What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  After he stands there slouched and smoking on the Griffith steps and I’m not joking, with a cool to cry for, a cool to lie for, this cool to die and.

  A cool such as I.

  Have never seen but now and then have sweet sweet dreamed.

  A cool such as I.

  Cannot affect, cannot perfect, but still a cool that I expect, knowing where it’s going where it leads to next.

  But it doesn’t and it wasn’t just superstition rhyming reason with treason but a premonition, you can make yourself heard even bound and masked, but no man answers what he isn’t asked.

  By anyone.

  In any scene.

  Sergeant Friday or a sweater queen.

  So rewind-repeat, no, forget it, cut to the chase and be, don’t let it, fresh from scene check at the Nightly Planet, with news they can use, they lose, I pan it, they and theirs, on round the corner, home away from home for L. Jackoff Horner, ample parking, convenient location, best movie books in the girth of a nation.

  I stomp right in at my convenience, looking for the dude to beg for lenience. But it’s his not mine when it comes to loss, under his breath says the night shift boss, poor old sweaterboy missing in action, such a specialist in satisfaction, for certain customers a certain service, though sorry there, son, to be making you nervous.

  The word is nauseous though I don’t say it, my clue card’s on the table and I make him play it, first through the screen-play, second the script, but nobody home so it wasn’t stripped. Still it rings too big of a bell, somebody said it but where the hell?

  Not High School Confidential.

  Not Rock Around the Clock.

  Not Blackboard Jungle, or the Waterfront dock.

  I give him a minute but he takes fifteen, then he’s back with a photo book open to a scene, a semitough biker and a phony cop, light-eater attitude their make-believe prop. And it’s minimum wild but max the one, I read the caption and walk don’t run, I might trip on my tongue-tied feet, I might flip if I lose the beat, it could be worse but on the other hand though.

  I based my fuckin life on Godfather Brando!

  So that’s my shame and my confession brings me to the point of this rhyming session, if the world is Dodge I’m your Marshal Dillon, cool on the hill and chillin’ like a villain.

  But now and then, I don’t deny—

  “Don’t stop,” Siouxsie says, after he does.

  “Is this a test?” David says.

  “Or a rest?” Squid says.

  “It’s find the rhyme,” Tim says. “Isn’t it?”

  “Then I won,” Squid says.

  “You did not!” Siouxsie says.

  “I found the first one,” Squid says.

  “It rhymes with Bob Dylan,” Siouxsie says.

  “Rhymes with which?” Tim says.

  Blitzer says, “Now and then, there’s a fool, such as I.”

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  I say, “My secret’s one I realized just now, I mean I must be blind or something, ’cause Blitzer’s like a genius.”

  But I’m not.

  Leastways at getting off the Captain Hook.

  Siouxsie says, “It has to be about yourself. Something new. We all know about Blitzer.”

  “About my genius? What hey, that’s damn white of you.”

  Siouxsie says, “I would lick your feet but is that the sickest move?”

  Tim says, “Would you?”

  David says, “Really?”

  Squid says, “You’d better not.”

  Siouxsie says, “I guess that settles that.”

  Blitzer says, “I can smell the sorrow on your breath.”

  Siouxsie says, “Just stay away from the coriander in my C-word.”

  And this time around the chop chop chopping block it’s Tim and David doing double-trouble takes, just like me back at the Jell-O factory, so I’m all over it yesterday with a cleavage confession. But Siouxsie rewind-repeats, giving me the hush-off, and Squid says, “That dog won’t hunt.”

  “Rhymes with which?” Tim says.

  Blitzer laughs all-fall-down style and almost does, backwards off the crossbar catwalk.

  “Either,” Squid says.

  Which.

  In the season of the.

  Leads to ether.

  And then just follow the strobing strobe through the riled new yonder of Lucy in the sky, ether, Seconal, drugged drug talk moving farther and farther from confessing the trues, till who can trace it back without a Boy Scout crumb trail, Spanish fly, absinthe tastes like licorice, kerosene tastes like rocket fuel.

  “Because it is rocket fuel!” Siouxsie yells. “And whose turn is it to blast off now?”

  So I tell them how I hit another kid over the head with my lunch box when I was like six. His name was Billy Morgan and he lived next door to this foster home I was in and he was actually my friend. He didn’t provoke me or anything. Talk about the sickest move. We were outside in the yard and I raised my lunch box over my head with both hands and brought it down hard. I wasn’t mad. I just got the urge. Maybe because he was standing there unsuspecting and I knew I could. To find out what would happen, I guess.

  And afterwards he didn’t touch me, just ran home wailing. What I didn’t know was that my soon-to-be-ex foster mom watched the whole thing, from the window right above us. She came out and grabbed me asking Why why why and I told her he called me a name, but she knew I was lying. So she dragged me next door and both her and Billy’s mother carried on for hours it seemed, but they didn’t lay a hand on me and finally I wanted them to, or someone to, I kept pushing the lunch box at Billy, telling him to do the same to me, do it twice, do it three times. I really wanted him to hit me, but he wouldn’t.

  He said he’d feel bad if he did.

  So I was the one who ended up feeling bad.

