What We Do Is Secret

by Thorn Kief Hillsbery

  And just like that the soundtrack spins “Suspicious Minds”– ward, no surprise if you think of him saying the exact same words in a smartass way, they may be dykes, but they’re on-duty cops, and they wouldn’t like it, oh most defiantly. But Blitzer sounds like he’s being considerate, he really does. Like a demo of what he said about not knowing for sure, but doing anyways. And they decide the answer is to wait for them to leave first.

  And they do. Right away.

  And it’s hard to explain, because he’s so much older and bigger than me. But after their cruiser rolls he hand-plants on my shoulders and his whole body’s shaking and he just collapses into me and I’m holding him up somehow, all of him with all of me.

  50

  More cops.

  At the Nast.

  As in Western.

  Not avenue, though. That’s west of the motel.

  West of the Western.

  Street of my, well, not birth exactly.

  Abandonment.

  Unless I was born in that fuckin laundromat too. Maybe there’s a bathroom? That might explain the SOUVENIR OF PARIS dish towel they wrapped me in, Dad could have jacked it from an unattended dryer while Mom was in the ladies’ dropping her load. Leaving plenty of time to come up with the note— according to the file, it looked like a dude’s handwriting, saying junkies could make good babies but not good parents.

  So it runs in the family, then.

  The wishful thinking.

  No sidewalk stars to wish on here, though, not this far east on Hollywood Boulevard, east of Western, east of the freeway. Just plenty to wish for, here and now in the flutter and wow, no black-and-whites in the head-in parking only, no coroner’s van, no night owl looky-loos knotted on the south-side pavement talking. After he parks us across the street Blitzer takes a sixer’s worth of Big Gulps just to stay the vocal Richter dry, but cops or no cops we can’t say no to three thousand bucks, he’s got a room key after all, and besides who’d try anything sketchy anyways crossing a police line, the cops know that, he wouldn’t be there if he didn’t belong there.

  Though both of us.

  Together.

  Might attract attention.

  “Dude, I know I said this leaving you behind shit is over, back at the Mayfair. But—”

  What hey, it’s the story of my so-called life anyways, right?

  I say to myself.

  “It’s cool.”

  I say out loud.

  He tells me to lay low in back while he walks the walk. I don’t, though, I kick it slumped down shotgun with the window cracked, so I can hear the gawkers chit-chattering outside, but the frequency’s strictly español and drogas and muerto are all I comprende, it must be an overdose. Then they all make like Speedy G anyways, skip to my looky-loo after a downtown-bound diesel bus that misses the stop because the driver’s checking the Nast I guess instead of the sidewalk, the sweat-shop express brakes hard up the block and honks and next thing you know everybody’s gone.

  Just like Blitzer.

  Gone like a song.

  All this started.

  And all this ends.

  He can’t even talk at first.

  There’s just this rhythm track, there’s drums, his fingers, on the steering wheel, those fingers, there’s bass, deep deep breaths, in out in out, not steady really but half-controlled at least, rock steady compared to the key castanet on the ignition faceplate, rattle-shaking forever it seems, till finally he steadies his hand enough to guide it in and the engine turns over and we start to pull away.

  “It’s Rory,” he chokes out.

  Dead.

  In the room next door.

  Worse than dead.

  Killed.

  Stabbed.

  At first I’m electroshocked and sad and too I’m scared, our fingerprints are all over that room, the cops could say.

  We did it.

  Lights.

  Headlights.

  He can’t find the fucking lights.

  And I can’t help him. And he’s crying. And somehow I know.

  I just know.

  It’s not just the cops could say.

  Even with the falling just beginning.

  It’s not just the cops could say.

  The pieces of the night, falling into place.

  It’s not just the cops could say.

  He did it.

  He made it happen.

  “When you went back over there, after they all left on the Poseur run, you said you left something,” I say. “You never said what.”

  “My leather. Darby’s leather.”

  He knows I know. I hear it in his voice like panic.

  “Because we’re leaving and I wanted him to have it.”

