a real father-and-son jamboree in other words.

  And too he blames himself for Darby checking out, they had a huge fight that night outside the Hong Kong Cafe, and Rory stormed off. Then at the funeral he cried and wailed more than anyone but Darby’s mom, and afterwards John Doe had to talk him out of jumping from the roof of Sunset 9000.

  I stand back up and tell Blitzer maybe we should bail.

  “What hey?” he says, all startled till finally he reaches for my arm.

  “You mean all of us, Rockets? Or—”

  “I mean we were going to do the haircuts, I thought, and—”

  “And as every daughter of the Confederacy learns at her Aunt Jemima’s knee, if it ain’t stiff it ain’t worth a fuck,” Squid says, then she and Siouxsie bookend Rory on either side of the bed and raise his arms over his head and start popping Bazooka bubbles in his armpit hair, one after another.

  Then Blitzer picks up the bottle of poppers and he’s all, Hmm, till Siouxsie points out the Calistoga stubbie with a one-piece twist-off cap in the ice bucket on the dresser, the kind of cap without a metal ring that separates off, the kind you can open and close without anyone knowing.

  Blitzer unscrews the top, takes a swallow, pours in the poppers, and seals it back up.

  That leaves the empty bottle, and I volunteer to fill it, in the bathroom. Blitzer follows me in and says he wants to hold it for me, and no not the bottle.

  “I’m afraid I’ll pee on you.”

  “Don’t be afraid of anything.”

  And I get this feeling, I know it’s the Desoxyn kicking in hard but that doesn’t change the feeling itself, it’s like we’re surfers, Blitzer and me, we’re surfers on this huge hollow wave, or no, not on the wave but in it, we’re surfing this wave and the wave is our luck and our luck is a tunnel, and the tunnel hurls us forward, and the tunnel never ends, but whose tunnel?

  Darby said.

  I fall into my tunnel.

  Darby said.

  I crawl into my tunnel.

  Darby said.

  What are you doing in my tunnel?

  19

  Tim and David’s room is one door down and isn’t that amazing smells like popcorn popcorn popcorn and what kind of perfume, Squid wants to know.

  “‘Promise her anything,’” Tim sings out. “ ‘But give her Arpège.’ ”

  “My mama wore that,” Squid says. “I’d recognize it anywhere.”

  She actually has a family that she remembers, and they even sent her a present through Greyhound will-call for her birthday. A dress. Or “sundress” according to Squid. She ended up giving it to Su Tissue of Suburban Lawns, who wore it onstage. Later I heard Kickboy wrote up the gig for Slash and said more about the dress than the band.

  While we’re settling onto the bed and around it on the matted shag carpet David offers us Cokes and I ask if there’s Pepsi, not thinking. Everybody laughs but me, and it takes awhile, but finally I get the joke. I know one thing though, if I was them I’d have made the switch by now. I’d have switched right there in Atlanta. That fuckin museum wouldn’t even let them in for free.

  I don’t say anything though. I’m sitting at the foot of the bed, legs stretched out on the carpet, leaning back against the mattress with the cardboard carrier box for the mice in my lap. I feel them scratching around in there, scratching around in the dark.

  Tim asks Blitzer about the studs on the shoulders of his leather, the swirly ones.

  “They’re called chocolate chips. They’re from London. This was Darby’s jacket. He put them on last year, when he went to England.”

  It was just a year ago. Right at this time. A year exactly. I remember listening on KROQ to the long-distance interview he did with Rodney. Nobody over there knew who Darby was. He carried the G.I. record around under his arm and played it for people. They all thought it was too fast.r />
  Darby said.

  Anybody that wants to get in touch with me can get in touch with me like through Michelle. Like if Rory wants to get in touch with me, or Blitzer, or Rockets, or Tony, if he could get in touch with me before he goes to jail.

  And how ranking was that, Darby naming us on the radio to all those jacks and all those jills? Especially since it wasn’t that long after Michelle stood in for Tony in that scene for The Decline.

