What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  “No.”

  “Well, I—forget it. I know one thing, this hit better help clear things up. In my head. Something’s not right, Rocketman, this is some heavy shit, people shooting guns our way on the street, even aiming low, there’s ricochets and, what do they call it, shrapnel, someone could get hurt, or killed, it’s not something the person doing it does without a major reason, see what I mean? Then what happened inside there, to her, fuck, it’s scary.”

  Because there’s the good news and there’s the bad news, with the ugly news maybe yet to come. On the good side, across the street they ended up taking refuge in this poshboy cokehead after-hours club, it’s one of those death-or-glory stories Liz Taylor–made for legends in their own minds like Tim and David but he’ll stay the telling dry for me till later, the main thing is once they were safe and renowned as only T and D could make them he went out under protection from the bouncers and talked face-to-face with the in-charge vato dude and they shook on it and everything, the cholos chasing us is over, completely over, mistaken ID, just like he thought. On the bad side, what came down was planned by somebody we know, it had to be. But you start asking who, you start asking why, and instantly you’re like teleported to another dimension where only three things have happened in all recorded history.

  Lost Atlantis.

  The Bermuda Triangle.

  The Kennedy assassination.

  “Here’s an example of what it’s like,” Blitzer says. “Not just any example, either. The perfect example.”

  “I hate that word, perfect. ”

  “Since when?”

  “Since tonight when Slade said it like fifty times. Everything was perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.”

  “Slade. Well. Until you told me about the dude in the taco stand I was pretty sure he was behind those losers.”

  “How could he be? Why?”

  “How? Paying them, or promising something, who knows, maybe jobs or something through his rich old man. Why? That’s easy. Ask a three-letter question, get a three-letter answer. You.”

  “Fuck, just stop.”

  “I told you, I don’t think it’s him anymore. He couldn’t have set it up so fast. Couldn’t have got someone so worked up he’d be holding a gun to someone else’s head for no reason, not robbing, not vengeance, nothing. A total stranger. And it sounded like the dude was foaming at the mouth, right?”

  “Pretty much. He slapped her too.”

  “And you’re totally sure you didn’t tell Slade you were getting ready to bail, with me? Leave town? Because that’s one thing that would get him working overtime to keep it from happening.”

  “Not even. He has more the opposite idea, from what I said.”

  “What was that?”

  “He wanted me to kick it with him tonight instead of you. And I said I couldn’t, but, you know, maybe some other time.”

  “You could have just said no.”

  “Yeah, well, you were honking the horn and I was trying to get away from him and I knew we were leaving anyways so it seemed like the best thing to say.”

  “Okay, you’re right. Fuck Slade. He’s not important. How’d we get on him again anyways?”

  “By me saying how lame I thought he was. For all the perfects.”

  Perfect.

  Right.

  The perfect example of what it’s like.

  While he.

  “What’s a rhyme for fixative?” he says, unbuckling his belt.

  While he sees to the priming.

  “I know the perfect example,” I say. “Of what this is like.”

  Of his pump for rhyming.

  “What hey, we’ll trade off, then.”

  So I sing out the first line from “Sugarlight,” how we’re addicts, that’s why we came.

  “This is what it’s like,” Blitzer says.

  Then the second, those gold leeches, how he pastes them on my arm.

  “On all our money there’s like the national motto, right?”

  And how he’s speaking French while we sharpen up our teeth, White Sugar.

  “In God we trust.”

  Who’s memorizing torsos, all open-throated.

  “Well, in the alternate limbo world the money looks exactly the same.”

  And meanwhile in the corner hands collide with hands.

  “Until you hold it up close to check the fine print.”

  With my arm all tired from waiting, to burn it down.

  “And read the new motto.”

  Sugarlight, sugarlight I can’t believe.

  “Nothing is revealed.”

  Swallowing one bulb after another in the city of electric light.