  He says because he’s over Darby, and Rory isn’t.

  “Wasn’t,” he whispers.

  But Blitzer hated Rory. He’d never do that. He’d do just what he did. He left all that Desoxyn that he must have jacked from V-13. That Squid dipped into later on their way back in, while we were in the bathroom. And that’s why the mysterious private conversation with the mysterious Mexican dude at the brewery went so mysteriously well so mysteriously fast. Because all Blitzer had to say was mistaken identity, it’s Rory Dolores, and this is where he is, here and now, sleeping like a baby, door wide open, tell your homies.

  And I could have stopped it. There was that chance of taking Rory with us tonight, Tim and David would have jumped at it, on the way to the Hollywood sign we even talked about going back for him, I could have forced it, I could have went in myself and woke him up. I think Blitzer tricked me. He got me worrying about Tim and David on purpose. Like a diversion.

  Same with getting me suspecting Squid.

  Same with reading me so hard for saying I thought he was mad enough to murder Squid and Siouxsie, how could I think such a thing?

  Mind control.

  Even on my back in the grass by the sidewalk up on Camrose, pressed hard together pulses racing, saying didn’t I hate Darby, for the mind control stuff, that was part of it.

  The fucking pot, the fucking kettle.

  Black as night, black as coal.

  Paint it, black.

  Darby said.

  You’d have to be a painter, to try and get it right, but even then you couldn’t.

  Black.

  His voice, denying everything.

  I ask what was up with the other Mexican dude at the Vex, the one he took off with, that’s part of the puzzle, I’m sure it is, but he says it was a trick, just a local respectable, craving gringo dick, Yes way to my No way, It was to my It wasn’t, What do you think I am to my Expert witness, my expert witness, my fuckin Elliot, my fuckin Mess.

  Black.

  Me, inside, remembering.

  Everything we did tonight, everything I did tonight, everything I really liked.

  I guess it started with Darby but now.

  Darby’s dead.

  Gone like a song.

  “Rory’s fuckin dead!” I scream back at him.

  He starts to yell back but stops. He says It’s his fault, it’s all the speed in me, mixed with one thing after another, all night long, we’ll get through this, we’ve got money now at least, we’ll just chill, shine the freeway, go surface, out to the pier like we planned, celebrate my birthday, we’ll watch—

  “Fuck you!” I yell.

  “I wasn’t—I don’t even think about it, Rockets, I just say it, I’m from back east! I always think of the ocean that way, watching the sun rise out of it.”

  Not setting into it.

  Fading to.

  Black.

  Her voice, screaming.

  “Shoot me motherfucker, or quit wasting my time!”

  Red.

  The light, Fairfax and Santa Monica.

  I’ll celebrate my birthday all right, lucky fuckin thirteen.

  Hell fuckin na.

  But I won’t even ride there with Blitzer. I could fool him but no, I stealth-hand my stick and pop the door a
nd I’m out out and away, on my own and completely alone, hiding on the high school grounds till I’m sure he’s gone gone gone. Then I count block after block to Olympic and start walking west.

  And the farther I walk the more it’s in the air, the change. This cooling. This dampening. At first it’s like the cemetery earlier, but that was localized, from sprinklers on grass, acres of grass, you know, just add water, lots of water and it changes everything, you get there and you feel it and you leave and you don’t, you pass through it, and this is more going into something big and forever stretching, it’s the marine layer I guess they call it, who knows how far it goes sometimes, upwards to the redwoods and Oregon, farther, outwards to those islands past Santa Barbara and farther farther, over all the dolphins and seals who feel this too on rocks in sea caves, wake up to this, if they ever sleep, they must though, not well not tight just sometimes, like Spanish sailors in the Aztec day, crewing those street-name explorers like Cabrillo and Balboa and Sepulveda sounds like too, La Cienega, most good citizens have no clue on that crew but there’s an exhibit with audio out in Exposition Park that runs it down, those conquistador dudes didn’t conquer anything, they made their camps out on the islands so they could sleep, or wake up actually, shut-eye wasn’t the problem, Indians slashing their throats so they never rose and shone again was the problem, the Indians around here didn’t crave beads and mirrors like the ones back east, and it wasn’t that the trinket shit staled either, they didn’t want it from day one, or flowed pumpkin pie and mincemeat, or giblet fuckin gravy, they just wanted white men dead or gone and preferably both, and what that made California for the Spaniards was a day job only, they sailed back to safety every night, to the islands where nobody lived because there wasn’t any water.

