What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  “I told you, earlier. That’s one thing I like about you.”

  He stands back up, one hand’s fingers leading the way, tracing circles up my leg, my inner thigh, farther, there.

  “So is that,” he says in my ear.

  “My worst fear is like ending up in a boys’ home.”

  He says I won’t. I say what about getting Rory in on the party, so we won’t be the only ones who could have jacked the checks. Like we could maybe just pay him to trick with Tim and David while they’re frying, we already know they like him, so giving them alone time could be camo for our getaway.

  “And at least that way they’d get laid.”

  Blitzer laughs like there’s nitrous pumping through the showerhead. Finally he asks how much cash I’ve got left, total, after buying the mice.

  “Twenty-three and change.”

  And he goes off again, then sits down hard on the toilet seat, catching his breath.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “That it’s even a possibility. In your mind. Because you’re Rory’s friend. You know him. So it is a possibility. That he’d turn an all-nighter, one on two, two fuckin flamers from the hottest part of homo hell, for twenty-three and change.”

  “But I don’t think he would.”

  “But he might,” he snorts. “He might.”

  It turns out I’m off the frequency, till we sell the L we won’t have any cash at all besides what’s in my pocket, and he reminds me twenty of that I’m holding for Squid and Siouxsie, since Blitzer promised them ten apiece of the fifty Tim and David already flowed that he put in on the tabs. So there’s actually more like three and change in the Rory rent-boy fund. And no way do we jack the checks here and now, because what if we do and the first order of business when they walk-right-in-sit-right-down is Coca-Cola inventory? What do we do then? Go Johny-hit-and-run-Paulene on the dudes? Get all violent?

  And I’m all, Okay, got it. But the whole thing seems kind of Darby-like. Telling you how smart you are, then showing how your way of doing something could lead to exactly what you don’t want happening in the first place, or worse. Building you up, tearing you down. Making a scene to put you in your place, and keep you there.

  Mind control.

  How fun.

  Though maybe it’s the speed, you do get paranoid. Either way it’s theories, making my head hurt. And I don’t want to think.

  “I want to shave.”

  “You do?”

  “Squid called me a Norelco virgin. So I better lose that one tonight too.”

  He helps me and when he’s finished he says I look great.

  “You were great, too.”

  He presses full-body hard against me.

  “The way you—yeah. Your fuckin—yeah. When I—yeah.”

  The lock starts turning in the outer door.

  But the deadbolt.

  He takes the towel for package camo and goes out to play doorman. And it’s so max vol suddenly with Tim and David shrieking about fabulous this and to-die-for that it sounds like New Year’s and Mardi Gras combined, it’s almost like they brought more people back, I even think I hear Hellin’s voice. But when Blitzer comes back he says no more youth of today, they just did more MDA.

  Now that we’re Mr. and Mr. Clean our clothes seem really nast. Not smelly dirty but gritty dirty. All that scary dust settling out of the air, from the cars. The shit we’re breathing, 24/7. I start pulling on the Circle One but Blitzer says Shine, he stays bareskin, I should too.

  “Just to keep the boys on edge.”

  His fingers race down my chest.

  “And me on edge.”

  We’re not two steps out the door before Siouxsie’s all, Yeah, sure you were in there drying off, it was jerking off, wasn’t it?

  “Jerking off’s the last thing on my mind.”

  I sound so cocky I surprise myself, Stickboy cocky, it must be the Desoxyn. Or maybe it’s walking into the room with no shirt, everyone looking at us knowing what we’ve been doing, not the details but more or less, it’s a ranking sexy feeling actually, and a new one, it reminds me of my birthday again, hell fuckin na, at least it’s going to mean something this time, like it’s supposed to.

  “So what’s the first thing on it, darlin’? Giving hickeys? That’s what it looks like.”

  And we don’t plan it or anything, it just happens, great minds think alike, we’re shoulder to shoulder in front of the bathroom door and both our hands shoot out tandem to flip her off, and next thing you know Tim’s holding our wrists in his skin-so-soft hands, saying, “Oooh, you match.”

