What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  “You’re right, I am. I fully am.”

  “Of course you are. Don’t feel guilty. You didn’t get him started. Everyone starts themselves.”

  “They get influenced, though. Sometimes.”

  “You think I’m trying to influence you to take drugs?”

  “You said I should! Flat out. Three, at least. Right now.”

  “Well, that’s just so you’ll go back to having fun tonight. And stop moping. But what I’m saying, day in day out, is be realistic. If you don’t like what drugs do to people, that means you don’t like your friends, doesn’t it? So you better find some new ones. And if you really do like ’em, well, then deal.”

  “With what?”

  With who you are, she says.

  With what you like, she says.

  And I start to ask exactly how you’re supposed to know, or really know instead of just thinking you know, but here’s Blitzer back already, at the bottom of the ladder starting up, and she says, “Because you can’t ever get serious with someone who uses unless you do too.”

  She takes my hand and counts down Desoxyn tablets into my palm. She starts closing my fingers over them, stops, adds one more, and sings in a whisper, “One two three four five six!”

  “Roadrunner, roadrunner,” I sing back.

  And Blitzer whisper-sings to both of us, “Go a thousand miles an hour!”

  He squats beside me and reaches up inside my shirt with fingers not Roman but Russian, Siberian, so cold I bite my lip, bite down hard to blood, to keep from lurching away.

  “And I will,” he says. “As soon as I refuel.”

  And it’s the funniest thing, funny strange not funny ha-ha. Because who goes all Puritan on us while he’s grinding up tablets for his hit but none other than, when I ask if the best way to go with the flow of the fast-lane traffic would maybe be to take one too. So the whole time he’s reading Siouxsie hard for saying the opposite of what she should be saying to someone like me he’s doing the opposite of what he is saying, going through all the steps of ritual de lo habitual, right up to when he takes a swing but he can’t hit, and she has to find a vein for him.

  Then as soon as the rush stops shaking him he takes up right where he left off, and they sling hot whispers back and forth about drugs I’m ready for and drugs I’m not and examples to set and examples to forget like it’s not me with them anymore, not me hearing every word and filing for storage and retrieval, just some too-long-lurking troll who turned to stone beneath a drawbridge, or stone-deaf anyways, I slit the shrink-wrap on Los Angeles with my fingernail, I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it, I finally let’s pretend I’m listening to my parents debate which college to send me to, but even so and even then it doesn’t change the one and only they agree to agree on, pick a choice, any choice, to make it mine’s to make the wrong one.

  They both stop talking all at once, the way that happens sometimes, with silent after-you-no-after-you’s that give way only to a fuller silence, a filled not empty silence, a brimming spilling silence, when the big deep unknown night comes flooding in so vast and curious they catch their breath and hold it, till Siouxsie finally says, “The crickets, oh my God, the crickets, I was always the only one whose favorite character was Jiminy Cricket, but there had to be someone else somewhere, and whoever it was and wherever they were, I knew they’d be my soulmate, and one day this girl I’d never seen before was checking out that old Disney Parade poster on the wall inside the newsstand on Cahuenga, so I wasted nobody’s time like nobody’s business, I walked right up and asked who she liked best, and she didn’t miss a beat or bat an eyelash, she said, ‘Who else but Jiminy Cricket, darlin’, who else is there?’ ”

  24

  Who can say then, why the girl who.

  Is the girl who?

  Why the boy who, is the boy who?

  Even why the girl’s a girl or boy’s a boy, who can say?

  With so much fate, and chance, and happenstance, what if Squid said Daffy Duck?

  Or never mind Siouxsie, what about Squid tonight and me, what if what if, what if she, left unsaid what stayed with me, “He’s always lifting his shirt up. I think he knows it’s sexy. I think he’s showing if off.”

  Would I have known?

  Or ever heard in his asking the going-gone gasping, going to the chapel but gone to the mountaintop, “How did you know?”