  Now it’s heavy in the air, though, it turns out what I thought were sweat trickles down my sides aren’t running from my armpits but angling off my chest, not sweat at all but dewdrops collected on my skin and warmed enough I guess to make like magnets into flowage for rills that gravity spills. And talk about magnets, my buzzed head’s tweakin’ like a beacon for every dew drop in from Malibu to Redondo, and with no hair to hold them any higher I’ve got leaky faucet drips off my eyebrows and bridge to tip-drop off my nose, watering wannabe whiskers on my chinny chin chin.

  I wish I had a hat.

  But here I am, wishing.

  And here it is, waiting, I finally notice I’m not on my own after all, not completely, my left hand’s still gripping the X record like we’re Thailand twins, or triplets, the ex of me one and the why of me two and the we of me three, so I might as well get some umbrella action. It’s not like I’ll ever play it, not where I’m going. And I just keep west west walking, and the soggier the jacket gets the more I hear nothing but the Doors’ greatest hit.

  51

  Until finally I smell it, fire, in the ever-cooler ever-damper, underneath the 405.

  Where garbage burns wetly, torched in a barrel in a cave at the top of the on-ramp underslope, wetly and smoky and smelly as the dude who talked me up here from the sidewalk, a Viet vet dude like all the others it seems, the underpass dudes, there’s so many now, but he might as well be by his lone ranger dangersome tonight, his buddy Graycloud’s at maximum ease on a pile of broken-down boxes, the only worse companion than a drunk’s a white port drunk, and the only worse drunk than a white port drunk’s an Indian white port drunk, and that there sad sack in the surplus fartsack’s got both bases covered, the sunova chief, couldn’t ask for better cover in a firefight, though, or watch-your-backup on a hooch-to-hooch, but that was just a.

  Sideshow.

  Brief interruption in the regularly scheduled.

  “How old are you, kid?”

  I say sixteen, I always add three, and it’s not only technically my birthday now, it’ll even be daytime officially any Zoo York minute now.

  He grunts.

  “Well, when I was your age I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be getting personal Greetings! from the General himself, and I don’t mean Motors, I don’t mean Dynamics, I don’t mean delivery, I mean damned old Lewis B., his Hersheyness. And once the General gave the G-word to a South Central boy like me there was no last exit via the D-word—that’s deferment, kid—just a hop, skip, and how-high jump to getting injected, in-fected, and see-lected.”

  He doesn’t laugh so much as cackle, it’s hard telling with these dudes who’s mental and who’s not, so mostly I steer as clear as the complexion on a Stri-Dex after model, but smelling smoke down below I knew the train was on the tracks never mind which kind, it made no difference, train in vain or train in vein, bands arrive at stands or hands arrive at hands, my arm is tired of waiting, to burn it down. And maybe a trickle of My Tunnel luck’s still flowing somewheres in the pipeline, because next thing you know what’s tripping slightly slurred off his tongue but the P-word setup, he says something about Alice in Wonderland’s restaurant then asks what kind of music I like, whose record I’m sacrificing to the elements tonight.

  “Actually, that’s why I—well, I was wondering—”

  And with Down at the bricks, hectic, isn’t it like this close to autopilot-tripping off the tip of my own tongue before I catch myself I know know know I have to do it now now now, make some kind of break, I mean what if there is an afterlife and I’m stuck with these songs in my head for infernity, talk about go to hell and see if you like it.

  “I want to burn this record tonight. It’s hard to explain. But it’s really important. And I know it’d stink up your camp here, so, well, here’s my offer, if you let me toss it in, I’ll give you some money for the trouble. All my money, actually.”

