What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

Through face plant sure, fracture, maybe, concussion, maybe, rib-punctured lungs, stud-spiked eyes, steel-toed nards, it happens crime and rhyme again, to friend and fiend alike. And which is it raising me, could they be saving me, ham hands grab my neck and crotch and lift me all of me, lifting ham commando hands but no, too high too high, lift me lift me ready to fly, forward fast, forward passed, but no receiver.

  And I just go limp, can’t fight, can’t bite, can’t kick, can’t see, I hear Slade and what is he?

  “Save us!”

  Shouting?

  “Jesus.”

  Singing?

  “Save us!”

  The music stops and the yelling with it. Slade’s voice sings it’s over over, the music’s over.

  The hands go seismic but grip me still and he starts to pivot for the snapback heave, the music’s over.

  Sung by Slade then off-mic not sung, ordered, urgent, “Do him! Do him now!”

  Direct below me cracks a bat, ball bat, yes, ball crack, no, cracks bat on bone, kneecap bone.

  Then cracks another, so he’s folding while I’m falling but I’m caught by strangers and sounds fade doorward, bats to flesh, beatdown sounds while Slade sings music is my special friend, I should dance on fire softer fading as it intends, the music Slade whispers is my only friend and these surfboys they touch me, they call me Bro.

  33

  Then it’s all theater in a crowded fire. Then it’s them asking am I okay and then all these confusion beats with different people talking onstage and the mic changing hands and some dude saying no one’s in danger but we all have to leave, but no one leaving or even moving, just laughing yelling spitting till Slade’s all, Listen up, fuckholes, they really are fire department, it’s just a coincidence, dance on fire as it intends, go downstairs as they intend, then Squid and Siouxsie beside me saying it’s true, it’s more than cig smoke coming up the stairwell, so we beat the rush that isn’t through the smoke that is from the fire that isn’t to the street where it isn’t, not anymore, the van.

  And the fry really isn’t, according to Siouxsie.

  All that groovy.

  Oh yes it is, according to Squid.

  I sit on the curb between them and the sidewalk fills behind us and the air fills too with everybody’s smell that hovers like ground fog, there’s beer in it but it’s not all locker room the way it always was in year one Hollywood, these kids wear lots of deodorant, nobody schooled them yet like Alice Bag with her lost-in-the-supermarket lecture at the gig at Marina Skatepark that Gerber set up by telling the owner that she and Rory just got married and his big concrete bowl was the only place in LA that could stand up to a punk rock reception. So the bands played in the deep end and it was like the first big chance to preach the gospel of Johnny to the suburbs, because all the usual skateboarder suspects who hung out there could still pay admission and join in the fun fun fun.

  Which is what Alice made of their surfy clothes and how they all smelled like products instead of people. She said Study advertising and see for yourselves, who gets heroized like Washington and Jefferson, who’s the Founding Fathers of modern marketing, the dudes who came up with ads for deodorant, back in the radio day. Because they brainwashed people for the first time ever into thinking they needed something no one ever needed before, and not only needed it but needed it bad, every day for the rest of their lives like food and water. Then Alice held up a can of Right Guard or whatever and flicked a lighter in front of the nozzle and told everyone to forget their armpits, aim where it counts with their personal flamethrowers, aim for the flag, aim for the cops.

  Right as LAPD showed, on a noise complaint. So they nailed her for inciting a riot.

  I say, “Remember at Marina when the cops were dragging off Alice Bag and she was screaming, ‘Deodorant doesn’t kill people, people kill people!’ ”

  Siouxsie laughs and scoots closer to me.

  “If that’s a hint, then I’m not taking it.”

  She nuzzles her cheek against my neck. She’s so warm I con the dots how cold I am now, cold and wet, Slurpee cold, chowder clammy, and my shirt’s in the van and the van is gone, gone like a song, when the music’s over.

  “No, you always smell good. Spicy. I don’t know what spice though.”