  So I lied.

  No way did all this start with words from songs.

  Only all this tonight.

  All this period started with a cigarette.

  Darby had seen me that night in the bathroom at the Masque, but he didn’t say anything, he waited for me by the door. And by then I knew who he was, he’d talked to me a few times. But we didn’t talk about him, we talked more about me, so mostly what I knew about him was what we all knew, that his first band was called Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens, that he had a shrine to Bowie in his room at home, that at the very first Germs gig he covered himself in red licorice whips that melted into goo and he stuck the mic in a jar of peanut butter. And I knew he did lots of drugs, anything he could get, and drank lots too. So that night when he came up to me and asked if I’d go outside with him I thought he wanted to do some drugs, though I wondered why outside when the Masque was always anything goes, people shot up in there, people fucked, people fought, people puked. And too I couldn’t figure out why with me but who the fuck cared, I still hardly knew anyone and there I was walking up the steps to the street with Darby Crash, just him and me, and all those year one little babies watching, I could feel it.

  Then on Hollywood Boulevard he started telling me about circles. This light misty rain was falling and I was cold after being inside and he stood super close so our legs kept touching and I could feel how warm he was. He said everything works in circles. Everything goes in circles and you’re always completing cycles and starting new ones, small cycles, big cycles, always. He said sometimes you’re doing something and then like a year later it seems like you’re doing something else, but really you’re back at that same point.

  He explained all this to me. Then he took my right hand and turned it wrist up to the rain and said he wanted to give me a Germs burn.

  Darby said.

  Cigarette burns are tied in because of circles. If you do a cigarette burn right here, right on the bone, you get a circle scar and a lot of us have them. You can only get them from a person who already has one. It all has to do with circles.

  He lit a cigarette.

  We stood there.

  He said, “Do you want me to burn you?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned in closer.

  “I want you to go home with me tonight. Do you want to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  He gripped his hand around my wrist.

  “Will you do anything I tell you to?”

  “Yes.”

  The smell was there before the hurt. I thought the smell must be the worst while I still thought and then I only hurt. He pressed so hard so long so hard on my wrist pushing up so long so long pushing down so hard so long so fucking fucking long.

  When he stopped I leaned back my head and opened my mouth and tried to catch rain. Darby stood beside me, breathing hard.

  “Let’s leave now,” he said.

  the letter H

  21

  But that was just a follow me don’t follow me, I followed him, I couldn’t watch no parking meters, I lit a cigarette on one though, and walked on down the—

  “Beach?” Squid says. “Would—”

  She swivels the shotgun captain’s chair back towards Siouxsie, full-length lounging in the popcorn gallery watching T and D and all of me, Rockets Redglare, Hair Distresser to the Stars, hand number one, battery-powered clippers,
hand number two, blunt-tipped kiddie scissors, A-side Tim, flipside David, trim on down.

  “Would what?” I say.

  “Would not!”

  Be named for beech trees. Not the beach but the street. Because the sign says Beachwood.

  “There aren’t any beech trees out here,” Siouxsie says. “Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Darlin’, there aren’t any holly trees out here either. But that’s not the Hollybeach sign up there—or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Holly doesn’t grow on trees! It grows on bushes. Bushes don’t even have wood.”

  “What do they have, then?”

  Up front Blitzer’s laugh breaks the astound barrier just when the light changes and he feeds the gas too hard too fast for the left he’s making so it feels like we’re already frying the friendly fluorescent skies, catching two wheels’ worth of air and hair, there and everywhere.

  “What hey, if you two lezzie-byrds aren’t the authorities on bushes without wood—”

  Which rows Squid’s boat even more merrily than mine and Tim and David’s. Not Siouxsie’s, though, she hucks a compact or something, good thing the Coca-Cola Kids did Atlanta to the max like Factor, not all generally, Sherman style, you know, popcorn and cannonballs.

  “Fuck you, Blitzer!”