  Then he’s all, Fuck, I missed, and next thing I know his fingers shoot between my fly buttons, long and strong and searching searching, finding while his other hand unbuttons me, then both together tug me bare down there and after his cheek touch chin touch nose touch eyelash earlobe forehead touch first, before his lips tongue mouth-roof throat-back touch second, he says, “Doesn’t it sound like swallowing one boy, though? It always does to me.”

  45

  Blitzer stops himself to find the water bottle just when I’m about to stop him anyways, or else. He takes a long slow double swallow then tells me to drink up too, it’s important, and afterwards dribbles a stream below my belly and finger-scrubs me there in probing circles, there’s all this dripped dried blood, he says, it’s gross, he doesn’t say, but it must be, pulled by him and pushed by me, close and closer to his face.

  “I’m just worsing it,” he says. “I need like a rag.”

  Then he says he knows, one of his socks.

  Perfect.

  And we both laugh.

  But first.

  Before he gets any more side—

  Tracked.

  This time we sing the first lines together, yelling out, “Addicts!” twice as loud as the lyrics before it then twice as loud as that when we get to “Came!” And I sort of expect him to go all finish-line-crazed when he’s through with rushing, or want him to, I guess, but after he finally stops twitching hard stretched full length facedown on the Heftys he just unlaces one boot and peels off his sock and starts cleaning me up all businesslike step by step while he talks and only talks, he says he wants to know about Squid, whether she’s talked shit about him tonight, to me or anybody else I maybe overheard.

  “She said I’d be better off hooking up with that kid who came up to us at the beer table than, you know, somebody like you.”

  “Fuck! Was it really somebody like me? Or did she say me, flat out?”

  “Not by name, but, you know, go down to OC instead of anywhere else.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I gave her shit.”

  And he’s all, Good, but doesn’t ask for details, just starts ranting about how it proves she must be up to something, if you think about everything changing tonight from getting better and better to worse and worser till we’re getting chased and shot at by people who don’t even know us you can say exactly when it started, with Squid going heavy mental in the van on Beachwood, nobody knows why, what if it’s all tied in somehow, he doesn’t know how, it’s that limbo world again, nothing is revealed, but how bogus can you get, a kid like that, living at home with his parents in the suburbs, going to school every day, him and me are like on different planets, how could anyone say or even think—

  “Right, Rocketman? You know, don’t you? You don’t think you could ever—”

  I feel like yelling that I told her and everybody else that kid was the last dude I’d ever connect with, I got so upset I fuckin blacked out, where the fuck were you, though?

  But I just nod.

  Because something’s bothering me.

  Actually two things.

  One’s the way I feel, amped and almost aggro, hurting stapled still but dealing not dazed, twice awake not half asleep, just like that almost, and why why why, all I’ve had is water, if fluoride felt like this a tube of Crest would co
st a bill.

  And two’s what Blitzer said about everything changing tonight, and when, because for me and me alone it was way before Beachwood, it was walking with Siouxsie on the boulevard, nothing to do with Squid at all.

  Except Squid was the reason we went on that walk in the first place.

  With her sore ankle that never came up again walking all over Hollywood, above and beyond even, to Poseur and back from the Nast Western on the hair dye run.

  And before that too, Squid was the reason.

  “I think he knows it’s sexy. I think that boy’s showing it off.”

  And after that Squid was the reason.

  For all the Desoxyn, via Siouxsie but Squid the source, and point and rig source too, even though she never slams.

  And who first said that Blitzer was in trouble with, how did she put it?

  “The wrong people.”

  Siouxsie said nothing, just sighed.

  I tell Blitzer and he says he can’t figure it out, who would have told them what, with so little to tell. He calls it a smoke-screen, he calls it camo.

  “The V-13 thing, I just don’t get it.”

  “Did you ever fool around with her?”

  “Who? Squid? Not even. Just Siouxsie, once. Drunk. She wanted to. She actually got me going pretty good, for a girl. Not good enough to, you know, do the deed, but—”

  “Does Squid know?”

  “Not unless Siouxsie told her.”