  Then heard it again, I didn’t find that spot, I went right there, I knew already, how did I know?

  And wasn’t that knowing what made me what I wasn’t anymore, from then exactly then to whenever when, not a kid, not anymore, not to him.

  I know it was.

  Think of what else, one night only, start at the beginning, what do I know?

  I know, a flavor.

  I know, I never lied before to him, not before it mattered, then I did.

  “It’s a circle, Blitzer, that’s how.”

  Darby said.

  Everything goes in circles and you’re always completing cycles and starting new ones, small cycles, big cycles, always.

  Like now. On Beachwood, again, Blitzer lying too, again, though just a little and not to me, about the mice, again.

  “Go roust the Mormons by your lonesome,” he tells Siouxsie. “We’ll just kick it till they leave. We forgot the mice at Candyland anyways.”

  But we didn’t. Before we bailed castlewards, while she squatted outside peeing, he said to leave them in the shelter.

  “U and I will be heartbroken,” Siouxsie says. “Missing the pleasure.”

  “I’m sure they won’t. I know how Mormons feel about people like me.”

  Then he calls after her, crossing Beachwood, “Besides, you never know when I might get the urge. The urge to—kill!”

  Back inside the shelter I sit on the bench and he bends over me cheek-dancing the new soft stubble on top of my head.

  “You know what kind of death I really like?” he says.

  “What the fuck! When you—I mean I took it serious up there, and you’re just—”

  It’s either stop talking or start crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and sits beside me with one arm over my shoulders. “I’ll stop teasing you.”

  His lips, brushing the top of my ear.

  “At least like that.”

  His breath, warm again, hot even.

  “But what I said, it wasn’t what you think, so let’s start over. I’m going to say, ‘I’m into little death, that’s the French for it.’ And then you say, ‘For what?’ Okay?”

  I just nod, I don’t want my eyes spilling.

  “I’m into little death, that’s the French for it.”

  “For what?”

  “Orgasm.”

  He heavy hand-plants square on my crotch, fingers squeezing through my jeans.

  Not the least bit coldly, either, not now.

  I’m all, Hmmm.

  He starts licking my ear. I swing one leg over his, half-sitting in his lap. He pushes up against me.

  “Fuck.”

  “Wanna?”

  And it’s like we’re on a hidden mic, the word’s off his lips and instantly there’s slams and clatter, just across the street, voices, footsteps.

  “What are they doing over there, watching us?”

  His hand moves down the back of my jeans, slips inside my shorts, farther down farther, between my legs.

  “Do you care?”

  “Just keep doing that.”

  While footsteps move our way, while he whispers, “Okay, Rockets, now hear this, when you feel in the dark on things you gotta fill it not with theories, weird ideas that just come to you from bumfuck wherefuck who even knows, but with this, right now, how it feels flesh and blood like this together, it tells us everything, all we need to know and what we don’t even know we know, this is what to trust man, this is real.”

  “I do, fuck, it’s all I want is—”

  “You,” he says.

  “You,” I say.

&
nbsp; “You two!” Tim says. “I knew.”

  Just like he knew, he says after we all climb the pipe rung ladder halfway up the scaffolding behind the letter H, knew even before we got there, before Blitzer parked in the flat hard dirt near the base of the first O and first things first I freed the mice with no one’s eyes on anything but the view, so it was private, not public, just mine and theirs, alone, unshared, Tim knew even before he came to California, just how sparkly from the sign the world the galaxy the universe would be, how un-dark the city, how un-sky the sky, how each could mistake itself, dawning or dreaming, one for the other, in the drama of the dazzle more than anything, the dazzle of its own reflection, this he knew.

  And who can say.

  That he didn’t.

  I don’t even know what he’s talking about.

  The star thing, I don’t get it.

  It sounds like theories all right. But I don’t think he got it from movies. From books, I guess. Like Darby had those heavy old serious books by Germans. Just having them around impressed some people. Not Rory or Gerber or Stickboy or me. He never read out loud from them, just Helter Skelter and Scientology. And that book about baby factories in the future where everyone’s on drugs 24/7, but legally, from the government.