  “Cloves,” Squid says. “She never wants to be seen with yours truly Miss Trendy smoking them, so she helps herself to half the pack. To shorten the period of embarrassment.”

  “You lie,” Siouxsie says.

  “I don’t.”

  “If this fry were any good, you couldn’t say that word right.”

  “Which word?”

  “You know, em—”

  Siouxsie giggles into her hands.

  “Maybe I am stoned.”

  Squid says, “It’s that other em- word I can’t say.”

  “Which one?”

  “I can’t say it!”

  “Try.”

  “You’ll make fun of me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Emena,” Squid says.

  “Emena?”

  “Like that song. ‘Teenage Emena Nurse.’ ”

  “Enema!” Siouxsie shrieks. “Enema!”

  She jumps up all jill in the box, yelling, “Hey everybody, Squid can’t say enema! Enema!”

  “Hello, Siouxsie,” sounds a woman’s voice behind me, and Squid chokes up giggling while Siouxsie spins around with one hand on my shoulder.

  “Sister Dana!” Siouxsie says. “Oh. Hi.”

  Supposedly she’s got this thing for the nun. And I do hear something different in her voice. I don’t think anything romantic though. She just wants to corrupt her, I’ll bet.

  “What does your button say?” asks the nun. “I’ve left my glasses behind.”

  “Quadriplegics can’t masturbate.”

  I cover my mouth with my hands pretending to cough, but grin camo’s wasted on Sister Dana, she laughs out loud herself and says, “All the more reason for compassion, then.”

  “Is that why you let bands play here?” Siouxsie asks. “Compassion for all us messed-up kids?”

  “Heavens, no. It pays the bills for Self-Help Graphics. And it’s fun!”

  “Except when we try to burn the place down.”

  “It’s not your fault, it’s ours. Someone forgot to turn off the waxer in the paste-up room downstairs. And it started smoking. You’ve all behaved wonderfully tonight. No panic at all.”

  “We thought it was part of the show,” Siouxsie says.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Slade was singing about fire, right before.”

  “And there were five of them,” Squid says. “It looked like a band.”

  “In firemen costumes?”

  “Disneyland says we’re all in costumes,” Siouxsie says.

  “They say we compete with the Disney characters. We can’t get in unless we cover up with trench coats and hats.”

  The nun laughs.

  “Oh, just you wait, ten years from now your bands will be on that stage in Tomorrowland. They’re just ahead of their time.”

  “And twenty years from now,” Squid says, “that singer will be—”

  In prison?

  On the golf course with Alice Cooper?

  Singing, in that unknown voice, I’ll take you over, there?

  “Running for governor of California,” this fireman breaks in from behind, then says he needs the sister’s help in filling out his report.

  “So the show can go on?” she asks.

  “If you call it that,” he says.

  “How soon?”

  “Give us fifteen minutes.”

  She asks Siouxsie if she’ll help spread the word, and Squid and me follow her up the block, smoking. Siouxsie doesn’t actually talk to anyone she doesn’t know. She just shouts to people like Connie Lingus and Johnny Valium and Animal Cracker and lets the mass of people overhear. Once Siouxsie told me I wouldn’t believe how really shy she is, and I was all, Word on that, I wouldn’t. But maybe it�
�s true. She’s had the same friends since I first met her. I might even be the last new one she made. I can’t think of anyone else.

  I wonder if she made like a decision about it, no more friends.

  I wonder what it means, that song, music is your only friend, it’s still playing in my head. No, it’s different, like he’s still singing it to me. The way he did in there. Or was it just what happened, with that muscle moron, making it seem that way?

  I don’t know.

  But I know this, from Connie Lingus: Blitzer left with Tim and David, she saw them, though where they went she doesn’t know, besides towards the freeway. She says at least Blitzer showed, Rory’s missing completely.

  “He’s the one Hollyweird dude who still goes to every show. It’s like a bad omen.”

  “Maybe he can’t be here and be queer at the same time, darlin’,” Squid says, and it’s cool how she actually tells the whole and nothing but without flowing information, it’s part of the manners thing, I guess, talk about schooling, now that’s the kind I really crave, the kind you get being brought up right, but it’s too late now for the bringing, I am up.