  Though actually she stood in for Rory Dolores, if you want the whole and nothing but. After Darby decided Tony would make him look bad, he asked Rory to do it instead, and I was over there when Tony found out. Tony laughed at Darby and said, “Oh, you don’t want me to be in it, but you want this blond-haired freak to be in it? Not only are you gonna look just as gay as if I was in it, but you’re gonna look like a gay dude with a hideous, acne-scarred freak for a boyfriend!”

  And Tony he actually listened to sometimes, so then he asked Michelle. But just a few weeks later Darby was name-checking his boys on Rodney on the Roq. So maybe it finally hit him.

  That you can’t keep a secret that isn’t one anyways.

  David starts station-surfing the radio for punker mood music, and Siouxsie tells him he’s wasting his time, real punk isn’t played on the radio.

  “Really?” Tim says. “But how do you know who the stars are?”

  At first we shop-talk Poseur and Vinyl Fetish and Zed Records, then scene-check back in the day at the Masque and the Starwood and Blackie’s and the Hong Kong Cafe till finally Siouxsie says the magic words.

  “We know who they are because we know them personally.”

  And you don’t need the Amazing Kreskin to read their minds, if they can’t be stars themselves, why not settle for knowing some?

  Hell.

  Fuckin.

  Na.

  Goodbye Judy, hello Darby.

  It’s 1980, can’t you afford a fuckin haircut?

  Only The Decline was last year, so they don’t just want haircuts, they want this year’s model, they want Atlantic Blue like Siouxsie, On Fire Fuchsia like Squid.

  “And that boy next door,” Tim says. “What were the streaks?”

  “Aubergine,” Siouxsie says.

  “And platinum! I loved his look.”

  “Among other things,” Blitzer mutters. He starts massaging my shoulders.

  “Well, it’s best to dye—” Squid says, then laughs and tells Tim and David it must be catching, she hopes it isn’t terminal, their “to-die” disease.

  “Anyway, darlin’s, you want to color before you cut, if you really want to color. Poseur’s fully stocked, and they’re still open.”

  David asks how far it is.

  “Within walking,” Squid says.

  And Tim’s boots, rumor has it, are made for just that.

  “So that’s just what they’ll do!”

  After the briefest little visit to the powder room.

  When he’s finished powdering whatever he powders Blitzer asks if they mind if him and me just kick it here. And Tim and David don’t mind at all. Or so they say. From the way they say it I bet they mind, all right. They mind not being here to watch.

  Blitzer follows them doorwards, though he doesn’t lock it behind them, just stands there waiting then walks out too. He’s back in three or four. He locks the deadbolt and starts searching the closet. I ask where he went.

  “Next door.”

  “Why?”

  “I left something.”

  “Did you do anything mean to Rory?”

  He says he channel-surfed the TV to a showing of a movie called Shaft. What hey, how fuckin appropriate. And how spun is Rory’s whirled tonight, anyways? There’s the open door policy, what the fuck is up with that? Then there’s the deal with his boots. He couldn’t get his clothes off and keep his boots on, so he must have put them back on. Maybe for the trick, and whatever his sick little trip was. Or is.

  I say maybe Rory was wasted and decided to leave when the trick went down for the count and he got his boots laced then remembered he was naked and just thought Fuck it and passed out cold.

  Blitzer laughs and says any which ways we couldn’t have planned it better ourselves, getting T and D all riled over Rotten Rory.

  “How’s that?”

  “Because they’re thinking one thing right now, and one thing only, we can get them in the groove and hook them up with dudes like Rory.”

  “But they can’t be punks, Blitzer. They’re way too big of fags.”

  “We know that, but they don’t. They think the whole scene’s one big homo clusterfuck, based on what they’ve seen.”

  “But sooner or later—”

  “They’ll figure it out. Right now they’re Silly Putty in our hands. We get ’em frying and point ’em at some punk boys and they’ll forget everything, their room, their van, they’ll forget—”

  What hey.

  He shakes something, muffled inside metal.

  How fuckin clever.

  He takes a sudden whistling breath.

  How fuckin fuckin clever.

  Traveler’s checks in the fake Coke can that’s mixed in with the real ones on the shelf in the closet.

  Three thousand dollars in traveler’s checks.

  Three thousand dollars in UNSIGNED traveler’s checks.