  Though too it could be Tim’s ideas on his own. Or, you know what I think sometimes, the stories and thoughts that go into all the books are already out there. Here in the present but past and future too. You know that Catholic Discipline song where Kickboy sings, “All the books have been written”?

  A little like that.

  But not just oldness, newness too, stories yet to be told. Waiting to be told. Or wanting to be told, could that be? If they’re like fish, hoping to be caught? So they show off, splash around in all these different minds and imaginations till the right person reels them in. The person meant to tell the story.

  Who doesn’t know what he’s looking for in advance, but knows it when he finds it, hears it, feels it.

  Like this, right now.

  How it feels flesh and blood like this together, perched next to Blitzer on the crossbar catwalk of the letter H, for hearing.

  This voice.

  While listening to Siouxsie too, saying she knows exactly what we have to do now, because it’s so open, because it’s so up, we have to.

  Open up.

  Play Secrets.

  One round only, before the chemicals—

  H, for hearing.

  It tells us everything.

  “The latest ones, anyways, before they take hold. All you have to do is tell the rest of us something you’ve never told anyone about yourself. And all we do is listen.”

  H, for hearing.

  All we need to know.

  “No comments during or after, no telling ever, anything said, to anyone who isn’t here. We do solemnly swear. And when we’re done, we go direct to the Vex, otherwise we’ll miss the band. I’m enforcer. I’ll go last.”

  H, for hearing.

  What we don’t even know we know.

  “Next to last,” Tim says.

  “Next to next,” Squid says.

  “I have a question,” David says. “Does it have to be something negative? Can it be a good thing?”

  “All it has to be is true,” Siouxsie says.

  H, for hearing.

  This is what to trust, man.

  “True and secret.”

  “I’ll go before Squid,” David says.

  H, for hearing.

  This is real.

  “Rockets?” Siouxsie says.

  “Before David. Right before. Not first.”

  H, for hearing.

  This voice.

  “I’ll take you over, there.”

  And there’s two ways to take that.

  Different as night and.

  Day of the day of the day of the but.

  This.

  Is.

  Night.

  Now.

  25

  Blitzer says, “What hey, then, movement, rapid, I.”

  Excuse me while I kiss this guy.

  Jimi? Janis? Lennon?

  Pledge!

  To pull my Daisy, drive a wedge between over the top and over the edge, over my shoulder, over there, over the smolder in his stare.

  Let’s sear it for.

  James!

  Fucking!

  Dean!

  Alive at the Griffith Planet Aquarium!

  Claps to the homes of the oh my stars!

  Judy, Marilyn, Trigger, Jayne.

  Shirley Temple, not a drink, Totie Fields, not a widow.

  (Not at least of W.C.)

  Stars and stripes and stars and bars, more stars than there are and the name of the bar.

  Is called Heaven.

  And the name of the band is.

  Twistelettes.

  Twistelettes.

  Twistelettes.

  Do you know how to slow me?

  Catch me?

  Catch up if you can, Heinz waits for no one and my secret’s at hand.

  Life on the Missedbeingahippie.

  Where priest is priest and West is West and never the Twain shall trick or treat, not whore’s truly, Brooklyn-born with father dead, brother a father with God in his head, he flies me out and flows me in, but reading for pleasure’s a (chortle) sin. So where does it put me, after school, knowing nobody, craving cool?

  Motion Picture Bookshop, Hollywood and Argyle.

  First among sequels.

  First fag that you smoke, first fag you wanna choke.

  (With the sleeves of the sweater knotted round his gullet, hair check, hair check, mohair mullet.)

  First porn pic showing somebody’s dick.

  Frankie goes to Avalon, Blitzer to Babylon.

  Hollywood, that is.