  And Slade just asked about me, according to Johnny Valium, who’s looking for Rory too.

  “Asked what?”

  “Where you’re kicking it these days.”

  “I hardly know him.”

  “He knows you.”

  Reggie Mental comes up alongside us, walking fast, singsonging, “Desoxyn, Desoxyn, who’s got Desoxyn?”

  We hold out empty hands.

  He says, “That’s not what a birdie told me,” and hurries on beep-beeping, one two three four five six, roadrunner roadrunner.

  When we pass the front again Sister Dana’s standing in the doorway and after she thanks us for getting out the word she asks if she can borrow Squid’s eye to look at some printouts of something she wants to be sure looks—

  “Psychedelic?” Siouxsie says.

  “Amateurish?” Squid says.

  “Contemporary. Like those flyers you did for the Women’s Building benefit.”

  Squid starts to tell her it might not be the best time but Sister Dana’s all, It’s the only time, we’ll need bullhorns to talk once the band starts again, and next thing you know it’s just the two of us, Siouxsie and me, butt-planting on the curb.

  “So are you jealous?” I ask.

  “Of a forty-year-old nun?”

  “I mean that she asked Squid but not you.”

  “How could I be? I’m clueless when it comes to art. And color-blind, too.”

  “Really? You can’t see colors?”

  “I see them, but not the way other people do. I mix them up. Some of them.”

  “So everybody in the whole world is supposed to see colors the same way?”

  “I don’t think location has anything to do with it, Rockets. Like the Eskimos seeing different colors than the Aztecs or whatever.”

  “But if it’s all snow and ice year round up there—”

  “Oh like evolution, I see what you mean. But supposedly they came from somewhere else, China I think. Where there’s lots of colors.”

  She puts her arm around me.

  “If anybody’s jealous, it’s Squid and Sister Dana. Of me out here with you.”

  I just shake my head from side to side. But she clamps one hand around the back of my neck and the other on my forehead and nods it for me.

  “If you weren’t—” she says. “And if I wasn’t—”

  Some commotion starts up across the street, yelling in Spanish and a car door slamming, and just like that everyone around us on the sidewalk goes quiet, watching and waiting. There’s this tension. Not like Hollywood street tension either. That’s more cop-directed, bottom-feeder-directed. This is different. I’ve felt it here before. The beach punks are sort of on their best behavior at the Vex. They don’t go out tearing up the neighborhood. There’s gangs here. Not posh-boy posses. Real gangs. One night Los Illegals and the Stains played at the Paramount Ballroom a few blocks away and there was a shooting outside, a drive-by, they shot a guy in the mouth, in front of the Jack in the Box, they killed a kid. I was upstairs and Hellin found me and told me he was sixteen or seventeen and he was dying this awful slow death, she looked right in his face, she looked at Death, she sees it still she says, sometimes.

  The car lays a patch and zooms off. The tension hangs on with the burning rubber stink for maybe thirty seconds over Little Tokyo and then it’s instant, all at once, talking, laughing, press to play, cannot live in a world this gay.

  It all makes me think of Idaho. What’s there and what’s not. I ask Siouxsie if she thinks I should go.

  “You might as well, if Blitzer’s set on it. If I was him I’d stick around to slurp the flow from Tim and David’s gravy train, but—” She palms my head. “You can always come back. I’m sure you will. How are you getting up there, hitching?”

  If Blitzer wasn’t missing in action I probably wouldn’t say anything, though it’s not like I swore to keep any secrets. Just as long as she does. And telling her I feel this relief rushing torrents in my blood almost, like shooting hope not dope, hope she’ll help make sure that nothing takes a turn, a wrong one. But when I’m finished she just laughs and says, “You haven’t talked any more about this since the Hollywood sign, just the two of you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the whole thing depends on the fry taking them to never-never land, and Tim isn’t going there. He’s too experienced. He even did the same kind of thing himself.”