  “I’m all yours, Siouxsie Sioux! But only if you’re packing!”

  “Packing?” David says.

  Tim seconds the emotion and I’m all Joseph in a G-string.

  Mary in a mullet.

  Here they are two full-blooded fags who even tune in to the stations of the cross-dressing on oh-so-special occasions and they don’t know? I mean there’s no excuse. Signed by parent, regal guardian, or otherwise. Ten to one marvelous Minnesota’s jammed gills to glory hole with lesbians, it’s the North Woods, after all.

  As in limber-tongued lumberjills at play in.

  The fields of the bored.

  Squid and Siouxsie girls talk about dykes like that constantly. Or skank like that is how they put it. Of the overalls, braids, and hairy legs persuasion. Not favorably, in other words. Probably about the same way normal-acting gay dudes talk about Tim and David types.

  If there are any normal-acting gay dudes.

  Who aren’t really acting, I mean.

  Who just are that way.

  Everybody I know, they seem the least bit normal for thirty seconds over Little Tokyo, bring on free admission for Academy members and their guests, you know what I mean?

  Though I got dibs on the envelope please right here and now in the flutter and wow. Because the ladies won’t reveal what they’d rather conceal, and Blitzer isn’t steppin’ in the range of their weapon. Leaving me best juvenile actor in a reporting role, snip snip snipping away while I school the two without a clue on strap-ons all ho-hum like it’s Play-Doh not dildo on the cue card table, girls will be boys and boys will be girls and all deserve favor but some deserve a porpoise.

  But next thing you know they’re back-to-schooling us on how the year one day one sign said Hollywoodland, and how one of their checkout glamour girls did the deed from the crossbar of the letter H, though David claims she sky-dived into the mild blue condor style—it’s a byrd! it’s a Jane!—while Tim says she got jumpy with one end of a rope tied around the crossbar and the other noosed round her neck. Either mix though they’ve got it all down, dates and names and reasons, identifying marks and tattoos. Which is food for thought at Mr. Smorgie, take all you want but eat all you take, because if they know this much about the damn Hollywood sign they probably know twice as many details about Marilyn’s last exit from strife in the fast lane, right down to aisle, row, and beat number of burial location. And unless that just happens to be Holy Cross Cemetery it complicates everything.

  Staying out of trouble, especially.

  I mean we’re trusting Tim and David totally, Blitzer and me. To be clueless, and to be trusting us. But what if they’re not and what if they don’t?

  Though if they’re trusting me with the finishing touches on their makeovers.

  It was even their idea, back at the Nast Western after Squid and Siouxsie got the wonderful swirled of colors in and with smiles to grow and promises too deep Blitzer said Let’s motivate to meet our date with Lady Fate, what could be more punk rock anyways than haircuts on the road as in you-know-what runner once, you-know-what runner twice?

  Asked and answered, in homo-phonic here, queer, and got-you-surrounded sound.

  “Let Rockets drive!”

  Not behind the wheel.

  “Let Rockets drive!”

  But behind the steel.

  And what about the surfer feeling too, the wave feeling, the luck feeling, the tunnel feeling, back in Rory’s room? Before the traveler’s checks even came up. Why not still feel that way? Nothing happened. No room check at all when they came back to the Nast. We could have jacked the checks already. We could have been stupid about it and gotten away with being stupid about it. So we’re bound to get away with being smart about it. It’s Einstein’s Theory of Inevitability.

  They must trust us. Maybe she is buried at Holy Cross. There can’t be that many cemeteries in LA. Most of the people who ever lived here are still alive.

  Though there’s plenty of tombs with a view once the street starts climbing. And that’s why this neighborhood’s famous, supposedly. Beachwood, I mean. Not all Hollywood obviously, every barefoot banana boat bwana-be in starkest Africa knows the scariest letter in the alphabet on that one. And not for the sign up top either, that’s not localized, this is just the street to get to the fire roads that go there. For the houses, that’s what David says to explain why Tim goes into multiple big-O overdrive, squealing like he’s playing that license plate game normal parents make their normal kids play on those family vacations you get every boring detail on in group homes so you’re schooled to Dudley Do-right by your own little monsters someday.