  Recommended highly by sweaterboy smiley and I didn’t know piss from a junior miss and to me a rig was a truck that’s big and you only took a swing in a boxing ring but dumb as I was and suave as he wasn’t I knew school’s in session on who does/who doesn’t and only a doer could make him so keen to point out the chapter on.

  James.

  Fucking.

  Dean.

  And there he was in all his glory, it wasn’t Camelot, or West Side Story, I hadn’t seen Rebel or Giant or Eden, but if this was east, it was east of Sweden.

  I didn’t even know there were movies like that.

  It wasn’t actually a still, just a grainy blown-up frame, but it was him, naked as the day, James the young and Dean the wreckless, balanced on a branch of a leafy tree, one hand gripping a branch above and the other—

  Eyes wild open.

  Mouth wide open.

  Gasping.

  I stared and stared and the page.

  Swam and swam.

  Faster, faster.

  Like rats off the Titanic.

  Like a starving great white towards an octoplegic octopus.

  And I wanted to get out then like Exene now, get out get out get out get out. But sweaterboy had other ideas. And one rhymed with conversation so he sighed me a river and settled for talking when I wouldn’t let fingers do that kind of walking.

  He said that spread-armed shot from East of Eden where JD holds the rifle locked behind his neck looking crucified was posed that way on purpose, it’s the Cain and Abel story in modern disguise. And he said his favorite scene in Rebel is on the steps of the planetarium, right over there, when the do-gooder cop asks him what he’s rebelling against and he just shoots the dude first a look and then a jet of smoke and says, “What have you got?”

  And oh, I swear.

  And swear alike.

  I swear by the nights of Columbus, C.

  I swear by the days of Da Gama, V.

  That once it was said it went straight to my head, the world stopped swimming but the ocean was brimming and I was swimming in the.

  World.

  Not don’t-be-astounded-give-up-you’re-surrounded by the.

  Whirled.

/>   So in one eye’s blinking it deserted my thinking, the dread of drowning and the down down downing but even off the Titanic maybe that’s me, manic, and maybe I panic the.

  World.

  If it can’t panic me, any more than the sea. And a question asked is a question masked so why not wear it, why not share it, maybe I me-too, one more bored boy ignored boy with nothing to do.

  And give back what I get even better with practice, stinging like nettles, barbed like cactus, give it right back and ask for more, and no not politely like this year’s whore, singing I’m not angry anymore, welcome to the working week where stones are hurled, it’s a mad mad mad mad mad mad world.

  Is what it is.

  And what it was.

  But I had no clue what a cool cat does.

  So I started practicing, that same day, at being a rebel and what to say, every whispered word in every waking hour, tried on for size and tweaked for power. But a rebel with and not without, from year one day one zero doubt, a cause because see, cause gets stressed.

  From east of Eden to west of the west.

  And mine’s Simon simple like most are not, the autopilot answer to what have you got, scared bent not straight by this dude in a tree, caused by him, my cause was me.

  Or so I’d.

  Sloe-eyed.

  Doe-eyed.

  Believed, the eyes had it like a rabbit without having to see, the film that made all the difference to the difference in me. And true, grooving pictures with oceans of motion aren’t the rock-steady slab to build your house of devotion, just forget the Chinese and forget the Egyptian, when just the facts, ma’am is the doctor’s prescription, don’t go there, you know there’s no worse place to flee, if seeing is believing like it’s snap crackle popped and wheat-puffed up to be.

  But face it, embrace it, mind over no matter, if your balls aren’t crystal, why worry they’ll shatter?

  So back to the future to the boulevard, me, REBEL JAMES DEAN on the Mann’s marquee, black and white and read all over, another range, another rover, no land but the land beyond the word, spoken or broken or barely heard, to every time a rhyme and every rhyme a reason, turnabout, foul play, here comes treason.

  ’Cause blame me for innocence but not for the loss of it, I can’t help my exit’s the exact coin toss of it, when roll come the credits and black goes the screen and it’s goodbye forever just like James Dean.