  And that’s the first time I remember.

  Wanting.

  Darby said.

  Wanting’s what controls everything.

  Now I remember something else.

  Sitting there holding the lunch box, when I wasn’t trying to get Billy to hit me with it I kept bringing it back up to my mouth, I was so afraid that he wouldn’t hit me back and something worse would happen to me, lots worse, I was gnawing on the top edge practically, I could taste the aluminum.

  And what’s the last time I remember?

  Wanting?

  Tonight, with Blitzer at the Nast, licking under his arms.

  My idea, I wanted to do that.

  Not the sickest move but I never did it before.

  And he had deodorant on, he found some in the bathroom at the Merv-wracking scene of crimes against true vanity.

  He told me afterwards.

  And there must be some kind of aluminum in deodorant. In one of the ingredients. I’m sure there is.

  Because it tasted the same.

  And it brought it all back.

  And I felt the same too.

  Afraid.

  That something bad might happen.

  Something really bad.

  Tonight.

  Darby said.

  So how does it feel, to want?

  I say, “Aluminum tastes like fear.”

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  David says, “It’s like church.”

  Choosing my confessions.

  And how A for appropriate.

  Because this is it: I like the Mormons.

  I know what you’re all thinking. It’s the missionaries like U and I because they’re so cute. And so blond. And they all have perfect complexions and they’re so sincere. They come to the door with their Book of Mormon and I’m always.

  Smitten.

  That’s the word. But it’s one of those words you say much more than once and it doesn’t sound like a word anymore, just sounds stranger and stranger if you say it over and over until it’s only a sound and you don’t even connect it with a word, you’re just making a sound.

  Like speaking in tongues.

  Do they even do that? The Mormons?
I don’t really know. I always invite them in. But usually the visit is, well, brief.

  Once they get a good look around.

  Once Tim joins us.

  Especially once Tim joins us.

  But there was the time he went away for a month to comfort his dying aunt Gladys, excuse me, Glad-Ass. And these gorgeous missionary boys named Lane and Laird showed up and I was—

  I don’t dare say it again.

  Rhymes with kitten.

  So believe me, I wanted them to come back. But I always thought it was like Girl Scout cookies. They either make the sale or they don’t. They move on. That’s not it, though. It’s quality, not quantity. They’re only expected to come across with a couple of conversions a year. Because if you get two people for life now it’s all their descendants later. And then those descendants go out and recruit at least two people a year for two years themselves. It adds up fast over the generations. It’s a system!

  So they want to come back. And you’ll never guess what happens when you don’t scare them off, when you don’t ask them day one how they really feel about slipping into lingerie every now and then.

  Well, not that. Unfortunately. But this buddy thing. They start dropping by. To chat. Shoot a few baskets. Help you change your oil. All this guy stuff. They’re not macho about it, though. Most straight guys that age get together and you know what they end up talking about.

  Thank you, Siouxsie.

  The P-word.

  But these boys never even ask why you don’t have a girlfriend. They’d rather you didn’t! Because if you did she wouldn’t be a Mormon. And that’s one more person to convert. They’d rather get you on board first. Then you marry a good Mormon girl. Or convert someone yourself. I told you! It’s a system.

  And the way it works is every time they visit they spill a little more. The golden plates. Baptizing the dead. Until finally they ask if you want to see the slide show. That’s when it really gets good. Because this is stuff they’d never bring up on the first visit. Like Jesus standing in front of a teepee with Indians in full war paint all gathered around. Or hunkered down with the Aztecs on the steps of one of their pyramids. After He got nailed in Jerusalem, of course. And who could blame Him? Time to put some frequent friar miles on those Birkenstocks. First stop, South America. Then Yucatán, pre-Cancún of course. Old Mexico on a collar a day, clerical. And on up the em-eye-ess-ess-eye-ess-ess-eye-peepee-eye to the original site of the Garden of Eden, someplace in Missouri.

  Which makes east of Eden, then—

  Peoria?

  That’s another one. Don’t say it again. I’m serious! Because if you can repeat one word and it doesn’t mean anything that means you can repeat two that don’t mean anything and what if it—

  Snowballs!

  From words to sentences! And from sentences—

  All right, the slide show.

  It’s so entertaining.

  Like how the golden plates were translated into the Book of Mormon. With special spectacles. With this sort of crystal ball. And both with alien-sounding science fiction names. It’s not like the Bible where there’s walking on water and loaves into fishes all out of thin air. There are methods. There are devices.

  It’s so modern.

  Like the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The Futurama! You rode in these cars through exhibits of the world of 1980. The world of right now! And do you know what they handed you when you climbed out at the end? A button. Everyone got a pin-on button. And do you know what it said?

  I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE.

  To die!

  Except we’re living in it now. And it’s nothing like the Futurama. It’s 1981 and—

  “Can’t you afford a fuckin haircut?” Blitzer says.

  “Hush,” Squid says. “This is interesting.”

  “You got it wrong, besides,” Siouxsie says. “Lee Ving doesn’t say ‘It’s 1981,’ he says—”

  “Hush!”

  David says, “It’s from that film, isn’t it?”

  That film you’re all in.