  “You’re walking the streets this time of night with that there long player so you can burn it? Hand ’er over, kid, let’s see what kinda trouble we can blame on rock ’n’ roll tonight, it won’t be the first time it’s taken—”

  I hold it out for him, but his hands don’t reach for it. Instead he sidesteps right next to me and bends down with his lips in lobelock distance practically and says in my ear, “Do you know what it won’t be the first time it’s taken, kid? Rock ’n’ roll?”

  He steps back like he’s waiting on professional advice from a Magic 8 Ball on Kentucky Derby day. But the only sure thing I’ve got for him is cluelessness. And it comes out like on its own, I’m actually trying interior to remember exactly what the fuck the original question was when I hear myself saying exterior, “I don’t know.”

  “You want some help? You want a hint?”

  “Sure.”

  “It won’t be the first time rock ’n’ roll’s taken the rap.”

  “Okay.”

  “But do you know what kind of rap, kid? Can you tell me that?”

  “Rap music?”

  “What? Rap music? What kind of answer is that? The answer can’t be one kind of music when the question’s another kind of music, that’s just common sense.”

  Is it, though? What was the question, anyways? Is it him or me?

  Who’s crazy.

  “C’mon, kid, you just think it through. What kind of raps are there? How many can there be?”

  “Bad?”

  “Good! Close! Almost there. Now just repeat after me.”

  His hands swirl the air in front of my face like he’s Beethoven conducting his symphony for the rebel.

  “It won’t. Be the first time. Rock ’n’ roll. Has taken. Taken what? A rap. What kind of rap? A—”

  “Bum rap?”

  His whoops reverb off the concrete overhead and I start laughing too, deep out of my belly so I gasp from the, fuck, bellows action is what it feels like, fueling embers hot already into fiery flicking lava tongues, not snake-forked but fork-forked, sharp superheated tines that rake and stab and edgewise carve inside me baked-potato style. But I cough for coverup, and the little dust bowl he’s kicking up jig-dancing in front of me camos the real reason.

  “You must be thinking I’m like retarded.”

  “
Hell, no! I’m thinking of myself! And I like what I’m thinking! I’m thinking you must not be thinking I’m a bum!”

  He lets out another good cackle.

  “All that matters is we got us to the mountaintop, kid.”

  He thumps my back.

  “And we got there together. Now let’s see the record behind the rap sheet.”

  Once he look-sees the cover he doesn’t give it much of the benefit, I tell him it’s an X burning, not a cross, but he says six of one, half dozen of the other, looks like the same old racist shit to him, and then he starts reading out the lyrics to “Los Angeles,” disbelieving at first, then disgusted.

  “You catch that, Graycloud? Niggers and Jews and spics and queers. Damned if your people don’t get the short end even when it comes to the equal-opportunity hating.”

  Though credit where due, the idle rich, well, he can’t say his dander gets past half mast on that one.

  “You want the skinny on that crowd, you go up to Santa Barbara. I had a buddy ask me why do hard time in LA, get up close and personal with all those rich folks feeling guilty and live high on the hog off the fat of the land. So I stuck my thumb out, did a little recon. And that town’s thick with blue-bloods, all right, thick as creamed peas, but let me tell you, they’re feeling no shame on account of having money. You’re the one who’s supposed to feel guilty for not having it.”

  “There’s islands up there, right?”

  “Islands?”

  “In the ocean. By Santa Barbara.”

  “The Channel Islands, you must mean. Yes indeed. Big as life. Not like on-a-clear-day-you-can-see Catalina, otherwise try a Pontiac dealer.”

  A beat.

  “Kid, don’t tell me—”

  “I get it.”

  “You got a nice smile, you oughta show it more. You had me worried there. Sure there’s islands, three, four, five, straight shot over the water. But it’s the damnedest thing, you never get a sunset behind ’em or between ’em or any which ways that direction. Geography’s all screwy up there. Sun sets over the land half the year, that’s what I heard. Over the mountains. Feels wrong, for California.”