  “Swiss chalet!”

  “English Tudor!”

  “French château!”

  “Arabian nights!”

  “Turkish delight!”

  Because the mass of different styles up here all beak by foul are major memory lane material from this required reading book called Day of the Old West, or something like that, West is definitely in there somewheres and hell fuckin na it fits like Jayne’s unmentionables, what is this after all but the merry merry month of Mae? And actually that reminds me of something I know that most good citizens don’t, I learned it from the 3-D globe in the Institute library on Vermont.

  So I tell David I’ve got twenty bucks with his name on it right here in my jeans pocket if he plays and wins one round only of geography Jeopardy.

  “Just hand it over no questions asked,” Tim says. “He’s got a thing for peekaboo loincloths. Lifetime subscription to National Geographic.”

  “Geography where?” David asks.

  “Right here. The West Coast. And back inland a ways, you know, Arizona, Nevada. I’ll name off four cities, and you tell me which one’s west of the rest before Tim counts five. If you’re right, IOU. If you’re wrong, UOYC.”

  “YC?”

  “Yours coolly.”

  “What proves the answer?”

  “Any old map with those marker lines running north south, the long ones, like on globes.”

  “All right.”

  “Las Vegas, Phoenix, LA, Reno.”

  “One.”

  “Westernmost?”

  “Two.”

  “Yes!”

  “Three, dummy!”

  “LA, of course.”

  “Wrong. It’s Reno.”

  “It is not,” Siouxsie says. “I’ve been to Reno. It’s in the desert.”

  “There’s no rule saying every desert’s east of LA.”

  Tim says, “What about that big fat rule saying the Pacific Ocean’s west of everything? Always. West of the West.”

  “Dude, down by that Panama Canal? That’s way east of here. It’s almost to the Atl
antic.”

  “It’s still west of it. So the rule stands.”

  “You didn’t say the Pacific’s west of the Atlantic, you said it’s west of everything!”

  “I did?”

  David tells Squid there’s a highway atlas under the passenger seat, but she’s already got it out. And next thing you know she’s passing it around so everyone can check how up past Santa Barbara the coast jogs east instead of south. Seriously east. As far east as that big lake up there on the Nevada border.

  “Tahoe,” David says. “We saw signs for Ponderosa Ranch. Where they filmed Bonanza! I wanted to stop, it looked so butch, but Tim—”

  All at once, no sounds.

  (Where there were sounds.)

  Not backwards behind me through speakers.

  (A long time ago a Dairy Queen came to me, that’s Dylan, David said, Minnesota corn and fed.)

  Not frontwards before me in sneakers.

  (Fidgety faggoty Tim, squealing to the rat-bite beat of Beachwood’s every bump and wind, scored by the clippers on the back of his head, in two-part disharmony, laddylike first, ladylike second.)

  Not sideways righthand.

  (Through Blitzer’s open window, hush-hour traffic, an accelerated murmur like the dry sound of bees.)

  Not sideways lefthand.

  (From pages Old Western as western can be, rustling.)

  All at once, no sounds but one sound.

  One slim soft girl.

  One Berlin Wall of max vol sound of riot rage and rant.

  Shout down the Red Army Chorus!

  QT the Tabernacle Choir!

  Why craze your chords, why tear your tonsils? Commie or Christian, shut it on down!

  I am Squidley! Hear me roar!

  It’s the scream you hear talked about, but never actually hear.

  Unless you’re at that college in Ohio with the girl kneeling on the ground in front of you and somewhere behind the National Guard kneeling too, with rifles.

  Unless you’re in Vietnam and she’s running towards you, a different girl, the naked little girl, on fire from napalm.

  You know the ones.

  Screaming, both of them.

  Screaming, Squid.

  Screaming, brakes, or is it breaks, all at twice or after brakes, our brakes, other brakes, something breaks, glass breaks?