  The Decline.

  I want to see it.

  And I want to make buttons.

  I have seen The Decline.

  I did see the poster. Already. On the wall of that shop where we bought the hair dye. With that weird guy with his shirt off and a chain around his neck and a mic in his hand, lying down on his back with his eyes closed, looking dead. Is that Lee Ving?

  “Darby Crash,” I say, or whisper, actually, like a secret.

  “He is dead,” Squid says. “Now.”

  “That’s his leather I was wearing,” Blitzer says. “He left it to one of us. Now it’s mine.”

  “So he knew?” Tim says. “In advance?”

  “He checked out,” Siouxsie says. “You know, on purpose.”

  Tim says, “Oh, he was the one—”

  “With Marilyn,” Blitzer says. “At the cemetery.”

  “The Catholic cemetery,” David says.

  So someone lied to get him in. They won’t bury a suicide, not on consecrated ground. But at least the Catholics, when it comes to girls will be boys and boys will be girls, at least you’re only damned if you do anything.

  With the Mormons you’re damned if you do and damned even if you don’t.

  So you might as well do.

  That’s what I told Lane the last time they visited. He’d brought over a copy of the Book of Mormon that he’d gone through and marked passages, just for me. And inside was a photo with writing on the back, a portrait of his family, mom and pop and older sis and him and his three younger brothers, all tall and strong and blond and gorgeous, just like him.

  The writing was his mother’s. And the penmanship!

  To die!

  Saying they were all praying for me, left to right, name by name, there was a Lance in there, and one of those Mormon monikers, faux as biblical can be, not Jared, that’s authentic Old Testament, a walk-on, though, he didn’t do anything exciting like spill his seed, or countenance abominations.

  Did I just say that?

  Countenance?

  I said it twice!

  And second time around it already sounds—

  No. Tell me it isn’t.

  Snowballing.

  Heber!

  Lance and Heber and Lane and—

  Harley?

  Parley!

  Lance and Heber and Lane and Parley. Though Parley had a little Harley in him. Definitely. Son Number 2. The one Lane said might “hold off” on going on a mission. Parley had this sideburn thing going. Parley had this little pout to his lips. You could imagine a Lucky Strike dangling from those lips.

  You could imagine asking Parley what he’s rebelling against, and him answering, “What have you got?”

  You could imagine a lot of things.

  Like Parley on his knees in front of you, every night and twice on Sunday, murmuring your name.

  But not the way I imagined it in Minnesota, one on one, no sacred underwear, no underwear period, no rest of the family, gathered specially together, back in Utah. Praying that their dearly beloved Lane would be the witness who would bring yours truly into the fold of the one true Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  So I told Lane, Look, I’m what you call a fluffer.

  Not a folder.

  I thought he might cry. He was just this big beautiful kid who’d never had anything happen to him. I could see the outline of the shoulder straps of his garment through his white dress shirt. That’s what they call their secret underwear. The garment. Which reminds me.

  I wished I’d brought up lingerie on the very first visit.

  But that’s not all I wished.

  I wished I didn’t feel sorry for him.

  It was just last week I started liking them.

  Not because they’re modern.

  Not because of the devices.

  Because they planted trees. You drive across Utah and you see all these pretty little towns. Wide streets and white picket fences
and not a yard without a willow tree or a house without a vegetable garden and usually a flower garden, too. Kids on swings and teeter-totters. And water, water everywhere, in ditches, in ponds, sprinklers, birdbaths, and even in the smallest towns, the blink and you’ll miss the business district towns, a public pool.

  Then you get to Nevada. And the country’s almost the same. The rocks get less red going west, but that’s the biggest difference. The climate’s the same so the rainfall’s the same and the soil’s the same and the plants growing wild are the same. But the folks who settled Nevada didn’t lay out streets and build houses that would last. They didn’t dig irrigation ditches. They didn’t plant anything. They dug up rocks. They shot a lot of guns at highway signs.

  You see a few flowers, here and there, then you look close and they’re plastic. But you can’t get plastic trees, so there aren’t any trees. Or lawns. Or public pools. Or kids on teeter-totters. It’s too hot to play outside, without shade. Too windy and too dusty, without windbreaks.

  They could have planted trees. But no one ever did. And no one ever will. Because there’s always somewhere better to go. Even if you never go there.

  There’s always California.

  Just like there’s always heaven, for Mormons. And only for Mormons. No exceptions. That’s why it’s so important to convert your ancestors. If you don’t, they won’t make it. And it’s all your fault. But even if you’re as wicked as that, keeping your whole family back to Neanderthal man out of heaven, and even if the Mormons all get called up there like they say they will, you’ve still got something.

  Trees. Nondenominational. Making life better for everyone. Even homos. Even Jews.

  Thanks to the Mormons. Who knew all along there was someplace better to go, and always knew they’d go there. But still they planted trees. And those snowball flower bushes, too. Everywhere. I can’t remember what they’re called. With purple blossoms, not deep purple but deeper than lavender, like that birthstone.

  Oh, God.

  It is snowballing.

  Literally!

  The worst one of all, say it even once and—

  David says, “Amethyst.”

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