  Not so fuckin clever.

  Just fuckin fuckin ranking cool.

  He dives on the bed and drops his head down over the edge by mine, then huggy-bears me with his arms and pulls me onto the mattress. He kisses the back of my neck.

  “It’s the real thing, Rocketman.”

  I’m still sitting facing away, with Blitzer on his knees behind me. He smells like leather and cloves. He links his fingers in mine and raises my arms over my head.

  And who do I think of?

  The Dog Groomer to the Stars.

  How fuckin romantic.

  He pulls his Circle One up over my head.

  But not like you know who.

  Faster.

  I try to smell myself.

  Neutral, I guess. Not bad. A little like Jell-O.

  His hands don’t shake.

  He doesn’t hold the shirt with all his fingers so none touch my skin.

  His fingers touch me.

  Everywhere.

  Too gently.

  He drops the shirt on the bed.

  “Something’s wrong,” he says. “Tell me what it is.”

  He moves out from behind me and presses me down on my back on the mattress with his hand on my chest.

  “Talk to me, Rocketman.”

  His fingers.

  “They can get those checks replaced?”

  Loosen my belt.

  “That’s why they’re traveler’s checks.”

  Work my top button open.

  “What’s up with V-13, anyways?”

  Pop my fly buttons.

  “I snaked them for a little Desoxyn, like a quarter, but somebody else snaked them for a lot, like a roll. They must have mixed us up. It’s like mistaken identity. Pretty soon they’ll figure it out.”

  Tug my jeans and shorts.

  “Is there a scene in Idaho?”

  Pull them down my hips.

  “If there isn’t we’ll make one.”

  His fingers fingers fingers.

  Move to where to there and then to.

  There.

  Too gently.

  Lips follow, circle check, left nipple, circle check, right nipple, lips follow, singing.

  Sex Pistols.

  “Submission.”

  I’m on a submarine mission for you baby.

  Lips follow, circle check, belly button, lips follow, singing.

  I can’t get enough of your watery—

  Drown, drown, down, down, hands follow, his, lifting me, legs follow, mine, lips follow, his, circle check.

  There.

  Not gently.

  Yes.

  Darby said.

  And you can swim, a
nd 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.

  And it’s dark, and it hurts, and I’m yes. The poison in the, yes. The future, yes. What I can’t tell, yes. The look on my face, if I could only, yes. I know and I can and I wonder, sex boy, was I ever, the slave, am I still, uncontaminated?

  All this started with words from songs.

  20

  Afterwards water runs quivers of rivers between us. Except where there’s nothing between us. Soap, maybe. Standing behind me in the shower Blitzer shows me with my hands how my chest isn’t flat like I claim it is. Curves are detectable. He says at least the cops went easier on me than Rory, my bruises aren’t as bad as his, and mine are looking better now too.

  The old ones anyways.

  He won’t let me dry myself. He wants to do it for me. He tells me to shake my head like a dog.

  I think of Dogboy and for the first time ever I wonder, What if I just went back? It’s only a bus ride. But I can’t go back. There’s nobody there I know. And I was nobody there myself. I just listened to tapes and kicked it in the library. I had no friends.

  He towels my hair. He says we’ll go to the Hollywood sign, and I can free the mice. Then to Vicious Circle at the Vex to sell the tabs, we only need a couple apiece for Tim and David, a couple for Squid and Siouxsie, we can move the rest at Oki’s easy, all the HB crowd will be out after.

  “How much a tab?”

  “Five bucks.”

  “That seems like a lot.”

  But he’s all, Not to those boys. And when I do the math, if we sell ninety, that’s four-fifty, and I’ve still got almost twentyfive. So with the traveler’s checks, it’s like money to burn. I tell him we could just buy bus tickets to Idaho, and forget about the van.

  “We can’t live on the bus once we get there. We have to get off.”

  He smooths my eyebrows with a corner of the towel.

  “What hey, if we take their money we might as well take their van. It’s insured anyways.”

  “I just don’t like getting caught up in shit.”

  “We won’t get caught in any way, shape, or form. I’m not stupid. You’re not, either. You’re smart.”

  He kneels behind me drying my legs.