  “Siouxsie said she told her everything, remember? At Candyland.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “She was worried it gave Squid power over her.”

  “Right.”

  “I wonder.”

  But what I really wonder is what exactly Siouxsie did to get Blitzer going.

  I can’t ask, though.

  I just can’t.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this till now,” Blitzer says. “You wanna bail?”

  “You mean—”

  “Back to the Nast. For the checks. Then hit the highway. The Golden Escape Freeway.”

  He says sure number one they’re expecting us like twenty minutes ago, to collect them for the run to Oki’s, and sure number two they’re bound to start thinking double cross sooner or later, but by the vato dude he shook with, and him not them on the stigmata end, so they’ll be sure number three he’s nose to the limestone in the LA riverbed with a carnitas cleaver back and center, no hoard in his future, and the longer the delay in unburdening their suspicious minds the farther the fruit will seem to have fallen from the Max Factor tree.

  So why not make a clean break now?

  And speaking of clean.

  “We got to wash you up. Soap and hot water.”

  “What’s the matter, do I smell?”

  “You don’t fuckin smell, it’s for germs. We have to get these fuckin staples out.”

  “No! Not now!”

  “I don’t mean right this second. I said with hot water. You think I want to do it? But the longer you wait, the worse it’ll hurt. Fuck this showing off at Oki Dog shit! Which one of them was talking that up? It was Squid, wasn’t it? It was!”

  Goddamn her to hell.

  Fuck ’em all.

  He helps me button my jeans and swivels me forward again, then settles into the driver’s seat.

  “They still might wonder about me,” I say. “Because if you did get jacked by cholos it could have happened before you got over here.”

  “What hey, so eventually they’ll check back and the taco lady says we bailed. But who knows what could have happened after that? They won’t be going to the cops or anything. Not even close to soon.”

  I start to say I don’t know, but stop when I realize I do. And then I surprise myself as much as Blitzer and say we’re not doing anything to get Wanda involved again period. We make her the last known witness and she’s bound to draw the LAPD. Who knows what might happen. She might lose her job. They might even frame her, say she was in on it somehow. On top of what happened already. First we throw her to the homies, then we serve her up to the heat.

  No.

  Just no.

  It’s wrong.

  He doesn’t argue it with me, not at all. Instead he changes the subject.

  “When Darby talked about black people, you know, calling them names, what was he saying?”

  “That labels always have some kind of truth behind them, that’s how they get started, and the blacks really are lazy, because otherwise they’d, you know, rise up.”

  He gives a disgusted snort.

  “Yeah, right, takes a white man to get ’em off their sorry black asses,” he says.

  He turns the key in the ignition.

  “Helter fuckin skelter.”

  He gasses the engine and we start rolling streetwards.

  “Jesus,” Blitzer says. “Darby, Darby, Darby.”

  46

  Pull it out!

  Of the light my fuckin fire.

  Pull it out!

  At the bottom of the slide.

  Pull it out!

  In swords of red disease.

  Night of the night of the night of the no.

  Trust?

  I’m saying it, not nightmaring it?

  Right?

  “That’s seven, six, and five,” Siouxsie says. “The most sensitive area. You flinched the most when you did these onstage, too.”

  I don’t remember flinching at all.

  “Could you two hold still just like that?” David says. “Right where you are, so I can shoot a picture?”

  I can’t even talk. Siouxsie has one hand on my forehead, her fingers so cool, my head’s in her lap, mostly, I’m propped lying, she’s propped sitting, in the popcorn, Blitzer’s driving, Squid’s shotgun, Tim’s watching too, saying, “If those ugly bolos didn’t steal your camera.”

  “Cholos,” Blitzer says. “Bolos are—”

  “The money in Bolivia,” David says. “Good thing I hid it in the blusher bag.”

  “And not in the mascara,” Tim says. “Someone’s set for life. Their sisters, I hope. Because those boys—”

  Don’t need beauty cream, they need Miracle Whip.

  Except that one Blitzer made peace with at the brewery.