  “I guess.”

  “I thought Blitzer looked a little green up there. But it’s not the end of the world. They’ll probably just sign over the pink slip if you dudes ask nice enough. Or rough enough, maybe that’s it.”

  “No way.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s up right now.”

  “But why?”

  “One, because they really like you. Both of you. And two, because Tim feels all guilty.”

  “Guilty about what?”

  “Weren’t you listening up there?”

  I just nod. But towards the end I tuned out more and more. It must be like priests with confessions. Blitzer’s was the raddest, Godfather Brando, was that the sickest move or what, he got us all laughing, just like he got me laughing at the Masque, always.

  How many punks does it take to change a lightbulb?

  A hundred. One to change the bulb and ninety-nine to be on the guest list.

  How many skinheads does it take to change a lightbulb?

  Fifteen. One to change the bulb and fourteen to kick the shit out of it.

  How many skinheads does it take to take a dump?

  Twenty. One to sit on the toilet and nineteen to beat the crap out of him.

  I miss him.

  Music or no music, friend or no friend.

  Siouxsie pushes up first one then the other corner of my mouth with a finger, and tells me to say chords of red dis-ease. “Cheer up. You’re not abandoned. He’ll be back.”

  She kisses my forehead.

  “Trust me. Tim and David are big boys. You’re all big boys. They’ll be fine. You’ll all be fine.”

  It’s hard to trust her, though. Like up on the letter H she was all, It must be hearing the voices that made me think of this game tonight, but no way Doris Delay, I know why she thought of it, so she could burn Squid for holding out secrets on her, she just made sure she went last in case Squid decided to spill after all. And besides that too I heard her loud and queer, not that long ago, saying she might not fight off someone trying to kill her and why, because she’d enjoy it too much, and if she doesn’t care about bad shit happening to herself how can she care about it coming down on anybody else?

  Except she doesn’t think it’s bad, not if you want it. Or like it. And I partly get that, to the mass of jacks another dude’s dick inside them’s a fate worse than death by tin snips, fire ants, and rubber hoses put together. But not this one, not now and not even. Still it see
ms like somewhere there’s a line you draw.

  But where the fuckety-fuck is it?

  Over the rainbow, I guess. Maybe the list of what Siouxsie’s got in common with Tim and David is longer than I thought. There’s the movie thing too, not just watching them, wanting to live them out, different movies, not Judy movies, not furs and silks movies, but still. So I bring up the live-to-die idea again, like she talked about walking on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  “Was it just that one horror flick that made you feel that way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sparks a smoke.

  “I guess there were other things besides that.”

  “Before or after?”

  “Before.”

  And she tells me about her first day of first grade. How she went out at recess and found this beautiful leaf, all shiny bright like it was lit from inside, lit with candles, she lived with foster parents then somewhere by Fresno where they have trees that lose their leaves, oak trees, not just boring pines and palms. So she brought it back to give to the old-lady teacher, because she liked her so far and too she knew that particular teacher mattered hard as coffin nails, because she’d be teaching her to read, and she wanted to read on her own more than anything under the big black sun. She lined up with all the other mommy’s little monsters waiting to get back into the classroom and hid the leaf in her hands behind her back. The teacher came back from lunch and unlocked the door and they started filing in. Then right before she went through the doorway, right before she was going to hold out the leaf to the teacher who was standing just inside, the girl in line behind her grabbed the leaf and crushed it.

  “For no reason?”

  “I didn’t even know her.”

  So Siouxsie had nothing for the teacher. And she went back to her desk and started crying, but she couldn’t say why. She couldn’t say anything. The teacher turned out to be a rhymes-with-rich about it too. Finally she took her down to the principal’s office and they phoned her foster mom. She couldn’t tell her mom either. She was in like shock. She ended up getting spanked.

  “And you liked it?”

  “No, it wasn’t that, but that’s when I probably first realized, you know, you’re stupid not to get pleasure from pain. Life’s full of pain.”