  The maître d’ or whoever didn’t have to apologize for letting that one in, and only as far as the doorway!

  Just to talk to Blitzer.

  Privately.

  Unfortunately.

  But under the watchful eyes of all those ebony hunks.

  Fortunately!

  “This is the last stoplight before the freeway,” Blitzer says. “Better point and shoot.”

  He’s sorry.

  Everyone but Squid got an audible jaw drop going after I schooled them on what went down at the taco stand. All she said was the Confederate army looked for generals in all the wrong places, put a woman like that up against Sherman and not the least lick of flame would have flickered in Atlanta.

  Which naturally changed the subject to the treasures of the Coca-Cola Museum.

  Squid.

  I wonder.

  I told them in the brewery parking lot, as soon as they got down to the van. When Blitzer left to round them up he kissed me and said he’d been leaving me all night long it seemed, but one last time. Just in case things inside took a turn while he was gone.

  In case Tim and David shredded the creative envelope exploring their new punk identities.

  In case Natalie showed.

  “Natalie?” I said.

  He said he didn’t know her any more than I did, but dropping her name upstairs saved their rhymes-with-molasses when the brewery turned out different than Siouxsie expected, all fixed up inside for artists and movie people, and with the cholo posse in hot-as-our-Mister-Sun pursuit up the fire stairs behind them they dead-ended up jacking a fright elevator to this private club where they didn’t exactly meet the dress code.

  “Dude, the doors open on like white carpet and I don’t know, orc
hid trees I guess in monster pots and a fuckin fountain with purple water jets and six or seven burly black dudes, full brawling bruisers but in top hats and bow ties, on instant blood-red alert already because you have to be in the know to even show at a place like that, there’s no sign, no ads or anything, and we’re like nobody who’s ever known and shown before, then Tim and David start screaming the P-word and what’s the last thing a hush-hush sweet harlots hang like that wants any notice from, cops, they’ve got coke on the fuckin menu, right after caviar, and it’s the real thing all right, flown in fresh from Colombia.”

  So when T and D made their to-flee-or-not-to-beeline for the inner door they got stopped in their tracks, a couple of world heavyweight contenders basically picked them up off the floor one-handed and held them treading air like cartoon roadrunner roadrunners who didn’t notice the edge of Grand Canyon, not fucking with them otherwise, super polite, even, shooting question mark looks to the one and only big big brother with a lightning-bolt slash of red silk ribbon firing down his top hat, making his own killer beeline as in B for Blitzer, asking please and asking sir, but asking still, who invited them, and talk about swear and swear alike, it hit him all at once, lashed him like a Miracle Whip, he only thought it through after, how all the pieces must have clued him in just below his radar screen, like he could hear the music inside was that piston-pumping rhymes-with-Crisco, and if the Welcome Wagon boys were black and swell endowed you could bet the gloating rights act multiple customers were too, and being in Los Angeles the city not the record they had to be entertainment-type people, so all he really had to do was baby be friends with who, think up a rhymes-with-fame in either music or movies or maybe television and hope they wouldn’t show themselves in person that very moment and overhear it taken in vain.

  Or vein, ha!

  Then he asked me if I remembered Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, in Hollywood on Ivar, down outside steps to a basement.

  “Dude, you got to, once we ate afternoon breakfast there together, that record company hang trying to be funky, remember I said I used to go there steady-like after tricking with my regular Pepe, you met him, the flamer with all the scrap-books from his transvestista days?”

  Back in the faaabulous fifties, check, I remembered Pepe all right, one more bruised brown fruit on Carmen’s veranda, then I remembered the restaurant, double check, I went there with Animal Cracker too, it had prices low enough that jagged jacks and jittery jills would actually show sometimes and give the industry crowd a little slumming thrill, and food to sink your treat tooth into, waffles topped with the business end of a busty bird doing the breaststroke through a Mrs. Butterworth’s pool to drool for. And there was old-school soul on the box, though I never let on how much I liked where it took me, over, I guess, music real music, like Phranc.